The first of the Apocalypse's seven letters, which Steiner read as the ancient Indian epoch, the dawn of post-Atlantean culture, praised for its works yet warned that it has left its first love.
The Letter to Ephesus opens the seven epistles of Revelation. Rudolf Steiner saw in this first message a likeness of the ancient Indian epoch, the earliest culture to follow the sinking of Atlantis. Ephesus, the city of Diana, stands over the human work of refining the physical body, and the letter both blesses that labour and grieves that the community's first ardour for the spirit has cooled.
In Steiner's Own Words
The first epistle is addressed to the community in Ephesus, the place dedicated to Diana. It emphasizes the beautiful design of the physical body. Where is the physical body headed? We can understand this more and more when we know that the physical body must become more and more purified and more and more an expression of the etheric body, and this in turn of the astral body, and this of the I.
What it Means Today
Read against the scheme of post-Atlantean epochs that Steiner laid out across his 1908 Nuremberg cycle and the 1909 lectures published as Reading the Pictures of the Apocalypse, the letter to Ephesus is not a message to a single Greek seaport. It is the signature of the first culture of our present age, the ancient Indian, the time of the seven holy Rishis, when the soul still felt the outer world as maya and turned with undivided longing toward the spirit. That undivided longing is the "first love" the letter names. To have left it is to describe what happens to a humanity that descends ever further into the physical and forgets the homeland it came from. Ephesus, the city whose great temple of Diana watched over the forces of the body, becomes the fitting emblem of an epoch whose task was the beautiful forming of the physical sheath.
The single image worth holding is the candlestick that can be taken away. Steiner reads each of the seven letters as a rung; Ephesus is the lowest and earliest, the one nearest the dawn, and its neighbour Smyrna already moves the work inward from the physical body to the etheric. The warning to Ephesus is therefore the warning at the threshold of the whole sequence: a culture may build well and labour patiently and still let its lamp grow cold if it loses the first ardour that once bound it to the spiritual world.
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