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mystery of the sun and the mystery of Christ as the decadent present-day representatives
of Christianity so often are. Dionysius the Areopagite, whom we have often mentioned,
calls the sun God's monument, and in Augustine we continually find such allusions. Even
in Scholasticism we find such references to the fact that the outwardly visible stars and
their movements are images of the divine-spiritual existence of the world.
However, we must understand the mystery of Christmas in a far wider context, if we wish
to understand what should concern us most of all in view of the important tasks of the
present age. I would like to remind you of something which I have repeatedly brought
forward in various ways in the course of many years. I have told you: We look back into
the first post-Atlantean age, which was filled with the deeds and experiences of the
ancient Indian people; we look back into the ancient Persian epoch of post-Atlantean
humanity, into the Egypto-Chaldean, and into the Greco-Latin. We come then to the fifth
epoch of the post-Atlantean humanity, our own. Our epoch will be followed by the sixth
and by the seventh. And I have drawn your attention to the fact that the Greco-Latin, the
fourth epoch of post-Atlantean humanity, stands, as it were, in the middle, and that there
are certain connections (you can read of this in my little book The Spiritual Guidance of
the Individual and Humanity) between the third and the fifth epochs, that is, between the
Egypto-Chaldean epoch and our own. Furthermore there is also a certain connection
between the ancient Persian epoch and the sixth, and between the ancient Indian and the
seventh epoch of post-Atlantean humanity. Specific things repeat themselves in a certain
way in each of these epochs of life.
I once pointed out that the great Kepler, the successor of Copernicus, had a feeling that
his solar and planetary system was repeating, of course in a way appropriate to the fifth
post-Atlantean age, what had lived as the world picture behind the Egyptian priest
mysteries. Kepler himself expressed this in a certain sense very radically when he said
that he had borrowed the vessels of the ancient Egyptian teachers of wisdom in order to
carry them over into the new age.
Today, however, we will consider something which stood, in a sense, at the center of the
view found in the cultic rituals performed by the priests in the Egyptian mystery religion;
we will consider the mysteries of Isis. In order to call up before our minds the spiritual
connection between the mystery of Isis and that which also lives in Christianity, we need
only look with the eyes of the soul upon Raphael's famous picture of the Sistine
Madonna. The Virgin is holding the child Jesus, and behind her are the clouds,
representing a multitude of children. We can imagine the Virgin receiving the child Jesus
descending through the clouds, through a condensation, as it were, of the thin cloud
substance. Created out of an entirely Christian spirit, this picture is, after all, nothing
more than a kind of repetition of what the Egyptian mysteries of Isis revered when they
portrayed Isis holding the child Horus. The motif of that earlier picture is in complete
harmony with that of Raphael's picture. Of course, this fact must not tempt us to a
superficial interpretation, common among many people since the eighteenth century and
throughout the nineteenth century right up to our own days - namely, to see the story of
Christ Jesus and all that belongs to it as a mere metamorphosis, a transformation, of
ancient pagan mysteries. From my book Christianity as Mystical Fact you already know
how these things are to be understood. However, in the sense explained in that book we
are permitted to point out a spiritual congruence between what appears in Christianity
and the old pagan mysteries.
The main content of the mystery of Isis is the death of Osiris and Isis's search for the
dead Osiris. We know that Osiris, the representative of the being of the sun, the
representative of the spiritual sun, is killed by Typhon, who, expressed in Egyptian terms,
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