The adversary of the Egyptian Osiris myth: Steiner read Typhon, the brother who slays and dismembers the god, as the hardening force that ended humanity's old spirit-vision.
Osiris and Typhon in Anthroposophy is the polarity Rudolf Steiner placed at the centre of the Egyptian myth in Ancient Myths and Their Meaning (GA 180), the lecture cycle he gave at Dornach in January 1918. Osiris, the beneficent ruler, stands for the old picture-consciousness through which early humanity still perceived the spiritual world directly. Typhon, his brother and murderer, called Set by the Egyptians, stands for the opposing soul-force that slew this perception: the power that hardened human sight, replaced the sacred picture-script with the abstract letter-script, and scattered the one spirit into the fourteen pieces of the dismembered god. For Steiner the fratricide is not a tale of two persons but the memory of a real change of consciousness in the third post-Atlantean epoch. The bearer of the Typhon-force today is mechanised, abstract thinking, which spiritual science asks us to recognise rather than deny.
Every myth of a dying god also names the killer. In the Egyptian story of Osiris and Typhon, the killer is the god's own brother, who rises against him while Osiris spreads his arts abroad, slays him on his return, and finally tears the recovered body into fourteen pieces. Steiner read in this adversary no mere villain but the force in the human soul that closed the door on the old spirit-seeing world.
In Steiner's Own Words
We have seen that this early age meant to say: there once lived a perception among men through which man could still directly experience the spiritual in his natural surroundings in his atavistic imaginations. That was the age in which Osiris ruled. But the new perceptions, the Typhon perceptions, those perceptions that have made the letter-script from the picture-script, those perceptions which from the primeval sacred language which men used to speak in common have formed the individually sounding languages, these perceptions of Typhon, they have slain what lived in humanity as the Osiris-impulse. So that since then Osiris is a Being at the side of men only when they are between death and a new birth.
What it Means Today
Steiner did not leave Typhon in old Egypt. In the same Dornach lecture of 6 January 1918 he told a counter-legend of his own, set in the age of scientific profundity, in the land he called Philisterium. A sleeping new Isis bears a child; the world drags it apart into fourteen pieces; and a spirit-visitor, whom Steiner names the new Typhon, gathers the pieces and joins them again with all the knowledge of natural science. What leaves his workshop has the appearance of life but only the laws of the machine, and each of its fourteen offspring wears the visitor's own face. At the centre of that legend stands a real object: the wooden statue of the Representative of Humanity that Steiner had been carving at the Goetheanum with the sculptor Edith Maryon since 1915, the veil, he said, of the new Isis.
The practice this asks of a reader is exact rather than pious. The Typhon-force is not to be cursed, for the same hardening gave humanity letters, law, and self-conscious thought; Osiris could only be mourned by a soul that had first learned to write. The task is to notice where assembly is being passed off as resurrection. Whoever can tell a reassembled mechanism from a risen god has begun to understand the adversary.
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