A pre-Christian ladder of seven symbolic ranks, Raven to Father, by which the oriental Mysteries led a candidate out of the group-soul into individual spirit-knowledge.
The Seven Oriental Degrees of Initiation in Anthroposophy is the pre-Christian ladder of seven symbolic ranks, Raven, Occultist, Warrior, Lion, the folk-name (such as Persian), Sun-Hero, and Father, that Rudolf Steiner described in The Gospel of St. John (GA 103, lecture of 23 May 1908, Hamburg). Each grade marked a stage in the candidate's withdrawal from the blood-bound group-soul toward individual spirit-knowledge. The Raven served as messenger between the outer world and the Mystery Place, the Warrior defended occult teaching, the Lion defended it through magical deeds, the folk-degree initiate carried the whole folk-soul within, and the Father stood as the completed initiate. Steiner set this oriental, Mithraic-type scheme beside the new Christian path opened after the Mystery of Golgotha, where the I-being, not the folk-soul, becomes the bearer of initiation. He read the ravens of Elias, of Wotan, and of the sleeping Barbarossa as memories of the first grade.
The Seven Oriental Degrees of Initiation are the seven symbolic ranks, from Raven through Sun-Hero to Father, that the old oriental Mysteries used to lead a candidate step by step out of the group-soul. Steiner described them in his lectures on St. John's Gospel to show what initiation looked like before Christ, a path through blood and folk that the Christ-impulse would later open to the free individual.
In Steiner's Own Words
You already know that there are different degrees of initiation. For example, in a certain form of oriental initiation, seven degrees can be distinguished and these seven degrees were designated by all sorts of symbolical names. The first was the degree of the "Raven," the second that of the "Occultist," the third of the "Warrior," the fourth that of the "Lion." Amongst different peoples, who still felt a kind of blood relationship as the expression of their group-soul, the fifth degree was designated by the name of the folk itself; thus among the Persians, for example, an initiate of the fifth degree was called in an occult sense, a "Persian."
What it Means Today
The closest verifiable parallel to Steiner's oriental ladder is the grade-system of the Roman Mithraic Mysteries, reconstructed by the Belgian scholar Franz Cumont in The Mysteries of Mithra (English edition, 1903). Cumont read the inscriptions and floor mosaics of Mithraic temples, above all the second-century site at Ostia, and recovered seven named grades that the initiate climbed in order: Corax (Raven), Nymphus (Bridegroom), Miles (Soldier), Leo (Lion), Perses (Persian), Heliodromus (Sun-Runner), and Pater (Father). Four of those names, Raven, Lion, Persian, and Father, sit in the same sequence Steiner gave for the oriental degrees, and his "Sun-Hero" answers to the Heliodromus, the runner of the Sun. The match is not coincidence: Mithraism was the pre-Christian Persian-Roman Mystery cult Steiner had in view when he spoke of "a certain form of oriental initiation."
Thalira synthesis: where Cumont reads the seven Mithraic grades as a social fraternity climbing toward the Pater, Steiner reads the same ladder as a map of the soul loosening itself from the group-soul, so that the grade an outside scholar sees as rank, the esotericist sees as a measured surrender of the blood-bound self. Read this way, the degrees are not titles to collect but stages of individuation, each one a further step by which the candidate stops belonging to the folk and begins to belong to the spirit, the precise inward freedom the Christ-impulse later offered to every person without the temple.
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