The Book of Revelations, The Holy Grail

An exploration of Karma, Soul Transformation and Modern Initiation.

A lecture given by Adriana Koulias
Rudolf Steiner House,
At
Sussex Street, Sydney
on 13
th
October 2010


































What is Revelation?

Rudolf Steiner spoke time and time again about the Apocalypse from 1904-1924.
In many different ways he recounts how the Apocalypse or Book of Revelations
was written by Lazarus who was raised by Christ to become John the Evangelist
the first and foremost Apostle of Christ called by Christ Jesus the Beloved
because of his initiation. John was the only Apostle to be at the foot of the
Cross with the three Marys and was addressed by Christ Jesus and told to take
His mother into his house that is to take the wisdom that he saw in the
representative of the Divine Sophia on earth, the Mother of God, the Solomon
Mary, into his own soul. For this reason he was able to write his Gospel and the
Apocalypse or Book of Revelations, the book that contained the knowledge of the
Christ being and his relationship to the Past, Present and Future of world
evolution and human evolution, that is, the Karma of the individual and the
World.

What is the Grail?

The Grail has been understood for centuries to have two meanings. In the
mystery centers it was, on the one hand, the vessel used by priests during the
act of Transubstantiation or Transformation and it was also the soul of the
acolyte who underwent transformation by way of Initiation.

At the time of Christ it was also known as two things. It was Jesus who was the
vessel for Christ and it was also the cup from which Christ Jesus drank at the
last supper when he performed a priestly ritual in the presence of his followers.
It is said that this cup collected His blood beneath the cross and that it was
then taken by Joseph of Arimathea to Glastonbury.

In the mysteries the Grail as the soul or as a cup led to the one thing Revelation
of the Gods Alpha and Omega beginning and end.

At the time of Christ as the grail as Jesus or as the cup that held the blood of
Christ Jesus also led to one thing: Revelation of Christ, his beginnings or his
Birth (Alpha) and his end or his death (Omega), which incidentally was a
beginning in itself, hence, his dying and becoming.

Through Christ what had always occurred in a secretive way in the mysteries
became Revealed in the Body of Jesus for all men to see with their lower Egos
because it happened on the physical plane. Later, a Revelation of Christ by John,
his closest disciple, occurred on a higher plane and this is what we find in the
Book of Revelations, a Revelation of Christ in the Higher Ego of John. This could
only occur because John was initiated by Christ himself who was his priest or
Father. When he was Raised, that is, when he became conscious of the spirit he
then took the Mother into his house, that is the Wisdom of Sophia which
transformed him into a Grail, ready for the content of Revelation.

For this reason the Holy Grail or the Transformative process in the human being,
that is, Initiation, goes hand in hand with Revelation of the spirit. One does not,
by and large, exist without the other. Rudolph Steiner even goes so far as to say
that we must imagine the Holy Grail or the cup of the Holy Mass sitting on top of
the Book of Revelations, because without transformation one does not see.

Our task tonight is to make a small attempt at understanding this and in order to
do so we have to go back to the time of the Ancient Mysteries, so that we can
understand what Transformation and Revelation mean to each other.

The Mysteries Physical, Etheric, Astral:

Ancient Mysteries: Physical.

In the Ancient Mysteries the Gods descended to priests at their altars and they
associated, as Rudolf Steiner says, Face to Face. The Act of Transubstantiation
was the result of the communion of Man with the Gods, the knowledge that was
gained was a Revelation of the Gods to man. The God Revealed was the
knowledge itself.

How did this happen?

The Gods sent down their forces during the Holy Times, and through Astrology,
the priests could know what these times were. A remnant of these Holy times
are what we call our Holidays. At these dead times the priests sought to
preserve the forces of the Gods, of sun and moon that had entered the earth
and transformed it. In order to do this the priest took himself to a cave and in
the cave he experienced a refined breathing in of the forces of the Gods, which
had transformed the Silica in the cave. The Silica was like a vessel for the
intentions, of the will of the Gods and the priests became one with these
intentions. The priest then united these intentions with the earth through their
physical bodies. The priests breathed these will forces into their very limbs and
outwards. This was an inner Communion a Meal with the Gods, the taking in of
the will of the Gods into their own vessels and the Breathing out of this will to
the living earth through the will of the priests, through the limbs.

The Priest who achieved this level of communion with the Father Gods was called
The Father or Saturn Initiate, who could experience the Alpha and the Omega;
the beginning and the end. That is, the taking in and the giving away.

Semi Ancient Mysteries: Etheric Body.

In the Semi Ancient Mysteries Temples were no longer under the ground but
above in the open air and Gods no longer descended to the earth into the Silica
but continued in a more aloof way to send their forces down into the fluid
substance of the earth: Water outwardly and inwardly into the Etheric body the
fluid element in the human being. The secret was now sought not in the earth
transformed by way of Sun and Moon but in the leavening agent; that is, in the
substance of growth, in everything that sprouts and grows and decays and
becomes seed again, and does so through the fluid element. These substances
were placed inside vessels made of Quartz Crystals and the forces of the gods
in them sent forth a sun radiance. Interestingly Christ Jesus speaks of the
leaven many times in the New Testament. In many different ways he alludes to
the leaven of the priests, he says it wont make good bread but that His leaven
will feed them. He spoke in this way because the time of the Hebrew priests was
essentially over and He, Christ Jesus, had brought to earth a new priesthood.

At any rate, the quartz vessel containing the little sun, or sun forces, which was
later transformed into the Catholic Monstrance, was seen by the priests of
those earlier times as an organ of perception, the organ of perception for
Apocalypse or Revelation of the substances transformed by the forces of the
Gods in the fluid element. A priest united his Etheric body with the forces in
these transformed substances and because of this he was able to see the sun
radiance in the substances. In these mysteries a priest only became a priest
when he could see this radiance, which indicated he had united his Etheric or
mercurial element with the Etheric or mercurial element of the Gods.

These mysteries were those mysteries of the Baptism and the consecrated
water and of ablutions. They were related to the Dying and Becoming of
everything in the world, nature and man. This gave the priest an experience of
eternal in the music of the Spheres, the feelings of the gods in the rhythm of
his heart, which died and was born again with every heartbeat.

Those who could experience this were Sun/Son Priests, Initiates who could
experience the beginning the middle and the end. The Alpha and Omega in the
universal Cosmic Word.

Semi-New Mysteries: Astral Body.

In the Semi new mysteries things were different. In the Ancient Mysteries the
Gods and their forces were observed through the element of the earth, in the
Semi Ancient Mysteries only the forces of the gods were present in water
element of the transformed substances, but in the semi-new mysteries the
priests were able to perceive only through the airy element, that is, what could
be seen through the awakening of the Word in the human soul itself.

What do I mean by this?

The cultus or ritual now included cultic speech or prayer. The intonation of
prayer or the magical word, the cultic word, in a holy place was the first ascent
from the human being to the gods. At Samothrace the substances in the vessels
were not leavening agents that transformed the substances but the inner
spiritual nature of the substance itself. When the substance was set alight its
inner nature was released in the smoke which rose upwards. Into the smoke the
priest he would intone the words. He would then see the patterns or shapes his
breath had made visible, outwardly. He could see that what he was able to allow
to stream into the smoke, the word of the gods, had been transformed in him by
his own effort and that this upwards sacrifice back to the gods allowed the gods
to stream into the smoke and reveal themselves through the Astral Element.
This was an Imagination of the Gods. The priest saw how the Word of Gods that
was living in him allowed the thoughts of the gods to Reveal themselves to him.




These were the Moon/Holy Spirit Priests.

In the first two stages man experiences revelation from the outside in and in
the third stage the priest experiences Revelation for the first time from the
inside out. This is an important point.

However the spiritual truths behind all of the above became gradually forgotten
and by the time of the Mystery of Golgotha the priestly role had reached its
lowest ebb, hence as I mentioned above, Christ Jesus many polemics against the
priests of his day.

New Mysteries, Soul and Spirit:

During the last supper, Christ Jesus explained to his disciples the new mystery
of the Transubstantiation of Bread and wine into the substance of the spirit of a
God who for the first time had descended into the soul and body of man Jesus
and had transformed him.

He said look at the Bread you eat after I die the earth will become my body, and
the wheat that comes from the earth is also a part of me so when you eat it
remember that I have transformed the earth for you and you can transform
your soul in order to see me again. Look at this wine, this wine is of the vine when
I die the vine too will be a part of me and so when you drink it, remember that
what comes from the earth has been transformed by the Blood I will shed for
you, the blood that will transform the earth.

After that beneath the Cross it became a reality when the blood of Christ in
Jesus the human Grail, entered the earth and the vessel of the Last Supper
beneath the cross, and later when the body itself was taken by the earth
through the earthquake which struck Jerusalem.

Here we have three Grails:

Jesus of Nazareth as a Grail
The Cup of the Last Supper as a Grail
The Earth as a Grail.

From the ritual of the last supper Christians developed the ritual of the Holy
mass. It was meant to be a reminder of what human beings would only be capable
of understanding much later, when they had developed a consciousness that
could know how this transubstantiation happens in the will and metabolism, in the
feelings and heart and in the breathing in and out - in the thinking life at every
moment. In fact the High Mass was not celebrated before Acolytes but only
before initiates because in it was given a Revelation of the evolution of the world
and the karma of the human being who, returns again and again at each stage, in
order to transform him or herself. In time this too was forgotten and the high
mass was celebrated before even the laity.

Human beings were passing through a time of darkness, the intellect had to be
born so that a new fully conscious initiation could arise out of the ashes of the
old, but the down side was that this intellect brought with it the darkness of
materialism. Human beings could no longer understand transubstantiation and
soul transformation and we see this reflected in the various church councils that
tried to deal with the problem. This meant that Revelation was not understood
either, because men had completely lost the ability to see or to remember what
others had once seen for themselves. Without Transformation and Initiation
there can be no knowledge of Revelation. For this reason the knowledge of Karma
disappeared from the Bible.

In recent times with the passing of the Kaliyuga or age of darkness it is possible
again for human beings to rise up from the intellect to consciousness and to
become Initiated. This initiation as all others in the past leads to Revelation but
it is very different.

John the Divine, Apostle of Christ Jesus, was the vanguard of this initiation. He
was the beloved of Christ and he was able to absorb the content of the
Revelation of Christ, not merely in his Physical body or limbs like the priests of
the Ancient Mysteries, or his Etheric body or blood like the priests of the Semi-
ancient mysteries, or his Astral body or breath like the priest in the semi-new
mysteries, but in his very Ego, in his I itself. This required a different initiation,
one that was conducted by Christ himself. John was made a priest a Presbyter,
by Christ and it was for this reason that he was able to unite his I with Christ in
a communion that enabled him to be filled with the content of the Revelation of
Christ completely Consciously. This enabled him to see how in the Past - in the
beginning - was the Word of Christ, and how His word, Alpha, was with the
Father Gods, and how this Word became flesh and walked with men and how this
Word became the Light and life of men and would be so until the end of time -
Omega. He could do this because at the foot of the cross he had firstly united
with the Wisdom of the Divine Sophia.

In fact beneath the cross his Ego was supported from below by the three Marys
each representing one aspect of the past priestly intiations now renewed in the
soul:

Magdalene the Sentient Soul Etheric through the Astral Renewal of Semi-
new Mysteries in the soul.

Mary of Cleophas The intellectual Soul Astral through the Etheric Renewal of
Semi-Ancient Mysteries in the soul

Mary Mother of God The Consciousness Soul Physical body through Etheric
and Astral Renewal of Ancient Mysteries in the soul.

And he was supported from above by those who represented future initiations in
the spirit:

John the Baptist Manas - Spirit in the Astral Body that is Spirit Self in the
Astral body.
Zarathustra Budhi - Spirit Self in the Etheric Body that is Life Spirit in the
Etheric Body.
Abraham Atma - Budhi in the Physical body that is Spirit Man in the Physical
Body.

Because of the above John was transformed as a human being way ahead of time
and this meant in his breath blood and body he was a Grail, a transformed human
being who could be filled with the content of: the Karma of the world; and of
human beings and what he saw he wrote down in a book his Apocalypse or Book
of Revelation.

He saw Revelation not with his body or with his soul but with his Ego, or spirit.

When Rudolf Steiner gave Occult Science to the world, he was able to do this
through his connection with St John the Divine, the same individual whom we
know later became Christian Rosencreutz. Christian Rosencreutz experienced
another initiation in the 13
th
century which made him capable of Christianizing all
the wisdom of the world and this transformed content of Apocalypse or
Revelation of world evolution and mans place in it he inspired Rudolf Steiner, to
give in a Scientific way, as a Science of the Grail.

When Rudolf Steiner himself gave Knowledge of Higher Worlds, this was a
guide book to Self Transformation, or Spiritual Alchemy. It was the way to the
transubstantiation of the soul so that it might be fashioned into a Grail for the
spirit filled with the content of Revelation in the human I or Ego.

Occult Science Revelation - Macrocosm
Knowledge of Higher Worlds Grail - Microcosm

Renewal of the Mysteries:

All of knowledge of Higher Worlds and Occult Science can be rediscovered in
the Foundation Stone Meditation. All the content of Past initiations and how
they can be renewed and transformed in the body soul and spirit of the human
being to create the possibility for this new experience of Revelation can be
found in it: The Father God, the Son God and the Holy Spirit God; the evolution
of the world in Saturn, Sun Moon and Earth; the hierarchies of angels. All of this
in relation to: the limbs, heart/lungs, nervous system of the physical body; the
thinking, feeling and willing in the soul; and the Manas, Budhi and Atma which are
purely spiritual. In other words Macrocosm and Microcosm.

Those who meditate practically, sound out and body forth this meditation will
eventually, as karma permits, if not in this life in the next, be capable of
transforming body and soul to experience a Revelation in the spirit. Rudolf
Steiner says There are as many Revelations as there are human Is devoted to
god. (The Book of Revelation and the Work of the Priest page 35).

The soul prepares itself to be the vessel for the I, which is filled with the
content of the Holy Spirit of Revelation by working on self-transformation or
Transubstantiation. Then, when little by little we absorb the content of
revelation or Imagination, this imagination more and more fashions the eye of
the spirit in us, or the vessel of the higher I. After that, when through our own
work we bring the content of our higher I forth again into the world as a
sacrifice to the spiritual world, this means Revelation is Multiplied and instead
of the gods feeding us we feed the gods with the content of our Revelation as a
reverse cultus.

Revelation or Apocalypse is therefore the Vision of Karma Alpha and Omega
Past, Present and Future, through Self Transformation of the soul or the Holy
Grail - Initiation. That is how the Grail or Holy transformation of the soul leads
to Revelation of the karma of human beings and the world.

But in our times the dragon seeks to snatch away this new clairvoyance, this new
initiation and seeks to devour the mystery of Apocalypse. The Woman with the
sun in her belly and the moon at her feet ready to give birth to the child is a
picture of this.

When we become our own priests we are capable of transforming this evil, which
is really in ourselves, to good. For this reason next time we meet I would like to
talk about the three great mysteries of the Apocalypse:

The Michael Mystery
The Mystery of the Etheric Christ
The Mystery of 666 the Antichrist

Until then, I will leave you with some words by Rudolf Steiner:

If you take the impulses of the Book of Revelations into your work, as priests, in
a truly spiritual sense, then you are the ones, dear friends, about whom the Book
of Revelation has been speaking as being the ones who come to turn aside the
might of the Beast, of the False Prophet, of Satan. (The Book of Revelations and
the Work of the Priest page 258).

May it be so.

Thank you and Goodnight.




















"#$ %&'()*+,&( -+&($ .$),+*+,&(

Soul of man,
Thou livest in the limbs
That beai thee thiough the woilu of space
Into the ocean being of the Spiiit
Piactice !"#$#%&$'()**'(%#)+
In uepths of soul
Wheiein the wieluing
Woilu cieatoi life
Thine own I comes to being
Within the I of uou
Then, in the all-woilu -being of man
Thou wilt tiuly *#,'.

Foi the Fathei-Spiiit of the Beights holus sway
In the Bepths of Woilus begetting life
Seiaphim, Cheiubim, Thiones!
Let theie iing out in the heights
What in the uepths is echoeu,
Speaking:
Ex Beo Nascimui.
The elementals heai it
In the East anu West anu Noith anu South
Nay human beings heai it!

Soul of Nan!
Thou livest in the beat of Beait anu Lung
Which leaus the thiough the ihythmic tiues of time
Into the feeling of thine own Soul being,
Piactice !"#$#%&-#+./0*+'11
In uepths of soul,
Wheiein the suiging
Beeus of the Woilus Becoming
Thine own I unites
0nto the I of the woilu
Then 'miu the weaving of the soul in man
Thou wilt tiuly /''*2

Foi the Chiist will in the enciicling iounu holus sway
In the ihythms of woilus blessing the soul
Kyiiotetes, Bynamis, Exusiai,
Let theie be fiieu in the East,
What in the West is foimeu
Speaking:
In Chiisto Noiimui
The Elementals heai it, in the East anu West anu Noith anu South
Nay human beings heai it!

Soul of Nan!
Thou livest in the iesting heau
Which fiom the giounu of the Eteinal
0pens to thee the thoughts of woilus
Piactice !"#$#%&,#1#)+
In quietness of Thought,
Wheie the eteinal aims of uous
Woilu-being's light
0pon thine own I unite
Foi thy fiee willing.
Then fiom the giounu of the Spiiit in Nan
Thou wilt tiuly %3#+4

Foi the Spiiits 0niveisal Thoughts holu sway
In the beings of all woilus ciaving foi light.
Aichai, Aichangeloi, Angeloi!
Let theie be piayeu in the uepths,
What in the height is answeieu,
Speaking:
Pei Spiiitum, Sanctum, Reviviscimus
The Elemental Spiiits heai it,
In the East anu West anu Noith anu South,
Nay human beings heai it!


At the tuining point in Time
The Spiiit Light of the Woilu
Enteieu into the spheie of Eaithly being
Baikness of night hau helu sway;
Bay-iauiant Light
Pouieu into the souls of men:
Light that waims simple Shepheiu's Beaits
Light that enlightens the Wise Beaus of kings

0h light uivine,
0h sun of Chiist!
Waim thou oui Beaits,
Enlighten Thou oui Beaus,
That goou may become,
What fiom oui heaits we woulu founu,
Anu fiom oui heaus uiiect
In conscious, light filleu, willing.