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From the Preface: "The time from the end of November until Christmas was devoted to the preparations for the coming decisive events. Rudolf Steiner did this through the third of the lecture cycles mentioned above dealing with Mystery Formations. By way of introduction, he explained the path that a human being must follow in his soul life in order to penetrate to an insight into the spiritual foundations of the world. He set forth that the spiritual in the course of evolution has worked each time upon the soul element of man, and molded the physiological element, even into the metamorphosing of the activity of thinking, of the forces of memory, of hereditary impulses, but also into the individual imprint in gesture, physiognomy, and forces of the earth planet. And he now developed in the lectures of December 2-23 a magnificent picture of the history of the ancient Mysteries, out of which we can still read how in early epochs this knowledge was achieved, protected, nut reed in the Mystery places of the Earth , and developed in the Mysteries of the North and the South as the most sacred treasure of humanity, unfolded from stage to stage. This description of a previously almost completely unknown chapter of spiritual history and the history of the Mysteries is so comprehensive, and so important in its details, lays open such and abundance of knowledge about the methods and stages of the spiritual guidance of humanity throughout the centuries that we can only allude here to the most important main divisions: "The Ephesus Mysteries of Artemis. The Mystery places of Hybernia. The Great Mysteries of Hybernia. The Chthonic and the Eleusinian Mysteries. The transition from Plato to Aristotle. The mystery of the nature of the plant, the metal, and the human being. The mysteries of the Cabire of Samothrace. The tradition from the spirit of the ancient Mysteries to those of the Middle Ages. The soul striving of the human begin during the Middle Ages. The Rosicrucian Mysteries." It is now the task of the modern Mystery place, of the spiritual-scientific Movement and its school, the Goetheanum in Dornach, to bring about again in human consciousness the lost knowledge of the spiritual guidance of man and humanity out of the spiritual history of the past. The revelation given during these weeks out of the history of the mysteries was for that reason the right foundation for the decisions to be carried out a Christmas of this year. Those who heard the lectures of November and December 1923 experienced the fact, and will still remember it, that at this decisive point the future history of humanity was inscribed in the consciousness and forces of the earth and the consciousness of those human beings who had a will for its reception."