Four Mystery Plays / The Portal of Initiation - The Soul's Probation - The / Guardian of the Threshold - The Soul's Awakening (PDF)

Rudolf Steiner wrote four plays that follow the initiation journeys of a group of fictional characters through a series of lives. These plays were intended to be modern mystery plays. Steiner outlined the plot of a fifth play to be set at the Castalian spring at Delphi, but due to the outbreak of First World War, this remained an unfulfilled project.

The titles of the completed plays are:

• The Portal of Initiation - World premiere on 15 August 1910, at the Schauspielhaus in Munich.
• The Trial of the Soul - World premiere on 17 August 1911, in the Gardener's Place Theatre in Munich.
• The Guardian of the Threshold - World premiere on 24 August 1912, in the Gardener's Place Theatre in Munich.
• The Soul's Awakening - World premiere on 22 August 1913, at the National Theatre in Munich.

In these four plays. Steiner intended to show how spiritual development might manifest in a karmically-intertwined group of people. The experiences of the main characters of the play, particularly Johannes Thomasius, Capesius and Strader, represent aspects of the path of initiation "differing according to the karma of the respective individualities."

For the first time in dramatic poetry, Rudolf Steiner in his dramas presents the driving forces of destiny events, openly and consistently on the stage. The success of the characterizing people towards the inevitability of fate, has always been the main nerve of tragic poetry, and Steiner's characters also remain true to these causes, which are ultimately enigmatic. Rudolf Steiner was the background of the fate complications to their true causes, namely karmic entanglements in former lives on earth, returning and brought dramatically to display in the present for the characters on stage. This is a critical and necessary impetus for the progress of dramatic art, even if it may take long time until it is taken up more widely by the public.