עברית The time has come, after four thousand years, thanks to Rudolf Steiner's modern spiritual science, to slightly lift the veil that the Bible so artfully weaves over Isaac's initiation.
If you read my book about Jerusalem: The Role of the Hebrew People in the Spiritual Biography of Humanity, in this light, you will get a deeper understanding of its true meaning:
"Those who once dwelt on earth as Moses, Abraham, and the Prophets will again become recognizable to human beings who experience the etheric Christ. We shall realize that, even as Abraham preceded Christ, preparing His way, he has also assumed the mission of helping later with the work of the etheric Christ. Those who are awake, who do not sleep through the greatest event of the near future, gradually enter into association with all those who, as patriarchs, preceded the Christ event and unite with them".
- Rudolf Steiner in the lectures from 25th January and 6th March 1910, in GA 118
Abraham had already himself experienced, at his initiation in the mysteries of Melchizedek, the spiritual secrets of humanity and the world. Now his initiation continues through Isaac, and it is intensified, since Isaac's initiation is not a repetition of Abraham's initiation, it is not about experiencing the divine forces and beings that created humanity and earth and all in them, which are still the forces of the divine father; but rather Isaac's initiation is destined to create the founding seed power that would enable humanity's soul, which is already beginning to separate from this father divinity, to find within itself the powers of resurrection in order to rise again towards the spirit. Isaac's initiation is the initiation of the human soul, the son's powers, occurring in a soul which begins to become a truly earthly soul, experiencing death and finiteness for the first time as an individual experience. That means, in an archetypal way, as preparation for the distant future, the soul of Isaac, son of Abraham and Sarah, first begins to experience death and finiteness, as a precondition to develop the forces of the personal, self-conscious self, and this means that it must also experience death, Seth- Ahriman, in a much more conscious way than was possible at this time, in which people still experienced death as a natural transition to life in the higher worlds. He must learn to experience, personally, something that would take human beings thousands of years to experience, the power of death as a power which begins to cloud the spiritual origins of the soul in the life before birth and the future life after death in the spiritual worlds. In other words, he had to experience personally what became the most universal human experience only in very recent centuries, the mortality and finality that the soul begins to feel because it identifies itself with the mortal and finite physical body. And this death of the primeval spiritual consciousness must be overcome on the way to developing new conscious and individual spiritual forces of vision and cognition.
As the Egyptian initiate was born, died and was resurrected in the dramatic combination of fates through Isis-Osiris-Horus, but could only undergo this in the higher worlds and not as a whole person on earth, Abraham, Sarah and Isaac stand before us for the first time as actual humans. In the story of the sacrifice as a tale of actual initiation, it is useless to discuss a blind faith in the irrational will of the God we cannot see nor understand consciously, but rather of the development of actual spiritual forces, guided by the high priest of the supreme God, aimed at using the new experience of the forces of death for good, transforming death into a new life, and igniting with it the new forces of spiritual perception and consciousness, over- coming death as humans on earth and not only as ancient Egyptian initiates undergoing initiation in the higher worlds, hidden from human eyes deep in the inner chambers of the Egyptian mysteries of Hermes, Isis and Osiris. That is the meaning of transforming and sanctifying the seed of promise borne by Isaac....
The time has come, after four thousand years, thanks to Rudolf Steiner's modern spiritual science, to slightly lift the veil that the Bible so artfully weaves over Isaac's initiation. The time has come, not because of any personal desire or ambition, but because it is expected from us by the gentle, etheric, higher self of humanity, who guides, regulates and strives to help us heal the karma of modern humanity. He wishes us to talk about this initiation again, but now for the first time openly in the new age of light, the new age of Michael, the spirit who is the former countenance of Jehovah and the Folk Spirit of the ancient Hebrew people, who now serves humanity as a whole, and to do so here and now, at the beginning of the new age of Abraham, in Hebrew and in Israel. It is high time to reveal the mission of the Hebrew people in the spiritual biography of humanity, through the whole Bible and in the esoteric Jewish lore. (Naturally, so much must be left out for now, as there is also much to say about the matriarchs' initiation: for example, how does Sarai become Sarah? And what was exactly her Sophian- Shekinah, or Mother initiation while Abraham and Isaac were initiated? But in these lectures, we must limit ourselves and hopefully we will be able address these mysteries and many others in future cycles.)
This, then, is the essence of the initiation of Isaac, in which Abraham ministers as the assistant of the high priest of El Elion, Melchizedek, whose exalted figure stands by the altar wholly concealed, shrouded and enveloped by the Bible's revealing, speaking silence:
“It is said, that when the knife touched Isaac's throat, his soul streamed out, spread its wings and was liberated from its body”. (Ginzberg, ibid.)
Physically speaking, Isaac's body in the physical world would look to an external observer, as a dead body; only if you would have touched and felt it, would you have sensed his hardly noticeable heart pulse and breathing. He is sunk in the deep, trance-like initiation sleep, a state deeper than our deep sleep at night, com- parable only to a full state of coma. He is undergoing a consciously planned and actualized near-death experience, which was the most universal form of initiation in all true mysteries in the past, and which many people experience in our times, as we can see by the thousands of near-death experiences reported everywhere. Today this form of initiation cannot and should not be attempted, because we live in the age of the consciousness soul. This means that the free individual pupil is the only one responsible for his or her initiation, which only should take place in the fullest and most heightened degree of self-consciousness. This kind of initiation was the most universal form of achieving supersensible spiritual knowledge in the ancient mysteries. But there the initiation took place in the depths of the hidden temples, in the underground chambers of the Pyramids, and no ordinary person could know anything about it; while in the Bible, in the biblical way of concealing-revealing, adapted to the much later earthly self-consciousness of the mind soul age, initiation begins its gradual transition; (we will address this in the Epilogue below, in which the main stages of the Hebrew initiation will be described, as a transitory initiation, between the hidden ancient temple initiations and the present modern initiation). Then, in Genesis 22:17, comes the blessing that Isaac's initiation will confer on the future descendants and hereditary blood stream of the Hebrew people, a stream that will carry from now on as one stream the universal blood of all of humanity, because it contains the divine forces of Jehovah and the Folk Spirit Michael, now impregnated through Isaac's initiation by the pure sun stream of the Supreme God, individualized, as a seed for the age of individual freedom and love...
read the whole chapter in the book