8. The Myth of Heracles
GA 87/1901-12-28/p042
·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.
This is how the later mystery teachings developed. These are the later myths that could only arise from those that contained truth, beauty and goodness in an undivided form. When the festivals that were celebrated in the mystery temples contained everything as if in one trunk, "Hermes and "Apollo" could not exist. But when the artistic striving arose, as in the tragedies of Aeschylus, and the striving for truth in Socrates and Plato, these two branches of the original trunk appeared. On the one hand, we have the pursuit of knowledge, which originated with Socrates and Plato, and on the other, art, which strangely enough has never - not even to this day - been connected with the pursuit of truth in the consciousness of the majority of humanity.
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