Plato is Dionysos the Younger reincarnated

Wonders of the World, Ordeals of the Soul, Revelations of the Spirit.

Lecture 7 of 10.

Rudolf Steiner, Munich, August 24, 1911:

What is it that has been the theme of our lectures during the last few days? We have been trying to bring to light again in the impressive pictures of Greek mythology, as the expression of an ancient wisdom, what in our own time we can come to know through spiritual science, occult science; and we have certainly seen how much of what we come to know today in quite another way is to be found there as something quite obvious. When we realize this, especially when we discover that the deepest and most significant principles of knowledge, principles still today not fully recognized, were already expressed in pictorial fashion in this Greek mythology, our usual very superficial ideas about it are bound to be severely shaken.

The Greeks felt that what they hid in their Mysteries and associated with the figure of Dionysos was still deeper and more significant than all that they associated with the upper gods — with Zeus, Poseidon, Pluto, with Apollo, Mars, and so on. For whereas they expressed pretty well everything which had to do with the upper gods exoterically, by means of the world around them, they veiled what had to do with Dionysos within the sanctity of the Mysteries, and only communicated it to those who had undergone a thorough preparation.

What then was the contrast between what the Greeks felt in their ideas about the upper gods, and what was withdrawn into the sanctity of the Mysteries? What was the fundamental difference? In their ideas about the upper gods, about Zeus, Poseidon, Pluto, Apollo, Mars, and so on, they expressed everything of which one can become conscious through a deeper insight into the wonders of the world, a deeper insight into what takes place all around us and into the laws which govern it. But something essentially different was involved in what was associated with the figure of Dionysos; Dionysos had to do with the deepest vicissitudes of the human soul struggling for knowledge and for entry into the supersensible worlds. The Mysteries associated with his name threw light upon the lot of the soul struggling for knowledge, living in the depths; they shed light upon all the testings which the soul had to undergo on its way.

If we would understand the figure of Dionysos and his connection with these tribulations, we must first give some thought to what modern spiritual science has to say about the human mind in the act of cognition. It might seem that modern man has abundant opportunity to become instructed as to what cognition really is. For the study of philosophy is accessible in all countries, and it is to this that we look to supply the answer to the question of how knowledge comes about. But from the standpoint of spiritual science, philosophy has not been very successful in answering this question, and you can easily see why this is. So long as philosophy — the ordinary philosophy of the day — refuses to recognize the truth about the human being — that he consists of physical body, etheric body, astral body, and ego — it can come to no viable theory of knowledge. For knowledge is bound up with the whole being of man, and unless the true being of man, his fourfold nature, is taken into account, the question as to what knowledge is will only be answered by the empty phrases which are so familiar in modern philosophy. Because of the limited time at our disposal I can of course only briefly refer to this, I can only say a few words about the nature of human knowledge. But we shall understand one another if we begin by asking how it is acquired, as distinct from what it may signify.

You all know that the human being could never attain to knowledge if he did not think, if in his mind he did not carry on something akin to work in ideation or thinking. Knowledge does not come of itself. The human being has to undertake work within himself, he has to allow ideas to pass through his mind if he wants to know. As adherents of spiritual science we have to ask ourselves where in human nature those processes take place which we designate as ideation, as mental representation, and which lead to knowledge.

According to the materialistic illusion, the typical philosophic fantasy of today, knowledge comes about as a result of work carried out by the brain. Admittedly, work does take place in the brain in the act of cognition, but if we bear in mind that the main thing in knowledge is the work within the soul in the life of ideation, the question must arise: ‘Has the content of the process of ideation anything to do with the work which goes on in the brain?’ The brain is part of the physical body, and what constitutes the content of our life of ideation, what constitutes the work of our soul in ideation, in mental representation, which is what brings knowledge about, does not go as far as the physical body; that all takes place in the three higher members of the human being, takes place from the ego through the astral body down to the etheric body. As far as its content goes, you will find nothing in any element of our process of ideation which takes place in the physical brain. Thus, if we are talking expressly of the content or of the activity of mental representation, we must attribute that solely to the three higher supersensible members of the human being, and then we can ask ourselves what the brain has to do with all this that goes on supersensibly in the human being. The obvious truth upon which modern philosophy and psychology are based, that in the act of cognition processes do take place in the brain, has of course to be admitted; it cannot and should not be denied, but it is relatively unimportant. Nothing of the mental representation itself lives in the brain. What significance, then, has the brain, has the external bodily organization in general, for knowledge, or let us say to begin with, for the life of ideation?

Since I must be brief, I can only indicate it pictorially. As regards what really happens in our souls in the forming of ideas and in thinking, the work of the brain has precisely the same significance as a mirror has for the man who sees himself in it. When you with your personality move through space, you do not see yourself — unless you meet a mirror; then you do see what you are, you see how you look. A man who claims that the brain thinks, a man who professes that the work of ideation, of representation, goes on in the brain, is just about as shrewd as the man who looks at a mirror and says: ‘I am not walking about out here, that is not me. I must get inside the mirror, that is where I am.’ He would soon become convinced that he was not in the mirror, but that the mirror was reflecting what was outside it. So it is with the whole of the physical organization. What becomes evident through the work of the brain is the inward supersensible activity of the three higher members of the human organization. The mirror of the brain is needed in order that this activity may become evident to the human being himself, in order that through the mirror of the brain he may perceive what he is supersensibly; this is an inevitable result of our contemporary human organization. If, as an earthly being today, man had not this reflecting bodily organism, primarily the brain, he would still think his thoughts but he would not be aware of them. The whole endeavor of modern physiology and a good deal of modern psychology to understand thinking is about as clever as looking into a mirror to find your own reality. What I have here said in a few words can be epistemologically and scientifically substantiated in the strictest manner. It is of course quite another question whether the argument would be at all understood. Experience indeed suggests the contrary. In however strictly logical a manner one argues today even with philosophers, they do not understand a mortal word, because they just do not want to go into these things. For in the outer world today there is still absolutely no will to tackle the most serious problems concerning the human faculty of cognition.

Let us take this diagram to represent the human physical bodily organization. If then we wish to express in correct diagrammatic form the human process of cognition, we have to say: ‘No part of what thinking is, nothing of the act of cognition, takes place anywhere within this external physical organism; it all takes place in the adjacent etheric and astral bodies and so on.’ It is there that all the thoughts which I have indicated diagrammatically by these circles are to be found. These thoughts do not enter into the brain at all — it would be nonsense to think that they do — they are reflected through the activity of the brain and thrown back again into etheric body, astral body, and ego. And it is these images, which we ourselves have first produced, and which are then made visible to us by the brain — it is these mirrored images which we see when as earthly men we become aware of what actually goes on in our soul-life. Within the brain there is absolutely no thought; there is no more of thought in the brain than there is of you in the mirror in which you see yourself.

But the brain is a very complicated mirror. The external mirror in which we see ourselves is simple, but the brain is tremendously complicated, and of necessity a complex activity takes place in order that it can become the instrument, not indeed for producing thought but for reflecting it. In other words, before a single thought of a single earthly man could come into existence, there had to be a preparation. We know that this preparation took place during the Saturn, Sun, and Moon evolutions, and that in fine the present physical body, and with it the brain, is the result of the work of many spiritual hierarchies. So we can say that by the beginning of Earth evolution man on Earth was so formed that he could develop his physical brain to become the reflecting apparatus for what the human being really is, for the real man, who is at first only to be met with in the environment of this our physical bodily organization. That is how we put it today, and it can surely be understood, at all events by an. audience of anthroposophists. Fundamentally this process of cognition we are examining is quite easy to understand.

What we today are able to understand in this way was felt by the ancient Greek, and therefore he said to himself: ‘There is concealed in this physical bodily organism, without man's having any direct consciousness of it, something of great significance. This physical organism is undoubtedly from the Earth, since it consists of the materials and forces of the Earth, but there is something secreted within it which can reflect back the whole life of the human soul.’ When the ancient Greek was directing his feeling upon the microcosm, upon man, he called this element — coming from the Earth and thus macrocosmic — this element which played a part in the constructing of the brain, the Dionysian principle; so that it is Dionysos who works in us to make our bodily organism into a mirror of our spiritual life.

Now, if we apply ourselves to this purely theoretical exposition, if we eter into it, we can experience that the soul is being put to a first and very gentle trial; it is very slight, and since the organization of present-day man is not tuned to the most delicate refinements, it usually passes unnoticed. These challenges will have to become ruder if the man of today is to feel them.

It is only when one is filled with enthusiasm for knowledge, when one looks upon the attainment of knowledge as a matter of life itself, that one feels what I am about to describe as a first tremendous challenge to the soul. It comes about when this very knowledge leads us on to recognize that the mighty word of wisdom ‘Know thyself’ resounds toward us out of primeval times. Self-knowledge, as the cardinal maxim upon which all other true knowledge turns, shines before us as a high ideal. In other words, if we want to attain knowledge in general, we must first endeavor to get to know ourselves, to get to know what we are. Now, all our knowledge takes its course in the process of ideation. Our life of ideation, or mental representation, which reproduces for us all the things outside us, we experience in the form of mirrored image. The process does not penetrate at all into what we are as physical bodily organism; it is thrown back to us, and the human being can no more see into his own physical being than he can see what is behind the mirror. Moreover, he does not penetrate into his physical organization, because his soul-life is completely filled by this process of representation. One is obliged to say: ‘Then it is quite impossible to learn to know oneself: one can come to know nothing but this process of ideation which has turned one into a reflecting apparatus. It is impossible to penetrate further, we can only reach as far as the frontier; and at the frontier the whole life of the soul is thrown back again, as a man's image is thrown back in a mirror.’ If an undefined feeling challenges us to know ourselves, we have to confess that we cannot do it, that it is impossible for us to know ourselves.

What I have just been saying is for most men of today an abstraction, because they have noenthusiasm for knowledge, because they are incapable of developing the passion which must come into play when the soul is confronted by its own absolute need. But imagine this realization developed into feeling, and then the soul is faced with a hard task indeed: ‘You must attain something which you cannot attain!’ In terms of spiritual science that means that no knowledge which man can acquire by exoteric means will lead to any degree of self-knowledge.

From this springs the endeavor to press on by quite another path than that of ordinary knowledge to what the work of Dionysos within us is — to our own being. That has to take place in the Mysteries. In other words, something was given to man in the Mysteries which had nothing to do with the ordinary soul-life, that is only mirrored in our bodily organization. The Mysteries could not confine man within the limits of exoteric knowledge, for that would never have enabled them to lead man into himself. Anyone determined to recognize only exoteric science would consequently have to say: ‘The Mysteries must have been pure humbug, for they only make sense on the assumption that something quite different from ordinary knowledge was cultivated in them, with the object of reaching Dionysos.’ Thus in the Mysteries we have to expect happenings of a kind which approach man in quite another way from all that man meets in ordinary exoteric life. This brings us directly up against the question: ‘Is there really any means of penetrating into what is ordinarily only a reflecting apparatus?’

I should like to begin from something seemingly quite unimportant. As soon as one takes the very  first step in describing spiritual truths — truths which lead to reality and not to the maya of the outer world, not to illusion — one has to set about it in quite a different way from the way one sets about describing scientific or other matters in ordinary life. That is why it is so difficult to make oneself understood. Today men try to confine everything within the fetters which have been forged for modern science, and nothing that is not presented in this form is accepted as ‘scientific’. But with such knowledge it is impossible to penetrate into the nature of things. Hence in the lectures on spiritual science which are given here, a different style, a different method of presentation is used from the one to which ordinary science is accustomed; here things are so described that light is thrown upon them from several sides, and in a certain way language is taken seriously again. If one takes language seriously, one reaches what one might call the genius of language. In one of the earlier  lectures of this course I said that it was not for nothing that in my second Rosicrucian Mystery Play, The Soul's Probation, I used the word dichten for an original activity of the World Creator, or that in The Portal of Initiation I said of Ahriman that he creates ‘in dichtem Lichte’. [ 1 ] Anyone who appraises such words in the light of present-day usage will believe that they are just words like any other. Not at all. They are words which go back to the original genius of language, words which draw out of the language something that has not yet passed through the conscious human ego-life of ideation. And language has many instances of this.

In the book The Spiritual Guidance of Man and of Mankind I have pointed out what a beautiful expression there still was in old German for what is indicated in an abstract way by geboren werden (to be born). When a man comes into the world today he is said ‘to be born’. In old German there was  another expression for this. The human being was of course not conscious of what really takes place at birth, but the genius of language, in which Dionysos plays a part, reaching in this way right into the activity of mental representation as distinct from the mere reflection of it — the genius of language knew that, when the human being goes through the gate of death, then in the first part of the time between death and a new birth, forces are at work in him which he has brought with him from his previous life and which are the forces which caused him to grow old in that life. Before we die we become old, and the forces which make us old we carry over with us. In the first part of the time between death and a new birth these forces go on working. But in the second half of the life between death and rebirth quite different forces set in. Forces take hold of us which fashion us in such a way that we return to the world as little children, that we become young. The language of the Middle Ages  hinted at this mystery, by not using merely the abstract phrase geboren werden but by saying: Der Mensch ist jung geworden (the man has become young). This is an extremely significant expression! In the second part of Goethe's Faust [ 2 ] we find this phrase: im Nebellande jung geworden. Nebelland is an expression for the Germany of the Middle Ages; it means no more than to have been born in Germany, but in this expression there lies an awareness of the genius of language, thus of a higher being than man, who participated in the creation of the human organism. That one speaks of ‘Dichtung’ in German is based on awareness that the ‘Dichter’ brings together what is outspread in the world, condenses it. One day there will be a philosophy which is not so dry and prosaic, not so philistine as that of today, because it will enter into the living genius of language, which in the ego-man of today underlies his conscious life of ideation. Much has to be elicited from this genius of language if one wants to characterize the things of the spiritual world, which lie beyond what ordinary consciousness can grasp.

Thus another method of presentation has to be used in the description of spiritual things. Hence the strangeness which is bound to be felt in many descriptions of the higher worlds. When we speak of the spiritual worlds we already meet at the very outset with something which must have originated behind what the human being has in his consciousness. It has to be drawn from the subconscious depths of the soul. Moreover, if one does this today something is necessary which seems quite trivial but is nevertheless important. If one wants to describe spiritual-scientific things in their true sense, one must forgo the use of the customary terminology. One has perhaps even to go so far as to acknowledge quite consciously: ‘If you reject the customary terminology then the professors and all the other intellectuals will say you have no proper command of language. They will find all manner of things to object to, they will find you lacking in clarity; they will carp at all sorts of things in the way in which spiritual science is expressed.’ One has to accept that quite consciously, for it is inevitable. One must face up to the fact that one will probably be looked upon as stupid, because one fails to make use of the customary ‘perfectly logical’ terms, which in a higher connection are the height of imperfection.

What I have pointed out to you as a small matter — or not so small — was in ancient Greece a necessity for the pupil of the Mysteries, and is still so today. In order to come to his full self, in order to penetrate into his inmost being, which otherwise is only reflected by his external bodily organization, the pupil must divest himself of the usual conscious external method of acquiring knowledge. Superficial persons could of course immediately say: ‘But you claim that the human being always retains his common sense, and judges everything in the higher worlds in accordance with it; yet you now say that he must renounce normal external knowledge. Surely that is a contradiction!’ In reality it is quite possible to test the things of the higher spiritual worlds with common sense and intelligence while nevertheless withdrawing from that form of conscious knowledge to which we are accustomed in the outer world. Here our souls are once more faced by a severe ordeal. In what does this ordeal consist?

As things are today, it is the habit of the soul to think and to apply the judgments of common sense within certain moulds, namely in those forms which in the ordinary process of mental representation are taught by the external world. That is the normal thing. And now imagine some professor or other, who is learned in the science of the outer world, and within the forms appropriate to that kind of knowledge an exceptionally able thinker. People come and say: ‘You want to make yourself understood by that professor; he obviously knows how to think scientifically in the modern sense of the term; if he can't understand you, you must have said something it is impossible for anyone to understand!’ Well, there is no need to dispute that our professor has a sound commonsense judgment for the things of the ordinary external world. But our subject matter is the things of the spiritual world, and it will not do for him to listen with that part of his soul which brings common sense to bear on the ordinary things of the external world; he would have to listen with quite a different part of his soul. It does not follow that his common sense will continue to accompany a man when he seeks to grasp anything other than the things belonging to the outside world. Those are the things for which common sense is adapted; and a man may well possess an understanding for those things — and yet it may leave him in the lurch when he comes to the things of the spiritual world.

What is required if we intend to penetrate into spiritual worlds is not a critique of spiritual-scientific things conducted by the instrument of common sense, but that we should take our common sense along with us in our approach to them, and not lose it on the way from outer science toward inner, spiritual science. What matters is that the soul should be strong enough to avoid the experience so many people endure today. You could describe it like this: As long as it is only a question of external science, these people are paragons of logic, but when they hear of spiritual science, then they have to make the journey from information about external things to information about the spiritual world. And on this journey they generally lose their common sense. Then they fancy that, because they had it with them when they started, they must have had it later on too! It would be a bad mistake to conclude that it is not possible to enter into the things of the spiritual world with common sense. It is just that one must not lose hold of it on the way there.

What I have just put before you in a petty example was in a far higher sense a necessity for Greek pupils of the Mysteries, as it is for modern mystics also. They have to slough off completely, as it were, their normal consciousness, yet for all that they have to keep with them the sound common sense which goes with normal consciousness and then make use of it as an instrument for judgment in an entirely different situation, from an entirely different viewpoint. Without relinquishing his normal consciousness no one can become a mystic. He has to do without the consciousness which serves him well in the everyday world. And the challenge to the soul which emerges at this point, on the way from the customary outer world to the spiritual world, is that it should not lose its common sense and treat as nonsense what, if it has held on to its common sense, reveals itself as a deeper experience.

Thus the pupil in the Greek Mysteries needed to divest himself of all that he was able to experience in the outer, the exoteric, world, and this is also necessary for the mystic today. Hence the things of the world outside sometimes assume quite different names when they enter into the sphere of mysticism. When in my Rosicrucian play The Soul's Probation it is said of Benedictus that in his speech the names of many things are changed, that they even take on a completely opposite meaning, this is something of deep significance. What Capesius calls unhappiness, Benedictus is obliged to call happiness. [ 3 ] Just as after death our life to begin with runs its course backwards and we experience things in backward order, in the same way we have to change the names of things into their opposites if we are speaking in the true sense of the higher worlds. Hence you can estimate what an entirely different world it was which the ancient Greeks acknowledged as the content of the holy Mysteries.

What was the meaning of Dionysos in these Mysteries? If you read the little book The Spiritual Guidance of Man and of Mankind, which is to be published within the next few days, you will see that in all ages there have been great teachers of mankind who have remained unseen, who only manifest themselves to clairvoyant consciousness. You will see that when the ancient Egyptians said, in answer to a question from the Greeks as to who their teachers were, that they were instructed by the gods, it was the truth. They meant that men who were clairvoyant were inspired by teachers who did not descend to Earth, but who appeared to them in the etheric sphere and taught them. I am not putting it fancifully, what I am saying is absolutely true! When in ancient Greece pupils were introduced into the Mysteries, after having undergone due preparation so that they did not take such things lightly, superficially — as is done today when they are discussed in abstract terms — they were then in a position to see within the Mystery the teacher who was not to be seen by physical eyes but was visible only to the inspired consciousness. The hierophants, who were to be seen with physical eyes, were not the important people. The important beings were those visible to clairvoyant consciousness. In the Mysteries with which we are concerned in these lectures, in the Dionysian Mysteries, the highest teacher of the pupils who were sufficiently prepared was in fact the younger Dionysos himself — that figure which I have already told you was a real one, he who was followed by a train of sileni and fauns and who made the journey from Europe to Asia and back again. He was the real teacher of the pupils in the Dionysian Mysteries. Dionysos appeared in an etheric form in the holy Mysteries, and from him it was then possible to perceive things which were not merely seen as mirror-images in normal consciousness, but things which welled forth directly from the inner being of Dionysos.

But because Dionysos is in us, the human being saw his own self in Dionysos, and learnt to know himself — not by brooding upon himself, as is so often recommended by people who know nothing of reality — but the way to self-knowledge for the Greek Mysteries was to go out of himself. The way to self-knowledge was not to brood upon himself and to gaze only upon the mirror-images of ordinary soul-life, but to contemplate that which he himself was, though he could not reach down to it  in normal consciousness, to look upon the great Teacher. The aspirants looked upon the great Teacher, who was not yet visible when they entered into the Mystery, as upon their own being. In the world outside, where he was recognized merely as Dionysos, he made his journey from Europe to Asia and back, actually incarnated in a fleshly body; there he was a real man standing upon the physical plane. In the Mysteries he appeared in his spirit-form.

In a certain way it is still so today. When in the world outside the modern leaders of men go about in human garb, they are unrecognized by the world. When from the standpoint of spiritual science we talk about ‘The Masters of Wisdom and of the Harmony of Feelings’ people would often be surprised to know in what simple, unassuming human form these Masters are to be found in all countries. They are present on the physical plane. But they do not impart their most important teachings on the physical plane, but following the example of Dionysos of old, they impart them on the spiritual plane. And anyone who wishes to listen to them, to be taught by them, must have access to them not only in their physical bodies of flesh, but in their spiritual forms. In a certain way that is true today as it was in the Dionysian Mysteries of old. Thus one of the tests we have to undergo is to obey the exhortation ‘Know thyself’ by going out of ourselves.

But in the Dionysian Mysteries the soul was exposed to yet another test. I told you that the aspirants learned to know Dionysos as a spirit-form. In the Mysteries they were actually instructed by him, they learned to recognize him as a spirit-form governed entirely by what was most essential and most important in man's own nature, by what represented the human self firmly planted upon the Earth. When the Greek pupils directed their clairvoyant sight upon the figure of Dionysos, then this Dionysos seemed to them a beautiful, sublime figure, a noble external representation of humanity. Now, just suppose that one of these pupils had left the Mystery Temple, after having seen Dionysos there as a beautiful, sublime human form. I expressly draw your attention to the fact that the younger Dionysos still remained a teacher in the Mysteries long after the real man, of whom I have told you that he journeyed from Europe to Asia and back again, was dead. If however one of these pupils had left the place where the Mystery was enacted and had encountered in the world outside the real Dionysos incarnated in the flesh, if he had met that human being who corresponded to the higher man  whom he had seen in the Mystery, he would have seen no beauty! Just as today the man who has entered into the Mystery may not hope to see the figure which he had before him in sublime beauty in the spiritual world in the same august beauty on the physical plane, just as he must be clear that the physical embodiment of the spiritual form which he met in the Mystery is maya, is complete illusion, and conceals the sublime beauty of the spiritual figure, so that in the physical world it becomes in a way hideous — so it was in the case of Dionysos. And what tradition has given us as the external appearance of Dionysos, who is not represented as such a perfect divine form as Zeus, is in fact the image of the Dionysos who was manifested in the flesh. The Dionysos of the Mystery was a beautiful being; the fleshly Dionysos was not to be compared with him. Hence it is no good looking for the figure of Dionysos among the finest types of antique human beauty. He is not so represented by tradition, and we have in particular to think of those who constituted his followers as being hideous in appearance, like the satyrs and sileni.

What is more, we discover in Greek mythology something extremely remarkable. We are told something which is in fact the truth — that the teacher of Dionysos was himself a very ugly man. This person, Silenus, who was the teacher of Dionysos himself, the aspirants in the Mystery came to know also. But Silenus is described to us as a wise individual. We need only recall that a great number of wise sayings are attributed to him, sayings which repeatedly stress the worthlessness of the  normal life of man if it is only viewed from the outside in its maya or illusion. Then we are told something which made a great impression upon Nietzsche — we are told that King Midas asked Silenus, the teacher of Dionysos, what was best for man. The wise Silenus gave the significant but puzzling reply: ‘Oh, thou race of brief duration, the best would be for thee not to have been born, or since thou hast been born, the second best for thee would be swiftly to die.’ This saying has to be rightly understood. It is an attempt to indicate the relationship between the spirituality of the super-sensible world and the maya, the great illusion, of outer life.

Thus, when we look at them in their physical human forms, these exalted beings are by no means beautiful — or at any rate they can only be regarded as beautiful in a different sense from that in which the late Greek period understood ideal beauty. We can in a way still idealize Dionysos in contrast to what he was as a man in the outer world. If we wish to contrast the form Dionysos assumed in the physical with the majestic splendor of the spiritual form which he revealed in the Mystery itself, there is nothing to stop us doing so. We are not obliged to think of him as ugly. But we should be wrong to think of the teacher of Dionysos, old Silenus, otherwise than as with an ugly snub-nose, and ears which stuck out, and anything but handsome. Silenus, the teacher of Dionysos, who was finally to hand over to man the archetypal wisdom in a form suitable for the human ego-consciousness — a wisdom which sprang from the deeper self of man — this Silenus was still closely akin to the life of Nature, which man in his present bodily form has really grown out of. The ancient Greek imagined that the present comeliness of the human being, from the point of view of external maya, had developed out of an old, ugly, human form, and that the type of the individuality who was incarnated in Silenus, the teacher of Dionysos, was not at all pleasing to look at.

Now, as students of spiritual science it will not be difficult for you, from all I have said so far, to suppose that both in the younger Dionysos and in his teacher, the wise Silenus, we have to do with individualities who have been of immense importance for the education of modern human consciousness. Thus when we cast about to find the individualities in the spiritual environment who—both for our own as well as for Greek consciousness—were and are momentous for what man has become, we find these two, Dionysos and the wise Silenus. These individualities are there in prehistoric times into which no history, no epic, goes back, but of which nevertheless the later history of the Greeks tells us, particularly in the epic tradition of its sagas and its myths. In these times both the wise Silenus and Dionysos were incarnated in physical bodies, performed physical deeds, and died, as their bodies had to do. The individualities remained.

Now you know of course that in human history very much happens which is highly surprising to the man who only thinks abstractly; this is especially the case as regards the incarnation of human and other beings. Sometimes a later incarnation, although more advanced, may from the outside seem less perfect than an earlier one. In my second Rosicrucian Mystery Play, in the incarnation of the monk in the Middle Ages (Maria in modern times), I have been able to give just a very faint idea of the spiritual realities. Thus in history too the abstract thinker must sometimes be overcome with astonishment when he contemplates two successive incarnations, or at any rate incarnations which belong together. The younger Dionysos, who, I told you, allowed his soul to be poured out into external culture, was nevertheless able at a specific time to gather himself together again as a soul in a single physical human body; he was born again, incarnated among men; but in such a way that he did not keep his old form but added to his outer physical form something of what had constituted his spirit-form in the Dionysian Mysteries. Both the younger Dionysos and his teacher, the wise Silenus, were reincarnated in historical times. Those initiated in the Mystery-wisdom of ancient Greece were fully conscious that these two had been born again; so were the Greek artists, who were stimulated and inspired by the initiates.

Little by little such things have to be told if spiritual science is not to stop at platitudes, if it is to enter into reality. Things which are true have to be told for the sake of the further evolution of humanity. The wise old teacher of Dionysos was born again, and in his further incarnation was none other than Socrates. Socrates is the reincarnation of old Silenus, he is the reincarnated teacher of Dionysos. And Dionysos himself, that reincarnated being in whom verily lived the soul of Dionysos, of old, was Plato. One only realizes the profound meaning of Greek history if one enters into what was known—not of course to the writers of external history — but to the initiates who have handed down the tradition from generation to generation right up to today — knowledge which can also be found in the Akasha Chronicle. Spiritual science can once more proclaim that Greece in its early period harbored the teacher of humanity, whom it sent over to Asia in the journey conducted by Dionysos, whose teacher was Silenus. What Dionysos and the wise Silenus were able to do for Greece was renewed in a manner suited to a later age by Socrates and Plato. In the very time when the Mysteries were falling into decay, in the very time in which there were no more initiates who could still see the younger Dionysos clairvoyantly in the holy Mysteries, that same Dionysos emerged as the pupil of the wise Silenus, he who had himself become Socrates — emerged as Plato, the second great teacher of Greece, the true successor of Dionysos.

One only recognizes the meaning of Greek spiritual culture in the sense of ancient Greek Mystery-wisdom when one knows that the old Dionysian culture experienced a revival in Plato. And we admire Platonism in quite another way, we relate ourselves to it in its true stature, when we know that in Plato there dwelt the soul of the younger Dionysos.

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Notes:

1. dichten = to compose, as author or a poet, to make literature; dicht = thick. In Ahriman's speech in Scene 4, he says: ‘Ich wirke diese Schönheit in  dichtem Licht’ — translated in the English version as ‘which charm I weave for thee in light condensed’.

2. Part II Act 2. Laboratory Scene. Spoken by Homunculus.

3. The Soul's Probation, Scene I.

Source: http://wn.rsarchive.org/GA/GA0129/19110824p02.html

Spiritual Geology : Greek Mythology. What prehistoric man looked like

Wonders of the World, Ordeals of the Soul, Revelations of the Spirit. Lecture 6 of 10.

Rudolf Steiner, Munich, August 23, 1911:

We have devoted much attention in these lectures to a subject that arose out of the dramatic performances which preceded them, but it is a subject which is intimately bound up with the aim we have set before us in this year's Cycle. I am referring to the world of the Greek gods and the form it took. Since our actual subject is ‘Wonders of the World, Ordeals of the Soul and Revelations of the Spirit’, why should we have spent so much time talking about the world of the Greek gods? The reason is that such a study can provide — as well as much else — the basis we need for a spiritual-scientific study of the world. I have pointed out that the concept of nature and natural existence which is generally accepted today was quite unknown to the ancient Greek. If we call to mind what the thought and feeling of ancient Greece was really like, we find there no chemical, physical, biological laws as we understand them today. What lit up in the soul of the ancient Greek, what was enkindled in the spirit of this marvellous Greek civilisation when the eye (clairvoyant or otherwise) was directed upon the wonders of the world, presented itself to them as a kind of knowledge, a kind of wisdom; but for us it is the marvellous structure of their world of gods. Anyone who looks upon this world as having no inner coherence, which is the usual attitude, knows nothing of what it is trying to express. This world of the Greek gods, in its wisdom-filled structure, is actually the Greek reply to the question ‘What is the response of the human soul to wonders of the world?’ The Greek response to the riddle of the world was not a law of nature as we understand it, but the shaping forth of some group or other of divine beings or divine forces. Hence in these wonderful clues we have followed up in the last few lectures, and which we sometimes found so astonishing, but which, pieced together, give us the world of the Greek gods, we cannot help seeing the equivalent of our own dry-as-dust, prosaic, abstract wisdom. And if we want to make real progress in Spiritual Science we must acquire a feeling that it is possible to think and feel in an entirely different manner from the modern way.

But when in the last lecture we were considering the figure of Dionysos, our attention was drawn to yet another thing. While the rest of the gods represent what was reflected in the soul of the Greek when he tried to understand the wonders of the world, we found that in the figure of Dionysos the Greek has concealed what we might call the inherent contradiction of life, and we shall get no further unless we give some thought to this aspect. Abstract logic, abstract intellectual thinking, is always trying to discover inconsistencies in higher world-conceptions, and then to say ‘This world-conception is full of inconsistencies; it cannot therefore be accepted as valid.’ The truth is, however, that life is full of contradictions — indeed nothing new, no development, would be possible unless contradiction lay in the very nature of things. For why is the world different today from what it was yesterday? Why does anything become, why does not everything remain as it was? It is because yesterday there was a self-contradictory element in the state of things, and today's new state has arisen through the realization of yesterday's contradiction and its overcoming. No one who sees things as they really are can say ‘Falsehood is detected by proving contradiction’ — for contradiction is inherent in reality. What would the human soul be like if it were free from contradictions? Whenever we look back at the course of our life we see that it has been activated by contradictions. If at some later date we are more perfect than we were earlier, it has come about because we have got rid of our earlier condition, because we have discovered our earlier state to be in contradiction to our own inner nature, and thus have called forth a reality of our own inner being in contradiction to what was. Contradiction is everywhere at the basis of all beings. Particularly when we study the entire man, the four-fold man, as we are accustomed to treat of him in the light of occultism, do we find this  contradiction, a contradiction which addresses itself not only to our reason, to our philosophy, but to our hearts, to our whole soul-nature.

We must constantly remind ourselves of the fundamental basis of our spiritual science: that man as he stands before us consists of physical body, ether body, astral body, and ego. Our being consists of these four members. Let us look at them as they meet us to begin with on the physical plane, in the physical world. We will for the present ignore the question as to how the human being appears to clairvoyant sight, we will just ask how the four members of the human being appear to physical eyes, for the physical world. Let us begin with the innermost member of the human being, the ego, which as you know we regard as the youngest — or better call it ‘the ego-bearer’. The outstanding characteristic of this human ego occurs at once to anyone who studies the world with even a little intelligence. However widely we search, we shall never find this ego by the exercise of our physical senses, by exercising our faculties for knowledge of the physical world. It is not visible to our eyes, nor in any way perceptible to any faculty for acquiring knowledge of the outer world. Hence when we meet another man, if we only try to study him physically, with purely physical instruments, if we do not enlist the help of the clairvoyant eye, we can never observe his ego. We go about among men, but with organs of perception for the outer world we do not see their egos. If anyone thinks he can see egos he is utterly deceiving himself. With physical faculties for acquiring knowledge of external things we cannot observe the ego as such; we can only contemplate its manifestation through the organs of the physical body. A man may be inwardly a thoroughly untruthful person, but so long as he does not utter the lie so that it passes over into the external world, we cannot see it in his ego, because egos cannot be observed with external physical instruments. Thus, however far we go in investigating with the forces of physical knowledge, we only encounter this ego once. Although we know quite well that there are many egos upon the Earth, only one of them is to be perceived, and that is our own. In the physical world, or for physical instruments of knowledge, each man has only one opportunity of perceiving the ego: that is his own ego. So that we may say that the peculiarity of this youngest and highest member of the human being is that its existence, its reality, is capable of being perceived in one example only, in ourselves. The egos of all other men are hidden from us within their bodily sheaths.

From this ego, as the innermost, as the youngest, but also the highest member of the human being, let us now turn to the outermost member, to the physical body. As you know from things I have written or said on various occasions in recent years, the physical body can only be known in its true inner being to clairvoyant consciousness. To ordinary consciousness, to the physically based powers of physical knowledge, the physical body manifests itself only as maya or illusion. When we meet a man, what we see as his physical body is maya, illusion. But there are as many instances of this illusion of a physical body as there are men to be met with on Earth. And in this respect — as maya — our own body is just like that of other men. Thus there is a great difference between the perception  of our own ego, of which only one example is given, and the perception of human physical bodies, of which we have as many examples as the people we know on Earth. We only learn to know the ego when we direct our physical faculty of knowledge upon ourselves. We have to look into ourselves with the power of knowledge which we have acquired upon the physical plane if we wish to learn to know our ego.

I should perhaps add, because there is so much unclear thinking, that what I mean by the ego which we perceive with our physical powers of knowledge belongs entirely to the physical world. It would be idle nonsense to say that what a man's normal faculties find within him as his ego ever belongs to any other world than the physical. If anyone were to consider the ego, observed not with clairvoyant but with normal faculties, as belonging to any other world than that of the physical plane, he would be making a mistake. In the higher worlds things look quite different; the ego too for clairvoyant consciousness is something very different from what man finds within him in normal consciousness. We must not think of the ego of which ordinary psychology and ordinary science speak as belonging to anything but the physical plane; only we are looking at it from within, and because we stand within it, as it were, because we do not confront it from the outside, we are able to say: ‘Admittedly we learn to know this ego upon the physical plane only, but we do at least learn to know it in its own inner being, by direct knowledge, whereas what we know of the physical body, of which we see so many specimens in the world, is only maya.’ For as soon as the faculty of clairvoyance is turned upon the physical body it dissolves like a cloud, vanishes away, reveals itself as maya. And if we wish to get to know the physical body in its true form we have to rise, not just to the astral plane but to the highest region of Spirit-land, to Devachan; thus a clairvoyance of a very high order is needed if we wish to learn to know the physical body in its true form. Here below, in the physical world, the physical body has only a quite illusionary stamp, and it is this counterfeit image that we see when we look at this physical body from outside. Thus these two members of the human organism, the highest and the lowest, show a very remarkable contrast. Here in the physical world we see the human physical organism as maya — that is to say, it is not at all in accordance with our inmost being; but the ego we see here in the physical world is in its physical manifestation quite in keeping with our inmost being. Please take note of that — it is an extremely important fact. Let me put it in another way, half symbolically, and yet with all the seriousness which the reality demands. Half symbolically, yes — but this pictorial approach has a fullness about it which comes nearer to expressing the truth than any abstract concepts.

Half symbolically then, but also half seriously, I ask how we have to think of Adam and Eve in Paradise before the Fall. We know that according to the Bible they were unable to see each other's outer physical bodies before the Fall, and that when they did begin to see them they were ashamed. That is the expression of a most profound mystery. The Old Testament tells why Adam and Eve were ashamed of their bodies after the Fall. It indicates that before the Fall the bodies they had were more or less spiritual bodies, bodies only accessible to clairvoyant consciousness, bodies of quite different appearance from physical bodies, bodies which expressed the ego in its true form. We see that even the Bible recognizes that quite a different bodily form, one only perceptible to clairvoyant vision, was really fitted to the deepest being of man, and that the external physical body we have today actually does not measure up at all to the inner being of man. What then did Adam and Eve feel when their relation to each other was no longer one in which they did not see their physical bodies, but on the contrary, one in which they did see them? They felt that they had fallen into matter, that, out of a world to which they had formerly belonged, denser matter than had been theirs formerly had been instilled into them. They felt that man with his physical body had been transplanted into a world to which, if the true nature of his ego is taken into account, he does not belong. No more striking expression could be found to mark how little the outer expression of his being, the sensible reality, really measures up to the divine ego than this being overcome by shame.

But we can look at the matter from another aspect, which throws quite a different light upon it. If man had not descended into his physical body, had not taken into himself the denser matter, he would not have been able to acquire his ego-consciousness, or in terms of the Greek mind, he would not have been able to participate in the Dionysos forces. That also was felt by the Greeks. They felt that the ego of man as it lives on the physical plane has within it not only those forces of a higher spiritual, supersensible world which it had had before the Fall, and which stream into it out of the spiritual worlds above, but that it is also dependent upon forces which come from quite another side, from the opposite direction. We know that before man had acquired his present ego-consciousness it was normal for him to have a clairvoyant consciousness. But this clairvoyant consciousness was a pictorial one, a dreamlike one, it was not a consciousness lit up by any real intellectual light; man only acquired that later. This old clairvoyant consciousness had to be lost to man in order that a new ego-consciousness could arise. To this end the old form of the ego, the old Dionysos Zagreus, had to be destroyed.

We had before us yesterday the impressive picture of how this came about—of how in the language of Greek mythology the elder Dionysos was dismembered by the Titans, and emerged again later as the younger Dionysos, that is, as our present ego-consciousness, the consciousness which has come about in human evolution as the achievement of time. But in order to bring about the birth of the younger Dionysos the human mother, Semele, has to play her part. The figure of Semele furnishes another example of the unerring wisdom of Greek feeling for the true wonders of the world.

A necessary condition for the coming into existence of this younger human ego was that the old clairvoyant consciousness had to die out, had to sink below the horizon of consciousness. Anyone who knew that—and those who built up Greek mythology did know it — said to himself: ‘Once upon a time the human soul was endowed with a clairvoyant consciousness which looked up into a world full of spiritual beings and spiritual deeds, into a world in which the human being was still a fellow-citizen. But in course of time man has withdrawn from this spiritual world, and has become a quite different being, a being permeated by an ego.’ What would happen to a man of today if, without his having undergone any preparation, any kind of esoteric training, suddenly, in a moment, there were to  stand before him, instead of the physical world as it appears to physical eyes and physical ears, the world that was there for the old clairvoyant consciousness? Let us imagine that, by some miracle or other, instead of the world which displays itself to him in the star-strewn heavens, in the rising and the setting of the Sun, in mountain and cloud, in minerals, plants, and animals, suddenly the world of old Atlantis were to stand before a normal human consciousness of today: the man would be shattered, so dreadful, so alarming, would seem the world which is nevertheless all around us; for this world is there behind everything, it is all around us — but it is covered over by the world of our ego. There is a world around us which would fill the man of today with fear, would shatter him with terror, if he were suddenly confronted by it. But the ancient Greek felt this too. That is also implicit in the wonderful, wisdom-filled form of the Dionysos saga. Dionysos had to come from another direction from that of the world-wonders in which the ancient Greek consciousness had placed Zeus and the other figures of the upper gods; the ancient Greek felt that in what constituted the world of men there lived something different from what lived in the gods of Zeus's world.

That the world in which we live has a heterogeneous constituent was felt too by the Greek. He felt that an element is included in our physical human existence that is certainly not present in the supersensible world. Hence the younger Dionysos, macrocosmic representative of our modern ego-consciousness, could not be like the elder Dionysos, a son of Persephone and Zeus, but he had to be a son of an earthly mother—he was the son of Semele and Zeus. But we must bear in mind what the Greek consciousness added in the further development of this saga. It was brought about through the machinations of Hera that Semele saw Zeus in his true form, not as the old Atlantean hero, but as he now is. That could only happen by means of clairvoyant consciousness. What then does it mean that Semele was to see Zeus for a moment as he now is? It simply means that Semele became for a moment clairvoyant. She was destroyed by flame because she saw Zeus in the flames of the astral world. Semele bears witness to this human tragedy, a tragedy which would immediately come about if man, unprepared, were to enter clairvoyantly the spiritual world.

Hidden somewhere or other in the world of the Greek tales, all the truths about the wonders of the world are to be found. We find secreted there how Dionysos, the macrocosmic representative of the ego—the ego which no man endowed with normal consciousness can see in more than one exemplar —derives from a being of the physical world; that, so to say, what only meets the eye for normal physical consciousness as a maya was embodied in Dionysos; in other words, we see how Dionysos had to participate in the great Illusion, in maya. Today when we discuss the wonders of the world in our prosaic, dry-as-dust way, we speak of physical, chemical, biological laws. The Greek used splendid pictures which really penetrate far deeper into those wonders than our laws that only skim the surface. This is true of the whole world of Greek legend and Greek mythology.

Thus we see as if in a mighty occult script the question arising out of this Greek myth. If this essential human ego is to manifest in a bodily form, can we expect to see it in the human form we have in the physical world? No, for this form is maya, it is not at all a manifestation of the real ego, it is truly of such a nature that the real egos in Adam and Eve were right to be ashamed of it. What we as men are confronted by today is in fact a real contradiction, and the Greek felt that too. Although it has often been said, very superficially, that he only paid attention to the outer beauties of Nature, even the Greek felt the self-contradiction in the external human form. He was not a naturalist in the sense in which modern man believes he was, but he felt profoundly that the human form as it walks the Earth today is a compromise; from no aspect does it show itself to be what in reality it ought to be. Suppose for a moment that the human form had only arisen under the influence of physical, etheric, and astral bodies, suppose that no ego had entered into this human form: then it would have been fashioned as it was when it came over from the previous embodiments of our Earth, as it came over from Saturn, Sun, and Moon. Then the human form would be different from what it actually is. If the Earth had not endowed man with the ego, men would be walking about with quite different-looking physical forms. Secretly, in the depths of his soul, the ancient Greek wondered what the human form would look like if earthly men today were ego-less, if men had not participated in the blessings bestowed by the Earth, had not participated in the coming into existence of the ego, had not taken Dionysos into themselves! If there were among us on the Earth men who had developed purely under the influence of the forces of physical, etheric, and astral bodies, he wondered what they would look like. And the Greek — uplifted, inspired by the spirit, and moved by unutterable depth of feeling — even put to himself the corresponding question: ‘If there were only the ego, if the ego had not been drawn into the physical, etheric, and astral bodies, how would it be formed?’

It would not have a physical body such as it has now, it would have a spiritual body that would be quite different from our external human body. But this spirit-body exists only for a clairvoyant consciousness, it is nowhere to be seen in the physical world. What, then, really is the man who actually walks about the Earth? He is neither the ego-less man, purely under the influence of astral, etheric, and physical bodies, nor is he the ego-man, but a compromise between the two, something coming about as the result of a combination of both. The man we see before us is a composite being. The Greeks felt this and they said to themselves: ‘Since Dionysos, the younger Dionysos, is really the first teacher of intellectual civilization, we must imagine him as not yet in a body which has already been subjected to the influence of the ego, for it is through the effect of the Dionysos civilization that man has first to acquire the intellectual ego. Therefore Dionysos must be represented as this human ego still outside the human body.’ So when the Greeks depicted the procession of Dionysos, which I have called a march of civilization, they could only accurately represent it on the basis that the essential ego of Dionysos had not yet entered the human body, but was just on the point of doing so; they could only imagine that Dionysos and all his followers had the kind of bodies which would inevitably come about if there were no egos in them, if their bodies were under the influence of forces  emanating only from the physical, etheric, and astral bodies. They said to themselves: ‘Dionysos and his rout should not look like the man of today, whose bodies are the combined result of the invisible ego and the visible body, but the invisible ego should hover as an aura over the bodily form and the body should be so fashioned as would inevitably come about under the sole influence of physical, etheric, and astral bodies, that is, as a man would inevitably be formed if he had continued to develop the forces he had brought over from the Moon without taking in the Earth ego.’

Because the Greek soul has given a graphic answer to this world-riddle quite in accordance with the truth, it has portrayed in the figure of Dionysos, and particularly in the figures of those who constituted his band of followers, human figures who have the ego outside them, and whose own external forms really show only the forces of physical, etheric, and astral bodies. These are the satyrs and Sileni who follow Dionysos on his travels, that wonderful creation of picture forms which comes to us from Greek thought. That is what man would look like if we were able to separate the composite form into its component parts. Imagine for a moment that by some kind of magic the physical, etheric, and astral bodies of a man could be so treated that the invisible, supersensible body of the ego could be torn out of him: then he would turn into a figure resembling those who followed in the train of Dionysos.

But the Greeks in their admirable mythology have also drawn attention to something else. We know that the ego has only gradually drawn into the human form, that in the time of Atlantis it was not yet within the body. What then, were these Atlantean bodies like? In the satyrs and the fauns and in Pan, as we shall see later, Greek fantasy and Greek intuition has elaborated pictures of the average Atlantean. Under present Earth conditions such human forms can of course no longer arise. The figures of the satyrs and the fauns and the whole rout of Dionysos represented those stragglers who had most closely retained the ancient Atlantean form. Dionysos had to take with him on his travels the very men who bore the least trace of the ego within them, because he was to become the ego's first teacher.

We see then that the Greeks represented in this train of Dionysos the forms of average Atlantean men. Atlantean men were so formed that they did not have skeletons such as men have today. The human body has become more solid; it was much softer in Atlantean times. For this reason it was incapable of preservation, and the geology, the palaeontology, of today will be hard put to it to find any trace of the real Atlantean man. But a geology, a palaeontology, of quite a different kind has preserved the Atlantean man for us! It is not in the geological strata of the Earth that we have to delve if we wish to know the man of prehistoric times, the man whose higher corporeality was still outside the physical body. To burrow in the earth is quite absurd; in the earth we shall never find traces of prehistoric man which are anything but decadent. But in the strata of human spiritual life, in the strata of spiritual geology which have been preserved for us in the wonderful Greek mythology, there we shall find the normal, average, Atlantean man, just as in the geological strata of the Earth we find snail shells and mussel shells. Let us study the configuration of the fauns, of Pan and of Silenus: it is there that we have the spiritual fossils which lead us to the Earth's prehistoric humanity. Therein we see how the ancient Greek consciousness had an answer to wonders of the world which today may be dubbed sentimental, dreamy, fantastic, but which nevertheless was imbued with a kind of science more profound than our modern abstract, prosaic, intellectual science. There are today many Darwinian and anti-Darwinian hypotheses as to what prehistoric man looked like. The Greeks set this world-riddle before us in a way that can satisfy the soul. Neither Haeckelism nor any other branch of Darwinism, nor the excavations of geology, tell us anything about the outward appearance of prehistoric man, but Greek mythology has supplied the answer to this question for us by its representations of the rout of Dionysos in its plastic art.

We must come to feel that Greek mythology really provides a serious answer to questions about the wonders of the world, and then we shall be able to enter into it ever more deeply. It is only someone who does not understand what underlies these things who can say ‘I can't accept that interpretation, it is too far-fetched.’ Anyone who knows the whole story in all its ramifications, besides knowing the true development of man as revealed by the Akasha Chronicle knows that there is nothing fantastic, nothing sentimental in what is being put before you today as spiritual science. The fancifulness, the sentimentality, lies in the abstract, empirical science of today, which imagines that it can dig up from the strata of the physical Earth something that is not there, and can make a study of that while it ignores the wondrous script of spiritual geology which comes before us, to the rescue of human wisdom and its evolution, in the impressive mythology of ancient Greece.

Source: http://wn.rsarchive.org/GA/GA0129/19110823p02.html

Coming to our senses

 

Rudolf Steiner:  "The earthly conceptual thinking process impelled the 'ash' or mineral substances into the living, soft, malleable body; and to the extent that this occurred, to that degree the calcification process occurred, forming the skeleton. And as this happened, the human being's soul became ever more permeated by self-awareness, by earthly thinking."

Source: GA 102 lecture 16, March 1908. As cited by Anderson, 7 Seals, p.87

Dionysos the Elder and the Younger, Zeus, Hera, Pallas Athena

 

Wonders of the World, Ordeals of the Soul, Revelations of the Spirit. Lecture 5 of 10.

Rudolf Steiner, Munich, August 22, 1911:

At the end of yesterday's lecture I introduced the name of Dionysos, and finished on a note of interrogation as to his nature. As everybody knows, Dionysos is one of the Greek gods, and the question must have arisen in your minds as to the nature of the Greek gods in general. I have already tried to describe in considerable detail such figures as Pluto, Poseidon and Zeus himself. In view of what I said yesterday as to the part played by the higher hierarchies in the spiritual guidance of mankind, you may have wanted to ask to what category of the higher hierarchies the ancient Greeks regarded their gods as belonging.

We said yesterday that in contradistinction to conditions prevailing in previous epochs — in the Persian and the Egypto-Chaldean epochs — during the Greco-Latin culture the reins of spiritual guidance from above were less tightly drawn. That the Greeks were conscious of this somewhat freer relationship between the divine Spirits and men is quite clear from the way in which they depicted their gods, giving them thoroughly human traits, one might even say human frailties, human passions, human sympathies and antipathies. From this we can infer that they knew that just as human beings on the physical plane have to strive to make progress, the gods immediately above them do the same thing—they strive to transcend such qualities as they have. In fact, compared with the gods of Egypt or Persia, the Greek gods needed so much to make progress in their own evolution that they could not bother themselves much about men! Hence came that standing-upon-its-own-feet of Greek civilization which is so truly human. The bond between gods and men was looser than ever before. It was just because they were aware of this that the Greeks could depict their gods as so human. This very fact may well prompt us to ask where in the ranks of the hierarchies the Greeks themselves placed their gods. We can be in no doubt — their very qualities proclaim it loudly enough—we have to put them all without exception into the ranks of the Luciferic beings. If we ask ourselves what these gods were trying to do, what they were seeking to gain by their participation in earthly life, we can have no doubt that they had failed to complete their Moon evolution and that the Greeks knew it, knew that they had to take advantage of Earth evolution just as men had to do. It follows from this that the Greeks knew quite well that all their gods were imbued with the Luciferic principle.

The Greek attitude toward their gods is in sharp contrast to that of another people. We know of one nation which had developed to a very high degree a consciousness of being under a divine hierarchy which in its own development had attained the full goal of the Moon evolution. Anyone who heard the course of lectures I gave here a year ago with all that I then said about the Elohim, about the culmination of the Elohim in Jahve, will have no doubt that the Hebrew people knew that the Elohim, that Jahve, belonged to the gods who could not be directly affected by the Luciferic principle on Earth, because they had reached their full development upon the Moon. That is the great contrast between these two peoples, and the singularity of the ancient Hebrew consciousness of God is wonderfully portrayed in that powerful dramatic allegory which sheds its light upon us from remote antiquity, and the profound meaning of which will only gradually be understood once more as spiritual science prepares the ground for it. If ancient Hebrew consciousness was utterly filled with the knowledge that every member of the Hebrew nation was under the divine guidance of spirits who had attained the full goal of their evolution on the Moon, how must this have affected its attitude toward man himself? The Hebrew must inevitably have felt: ‘Devotion to this divine world with the whole strength of the soul will lead men upward to the spiritual in the universe; union with any other forces, union with forces which still belong to the material world, will inevitably lead men away from the spiritual.’ This is the significance of that text, that epigrammatic utterance, which has come down to us from the Book of Job, whose wife says to her suffering husband: ‘Curse God and die.’ There is something magnificent, powerful, in these words, and they can only mean that union with Jahve, as the extract of the Elohim, means life itself to the ancient Hebrew people. Union with the hierarchy of the Elohim is life, and union with any other hierarchy would mean turning away from this progressive principle of human evolution, would mean death to human evolution. To the ancient Hebrews, no longer to be permeated by the substance of the Elohim, or of Jahve, meant to die.

This is just an indication that in remote antiquity there was an opposite spiritual consciousness in vivid contrast to the consciousness which we meet later among the Greeks. Greek consciousness brings to maturity the truly human element in earthly life, tries to assimilate into its humanity all that the Earth has to offer and is in consequence under the domination of a hierarchy which is seeking to lay hold of the elements of earthly life for its own development, and which therefore exercises the least possible control over men. The other consciousness, the ancient Hebrew consciousness, surrenders itself entirely to the principle of the Elohim, is completely given up to Jahve. Those were the two great poles of civilization in the past.

I said yesterday that the Luciferic beings, or the Angels who during the Moon evolution remained  backward, can still incarnate upon the Earth, can still move among men, in contradistinction to those who completed their evolution on the Moon. But we are not told that the Greek gods incarnated directly in human form! There seems here to be an inconsistency. Such apparent inconsistencies are inevitable, for spiritual science is extraordinarily comprehensive and complicated. Indeed the paths of spiritual truth are intricate, and can only be trodden by those who patiently wind their way through the labyrinth — as is said in a passage of my Mystery Play The Soul's Probation. [ 1 ] Such inconsistencies can only be resolved little by little, and anyone who expects a glib solution will not easily penetrate to the truth. The Greeks were certainly aware that in their own time the beings of their divine hierarchies were not able to incarnate directly upon the Earth. But those soul-individualities whom the Greeks regarded as their gods did nevertheless incarnate in physical bodies, and that happened in the time of Atlantis! Just as in the Greek Heroes we have the later incarnations of backward Angels from the Moon evolution, going about the Earth in human bodies, bearing within them knowledge of a Luciferic nature, a superhuman nature, so in the Greek gods we have beings who underwent their fleshly incarnation in Atlantean bodies. Thus we can say that the Greeks looked upon their gods as true Luciferic beings who had already gone through their human incarnation in Atlantis. We must be clear about this if we wish to understand the whole world of the Greek gods.

But another apparent contradiction might occur to you. You might say: ‘All very well, but another time you tell us that Zeus is outside in space as the macrocosmic representative of the astral forces at work in man, Poseidon as the macrocosmic representative of the forces working in the ether body, Pluto as the macroscosmic representative of the forces of the physical body — so that one has to think of these forces as outspread in the widths of space!’ The objection that these forces are at work outside in space without being gathered together into separate human forms could only be made by someone who has not yet understood how evolution comes about, what is its whole meaning. For a modern consciousness it is somewhat difficult to come to terms with the proper concepts. It is difficult to imagine that what works outside in space as natural law can at the same time walk about the Earth in a human body. Nevertheless it can be so. For the scientist of today naturally it would seem utter nonsense for anyone to say ‘Take all the forces known today to the chemist, all the chemical forces described in the textbooks, all the forces at work in the analysis and combination of substances, and then think of all these laws at some time concentrated in a human body, walking about, making use of hands and feet’ — a modern man would regard that as sheer madness! Equally little would he be able to imagine that the macrocosmic counterpart of the forces at work in our astral bodies, their counterpart outspread in space, was once upon a time, exactly in the manner of today, a human soul, centered in a single person, a single person who in Atlantis walked the Earth as Zeus. And the same thing applies to Poseidon and to Pluto. In these Atlantean men to whom Greek consciousness gave the names of Pluto, Zeus, Poseidon there were incarnated those wonders of the world which are also called laws. Try then to imagine to yourself a real man of Atlantean mould walking about in Atlantis just like other Atlanteans, and imagine an observer endowed with full consciousness looking upon this denizen of Atlantis who was Zeus: such an observer would have been obliged to say: ‘This soul of Zeus walking about as an Atlantean appears to be concentrated in an Atlantean body, but that is an illusion, that is maya. It only seems to be so. The truth is that this soul is the totality of all the macrocosmic forces which work outside as the counterpart of the soul-forces concentrated in our astral bodies.’ If clairvoyant observation were directed to this Atlantean man who is Zeus, it would acknowledge: ‘As I observe this soul, it becomes larger and larger, it broadens out, it is in fact the macrocosmic counterpart of the soul-forces in the human astral body.’ The same thing applied to the other Atlanteans who were really Greek gods. The world as it meets us on the physical plane is altogether maya. It is because the modern man has no idea of this that it is so difficult for him to conceive of the being of Christ Jesus Himself. For if we contemplate the soul which was in Christ Jesus after the baptism in the Jordan, we find the same thing. That is made clear in the little book The Spiritual Guidance of Man and of Mankind. In that book we come to recognize that as long as the clairvoyant, or so long as human beings in general, could think of this soul as confined to one human body, they were the victims of maya. In reality this soul pervades all space, and exercises its influence from the whole of space, though for the mind held captive by the sense-world it seems to work through the body of Jesus of Nazareth. Whereas after the baptism by John we have to see the cosmos as a whole through the body of Jesus, in the Greek gods, during the time they were Atlantean men, we have to see those specific forces which have their place within the cosmos. They actually dwelt on the physical plane, and were, in terms of maya, real Atlantean men.

But this will no longer astonish you if you observe the ordinary man of today. At bottom he also is maya, and it is sheer illusion to think that the human soul is confined to the space which encloses his body. As soon as a man attains to knowledge of the supersensible world he no longer looks upon his physical body as something within which he with his ego is confined; it is something upon which he looks from without, toward which he is focused, and he feels himself, together with his ego, as poured out into cosmic space. He is in fact outside himself, united with the beings of the surrounding world, whom formerly he only looked at; and in a way every soul is spread out over the whole macrocosm, every soul is there within the great universe. Moreover, when man goes through the gate of death and severs his essential soul-nature from his bodily part, as soon as death has taken place, he at once feels himself to be poured out into the macrocosm, he feels himself to be one with the macrocosm, because reality then enters into his consciousness and takes the place of the maya.

I have tried to make clear what a consciousness experiences when it has been freed from the body, when so to say it looks upon the physical body from without, when it lives instead in the spiritual world, when it gradually makes itself at home in the macrocosm. I tried to make that clear in Scene 10 of my playThe Soul's Probation, in the monologue which Capesius speaks when, after having plunged into the cosmic, the historical form of his previous incarnation, he returns again to ordinary consciousness. In that monologue what he experienced while he was living through his earlier incarnation passes through his soul; it is not just drily recorded that he had seen one of his earlier incarnations, but if you follow the monologue word by word, line by line, you find a true description of what he experienced. You find it all there, quite realistically described. From this monologue you can get an idea of what really takes place when one looks back in the Akasha Chronicle to earlier periods of Earth evolution, in which one has gone through earlier incarnations. It would be a great mistake to overlook a single word of it; it would be a mistake as regards other passages too, but particularly in this monologue it would be a great mistake not to realize that it describes quite realistically, in all detail, actual soul-experiences. You are even told how the human being has to ask himself whether everything out there in space has not been woven out of the stuff of his own soul! Capesius does actually feel as if what he has encountered there outside himself has been made out of the stuff of his own soul. It is very strange to feel oneself to be part of other things, to feel expanded to a cosmos, to feel completely drained, literally starved of one's own being, which has turned into pictures which then stand before one, pictures that one sees just because they are saturated with the stuff of one's own soul. If you take all that into consideration, you will come to understand the assurance with which the Greeks fashioned the pictures of their gods and of the divine world.

Thus during the time of Atlantis these gods were human beings, with souls which had a macrocosmic significance, and this experience enabled them to make such progess as to fit them to play their part in the fourth post-Atlantean culture-epoch, but during that epoch to hold the reins very loosely in their spiritual guidance of humanity. As gods they no longer needed to be like Cecrops, Theseus, and Cadmus, in whom were also incarnated Luciferic souls who had fallen behind during the Moon evolution, for they had finished with what earthly incarnation could give them in their Atlantean incarnations. Yet if we are looking at the matter in the right light we see that however much these Greek gods could still give to men, there was one thing they could not give: they could not give the ego-consciousness which man had to acquire. Why not? You will have gathered from all my earlier lectures that this human ego-consciousness was something which had to come about specifically upon Earth. We know of course that man first developed his physical, etheric, and astral bodies during the Moon evolution. On the Moon the ego-consciousness could find no footing. There was no ego-consciousness in anything created on the Moon, or in any knowledge which the Greek gods had acquired there about the principle of creation. They could not give ego-consciousness to men, because that was an Earth product. They could do much for man's physical, etheric, and astral bodies, for they had been fully conversant with the laws governing these from the time of the Saturn, Sun, and Moon evolutions, in which at a higher level they themselves had participated. But because they were retarded beings they could not become creators of the ego-consciousness. In this respect they are in marked contrast to the Elohim, to Jahve, who is pre-eminently the creator of the ego-consciousness. Thus the whole of modern mental life has only been able to develop through the intermingling of these two polaric influences in human spiritual development — the ancient Hebrew influence, which had the very strong tendency to arouse all the forces in the human soul leading toward ego-consciousness, and the other influence which poured into the human soul all these forces which the human physical, etheric, and astral bodies needed in order that Earth evolution might be rightly carried through.

It was only through the intermingling of these two, the Greek and the Hebrew influences, that it was possible for that unified consciousness to arise which was then able to absorb the Christ Impulse, the Christ principle. For within Christianity these two influences are to be found, merged together as the waters of two rivers flow into one. Thus while the life of the soul in modern Western civilization is inconceivable without the impact of Greece, it is no less so without the impulse which was contributed by the ancient Hebrew civilization. But from the hierarchy to which Zeus, Poseidon, and Pluto belonged there was no possibility of man's acquiring his earthly ego-consciousness. The Greeks had a wonderfully clear perception of this, and brought it to expression in their concept of Dionysos. Indeed as regards this figure of Dionysos the Greek soul has expressed itself with such marvelous clarity that we can only contemplate the wisdom of its mythology in reverent amazement.

Greek mythology tells us of an older Dionysos, Dionysos Zagreus. This older Dionysos was a figure which the Greeks depicted in such a way as to give expression to their feeling that an old clairvoyant consciousness had preceded the intellectual consciousness man has since acquired. This sentiment they did not of course express outwardly in thought such as ours; it was entirely a matter of feeling. This old clairvoyant consciousness was not constrained by maya, illusion, deception, to the same degree as is the later consciousness of humanity While men were still clairvoyant they did not believe that the soul is enclosed in the body, that it is bounded by the skin; the center of the human being, so to say, was still outside the body. Man did not believe that he saw through his eyes by means of his physical body, but he knew: ‘With my consciousness I am standing outside my physical body.’ He regarded the physical body as a possession. One might say that modern man is like someone who sits firmly and comfortably on a chair in his house and says: ‘Here am I inside my house and surrounded by its walls!’ The old clairvoyant man did not sit within his house in this way: he was more like a man who walks out through the door of his house, stands outside it and says: ‘There is my house, I can walk round it, I can look at it from various standpoints’ — one then has a far wider view of the house than when one is inside it. That is what the old clairvoyant consciousness was like. It circulated outside its own bodily form, and looked upon the latter merely as a possession of the consciousness outside it. When we consider the course of earthly evolution from ancient Lemuria through the Atlantean time and on into the post-Atlantean epochs, we know that the development of earthly consciousness has been gradual. During the Lemurian time this human consciousness was in many respects very similar to that of the Moon evolution. Man paid little attention to his body, he was still outspread in space. It was only by slow degrees that he entered with his ego into his body; during Atlantis his consciousness was to a considerable extent outside it.

Thus it was only gradually that this consciousness began to enter into the physical body — the whole tenor of Earth evolution shows this, and the Greek too was aware of it. He was sensible of an earlier consciousness, a clairvoyant consciousness which, though it had arisen during Earth evolution, still had a very strong leaning toward the Moon consciousness, toward the consciousness which had developed when man's highest member was his astral body. We ourselves might express this stage of human evolution thus: At the time the Earth entered upon its present evolution man had developed physical, etheric, and astral bodies: man bore in his astral body the Zeus forces; in the course of Earth evolution there was added to this all that went to form the ego. A new element united itself with the astral Zeus forces. Grafted upon the Zeus forces, as it were, was something which in earlier times had indeed been vaguely associated with them, but which more and more came to be an independent ego added to the Zeus forces. The independent ego first found clairvoyant, and only later intellectual expression. If we see in the astral and Zeus forces, and if in what then emerges, and is at first clairvoyant, we see what we have called Persephone, then we can say: ‘Before man lost his clairvoyant consciousness there lived in him, side by side with what was in his astral body as the Zeus forces, Persephone.’ Man had brought over this astral body, closely associated with the forces of Zeus, from the Moon. The soul-life which we find personified by Persephone was developed in him on the Earth. And that is what the man who lived in olden times on Earth was like! He felt, ‘I have in my astral body — I have within me Persephone.’ In olden times man could not yet speak of an intellectual ego, as we do today, but he was aware of something which arose in him as a result of the cooperation of the Zeus forces in his astral body with the Persephone forces. What came about in him through the union of these two, Zeus and Persephone — that was his very self. He was something only one aspect of which was bestowed upon him by Zeus; to this there had to be added the other thing, upon which Zeus as such had no direct influence. What Persephone as the daughter of Demeter was, was connected with the forces of the Earth itself. Persephone was the daughter of Demeter, a divine being whose relationship with Zeus was regarded as that of a sister. Persephone was a soul who had gone through a different evolution from Zeus — she was connected with the Earth, and out of the Earth had an influence upon man and thereby upon the formation of his ego-consciousness.

Thus from very ancient times man bore in him from the side of Zeus his astral body, from the side of the Earth, Persephone. The ancient Greek was conscious that he bore within him something the origin of which he could not discover when he looked up to the hierarchies of the upper gods. Hence he ascribed what he bore within him to what were called the sub-earthly gods, to the gods who were connected with the origin of the Earth, in which the upper gods had played no part. ‘I bear something in my being to which I owe my earthly consciousness, something which the world of the upper gods, the world of Zeus or of Poseidon or of Pluto, could not directly give me, something with which they could only cooperate! Thus there is upon the Earth something beyond what the macrocosmic forces of Zeus, Poseidon, and Pluto are, something which Zeus can only look upon, but which he cannot himself produce.’ For all these reasons Greek mythology has good ground for making the elder Dionysos, Dionysos Zagreus, a son of Persephone and Zeus. In olden times, forces in earthly life which further the development of man's ego-consciousness, looked at microcosmically from within man, constitute the ancient clairvoyant consciousness; seen from the macrocosmic aspect, as they surge through the earthly elements, they are the elder Dionysos.

Thus when man had an ego which was not yet the ego of today with its power of intellect, but the forerunner of our present ego, when man had the old consciousness, which has now become subconscious, man looked outward to the macrocosmic forces which cause the ego-forces to flow into us, and called them Dionysos Zagreus, the elder Dionysos. But the Greek had a peculiar feeling toward what the elder Dionysos could give him. He was, after all, already living in an intellectual civilization, even though one permeated with the living sap of fantasy, one wholly pictorial. Within the pictorial mode his culture was already intellectual. Only the oldest times still bear evidence of a clairvoyant civilization. Everything to do with Greece which has been handed down historically to later times is intellectual civilization, however steeped in imagery and fantasy. Thus actually the Greek looked back to an older time, to a time to which the elder Dionysos really belonged, to a time when he infused into human nature the still clairvoyant ego. The Greek had a sense of tragedy when he said to himself: ‘Our Earth can no longer maintain such an ancient ego-consciousness.’ Try for a moment to place yourself livingly within such a Greek soul. He looked back as if in recollection upon those olden times, and said to himself: ‘At that time there was a humanity which lived with its consciousness outside the physical body, a time when the soul was independent of the bit of space enclosed by its skin, a time when it lived outside, lived at one with the world of cosmic space. But those times have gone, they belong to the past. Since then this ego-consciousness has developed in such a way that in fact man cannot do otherwise than feel himself enclosed in the space bounded by his skin.’

This involved something further. Try to imagine for a moment that, by a miracle, it could come about that each one of your souls, now in your physical bodies, were to leave them, were to become outspread in the widths of space: then your souls would merge into one another, they would not be separate. The several souls could point to their own property at as many different points as there are heads sitting here; but out there above, the souls would coalesce and we should have a unity. But if the souls were to withdraw from this exalted consciousness into their respective bodies again, what would become of this unity? It would be divided up into as many bodies as are sitting here. Picture to yourselves this sensation, think to yourselves that the Greeks knew in their souls that there was a kind of consciousness in which souls were united with one another and formed a unity, a consciousness in which the human psyche drifted over the Earth, and as an egoity none could really distinguish himself from another; then came a time when this egoity lost its unity and each separate soul trickled into a body. Greek fancy represents this moment in an impressive picture, the picture of the dismembered Dionysos.

With nice discernment Greek mythology has interwoven into the Dionysos saga the figure of Zeus on the one hand and Hera on the other. We have seen that Zeus is the central power of the macrocosmic forces which correspond to the soul-forces anchored in the astral body. These soul-forces have come over from the Moon evolution. Even Zeus really derives from the Moon evolution, so that he plays a part in the creation of Dionysos, who to begin with, as Dionysos the elder, is a son of Zeus and Persephone. Zeus's part in the creation of Dionysos lies in his representing the element of oneness, of homogeneity, of Being as yet unfragmented. The figure whom we meet in the feminine Hera has passed through a different development. She has passed through a development considerably more advanced spiritually than that of Zeus—more advanced in the sense that she inclined more toward the Earth, whereas Zeus had remained behind at an earlier stage. Whereas Zeus had remained at the stage of the Moon evolution, had persisted in the Moon stage of development, Hera had gone further and had taken into herself certain motives which could be used upon the Earth. Hera belongs to the category of those Luciferic beings who labor to bring about the separation, the individualization, of men. Hence she is so often represented as jealous. Jealousy can only come about where individuality is well defined. Where consciousness of unity prevails there can be no jealousy. Hera belongs to those gods who further separation, individualization, isolation. Thus Hera plays an active part in the mutilation of Dionysos, whereas he is the offspring of the union of Zeus and Persephone. At a time when the human being of old was endowed with clairvoyant consciousness as a universal consciousness, the individualizing goddess Hera — a function symbolically expressed as her jealousy — appears and calls upon the Titans, the gods centered in the forces of the Earth, to cut into pieces the old unified consciousness, thereby driving it into separate bodies. This is how this universal consciousness, this consciousness of being one, was banished from the world.

The ancient Greek looked back with a sense of tragedy to that old clairvoyant consciousness which lived outside the physical body and knew itself to be one with all things in the universe; for he could only look back to it as to a thing of the past. If nothing else had supervened, had there been only the deed of Hera, man would have walked the Earth enclosed within the narrow confines of his own personality. Men would never have understood one another. But neither would they have been able to understand their environment, the elements of the Earth, the world. They would have been able to look upon their bodies as their property, to feel themselves shut up within their bodies as in a house; possibly they would have been able to feel the environment in their closest proximity as their own, as a snail feels its shell to belong to it, but further than this the human ego would never have expanded; it would never have expanded to a consciousness of the world. That is what Hera wanted. She wanted to separate men from each other in their individuality.

What then saved men from this isolation? Whence comes it that, although men's egos had assumed intellectual form, this later consciousness, no longer clairvoyant but intellectual, is able to form an image of the world through acquiring intellectual knowledge? Whence comes it that the ego can transcend itself, is able to connect one thing with another? Whereas clairvoyant sight encompasses the whole world in one look, intellectual vision is restricted, it has to pass from object to object, to assemble the separate items in its vision of the world in order to make a picture of the whole by intellectual knowledge. It is not only the work of Hera which has continued to develop, but the intellectuality of the ego has been brought to completion, and although man can no longer, like Dionysos Zagreus, live in objects clairvoyantly, he can at least form intelligent pictures of the world, he can picture the world as a whole. To the Greeks the central power behind this world-picture, behind the thoughts and imagery with which we grasp it, was represented by the goddess Pallas Athene.

In point of fact it was the intellectual image of the world, the wisdom of the intellect, which rescued the dismembered Dionysos, rescued the old unified consciousness that had withdrawn into human bodies. It directed human consciousness once more outward. Hence the subtlety of the Dionysos saga, which relates how Pallas Athene, after Dionysos had been dismembered by the Titans at the instigation of Hera, rescued his heart and brought it to Zeus. That is a marvellously subtle and wisdom-filled feature of the story, in full accordance with the ‘world-wonders’ to which spiritual science provides the key again today. We contemplate its profundities with reverence and admiration. This story of the dismemberment of Dionysos and the rescuing of his heart by Pallas Athene, who took it to Zeus, is only the macrocosmic counterpart of something which takes place microcosmically  in us.

We know that the blood which sets the heart in motion is the physical expression of earthly man. What would have happened if the intellectual expansion of the ego to an intellectual conception of the world had not saved it from being imprisoned in the human body? What would have happened had not Pallas Athene rescued the heart of the dismembered Dionysos and taken it to Zeus? Men would have walked about, each imprisoned in his own bodily form, each imprisoned in those microcosmic forces of his body which manifest merely the lower egotistic impulses, through which man does in fact tend to cut himself off as an isolated person enclosed in his skin. Of course man does have within him those forces which led to the dismemberment of Dionysos. They are the lower impulses of human nature, those which work in an animal way, an instinctive way, and are the basis of human egotism. Those are the impulses from which develop sympathy and antipathy, everything of an instinctive nature, from hunger and other allied instincts to the reproductive instinct, which as such belongs entirely to the category of lower instincts. Had it depended upon Hera alone, had Pallas Athene not intervened to save man, he would only have developed an appetite for food, for the process of reproduction, in short for all the lower instincts.

What then happened to enable man to overcome this egotism, concentrated solely upon his lower nature? These lower instincts do constitute egohood, but there is something in human nature which lifts us above them. It is the fact that in our hearts we can still develop a different kind of enthusiasm from the egotistic passions — the hunger that drives us to maintain life and the sexual instinct that drives us to maintain the species. Those appetites, after all, still leave human nature plunged in its egotism. It is only because something else is intermingled with them that their egotistic character can to a certain extent be overcome, that they can be released from the body. There is a higher element connected with the heart, particularly with the circulation of the blood, which develops higher enthusiasms. When our hearts beat for the spiritual world and for its great ideals, when our hearts are afire for things of the mind, when we feel as much warmth for the spiritual world as a man feels in his lower instincts in the erotic life, then human nature is being purified and spiritualized by what Pallas Athene has added to the deed of Hera. Humanity will only become able to understand this tremendous truth in course of time, for at present there is much in human nature to give the lie to it. How often do we hear this sort of thing said: ‘Some people are very queer; they get worked up about all sorts of things which really don't exist; they get as heated over abstractions, over mere ideas, as other men do about real life’ — meaning by that the satisfaction of hunger and other lower instincts. But those who are capable of developing so much warm enthusiasm for the supersensible, for things in no way concerned with the lower instincts, that they can feel the supersensible world to be a reality, have devoted themselves to what Pallas Athene added to the work of Hera. That is the microcosmic counterpart of the forces holding sway in the universe, of which Greek mythology gives us such a magnificent picture when it tells how Pallas Athene rescued the heart of the dismembered Dionysos and took it to Zeus, who hid it in his loins. After the old clairvoyant consciousness had entered into man it merged with his bodily nature; this is wonderfully expressed in the Greek myth in the fact that the Dionysos-nature is concealed in the loins of Zeus — for all that would have sprung from the dismembered Dionysos would have had its microcosmic counterpart in what emanates from man's lower bodily nature. Thus we see how wonderfully what is given in the magnificent pictures of the old Dionysos saga is in agreement with spiritual science.

However, we are told how the old clairvoyant consciousness, represented by the elder Dionysos, developed further into the younger Dionysos, into the later consciousness, into our present ego-consciousness. For the macrocosmic counterpart of our present ego-consciousness, with its intellectual civilization, with all that derives from our reason, and from our ego generally, is in fact the second Dionysos, who was born because a love-potion brewed from the rescued heart of the dismembered Dionysos was given to Semele, a mortal, and resulted in her union with Zeus — with the forces of the astral body. Thus one who, as a human being, is already different, unites with what has come over from the Moon evolution, and from this union comes the man of today, who has his macrocosmic counterpart in the younger Dionysos, the son of Zeus and Semele. What further are we told about this younger Dionysos? Surely if he is the macrocosmic counterpart of our intellectual ego-forces, then he must be the intelligence which spans the Earth, which is outspread in the widths of space. If Greek feeling is to be in accordance with the truth, it will have to think of the younger Dionysos, the macrocosmic counterpart of our intellectual ego, as the intelligence which encircles the Earth; it will have to think that there moves a being outside in space who is like intelligence passing from land to land! And, wonderfully enough, we do find in Greek mythology the splendid legend of the second Dionysos who traveled from Europe to far-distant India, everywhere teaching men the arts  of agriculture, the cultivation of the vine, and so on; we find how he then crossed into Arabia, returning again through Egypt. Every variety of intellectual civilization stems from the journeys of the younger Dionysos; what we in our abstract dry-as-dust way call the spread of intellectual civilization, the old Greek mythology called the journeys of the younger Dionysos, who taught men agriculture, taught them the cultivation of the vine, besides teaching them science, the art of writing and such things, during journeys which carried him all over the Earth. The conceptions of the older and the younger Dionysos fit in wonderfully together; they are pictures of mankind advancing from its older, clairvoyant consciousness, with its macrocosmic counterpart in the older Dionysos, to the younger, intellectual consciousness, which has a macrocosmic counterpart in the younger Dionysos.

Let us once more turn to the thought which formed the starting point of this lecture, the idea that the ancient Greek gods were Atlantean men. The older Dionysos: you will feel of him that — although the son of Persephone and Zeus has already taken Earth-elements into himself through the Titans — he still has a very close affinity with the gods of the Zeus hierarchy. He is the son of Zeus and Persephone, a supersensible being. This elder Dionysos, from the very fact that he is still the son of Zeus as well as of Persephone — a supersensible figure of the post-Atlantean epoch — is in his very nature allied with the Zeus hierarchy. Because of this, ancient Greek consciousness is clear, and the legend makes it clear, that the elder Dionysos, Dionysos Zagreus, like the other Greek gods, lived as a human being in Atlantis, walked the Earth as a man in Atlantis. But when you enter into the spirit of the saga of the younger Dionysos, who is already closely related to man, being born of a human mother, you see that the myth is aware that he is actually more closely akin to man than to the gods. Hence the legend relates what is in fact true, that the younger Dionysos was actually born in Greece in remote antiquity, and lived in a post-Atlantean fleshly body. Just as the forces of Zeus were once to be found in an Atlantean Zeus, in the same way what we recognize as the intellectual civilization which is spread throughout the world, this mental macrocosmic counterpart of the personal intellectual ego, once lived as a man, as the younger Dionysos, in the post-Atlantean epoch, somewhere in Greek pre-historic times. This Dionysos the younger actually lived, he was one of the Greek Heroes. He grew up in Greece, and traveled to Asia, getting as far as India. This journey really did take place! And much of Indian civilization—not the part which has survived from the teaching of the Holy Rishis, but another part — derives from the younger Dionysos. Then with his band of earthly creatures he journeyed to Arabia and Libya, and back again to Thrace. This prodigious pre-historic journey really took place. Thus a Dionysos figure who actually lived as a man, accompanied by a remarkable band of followers, described in mythology as sileni — fauns and other like beings — actually made the round journey to Arabia, Libya, Thrace, and back again to Greece. When the time came for his death, he poured out his soul into the intellectual civilization of mankind.

Thus one is justified in asking: ‘Is Dionysos the younger alive today?’ Yes, my dear friends. Go where you will, look at what lives in the world as intellectual culture, consider the mental content of what is given to us by modern historians in such a hopelessly dry-as-dust form, and which is called the tradition of history or something equally fantastic—consider this in its concrete reality. Think of this concrete, macro-telluric element which surrounds the Earth like a spiritual sheath, which subsists from epoch to epoch, which is not only in every head, but which as an atmosphere of intellectual culture also envelops all men in their daily lives—therein lives Dionysos the younger! Whether you turn to the teaching of our universities, or to the intellectual training which is applied to technology, whether you look at the kind of thought which has come into the world and forms the mental atmosphere of the banking and financial system throughout the world — in all that there lives the soul of Dionysos the younger. Since the death of the personality of the younger Dionysos who made that great journey, his soul has gradually been poured out into the intellectual civilization of the entire Earth.

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Notes:

1. Scene 2 of The Soul's Probation. The precise words are:

“Der höhern Wahrheit Wege sind verworren;

nur der vermag zurecht zu finden sich

der in Geduld durch Labyrinthe wandeln kann.” 

Translated as:

“Tangled the paths that lead to higher truths!

And only those may hope to reach the goal

Who walk in patience through their labyrinths.”

Source: http://wn.rsarchive.org/GA/GA0129/19110822p02.html