The Persian initiate whose I-being incarnated as the Solomon Jesus and at age twelve passed into the Nathan Jesus to prepare the vessel for the Christ.
Zarathustra in Anthroposophy names a single initiate-individuality, the founder of the ancient Persian sun-religion of Ahura Mazda, whose I-being Steiner identifies in The Gospel of St. Matthew (GA 123, Bern, 1910) with the Solomon Jesus of Matthew's genealogy. According to Steiner's karma-research, this same individuality at the twelfth year of life passed over into the Nathan Jesus of the Luke Gospel, eventually preparing the threefold bodily vessel that received the Christ-Being at the Jordan baptism.
Steiner places the original Zarathustra at the dawn of the second post-Atlantean cultural epoch, the Ancient Persian epoch that followed the Indian Rishis. From the holy Mysteries Zarathustra brought a sun-religion that did not yet see the Christ on Earth but pointed to him in cosmic distance, calling him Ahura Mazda, the Great Aura behind the visible solar disc. In earlier incarnations Zarathustra had been the teacher whose offered astral body was woven into the Egyptian Hermes and whose offered etheric body was woven into Moses. Later, under the name Nazarathos or Zarathos, he taught Pythagoras and the captive Hebrews in the Babylonian mystery-schools. The reincarnation arc culminates as the Solomon Jesus, whose physical and etheric bodies, perfectly prepared by Zarathustra, were then transferred at age twelve into the Nathan child to await the Mystery of Golgotha.
In Steiner's Own Words
During boyhood the Zarathustra-Individuality evolved in the physical body and etheric body of the Jesus of St. Matthew's Gospel until the twelfth year. In the case of this Individuality and also on account of the climate, the point of development occurring in our regions at the age of 14 to 15 fell somewhat earlier. By the twelfth year everything that could possibly be attained in the suitably prepared physical and etheric bodies of the Solomon lineage had actually been attained. And then the Zarathustra-Individuality forsook the bodies to which the Gospel of St. Matthew is primarily referring and passed over into the Jesus of the Gospel of St. Luke.
What it Means Today
The figure that takes shape in GA 123 is not the literary Zarathustra of Nietzsche, which is a poetic mouthpiece, but a distinct karmic individuality whose biography Steiner traces across cultural epochs. Sergei O. Prokofieff, the late Vorstand member of the General Anthroposophical Society at the Goetheanum (1954 to 2014), made this thread the spine of much of his Christology, particularly in The Cycle of the Year as a Path of Initiation and in his work on the two Jesus children. Prokofieff's contribution was to read the Solomon-to-Nathan transfer as the karmically necessary precondition for the Christ-Being to incarnate at all: the Nathan child carried a soul-substance untouched by post-paradisal incarnation, while Zarathustra carried thirty centuries of initiate-knowledge developed in the Mysteries. The two became one so that the third, the Christ, could descend.
For a practitioner, the Zarathustra biography is the corrective to two flat readings of esoteric Christianity. The first flattening, common to academic study, treats the Persian sun-religion and the Gospels as separate traditions to be compared. The second, common to comparative religion, treats Zarathustra as a Persian reformer of the sixth century BC. Steiner's reading puts both aside and treats Zarathustra as one I-being whose work prepared the Christ Impulse from inside human history. Read in this light, the Magi from the East in Matthew are not anonymous astrologers but the inheritors of Zarathustra's own school, returning to greet the body their teacher had taken. Zarathustra's revelation to the Persians of the cosmic Sun-Being is known as Ahura Mazda, the Wise Lord whose pre-Christian sun-religion prepared the way for the Mystery of Golgotha. It is the reborn Zarathustra, the Solomon Jesus, of whom the Gospel of Matthew chiefly speaks. As Zarathustra brought the sun-wisdom, so Krishna brought the impulse of the self-conscious I at the close of the ancient age. The cosmic teaching Krishna gives in the Bhagavad Gita stands among the great revelations alongside the Zarathustra-stream. The preserved sheaths of the great Persian initiate are traced in the etheric body of Zarathustra.
Where to Read More
- The Gospel of St. Matthew, GA 123
- The Gospel of St. Luke, GA 114
- Buy from SteinerBooks
- Thus Spoke Zarathustra by Nietzsche: The Three Metamorphoses and the Eternal Return
- Thus Spoke Zarathustra by Friedrich Nietzsche: The Overman, Eternal Recurrence, and the Death of God
- Zoroastrianism Beliefs: Ahura Mazda, Ahriman, and the Cosmic Fire