The great initiate who guards the ancient wisdom of Atlantis, one of the three great teachers gathered around Manu in Steiner's account of the Mysteries.
Skythianos is the name Rudolf Steiner gives to the great initiate who preserved the clairvoyant wisdom of old Atlantis for the post-Atlantean age. Living in deep concealment in the West, he kept the secrets of the physical body that the Atlantean Mysteries had known. He stands beside Buddha and Zarathustra as one of three teachers around Manu, masters who later guided the Rosicrucian schools toward an understanding of the Christ.
In Steiner's Own Words
It was guided there by a Being who once upon a time lived in deepest concealment, withdrawn behind those who had already forsaken the world and who were pupils of the great initiates. This Being had remained behind in order to preserve for later ages what was brought over from old Atlantis. Among the great initiates who had founded mystery places in the West for the preservation of the old Atlantean wisdom, a wisdom that entered deeply into all the secrets of the physical body was the great Skythianos, as he was called in the Middle Ages. And anyone who knows the nature of the European mysteries knows that Skythianos is the name given to one of the greatest initiates of the earth.
What it Means Today
Within comparative esotericism, Skythianos is the figure who closes the gap between the lost wisdom of Atlantis and the later European Mystery schools. Steiner did not invent the name. It reaches him through the Manichaean writings of the early Church, where Skythianos (or Scythianus) appears in the Acta Archelai of Hegemonius around the year 350 as a teacher whose books passed to Terebinthus and then to Mani, the founder of Manichaeism. Steiner reads this fragmentary heresiology spiritually rather than literally. For him Skythianos names a real initiate-individuality whose knowledge of the bodily, physical side of the human being was held in reserve, then carried forward into the schools of the Rosy Cross alongside the teachings of Buddha and Zarathustra. A practitioner working with this lineage today studies the three streams as distinct gifts: from Buddha the understanding of reincarnation and karma, from Zarathustra the reading of the sun-spheres, and from Skythianos the laws of the physical organism. The Goetheanum School of Spiritual Science in Dornach, founded in 1923, treats this threefold inheritance as the background to anthroposophic study of the human form. To name Skythianos is to point to the Western, body-wise keeper of that inheritance, the one whose Atlantean knowledge of physical nature meets the modern Consciousness Soul and asks to be thought through again, in full daylight, rather than merely received.
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