The teaching that the great public myths were not invented tales but the outflow of guarded initiation experience inside the ancient mystery-schools.
Every people that told great myths also kept something it did not tell. The Mysteries Behind the Myths names Steiner's claim that mythology was the public echo of initiation: what the candidate underwent in the silence of the mystery-school stepped out into the marketplace as story. The tale of Zeus or Osiris was never mere poetry; it was wisdom translated for the unconsecrated.
In Steiner's Own Words
Now I have often brought to your attention that besides this external mythology the Greeks had their Mysteries. The Greeks revered in the Mysteries other Gods as well as the celestial Gods, namely, the Chthonic Gods. And of one who was initiated in the Mysteries one could say with truth: he learns to know the upper and the lower Gods, the Upper and the Lower Gods. The upper Gods were those of the Zeus-circle; but they only have rulership over what is spread out before the senses, and what the intellect can understand. The human being is more than this. Man is rooted with his being in the kingdom of the lower Gods, in the kingdom of the Chthonic Gods.
What it Means Today
Modern scholarship arrived at the threshold Steiner pointed to. Walter Burkert's Ancient Mystery Cults (Harvard University Press, 1987) concluded that Eleusis transmitted no secret doctrine at all but a staged experience, things shown and done in the night of initiation, which the initiate was forbidden to describe and the poets could only circle in images. That is the precise shape of Steiner's 1918 claim, reached by philology sixty-nine years later: the myth is what the experience looked like from outside the temple wall. Where the two part company is the nature of that experience. Burkert reads it anthropologically, as ritual psychology; Steiner read it as actual perception of spiritual beings, the chthonic gods his lecture names, met by candidates whose old clairvoyant sight was deliberately awakened.
For Steiner the consequence was practical rather than antiquarian. Once the old sight had faded from humanity, the mystery-principle had to be founded again in full consciousness, which is what he attempted with the School of Spiritual Science at the Goetheanum in 1924, a school whose results, unlike those of Eleusis, are published. A reader who wants to test the idea can hold any single myth against one question: what would someone have had to experience for this story to become a report of it?
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