Kabiri

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The Kabeirion on Samothrace.

The Kabiri (also Kabeiri, Cabeiri or Cabiri, from Greek: Κάβειροι Kábeiroi "the great ones", Latin: Cabiri) were unspecified chthonic gods of both sexes from Asia Minor, who were often associated with fertility, seafaring or blacksmithing. They were worshipped as "Great Gods" (Greek: Μεγάλοι Θεοί Megáloi Theoí), especially on Samothrace, but also on Imbros and Lemnos. There were other cult sites in Macedonia, Boeotia, Pergamon and Miletus, among others. However, the cults were sometimes very different.

The Kabiri were regarded as children of the Great Mother, the Kabeiro (also Cabeiro, Greek: Καβειρώ). According to Greek mythology, she was a daughter of the shape-shifting sea god Proteus and lived as a sea nymph on the island of Lemnos. After she was cast out of Olympus, the Greek smith god Hephaestus had three sons with her. According to some ancient authors, three Kabeiri and three Kabeirian nymphs (Greek: τρεῖς Καβειρίδες νύμφαι treís Kabeirídes nýmphai) were worshipped on Lemnos.[1] Among others, Kabeiro was identified by the Greeks with the mother of the gods Rhea, but also with Demeter, Hecate and Aphrodite.

Mythology

The Kabeirion of Lemnos

The name of the Kabiri is not of Greek origin, but derives from the mountain Kabeiros in the landscape of Berekyntia, which belonged to Cybele, the Phrygian mother of the gods. Later they made Samothrace their sacred mystery island and founded the Samothracian mysteries here. At this time Orpheus was also their disciple. They were invoked as saving gods by sailors in distress.

Compared to the Great Mother, they appeared like dwarfs, yet they were called Megaloi Theoi, "Great Gods". The four surviving god names known from mysteries of the Kabiri, probably from Thebes, Axierus, Axiocersus, Axiocersa and Kadmilus, were claimed to denote Persephone, Demeter, Hades and Hermes. The prefix axios (Greek: ἄξιος), which occurs in these names, means worthy.

The Kabiri of Lemnos were blacksmiths, and were therefore called Hephaistoi, which places them in kinship with the Telchines, those divine artists who are said to have formed the first statues of the gods from ore in the human image. Only with the Telchines, the underworldly trait was more prominent. They were discredited as evil sorcerers and jealously guarded the secrets of their art.

There is also a story of a tragic fratricide among the Kabiri:

„On the mainland, opposite the aforementioned islands, in Macedonia, it was said of them: there were once three Corybantes, three brothers, and two of them murdered the third. They wrapped the cut-off head in a purple robe, garlanded it and carried it on a brazen shield to the foot of Mount Olympus. There they buried it. The same two brothers also carried the mystery basket, which contained a phallos, the limb of Dionysus, to the Etruscans.“ (Lit.: Kerényi, p. 70)

The Kabiri in Goethe's "Faust II"

Agamemnon is initiated into the Samothracian mysteries. Relief from Samothrace (Louvre). From left to right, Agamemnon, Talthybios and Epeios, identified by inscriptions in Ionian script ("Agamemnon" is written in retrograde script).

In the second part of Goethe's Faust drama, in the scenes in the rocky coves of the Aegean Sea, the Kabiri play an essential role:

NEREIDS AND TRITONS.
What we carry on our hands
Shall please you all.
Chelonen's giant shields
Unshines a stern structure:
Are gods we bring!
Must sing high songs.

SIRENS. Small of shape,
Great of violence,
The failing saviours,
Ancient gods!

NEREIDS AND TRITONS.
We bring the Kabiri,
To lead a peaceful feast;
For where they holy reign,
Neptune will kindly rule.

SIRENS. We are after you:
When a ship broke,
Irresistible in strength,
You protect the crew.

NEREIDS AND TRITONS.
Three we took with us,
The fourth would not come;
He said he was the right one;
Who thought for them all.

SIRENS. One god the other god
Makes a mockery of it.
Honour ye all graces!
Fear all harm!

NEREIDS AND TRITONS.
Are actually seven of them!

SIRENS. Where have the three gone?

NEREIDS AND TRITONS.
We don't know,
Are to be asked in Olympus;
There, too, probably is the eighth,
Of whom no one has yet thought!
With grace to us,
But all not yet finished.
These incomparable ones
Want to go on and on:
Longing hungry sufferers
For the unreachable.

Rudolf Steiner has pointed out that the Kabiri are essentially connected with the becoming of the human being. They are closely related to the seven members of man:

„Externally they are again simple sea-gods. Samothrace - as the Greeks knew - was surrounded by the most terrible, earthquake-like storms in relatively recent times. So the demons of nature had ruled here in such a monstrous way that it was still like a historical memory for the ancient Greeks. And in the forests, in the dense, then dense forests of Samothrace, was hidden the mystery of the Kabiri. Among the various names given to the Kabirs are those where one Kabir is called Axieros, the second Axiokersos and the third Axiokersa, Kadmilos the fourth. Then there was a vague feeling that there was a fifth, a sixth and a seventh. But in essence, man's spiritual gaze was focused on the first three Kabirs. The old ideas of the Kabiri were really the secret of man's becoming. And, in fact, he who has been initiated into the sacred mysteries of Samothrace should come to the conclusion: What corresponds in the spiritual world, viewed spiritually, to that which happens here on earth when a human being comes into being for a soul that embodies itself on earth, when a human being becomes a human being in the succession of generations? - The spiritual correlate, so to speak, of the human birth should be seen in the spiritual world.“ (Lit.:GA 273, p. 202f)

„Take the scene with the Kabiri out of today's imagination, try to read everything in this "Faust" scene that relates to the Kabiri, try to really follow every single line with deeper interest, and you will see how Goethe, through his spiritual instincts, was still inside the foreboding cognition. Through such ideas and mystery practices, as the Greeks had them, for example, in reference to the Kabiri, a supreme quality is expressed for man in relation to the striving for knowledge and the like. Goethe rightly associated these Kabiri with the path that is to lead from the homunculus to the homo. He rightly brought these Kabiri together with the mystery of human development.

Three Kabiri are brought forward. We speak of three human members first. Before we go on to the truly inner human being, we speak of three human members: the physical body, the etheric body, the astral body. By speaking of these human members, one immediately arouses the criticism of those people who think themselves particularly clever today, who think themselves particularly scientific today. Such people, for example, object: Why divide and subdivide the unified human being? The human being is a unity, it is schematic to divide the human being into such parts. - Yes, but the matter is not like that, it is not so simple. Certainly, if only a schematic division of the human being were the basis, there would be no need to attach particular importance to these members. But these individual members, which seem to be so abstracted from the whole human being, are all connected with quite different spheres of the universe. Because man has a physical body, as he has it today, and because this physical body has developed from its Saturnian constitution up to the present time, man belongs to the sphere of space. And through his etheric body man belongs to the sphere of time. Thus, by belonging to the two totally different spheres, by being crystallised out of the world of time and space, one could say, man consists of a physical body and an etheric body. This is not something arbitrary and schematic, which is cited as a division, as a subdivision of the human being. It is actually based on the whole connection of the human being with the universe. And through his astral body man already belongs to the extra-space and extra-temporal.

This trinity, in a sense the human envelope trinity, is presented in the three Kabiri. The fourth "would not come". And it is he who thinks for them all! If we ascend from the three sheaths to the human I, then in this human I we first have that which rises above space and time, even above the timeless, spaceless of the astral. But this I of the human being only came to consciousness precisely in the period that followed the Samothracian Kabiri worship. The Greeks, however, had their belief in the immortal from the ancient sacred Samothracian teachings; but it was only within the Greco-Latin period that the consciousness of the I was to be born. Hence the fourth did not want to come, which represents that which exists as a relationship between the I and the cosmos. And how remote this was from the Kabiri mystery, which first points to that which was there in the becoming of man. The three highest, the fifth, sixth and seventh, are still "to be enquired into in Olympus": Spirit Self, Life Spirit, Spirit Man. They come, as we know, in the sixth and seventh periods. And no one has even thought of the eighth yet!

In the old form we actually see the mystery of humanity as it was concealed in Samothrace in those mysteries from which the Greeks took the best for their knowledge of the soul, for their wisdom of the soul, and also the best for their poetry, in so far as it related to man. That is the important thing, that one recognises: as soon as one turns one's gaze back to these old times, which Goethe thus tried to revive, one looks into a knowledge of the connection of man with the universe. Man felt himself related to all the mysteries of existence. Man knew that he was not merely enclosed within the boundaries of his skin, but that he belonged to the whole, vast universe. And that which is enclosed in his skin is only the image of his particular being.“ (Lit.:GA 188, p. 168ff)

In Goethe's Faust drama, the Nereids and Tritons rush off to bring the Kabiri, which the Sirens comment on in this way:

SIRENS: Away they go in a flash!
Straight to Samothrace,
Gone with a fair wind.
What do they think to accomplish
In the realm of the high Kabiri ?
Are gods! wondrously their own,
Who are always making themselves,
And never know what they are.

„So this is what the Sirens say about the Kabiri. Perhaps this is the easiest way to get close to the overall condition of these Kabiri, if you think of the passage in the Bible where it speaks of the Elohim, who actually only see after they have created their day's work that it was good, or actually, as it says there, that it was beautiful. Of course, it is somewhat difficult for humans to understand, because gods - the Kabiri - precisely those we are talking about here, do not have such a consciousness as humans or as certain later gods. The Kabiri are gods of first emergence, and they are absorbed in this emergence. Therefore, they are far too alive to have a fully developed consciousness. They also belong together in this respect. There are four such Kabiri gods in Samothrace. Actually there are eight, but for Samothrace itself only the four come into consideration. And now, of course, one may say, "Wondrously peculiar, who continually produce themselves, and never know what they are." This can already be said of the three, of the three main gods who are the gods of generation: of Axieros Axiokersos and Axiokersa. Of them it can already be said that they do not know what they are. But as little as these three together know what they are, so well does the fourth know for the three. So, if you think that man consists of a physical body, an etheric body, an astral body and an I, and that the I performs consciousness, you must think that these Kabiri are four. Whereas in man these four members hold together, these Kabiri are four separate beings. And Axieros is the physical body, Axiokersos is the etheric body, Axiokersa is the astral body; so they have no consciousness. Kadmilos, on the other hand, who corresponds to the I, thinks for all three. So that is the peculiarity of these gods, that the fourth is actually their consciousness at the same time.

If you take the cycle where I spoke of the Elohim, it is also similar in that the seventh actually thinks for the six.[2]“ (Lit.:GA 277, p. 534)

The artistic design of the Kabiri

The Kabiri, designed as jugs according to Rudolf Steiner's sketch.

On the occasion of the staging of scenes from the second part of Goethe's Faust drama, Rudolf Steiner looked for a suitable artistic representation of the Kabiri:

„Let us recall here, for example, the Samothracian mysteries to which Goethe alludes in the second part of his Faust, where he speaks of the Kabiri. I tried to recreate these Kabiri in my studio in Dornach. What did I get out of it? It was something very interesting. I simply set myself the task of finding out by visualisation what the Kabiri must have looked like within the Samothracian mysteries. And think: I got three jars, but jars with a plastic-artistic design! At first I was astonished myself, although Goethe also speaks of jars. The matter only became clear to me when I realised that these jars stood on an altar, something similar to incense was brought into them, the sacrificial word was chanted, and from the power of the sacrificial word, which in older human times still had a completely different vibration-generating power than today, the sacrificial smoke formed itself into the image of the divinity that was sought. They have directly in the religious performance the secondary song which lives itself out directly in the sculpture of the smoke.“ (Lit.:GA 218, p. 280)

Literature
References to the work of Rudolf Steiner follow Rudolf Steiner's Collected Works (CW or GA), Rudolf Steiner Verlag, Dornach/Switzerland, unless otherwise stated.
Email: verlag@steinerverlag.com URL: www.steinerverlag.com.
Index to the Complete Works of Rudolf Steiner - Aelzina Books
A complete list by Volume Number and a full list of known English translations you may also find at Rudolf Steiner's Collected Works
Rudolf Steiner Archive - The largest online collection of Rudolf Steiner's books, lectures and articles in English.
Rudolf Steiner Audio - Recorded and Read by Dale Brunsvold
steinerbooks.org - Anthroposophic Press Inc. (USA)
Rudolf Steiner Handbook - Christian Karl's proven standard work for orientation in Rudolf Steiner's Collected Works for free download as PDF.

References

  1. ↑ Strabo, Geography, translated by Horace Leonard Jones; Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press; London: William Heinemann, Ltd. (1924). LacusCurtis, Online version at the Perseus Digital Library, Books 6–14
  2. ↑ cf. CW 122 (Genesis - Secrets of the Bible Story of Creation), where Rudolf Steiner describes how the seven Elohim awaken to a higher community consciousness through the activity of creation and especially through the creation of man, which is represented by Yahweh, who is at the same time one of the seven Elohim and later connects with the lunar sphere.
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