The Hebrew preparation school whose members were trained, by strict rules of diet and life, to recognise the approaching Christ clairvoyantly; John the Baptist was its greatest member.
The Nazarenes in Anthroposophy is the name Rudolf Steiner gives to the school of preparation within the ancient Hebrew people whose members were trained to recognise the approaching Christ by clairvoyant means. In lectures published as Deeper Secrets of Human History in the Light of the Gospel of St. Matthew (GA 117, Berlin, 1909), Steiner describes their rule: nothing derived from the grape, since the grape carries forces beyond the pure working of the sun; nothing possessing an astral body, making the Nazarene a strict vegetarian who fed on the carob bean and the honey of wild bees; and no cutting of the hair during training, an echo of the sun-forces of older epochs. John the Baptist was the last and greatest Nazarene, and his baptism in the Jordan crowned the school's whole purpose: preparing human beings to know the Christ when He came.
The Nazarenes were not a sect in the ordinary sense but a training path running through Hebrew history. Steiner describes men prepared, generation after generation, so that a few souls would be capable of recognising the Christ Event when it arrived. Their rules of food, drink, and uncut hair were instruments of clairvoyant preparation, and in John the Baptist the school completed its work.
In Steiner's Own Words
These men were able to perceive clairvoyantly all that had been prepared from the earliest days of the Hebrews, in order that, out of and through this people, the Christ might be born and understood. In a mode of life compatible with the development of clairvoyant insight, these Nazarenes were bound by strict and strenuous rules. These rules, since they belonged to quite another age, differ considerably from those essential for the attainment of spiritual knowledge to-day, although in some respects there is a certain similarity. Much that was of primary importance in the Nazarene training is subsidiary to-day, and much that was subsidiary then would now be essential. Nobody should imagine that methods which in earlier times led to clairvoyant knowledge of Christ would have the effect of leading a man of the modern age to the same momentous recognition.
What it Means Today
The sharpest modern lens on the Nazarene rule is the afterlife of the Nazirite vow of Numbers 6, the discipline in which a man or woman consecrated a period of life by refusing every product of the vine, leaving the hair uncut, and avoiding contact with the dead. Biblical scholarship keeps the two words apart, Nazirite for the vowed one and Nazarene for the man of Nazareth, yet Steiner's description of the school matches the vow point for point, down to the grape and the razor. When the Rastafari movement formed in Jamaica in the 1930s, after the 1930 coronation of Haile Selassie I in Ethiopia, its practitioners grounded uncut dreadlocks directly in Numbers 6:5, and many keep the ital diet, plant food without wine, repeating the old Nazirite pattern with remarkable fidelity. A discipline Steiner described in Berlin in 1909 as belonging to another age is still being practised on a Caribbean island.
Thalira synthesis: the Nazarene rule is a throat discipline, a schooling of everything taken in through mouth and breath so that one voice could at last speak the recognition. That is why John the Baptist, the voice in the wilderness, stands as the school's completion.
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