Ancient Myths & Their Meaning
Ancient myths read as memories of real spiritual experience (GA 180): Osiris and Isis, the Greek generations of the gods, and the mysteries behind the myths. Part of Thalira's Anthroposophical Glossary of 515 terms, and companion to the in-depth guide Anthroposophy.
Steiner's January 1918 Dornach lecture cycle (GA 180), which reads Egyptian and Greek mythology as the memory of real, older spiritual experience, not invention.
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.
Steiner reads Isis's hunt for the slain Osiris as the human soul of the Egyptian epoch seeking its own lost spiritual vision among the dead remains of culture.
The Titan who devours his own children, read by Rudolf Steiner as Greek memory of a vanished time-consciousness, one that swallowed each soul-state it had brought to birth.
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, for Steiner, is not invented allegory but humanity's picture-memory of a vanished clairvoyant perception, a record of what early souls actually experienced of the spirit.
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.
Steiner read the Osiris story as the public form of wisdom guarded in Egypt's temple sanctuaries: knowledge of what in the soul passes through birth and death.
Steiner read the three Greek god-dynasties, Gaia-Uranos, Rhea-Kronos, Hera-Zeus, as the Greek memory of three earlier states of human consciousness: Intuition, Inspiration, Imagination.
The teaching that the great public myths were not invented tales but the outflow of guarded initiation experience inside the ancient mystery-schools.
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.
For Steiner, Zeus is the Greek soul's picture of itself: a god who kept the old Imagination while his people grew into thinking, ruling the living from Olympus.