The Rudolf Steiner Archive

3. Goethe's Spiritual Disposition, as Illustrated in his Fairy Tale: “The Green Snake and the Beautiful Lily.”

These remarks are a revised version of my essay “Goethe’s Secret Revelation,” which appeared in the Magazin für Literatur in 1899 on the occasion of Goethe’s 150th birthday.

[ 1 ] Around the time his friendship with Goethe began, Schiller was preoccupied with the ideas that found expression in his Letters on the Aesthetic Education of Man. He adapted these letters, originally written for the Duke of Augustenburg, for the Horen in 1794. What Goethe and Schiller discussed verbally at the time and what they wrote to each other repeatedly followed, in terms of their line of thought, the circle of ideas presented in these letters. Schiller’s reflections centered on the question: Which state of the human soul’s powers corresponds, in the best sense of the word, to a life worthy of a human being? “Every individual human being, one might say, bears within himself, by nature and destiny, a pure, ideal human being, and the great task of his existence is to harmonize with the unchanging unity of this being in all his vicissitudes.” ^{1So writes Schiller in the fourth letter.} Schiller seeks to build a bridge from the human being of everyday reality to the ideal human being. Two drives are present in human nature that hold it back from ideal perfection if they develop in a one-sided manner: the sensual and the rational drive. If the sensual impulse prevails, man succumbs to his instincts and passions. A force that clouds this consciousness interferes with the activity illuminated by it. His actions become the result of an inner compulsion. If the rational impulse prevails, the human being strives to suppress instincts and passions and to surrender to an abstract necessity not sustained by inner warmth. In both cases, the human being is subject to compulsion. In the first, his sensual nature overpowers the spiritual; in the second, the spiritual overpowers the sensual. Neither one nor the other grants the human being, at the core of his being—which lies midway between sensuality and spirituality—complete freedom. This can be realized only through a harmony of the two drives. Sensuality is not to be suppressed, but ennobled; the instincts and passions are to interpenetrate with spirituality, so that they themselves become the agents of the spiritual that has entered into them. And reason should take hold of the soul in man in such a way that it takes away the power of the merely instinctive and passionate, and man accomplishes what reason advises him to do as a matter of course, out of instinct and with the power of passion. “When we embrace someone with passion who is worthy of our contempt, we feel the painful coercion of nature. When we are hostile toward another who commands our respect, we feel the painful coercion of reason. But as soon as he simultaneously captures our affection and earns our respect, both the coercion of feeling and the coercion of reason vanish, and we begin to love him.” [Fourteenth Letter.] A person who reveals the spirituality of reason in his sensuality and the elemental power of passion in his reason would be a free personality. Schiller wished to base harmonious coexistence in human society on the development of free personalities. For him, the question of a truly dignified existence was linked to that of the organization of human coexistence. This was his answer to the questions posed to humanity by the French Revolution at the time he was formulating these ideas.^{227th Letter}

[ 2 ] Goethe found such ideas deeply satisfying. In a letter to Schiller dated October 26, 1794, regarding the Aesthetic Letters, he writes: “I read the manuscript you sent me immediately and with great pleasure; I devoured it in one sitting. Just as a delicious drink, analogous to our nature, willingly slides down our throats and already shows its healing effect on the tongue through the good mood of the nervous system, so were these letters pleasant and beneficial to me, and how could it be otherwise, since I found what I had long recognized as right—what I partly lived and partly wished to live—presented in such a coherent and noble manner.”

[ 3 ] What Goethe wished to experience in order to be able to be conscious of a truly dignified existence, he found articulated in Schiller’s aesthetic letters. It is therefore understandable that thoughts were stirred within his soul as well, which he sought to develop in his own way, following Schiller’s lead. From these thoughts arose the poem that has been subject to such diverse interpretations: the riddle-fairy tale with which Goethe concluded his story “Conversations of German Emigrants,” published in Horen, and which appeared in Horen in 1795. Like Schiller’s aesthetic letters, these “Conversations” also draw on the French context. One must not attempt to explain the “fairy tale” that forms their conclusion by imposing all manner of external ideas upon it, but rather by returning to the ideas that lived in Goethe’s soul at that time.

[ 4 ] The largest number of attempts to interpret this poem can be found in the book Goethe’s Fairy-Tale Poems by Friedrich Meyer von Waldeck. ^{3Heidelberg, Karl Wintersche University Bookstore [1879]} Since the publication of this book, however, several newer attempts at interpretation have been added to the earlier ones. ^{4I have attempted to penetrate the spirit of the fairy tale from the perspective of Goethe’s intellectual world in the early 1790s, and I first presented my findings in a lecture I delivered on November 27, 1891, at the Vienna Goethe Society. What I said at that time has since expanded in a wide variety of directions. But everything I have since had printed or spoken about the “fairy tale” is merely a further elaboration of the thoughts expressed in that lecture. My mystical drama The Gate of Initiation, published in 1910, is also a fruit of those thoughts. [The lecture “On the Mystery in Goethe’s Riddle Fairy Tales in the ‘Conversations of German Emigrants’” delivered by Rudolf Steiner on November 27, 1891, at the Vienna Goethe Society in a paper by K. J. Schröer was reprinted in 1942 in Issue XV (Volume III) of “Publications from the Early Literary Works.”]}

[ 5 ] One must look for the seeds of the “fairy tale” in the “Conversations,” of which it forms the conclusion. In these “Conversations,” Goethe depicts a family's flight from regions ravaged by war. In the conversations that take place among the members of this family, we see brought to life what had been inspired in Goethe’s mind at the time by his exchange of ideas with Schiller. The conversations revolve around two central themes. One of these dominates all human conceptions through which people believe they perceive a connection in the events that intervene in their lives—a connection that cannot be penetrated by the laws of sensory reality. The stories told here are partly pure ghost stories, partly such in which experiences are depicted that seem to reveal a “wondrous” connection in place of the natural-law connection. Goethe certainly did not compose these descriptions out of a penchant for any kind of superstition, but rather out of a much deeper impulse. The pleasantly mystical sensation that some people experience when they hear of something that “cannot be explained” by “limited” reason, which relies on lawful connections, was entirely foreign to him. But he found himself repeatedly confronted with the question: Is there not a possibility for the human soul to free itself from the ideas that arise solely from sensory perception and to grasp a supersensory world through a purely spiritual contemplation? The urge toward such an exercise of the cognitive faculties could well represent a natural human striving based on a connection to such a world that is hidden from the senses and the intellect grounded in them. And the inclination toward experiences that seem to break through the natural order could be nothing more than a childish deviation from this legitimate human longing for a spiritual world. Goethe was far more interested in the direction that the activity of the soul takes in its inclination toward the superstitiously cherished than in the content of the stories that arise from such an inclination in childish minds.

[ 6 ] The second center of thought radiates the ideas that pertain to moral human life, in which a person draws their impulses not from sensuality but from forces that lift them above what sensuality stirs within them. In this realm, a world of supersensible forces reaches into the inner life of the human being.

[ 7 ] From both of these focal points of thought, rays extend that must terminate in the supersensible. And from them arises the question of the inner human being, of the connection between the human soul and the sensory world on the one hand, and the supersensible world on the other. Schiller approached this question philosophically in his aesthetic letters; for Goethe, the abstract-philosophical path was not viable; he had to embody what he had to say in this regard in the image. And this was done through the “Fairy Tale of the Green Snake and the Lily.” In Goethe’s imagination, the manifold powers of the human soul took shape as fairy-tale characters, and the entire life and striving of the human soul is embodied in the experiences and interactions of these characters. - When one expresses such ideas, one must immediately anticipate an objection from a certain quarter: but this removes a work of poetry from the realm of artistic imagination and turns it into an inartistic illustration of abstract concepts; the characters are taken out of real life and made into inartistic symbols or even allegories. Such an objection is based on the notion that only abstract ideas can live in the human soul once it leaves the realm of the sensory. It fails to recognize that there is a vital suprasensory perception just as there is a sensory one. And Goethe, with his characters in the “fairy tale,” does not move in the realm of abstract concepts, but of supersensory perceptions. What will be said here about these characters and their experiences is by no means intended to assert that one means this, and the other that. Such a tendency toward symbolic interpretation is as far removed from these considerations as possible. For them, the Old Man with the Lamp, the will-o’-the-wisps, and so on in the “fairy tale” are nothing other than the figments of the imagination as they appear in the poem. But one should seek to discover the thought impulses that animate the poet’s imagination to create such figures. Goethe certainly did not bring these thought impulses to his consciousness in an abstract form. Because they would have seemed too devoid of content to his mind in this form, he expressed himself precisely through figures of the imagination. The thought impulse reigns in the depths of Goethe’s soul; its fruit is the figure of the imagination. The intermediate stage as a thought lives only subconsciously in his soul and gives direction to the imagination. The reader of Goethe’s “fairy tale” needs the content of the thought; for that alone can attune his soul so that, in imitative imagination, it follows the paths of Goethe’s creative imagination. Immersing oneself in this intellectual content is nothing other than, so to speak, appropriating the faculties through which the reader can place themselves in the same atmosphere in which Goethe breathed spiritually when he wrote the “fairy tale” . It is the focusing of one’s gaze upon the human soul-world that Goethe gazed upon, and from whose realm—instead of philosophical ideas—living spiritual figures sprang forth to meet him. What lives in these spiritual figures lives in the human soul.

[ 8 ] The mode of imagination that pervades the “fairy tale” is already foreshadowed in the “Conversations.” In the conversations described there, the human soul turns its attention to the two realms of the world between which man finds himself placed in life: the sensual and the supersensual. The deeper nature of man strives to establish the right relationship to both realms, to achieve a free, dignified state of mind, and to shape a harmonious coexistence among human beings. Goethe felt that what he had allowed to shine through in the narratives regarding humanity’s relationship to these two realms of existence had not been fully expressed in the “Conversations” themselves. He felt the need, within the comprehensive tapestry of the fairy tale, to bring the mysteries of the human soul—upon which his gaze was fixed—closer to the immeasurably rich world of spiritual life. - The striving for the truly human condition to which Schiller alludes, and which Goethe wished to live, is embodied for him by the young man in the “fairy tale.” His marriage to the Lily, the embodiment of the realm of freedom, is the union with the forces slumbering in the human soul, which, when awakened, lead to the true inner experience of the free personality.

[ 9 ] One character who plays a significant role in the unfolding of events in the “fairy tale” is the Old Man with the Lamp. When he enters the rocky crevices with his lamp, he is asked which of the secrets he knows is the most important. He replies, “The obvious one.” And when asked if he could not reveal this secret, he says: If he knew the fourth one. But the green snake knows this fourth one. And she whispers it into the old man’s ear. There can be no doubt that this secret refers to the state for which all the characters in the “fairy tale” long. This state is described at the end of the “fairy tale.” It expresses, in imagery, how the human soul enters into a connection with the forces reigning in its depths, and how, through this, its relationship to the supersensible—the realm of the lily—and the sensible—the realm of the green serpent—is regulated in such a way that this soul, through its experiences and actions, allows itself to be freely inspired by both realms, so that, in union with the two, it may realize its true nature. One must assume that the Old Man knows the content of this secret; for he is, after all, the only person who always stands above the circumstances, the one on whose guidance and direction everything depends. So what can the Serpent say to the Old Man? He knows that she must sacrifice herself if the longed-for final state is to be brought about. But this knowledge of his is not decisive. He must wait with this knowledge until the serpent, from the depths of her being, finds herself ready for the decision to sacrifice. - Within the scope of human soul life, there is a force that carries the soul’s development toward the state of free personality. This force has its task on the path to this state. Were this state reached, it would lose its significance. It connects the human soul with life experiences. It transforms what science and life reveal into inner wisdom. It makes the soul ever more mature for the longed-for spiritual goal. At this goal it loses its significance, for it establishes the human being’s relationship to the external world. At the goal, however, all external impulses are transformed into inner soul impulses. There this force must sacrifice itself; it must cease its activity; it must continue to exist in the transformed human being as a ferment permeating the rest of the soul life, without a life of its own. Goethe’s spiritual eye was directed in particular toward this force in human life. He saw it at work in the experiences of life and in those of science. He wanted to see it applied there, without setting an abstract goal based on preconceived opinions or theories. This goal must first emerge from experience. When these have matured, they should give birth to the goal from within themselves. They should not be mutilated by a predetermined end. This soul force is embodied in the green serpent. It takes in the gold, the wisdom that stems from the experiences of life and science, and which must be appropriated by the soul, so that wisdom and soul become one. This soul force will sacrifice itself at the right time; it will lead the human being to his goal, the free personality. The serpent whispers into the old man’s ear that it wishes to sacrifice itself. It entrusts him with a secret that is obvious to him, but which is nevertheless worthless to him as long as it is not realized through the serpent’s free decision. When the described soul force speaks within the human being as the serpent speaks to the old man, then it is for the soul “time,” to experience life’s experience as life’s wisdom, which establishes a harmonious relationship between the sensory and the supersensory.

[ 10 ] The longed-for goal is brought about by the revival of the young man who was untimely touched by the supernatural—the lily—and was thus paralyzed and killed; through his union with the lily, once the serpent—the soul’s life experience—has sacrificed itself. Then the time has also come when the soul can form within itself the bridge between the earthly and otherworldly realms of the river. This bridge is formed from the very substance of the serpent itself. From now on, life experience no longer leads a life of its own; it is no longer, as before, directed solely toward the external sensory world. It has become an inner soul force, which one does not consciously exercise as such, but which acts only as the sensory and the supernatural mutually illuminate and warm one another within the human being. - Even though the serpent is the originator of this state, she alone could not bestow upon the youth the gifts that enable him to rule the newly established realm of the soul. He receives these from the three kings. From the bronze king, he receives the sword with the command: “The sword in the left hand; the right hand free.” The silver king gives him the scepter, saying: “Feed the sheep.” The golden king places the oak wreath upon his head with the words: “Know the Highest.” The fourth king, who contains a mixture of the three metals—copper, silver, and gold—sinks into an insubstantial lump. - In the human being who is on the path to a free personality, three soul forces are at work in combination: the will (copper), feeling (silver), and knowledge (gold). In the course of existence, life experience reveals what the soul acquires through these three powers: the power through which virtue works reveals itself to the will; beauty (the beautiful appearance) reveals itself to feeling; wisdom reveals itself to cognition. What separates human beings from the “free personality” is that these three act in a mixture within their soul; they will attain the free personality to the extent that they receive the gifts of the three—each in its own distinct nature—with full consciousness, and only then—through free, conscious activity—unite them within their own soul . Then what previously overpowered him—the chaotic mixture of the gifts of willing, feeling, and knowing—will dissolve within him.

[ 11 ] The King of Wisdom is made of gold. Whenever gold appears in the “fairy tale,” it embodies wisdom in some form. How wisdom manifests itself in the life experience of ultimate self-sacrifice has already been hinted at. But the will-o’-the-wisps, too, lay claim to the gold in their own way. Human beings possess a soul disposition—and in some individuals it unfolds in a one-sided manner, so that it seems to fill their entire being—through which they appropriate the wisdom bestowed by life and science. But this soul disposition does not strive to unite wisdom fully with the life of the soul; it remains as one-sided knowledge, as a means to assert or criticize this or that; it serves to make the person shine, or to bring this person to prominence in life in a one-sided way. Nor does it strive to find balance through connection with what external experience offers. It becomes the superstition that Goethe depicted in the ghost stories of The Emigrants, because it does not strive to harmonize with what is natural. It becomes a doctrine before it has become life within the soul. It is what false prophets and sophists wish to carry through life. It is far from embracing Goethe’s principle of life: One must give up one’s existence in order to exist. The serpent—that selfless life experience developed through love of wisdom and lived wisdom—surrenders its existence to form the bridge between sensuality and spirituality.

[ 12 ] The young man is driven by an irresistible longing for the realm of the beautiful lily. What are the hallmarks of this realm? Although people have the deepest longing for the realm of the lily, they can only enter it at certain times before the bridge is built. At noon, even before its sacrifice, the serpent forms a temporary bridge into the realm of the supersensible. And in the evening and morning, one can cross over the river—the power of imagination and memory—that separates the sensible from the supersensible, via the giant’s shadow. Anyone who approaches the mistress of the supernatural realm without possessing the inner aptitude to do so must suffer as much harm to their life as the young man. The lily, too, has a longing for the other realm. The ferryman who has ferried the will-o’-the-wisps across the river can bring anyone over from the supernatural realm, but no one across.

[ 13 ] Anyone who wishes to be touched by the supernatural must first, through life experience, have prepared their inner self to receive this supernatural—which can only be grasped in freedom. In his “Prose Sayings,” Goethe expresses his conviction regarding this: “Everything that liberates our spirit without giving us mastery over ourselves is pernicious.” Another of his sayings is this: “Duty, where one loves what one commands of oneself.” The realm of the one-sidedly acting supernatural—in Schiller, the one-sided drive of reason—is that of the lily; the realm of the one-sidedly acting sensuality—the sensual drive in Schiller—is that in which the serpent lives before its sacrifice. —The ferryman can bring anyone across into this latter realm, but no one across into the other. All human beings originate from the supersensible, without doing anything to bring it about themselves. But they can establish a free connection with this supersensible—one not dependent on any “time,” that is, on any state of the soul brought about merely involuntarily—only if they are willing to cross the bridge of sacrificed life experience. Before that, there are two involuntary states of the soul through which a person can enter the supersensible realm, which is one with the realm of the free personality. One such state of the soul is that brought about by creative imagination, which is a reflection of supersensible experience. In art, a person connects the sensible with the supersensible. In art, too, they reveal themselves as a freely creative soul. This is symbolized by the transition that the serpent—life experience not yet ready for supersensible experience—facilitates at midday. - The other state of the soul occurs when the state of consciousness of the human soul—the giant within the human being, who is a likeness of the macrocosm—is subdued, when conscious knowledge darkens and becomes dulled, so that it manifests itself as superstition, vision, or mediumship. The soul force that manifests itself in this way when consciousness is paralyzed is, for Goethe, one and the same as that which seeks to lead humanity into a state of freedom through violence and arbitrariness, in a revolutionary manner. In revolutions, the urge toward an ideal state plays itself out in a dull manner, just as the giant’s shadow falls across the river at twilight. That this view of the “giant” is also justified is supported by what Schiller wrote to Goethe on October 16, 1795, while Goethe was on a journey that was to extend as far as Frankfurt am Main: “It is indeed a comfort to know that you are still far from the strife on the Main. The giant’s shadow could easily treat you a bit roughly.” What the arbitrariness, the unbridled course of historical events, brings in its wake is symbolized in the giant and his shadow, alongside the dimming state of human consciousness. The impulses of the soul that lead to such events are, in fact, akin to a tendency toward superstition and dreamy ideology. The old man’s lamp has the property of shining only where another light is already present. One must recall the saying of an ancient mystic, repeated by Goethe: “Were the eye not sun-like, it could never behold the sun; were God’s own power not within us, how could the divine delight us?” ^{5See “Goethe’s Scientific Writings,” Vol. III. Edited by Rudolf Steiner. Special edition, Stuttgart 1922, p. 88.}

[ 14 ] Just as a lamp does not shine in the dark, so the light of wisdom and knowledge does not shine upon a person who does not meet it with the appropriate faculties—the inner light. But what the lamp is becomes even clearer when one considers that, in its own way, it can indeed illuminate what the serpent is maturing within itself as a decision, yet it must first perceive the serpent’s inclination toward this decision. There is a human insight that always points to the highest aspiration of humanity. It has risen from the inner experience of souls in the course of humanity’s historical life. But what it points to—the goal of human striving—can only be attained in its concrete reality through the self-sacrificing experience of life. What the contemplation of the historical past teaches humanity, what mystical and religious experience can tell it about its connection to the supersensible: all of this can find its ultimate realization only through the sacrifice of life experience. The Elder can transform everything with his lamp so that it appears in a new form more conducive to life; but true development depends on the maturing of life experience.

[ 15 ] The Old Man sees in the woman the person who, with her body, clings to the river for what she owes him. This woman embodies both human perception and imagination as well as humanity’s historical memory of its past. She is the Old Man’s companion. With her help, he possesses the light that can illuminate what is already bright through external reality. But the powers of imagination and memory are not united in a living unity with the concrete, real forces that are active in the development of the individual and in the historical life of humanity. The powers of imagination and memory cling to the past; they preserve the past, so that it becomes a demand upon what is emerging and becoming. The conditions in which human beings and humanity live—as that which is held fast by memory—contain the imprint of this soul power. In the third of his Aesthetic Letters, Schiller writes about this imprint: “The compulsion of necessity cast him (man) into it before he could choose this state in his freedom; necessity established it according to mere natural laws before he could do so according to the laws of reason.” The river separates the two realms: that of freedom in the supersensible, and that of necessity in the sensible. The unconscious soul forces—the ferryman—place the human being, who has his origin in the supersensible, into the sensible world. There he initially finds himself in a realm where the powers of imagination and memory have created conditions with which he must live. But they separate him from the supersensible; he finds himself in a position of debt to them when he is compelled to approach the power (the ferryman) that has brought him, in a way unconscious to him, from the supersensible into the sensible. He can break the power that these circumstances exert upon him—a power that manifests itself in the deprivation of his freedom—only if he frees himself from the debt and compulsion imposed upon him by these circumstances through the “fruits of the earth,” that is, through self-created wisdom of life. If he cannot do this, these circumstances—the water of the river—will take away his selfhood. He will fade away in his soul-self.

[ 16 ] On the river, the temple is erected where the marriage of the youth to the lily takes place. In the human soul, where the forces have been reorganized into an order transformed from the ordinary state, the marriage with the supersensible—the realization of the free personality—becomes possible. What the soul has previously gained as life experience has matured to such an extent that the power directed toward this life experience is no longer exhausted in the mere integration of the human being into the sensory world, but becomes the content of that which can flow from the realm of the supersensible into the human inner being, so that activity in the sensory realm becomes the executor of supersensible impulses. - In this state of the soul, even those human mental powers that previously ran in erratic or one-sided channels gain a new significance within the totality of the soul, one appropriate to a heightened state of consciousness. The wisdom of the will-o’-the-wisps, for example—which has broken away from the sensory world and strayed into superstition or tumultuous thinking—serves to unlock the gate of that castle that symbolizes the state of the soul in which willing, feeling, and knowing, through their chaotic mixture, still keep the human being in an unfree inner life, separated from the supersensible.

[ 17 ] In the fairy-tale images of the poetry under consideration here, Goethe presented the development of the human soul before the mind’s eye, from the state in which it feels alien to the supersensible, up to that height of consciousness at which life lived in the sensory world interpenetrates with the supersensible spiritual world, so that both become one. This process of transformation stood before Goethe’s soul in the form of lightly woven figures of the imagination. The question of the relationship between the physical world and an experience of a supersensible realm free from physical experience—with its implications for human community life—which the “Conversations of German Emigrants” explores: here, in the conclusion of the fairy tale, it finds a comprehensive solution in the weaving of poetically shaped images. These remarks merely hint, so to speak, at the path leading into the realm where Goethe’s imagination wove the “fairy tale.” All other details must be felt in their liveliness down to the last by those who regard the “fairy tale” as a portrait of human soul life in its striving toward the supernatural. Schiller must have sensed that it is such a portrait of the life of the soul. He writes about it [on August 29, 1795]: “The fairy tale is colorful and cheerful enough, and I find the idea you once mentioned—the mutual assistance of the forces and their reliance on one another—quite nicely executed.”

[ 18 ] For even if someone were to object that this mutual assistance of forces refers to forces of different human beings, the truth—with which Goethe was thoroughly familiar—applies here: that the soul forces, which are distributed unilaterally among different human beings, are nothing other than the disaggregated essence of the total human soul. And when different human natures interact in community life, this interaction is merely a reflection of the manifold forces that, in their mutual relationship, constitute the single individual human being as a whole.