The Gospel of Hellas - Research Institute for Waldorf Education

the twilight of the gods
existed before the gods began to rule. The Greek mythology does not reveal a
divine law and found a moral doctrine; the concepts of the gods were the result
of man’s perception in nature, but a nature quite different from ours.
If we ask whether the gods were real, symbolic or only fictitious, then we
must answer that they were actually all three in one. It is only a matter of
recognizing to what extent every one of these aspects prevails in any instance.
Judgment is often difficult when we are confronted by the human features
and attributes of the gods. What is the import of the myths which tell us, for
example, that Zeus, besides begetting, by Hera, Ares, Hephaistus and Hebe,
also progenerated Persephone by Demeter, Aphrodite by Dione, Hermes by
Maya, Apollo and Artemis by Leto, approached Leda as a swan, Danae as
a shower of gold and Europa as a bull? If the gods were spirits, how is their
kinship to be interpreted? If they were divine, how is their jealousy and envy to
be understood? If they were super-sensible beings, what does their being born
in a particular place on earth indicate?
The gods are an objective reality in their own nature and a subjective reality
for man’s cognition. In many ways they appeared only as higher and loftier
human beings; but it is most illuminating to learn from Steiner that the Greek
gods differed in character from the human being mainly in three respects: They
lacked the faculties of devotion, compassion and conscience. 40
Yet these three capacities—for being devoted in awe and wonder, for living
in pity and compassion, for experiencing the voice of conscience within the
free spirit of an individual—belong to the inmost human achievements which
the culture of Hellas gradually unfolded in its works of art and science. These
three soul qualities were the roots from which philosophy and natural science,
drama and poetry, music and dance, architecture and sculpture, in short the
entire message of the Hellenes, sprang. Therefore, the gods, who are described
as devoid of these three human qualities, were different from mere idealizations
of mortals. The gods really lived on earth, not in the time of Hellas, it is true,
but in the period that Plato recognized as Atlantis. They passed through a prehistorical
existence as the forerunners of man and therefore as his leaders, at a
time before the freedom of the individuality was born. 41
This knowledge of the origin of the gods in connection with the sunken