Head of Medusa

From AnthroWiki
Peter Paul Rubens: Head of Medusa (ca. 1617-1618)

Head of Medusa or Gorgon (Greek: Γοργόνειον Gorgoneion) is the name given in Greek mythology to the head of the Gorgon Medusa, which Perseus cut off and offered as a gift to the gods.

In fact, in clairvoyant perception, every head appears as the head of Medusa.

„For clairvoyance, however, a head is something quite different from what it appears to us in ordinary people. For the clairvoyant the brain is something that rises out of the head like a serpent. Every head is a Medusa's head. That is something very real. And this is the difference between the human head and the other body, that in relation to the other body the human being will only attain, through a progressive evolution, what in the case of the head is the ordinary external thinking. In this, in a certain respect, lies the strength of thinking, that man is able, as far as possible, to bring the brain to rest while he thinks, even into the finer, invisible movements, the nerve movements. By being able to quiet the brain when he thinks, to quiet it down to the finer movements, which are, so to speak, the nervous movements, thoughts become finer, calmer, more logical.

Thus we can say that when man comes into existence through birth, his head is most finished, because for him that has already come about which, in relation to that part of man which expresses itself through gestures, the hands, can only be achieved in the future. In the old lunar age, what is now the brain was still in the position of today's hands. Then the head was still open on many sides, was not yet closed by the skullcap. Whereas now it sits as if in a prison, back then it could move out on all sides. But that was on the Old Moon, where we still have the human being in the liquid, not in the solid element. Even in a certain epoch of the old Lemurian time, when man had reached that stage of development which repeats the Old Moon time, even then it was still the case that, for example, where there was a cerebral cleft at the top, there was not only the organ often mentioned, but something like an effervescence of thought in the liquid element. And a kind of fiery vapour, which developed in the human element, was even still present in the old Atlantian. Without having a supernormal clairvoyance, but with a clairvoyance that simply every human being had, one could see with the Atlantean whether a human being was a thinker in the sense of the old Atlantean time, or whether he was not. He who was a thinker had just a luminous glow of fire, a kind of luminous haze over his head; and he who did not think went about without one.“ (Lit.:GA 141, p. 113f)

In order for the modern consciousness to form, the clairvoyant perception of the head had to disappear - the Gorgon head had to be cut off by the intellectual consciousness.

„Someone who would have imagined the transition to the new consciousness already in the manner of the old consciousness would have said to himself: When man formerly looked out into the environment, he saw spiritual-divine powers everywhere, but in his old imaginative seeing. This old imaginative consciousness has receded, it has gradually experienced something like a twilight, and what remained in the end were actually the worst forces of spiritual beings working outside. They came to the consciousness of a man who had imagined the new in the manner of the old, as the Gorgons, in whom men in their vision only saw the worst beings and therefore also so depicted as that which rose up in their consciousness also only as the worst beings. There rises the new man, Perseus, mutilated the Gorgons, the Medusa, that is, that consciousness which was still present, like a last remnant, represented in the serpent's head of the Medusa. Then it goes on to show how two beings emerge from the mutilated Medusa: Chrysaor and Pegasus. I am not a friend of the allegorical-symbolic interpretation of myths. I mean - not even in the sense of an allegorical-symbolic interpretation - that he who has experienced the rise of the new with the conditions of the old consciousness, has still seen clairvoyantly, entirely with the conditions of that old consciousness, that to which humanity was to develop, as the emergence of Chrysaor and Pegasus from Medusa. What did he see? Chrysaor, the image that man received as a down payment for what he had lost as the old clairvoyant species. Pegasus, the personification of fantasy. For this is the cause of the imagination, that the old imagination enters into a kind of twilight, and men have no longer the power to enter into the new epoch of time with an old power of consciousness. And in place of the old imagination, which went into spiritual reality, they put that which does not go into spiritual reality, but into the eternal shaping of the human soul, and which wants to represent the new shaping of the human soul. Pegasus is nothing other than that which is in human life as I-culture. That continues to shape itself. Therefore we hear how that which has led to the I-culture, Chrysaor, unites with Kallirrhoe. There Geryoneus arises as what we must call the modern culture of understanding, the intellectual culture, of which the Greek felt that it led man out of the old clairvoyant culture, but that it had to lead him out because otherwise he could never have come to the grasp of I-consciousness. Again, the figure of Chrysaor has something strangely tragic about it; it characterises for us how human intellectual culture itself is doing. And as one of those who felt this most deeply, a poet, Robert Hamerling, said of this intellectual culture: In the course of the development of humanity we see the conscious culture of the intellectual developing out of the old unconscious culture of myth. But this culture has the purpose of every development to lead to its own death! - If the mere culture of the intellect were only to progress in its own way - this is clear to Hamerling, and it must be clear to everyone who can really gauge the peculiar culture of the intellect in its innermost being - it would lead to a goal which would be a drying up, an extinguishing of all liveliness, all originality and all vigour of culture.“ (Lit.:GA 61, p. 335)

Literature
References to the work of Rudolf Steiner follow Rudolf Steiner's Collected Works (CW or GA), Rudolf Steiner Verlag, Dornach/Switzerland, unless otherwise stated.
Email: verlag@steinerverlag.com URL: www.steinerverlag.com.
Index to the Complete Works of Rudolf Steiner - Aelzina Books
A complete list by Volume Number and a full list of known English translations you may also find at Rudolf Steiner's Collected Works
Rudolf Steiner Archive - The largest online collection of Rudolf Steiner's books, lectures and articles in English.
Rudolf Steiner Audio - Recorded and Read by Dale Brunsvold
steinerbooks.org - Anthroposophic Press Inc. (USA)
Rudolf Steiner Handbook - Christian Karl's proven standard work for orientation in Rudolf Steiner's Collected Works for free download as PDF.
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