ad come to the final act in the great drama of knowledge.
He had learned how resurrection is attained. An initiation into the
Mysteries had been consummated. It was a case of such an initiation as
had been understood as such during the whole of antiquity. It had
taken place through Jesus, as the initiator. Union with the divine
had always been conceived of in this way.

In Lazarus Jesus accomplished the great miracle of the transmutation
of life in the sense of immemorial tradition. Through this event,
Christianity is connected with the Mysteries. Lazarus had become an
initiate through Christ Jesus Himself, and had thereby become able to
enter the higher worlds. He was at once the first Christian initiate
and the first to be initiated by Christ Jesus Himself. Through his
initiation he had become capable of recognising that the "Word" which
had been awakened within him had become a person in Christ Jesus, and
that consequently there stood before him in the personality of his
awakener, the same force which had been spiritually manifested within
him. From this point of view, these words of Jesus are significant,
"And I knew that thou hearest me always: but because of the people
which stand by I said it, that they may believe that thou hast sent
me." This means that the point is to make evident this fact: in Jesus
lives the "Son of the Father" in such a way that when he awakens his
own nature in man, man becomes a Mystic. In this way Jesus made it
plain that the meaning of life was hidden in the Mysteries and that
they were the path to this understanding. He is the living Word; in
Him was personified what had been immemorial tradition. And therefore
the Evangelist is justified in expressing this in the sentence, "in
Him the Word was made flesh." He rightly sees in Jesus himself an
incarnated Mystery. On this account, St. John's Gospel is a Mystery.
In order to read it rightly, we must bear in mind that the facts are
spiritual facts. If a priest of the old order had written it, he would
have described traditional rites. These for St. John took the form of
a person, and became the life of Jesus.

An eminent modern investigator of the Mysteries, Burkhardt in _Die
Zeit Konstantins_, says that they "will never be cleared up." This is
because he has not found out how to explain them. If we take the
Gospel of St. John and see in it the working out in symbolic-corporeal
reality the drama of knowledge presented by the ancients, we