8. The Myth of Heracles
GA 87/1901-12-28/p016
·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.
So Heracles appears to us like the humanized Dionysus. He appears to us as one who has taken all suffering upon himself, in contrast to Dionysus, who has been spared this suffering. These twelve labors are nothing other than human trials that man has to pass in order to gradually ascend to the highest level he can reach. This whole myth can only be understood as a symbolic representation of the initiation process, and the twelve labors represent twelve successive states of the human soul. Through these, man gradually reaches an elevated consciousness, the entrance, the attainment of the actual divine consciousness.
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