The Artemis-temple initiation school at Ephesus where the candidate learned to perceive the cosmic Word streaming through the etheric body of nature, and from which the Logos-prologue of John's Gospel was later drawn.
The Ephesus Mysteries in Anthroposophy are the pre-Christian initiation school housed in the great Temple of Artemis at Ephesus on the Ionian coast of Asia Minor, reconstructed by Steiner from the Akashic Record across the December 1923 lecture cycle Mystery Knowledge and Mystery Centres (GA 232, sixth lecture, 2 December 1923, Dornach) and supplemented in World History in the Light of Anthroposophy (GA 233, Dornach, December 1923). The candidate was trained in the threshold of human speech, the place where air becomes warmth and water in the larynx, until the same wave of Fire and Water could be perceived as the cosmic-formative Word streaming through the etheric body of nature. From this Ephesian Logos-instruction, Steiner says, John the Evangelist drew the opening of his Gospel. The Temple was burned the night Alexander the Great was born (356 BCE).
The Ephesus Mysteries were the Artemis-of-Ephesus temple-school in which initiates were taught to feel, in their own larynx and breath, the same Logos that wove the worlds into being. Steiner reconstructs them in 1923 as the immediate spiritual root of the Gospel of John, transmitted to its author during his Ephesian discipleship after Pentecost.
In Steiner's Own Words
Prepared by what we have heard in the last two lectures, let us think of the Mysteries of the Temple of Diana at Ephesus as they were six or seven centuries before the birth of Christianity, or even earlier, and of what was done in this sanctuary that was held to be so holy by the men of that olden time. We find that the instruction given in the Mysteries at Ephesus was primarily concerned with the processes active in human speech. The Akashic Record reveals again and again how the teacher directed the attention of the pupil to human speech. Again and again he was exhorted: Learn to feel in your own instrument of speech what it is that takes place there when you speak!
What it Means Today
In Steiner's reading, the Ephesian instruction was not philology and not poetry. It was a physiological-spiritual discipline. The pupil was made to articulate "I am, I am not" through the larynx until he could feel, with his own etheric organism, how the air rises into warmth to catch the thought of the head, and how the same air sinks as fluid to carry feeling downward. Fire and Water, Fire and Water, in waves of speech. That microcosmic wave was then expanded outward: the candidate learned to perceive the same Fire-and-Water rhythm in the chalk and silica of the Earth, in the rising and falling of plant-form, in the becoming of the animal kingdom. What he heard, with his trained etheric body, was the Logos. The whole cosmos became Speech.
Sergei Prokofieff, in The Apocalypse of John and the Mystery of Pentecost and his later The Cycle of the Year as a Path of Initiation, follows Steiner's claim that John the Evangelist received this same Ephesian Logos-content after Pentecost and clothed it in the prologue of his Gospel. The Christian Community, the religious renewal movement founded in Dornach in 1922 under Friedrich Rittelmeyer with Steiner's counsel, has carried this Johannine-Ephesian reading into its altar service and its sermons for the four-week St John's Tide each summer. The Goetheanum's School of Spiritual Science, Section for the Spiritual Striving of Youth, continues to research the Ephesian speech-stream as a living source for eurythmy and creative speech, the two arts Steiner inaugurated at the first Goetheanum in 1912 and 1924. None of this pretends to be the same referent as classical archaeology of the Artemision: Steiner is reading interiorly, from the Akashic Record, and locates the heart of the school not in stones but in the wave of human breath.
Where to Read More