Two years after the founding of the Esoteric Section in 1906, Steiner met John Yarker within the Theosophical Society. Having a relationship of mutual esteem, Yarker had invited Steiner and his future wife Marie von Sivers to join the Memphis-Misraim Rite of which he had become Grand Jerofante General after Garibaldi in the same year. Steiner himself already regarded Egyptian Freemasonry as a corpus quite distinct from the other Masonic rites, united with the source of the Ancient Mysteries.
Thus Theodor Reuss, Yarker's representative for Germany, formally bestowed on Steiner and his wife, the highest operative degrees: 33° 90° 96° of the Memphis-Misraim Rite and a license, entrusting them with the task of founding a lodge in Berlin, with the name Mystica Aeterna. Through the conferring of the degrees and the license, the outward foundation of the Misraim Service, that is, the formal connection with the Misraim Rite, takes place.
However, Steiner asserted that this formal connection responds to the occult law of historical continuity, between the past and the present of occult research, but that if such a formal connection could not be established, it would still found the Service: this passage is crucial to understand in that Steiner gave prevalence to the substance of esoteric work rather than to formal continuity, as is often the case in Masonic circles. Steiner found himself with a "ritual frame" on his hands emptied of the esoteric content that demanded to be renewed.
The rite became associated with the Esoteric Section as "Misraim Service" and immediately accepted women as sisters as well. From Steiner's original lodge soon sprout other lodges operating under the same rite: in Cologne, Leipzig, Stuttgart and Munich and then throughout Europe. Meanwhile, Steiner holds lectures and esoteric classes for Mystica Aeterna members only. In the middle of the following year, 1907, 100 members were reached, a condition for which Steiner could become Grand Master, completely independent of Reuss.
Steiner continued to renew the Misraim Service in order to bring it into line with the Rosicrucian tradition until around 1908 he ceased relations with Reuss altogether. Thus was born "Cognitive Worship," or a ritual designed to place the neophyte in relation to the being who presides over spiritual thinking, Michael, himself a herald of Christ as well as the leader of the Rosicrucian spiritual current.
Pictured: staging of a conference in the early period of Mystica Aeterna.
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