Steiner's names for the pupil in training and for the fully trained graduate of the ancient mysteries, whose central subject was the knowledge of the sun.
Sun Disciple and Sun Master in Anthroposophy is the paired designation Rudolf Steiner gives to the pupil and to the finished graduate of the ancient mystery schools, in an age when church, theatre and school were not yet three institutions but one thing, called the mysteries. Steiner sets the pair out in the thirteenth lecture of The Life of Man on Earth and the Essence of Christianity (GA 349), given at Dornach on 9 May 1923 to the workmen building the Goetheanum. The subject those schools existed to teach was what he calls the knowledge of the sun: that the sun is not a ball of burning gas but an inhabited body bearing soul and spirit, whose forces draw plant, animal and human life out of the earth. A pupil learning those secrets was a Sonnenschüler, a sun disciple. Once his training was complete he was a Sonnenmeister, a sun master.
The paired title Sun Disciple and Sun Master marks two ends of a single training, not two separate offices. The disciple has begun on the secrets of the sun; the master is that same person once nothing further remains to learn. Steiner reaches for the pair to say what happened to Jesus of Nazareth in his thirtieth year, when, on his account, this solar wisdom came over him.
In Steiner's Own Words
And this knowledge of the sun was the main thing taught to students in the ancient mysteries. And that is why these students were called sun disciples. It was said: Up there on the sun, there are the forces, the spring forces, the sun forces, there is that which draws everything out of the earth. And so someone who had learned in ancient times the secrets of the sun was called a sun disciple, and later, when he was fully trained, a sun master. And what Jesus of Nazareth suddenly knew at the age of thirty was this solar wisdom. This solar wisdom had come over him.
What it Means Today
Steiner was not making an antiquarian point to those workmen. Roman Mithraism, the mystery religion that travelled with the legions in the same centuries the Gospels were circulating, ran a seven-grade initiation ladder. The grade names are preserved in Jerome's Letter 107, and their symbols survive in the mosaic floor of the Mithraeum of Felicissimus at Ostia Antica, where each grade sits beneath a planetary tutelary. The sixth grade was Heliodromus, the Sun-Runner, and above it stood only Pater, the Father. A solar pupil who rises to a solar elder is not an idea Steiner had to import. It is the structure Roman archaeology reads off a floor.
Roger Beck, who taught classics at the University of Toronto, called his standard treatment The Religion of the Mithras Cult in the Roman Empire: Mysteries of the Unconquered Sun (Oxford University Press, 2006), and argued that a Mithraeum was built as a working model of the cosmos, so that climbing the grades meant travelling the planetary spheres rather than collecting doctrine. Sonnenschüler and Sonnenmeister name that same climb in German, and fix its subject in one place: what the sun is, and what it does to everything that grows.
Thalira synthesis: the sun disciple is not a beginner and the sun master is not an expert, because the pair measures degrees of participation in one living source rather than quantities of information held, which is why Steiner passes without a break from the mystery grades to a man of thirty who suddenly knows.
Where to Read More
- The Life of Man on Earth and the Essence of Christianity, GA 349
- Find this volume at SteinerBooks [THALIRA_BLOG_LINKS_PLACEHOLDER]