The inherited, dreamlike picture-seeing by which early humanity beheld the spiritual world, before it faded away so that self-conscious thinking could be born.
When Steiner reads the Osiris story or the Greek generations of the gods, he is not decoding allegory. He is pointing to atavistic clairvoyance, the old faculty by which whole peoples once watched spiritual beings the way we watch sunlight on water. Myth, for him, is what remained when the watching stopped: a folk memory of perceptions that the evolving human soul had to surrender.
In Steiner's Own Words
We have seen that the Egyptian and Grecian mythologies in the manner of their structure, are derived from certain ancient experiences of mankind. They are based on a certain consciousness that humanity once possessed atavistic clairvoyance, and through the atavistic clairvoyance had stood in the same inner relation to the spirit pervading Nature, as later on man is related between birth and death to the things of the senses. We have seen that for this old atavistic knowledge the far-reaching world-conception, which was an inner experience, signified more than the mere sense-perception knowledge of the transitional humanity to which we still belong.
What it Means Today
The clearest modern doorway into the old dream-seeing is Owen Barfield, the Oxford philologist and lifelong reader of Steiner, whose Saving the Appearances (1957) named the ancient condition original participation. Early peoples, Barfield argued, did not look at a neutral world and then decorate it with gods; the seeing itself was participatory, perceiver and perceived woven into one fabric, as a dreamer is woven into the dream. He found the fossil record of this in language: words like pneuma once carried wind, breath, and spirit as a single experience, and only later split into an outer fact and an inner metaphor. That split is the fading Steiner traces through the Osiris grief and the dethroned generations of the Greek gods.
Steiner refuses the nostalgia this could invite. The old seeing was dim, unfree, bound to blood and heredity, and its withdrawal was the price of the independent ego; nobody should try to dream it back. What the 1918 Dornach lectures ask for instead is its conscious counterpart: a perception of spirit built deliberately, in full waking thought, which spiritual science calls Imagination. Atavistic clairvoyance is the gift evolution gave and then took away; the new clairvoyance is the one a free human being gives himself.
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