Ancient Myths & Their Meaning

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.

Steiner's thesis that the phenomena of the heavens find their counterpart and verification in the forming of the human embryo.

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.

The world-view that everything is built from indivisible material atoms, which Steiner showed contradicts itself unless the atom is rethought as force, not matter.

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.

The three quantities by which modern science defines matter, once felt by ancient humanity as living cosmic realities before they hardened into abstraction.

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's view that velocity, not space or time, is the one real property of a moving body, with time reducing to a mere number.

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.

For Steiner, the fourth dimension is time itself, the living medium into which everything that grows and changes moves, while space holds only the inanimate three.

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.

In Steiner's occult science the atom is condensed electricity and densified divine thought, a miniature of the Logos, not the dead final particle of matter.

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.

Width, depth, and height as Steiner read them: not given forms of the mind, but realities the threefold body constitutes in seeing, gesturing, and walking.

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.