Lecture 5
22nd August, 1911
T
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 EgyptoChaldean 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 civilisation 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
towards 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 towards man himself?
The Hebrew must inevitably have felt: ‘Devotion to this divine
world with the whole strength of the soul will lead men upwards 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 civilisation 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, 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 text-books, 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, centred 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 recognise 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 super-sensible 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, towards 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
realise 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 towards
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 civilisation is inconceivable
without the impact of Greece, it is no less so without the impulse
which was contributed by the ancient Hebrew civilisation. 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
marvellous 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 centre 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
towards the Moon consciousness, towards 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 co-operation 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 co-operate! 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 towards what the elder Dionysos could give
him. He was, after all, already living in an intellectual
civilisation, 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 civilisation. Everything to do with Greece which has
been handed down historically to later times is intellectual
civilisation, 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 one-ness, 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 towards 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 labour to bring
about the separation, the individualisation 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, individualisation, 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 individualising goddess Hera — a function
symbolically expressed as her jealousy — appears and calls upon
the Titans, the gods centred 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 outwards. 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, 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
spiritualised 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 super-sensible, for things in no way concerned with
the lower instincts, that they can feel the super-sensible 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 civilisation, 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 travelled 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 civilisation stems from
the journeys of the younger Dionysos; what we in our abstract
dryas-dust way call the spread of intellectual civilisation, 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
super-sensible Being. This elder Dionysos from the very fact that he
is still the son of Zeus as well as of Persephone — a
super-sensible 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 recognise as the intellectual civilisation 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 travelled to Asia,
getting as far as India. This journey really did take place! And much
of Indian civilisation—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 civilisation 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 civilisation of the
entire Earth.
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.”
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