The Eddas

What this work carries

The Eddas preserve Atlantean mystery-wisdom transmitted through the druidic and 'drottes' lodge-systems of northern Europe. The Ragnarök cycle encodes initiatory knowledge concerning cosmic destruction and renewal, originally held within the Germanic-Norse mystery schools. This oral inheritance was finally fixed in Old Norse manuscripts during the Greco-Latin epoch, by which time the living mystery impulse had withdrawn from the outer tradition.

Language frame

The two texts—the Poetic Edda (Codex Regius, c. 1270) and Snorri Sturluson's Prose Edda (c. 1220)—are composed in Old Norse, a North Germanic literary idiom shaped by skaldic and eddic verse conventions. The mythographic form blends cosmogonic narrative, divine genealogy, and eschatological prophecy, most concentrated in the Völuspá.

Steiner’s engagement

• GA 90b, 1905-12-10Steiner identifies the Edda as an echo of the Atlantean migration and equates the words 'Edda' and 'Veda' as etymologically and spiritually identical.
• GA 90b, 1906-01-10Steiner repeats that the Edda, like the Veda, was the vehicle through which sacred knowledge was preserved by the druidic holy men of the European stream.
• GA 93, 1904-09-30Steiner states that everything in the Edda and the ancient German sagas refers back to the initiatory temples of the 'drottes' or druids, and that its narratives record actual events within those mystery-streams.
• GA 92, 1904-07-30Steiner emphasizes that most readers of the Edda do not recognize it as a narrative of what genuinely occurred within the ancient druidic mysteries, in which an immense spiritual power resided.
• GA 93a, 1905-11-05Steiner notes that while 'Veda' and 'Edda' are the same word, the Vedic content is more finely developed than what survived in the European Eddic tradition.
• GA 94, 1906-05-30Steiner references the raven motif in the Edda—the raven whispering to Wotan—as a preserved image of the first degree of esoteric initiation, the figure who remains at the threshold.
• GA 228, 1923-09-10Steiner reads the Eddic traditions concerning Baldur, son of the Wotan-forces, as evidence that post-Atlantean Germanic humanity pondered deeply the question of the resurrection of the solar-spiritual being.
• GA 104a, 1909-05-15Steiner observes that in ancient times the Edda itself was not required as textual proof of cosmic spiritual realities, because the living mystery-knowledge was directly accessible; its necessity as document marks a later, diminished stage.
• GA 51, 1904-10-25Steiner notes that knowledge of the Germanic peoples must be reconstructed from the songs and sagas collected in Iceland in both the Prose Edda and the Poetic Edda.
• GA 277a, 1915-09-09Steiner draws on a passage from the Bjarkilied of the Edda for use in eurythmy work, treating the verse as living spiritual-cultural material fit for artistic performance.

Cross-tradition congruence

• Vedic tradition (India)Steiner's etymological identification aside, the Eddas and the Vedas share a structural parallel as post-Atlantean repositories of oral mystery-wisdom, each encoding cosmogonic, theogonic, and eschatological knowledge in verse forms transmitted by a priestly initiatory class.
• Zoroastrian cosmology (Persia)The Ragnarök cycle's structure of cosmic conflict between divine and adversarial forces, culminating in world-dissolution and renewal, exhibits cross-tradition congruence with Zoroastrian Frashokereti—the final renovation of existence following the defeat of Angra Mainyu.
• Greek mystery mythologyThe Eddic figure of Baldur—a luminous solar being who dies and whose resurrection is awaited—shows cross-tradition congruence with the Persephone/Dionysus cycle of the Greek mysteries as an encoded initiatory death-and-renewal motif.