Four plays that follow the initiation journeys of a group of fictional characters through a series of lives - The Portal of Initiation, The Trial of the Soul , The Guardian of the Threshold, and The Soul's Awakening.

Rudolf Steiner's Mystery Dramas are an attempt to dramatically depict the path of initiation of individual, concrete individual people in an artistic form. Rudolf Steiner completed four mystery dramas, a fifth, which, according to Marie Steiner, was supposed to bring a review of events at the Castalian spring in Delphi, was already outlined in broad outline, but the outbreak of World War I meant that the draft was no longer developed . Presumably a total of seven (occasionally even twelve are spoken of) dramas were supposed to arise in which retrospectives would have been given again and again into earlier incarnations of the characters, which would ultimately have resulted in a complete panorama of the spiritual development of mankind.—Ulf Kjell Gür