Rudolf Steiner had a vast amount to say regarding the process of
initiation, which is a phase or training meant to orient one in the
spiritual world while still in the physical world, and thereby orient one
more fully and more meaningfully in the physical world before passing into
the spiritual world upon death. He remarked that Virgil was an initiate of
the mysteries, and in the above lecture of February 11, 1906 entitled
"Dante's Divine Comedy", he comments on the connection between Dante and
Virgil and initiation. I reproduce the pertinent three parargraphs from
his four page lecture below in the event any on the list are interested in
exploring Virgil from possibly another angle. In Steiner's picturing of
the organism of the human being, it has the following members: a physical
body, which is just organic chemistry - what we share with nature; an
etheric body that gives life, which he shares with plants and animals, but
without anything more would render him in a state of perpetual sleep; an
astral body that gives awakeness and passions, that he shares only with
animals; and an ego, which only man has, which is what allows him to learn
from repeated lives lived on earth and which is what he has in common with
the divine worlds, with God, as in the Quaker dictum. 'that of God in every
man'. So here is Steiner speaking on Dante and Virgil:
'When we pass into another existence, we perceive what is now contained
within us - for then it becomes outwardly visible. We say that our
passions, instincts and impulses belong to us. But when we enter the
spiritual worlds, the members of our human organism become exteriorised.
They become something which may be compared with the other objects, here
upon the earth. They become symbols.
Dante mentions three symbols, three fundamental qualities of his astral
body, the body of passions, or the lower soul. A panther, a lion and a
she-wolf - his three chief passions - face him in the shape of three
animals. This is not merely a symbol. When a human being enters the
astral plane, the lower passions face him in the form of animals. The
she-wolf is one of these passions. It is the same she-wolf that once
suckled Romulus and Remus. It symbolises a passion which took hold of men
when the Roman nation was founded; it is the passion which lives in all
those whose chief aim is to possess something - avarice - and on the other
hand, the right to personal possession. This passion was inoculated into
men when the she-wolf suckled Romulus and Remus.
Before the Roman period, the quality which men appropriated for
themselves was courage, symbolised in the lion. At a still earlier time,
we find that the caste of the priests strove to develop a special cunning -
the panther, the symbol for the qualities of an Odysseus. When Virgil
meets Dante, he tells him: "I cannot free you from the three animals, least
of all from the she-wolf." He tells him this , because Dante, as an
Italian, has grown out of what has remained behind from the passions of
ancient Rome. Virgil, who gives us a picture of Initiation in his Aeneid,
is the leader chosen by Dante, because Virgil was at that time the one who
could teach men, more than anyone else, something concerning the aspect of
the Beyond. And men imagined that this Beyond consisted of three spheres:
Hell, Purgatory and Heaven.'
Larry Ely, Amherst, Massachusetts
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