The Mystery Wisdom of Egypt, the Rudolf Steiner’s study which we propose to our readers today, is taken from Christianity as Mystical Fact, a Steiner’s primitive and fundamental work, first published in German in 1902; an essay that, in Steiner's intentions, intends to demonstrate how Christianity was born from what had been prepared in the pre-Christian Mysteries. This is a theory that is certainly questionable and refuted by many philosophers and intellectuals, including Arturo Reghini and Friedrich Nietzsche.
According to Steiner, an utterance by Empedocles («When leaving thy body behind thee, thou soarest into the ether, then thou becomest a God, immortal, not subject to death») summarizes what the ancient Egyptians thought about the eternal element in man and his connection with the divine. Proof of this is found in the so-called Book of the Dead, which was deciphered by the diligence of nineteenth-century investigators.