Steiner reads the slain and risen Osiris as Egypt's memory of a lost soul-condition: the old picture-consciousness that died for the earth and now meets man only after death.
The Osiris Myth in Anthroposophy is Rudolf Steiner's reading of the Egyptian story of the god dismembered by Typhon and restored by Isis as a true memory of the human soul's own history. In Ancient Myths and Their Meaning (GA 180), lectures held at Dornach in January 1918, Steiner says the age when Osiris ruled on earth was the age when human beings still lived in picture-seeing Imaginations. Typhon's murder of the god pictures the dying away of that atavistic clairvoyance in the Egyptian, or third post-Atlantean, epoch: the seeing soul-force was scattered into the grave of matter, and Osiris became Judge of the dead, met only beyond the gate of death. The myth is therefore physiology of consciousness, not priestly invention. For spiritual science today it marks the soul-condition that must be consciously won back as exact Imagination.
Egypt told of a king who gave men the plough, the cities and the script, was slain by his brother, and rose to rule the dead. Steiner heard in the Osiris myth no fable about grain or stars but the biography of a soul-faculty: humanity once saw the spirit in living pictures, lost that sight, and has carried the longing for the risen god ever since.
In Steiner's Own Words
But that time has gone by ... now (in the Egyptian Osiris-culture) one can no longer look to a human being on the physical plane if one wants to find Osiris, one must look to the world which man enters when he goes through the portal of death. Osirises are no more in the world where human beings live, but man meets them after death. Thus the Egyptian too looked back to an ancient time in the sense of the change of human consciousness, when he distinguished between the Osiris who could once wander the Earth, and the Osiris who can now no longer wander the Earth, who only belongs to the Kingdom of death.
What it Means Today
Steiner came to the Osiris myth twice. In the Leipzig cycle Egyptian Myths and Mysteries (September 1908) he treated the god as a picture of the soul's descent into the body; a decade later, in the Dornach lectures of January 1918, he sharpened the reading into a history of consciousness. The detail he prized stands in Plutarch's De Iside et Osiride, the first-century source that preserved the tale: Isis finds the coffin of her husband at Byblos, in Phoenicia, the land that gave the ancient world its letter-script. For Steiner this is no ornament. Osiris had been the divine hero of Egypt's sacred picture-writing, signs copied from what clairvoyance read in the star-constellations; Typhon stands as hero of the abstract letters that replaced it. When Isis carries the corpse home from Phoenicia, the myth records, with documentary precision, the exchange of living Imagination for dead abstraction.
Whoever reads these words in letter-script lives after the death of Osiris. The Egyptian answer to that death was the mummy, the death-rite, and the judgment seat beyond the grave. The anthroposophical answer is different: the slain seeing must rise again, this time as Imagination earned in full waking consciousness, so that what Egypt could only meet beyond the grave becomes a faculty of the living.
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