The ancient temple-sanctuaries where, across many lands, spiritual knowledge was guarded and initiation conferred in secret before the time of open teaching.
The Mystery Centres in Anthroposophy were the ancient temple-sanctuaries where spiritual knowledge was guarded and initiation conferred, before the open teaching that followed the Mystery of Golgotha. According to Rudolf Steiner in Mystery Centres (GA 232, lectures of 1923), they were spread in varied form across the Earth, each region holding its own form: the oriental Mysteries, Ephesus in Asia Minor, the Eleusinian and Chthonic Mysteries of Greece, the Samothracian Mysteries of the Kabiri, and the Hibernian Mysteries of ancient Ireland. Within the obscurity of the inner temple, a candidate passed through ordeals of suffering and joy to wake higher organs of perception, and from that hidden centre wisdom streamed outward to shape the surrounding culture. As the umbrella of the sacred streams of history, the Mystery Centres are studied today through comparative esotericism and the Goetheanum School of Spiritual Science.
In Steiner's Own Words
In my book Christianity as Mystical Fact, it can be seen that what happened on Golgotha gathered together, in a certain sense, what had previously been distributed in the various Mysteries throughout the world. The Mystery of Golgotha, however, differs from all the other Mysteries which I have been describing, in that the Mystery of Golgotha stands so to speak on the stage of history before the whole world, while the older Mysteries were enacted in the obscurity of the inner temples and sent out their impulses into the world from the dim twilight of these inner temples.
What it Means Today
A Mystery Centre was not a church and not a university, though it held something of both. It was an enclosed temple-school where a small body of pupils was led, under oath of silence, through a deliberate reshaping of the soul so that worlds normally closed to waking sense became visible. Steiner treats the centres as a single institution wearing many local costumes. The reader who wants the particular centres can follow them through the Eleusinian, Ephesian, Samothracian and Hibernian entries in this glossary; this entry holds the parent idea that binds them. What unites them is the principle of the guarded threshold: knowledge was given only to those prepared to be changed by it, never broadcast to the curious.
Comparative esotericism is the living thread here. The Western initiatic line that Steiner places after the temple age, from the Rosicrucian brotherhood of the fourteenth century to the Goetheanum School of Spiritual Science he founded at Dornach in 1923, understood itself as the heir of those hidden schools, now working in moral and spiritual gatherings rather than walled sanctuaries. The Thalira reading is that the Mystery Centres mark the Temple Pattern of history: each closed school was a vessel holding a fragment of a single wisdom, and the long arc of the streams runs from their scattered twilight toward a teaching meant at last to stand openly before all. The mystery centres fed their wisdom into the public myths; see the mysteries behind the myths.
Where to Read More