The officiating initiator of the ancient mystery temple, who freed the neophyte's etheric body during a three-day trance and imprinted his own wisdom upon it.
The Hierophant in Anthroposophy is the officiating initiator of the ancient mystery temple, the priest-teacher who carried a candidate through the older, temple-bound form of initiation. Rudolf Steiner set out the office in An Esoteric Cosmology (GA 94), lectures given in Paris in 1906. In that account the Hierophant loosened the neophyte's etheric and astral bodies from the physical body, held him in a trance of three days, and worked directly on the freed etheric body, pouring impulses into it and teaching it wisdom. Because memory inheres in the etheric body, the candidate woke still holding what had been given, and was called twice-born. Steiner then adds the detail that matters most: the knowledge kept the personal stamp of the particular Hierophant who imparted it. The word itself is Greek, hierophantes, the one who shows the sacred things, and it named the chief priest of the Eleusinian Mysteries.
The Hierophant is the title Steiner gives to the officiating initiator of the old mystery sanctuaries, a figure who stood at the head of a temple rite rather than at the head of a school. His work was done upon the candidate's freed etheric body while the physical body lay in trance, and what he transmitted carried his own signature rather than an impersonal doctrine.
In Steiner's Own Words
Oriental Initiation consisted in a process whereby the etheric and astral bodies of the neophyte were forced out of his physical body. He lay in a trance lasting three days and during this time the hierophant controlled his freed etheric body, poured impulses into him and taught him wisdom which remained as a powerful, lasting impression. When he awoke from the trance, the new Initiate found himself in possession of this wisdom, for the reason that memory inheres in the etheric body. The wisdom was occult doctrine but it bore the permanent and personal stamp of the hierophant who had imparted it. A man who had passed through this Initiation was said to be ‘twice-born.’
What it Means Today
The office Steiner describes has a documented classical counterpart. At Eleusis the chief priest bore the title hierophantes, and the post was held for life by a man drawn from the Eumolpidae, one of the two priestly families that ran the sanctuary. Walter Burkert, the Swiss classicist at the University of Zurich, gathered the surviving evidence in Ancient Mystery Cults (Harvard University Press, 1987), the published form of his Carl Newell Jackson Lectures. Burkert's argument runs against the older habit of treating the Mysteries as rival religions with a secret creed. What Eleusis offered, he shows, was a personal change of condition, structured around three components that ancient writers name: the dromena, things enacted; the legomena, things spoken; and the deiknymena, things shown. The hierophant was the officer of that third component. He did not explain, he displayed.
Thalira synthesis: Burkert names from the outside what Steiner describes from the inside, because a thing shown to a loosened etheric body is not information passing between two people but a form pressed into the one member that keeps its shape. That is also why Steiner insists the wisdom bore the hierophant's personal stamp, and why he treats the whole arrangement as finished. Read the two accounts together and the practical question follows on its own: what can be learned when the pupil stays awake, upright, and free to refuse?
Where to Read More
- An Esoteric Cosmology, GA 94
- Find An Esoteric Cosmology at SteinerBooks [THALIRA_BLOG_LINKS_PLACEHOLDER]