The Gospel of Hellas - Research Institute for Waldorf Education

0 the gospel of hellas
mystery-place and king’s castle. The new impulse of the polis of Hellas had to
struggle for domination; it had to take up the Palladium at any price. That this
happened through the cunning of Odysseus’ reason and intellect reveals the
most characteristic feature of the mission of the Hellenic mind.
After the Palladium had been carried away, Laocoon, the priest of Troy,
had to die with his two sons. His death represented the overcoming of
sacerdotalism by the intellect. The myth describing the death of Laocoon and
his sons emphasized the extinction of clairvoyance based on family-ties on
which the culture of Ilium was founded. The heroes of Troy were the sons of
Priam; they were clan. The Greeks on the other hand, fought as personalities,
each of them with his own mind, decision, mood and temper.
Troy was at an end. Hellas was beginning. The path from Troy to Hellas
led to the polis of the Greeks. The Trojan War signified the beginning of the
dissolution of ancient blood-ties. Paris, the son of Priam and a member of
the royal clan, desired Helen of Argos to break away from the rule of bloodties
on which the Oriental consciousness was based. The Hellenes received the
Palladium, the present of Zeus and the symbol of his daughter Athena, because
the gods favored the cunning of the intellect more than the conservative rites
of the Trojan priests.
The wooden horse, which brought about the final defeat of Troy, enfolds a
mystery. The symbol of the horse has always been connected with the forces of
the intellect; Plato used the figure of the horse when he spoke of the faculties
of the soul that are given from a higher world, in contrast to those coming
from within. What was the Trojan horse in terms of inner significance? It was
intended to resemble the conception of the Centaur: the being half-horse and
half-man. The Centaur was a relic of the age of Atlantis, when the human being
was still struggling with the making of his body in battle against animality. And
it was the cunning of Odysseus, in all its mockery and irony, that placed the
horse before the gates of the old castle, that fateful present which came out of
the past of the world!
The Trojan War was the archetype of all wars that Hellas fought. It was
the fight for the creation of the polis, a battle which raged as an ever-recurrent
conflict between Orient and Occident. The duel between Hector and Achilles