Steiner traced Greek drama to the ancient mystery centres: Aeschylus and Sophocles lifted the artistic side out of initiation rites, and Aristotle's catharsis echoes that origin.
The Mystery Origin of Drama in Anthroposophy is Rudolf Steiner's teaching that theatre began as an after-image of the ancient mystery centres, where religion, art, and science still formed one whole. In a lecture given at Stratford-upon-Avon on 23 April 1922, published in Waldorf Education and Anthroposophy I (GA 304), Steiner described how the artistic side of mystery experience separated from the religious in the tragedies of Aeschylus and Sophocles. The figure of Prometheus pictures the terror of initiation, and Aristotle's definition of tragedy, arousing sympathy and fear for the sake of catharsis, preserves an echo of the out-of-body mystery experience: compassion as world-empathy, fear as the meeting with the unknown supersensible. Steiner read Shakespeare, and later drama generally, as carriers of this current. Waldorf schools and the Goetheanum stage work with drama today as an educational and initiatory force on this basis.
When Steiner stood before the Shakespeare festival audience at Stratford-upon-Avon in April 1922, he named the mystery origin of drama as the hidden source of everything living in theatre. The stage did not begin as entertainment. It began in the mystery cults, where initiation scenes lifted the neophyte out of the body, and Greek tragedy carried that experience into pictures for the whole people.
In Steiner's Own Words
At first, what was living in the mysteries had its artistic and its religious side. Afterward, these two separated. In Aeschylus and in Sophocles we already see the artistic element, as it were, lifted out of the mysteries. There is the divine hero, Prometheus. In Prometheus, the human being comes to know something of the deeply-moving, terrifying experiences, the inner fear of the mysteries. What was living in the mysteries, in which the neophytes were initiated into a higher stage of life, becomes in Prometheus a picture, though permeated with living dramatic power. Thus drama became an image of the deepest human experiences. Aristotle, who was already, in a sense, an intellectual, still lived in some of the old traditions. He knew and experienced how drama was a kind of echo of the ancient mysteries.
What it Means Today
Steiner was not alone in tracing tragedy back to ritual. In Cambridge, the classicist Jane Ellen Harrison published Themis: A Study of the Social Origins of Greek Religion in 1912, arguing that Greek drama grew out of the ritual dromenon, the thing done, performed for the year-spirit of the Dionysian cult. Her colleague Gilbert Murray contributed an excursus to that book on the ritual forms preserved in Greek tragedy, and Francis Cornford extended the argument to comedy in The Origin of Attic Comedy (1914). The group, remembered as the Cambridge Ritualists, put the ritual origin of theatre on the academic map a decade before Steiner's Stratford lecture.
The parallel is close, and the difference is instructive. Harrison and Murray read the ritual sociologically: collective emotion, projected as the daimon, gradually crystallising into actor and plot. Steiner read the same evidence from the inside. For him the mysteries were not group excitement but a discipline of initiation, and catharsis names what remains of an out-of-body experience once it becomes a picture on a stage. Thalira synthesis: where the Cambridge Ritualists saw society dramatising itself, Steiner saw the supersensible dramatising itself through society, which is why he could treat Shakespeare, and drama teaching in the Waldorf school, as late stations of one initiatory current rather than as ornaments of culture.
Where to Read More