The words Christ speaks from the cross, which Steiner reads as the ancient initiate’s waking formula: not abandonment, but “how you have raised me up high.”
Eli, Eli, Lama Sabachthani in Anthroposophy is the cry from the cross read as an initiation formula rather than a lament. In the lectures published as The Christian Mystery (GA 97), and in particular the address given at Cologne on 2 December 1906, Rudolf Steiner describes the ancient Hebrew initiation in which the candidate lay three days in temple sleep, passed through the higher worlds, and returned to the body. The words that broke from the initiate on waking were, in Steiner’s rendering, “My God, my God, how thou hast raised me,” a statement of having been glorified. Steiner holds that a small change to the Hebrew consonants produced the Gospel wording lama asabthani, “why have you forsaken me.” Set at Golgotha, the sentence marks the hour when a formula once guarded inside the temple was spoken in the open, on the physical plane, in front of witnesses who half heard it.
Eli, Eli, Lama Sabachthani are the words Matthew and Mark place on Christ’s lips at the ninth hour. Steiner does not treat them as a collapse of faith. He treats them as a formula with a history behind it, spoken by every candidate who woke from the three-day sleep of the older Mysteries, and recognised by anyone standing at the cross who knew what those syllables had always meant.
In Steiner’s Own Words
All initiations into the Mystery of the Spirit pointed to the coming of Christ Jesus. This initiation was attained in the Yoga sleep, in the Orphic sleep, in the Hermes sleep. When the initiate woke up again and returned into his body, so that he could again hear and speak with his physical senses, he uttered the words which are rendered as follows in the Hebrew language: “Eli, Eli, lama sabathani.” The pupil of the Mysteries woke up with the words: “My God, My God, how thou hast raised me!”
What it Means Today
Passion scholarship reaches a related instinct by an entirely different road. Raymond E. Brown, in The Death of the Messiah (Doubleday, 1994), the two-volume commentary that remains a standard reference on the crucifixion narratives, treats the cry as the opening line of Psalm 22, and notes that the psalm it opens does not stay in abandonment. By its closing verses the psalm has turned into public praise and vindication, so a first-century listener who knew the piece by its first line already knew where the line was going. Brown also records the confusion the sound itself caused, since Mark reports bystanders hearing Eli as a call to Elijah.
The philological hinge Steiner leans on can be named plainly: the root shabach carries the sense of praising or glorifying, while shabaq carries the sense of leaving or forsaking, and in an unpointed consonantal text the two sit very close together. Steiner returns to the same problem four years after Cologne, at Basel on 12 September 1910, in the cycle published as The Gospel of St Matthew (GA 123). Thalira synthesis: the cry is the one moment in the Gospels where the temple’s private vocabulary is spoken outdoors, which is why the crowd at Golgotha could hear the syllables clearly and still miss the sentence.
Where to Read More
- The Christian Mystery, GA 97
- The Gospel of St Matthew, GA 123
- Find The Christian Mystery at SteinerBooks [THALIRA_BLOG_LINKS_PLACEHOLDER]