Steiner's name for the three historical acts of initiation performed on humanity: in wisdom, in the mind, and in the will.
The Initiation of Wisdom, Mind and Will in Anthroposophy is Rudolf Steiner's periodisation of initiation as three successive acts carried out on humanity as a whole, set out in the Berlin lecture of 4 December 1903 published as Theosophy and Occultism (GA 90c). The first act, the initiation in wisdom, belonged to the ancient Mysteries: the candidate lay in trance under a guru in complete seclusion, with the etheric body released alongside the astral so that memory of the experience could be stamped into the physical body. The second, the initiation of the mind or Gemüt, left the darkness of the temple and happened once, publicly, on the cross of Golgotha, where feeling rather than trance was the organ of the event. The third, the initiation of the will, is the one still unfinished, prepared by the blood poured out in enthusiasm after Golgotha and left to humanity as the legacy of the Christ.
The Initiation of Wisdom, Mind and Will is the frame Steiner used to explain why initiation no longer looks the way it did in Egypt or Eleusis. Each act moved the process outward: from the sealed temple chamber, to a public hill outside Jerusalem, to the ordinary daylight of individual willing, where no guru stands between the person and the deed.
In Steiner's Own Words
Man is led step by step. There has been an initiation in wisdom, one in mind, one in will. Genuine Christianity is the sum of all stages of initiation. The initiation of antiquity was the prediction, the preparation. Slowly and gradually, the newer man emancipated himself from his initiator, his guru. The initiation took place first in full trance consciousness, but equipped with the means to imprint into the physical body the memory of what had happened outside the physical body. Therefore, there was the necessity to also release the etheric body, the carrier of memory, together with the astral. Both plunged into the sea of wisdom, into Mahadeva, into the light of Osiris. This initiation took place in the deepest secret, in complete seclusion.
What it Means Today
Mircea Eliade delivered the Haskell Lectures at the University of Chicago in 1956 and published them as Rites and Symbols of Initiation, the book that turned initiation into a working category of comparative religion. Eliade gathered field reports from Australia, Africa and North America and found one grammar repeating: the novice is taken from the village, held in seclusion, treated as dead, and returned with a new name and knowledge that may not be spoken outside. He called it ritual death and rebirth, and he observed that modern Europe kept the appetite for the experience while losing the institution that carried it.
Set beside Steiner's Berlin lecture of 1903, Eliade's evidence describes the first act with precision: the seclusion, the trance, the guru, the ban on daylight. The two accounts then part, and the parting is the useful part. Eliade's survey ends at the observation that modern people have no initiation available to them. Steiner's periodisation says the venue moved rather than the process ending, out of the Egyptian temple, onto a public hill outside Jerusalem, and finally into the ordinary willing of individual people who have no initiator at all.
Thalira synthesis: a seeker who finds no chamber to enter has not missed the door, since the third act was built without one, a will initiated by another hand being no longer a will. Steiner says as much in the same lecture when he writes that working on the sleeping astral body would spare people the difficulty and cost them their freedom.
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