8. The Myth of Heracles
GA 87/1901-12-28/p008
·1901-12-28
·
English
HighHigh alignmentThis translation's paragraph count matches the German original — the locus maps cleanly to the same paragraph in DE.
Record: listeners' notes. Written from listeners' notes, summaries, or memory rather than a shorthand transcript. The wording is the note-taker's as much as Steiner's: weigh a single striking phrase here far more cautiously than the same phrase in a stenographic volume, and do not rest an argument on one word. Evidence: «Auch wenn die Mitschrift noch nicht die später übliche Genauigkeit aufweist» (Even though the transcript does not yet have the accuracy usual later). The publisher's description of the volume, as mirrored on AnthroWiki (GA 87), which calls the cycle the earliest of which a listener's transcript exists. The translation is the maintainer's, not a published one.
We do not understand the concept of art at all if we do not understand it as something that has arisen as a distillation of the Greek Mysteries. But we can only understand this when we have penetrated the meaning of the ancient Greeks of the pre-Platonic period, who understood the really deep meaning of the word mystery. The Greek mystery being of pre-Platonic times united everything that can be expressed in inner aspirations. And what confronts us on the surface - including Heraclitus' philosophy - are only the diluted products of those who penetrated the depths of the mystery being, who threw them into the others because they could not penetrate, so that they could at least suspect, even if they could not see.
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