Collected as volume 101 of Rudolf Steiner's complete works, Myths and Legends, Occult Signs and Symbols gathers a sequence of lectures Steiner gave through 1907, most of them to the Berlin branch of the Theosophical Society, with a further group held in Cologne at the year's end. Across roughly sixteen talks he pursues a single question from many angles: what do the old myths, the runic and ritual symbols, and the figures of Genesis actually record? His answer, returned to again and again, is that these are not the inventions of a poetic folk imagination but the preserved reports of an older, picture-forming clairvoyant consciousness. The volume is a working manual for reading symbol as spiritual fact rather than as loose allegory.
Place in Steiner's Work
GA 101 belongs to the years when Steiner still lectured within the Theosophical Society yet was already laying down the distinctive method that would become anthroposophy. The talks sit alongside other 1907 cycles in which he was working out the evolution of consciousness and the planetary stages of the earth, themes that recur here as the backdrop to every myth he interprets. What sets this volume apart is its insistence on a discipline of interpretation. Steiner repeatedly warns against speculation and cleverness, against the habit of deciding in advance what a sign must mean. A person can be very intelligent, he notes, and still say something foolish about a symbol if he does not know the facts behind it. The true student, he argues, does not reason toward a symbol's meaning but trains himself to perceive the spiritual reality the symbol points to.
In that sense GA 101 is as much about a way of knowing as it is about any particular legend, and it prepares the ground for the path of inner training Steiner set out more fully in his books on initiation. He frames signs and symbols as instruments: held in patient meditation, an image such as the pentagram can become a means by which the student is gradually led into perception of the higher worlds. The lectures therefore belong with his work on cognition rather than with comparative mythology as an academic field. They ask the reader to treat the study of myth as a spiritual exercise.
Themes and Structure
The lectures move in loose groupings rather than as a single linear argument. An opening sequence reads the Norse and Germanic material, above all the image of the world ash, as a remembered account of how human beings acquired waking sense-perception. Steiner describes how, in this picture-language, the twelve nerve-streams that flow into the human head became the gods and giants of the northern cosmos, and how the ash with its three roots images the threefold human being who has just gained an ego. He sets the Persian mythology of Ormuzd and Ahriman alongside the Germanic gods to show a shared root beneath both traditions, tracing the same spiritual facts as they were perceived and then told across a broad belt of peoples from Persia into central Europe. The northern myths, in his reading, are not borrowed literature but parallel testimony, each people setting down in its own images what its seers had once beheld.
A second movement turns to the nature of occult signs themselves. Here Steiner takes the pentagram as his central example, presenting it not as a magical emblem but as the figure traced by five main currents flowing through the human etheric body. When a person stands with limbs outstretched, these currents run from the point between the eyebrows down to one foot, across to a hand, over to the other hand, down to the other foot, and back, forming a living, mobile skeleton within the etheric body that the clairvoyant can verify directly. From the same starting point he explains why light came to stand for wisdom in the old religious documents. The astral body, he says, becomes luminous to the degree that the ego works moral and intellectual order into it; the luminous beings of an earlier cosmic age, whom he names the Elohim or spirits of light, were astral bodies wholly filled with wisdom. Light, in the religious texts, is therefore the body of wisdom, not a poetic comparison but a perceived relation.
From there the cycle reads the first chapters of Genesis through the same lens, treating the creation of heaven and earth as the descent of the human ego into its bodily nature. Before the ego entered the three bodies prepared for it through the Saturn, Sun, and Moon stages of the earth, Steiner says, the human being dwelt in the bosom of the divine and could see nothing; the division of heaven from earth is the inner experience of that descent into sight. The Cologne talks then broaden outward. Steiner contrasts the group soul of the animal kingdom, which lives as a closed entity on the astral plane, with the slowly forming individual soul of the human being, arguing that the ego we carry today is still an intermediate product between the two and will only be complete when earthly evolution itself draws to a close.
He devotes striking pages to the wisdom built into the physical body, pointing to the architecture of the thigh bone, whose fine internal beams produce the greatest strength from the least material in a way no engineer can yet match. The astral body, by contrast, with its drives and desires, stands at a far lower stage and continually assaults the body's older perfection. The later talks gather the spiritual meaning of forms and numbers, the role of pictorial representation in education, and the relationship between people and their surroundings, closing with a Christmas contemplation drawn from the wisdom of life. Throughout, the method holds steady: every symbol and mythic name is treated as the trace of something once perceived in the higher worlds and only later set down in story, and the reader is asked never to flatten these into mere meanings but to use them as instruments for ascent.
Glossary Terms from this Volume
The following entries in the Thalira glossary draw on themes Steiner develops in GA 101. Each links to its full study entry.
Where to Read It
You can read the full text of the lectures at the Rudolf Steiner Archive, which hosts both the English translations and the original German under the GA 101 designation. For print editions and any current English-language volume, search the publisher directly at SteinerBooks. Reading several of the Berlin talks in sequence is the best way to feel how Steiner builds his method, since each lecture assumes the discipline established in the one before.
Continue Your Study
To go deeper into the ideas this volume opens, follow these paths:
- Begin with the volume's own terms in the Thalira glossary, where each concept above is explained on its own page with related cross-links.
- Compare Steiner's reading of symbol-as-fact with his treatment of inner development, and trace how the pentagram and the meditation on light reappear as exercises on the path of knowledge.
- Set the Norse material here beside the wider study of myth and cosmic memory, where the world ash and the Persian gods are read as one evolving picture of how human consciousness came to be.