I. The Prometheus Saga
GA 92/1904-10-07/p032
·1904-10-07
·
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: «Sechzehn Vorträge, gehalten in Berlin, Köln und Nürnberg in den Jahren 1904, 1905 und 1907 (Hörernotizen)» (Sixteen lectures, given in Berlin, Cologne and Nuremberg in 1904, 1905 and 1907 (listeners' notes)). The volume's subtitle as given in the publisher's description, mirrored on AnthroWiki (GA 92); the 2022 catalogue's subtitle omits it. The translation is the maintainer's, not a published one.
During the fifth root-race mortal man is expected to stand on his own feet. This humanity of the fifth root-race is represented by Prometheus. The fifth race was the first to acquire human skill and the primeval art of fire-making. Zeus is jealous of this race, the race in which men come to have their own initiates, initiates who in the sixth race will take the lead into their own hands. But humanity has to pay the price for this. Hence its primordial initiate must first of all take upon himself the sum of all suffering. Prometheus is the archetype of the initiate of the fifth root-race, one initiated not only into wisdom but into deed. He runs through the whole gamut of suffering, and is released by the man who makes himself mature enough to free humanity little by little and to lift it above the mineral realm.
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