Translations:Benutzer:Arian/Klett-Mini-Test/257/en

The fourth post-Atlantean epoch, following the preceding Creto-Mycenaean transitional culture, begins in the eighth century BC and ends at the beginning of the modern era, at the start of the fifteenth century AD. Here the gaze shall first be confined to the transformation of the evolution of consciousness up to the Turning Point of Time. This is the period of the rise of ancient Greece to its cultural flowering — and to its dissolution. Spiritual leadership proceeded from the two spiritual streams, the Apollinian and Dionysian Mysteries, the Apollinian, which through the veil of sense-appearance beheld the spirit active in nature and cosmos, the Dionysian, which brought this spirit to experience from out of the depths of the soul's interior, through the veil of soul-movements. No longer, as in the preceding times, were it the kings who, together with the priesthood of the Mystery-sites, gave direction to the communal life of the peoples in a culture-shaping way; now it was the people itself — indeed, the individual human being — who, guided by the word of the Mysteries, sought out his destiny. This is the birth-hour of democracy, a new step in consciousness, which had its place of cultivation, as if in a focal point, in the Apollinian Oracle of Delphi. Here above all — from its flowering to its gradual dying-away toward the Turning Point of Time — the high significance becomes clear that the Mystery-life held through all the preceding cultural epochs: namely, from the sources of wisdom that opened themselves to the gaze of the