Steiner read the ancient myths as memories of an older picture-consciousness, and taught Imagination as its conscious renewal: exact inner pictures won by schooled thinking.
Myth and Imagination in Anthroposophy is the teaching that the great myths and the modern faculty of Imagination are two forms of one way of knowing, separated by an age of abstraction. In his Dornach lectures of January 1918, published as Ancient Myths and Their Meaning (GA 180), Rudolf Steiner described how Egyptian and Greek humanity still experienced cosmic facts in pictures: an inherited, dreamlike clairvoyance whose memories condensed into myth. That picture-consciousness faded so that self-aware thinking could be born, and thinking has since run into letter-bound abstraction. Imagination, the first stage of Steiner's path of cognition, renews the old picture-wisdom in fully wakeful form: exact images built by the trained soul rather than received as inheritance. The bearer of this renewal is the human astral body and soul life, schooled through thinking, feeling, and willing. Practitioners in the School of Spiritual Science work with this discipline today.
The bond between myth and Imagination runs through every lecture Steiner gave at Dornach in the first days of 1918. A myth, he argued, is not primitive fancy but the residue of real seeing: pictures that ancient peoples beheld in the airy world around them. What humanity once received without effort must now be earned. The new Imagination rises where the old myth fell silent.
In Steiner's Own Words
In a certain sense things take place in later times in connection with events of earlier times. We look back from our Fifth Post-Atlantean epoch, in the development of which we are standing, to the Fourth Post-Atlantean epoch, the Greco-Latin, and to the Third, the Egyptian; we come then already to the time in which it was natural for men to express in certain mythical pictures and imaginations what they thought and felt about cosmic mysteries. In another connection we have already stated that we in our Fifth Post-Atlantean epoch have to recapitulate in a sort of inverted way what had happened in the Third, the Egypto-Chaldean epoch, so that it emerges again differently.
What it Means Today
Steiner did not ask his hearers to mourn the lost picture-consciousness, and he did not ask them to revive it. The whole point of the 1918 lectures is directional. Atavistic image-seeing had to die so that the self-possessed thinker could be born; the thinker, once born, can climb back to the image in freedom. He had set out the method long before, in Knowledge of the Higher Worlds (1904), and he gave it institutional form when the School of Spiritual Science opened at the Goetheanum in Dornach, its First Class lessons beginning in February 1924. There the first stage of schooling is called Imagination: not fantasy, not visualization for its own sake, but a disciplined building of inner pictures that the meditant constructs, holds, and then dissolves, keeping only the strengthened activity. The myths stand to this work roughly as folk memory stands to method.
A Thalira reading: where a myth once carried a whole people, an Imagination carries one soul; the picture is no longer inherited from the gods but composed before them. Anyone can begin testing this with the simplest of Steiner's exercises, the Rückschau or evening review, picturing the day backwards in deliberate images each night. The exercise looks trivial. Practiced for weeks, it shows the difference between an image that happens to you, the stuff of dream and myth, and an image you make, which is the seed of Imagination in Steiner's strict sense.
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