V. The Human Being and its Expression in Greek Art

If man, while waking, would consciously follow the whole process that takes place when waking up, he would say to himself every morning: I must not lose my physical body, I must really get back into this physical body! Man would be afraid of not being able to get properly into the physical body. The ancient Greeks knew much about this fear, and they also knew that every night the etheric body has a tendency to split into four different forms: an angelic, a lion-like, an eagle-like, and an ox-like form. Every morning, starting from the astral body, one must endeavor to synthesize these four members of the etheric body, if I may use the expression, in such a way that a real human being is formed again. But the Greeks liked to have life in the physical and etheric bodies. I have often quoted the saying that comes to us from Greece: “Better a beggar on earth than a king in the realm of shadows,” in the underworld. The Greeks loved this physical existence. He also wanted to be strengthened in the possession of his physical body, in the becoming similar of the etheric body to man. And you see, tragedy arose out of this tendency. And Aristotle still gives a definition of tragedy that clearly indicates that basically the Greeks did not think of tragedy as modern man thinks of it. I don't know if anyone else has had different experiences, but I have mostly found that people today believe that tragedies exist because, after spending the whole day dealing with what the day brings, they like to sit down for a few hours in the evening to experience something more or less exciting, which is not a real experience but only an image.