The Goddess: From Nature to the Divine Sophia

By Rudolf Steiner

Rediscovering the Goddess Natura; Retracing our Steps - Mediaeval Thought and the School of Chartres; The Goddess Natura in the Ancient Mysteries; The Goddess in the Beginning - the Birth of the Word; Esoteric Christianity - the Virgin Sophia; the Search for the New Isis; The Renewal of the Mysteries; The Modern Isis, the Divine Sophia.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Rudolf Steiner Press
• Release date: May 16, 2013
• ISBN: 9781855843257

Rudolf Steiner

Nineteenth and early twentieth century philosopher.

Book preview

1. Rediscovering the Goddess Natura

Thinkers in former times, such as those of the great medieval School of Chartres, could still acknowledge the divine-spiritual in feminine form, as the creative principle in nature. With his understanding of the changing conditions of human consciousness, Rudolf Steiner showed how we do not need to lose this sense for the goddess nature/ Natura through having moved on in modern thought. In fact it is the loss of it which has led to the sense of alienation and dehumanization so many feel today. It is a matter of being able to rediscover it in the form that is valid for us now. Since he spoke, discontentment with the abstract, inert conception of earthly nature has only increased — not least among scientists themselves, many among whom would nowadays recognize Gaia, the living Earth. But few have had the ability to trace the potential of our response to nature through from the ancient myths of Mother and Maiden, Demeter and Koré to our modern situation, making the rediscovery of the Goddess a key to the evolution of humanity.

Retracing our steps: medieval thought and the School of Chartres

Nature today has become something vague and nebulous, a catalogue of laws of gravitation, heat, light, electricity, magnetism — the laws of mechanics. Natural science and natural history deal with the study of stones and plants. But in addition, natural science includes the life and inner constitution of the organs of plants, animals and human beings of which we are admittedly ignorant. In brief, natural science and natural philosophy today include much that we claim to know and much of which we are totally ignorant.

Now this is a state of affairs that hardly inspires confidence; everything is so nebulous and confused, the thinking so superficial and abstract. Nowadays we strive spiritedly to master this abstraction we call ‘nature’ and many, it must be admitted, have grown somewhat indifferent to such an abstract approach. And if we do not belong to the younger generation, which is in active revolt against what is being taught in our schools as natural science, we adopt an attitude of benevolent neutrality. This was not always the case. I should like now to characterize briefly the attitude to knowledge of a few centuries ago.

When we look back to the ninth, tenth, eleventh and even to the twelfth and thirteenth centuries we come across people — though they were considerably fewer at that time — whom we would describe today as savants, men judged to be the outstanding scholars of their day, who taught in the famous School of Chartres in the eleventh and twelfth centuries, such as Bernardus Silvestris, Bernard of Chartres, Alanus ab Insulis.¹⁰ These personalities were still fortunate enough at that time to be associated with initiates, people who had profound insight into the mysteries of existence, such as the famous medieval initiate Joachim of Fiore or that other illustrious personality known to the world as John of