Where and How Does One Find the Spirit?
GA 57
29 April 1909, Berlin
Isis and Madonna
Goethe has repeatedly pointed out how a man who draws near the secrets of nature yearns for the worthiest exponent of her secrets, namely, for art.1This translation first appeared in a pamphlet published by Mercury Press 1987. And all through life Goethe showed in his creations how art was to him the interpreter of truth. It may be said that in this conception Goethe lit on something that has been a basic conviction, a basic theme, throughout all ages and epochs of human evolution.
In the different arts more or less consciously we are presented with different languages that give expression to certain truths living in the human soul. They are often the most secret truths, the most secret knowledge, which cannot readily be reduced to rigid concepts nor clothed in abstract formula but seek artistic expression.
Today our attention is to be drawn to a secret truth of this kind which for centuries has endeavored to find expression in art; it is true this has always found its scientific formulation in certain narrow circles, but for a wider public it will only become a matter of popular knowledge in the future through spiritual science. Goethe himself was able in his soul to approach this truth from very many angles. In one of my lectures here on Goethe I pointed to the significant moment in his life that was an instance of this kind of experience. In the second of the lectures on Faust I told you how Goethe on reading the Roman writer Plutarch came across the remarkable story of Nikias, who wanted to make subject again to the Romans a certain town in Sicily belonging to the Carthaginians, and on that account was being pursued. In his flight he feigned insanity, and by his strange cry: “The Mothers, the Mothers are pursuing me!” it was recognized that this insanity was of no ordinary kind. For in that region there existed a so-called “Temple of the Mothers,” set up in connection with ancient Mysteries; hence it was known what was signified by the expression “the Mothers.” When Goethe was able to let the full significance of the expression “the Mothers” sink into his soul, he realized that if he wanted to reach the highest point of awe-inspiring beauty in one of the scenes in the second part of his Faust, he could not express this better than by sending Faust himself to the Mothers.
Now what does this journey to the Mothers signify for Faust? We have made brief mention of this in the lecture referred to. Mephistopheles himself cannot enter the realm where the Mothers are enthroned although he gives Faust the key. Mephistopheles is the spirit of materialism, the spirit contained in the forces and powers of man's material existence. To him the realm of the Mothers is the realm of nothingness. Faust, the spiritual human being, with his bent towards the spirit is able to answer: “In thy nothingness I hope to find the All.” Then follows the highly remarkable and significant description of the realm of the Mothers, and we are told how they weave and live in a sphere out of which the forms of the visible world are fashioned; how man, if he would penetrate to the Mothers, must rise above all that lives in space and time. Formation, transformation, this is the essence of their realm. They are mysterious Goddesses holding sway in a spiritual realm behind the reality of the senses. Faust must penetrate to them if he is to obtain knowledge of all that transcends the sensory and physical. Only by widening his soul to this realm of the Mothers can Faust worthily unite in Helen the eternal with the temporal. In that lecture on Faust it was possible to indicate that Goethe fully understood how in this realm of the Mothers one has to do with a sphere into which man is able to penetrate when he awakens slumbering spiritual forces in his soul. This is for him the great moment in which are revealed to him the spiritual beings and facts which are always around us, but which with the eyes of the senses we see as little as the blind man sees color and light. It is the moment when the spiritual eyes and ears are opened to a world lying behind the physical world. Entrance into this realm is portrayed by the journey to the Mothers.
In these lectures it was repeatedly indicated that when man practices certain inner exercises on his soul, certain minutely-prescribed methods for sinking deeply into the world of his conceptions, feelings and will, then his spiritual eyes and ears actually become open and new realms are unfolded around him. It was also shown that whoever enters this realm is confused by all the impressions that work upon him. Whereas in the physical world we perceive objects in sharp outline from which we take our bearings, in the spiritual world we have a confused feeling of inter-weaving, hovering form, just as Goethe describes it in the second part of Faust. But it is out of this realm of the Mothers that there is born all that is given to our senses, just as in the mountains metal is born out of the mother-ore. And because this mysterious realm, the Mother-realm of everything earthly and physical, the realm containing, so to say, the divine substance of all things—because this mysterious realm is resounding in Goethe, the expression “the Mothers” works with such fascination and awesome beauty. Thus, when he read in Plutarch that someone cried “The Mothers, the Mothers,” he recognized that this was not a mad vision into an insane and unreal world, but a vision into a world of spiritual reality. The Mother problem of the world stood before Goethe while he was reading Plutarch, and in the way he did with much else he inserted this Mother problem as a mystery into the second part of his Faust.
Now anyone wishing to enter this realm of the Mothers, the realm of the spiritual world, has had at all times to undertake, besides other exercises that may be found in Knowledge of the Higher Worlds, what has invariably been called preparatory purification, catharsis of the soul. He must so prepare himself that his soul, out of which the higher spiritual forces are to be derived is free of all urge and passion for the ordinary world of the senses. The soul must be purified from all those things which have sensuous attraction and provide food for the senses and which hold the understanding captive in the physical body. The soul must be free, then it can awaken within itself the spiritual eye and penetrate into the spiritual realm. The so-called purified soul, the soul that has passed through catharsis and is no longer turned towards the physical world of the senses, wherever knowledge of this mystery has existed has always been called the higher being of man, that inner being of which it has been said that it does not originate in anything the outer eyes can investigate, but in sources of a higher soul and spiritual nature; it has not an earthly but a heavenly home. It was thought that the ennobled, purified soul was connected with this true origin of man, for what has been spiritual science through the ages has never been able to speak of a purely material evolution, of a perfection or imperfection in accordance with the senses. Spiritual science does not condemn as erroneous what today is called evolution, the ascent from the lowest to the most perfect physical being wandering on the face of the earth, namely, physical man. As I have often emphasized, that is fully recognized. The scientific theory of evolution and descent is fully recognized by spiritual science, but at the same time it is pointed out that the whole being we call man is not included in this evolution, which evolution only applies to the external side of man's development.
Now when we trace man back through all the changes of time we find that the further we go back to ever more imperfect physical forms the more we meet with man's origin as a soul spiritual being. We have often gone back to an age of human evolution when the being we now call man had as yet no kind of physical existence and was securely sheltered within an existence of spirit and soul. Attention has repeatedly been drawn to how, in the sense of spiritual science we look upon the material form, man's physical body, as a densification of a being who was once only spirit and soul. This being of spirit and soul has been densified, as it were, to present-day man, as water is solidified into ice. This picture has often been made use of, when it is said: Let us imagine a quantity of water condensed to ice so that finally we are left with a certain amount of water together with the part that is changed into ice. Here we have an image of man's origin. In the man who was once just soul and spirit there existed as yet nothing of the physical, material bodily nature today perceptible to the eyes and tangible for the hands. Man becomes gradually ever more physical, until he comes to his present physical form. The age to which orthodox science can look back reveals indeed man in the physical form we see today. But spiritual science looks back into a primordial past when man was born out of the spiritual world and was still of a spirit and soul nature. When we contemplate the soul of man today we can say that the soul element in him is the last remnant, so to speak, of the spiritual and soul nature that once was his. We look at the inner nature of man, learning to know his spiritual and soul being, and come to realize that as he is in his inner being, so he was once long ago when he was born out of the womb of the spiritual world. This being of soul is sheathed from outside in the lower elements of the sense world, but he can be purified and cleansed, can raise himself to a perception free of the senses, thereby regaining the spirituality out of which he was born. This is the process of spiritual knowledge that passes through purification. Thus in spirit we gaze into man's being of soul, and speaking not merely in imagery but with reality say: Knowing this soul being in its truth, we perceive that the being is not of this world. In the background of this soul being we see a divine spiritual world out of which he was born.
Now let us try to turn what has been said into a physical picture. Let us ask ourselves: Do we not possess a physical picture of what has been described, where the spiritual world is represented by cloud formations out of which the spiritual is born in the form of angels' heads portraying the human soul? Have we not in the Virgin's figure in Raphael's Sistine Madonna a picture born out of the divine spiritual world?
Let us go on to ask: What becomes of a man whose soul has been cleansed and purified, who has ascended to higher knowledge and has unfolded in his soul those spiritual images that give life within him to the divine, living and weaving through the world? This human being who gives birth in man to the higher man, to a man who represents a little world in the great world, who out of his purified soul brings forth the true higher man—what is he? He cannot be otherwise described than by the word clairvoyant. If we try to make a picture of the soul that gives birth to the higher man out of himself, out of the spiritual universe, we need only call to mind the picture of the Sistine Madonna, the Madonna with the wonderful Child in her arms.
Thus in the Sistine Madonna we have a picture of the human soul born of the spiritual universe, and springing from this soul the highest that a human being can bring forth—man's own spiritual birth, what within him is a new begetting of cosmic creative activity.
Let us try to experience in our feeling what clairvoyant consciousness does. There was once a time when the structure of the world was founded on divine spirituality; for it would be senseless to seek in the world for spirit if this spirit had not originally built the world. All that surrounds us in the world has sprung from the spirit we seek in the soul. Thus the soul has sprung from the divine Father-spirit living and weaving throughout the universe, bearing the Son of wisdom Who is like unto this Father-spirit, of Whom He is a repetition.
We understand now the way in which Goethe approached this problem in all its mystical significance when he tried to gather the whole content of Faust together in the “Chorus Mysticus”, where he speaks of the human soul as the “eternal feminine” that draws us onward to the universal spirit of the world. This was Goethe's attitude to his Madonna problem at the very end of Faust. From the figure which the portrayal of the Madonna has assumed, even today it is hardly possible to recognize fully what is here expressed as in a picture which is nevertheless founded on profound truth. If, however, we trace this Madonna problem back to its origin, we shall realize that in very truth the mightiest human problem, though closely veiled, confronts us in the figure of the Madonna. These Madonnas are, it is true, greatly changed from the simple figure of the catacombs in the first Christian centuries, where we find Madonnas with the Child groping for the mother's breast. From this first simple figure, having little to do with art, it is a long way to the fifteenth century, to Michaelangelo and Raphael, where after many transformations the Child and the Madonna have become in the modern sense much more in accordance with art—in accordance with the art of painting. It is, however, as if these supreme artists proceeded from no very full knowledge but a definite feeling of the deeper truth of the Madonna problem. Very beautiful experiences arise in us when we stand before the so-called Pieta of Michaelangelo in St. Peter's in Rome, where the Madonna is sitting with the corpse across her knees—thus the Madonna is at the age when Christ had already passed through death but is portrayed with all the beauty of youth. In Michaelangelo's day it was a much discussed question why at her age he had given the Madonna this youthful beauty. When asked about it he replied how it was well known that virgins long preserve the freshness of youth—and this is no mere belief but spiritually derived knowledge. Thus why should he not be right in representing the Mother of God at this age still with all the freshness of youth? It is a remarkable conception here expressed by Michaelangelo! Although it is not openly expressed by Raphael, nevertheless we feel it to be there in his pictures. We can, however, understand this conception only by going far back into the times when what meets us in the Madonnas as unconscious art was still outwardly living. We might go very far back, and actually we should find the Madonna problem all over the world. We might go to old India and there find the Goddess with the Krishna child at her breast; in a Chinese cult we might find similar pictures.
We will not, however, go back into these far-off regions, but keep the representations repeated so impressively in olden times and which is given us again with such beauty in the Madonna. We will turn to the representations of Isis with the child Horus. These representations which have grown entirely out of Egyptian wisdom may in a certain sense be the key for the correct understanding of the portrayal of the Madonna. Here, it is true, we must direct our attention to the nature of the wisdom that led to this remarkable figure of the Egyptian Goddess, fix our attention on what this wisdom, expressed in the Isis Osiris saga, means to us. For when we understand it aright, this saga leads us deep into the actual problem of humanity. Wherever we look in the religion of Egypt, the saga of Osiris is still what is most significant and full of content—this King who in primordial times ruled as if in a golden age among men, and married his sister, Isis, who brought happiness and blessing to mankind. He stood before the eyes of ancient Egypt as a human King of divine power and divine virtue; and he ruled until he was killed by Set, his evil brother. He was killed in a strange way. At a banquet the evil brother Set, in later times called Typhon, caused a chest to be made, and craftily induced Osiris to lie down in it, when the lid was quickly closed. The chest was then thrown into the water and swept away to the unknown. His sorrowing spouse Isis seeks everywhere for her husband, after long searching finally discovering him in Asia. She brings him back to Egypt where he is dismembered by his evil brother Set, his fragments being interred in many graves. Hence the great number of tombs of Osiris in Egypt. Osiris now becomes King of the Dead, as previously he was King of living men on earth. From that other world a ray pierces the head of Isis and she gives birth to Horus who becomes the ruler of this world.
According to the Egyptian legend Horus is the posthumous son of Osiris. Horus, who has come into existence as the result of impregnation from the world beyond, is ruler of the earthly world of the senses; Osiris is ruler of the realm of the dead. Whereas the soul while enclosed in a body is subject to the rulership of Horus, when it abandons the body—so the Egyptian Book of the Dead testifies it enters the realm of Osiris, itself becomes an Osiris. The Egyptian Book of the Dead describes in what a deeply impressive way the soul is arraigned before the tribunal in these words: “And thou, O Osiris, what hast thou done?” Thus the soul by passing through the gate of death itself becomes an Osiris.
According to the old Egyptians, then, we look towards two realms, the realm perceived by the senses, the realm of Horus, and the realm into which the soul enters after death where Osiris holds sway. But at the same time we know that according to the old Egyptian initiates, the initiate who had acquired the faculty of clairvoyance already in his lifetime entered the same region which otherwise can be entered only after death—that he could be united with Osiris. The initiate therefore himself became an Osiris. He tore himself from the physical, renounced all habits of the physical plane, all passions and desires, cleansed himself of the physical, became a purified soul and as such was united with Osiris.
Now what does this legend tell us? It is a childish idea to maintain that this legend is supposed to represent the yearly course of the sun round the earth. The learned ones of the earth in council have created the legend that Osiris is the sun, whose disappearance signifies his conquest by nature's wintry powers said to be Set, the evil brother Typhon. And in Isis we have the representation of the moon who seeks the sun in order to be irradiated by his light. Only those who spin theoretical myths about nature out of their own minds can make such statements. The truth is that this is the external, pictorial expression of a most profound truth.
What is this age when Osiris ruled over men? It was the time when men were still beings of soul and spirit dwelling in the world of soul and spirit among beings who also had their being in soul and spirit. When, therefore, the realm of Osiris is spoken of, it is not the physical realm that is meant, but a realm of the past in which man held sway as a being of soul and spirit. And the brother, the enemy of Osiris, is that being who enveloped man in a physical body, who densified part of this spirit and soul being into the physical body. Now we see how the once purely spiritual Osiris was laid in a chest. This chest is simply the human physical body. But because Osiris is a being who in accordance with his whole nature cannot descend so far as the physical world, who is meant to remain in the divine spiritual world, the laying in the chest, the human body, has for him the same meaning as death.
Here, then, is represented in a wider sense the passage from the realm of soul and spirit to the physical evolutionary epochs of humanity. Osiris could not enter this physical realm; he died to the external physical world and became King in the realm the soul enters on leaving the physical world of the senses, or on developing clairvoyant powers. Hence the initiate is in his soul united with Osiris.
What has remained to man from that realm of soul and spirit, to man who did not withdraw like Osiris from the physical sense world but entered into it? What has remained to him? It is his soul, his being of spirit and soul that will always draw him onwards to the original source of spirit and soul—to Osiris. This is the human soul dwelling within us, Isis, in a certain sense the eternal feminine who draws us onward to the realm out of which we are born.
Isis, when she is purified and has laid aside all that she has received from the physical, is impregnated from the spiritual world and gives birth to Horus, the higher man, who is to be victorious over the lower human being. Thus we see Isis as the representative of the human soul, as that in us which as the divine spiritual is born of the universal Father and has remained within us, seeking Osiris and only finding him through initiation or death. By conjuring this Osiris and Isis saga in a picture before our soul we are looking into the realm that lies behind the physical world of the senses, into a time when man was still among the Mothers, the primordial grounds of existence, when Isis was not yet enclosed in the physical body but still united in the golden age with her spouse Osiris.
Then there is revealed to us the most beautiful flower of mankind, the highest human ideal, which is born out of the human body impregnated by the eternal world-Spirit. Hence how could it be other than the most sublime ideal, the highest peak of humanity, the Christ Himself—for He is the ideal of what they represent—Who would naturally enter the realm of the Mothers. In Goethe's Faust we meet with three Mothers seated on golden tripods—three Mothers. The human soul has passed through its evolution during the ages when it was not as yet in a human body. What we today have as human conception and human birth appears to us only as final emblem and symbol of the earlier form of the same thing. In the physical Mother we see the ultimate physical form of a spiritual Mother who is behind her; and we see the impregnation of this spiritual Mother taking place not in the way happening on earth today but out of the cosmos itself, just as in higher knowledge our souls are fructified from out the cosmos. We look back to ever more spiritual forms of fructification and reproduction.
Therefore in the true sense of spiritual science we do not speak only of one Mother but of the Mothers, realizing that what we have today as the physical Mother is the last development of the soul-spiritual figure out of the spiritual realm. There are in fact images of Isis representing not one Mother but Mothers, three Mothers. In front we have a figure, Isis with the Horus child at her breast, resembling the oldest representations of the Madonna. But behind this figure in certain Egyptian representations we have another figure, an Isis, bearing on her head the two familiar cow horns and the wings of the hawk, offering the “crux ansata” (see Figure left) to the child. We see that what is physical, human, in the foremost figure is here more spiritualized. Behind there is yet a third figure, bearing a lion's head and representing the third stage of the human soul. This is how these three Isis figures appear, one behind the other. It is an actual fact that our human soul bears in it three natures—a will nature, found in the inmost depths of the being, a feeling nature and a wisdom nature. These are the three soul Mothers; we meet them in the three figures of the Egyptian Isis.
That behind the physical Mother we have the superphysical Mother, the spiritual Mother, the Isis of spiritual antiquity, with the hawk's wings, the cowhorns, with the globe of the world between them on the head of Isis—this is profound symbolism. Those who understand something of the ancient so-called theory of numbers have always said—and this corresponds with a deep truth—that the sacred number three represents the divine masculine in the cosmos. This sacred number three is pictorially expressed by the globe of the world and two cowhorns which are, if you like, a kind of image of the Madonna's crescent, but actually represents the fruitful working of the forces of nature.
The globe represents the creative activity of the cosmos. I should have to speak for hours were I to give a picture of the masculine element in the world. Thus behind the physical Isis stands her representative the superphysical Isis, who is not impregnated by one of her own kind but by the divine masculine living and weaving throughout the world. The process of fructification is still portrayed as being akin to the process of cognition. The consciousness that the process of cognition is a kind of fructification was still living in ancient times. You may read in the Bible: “Adam knew his wife and she brought forth ...” What today we receive as spiritual gives birth to the spiritual in the soul; it is something that represents a last remnant of the ancient mode of fructification. What comes to expression here shows us how today we are fructified by the spirit of the world receiving this spirit into the human soul as spirit of the world in order to acquire human knowledge, human feeling, human will.
This is what is represented in Isis. She is fructified by the divine male element, so that the head is fructified; and it is not material substance that is offered the child, as in the case of the physical Isis, but the “crux ansata” which is the sign of life. Whereas here from the physical Isis physical substance of life is offered, there is offered the spirit of life in its symbol. Behind the physical Mother of life there appears the spiritual Mother of life; behind her again the primal force of all life, represented with the life force, just as the will dwells behind everything in the still spiritual, far distant past. Here we have the three Mothers, and also the way in which out of the cosmos these three Mothers impart vitalizing force to the sun. Here we have what is not an artistic expression, nevertheless a symbolic expression of a profound cosmic truth. What lasted throughout the Egyptian evolution as the Isis symbol was received in more recent times and transformed in accordance with the progress made by humanity as a result of the appearance of Christ Jesus on earth; for in Christ Jesus we have the great prototype of everything that the human soul is destined to bring forth out of itself. The human soul in its fructification out of the spirit of the world is given tangible form in the Madonna. In the Madonna we meet, as it were, with Isis reborn and in an appropriate way enhanced, transfigured.
What could be portrayed in pictures at the beginning of the lecture now comes before our souls as bound up with the evolution of humanity, streaming forth from hoary antiquity, artistically transfigured and given new form in the modern pictures presented throughout the world to the human souls thirsting for art. Here we see how in very truth art, as in Goethe's words, becomes the exponent of truth. We see how in reality when our gaze falls on the Madonna, when this gaze is permeated with deep feeling, the soul partakes in certain knowledge of the mighty riddle of the world. We realize that in such surrender our soul, seeking in itself for the eternal feminine, is yearning for the divine Father-Spirit born out of the cosmos, to Whom as the Sun we give birth in our own soul. What we are as man, and how as man we are related to the universe, this is what meets us in the pictures of the Madonna. That is why the pictures of the Madonna are such holy things, apart altogether from any religious stream, from any religious dogma. Hence we can feel it as something born out of the cosmos when the hazy masses of cloud form themselves into the heads of angels, and out of the whole the representative of the human soul comes into being. The Madonna also includes what can be born out of the human soul, the true higher man slumbering in every human being, all that is best in man, what as spirit flows and weaves through the world. Goethe too felt this when he gave final form to his Faust when he had led him on through the different stages up to higher knowledge and the higher life. This is why he makes Faust go to the Mothers and why the name “Mothers” sounds to Faust so awe-inspiring and so beautiful, instilling in him a feeling for the wisdom echoing down from ancient times. Thus Goethe felt that he must send Faust to the Mothers, that only there could Faust seek and find the eternal through which Euphorion can come into being. Because the human soul appeared to him to be represented by the Madonna Goethe gave expression to the riddle of the soul in the words of the Chorus Mysticus: “The eternal feminine draws us upwards.”
Whatever modern times may have to say, this is the reason why Raphael in his wonderful picture of the Madonna, succeeded so well in leading us back to the realms to which the old figures of Isis belong. From what is spiritual, from what can no longer be expressed in a human figure because it would be too material, from that Isis whose force can be represented symbolically only by the lion's head, we descend to the human Isis who transmits her force to Horus through physical substance. Raphael unconsciously expressed this in his Sistine Madonna. But spiritual science will lead man consciously back to the spiritual realm out of which he has descended. Two lectures that I shall be giving here will furnish examples of how man has descended out of spiritual heights and will ascend again to this higher existence. Both lectures (5/1/1909 not translated. 5/6/1909, see Anthroposophical Quarterly, IV, 3.), that of 1st May and that of 6th May, 1909, will show us in a strictly scientific sense how these Madonna pictures and representations of Isis are indeed dearly and definitely artistic exponents of the very deepest secrets of Nature and of the spirit, and how in reality they are just a transcription of Plato's sublime words: “Once man was a spiritual being; he descended to earth only because he was robbed of his spiritual wings, and was enveloped in a physical body. He will struggle out of this physical body again and re-ascend to the world of spirit and soul.” This was proclaimed by the philosopher Plato. Pictures of the Madonna proclaim the same, for in the most beautiful sense they are what Goethe wished to express in the words: “Art is the worthiest exponent of the recognized mysteries of the world.” Man need not fear that art will become abstract or wholly allegorical if it is once again compelled, I repeat compelled, to recognize the higher spiritual realities; nor need he fear that it will become stiff and lifeless when it finds itself unable to continue using outer, crude physical models.
Because man has forgotten the spiritual, art has become bound up with the outer senses. But when men find the way back to spiritual heights and spiritual knowledge, they will then realize that true reality lies in the spiritual world, and that those who perceive this reality will create livingly, without being slavishly bound to physical models. Goethe will be understood only when it is more widely recognized that art and wisdom go hand in hand, when art again becomes a representation of the spiritual. Science and art will then again be one; in their union they will become religion, for the spiritual will work in this form as divinity once again in the heart of man, and give birth to what Goethe called the true, genuine piety. “A man who has both science and art also has religion,” says Goethe. “If anyone does not possess these two then let him have religion.”
In truth, whoever has knowledge of the spiritual secrets of the world and knows what speaks through Isis and Madonna sees in them something of primeval life, something much more living than all it is possible to express in any slavish imitation of a physical human model. A man of this kind whose gaze penetrates as through a veil through the living quality these Madonnas portray, and beholds the spiritual behind it, can, free from all dogma and prejudice, again feel piety in complete spiritual freedom. He will unite in his soul science or wisdom with art and give new birth to genuine free religious feeling—to genuine piety.
Isis und Madonna
Goethe hat wiederholt darauf hingewiesen, daß derjenige, welcher den Geheimnissen der Natur nahekommt, sich sehnt nach der würdigsten Auslegerin dieser Geheimnisse, nach der Kunst. Und Goethe hat in seinen Schöpfungen sein ganzes Leben hindurch gezeigt, wie ihm die Kunst Auslegerin der Wahrheit war. Aber man darf sagen, daß Goethe mit dieser Anschauung etwas getroffen hat, was als eine Grundüberzeugung, als ein Grundmotiv durch alle Zeiten, durch alle Epochen der Menschheitsentwickelung gegangen ist.
Mehr oder weniger bewußt oder unbewußt stellen sich uns in den verschiedenen Künsten verschiedene «Sprachen» — könnte man sagen — dar, um gewisse Wahrheiten, welche in den Seelen leben, zum Ausdruck zu bringen. Es sind oftmals gerade die geheimnisvollsten Wahrheiten, die geheimnisvollsten Erkenntnisse, die sich nicht leicht in starre Begriffe bringen, nicht leicht in abstrakte Formeln kleiden lassen, und die dann ihren Ausdruck suchen in der künstlerischen Darstellung.
Heute soll uns eine solche geheimnisvolle Wahrheit vor Augen treten, welche sich durch Jahrhunderte hindurch in der Kunst aussprechen wollte, welche auch in gewissen engen Kreisen immer ihre wissenschaftliche Formulierung gefunden hat, die aber für weitere Kreise erst in einer gewissen Zukunft durch die Geisteswissenschaft populär werden wird. Goethe selbst konnte sich dieser Wahrheit mit seiner Seele von den verschiedensten Seiten nähern. Wir durften in einem der Vorträge, die hier von mir über Goethe gehalten wurden, auf den bedeutungsvollen Augenblick bei Goethe hinweisen, der ein Erleben solchen Geheimnisses darstellt. Hingewiesen wurde darauf in dem zweiten der Vorträge, die Goethes Faust behandelten, wie Goethe, den griechischen Schriftsteller Plutarch lesend, an einer Stelle die merkwürdige Erzählung fand von Nikias, der eine den Karthagern gehörende Stadt in Sizilien den Römern wieder geneigt machen wollte und der deshalb verfolgt wurde. Auf der Flucht stellte er sich wahnsinnig, und man erkannte an dem eigentümlichen Ruf, den er ausstieß: «Die Mütter, die Mütter verfolgen mich» —, daß es sich nicht um einen gewöhnlichen Wahnsinn handelte, denn in jener Gegend war ein sogenannter «Müttertempel» in alter geheimnisvoller Art errichtet, und man wußte daher, was der Ausdruck «die Mütter» bedeutet. Als Goethe in seiner Empfindung wieder die volle Bedeutung des Ausdrucks «die Mütter» vor seine Seele hinstellen konnte, da wußte er auch, daß er das Schaurig-Schöne der Faustszene im zweiten Teil, worin er ein Höchstes darstellen wollte, nicht besser ausdrücken könnte als dadurch, daß er Faust selber zu den Müttern gehen ließ.
Was stellt der Gang zu den Müttern bei Faust dar? Wir haben es in jenem Faustvortrag kurz erwähnt. Mephisto bringt Faust zwar den Schlüssel, aber er kann sich nicht selbst in jenes Reich begeben, in dem die Mütter thronen. Mephisto ist der Geist des Materialismus, der Geist, der sozusagen in den Kräften und Gewalten des materiellen Daseins als den Menschen angehend enthalten ist. Für ihn ist das Reich der Mütter das Reich des Nichts. Faust, der spirituelle Mensch, der dem Geiste zugeneigt ist, kann antworten: «In deinem Nichts hoff ich das All zu finden.» Nun folgt jene durchaus merkwürdige, bedeutungsvolle Beschreibung des Reiches der Mütter, wo uns gesagt wird, wie sie weben und leben in einem Gebiete, aus dem die Gestalten der sichtbaren Welt herausgeformt werden; wie man sich hinwegsetzen muß über alles das, was in Zeit und Raum lebt, wenn man zu diesen Müttern dringen will. Gestaltung, Umgestaltung, das ist das Wesen ihres Reiches. Geheimnisvolle Göttinnen sind sie, die da walten in einem Geist-Reiche hinter der sinnlichen Wirklichkeit. Zu ihnen muß Faust hinunter in dem Augenblick, da er Erkenntnis schöpfen soll von dem, was über alles Sinnliche, über alles Physische erhaben ist. Nur dadurch kann Faust das Ewige der Helena mit deren Zeitlichem in würdige Vereinigung bringen, daß seiner Seele sich auftut dieses Reich der Mütter. Schon damals in jenem Faustvortrage konnte darauf hingewiesen werden, daß Goethe sehr wohl verstand, daß man es bei diesem Reiche der Mütter mit dem Reich zu tun hat, in das der Mensch eindringen kann, wenn er die in seiner Seele schlummernden geistigen Kräfte erweckt. Es ist das für ihn der große Augenblick, in dem die geistigen Wesenheiten und Tatsachen sich offenbaren, die immer um uns herum sind, die man aber mit sinnlichen Augen ebensowenig sieht, wie der Blinde Farbe und Licht; wo sein geistiges Auge und sein geistiges Ohr geöffnet wird für eine Welt, die hinter der physischen ist. Der Eintritt in dieses Reich ist mit dem Gang in das Reich der Mütter bezeichnet.
Es wurde in diesen Vorträgen wiederholt darauf hingewiesen, daß der Mensch, wenn er gewisse intime Vorgänge auf seine Seele anwendet, gewisse genau vorgeschriebene Methoden der inneren Versenkung in seine Vorstellungs-, Gefühls- und Willenswelt, daß er dann in der Tat diese geistigen Augen und Ohren und mit ihnen neue Reiche um ihn herum aufgeschlossen erhält. Hingewiesen wurde auch darauf, daß derjenige, welcher in dieses Reich eintritt, verwirrt wird von den Eindrücken, welche auf ihn wirken. Während wir in der physischen Welt die Gegenstände mit scharfen Konturen haben und durch diese uns auskennen, werden wir in der geistigen Welt ein verwirrendes Gefühl von ineinander schwebender und webender Gestaltung haben, genau wie es bei Goethe im zweiten Teil des «Faust» beschrieben wird. Aber aus diesem Mütterreiche ist das, was unsern Sinnen gegeben ist, herausgeboren, wie aus der Erzmutter im Gebirge herausgeboren ist das Metall. Deshalb, weil dieses geheimnisvolle Reich, das Mutterreich aller physischen und irdischen Dinge, das Reich, das sozusagen die göttliche Substanz von allem enthält, bei Goethe anklingt, wirkt bei ihm der Ausdruck «die Mütter» so faszinierend, so schauervoll schön. Deshalb verstand er, was er bei Plutarch las, erkannte, daß wenn jemand ruft «Die Mütter, die Mütter!», er nicht wie ein Wahnsinniger in ein unsinniges, wesenloses Reich sieht, sondern in ein Reich geistiger Wirklichkeit. Sozusagen das Mutterproblem der Welt stand Goethe bei der Lektüre des Plutarch dazumal vor Augen, und dieses Mutterproblem geheimnißte er, wie so vieles, in den zweiten Teil des «Faust» hinein.
Derjenige nun, der in dieses Reich der Mütter, in das Reich der geistigen Welt, eintreten will, mußte in alten Zeiten etwas durchmachen - neben all den anderen Übungen, die Sie beschrieben finden in «Wie erlangt man Erkenntnisse der höheren Welten?» —, was man immer genannt hat die vorbereitende Reinigung, die Katharsis des Gemütes. Er mußte sich so vorbereiten, daß seine Seele, aus der die höheren geistigen Kräfte herausgeholt werden sollten, keinen Zwang, keine Leidenschaft mehr hat für die gewöhnliche, sinnliche Welt, daß sie sozusagen sich gereinigt und geläutert hat von alledem, was hinzieht zum Sinnesschein, hinzieht zu dem, was Augen- und Ohrenweide für die Sinne ist, und die den Verstand an den physischen Leib gebunden hält. Frei davon muß die Seele sein, dann kann sie in sich erwecken das geistige Auge und eindringen in das geistige Reich. Was man die gereinigte Seele nennt, was man nennt die durch die Katharsis durchgegangene Seele, die nicht mehr dem Sinnlich-Physischen zugewandte Seele, das hat man überall da, wo man von diesem Geheimnis etwas gewußt hat, des Menschen höheres Innere genannt, jenes Innere, von dem man sich gesagt hat: Das stammt nicht von dem her, was äußerliche Augen untersuchen können, das stammt aus höheren, aus geistig-seelischen Quellen, das hat nicht irdische, das hat himmlische Heimat. - Zusammenhängend dachte man sich diese geläuterte, gereinigte Seele mit des Menschen wahrem Ursprung; denn dasjenige, was die Geisteswissenschaft zu allen Zeiten war, das hat nicht in demselben Sinne sprechen können von einer rein materiellen Entwickelung, von einem sinnlich Vollkommenen, von einem sinnlich Unvollkommenen. Das, was man heute Entwickelung nennt, was man den Aufstieg nennt von einem sinnlich niedrigen Wesen bis herauf zu dem auf unserer Erde wandelnden vollkommensten sinnlichen Wesen, dem sinnlichen Menschen, das wird von der Geisteswissenschaft nicht als irrtümlich hingestellt; es wird, wie schon oft betont worden ist, ganz und voll anerkannt. Die naturwissenschaftliche Evolutions- und Deszendenzlehre wird von der Geisteswissenschaft vollkommen anerkannt; aber es wird zu gleicher Zeit darauf hingewiesen, daß das, was wir Mensch nennen, sich nicht erschöpft in dieser Entwickelung, daß sie nur die Außenseite der Menschheitsentwickelung ist.
Wenn wir den Menschen zurückverfolgen in der Zeitenwende, dann werden wir finden, daß, je mehr wir zurückkommen zu unvollkommeneren sinnlichen Gestalten, wir auf den geistig-seelischen Ursprung des Menschen treffen. Öfter haben wir uns schon zurück versetzt in eine Zeit der Menschheitsentwickelung, wo dasjenige, was wir heute Mensch nennen, überhaupt noch kein physisches Dasein hatte, noch ganz in seelisch-geistigem Dasein geborgen war. Wiederholt durfte aufmerksam gemacht werden darauf, daß wir uns im Sinne der Geisteswissenschaft die sinnliche Gestalt, die physische Leiblichkeit des Menschen denken wie eine Verdichtung eines einstmals nur geistig-seelischen Menschen, Jener geistig-seelische Mensch ist sozusagen verdichtet zu dem gegenwärtigen Menschen, wie das Wasser zu Eis sich verfestigt. Auch dieses Bild ist öfter gebraucht worden. Es ist da gesagt worden: Stellen wir uns eine Masse Wasser vor; diese verdichtet sich zu Eis, so daß wir zuletzt einen gewissen Rest der Wassermasse haben und den zu Eis umgewandelten Teil derselben; dann haben wir das Bild der Entstehung des Menschen. Bei dem einstmals geistig-seelischen Menschen war noch nichts von dem PhysischSinnlichen der Leiblichkeit vorhanden, was heute Augen sehen und Hände greifen können. Nach und nach wird er immer physischer bis zu seiner heutigen physischen Gestaltung. Diejenige Zeit freilich, in welche die äußere Wissenschaft zurückblicken kann, zeigt den Menschen in jener physischen Gestalt, in der wir ihn heute sehen. Aber die Geisteswissenschaft sieht zurück in urferne Vergangenheit, wo der Mensch aus der geistigen Welt herausgeboren wurde und noch geistig-seelischer Art war. Wenn wir heute auf seine Seele blicken, so sagen wir uns, das Seelische im Menschen ist sozusagen der letzte Rest desjenigen Geistig-Seelischen, das einstmals war. Wir blicken hin auf des Menschen Inneres, lernen des Menschen geistig-seelische Wesenheit kennen und sagen uns: wie er im Innern ist, so war er einstmals, als er aus dem Schoße der geistigen Welt herausgeboren wurde. Dieses Seelenwesen ist eingehüllt in das Niedrige der Sinnenwelt von außen, aber es kann sich wieder reinigen und läutern, kann sich erheben zu einem sinnlichkeitsfreien Anschauen und dadurch zu der Geistigkeit gelangen, aus der es selbst herausgeboren ist. Dies ist der Prozeß der geistigen Erkenntnis, die durch Läuterung und Reinigung geht. So erblicken wir im Geiste des Menschen Seelenwesen, und indem wir nicht bloß bildlich, sondern wirklich sprechen, sagen wir: Wenn wir dieses Seelenwesen in seiner Wahrheit erkennen, so sehen wir, daß es nicht von dieser Welt ist. Wir sehen im Hintergrunde dieses Seelenwesens eine göttlich-geistige Welt, aus der es herausgeboren ist.
Und nun versuchen wir, uns, was wir eben ausgesprochen haben, in ein sinnliches Bild zu übersetzen. Fragen wir uns einmal: Haben wir nicht das, was wir eben ausgesprochen haben, in ein sinnliches Bild verwandelt, auf dem die geistige Welt durch Wolkengebilde versinnlicht wird, aus denen geistige Gestalten wie Engelsköpfe herausgeboren werden, welche die menschliche Seele versinnlichen? Haben wir nicht in der Madonnengestalt der Sixtinischen Madonna des Raffael ein Bild, das herausgeboren wurde aus der göttlich-geistigen Welt?
Nun gehen wir weiter und fragen uns: Was wird aus dem Menschen, der seine Seele gereinigt und geläutert hat, der aufgestiegen ist zu höheren Erkenntnissen, der in seiner Seele ausgewirkt hat die geistigen Gebilde, die in ihm lebendig machen das, was als Göttliches die Welt durchlebt und durchwebt? Der Mensch, der den höheren Menschen im Menschen gebiert, einen Menschen, der repräsentiert eine kleine Welt in der großen Welt, der aus gereinigter Seele den wahren höheren Menschen gebiert, was ist er? Ihn kennzeichnet nichts anderes als das, was wir das Hellseherische nennen. Versuchen wir, die Seele, welche den höheren Menschen aus sich, aus dem geistigen Universum, herausgebiert, zu verbildlichen, so brauchen wir uns nur vorzustellen das Bild der Sixtinischen Madonna, das wunderbare Kind in den Armen der Madonna.
So haben wir in der Sixtinischen Madonna vor uns ein Bild der menschlichen Seele, herausgeboren aus dem geistigen Universum; entsprungen aus dieser Seele das Höchste, was der Mensch hervorbringen kann, seine geistige Geburt, das, was in ihm ist, eine Wiedererzeugung der Schöpfertätigkeit der Welt. Versuchen wir einmal, in uns zur Empfindung zu erheben, was hellseherisches Bewußtsein tut.
Einstmals lag unserem Weltenbau zugrunde die göttliche Geistigkeit, denn unsinnig wäre es sonst, nach einem Geiste in der Welt zu suchen, wenn dieser Geist nicht ursprünglich die Welt gebaut hätte. Das, was uns draußen umgibt in der Welt, ist aus dem Geiste entsprungen, den wir in der Seele suchen. So ist die Seele aus dem göttlichen Vatergeiste entsprungen, der das ganze Universum durchlebt und durchwebt, gebärend den Sohn der Weisheit, der diesem Vatergeiste ähnlich, der seine Wiederholung ist.
Jetzt verstehen wir, wie Goethe diesem Problem in seiner ganzen mystischen Bedeutung nahetrat, als er den ganzen Inhalt des «Faust» zusammenschließen wollte indem Chorus mysticus, in dem er die menschliche Seele ansprach als das Ewig-Weibliche, das uns hinanzieht zu dem universellen Geiste der Welt. So stand Goethe auch noch am Schlusse des «Faust» zu seinem Madonnenproblem. Kaum noch kann heute aus der Gestalt, welche die Madonnendarstellung angenommen hat, voll erkannt werden, was jetzt wie in einem Bilde ausgesprochen worden ist, und dem doch tiefe Wahrheit zugrunde liegt. Aber wenn wir dieses Madonnenproblem auf seinen Ursprung zurück verfolgen, dann werden wir erkennen, daß in der Tat, wenn auch vielfach verschleiert, uns heute noch in der Gestalt der Madonna das größte Menschheitsproblem entgegentritt. Sie haben sich freilich verändert, diese Madonnen, von der einfachen Gestalt, die wir aus den ersten Jahrhunderten der christlichen Weltin den Katakomben sehen, wo wir die Madonnen finden, das Kind nach der Brust der Mutter langend. Von dieser einfachen Gestalt, die wenig Künstlerisches hat, ist ein weiter Weg bis zum fünfzehnten Jahrhundert, wo nach vielfachen Wandlungen das Kind und die Madonna in dem heutigen Sinne immer künstlerischer, malerischer geworden sind, bis zu Michelangelo und Raffael. Es ist aber doch so, wie wenn auch diesen herrlichen Künstlern zwar nicht das volle Wissen, wohl aber ein deutliches Gefühl von einer tieferen Wahrheit des Madonnenproblems aufgegangen wäre.
Es überkommen einen die schönsten Empfindungen, wenn man vor der sogenannten Pietà des Michelangelo in der Peterskirche in Rom steht, wo die Madonna mit dem Leichnam auf den Knien dasitzt, die Madonna also in dem Alter, da der Christus bereits durch den Tod gegangen ist, in jugendlicher Schönheit. Es war damals eine vielfach berührte Frage, warum Michelangelo die Madonna in diesem Alter so jugendlich schön dargestellt habe. Michelangelo selbst wurde darum gefragt, und er antwortete — ich sage ausdrücklich, daß nicht von Geglaubtem dabei gesprochen werden soll, sondern von geisteswissenschaftlichen Erfahrungen -, es sei Erfahrung, daß jungfräuliche Frauen sich ihre Jugendfrische bis ins hohe Alter hinein erhalten; wie sollte er nicht berechtigt sein, die Gottesmutter auch in diesem Alter noch in aller Jugendfrische darzustellen? — Eine merkwürdige Anschauung, die Michelangelo hier ausdrückt! Wenn auch nicht ausgesprochen, so finden wir sie doch auch ausgedrückt in den Bildern des Raffael. Verstehen können wir diese ganze Anschauung aber nur, wenn wir weit zurückgehen in die Zeiten, in denen noch äußerlich lebendig war, was uns in den Madonnen als Unbewußt-Künstlerisches entgegentritt. Wir könnten weit zurückgehen und wir würden im Grunde genommen das Madonnenproblem in aller Welt finden. Wir könnten nach dem alten Indien gehen und würden die Göttin mit dem Krishna-Kinde an der Brust finden, wir könnten in einen chinesischen Gottesdienst kommen und auch da ähnliche Bilder finden.
Wir wollen aber nicht in jene entlegenen Gebiete gehen, sondern uns an jene Darstellung aus alten Zeiten halten, welche im allerbezeichnendsten Sinne wiedergibt, was uns in der Madonna so schön gegeben ist. Wir wollen die Darstellungen der Isis mit dem Horuskinde betrachten. Diese Darstellungen, die ganz herausgewachsen sind aus der ägyptischen Weisheit, werden uns in gewisser Beziehung ein Schlüssel sein können zur richtigen Erfassung der Madonnendarstellung. Dabei müssen wir allerdings ein wenig unser Augenmerk darauf lenken, was die Weisheit eigentlich ist, die zu dieser merkwürdigen Göttergestalt des alten Ägyptens, zur Isis hingeführt hat, und was jene Weisheit, die sich in der Sage von Isis und Osiris ausdrückt, für uns ist. Tiefgründig, wenn wir sie wirklich verstehen, führt diese Sage in das eigentliche Menschheitsproblem hinein. Wir mögen die ägyptische Religion da oder dort durchforschen, das Bedeutsamste und Inhaltsvollste bleibt uns die Sage von Osiris, dem König, der in uralten Zeiten wie in einem goldenen Zeitalter unter den Menschen geherrscht hat, der vermählt war mit seiner Schwester Isis, die den Menschen Glück und Segen gebracht hat. Ein menschlicher König mit göttlicher Macht und göttlicher Tugend, so steht er vor dem Blicke des alten AÄgypters und herrscht, bis er von seinem Bruder, dem bösen Set, getötet wird. Er wird auf eine sonderbare Weise getötet. Bei einem Gastmahl läßt der böse Bruder Set, den man in späterer Zeit Typhon genannt hat, einen Kasten formen, und durch eine List wird Osiris veranlaßt, sich in diesen Kasten zu legen. Dann wird der Kasten zugeschlagen und dem Wasser übergeben, so daß er ins Unbekannte fortgeschwemmt wird. Isis, die trauernde Gemahlin, sucht den Gatten überall, bis sie ihn nach langem Suchen in Asien findet. Sie bringt ihn ins Ägypterland zurück, und dort zerstückelt ihn der böse Bruder Set, und die Stücke werden in vielen Gräbern begraben. Daher die vielen Osirisgräber in Ägypten. Osiris wird nun der König der Toten, wie er früher der König der auf der Erde lebenden Menschen gewesen ist. Von der jenseitigen Welt trifft ein Strahl den Kopf der Isis. Sie gebiert darauf den Horus, der Herrscher wird in diesem Reiche.
Im Sinne der ägyptischen Sage ist Horus der nachgeborene Sohn des Osiris. Der durch Befruchtung von jenseits entstandene Horus ist Herrscher in der irdisch-sinnlichen Welt, Osiris ist Herrscher im Totenreiche. Während die Seele hier, während sie im Körper eingeschlossen ist, der Gewalt des Horus untersteht, kommt sie, wenn sie den Körper verläßt — das bezeugt das ägyptische Totenbuch -, in das Reich des Osiris, wird selbst ein Osiris. In höchst bezeichnender Weise wird bei jenem Gerichte, das im ägyptischen Totenbuch dargestellt wird, die Seele, wenn sie drüben ankommt, angesprochen: «Du, Osiris, was hast du getan» und so weiter, so daß also die Seele heranreift, selbst ein Osiris zu werden, indem sie durch die Pforte des Todes geht.
So blicken wir im Sinne des alten Ägyptens auf zwei Reiche, auf das Reich, das wir mit unseren Sinnen sehen, das Reich des Horus, und das Reich, in das die Seele eintritt nach dem Tode, und in dem Osiris herrscht. Gleichzeitig aber wissen wir, daß es im Sinne der alten ägyptischen Eingeweihten lag, daß der Eingeweihte, der zu hellseherischen Fähigkeiten gelangt, schon zu Lebzeiten dieselben Gebiete betritt, die die Seele erst nach dem Tode betreten kann, daß er also vereinigt werden kann mit Osiris. Der Eingeweihte wird also selber ein Osiris. Er entreißt sich dem Physischen, entsagt allen Gewohnheiten des physischen Lebens, allen Leidenschaften und Begierden, er reinigt sich gegenüber dem Physischen, wird eine geläuterte Seele und ist als solche vereinigt mit dem Osiris. Was stellt uns diese Sage dar? Oh, es ist eine kindliche Vorstellung, wenn da behauptet wird, daß uns diese Sage vorstellen soll etwa den jährlichen Lauf der Sonne um die Erde. Da wird am «grünen Tisch» der Gelehrsamkeit ausgeheckt, daß Osiris die Sonne sei, und wenn sie untergehe, sei es die Überwindung durch die winterlichen Naturmächte, die durch den Set, den bösen Bruder Typhon, charakterisiert werden sollten; und in der Isis werde uns der Mond dargestellt, der die Sonne sucht, um von ihrem Licht bestrahlt zu werden.
Nur wer dergestalt aus seinem eigenen Kopf heraus eine Theorie von Naturmythen aufstellt, der kann so etwas behaupten. In Wahrheit ist die Isis-Sage der bildliche Ausdruck für eine tiefe Wahrheit. Welches sind die Zeiten, in welchen Osiris über die Menschen geherrscht hat? Das sind keine andern Zeiten als diejenigen, in welchen die Menschen noch geistig-seelische Wesen waren, wo sie noch in der geistig-seelischen Welt weilten unter solchen Wesen, die ihnen gleich, also auch geistig-seelischer Wesenheit waren. Wenn also von dem Reich des Osiris gesprochen wird, so ist damit nicht das physische Reich gemeint, sondern ein Reich der Vergangenheit, in dem der Mensch als eine geistig-seelische Wesenheit waltete. Und mit dem feindlichen Bruder des Osiris ist jene Wesenheit gemeint, die den Menschen umgeben hat mit dem physischen Leibe, die einen Teil seines geistig-seelischen Wesens zum physischen Leibe verdichter hat. Nun sehen wir, wie der einstmals rein geistige Osiris hineingelegt wird in einen Kasten. Dieser Kasten ist nichts anderes als der physische Menschenleib. Weil aber Osiris eine Wesenheit ist, die ihrer ganzen Natur nach nicht hinuntersteigen kann bis in die physische Welt, die in der göttlich-geistigen Welt verbleiben soll, so ist das Hineinlegen in den Kasten — den menschlichen Leib - für Osiris gleichbedeutend mit dem Tode. Es wird hier also dargestellt in weiterem Sinne der Übergang von jenem geistig-seelischen Reiche zu der physischen Entwickelungsepoche der Menschheit. In dieses physische Reich konnte Osiris nicht hinein, da starb Osiris für die äußere physische Welt und wurde der König in demjenigen Reiche, das die Seele betritt, wenn sie aus der physisch-sinnlichen Welt fortgeht oder wenn sie die hellseherischen Kräfte entwickelt.
Daher wird der Eingeweihte als Seele mit Osiris vereinigt. Was ist dem Menschen geblieben aus jenem geistig-seelischen Reiche? Dem Menschen, der nicht wie Osiris sozusagen sich zurückzog von der physisch-sinnlichen Welt, sondern in sie eintrat, was ist ihm geblieben? Seine Seele, sein geistig-seelisches Wesen, das ihn immer hinziehen wird zu den Urkeimen des Geistig-Seelischen, zu Osiris. Das ist die Menschenseele, die in uns wohnt, die Isis, in einer gewissen Beziehung das Ewig-Weibliche, das in uns wohnt und uns hinanzieht zu dem Reiche, aus dem wir herausgeboren sind.
Diese Isis, wenn sie sich läutert und reinigt, abtut alles, was sie aus dem Physischen empfangen hat, wird befruchtet aus der geistigen Welt und gebiert dann den höheren Menschen, den Horus, der den Sieg erringen wird über alles niedere Menschliche. So blicken wir auf die Isis als die Repräsentantin der Menschenseele, als das, was in uns als Göttlich-Geistiges des Vateralls herausgeboren ist, was zurückgeblieben ist in uns, was den Osiris sucht und was ihn nur findet bei der Einweihung oder im Tode. Wir blicken geradezu hinein in jenes Reich, das hinter dem SinnlichPhysischen liegt, indem wir uns diese Osiris-Isis-Sage vor die Seele malen, in die Zeit, da der Mensch noch bei den Müttern, den Urgründen des Daseins war, da Isis noch nicht eingeschlossen war in den physischen Leib, noch vereinigt war im goldenen Zeitalter mit ihrem Gatten, dem Osiris. Es erscheint uns darin das, was als schönste Menschlichkeit, als höchstes menschliches Ideal geboren wird aus dem menschlichen Leibe, befruchtet durch den ewigen Weltengeist selbst.
Wie könnte daher etwas anderes als das höchste Ideal, die höchste Menschlichkeit, der Christus eben — denn er ist dieses Ideal, das sie darstellen - hineingepaßt werden in das Reich der Mütter? Im Goetheschen «Faust» treten uns drei Mütter, sitzend auf goldenen Dreifüßen, entgegen, drei Mütter! Die Menschenseele hat ihre Entwickelung durchgemacht in den Zeiten, da sie noch nicht im menschlichen Leibe war. Das, was wir heute sozusagen mit sinnlichen Augen als menschliche Befruchtung und menschliche Geburt vor uns haben, erscheint uns nur als letztes Sinnbild und Gleichnis der früheren Gestalt desselben Vorgangs. In der leiblichen Mutter sehen wir sozusagen die letzte physische Gestalt einer geistigen Mutter, die hinter ihr ist, und wir sehen diese geistige Mutter nicht befruchtet in derselben Weise, wie das heute geschieht, sondern aus dem Weltall selber heraus, so wie wir auch unsere Seele in der höheren Erkenntnis befruchtet haben aus dem Weltall heraus. Wir sehen zu immer geistigeren Gestaltungen der Befruchtung und Fortpflanzung zurück.
Daher spricht man, wenn man in wahrhaft geisteswissenschaftlichem Sinne spricht, nicht bloß von einer Mutter, sondern von den Müttern, und stellt sich vor, daß das, was als sinnliche Mutter heute vor uns steht, die letzte Ausgestaltung ist für die geistig-seelische Gestalt aus dem geistigen Reiche. In der Tat gibt es Abbildungen der Isis, welche uns nicht eine Mutter, sondern Mütter darstellen, drei Mütter. Vorn haben wir eine Gestalt, die Isis mit dem Horuskinde an der Brust, wie auch die ältesten Madonnengestalten dargestellt sind. Aber hinter dieser Gestalt haben wir in gewissen ägyptischen Darstellungen eine andere Gestalt, eine Isis, die auf dem Haupte die bekannten beiden Kuhhörner hat und Geierflügel trägt, das Henkelkreuz dem Kinde reichend. Da sehen wir, was vorn physisch, menschlich ist, hier schon mehr vergeistigt. Hinter dieser sehen wir noch eine dritte, die den Löwenkopf trägt, darstellend eine dritte Stufe der menschlichen Seele. So erscheinen uns diese drei Isisbilder hintereinander. Unsere menschliche Seele trägt in der Tat drei Naturen in sich: eine willensartige Natur, ihre in den tiefsten Gründen befindliche Wesenheit, eine gefühlsartige Natur und eine weisheitsartige Natur. Das sind die drei Seelenmütter; sie treten uns in den drei Gestalten der ägyptischen Isis entgegen.
Daß hinter der zunächst sinnlichen Mutter die übersinnliche, die geistige Mutter, die Isis aus der geistigen Vorzeit, sich befindet, und daß da zum Beispiel bei den Gestalten die Geierflügel, die Kuhhörner und die Weltenkugel in ihrer Mitte am Kopfe der Isis angebracht sind, das ist ein tiefsinniges Symbolum. Diejenigen, welche etwas von der sogenannten alten Zahlenlehre verstanden, haben immer gesagt, und das entspricht einer tiefen Wahrheit, die heilige Dreizahl stelle dar das Göttlich-Männliche im Weltall, und bildlich werde diese heilige Dreizahl dargestellt durch die Weltkugel und die beiden Kuhhörner, die, wenn man will, eine Art von Abbild der Madonnensichel sind, aber eigentlich einen Ausdruck für die fruchtbare Wirkung der Naturkraft darstellen.
Die Weltkugel ist der Ausdruck für das Schaffen in der Welt. Wir müßten viele Stunden darüber sprechen, wenn wir ein Abbild für das Männliche in der Welt ausführen wollten. So steht hinter der sinnlichen Isis deren Repräsentantin, die übersinnliche Isis, die nicht befruchtet wird von ihresgleichen, sondern von dem Göttlich-Männlichen, das die Welt durchlebt und durchwebt. Es wird der Befruchtungsprozeß noch dargestellt als etwas, was nahesteht dem Erkenntnisprozeß,.
Das Bewußtsein, daß der Erkenntnisprozeß eine Art Befruchtungsprozeß ist, war in älteren Zeiten noch lebendig. Sie können in der Bibel noch lesen: «Adam erkannte sein Weib, und... sie gebar.» Das, was wir heute aufnehmen als Geistiges, gebiert das Geistige in der Seele; das ist etwas, was noch einen letzten Rest der alten Befruchtungsart darstellt. Was da zum Ausdruck kommt, zeigt uns, wie wir heute befruchtet werden von dem Weltengeiste, ihn aufnehmen im Sinne des Weltengeistes in die menschliche Seele, um zu gewinnen das menschliche Erkennen, das menschliche Fühlen, das menschliche Wollen.
Das wird uns bei der Isis dargestellt. Sie wird befruchtet von dem Männlich-Göttlichen, damit ihr Haupt sich befruchte, und dem Kinde wird nicht sinnlicher Stoff gereicht, wie bei der sinnlichen Isis, sondern das Henkelkreuz, die Syastika, das, was das Zeichen des Lebens ist. Während von der physischen Isis der physische Stoff des Lebens gereicht wird, wird ihm hier der Geist des Lebens in seinem Symbolum gereicht. So tritt hinter der physischen Lebensmutter die geistige Lebensmutter auf und hinter dieser die Urkraft alles Lebens, dargestellt mit der Lebenskraft, wie der Wille hinter allem weilte in noch geistiger, urferner Vergangenheit. Da haben wir die drei Mütter, und da haben wir auch die Art und Weise, wie diese drei Mütter aus dem Weltenall an die Sonne überliefern die belebende Kraft. Da haben wir einen, wenn auch noch nicht künstlerischen, doch symbolischen Ausdruck einer tiefen Weltenwahrheit. Was so als das Isis-Symbol durch die ägyptische Entwickelung gegangen ist, wurde aufgenommen von der neueren Zeit und umgestaltet gemäß dem Fortschritt, den die Menschheit gemacht hat durch die Erscheinung des Christus Jesus auf der Erde, denn in dem Christus Jesus war das große Vorbild für alles das gegeben, was die menschliche Seele aus sich selber gebären soll. Diese menschliche Seele in ihrer Befruchtung aus dem Weltengeist heraus wird in der Madonna versinnlicht. In der Madonna tritt uns daher gleichsam wiedergeboren die Isis entgegen, in entsprechender Weise gesteigert und verklärt.
Was wir im Anfange unseres Vortrages bildlich hinstellen konnten, das tritt uns jetzt vor die Seele als mit der Entwickelung der Menschheit verbunden, heraufströmend aus dem grauen Altertum, künstlerisch verklärt und ausgestaltet in den modernenBildern, die in aller Welt vor die kunstbedürftige menschliche Seele hingestellt worden sind. Da sehen wir, wie in der Tat die Kunst zur Auslegerin der Wahrheit wird, wie Goethe sagt. Da sehen wir, wie im Grunde genommen, wenn unser Blick aufschaut zur Madonna und wenn dieser Blick durchdrungen ist von dem Gefühl des Herzens, die Seele noch etwas mitgeteilt erhält von dem großen Weltenrätsel. Da sehen wir, wie in einer solchen Hingabe unsere Seele als das Ewig-Weibliche in uns sich suchend sehnt nach dem göttlichen Vatergeiste, der aus dem Weltenall herausgeboren ist, und den wir als Sonne gebären in der eigenen Seele. Das, was wir als Menschen sind und wie wir als Menschen mit der Welt zusammenhängen, das tritt uns in den Madonnenbildern entgegen. Daher sind ‚uns diese Madonnenbilder, ganz abgesehen von jeder religiösen Strömung und jedem religiösen Dogma, etwas so Heiliges. Dadurch können wir es wie etwas aus dem Weltall Herausgeborenes empfinden, wenn die unbestimmten Wolkengebilde sich zu Engelsköpfen formen und aus dem Ganzen die Repräsentantin der menschlichen Seele herausgeboren wird. Und wiederum enthält die Madonna dasjenige, was aus der menschlichen Seele herausgeboren werden kann: den wahren, höheren Menschen, das, was in jedem Menschen schlummert, das menschlich Allerbeste und das, was als Geist die Welt durchflutet und durchwebt.
So hat auch Goethe gefühlt, als er seinen «Faust» zuletzt ausgestaltete, als er ihn durch die verschiedenen Stufen gehen ließ, die zu den höheren Erkenntnissen und zu dem höheren Leben hinaufführen. Deshalb läßt er Faust zu den Müttern gehen, deshalb erklingt ihm der Name «Mütter» so schauerlich-schön und läßt ihn ahnen die Weisheit, die aus alten Zeiten hereinklingt. Deshalb fühlte Goethe, daß er Faust zu den Müttern gehen lassen muß, daß er nur da das Ewige suchen und finden kann, jenes Ewige, durch das der Euphorion entstehen kann. Weil ihm eben die menschliche Seele durch die Madonna repräsentiert erschien, deshalb läßt Goethe im «Chorus mysticus» das Seelenrätsel zum Ausdruck kommen in den Worten: «Das Ewig-Weibliche zieht uns hinan.» Deshalb ist es auch Raffael in seinem wunderbaren Madonnenbilde — mögen unsere Zeiten sagen, was sie wollen — so schön gelungen, wieder zu den Gefilden zurückzuführen, zu denen die alten Isisbilder hinführten. Von dem, was geistig ist, was man nicht mehr durch Menschengestalt ausdrücken kann, weil zu sinnliche Gestalten hervorgerufen würden, von jener Isis, die symbolisch für ihre Kraft nur mit dem Löwenkopfe dargestellt ist, steigen wir hinunter zur menschlichen Isis, die ihre Kraft durch den sinnlichen Stoff auf das Horuskind überträgt. Unbewußt hat Raffael in seiner Sixtinischen Madonna dies ausgedrückt; die Geisteswissenschaft wird die Menschheit wieder bewußt hinaufführen in das geistige Reich, aus dem sie hinuntergestiegen ist.
Noch an zwei Beispielen soll uns der diesjährige Winterzyklus zeigen, wie der Mensch heruntergestiegen ist aus geistigen Höhen und in ein erhöhtes Dasein wieder hinaufsteigen wird. In den beiden Vorträgen, die die Titel führen «Alteuropäisches Hellsehen» und «Die europäischen Mysterien und ihre Eingeweihten» soll sich uns in streng wissenschaftlicher Weise zeigen, wie eigentlich diese Madonnenbilder und Isisdarstellungen klar und deutlich künstlerische Auslegerinnen tiefster Natur- und Geistesgeheimnisse sind, wie sie im Grunde genommen nur eine Umschreibung des großen Wortes sind, das Plato gesprochen hat: Einstmals war der Mensch ein geistiges Wesen. Er ist heruntergestiegen nur dadurch, daß er der geistigen Flügel beraubt worden ist, daß er in den sinnlichen Leib gehüllt wurde. Er wird sich diesem sinnlichen Leib wieder entringen, wieder hinaufsteigen in geistig-seelische Welten. — Dies hat Plato einst philosophisch verkündet. Dies verkündigen auch die Madonnenbilder, indem sie im schönsten Sinne das sind, was Goethe mit den Worten ausdrücken wollte: Die Kunst ist die würdigste Auslegerin der erkannten Weltgeheimnisse. — Man fürchte nicht, daß die Kunst abstrakt oder gar allegorisch wird, wenn sie wieder gezwungen sein wird — ich sage gezwungen! -, die höheren geistigen Realitäten anzuerkennen; man fürchte nicht, daß sie künstlerisch steif und leblos wird, wenn sie sich nicht mehr an äußere grobe Modelle halten kann.
Nur dadurch, daß der Mensch verlernt hat, das Geistige zu erkennen, ist auch die Kunst an die äußeren Sinne gebunden. Wenn aber die Menschheit wieder zurückfinden wird den Weg zu den geistigen Höhen und Erkenntnissen, dann wird sie auch wissen, daß wahre Realität in der geistigen Welt ist, und daß derjenige, der diese Realität schaut, lebensvoll schaffen wird, auch ohne sich sklavisch an sinnliche Modelle zu halten. Dann erst wird man Goethe verstehen, wenn in weiterem Umfang wieder miteinander gehen werden Kunst und Weisheit, wenn’ Kunst wiederum sein wird eine Darlegung des Geistigen. Dann wird Wissen und Kunst wieder eins sein, und dann werden sie in ihrer Vereinigung Religion sein. Denn das Geistige wird in seiner Form in den menschlichen Herzen wiederum als ein Göttliches wirken und die von Goethe so genannte wahre, echte Frömmigkeit erzeugen. «Wer Wissenschaft und Kunst besitzt, der hat auch Religion», sagt Goethe, «wer diese beiden nicht besitzt, der habe Religion.»
Wahrhaftig, wer Wissenschaft besitzt von den geistigen Geheimnissen der Welt und weiß, was durch die Isis-Madonna spricht, der sieht in ihnen etwas Urlebendiges, etwas viel Lebendigeresals in irgendeiner sklavischen Nachahmung äußerlich-physischer Menschenmodelle zum Ausdruck gebracht werden kann. Und ein solcher, der durch das Lebendige, das die Madonnen darstellen, wie durch einen Schleier hindurchschaut in das Geistige, der kann ohne alle Dogmatik, ohne jedes Vorurteil in vollständiger geistiger Freiheit wiederum fromm fühlen. Er wird Wissenschaft oder Weisheit und Kunst vereinigen in seiner Seele und wieder eine echte, freie Religiosität oder Frömmigkeit in sich gebären.
Isis and Madonna
Goethe repeatedly pointed out that those who come close to the mysteries of nature long for the most worthy interpreter of these mysteries, namely art. And throughout his life, Goethe showed in his creations how art was the interpreter of truth for him. But it can be said that with this view, Goethe touched on something that has been a fundamental conviction, a fundamental motif throughout all times, throughout all epochs of human development.
More or less consciously or unconsciously, different “languages” — one might say — present themselves to us in the various arts in order to express certain truths that live in the soul. It is often precisely the most mysterious truths, the most mysterious insights, that cannot easily be expressed in rigid concepts or abstract formulas, and which then seek expression in artistic representation.
Today, we will consider one such mysterious truth, which has sought expression in art for centuries, which has always found its scientific formulation in certain narrow circles, but which will only become popular in wider circles in the future through spiritual science. Goethe himself was able to approach this truth with his soul from many different angles. In one of the lectures I gave here on Goethe, we were able to point to the significant moment in Goethe's life that represents an experience of such mystery. This was pointed out in the second of the lectures dealing with Goethe's Faust, how Goethe, reading the Greek writer Plutarch, found at one point the remarkable story of Nicias, who wanted to make a city in Sicily belonging to the Carthaginians favorable to the Romans again and was therefore persecuted. While fleeing, he pretended to be insane, and people recognized from the peculiar cry he uttered, “The mothers, the mothers are pursuing me” — that this was no ordinary madness, for in that region there was a so-called “temple of mothers” built in the ancient, mysterious style, and people therefore knew what the expression “the mothers” meant. When Goethe was able to fully grasp the meaning of the expression “the mothers” in his soul again, he knew that he could not better express the eerie beauty of the Faust scene in the second part, in which he wanted to portray the highest, than by letting Faust himself go to the mothers.
What does Faust's journey to the mothers represent? We briefly mentioned this in that Faust lecture. Mephisto brings Faust the key, but he cannot enter the realm where the mothers reign. Mephisto is the spirit of materialism, the spirit that is, so to speak, contained in the forces and powers of material existence as it affects human beings. For him, the realm of the mothers is the realm of nothingness. Faust, the spiritual man who is inclined toward the spirit, can respond: “In your nothingness, I hope to find the universe.” Now follows that thoroughly strange, meaningful description of the realm of the mothers, where we are told how they weave and live in a realm from which the figures of the visible world are formed; how one must transcend everything that lives in time and space if one wants to reach these mothers. Creation, transformation—that is the essence of their realm. They are mysterious goddesses who reign in a spiritual realm behind sensory reality. Faust must descend to them at the moment when he is to gain knowledge of that which is exalted above all that is sensory, above all that is physical. Only by opening his soul to this realm of the mothers can Faust bring Helena's eternity into worthy union with her temporality. Even back then, in that Faust lecture, it could be pointed out that Goethe understood very well that this realm of mothers is a realm that humans can enter if they awaken the spiritual powers slumbering in their souls. For him, this is the great moment when the spiritual beings and realities that are always around us, but which cannot be seen with the physical eyes, just as the blind cannot see color and light, reveal themselves; when his spiritual eye and spiritual ear are opened to a world that lies beyond the physical. Entry into this realm is signified by the passage into the realm of the mothers.
It has been repeatedly pointed out in these lectures that when a person applies certain intimate processes to their soul, certain precisely prescribed methods of inner contemplation in their world of imagination, feeling, and will, they then indeed receive these spiritual eyes and ears and with them new realms around them. It was also pointed out that those who enter this realm are confused by the impressions that affect them. While in the physical world we have objects with sharp contours and know our way around them, in the spiritual world we will have a confusing feeling of forms floating and weaving together, just as Goethe describes in the second part of Faust. But what is given to our senses is born out of this mother realm, just as metal is born out of the mother ore in the mountains. Because this mysterious realm, the mother realm of all physical and earthly things, the realm that contains, so to speak, the divine substance of everything, resonates with Goethe, the expression “the mothers” has such a fascinating, spine-tinglingly beautiful effect on him. That is why he understood what he read in Plutarch, recognizing that when someone cries out “The mothers, the mothers!”, he is not looking like a madman into a nonsensical, insubstantial realm, but into a realm of spiritual reality. Goethe, so to speak, had the mother problem of the world before his eyes when he read Plutarch at that time, and he incorporated this mother problem, like so much else, into the second part of Faust.
Now, anyone who wants to enter this realm of mothers, the realm of the spiritual world, had to go through something in ancient times—in addition to all the other exercises described in “How to Attain Knowledge of Higher Worlds?” —, what has always been called the preparatory purification, the catharsis of the mind. He had to prepare himself in such a way that his soul, from which the higher spiritual powers were to be drawn, no longer had any compulsion or passion for the ordinary, sensual world, that it had, so to speak, purified and purified itself from all that draws it to the sensory world, to what is a feast for the eyes and ears, and which keeps the mind bound to the physical body. The soul must be free of this, then it can awaken the spiritual eye within itself and penetrate the spiritual realm. What is called the purified soul, what is called the soul that has undergone catharsis, the soul that is no longer turned toward the sensual-physical, has been called, wherever something of this mystery has been known, the higher inner being of man, that inner being of which it has been said: This does not come from what the outer eyes can examine, it comes from higher, spiritual-soul sources, it does not have an earthly home, it has a heavenly home. This purified, cleansed soul was thought to be connected with the true origin of the human being; for what spiritual science has always been has not been able to speak in the same sense of a purely material development, of a sensually perfect being, of a sensually imperfect being. What we today call development, what we call the ascent from a sensually low being up to the most perfect sensually being walking on our earth, the sensually human being, is not presented as erroneous by spiritual science; as has often been emphasized, it is fully and completely recognized. Spiritual science fully acknowledges the scientific theory of evolution and descent; but at the same time it points out that what we call human beings is not exhausted in this development, that it is only the outer side of human development.
If we trace human beings back to the dawn of time, we will find that the further we go back to more imperfect physical forms, the closer we come to the spiritual and soul origins of human beings. We have often transported ourselves back to a time in human development when what we now call human beings did not yet have a physical existence at all, but were still completely immersed in a spiritual-soul existence. It has been repeatedly pointed out that, in the sense of spiritual science, we think of the sensory form, the physical body of the human being, as a condensation of a once purely spiritual-soul human being. That spiritual-soul human being is, so to speak, condensed into the present human being, just as water solidifies into ice. This image has also been used frequently. It has been said: Let us imagine a mass of water; this condenses into ice, so that we are left with a certain amount of the water mass and the part of it that has been transformed into ice; then we have the image of the origin of the human being. In the once spiritual-soul human being, there was still nothing of the physical-sensory nature of physicality that eyes can see and hands can grasp today. Gradually, he became more and more physical until he reached his present physical form. Of course, the period that external science can look back on shows human beings in the physical form in which we see them today. But spiritual science looks back into the distant past, when human beings were born out of the spiritual world and were still of a spiritual-soul nature. When we look at his soul today, we say to ourselves that the soul in man is, so to speak, the last remnant of what was once spiritual and soul-like. We look at the inner being of man, get to know his spiritual and soul-like essence, and say to ourselves: as he is inside, so was he once when he was born out of the womb of the spiritual world. This soul being is enveloped in the baseness of the sensory world from without, but it can purify and refine itself again, can rise to a perception free of sensuality and thereby attain the spirituality from which it itself was born. This is the process of spiritual knowledge, which goes through purification and refinement. Thus we see soul beings in the spirit of human beings, and speaking not merely figuratively but truly, we say: when we recognize this soul being in its truth, we see that it is not of this world. We see in the background of this soul being a divine-spiritual world from which it was born.
And now let us try to translate what we have just said into a sensory image. Let us ask ourselves: Have we not transformed what we have just said into a sensory image in which the spiritual world is symbolized by cloud formations from which spiritual figures such as angel heads are born, symbolizing the human soul? Do we not have in the Madonna figure of Raphael's Sistine Madonna an image that was born out of the divine spiritual world?
Now let us go further and ask ourselves: What becomes of the person who has purified and refined their soul, who has ascended to higher knowledge, who has brought to bear in their soul the spiritual forms that enliven within them that which, as the divine, permeates and interweaves the world? What is the person who gives birth to the higher human being within the human being, a person who represents a small world within the greater world, who gives birth to the true higher human being from a purified soul? He is characterized by nothing other than what we call clairvoyance. If we try to visualize the soul that gives birth to the higher human being from within itself, from the spiritual universe, we need only imagine the image of the Sistine Madonna, the wonderful child in the arms of the Madonna.
Thus, in the Sistine Madonna, we have before us an image of the human soul, born out of the spiritual universe; springing from this soul is the highest that man can produce, his spiritual birth, that which is within him, a recreation of the creative activity of the world. Let us try to raise within ourselves the feeling that clairvoyant consciousness does.
Once upon a time, our world was based on divine spirituality, for it would be senseless to search for a spirit in the world if this spirit had not originally built the world. What surrounds us outside in the world springs from the spirit we seek in the soul. Thus, the soul springs from the divine Father Spirit, which permeates and interweaves the entire universe, giving birth to the Son of Wisdom, who is similar to this Father Spirit, who is its repetition.
Now we understand how Goethe approached this problem in all its mystical significance when he wanted to summarize the entire content of “Faust” in the Chorus mysticus, in which he addressed the human soul as the eternal feminine that draws us up to the universal spirit of the world. Thus, even at the end of “Faust,” Goethe still stood by his Madonna problem. Today, it is hardly possible to fully recognize from the form that the representation of the Madonna has taken what has now been expressed as in a picture, and yet which is based on a profound truth. But if we trace this Madonna problem back to its origins, we will recognize that, even if it is often veiled, the greatest problem of humanity still confronts us today in the form of the Madonna. These Madonnas have certainly changed from the simple form we see in the catacombs from the first centuries of the Christian world, where we find Madonnas with the child reaching for its mother's breast. From this simple figure, which has little artistic merit, it is a long way to the fifteenth century, where, after many changes, the child and the Madonna have become increasingly artistic and picturesque in the modern sense, up to Michelangelo and Raphael. But it is as if these magnificent artists, even if they did not have full knowledge, had nevertheless gained a clear sense of a deeper truth about the Madonna problem.
One is overcome with the most beautiful feelings when standing in front of Michelangelo's so-called Pietà in St. Peter's Basilica in Rome, where the Madonna sits with the corpse on her knees, the Madonna at the age when Christ has already passed through death, in youthful beauty. At the time, it was a frequently asked question why Michelangelo had depicted the Madonna as so youthfully beautiful at this age. Michelangelo himself was asked about this, and he replied—I expressly say that we are not talking about beliefs here, but about spiritual scientific experiences—that it is an experience that virgin women retain their youthful freshness into old age; how could he not be justified in depicting the Mother of God in all her youthful freshness even at this age? — What a remarkable view Michelangelo expresses here! Although not explicitly stated, we find it expressed in Raphael's paintings as well. However, we can only understand this whole view if we go far back in time, to the days when what we encounter in the Madonnas as unconscious artistry was still alive in the external world. We could go far back and we would basically find the Madonna problem all over the world. We could go to ancient India and find the goddess with the child Krishna at her breast; we could go to a Chinese church service and find similar images there too.
But we do not want to go to those remote areas, but rather stick to the representation from ancient times that most significantly reflects what is so beautifully given to us in the Madonna. Let us consider the depictions of Isis with the child Horus. These depictions, which grew entirely out of Egyptian wisdom, can in a certain sense be a key to the correct understanding of the Madonna image. In doing so, however, we must turn our attention to what wisdom actually led to this remarkable divine figure of ancient Egypt, Isis, and what that wisdom, expressed in the legend of Isis and Osiris, means to us. Profound, if we truly understand it, this legend leads us into the real problem of humanity. We may explore Egyptian religion here and there, but the most significant and meaningful thing for us remains the legend of Osiris, the king who ruled among humans in ancient times, as if in a golden age, who was married to his sister Isis, who brought happiness and blessings to the people. A human king with divine power and divine virtue, this is how he appears to the ancient Egyptians, ruling until he is killed by his brother, the evil Set. He is killed in a strange way. At a banquet, the evil brother Set, later called Typhon, has a chest made and, through a ruse, Osiris is persuaded to lie down in it. Then the chest is slammed shut and thrown into the water, so that it is carried away into the unknown. Isis, his grieving wife, searches everywhere for her husband until, after a long search, she finds him in Asia. She brings him back to Egypt, where his evil brother Set dismembers him and the pieces are buried in many graves. Hence the many Osiris graves in Egypt. Osiris now becomes the king of the dead, as he was once the king of the living on earth. A ray from the other world strikes Isis on the head. She then gives birth to Horus, who becomes the ruler of this realm.
According to Egyptian legend, Horus is the posthumous son of Osiris. Horus, who was conceived through fertilization from the afterlife, is the ruler of the earthly, sensual world, while Osiris is the ruler of the realm of the dead. While the soul is here, while it is enclosed in the body, it is subject to the power of Horus, but when it leaves the body — as attested to in the Egyptian Book of the Dead — it enters the realm of Osiris and becomes an Osiris itself. In a highly significant way, in the judgment described in the Egyptian Book of the Dead, the soul is addressed when it arrives on the other side: “You, Osiris, what have you done?” and so on, so that the soul matures to become an Osiris itself by passing through the gate of death.
Thus, in the spirit of ancient Egypt, we look at two realms: the realm we see with our senses, the realm of Horus, and the realm into which the soul enters after death, where Osiris reigns. At the same time, however, we know that it was the belief of the ancient Egyptian initiates that the initiate who attained clairvoyant abilities entered during his lifetime the same realms that the soul can only enter after death, that he could thus be united with Osiris. The initiate himself becomes an Osiris. He breaks free from the physical, renounces all habits of physical life, all passions and desires, purifies himself from the physical, becomes a purified soul, and as such is united with Osiris. What does this legend represent to us? Oh, it is a childish idea to claim that this legend is supposed to represent the annual course of the sun around the earth. At the “green table” of scholarship, it is concocted that Osiris is the sun, and when it sets, it is the overcoming by the winter forces of nature, which are to be characterized by Set, the evil brother Typhon; and in Isis, we are presented with the moon, which seeks the sun in order to be illuminated by its light.
Only someone who devises a theory of nature myths from his own head can make such a claim. In truth, the Isis legend is the pictorial expression of a profound truth. What are the times in which Osiris ruled over human beings? These are none other than those times in which human beings were still spiritual-soul beings, when they still dwelled in the spiritual-soul world among beings who were like them, that is, also spiritual-soul beings. So when we speak of the kingdom of Osiris, we do not mean the physical kingdom, but a kingdom of the past in which human beings reigned as spiritual-soul beings. And the hostile brother of Osiris refers to that being which surrounded human beings with the physical body, which condensed part of their spiritual-soul being into the physical body. Now we see how the once purely spiritual Osiris is placed in a coffin. This box is nothing other than the physical human body. But because Osiris is a being who, by his very nature, cannot descend into the physical world, who is meant to remain in the divine-spiritual world, being placed in the box — the human body — is equivalent to death for Osiris. What is depicted here, in a broader sense, is the transition from that spiritual-soul realm to the physical epoch of human development. Osiris could not enter this physical realm, so Osiris died for the outer physical world and became the king of the realm that the soul enters when it leaves the physical-sensory world or when it develops clairvoyant powers.
Therefore, the initiate is united with Osiris as a soul. What has remained for human beings from that spiritual-soul realm? What has remained for human beings who, unlike Osiris, did not withdraw from the physical-sensory world, but entered into it? His soul, his spiritual-soul being, which will always draw him to the primordial seeds of the spiritual-soul, to Osiris. This is the human soul that dwells within us, Isis, in a certain sense the eternal feminine that dwells within us and draws us up to the realm from which we were born.
This Isis, when she purifies and cleanses herself, discards everything she has received from the physical world, is fertilized by the spiritual world, and then gives birth to the higher human being, Horus, who will achieve victory over all that is base in humanity. Thus we look upon Isis as the representative of the human soul, as that which is born within us as the divine-spiritual of the Father-All, that which has remained within us, that which seeks Osiris and finds him only at initiation or in death. We look directly into that realm that lies beyond the sensory-physical by picturing this Osiris-Isis legend before our soul, in the time when human beings were still with their mothers, the primordial sources of existence, when Isis was not yet enclosed in the physical body, but was still united in the golden age with her husband, Osiris. What appears to us in this is that which is born as the most beautiful humanity, as the highest human ideal, from the human body, fertilized by the eternal world spirit itself.
How could anything other than the highest ideal, the highest humanity, Christ himself — for he is this ideal that they represent — fit into the realm of mothers? In Goethe's “Faust,” we encounter three mothers, seated on golden tripods, three mothers! The human soul underwent its development in the times when it was not yet in the human body. What we see today with our physical eyes as human fertilization and human birth appears to us only as the last symbol and parable of the earlier form of the same process. In the physical mother, we see, so to speak, the last physical form of a spiritual mother who is behind her, and we see this spiritual mother not fertilized in the same way as happens today, but from the universe itself, just as we have fertilized our soul in higher knowledge from the universe. We look back to ever more spiritual forms of fertilization and procreation.
Therefore, when speaking in a truly spiritual scientific sense, one speaks not only of a mother, but of mothers, and imagines that what stands before us today as a physical mother is the last manifestation of the spiritual-soul form from the spiritual realm. In fact, there are images of Isis that depict not one mother, but mothers, three mothers. In front we have a figure, Isis with the child Horus at her breast, as the oldest Madonna figures are also depicted. But behind this figure, in certain Egyptian depictions, we have another figure, an Isis who has the familiar two cow horns on her head and wears vulture wings, handing the child the handle cross. Here we see what is physical and human in the foreground, already more spiritualized. Behind her we see a third figure wearing a lion's head, representing a third stage of the human soul. Thus these three images of Isis appear to us one behind the other. Our human soul indeed carries three natures within itself: a will-like nature, its essence found in the deepest depths, a feeling-like nature, and a wisdom-like nature. These are the three soul mothers; they appear to us in the three figures of the Egyptian Isis.
The fact that behind the initially sensual mother there is the supersensible, spiritual mother, Isis from spiritual prehistory, and that, for example, the vulture wings, cow horns, and the world sphere are attached to the head of Isis in the center of the figures, is a profound symbol. Those who understood something of the so-called ancient numerology have always said and this corresponds to a profound truth, that the sacred trinity represents the divine masculine in the universe, and this sacred trinity is represented figuratively by the globe and the two cow horns, which, if you like, are a kind of image of the Madonna's crescent, but actually represent an expression of the fertile effect of the forces of nature.
The globe is the expression of creation in the world. We would have to talk for many hours if we wanted to explain the image of the masculine in the world. Behind the sensual Isis stands her representative, the supersensible Isis, who is not fertilized by her own kind, but by the divine masculine that lives through and interweaves the world. The process of fertilization is still depicted as something close to the process of cognition.
The awareness that the process of cognition is a kind of fertilization process was still alive in earlier times. You can still read in the Bible: “Adam knew his wife, and... she bore children.” What we take in today as spiritual gives birth to the spiritual in the soul; this is something that still represents a last remnant of the old mode of fertilization. What is expressed here shows us how we are fertilized today by the world spirit, taking it in in the sense of the world spirit into the human soul in order to gain human cognition, human feeling, human will.
This is represented to us in Isis. She is fertilized by the male divine so that her head may be fertilized, and the child is not given sensual matter, as with the sensual Isis, but the handle cross, the syastika, which is the sign of life. While the physical Isis is given the physical substance of life, here she is given the spirit of life in its symbol. Thus, behind the physical mother of life appears the spiritual mother of life, and behind her the primal force of all life, represented by the life force, as the will behind everything in a still more spiritual, primal past. There we have the three mothers, and there we also have the way in which these three mothers from the universe transmit the life-giving force to the sun. There we have a symbolic, if not yet artistic, expression of a profound world truth. What has passed through Egyptian development as the Isis symbol was taken up in more recent times and transformed in accordance with the progress that humanity has made through the appearance of Christ Jesus on earth, for in Christ Jesus was given the great model for everything that the human soul should bring forth from itself. This human soul, fertilized by the world spirit, is symbolized in the Madonna. In the Madonna, Isis appears to us as if reborn, correspondingly enhanced and transfigured.
What we were able to depict figuratively at the beginning of our lecture now appears before our soul as connected with the development of humanity, flowing up from ancient times, artistically transfigured and elaborated in the modern images that have been placed before the human soul in need of art throughout the world. There we see how art indeed becomes the interpreter of truth, as Goethe says. We see how, when we look up at the Madonna and when this gaze is imbued with the feeling of the heart, the soul receives something more of the great mystery of the world. There we see how, in such devotion, our soul, as the eternal feminine within us, longs for the divine father spirit, which is born out of the universe and which we give birth to as the sun in our own soul. What we are as human beings and how we are connected to the world as human beings is revealed to us in the images of the Madonna. That is why these images of the Madonna are so sacred to us, quite apart from any religious movement or dogma. We can perceive them as something born out of the universe when the indefinite cloud formations take the shape of angel heads and the representative of the human soul is born out of the whole. And in turn, the Madonna contains that which can be born from the human soul: the true, higher human being, that which slumbers in every human being, the very best of humanity and that which, as spirit, floods and interweaves the world.
Goethe felt the same way when he finally completed his “Faust,” when he had him go through the various stages that lead to higher knowledge and higher life. That is why he lets Faust go to the mothers, why the name “mothers” sounds so eerily beautiful to him and lets him sense the wisdom that echoes from ancient times. That is why Goethe felt that he had to send Faust to the mothers, that only there could he seek and find the eternal, that eternal through which Euphorion could arise. Because the human soul appeared to him to be represented by the Madonna, Goethe expresses the mystery of the soul in the “Chorus mysticus” with the words: “The eternal feminine draws us upward.” That is why Raphael, in his wonderful painting of the Madonna—whatever our times may say—so beautifully succeeded in leading us back to the realms to which the ancient images of Isis led. From that which is spiritual, which can no longer be expressed through human form because it would evoke too sensual figures, from that Isis who is symbolically represented only with the lion's head for her power, we descend to the human Isis, who transfers her power to the child Horus through sensual matter. Raphael unconsciously expressed this in his Sistine Madonna; spiritual science will consciously lead humanity back up into the spiritual realm from which it descended.
This year's winter cycle will use two more examples to show us how humanity descended from spiritual heights and will ascend again to a higher existence. In the two lectures entitled “Ancient European Clairvoyance” and “The European Mysteries and Their Initiates,” we will see in a strictly scientific way how these images of the Madonna and depictions of Isis are actually clear and distinct artistic interpretations of the deepest secrets of nature and the spirit, how they are basically only a paraphrase of the great words spoken by Plato: Once upon a time, man was a spiritual being. He descended only because he was robbed of his spiritual wings, because he was enveloped in the sensual body. He will break free from this sensual body again, ascend again into spiritual-soul worlds. — Plato once proclaimed this philosophically. The images of the Madonna also proclaim this, in that they are, in the most beautiful sense, what Goethe wanted to express with the words: Art is the most worthy interpreter of the recognized secrets of the world. — Let us not fear that art will become abstract or even allegorical when it is once again forced — I say forced! — to recognize the higher spiritual realities; let us not fear that it will become artistically stiff and lifeless when it can no longer adhere to external, crude models.
It is only because human beings have forgotten how to recognize the spiritual that art is bound to the external senses. But when humanity finds its way back to spiritual heights and insights, it will also know that true reality is in the spiritual world, and that those who see this reality will create with vitality, even without slavishly adhering to sensual models. Only then will Goethe be understood, when art and wisdom will once again go hand in hand to a greater extent, when art will once again be an expression of the spiritual. Then knowledge and art will be one again, and in their union they will be religion. For the spiritual will once again work in its form in human hearts as something divine and produce what Goethe called true, genuine piety. “Those who possess science and art also possess religion,” says Goethe, “those who do not possess these two should have religion.”
Truly, those who possess knowledge of the spiritual mysteries of the world and know what speaks through the Isis Madonna see in them something primal and alive, something much more alive than can be expressed in any slavish imitation of external, physical models of human beings. And someone who sees through the veil of the living, which the Madonnas represent, into the spiritual, can feel pious again without any dogmatism, without any prejudice, in complete spiritual freedom. They will unite science or wisdom and art in their soul and give birth to a genuine, free religiosity or piety within themselves.