The Occult Truths of Old Myths and Legends gathers the lectures catalogued as GA 92 in the collected edition of Rudolf Steiner's work. These are not written treatises but transcribed talks, drawn mostly from Berlin between 1904 and 1905, with single lectures given in Cologne and in Nuremberg in 1907. Sixteen lectures survive in the volume. Across them Steiner pursues a single question: what do the old myths and sagas of Europe and the ancient world actually record? His answer, stated early and returned to often, is that myth is not invented decoration but a memory of spiritual events, preserved in picture-language by peoples who once perceived the world differently than we do. The volume reads the Greek and Germanic legends, the Grail story, and even the operas of Richard Wagner as coded accounts of how humanity passed from an older, dreamlike consciousness into the sharp, calculating intellect of the present age.
Place in Steiner's Work
GA 92 belongs to the early theosophical phase of Steiner's teaching, the years just after he took up leadership of the German Section of the Theosophical Society. The vocabulary of these lectures reflects that setting. Steiner speaks of root-races and culture-epochs, of the astral and mental planes, of Kama and Manas, of Atlantis and Lemuria, and of Masters and chelas. Readers who know only his later anthroposophical writings will notice terms he would soon set aside or recast. What stays constant is the method. Already here Steiner treats spiritual research as a disciplined act of cognition rather than vague feeling, and he insists that reading the so-called Akashic record requires the seeker to silence personal opinion and let the connections among thoughts be formed from beyond the ordinary self.
The volume also marks a turning point in how Steiner used cultural material. Rather than expounding doctrine in the abstract, he interprets specific stories the way a botanist studies a plant: by uncovering the law of growth working unseen within it. This interpretive habit, applied to legend and to art, runs through much of his later work on the Gospels, the mysteries, and the festivals of the year. GA 92 is where that habit first appears at full strength.
One passage shows the connection between method and message clearly. Steiner praises the medieval monk who made what he calls the sacrifice of the intellect, setting aside personal judgment to serve a given content. He does not hold this up as a return to obedience but as a training of the mind, a discipline that, carried into a later life, ripens into the selfless thinking the spiritual researcher needs. The point is characteristic of the whole volume: faculties that look like limitations from one vantage prove to be preparations when seen across the longer arc of human development.
Themes and Structure
The lectures move through a wide arc, yet a few governing ideas hold them together. The first is the relativity of good and evil. Steiner argues that what counts as evil is often a force that was rightful in an earlier age and has merely arrived out of season, a displaced good rather than an absolute opposite. From this he reads the rise of Christianity, of Islam, and of modern physical science as stages in a single long shift, each redirecting human consciousness toward a new task.
A second theme is the birth of the intellect. In the cycle on Greek and Germanic mythology, Steiner presents the Argonaut saga as a picture of the moment when a primal wisdom, once shared by all and bound up with love, separated from a colder, calculating knowledge. The golden fleece becomes a symbol for that lost union, carried into the hidden mystery-schools and sought again by Jason and his companions. The Odyssey he reads as the story of an initiation, with Odysseus passing through trials that retrace the whole journey of the human soul from ancient Lemuria down to the founding of the Greek mysteries.
Closely tied to this is Steiner's reading of the Greek inventor myths. He takes the saga of Daedalus and Icarus as a parable of how each age of the earth carries its own proper task. Daedalus masters arts that already belong to a vanished age, while his pupil Talos invents tools, the saw among them, that announce the practical skills of the present epoch. Icarus, attempting to rise on wings into a region not yet his, falls; the lesson Steiner draws is that an age which seizes a power meant for another time destroys itself in the attempt. The Prometheus saga, with its hero bound to the rock, supplies a kindred image, the human intellect chained to the physical world yet straining toward the spirit. These myths, in his account, are not idle tales but exact records of evolutionary law set down in pictures.
A third strand concerns the Grail and its messengers. Steiner interprets the medieval city-founding age through the figure of Wolfram von Eschenbach, casting Lohengrin as an emissary of a hidden brotherhood sent to give the soul of the time a fresh impulse. The Grail cup, in his telling, preserves the inner substance of true Christianity and renews it across the centuries. The closing lectures turn this same lens on Richard Wagner, whom Steiner regards as an artist who felt, if not consciously thought, the ancient unity of religion, art, and science that the mystery-centres once held together. Wagner's longing to fuse drama and music into one comprehensive work becomes, in this reading, an instinct to heal a division that history had forced upon the arts. Steiner notes that Wagner saw two supreme figures, Shakespeare and Beethoven: the one staging outer human action with sure command, the other voicing the inner experiences that never pass into deed. The musical drama Wagner envisioned was an attempt to bind those two halves of human nature back together, letting what drama cannot say live in the music and what music cannot say live in the drama.
Throughout, Steiner treats saga and opera alike as documents to be deciphered, never as mere entertainment. The reader who wants the connecting argument, rather than a catalogue of episodes, will find it in this insistence that outer story always shadows an inner spiritual fact.
Glossary Terms from this Volume
Three entries in the Thalira glossary draw directly on GA 92. Each one expands on a motif the lectures treat at length, and together they sketch the volume's reach from the Greek mysteries to the modern stage:
Where to Read It
You can read the full text of GA 92 at the Rudolf Steiner Archive, which hosts the lectures in English along with the German originals. For print and ebook editions, search the publisher catalogue at SteinerBooks. Because several of these lectures were transcribed from listeners' notes and later retranslated, wording can vary between editions; comparing two renderings of the same lecture is often the surest way to test a difficult passage.
Continue Your Study
If the mythic threads in GA 92 interest you, a few paths lead onward:
- Browse the full Steiner glossary to follow individual terms such as the Grail, the mysteries, and the culture-epochs into related volumes.
- Read the companion study guides in the GA Work Library, where the Gospel cycles and the lectures on ancient myth take up many of the same images in greater depth.
- Trace the figure of the mystery-centre forward into Steiner's later work on initiation and the festivals of the year, where the unity of religion, art, and knowledge that Wagner sensed becomes an explicit theme.