The Rudolf Steiner Archive

8. The Legend of the Argonauts and the Odyssey

[ 1 ] By examining various myths, I would like to lay the foundation for a certain type of esoteric teaching that I will discuss in the next few hours. Today I would like to speak about a very important myth that we also find in Greece and which, like every other myth, can be interpreted in stages and in many different ways. Today we want to clarify its real core. But before I do so, I would like to preface this with some theoretical remarks.

[ 2 ] In the last issue of “Lucifer-Gnosis,” I pointed out that within the last three Atlantean cultures, a certain influence on our human race began that still continues today in a certain way. This influence is connected with the fact that at that time, people became ready to live in what we call our intellect, our mind. Before that, humans were more memory-based beings. Until the fourth Atlantean culture, their memory was particularly well developed. The combining mind, the ability to calculate, in short, everything on which our entire culture is based today, began with the fifth Atlantean culture, with the Proto-Semites. And that is why these Proto-Semites were also able to become the root race of the entire fifth post-Atlantean root race. In the course of evolution, this root race has to develop primarily the intellect that is concerned with the physical plane. When a new phase of development such as that of the intellect occurs in humanity, it is possible that new beings, which previously existed only in a hidden form, gain influence on evolution. And indeed, since that time, since the fifth Atlantean culture, a certain group of beings whose activity was previously unnoticeable has been able to work in the field of human evolution. You must imagine these beings as highly developed, much more highly developed than humans at their stage of evolution at that time. But in a certain sense they were lagging behind those beings who intervened in the human race in the middle of the Lemurian epoch. It was a new reinforcement that took place. These beings of whom I am now speaking belonged by their whole nature to what we call the lunar evolution. They had undergone their development during the lunar epoch, but they had not progressed as far as those who were able to intervene in the middle of the Lemurian epoch. They had lagged behind the normal development on the moon. They had just reached the point where they recognized the abilities that humans had acquired at that time as being similar to their own, and as a result, they were able to take control of them. Before that, humans were not intelligent beings; now they acquired intellect. And the beings used this new ability for their further development. Thus it came about that the phase of development began which we call the preparation for objective science. It did not exist before and will not exist again in the future. All the wisdom acquired in the evolution of humanity was fundamentally linked to what we call love. That cold, purely calculating scientific method is influenced by these beings, who represent a kind of “supply.”

[ 3 ] The influence of these beings, which are still active in a certain way today, will only come to an end when our entire intellectual activity, everything we can know, everything we call intellectual activity, is once again permeated by love. When the intellect and love have reunited in higher wisdom, the influence of these beings, which are not visible on the physical plane, will disappear. Making the influence of these beings clear to people, first of all to mystery students, was the task of the Greek mysteries in particular.

[ 4 ] Around the eighth century BC, a particularly important epoch dawned in relation to these beings. If you consider the cultures of our fifth root race, those that founded the ancient Vedic culture, then those that founded the ancient Persian and Chaldean-Egyptian cultures, you will find that even in the epochs that produced the Druid culture, there was actually no objective, sober science. This only emerged as the fourth cultural epoch dawned more and more. The beginning of the fourth cultural epoch can be traced back to around the 8th century BC. With it dawned an objective science separated from all other human mental content. A Chaldean priest who studied astronomy still tried to fathom the intentions of the world government. The same was true of the priests of Egypt and the Druid priests; they sought to gain insight into the intentions of the world's ruler. A pure intellectual science only dawned in Greece. This intellectual science, which had gradually prepared itself and emerged through the influence of the aforementioned beings, but was linked to other human activities, was completely unleashed in the fourth cultural period of the fifth root race. The initiates who were instructed in the mysteries of that time felt that the primordial wisdom that had been given to the human race in earlier times was something lost in relation to external wisdom, something that had to be sought again. There was a time when this lost wisdom separated itself from the comprehensive primordial wisdom. This moment, when this sober, dry wisdom separated itself from the comprehensive primordial wisdom, was described by saying that around the 8th century BC, the sun passed through the vernal equinox in Aries. This passage of the sun through Aries is the repetition of an earlier passage through the same sign that took place thousands of years ago. As is well known, the sun moves through the entire zodiac, through the zodiacal signs of Aries, Taurus, Gemini, Cancer, Leo, Virgo, and so on, so that it has already passed through Aries many times. The last time it passed through Aries was when human beings still possessed the union of love and knowledge and thus the primordial wisdom. This primordial wisdom had now been lost and had given way to an external culture of the intellect. The Greek mystery priest expressed this entire process in its occult meaning through the immensely profound myth of the Argonauts, in which the ram symbolizes the union of love and knowledge.

[ 5 ] Let us first consider the entire myth. We are told that Phrixos and Helle suffered greatly at the hands of their evil stepmother Ino. Therefore, Phrixos' divine mother Nephele appeared to him and advised him to flee with his sister. She also gave him a large ram with a golden fleece, on which they were to ride across the sea. Helle then fell and drowned in the sea, which was subsequently named Hellespont; Phrixos, on the other hand, arrived in Colchis with the ram. There he sacrificed the ram to Zeus and gave the fleece to King Aietes, who hung it on an oak tree in front of a cave. Later, the Greek hero Jason, together with the most important Greek initiates of the time—Orpheus, Theseus, Heracles, and others—set out to retrieve the ram's fleece from the barbarian peoples of Colchis. By winning the hand of King Aietes' youngest daughter, Medea, he was able to bring the ram's skin back to Greece. First, he had to defeat two fire-breathing bulls. He also had to scatter dragon's teeth, from which armored men sprang forth and fought each other. Medea enabled him to settle this dispute. It was also she who enabled Jason to take the ram's fleece and set off with her and Medea on the journey home to Greece. In order to deceive her father, Medea had taken her brother with her, killed him, and thrown his dismembered body into the sea. While the grieving father gathered the limbs, they were able to continue their flight to Greece.

[ 6 ] In the 8th and 9th centuries BC, at the dawn of the Greek cultural period, the occult meaning of this legend was taught to Greek secret disciples. This occult meaning lies in the message that those beings who make use of the dry, sober intelligence of human beings acquired a special significance from that time onwards. The longing for the original culture that had once existed when the sun passed through Aries for the penultimate time was now reawakened. The fact that the twins Phrixos and Helle were brought from the ram to Colchis means nothing other than that a previous subrace, the Persian-Iranian with its twin nature – they stood under the sign of good and evil, Ormuzd and Ahriman – wanted to regain the connection between knowledge and love. The previous subrace had carried this into hidden realms. In earlier times, in the Atlantean era, this fleece, this wisdom, had been the common property of human culture, but then it had been carried away to distant secret schools. It must be brought back. Thus, in the legend of the Argonauts, we see expressed the founding of the secret schools in Greece.

[ 7 ] We are told that there was a primordial wisdom among the Atlantean race. This primordial wisdom was once the common property of humanity. It has been lost and can now only be found in the caves and crypts of the mystery schools. The Greeks, however, re-established the mysteries for their initiates, and Theseus, Orpheus, Hercules, and others were the founders of these schools of wisdom by bringing the primordial wisdom back to Greece. Through Thales, Anaximenes, Socrates, and other philosophers, a sober, cold intellectual wisdom was brought forth that is objective. Mystery wisdom is connected with love. It is a wisdom that cannot be attained without the purification of the passions, the Kama forces. Intellectual science, on the other hand, can be attained without purification from Kama. The important Argonaut legend thus depicts the transition from the third to the fourth cultural period of our present root race. The transition consists in the fact that the formerly common stream of human culture divided into two streams: into mystery wisdom and into external intellectual science. One stream was hidden, but in such a way that it was still effective and exerted influence on Greek art and culture—it is represented as the retrieval of the ram's skin. From then on, it was to have no influence on intellectual science. This is the legend of the Argonauts.

[ 8 ] In the legend of Odysseus, too, we see that it refers to the transition from one race to another. The legend of Odysseus has found the most varied interpretations and explanations. Today I would like to indicate only the framework of this legend. In my book Christianity as Mystical Fact, I attempted to apply the second type of interpretation, the allegorical; today we will consider the third type of interpretation, the occult.

[ 9 ] Odysseus, who was among the warriors of Troy, helped the Greeks conquer Troy through cunning and cleverness. He went through great wanderings on the water; please keep that in mind. He came to the Cyclops, defeated the chief Cyclops with one eye, then went on to Circe, who, as we are told, turned his companions into pigs. Then he went to the underworld and made the acquaintance of the heroes who had fallen in the Trojan War. Then he came under the power of the Sirens, who seduce men with their enchanting song. We are told how most of his companions succumbed to the seduction and how he saved himself by having himself tied to his ship. Odysseus then comes to a place between Scylla and Charybdis, where ships are in danger of being wrecked. He has to save himself by passing through a whirlpool. He then arrives at Ogygia, the island of the nymph Calypso, where he stays for seven years and is released by Zeus, who orders Calypso to set him free, and finally reaches his homeland of Ithaca. The goddess Pallas Athena leads him to his house and to his wife Penelope, who had to endure various perils because many suitors were vying for her hand. During the day, she wove a cloth, which she unraveled at night because she had promised her hand to the suitors when the cloth was finished.

[ 10 ] Now I ask you to go through this framework of the Odyssey with me in the way we know it from Greek mystery wisdom. The initiation schools, where what is recounted here actually took place, guided the student on the astral and mental planes so that he could pass through a certain stage of human development, namely the stage from the middle of the Lemurian period to the time when, in Greece, human beings could once again find the primordial wisdom in the initiation schools founded by Jason together with Orpheus, Theseus, Heracles, and others. The student was thus led to the astral and mental planes and shown the events that humanity had undergone from the middle of the Lemurian period to the point where the Trojan War took place. The mythical elements in the Argonauts' journey reveal a piece of the original wisdom to us. We see that it existed alongside science at that time. What was shown to the people, the initiation students, in the Odyssey saga? This is represented to us in Odysseus.

[ 11 ] Let us transport ourselves back to the middle of the Lemurian epoch. Human beings were then in transition from the hermaphroditic state to the state of sexuality, from the state of seeing without external physical sense organs to seeing with the external physical eye. In fact, until the middle of the Lemurian epoch, human beings had that “one eye,” which was then replaced by the two external physical eyes. The students were then transported back to this stage of development. They were to experience the transition from the pre-Lemurian period to the post-Lemurian period, from the middle of the Lemurian race to the emergence of the external eye. The Cyclops were the people of the pre-Lemurian period. Odysseus made their acquaintance on the astral plane. After this period, the human astral body had been sunk into increasingly dense and solid matter. This was presented to the initiates. We then come to the first Atlantean times. More and more, the Atlanteans gained the ability to use their life forces for their tasks. These were highly developed astral abilities, which the Atlanteans developed and to which a Greek could only return on the astral plane. This was the time so often mentioned in ancient occult writings, when the Atlantean races fell into the wildest arts of black magic. This epoch was dramatically presented to Greek mystery students in images of transformation. It was the epoch when human passions were so distorted under the influence of black magical forces that the astral bodies resembled the lowest animals. This was also the picture that presented itself when, later on, the Turanians fell into these wild magical arts. The astral body was so transformed under the influence of these black arts that, symbolically speaking, Circe transformed Odysseus' companions into pigs. The Greek initiate went through this stage of human development.

[ 12 ] Then Odysseus descended into the underworld. Wherever we encounter the descent into the underworld in Greek mythology, it signifies that an initiation is taking place. When it is said of a hero that he descended into the underworld, the narrator means nothing other than that the person in question was initiated, that he became acquainted with the things that lie beyond death. Odysseus was an initiate, and the Odyssey itself is the story of his initiation. We now proceed to the point in time when, after the Atlantean flood, human beings became acquainted with the first effects of those beings of which I have spoken, who reveal themselves in the outer culture, in the science and arts of that time, with those effects that had an influence on the intellectual after the Atlantean flood. The first beginnings of purely external physical culture were presented to the initiate as the temptations of purely worldly arts, of purely worldly culture. These are the siren songs of the young fifth root race. It was these siren songs of the young fifth root race that are spoken of so much in the occult writings. For on the one hand we have the great wisdom teaching of Manu, who draws the attention of the people of the fifth root race to the fact that their intellect must rise to the divine. This found expression in the Vedas and in what the Persian Zarathustra founded as a religion and left to his fellow believers. Alongside this, we have the purely intellectual culture that leads people away from what develops under the influence of Manu. You will find the events that took place described in all occult writings. Manu chose the small group and went into the Gobi or Shamo desert. There was only a small group that remained loyal to him, while the others became unfaithful and scattered in all directions. This important process, in which Manu first selected a part of the original Semites, but only a small part of these chosen ones followed him, while the other part perished because they followed the siren songs of the outer culture, this important process was presented to those who were to be initiated.

[ 13 ] Then another important point in the development of humanity is presented in the Odyssey, the passage between Scylla and Charybdis. What is actually beginning now in humanity? As we have seen, the actual Kama-Manas culture is only now beginning. It has been prepared little by little up to this point. Now it begins. Our fifth root race has this Kama-Manas culture as its primary culture. Kama is active in the astral and still is in the astral body today. Manas, however, is what is active in the physical brain. The human being of the fifth root race thinks with his physical brain. Only in a future phase of development will Kama, the astral body, be ready to think. Today, manas has only taken hold in the physical brain. We must pass between the two whirlpools, Scylla and Charybdis, which hurl us in opposite directions. This is represented by Odysseus' passage between Scylla-manas and Charybdis-kama. On one side is the astral whirlpool, the instincts, desires, and passions in which human beings can perish, and on the other side is the physical mind chained to the rock. We have already encountered the rock in the legend of Prometheus. Here the rock confronts us again. The human mind is exposed to all the dangers of the physical world, of the rock. Humans must navigate between the cliffs of the physical mind and the vortex of astral life. Once they have made it through, recognized the dangers that threaten them, and nevertheless managed to remain upright, they arrive at the island of Calypso, the hidden wisdom. There they can look into the future of humanity and undergo a trial period lasting seven years. That is why Odysseus stays with Calypso for seven years. Everyone who wants to be initiated must undergo a seven-year trial period, which is symbolized by the stay with Calypso, where wisdom hidden behind deception lives. Only then can he reach the place where the soul arrives when it has escaped the whirlpool of astral passions. Read Homer's “Odyssey”; it suggests that man is searching for his own soul. The return of one's own soul is the striving for home. Anyone who really wants to understand the Odyssey must not subscribe to the view of a recent scholar who believes that Polyphemus and the Cyclops are nothing more than Etna spewing fire, the site of the conflagration appearing to Odysseus as the giant's eye.

[ 14 ] Odysseus finally returns home as a beggar, without any external possessions. This suggests that man, who has seen through the insignificance of the external world and worldly goods, seeks the home of the soul not in Maya, but behind Maya, and that he therefore returns home as a beggar in the mystical sense. That he is in truth a wise man is indicated by the fact that Pallas Athena guides Odysseus home. In all esotericism, the soul is represented by a female being; female beings are always chosen as symbols for the striving of the soul. Goethe calls it the eternal feminine. As in Medea in the legend of the Argonauts, we see here in Penelope the soul itself, to which Odysseus is seeking to return. In the Christian religion, the Virgin Mary is the human soul striving for redemption, only here the meaning is infinitely deeper. This Penelope is, to be precise, the soul of the human being in the fifth root race. The fifth root race has to cultivate the human intellect. It is the most barren thing there is; only when it is applied to content can the intellect become fruitful. The intellect is a net that is woven around the things we have from elsewhere. When external experience teaches you something, you can spin it around with your mind. When higher occult wisdom teaches you something, you can spin it around with your mind again. People often say that occult wisdom contradicts the mind. Nothing contradicts the mind. Whenever something new has entered their horizon, people have always said that it contradicts the mind. But the mind is only there to combine and connect. It cannot gain anything from itself; you cannot prove anything from the mind. This barrenness of the intellect, which is nevertheless the actual soul of the fifth root race, is expressed in the constant spinning and unraveling of Penelope's web. Odysseus is guided by wisdom. The initiate must find the way to the soul of the fifth root race, to the barren intellect. But he will only connect with the soul of the fifth root race in the right way if he is filled with wisdom itself, if he is guided by Pallas Athena. Pallas Athena, in turn, is a higher female deity, another force in the soul; wisdom, the true guide. After many wanderings, which are really journeys of development, man must come to the intellect. Pallas Athena, wisdom, must be his guide. This was demonstrated to the mystery student in Greece, and this is what Homer wanted to tell us in the profound legend of Ulysses.

[ 15 ] An initiation as it was practiced in Greece at that time is thus presented to us in the legend of Odysseus, an initiation that was nothing other than a repetition in the astral-mental realm of the experiences of human beings in the Lemurian epoch up to the time of the mysteries themselves. Odysseus is the clever one, the wise one, and through his abilities Troy was conquered. The clever intellectual is the human being of the fifth root race. But he must search for his home, his Penelope, by a roundabout route in order to be able to follow the right path in the fifth root race. Those who are merely clever and intelligent would not find the right path within the fifth root race. He must first come out of himself and broaden his view by looking back on the long path of human development. Odysseus is the representative of the clever Kama-Manas human being, who must undergo many wanderings in order to be led back to the soul in the fifth root race.