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Herder, along with Fontenelle, Vico, and Schelling, are these underappreciated figures that the Anglo-Saxons due to their strict empiricism, deism, along with a tradition, originating from the Reformation's abolishment of sacraments such as Eucharist, that rejects the fantastic and the irrational, may not really like. These are theoreticians that proposed to view religion as religion, myths as myths, and suggested a possibly irrational root of human culture. Nowadays people tend to think it is Freud who single-handedly conjured up the notion of unconscious, prefigured by Nietzsche, but no, this is a long tradition that goes back to Joachim of Fiore and even earlier. A large field of contemporary humanity couldn't have emerged without the works of these unappreciated philosophers. And Herder is probably the most underappreciated one. It was he who transformed Goethe from a lawyer and a poet into a full-blooded proto-architect of German romanticism. It was he, along with Oetinger, Baader, etc., who motivated Hoelderlin and Schelling in their research into the myths and into the mystical cults. It was he who virtually created the modern discipline of anthropology in its non-reductionist shape - though it was Kant who coined the term. In these writings the modern human science as a whole takes the shape. It might be argued that these writings are now largely out-dated, but that is only for the mediocre mind. There are so many insightful gems hidden here, that these works should be ceaselessly be read, reread, pondered, and reflected on.

First, a complaint: the translation is awful, coupled with the fact that this is not a proper writing but a lecture series filled with parenthetical phrases, it is nearly unreadable. I understand that the translator might wanted to preserve the German sentence structures, but the result is just... intolerable.

As I've said earlier, Voegelin's Order and History, Jung's entire project regarding the transformation of archetypes in history, and the entire field of History of Religions, is foreshadowed by this brief series of lectures. Even Julian Jaynes' The Origin of Consciousness in the Break Down of the Bicameral Mind is discernible in its original, and maybe, better shape. Here Schelling, who like his contemporaries was well educated in ancient languages and philology, applies philosophy of consciousness, Biblical hermenuetics (higher criticism and canonical), masterfully, to draw an outline of the history of consciousness which is inseparable from the mythological narratives of world religion. Thus a strong link is revealed that holds consciousness and mythology together, so that concepts like revelation begin to make sense. His speculations about monotheism preceeding successive polytheism is largely confirmed by later researches (and also by earliest Upanishads), though not made popular (relative monotheistic became Deus otiosus in successive polytheistic systems), and by means of distinguishing between, first, relative monotheism and the God in actu (Elohim), and second, absolute, true monotheism and the God in truth (Yahweh), the entire uniqueness of the religion of the Israelite becomes to make sense. Here, the mystical teachings of, say, Kabbalah, and the historical-critical method, cooperate harmoniously so that unprecedented and yet without successor, mystical teachings become real and the historical-critical method becomes mystical.

For Schelling, his lectures are much more insightful than his finished writings, since it is the speculation in act and in life that is the essence of Schelling's thoughts, rather than any fixed position. This is a non-dogmatic, powerful thinker, whose power can only be comprehended by participating in his thinking process, rather than reading a summary of his positions.