The New Cain: The Temple Legend as a Spiritual and Moral Impulse for Evolution and Its Completion by Rudolf Steiner

Description

Who was Cain and what does he represent? The first part of thisbook invites us to revise the traditional, biblical, view of Cain as hisbrother's murderer. Rudolf Steiner shows how the original Cain was ready tosacrifice his being to something higher, but this pure impulse was pervertedinto the desire to murder. Our earthly knowledge has an affinity with thefallen Cain, but there is also a path by which we can ascend to the conditionof Cain before his fratricide--through the stages of higher knowledge. Only the descendants of Cain, coming tofull and real "I" development, can sustain themselves in the face of earthlyforces.

In the context of this primevalCain, or the "new" Cain, the ritual ceremonies enacted by Steiner between1905 and 1914 acquire their true meaning, as a way to incorporate previouslydeveloped spirit knowledge into the human soul and into physical reality. Herethe practical occultist increasingly identifies with Hiram, the central figureof the Temple Legend, in order to realize the new Cain within him. Meyerdemonstrates the direct line from Rudolf Steiner's early "rites of knowledge"to the Class lessons of 1924, which Steiner had intended to reinvest with aritual element.

Besides reflections by Rudolf Steiner and editor Thomas Meyer'scommentary, this volume includes important thoughts by Marie Steiner, W. J.Stein, Ludwig Polzer-Hoditz and Rudolf Geering-Christ. The final chapter containsa lecture by D. N. Dunlop--perhaps Steiner's most important pupil in theWest--that reveals the universally humancore of the rituals we encounter both in traditional Freemasonry rites and inthose developed by Rudolf Steiner.