A cycle of short verses in GA 40 in which Steiner re-created the soul-mood of the Indian, Egyptian, Greek, Ephesian and Samothracian mysteries.
Wisdom from Ancient Cultural Epochs in Anthroposophy is the title Rudolf Steiner gave to a group of free adaptations and translations printed in Truth-Wrought Words (GA 40), the collected volume of his verses and mantric sayings. The group gathers short formulae drawn from successive mystery streams: an Indian proverb addressed to the Original Self from whom the world originates and to whom it returns, words of the Egyptian mysteries after Apuleius describing the sun seen shining at midnight, mystery teachings of ancient Greece on the secret of plants, the secret of metals and the human being, and sayings from the Mysteries of Ephesus and from the Cabiri Mysteries on Samothrace. Steiner gave these verses between 1906 and 1923, the later ones at Dornach. They are practised as meditation rather than read as history: each one carries the characteristic soul-mood of the epoch that produced it.
Wisdom from Ancient Cultural Epochs is a short cycle inside Steiner's book of verses, GA 40. Instead of describing what the old mysteries taught, Steiner re-made their sayings in German, one for each stream: India, Egypt, Greece, Ephesus, Samothrace. The reader meets the Original Self, the midnight sun, the kinship of flowers with the moon, and the Cabiri who speak in limbs, heart and speech.
In Steiner's Own Words
From the Cabiri Mysteries on Samothrace
Feeling of the disciple at the gate:
I enter into that which
Encloses me in a mighty spirit,
Encloses me in the great gods,
Those great gods who on earth
Through the sacrificial acts of human beings
Reveal the mysteries of the universe.
Inner experience of the student, conveyed by the celebrating initiator at the sacrificial altar:
Thus the Cabiri,
The great gods:
Mercury in the limbs,
Sun in the heart,
Mars in speech.
The secret of the Samothracian world, to impart consciousness to the disciple:
Nature is spirit,
spirit is nature.
What it Means Today
The Cabiri verse points at a real place. On Samothrace in the northern Aegean, the Sanctuary of the Great Gods has been excavated since 1938 by the Institute of Fine Arts at New York University, first under Karl Lehmann and later under James R. McCredie. What the digging recovered was a rite rather than a doctrine: an initiation open to anyone who came, citizens and foreigners, women and slaves, with no creed to memorise and no public name for the gods themselves. Walter Burkert made the same case from the literary side in Ancient Mystery Cults (Harvard University Press, 1987), citing Aristotle's remark that initiates went not to learn something but to undergo something. That is the gap these verses work in. Classical scholarship can date the buildings, catalogue the finds and reconstruct the procession route, and it cannot say what the candidate felt at the gate. GA 40 offers a soul-mood in place of a reconstruction, which is why Steiner titled the cycle free adaptations and translations rather than translations alone.
Thalira synthesis: the excavation supplies the where and the when, the verse supplies the inner posture, and holding both at once is a discipline neither the archaeologist nor the devotee practises alone. Anthroposophical study groups work these lines the way they were given, spoken aloud and carried for a week at a time, one epoch per verse.
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