The Rudolf Steiner Archive

Fourth Lecture

[ 1 ] The deeper one penetrates into the work of Richard Wagner, the deeper one also enters into theosophical-mystical questions and the riddles of life. It is extremely significant that Richard Wagner, after developing the entire prehistory of the European peoples in four stages in his Ring cycle, went on to create an eminently Christian drama, the work with which he actually completed his life's work, Parsifal. One must penetrate Wagner's entire personality if one wants to understand what actually lives in this Parsifal.

[ 2 ] For him, the figure of Jesus of Nazareth had been taking shape since the 1840s. He wanted to write a drama called Jesus of Nazareth, fragments of which still exist, a work in which the infinite love that Jesus of Nazareth showed for all humanity was to be brought to life. He wanted to create this, but he never got beyond the basic ideas. In the 1950s, he then drafted the drama Die Sieger (The Victors). In these dramas, we can see the depths of the worldview from which this poet's intuitions were drawn.

[ 3 ] Let us briefly consider the content of the drama “Die Sieger”: Ananda, a young man from a noble caste, is passionately loved by Prakriti, a Chandala girl, that is, a girl from a despised caste. But he renounces all sensual, earthly love and becomes a disciple of Buddha. According to Wagner's intention, the Chandala girl was supposed to have been a member of the Brahmin caste in a previous incarnation and to have rejected the love of a Chandala youth with haughty contempt. The karmic punishment is now to be reborn in the Chandala caste. Having worked her way through to the point where she can renounce her love, she too becomes a disciple of Buddha. You can see that Wagner had already grasped the karmic problem in all its depth when, in the mid-1850s, he set about creating a deeply serious musical drama such as Die Sieger (The Victors). All these thoughts ultimately flowed together in his Parsifal. But at the same time, the Christ problem is at the center of Parsifal.

[ 4 ] The history of the Middle Ages has an important point at the turn of the 12th to the 13th century. This was when Wolfram von Eschenbach was active, who poetically elaborated the mystery of Parzival from the deepest spirituality of the Middle Ages. In the Middle Ages, people who had a spiritual life experienced something that was called the elevation of love in initiated circles. Love singers and minstrels existed before and after this period. But there was a great difference between what was previously understood as worldly, sensual love and what later emerged in Christianity as purified, refined love. A significant monument to this turning point in spiritual life in the Middle Ages has been preserved for us in Hartmann von Aue's “Der arme Heinrich” (Poor Henry). This deeply spiritual poem is imbued with the spiritual teachings that the knights of the Crusades brought back with them from the East. Let us imagine the content of “Der arme Heinrich”: A knight of Swabian descent, who had always prospered until then, is struck by an incurable disease, miselsucht, and can only be freed from it by the sacrificial death of a pure virgin. A virgin is found who is willing to sacrifice herself for him. They go together to Salerno in Italy to see a famous doctor. The maiden is about to be sacrificed, but at the last moment Heinrich refuses to accept the sacrifice; the maiden remains alive, Heinrich is healed, and they marry.

[ 5 ] Here we find again the image of the pure maiden who sacrifices herself for a man who has lived only for sensual pleasures and is now saved by her. From the medieval point of view, there is a mystery hidden here. Minstrelsy was attributed to an ancient tradition that had emerged during the four successive stages of European cultural development, as depicted in the legends presented by Richard Wagner in his tetralogy. In that era, love that originated solely from the sensual was regarded as something that had to be overcome. Purified by the higher spiritual power of Christianity, minstrelsy was to emerge in a new form.

[ 6 ] If we want to understand what happened, we must take all the factors into account in order to recall the character and physiognomy of that time. Then we can understand what prompted Wagner to depict this legend. There was an old legend, an original legend, which we can find among the oldest Germanic peoples and, in a slightly different form, also in Italy and other countries. Let us clarify the outline of this legend: a man has experienced the joys of the world and now enters a kind of underground cave, where he meets a woman of extraordinary charm and attractiveness. There he experiences certain pleasures of paradise; but then he is overcome by a longing for the upper world, and after some time he returns from the mountain. This is particularly clearly expressed in the Tannhäuser legend. When we consider this legend, we find in it a beautiful symbol of the ancient striving for love in the Germanic lands before that great turning point of which I have spoken: The activity of human beings in the sensory world, the withdrawal to the joys of love in the old sense, which was thought to be embodied in the goddess Venus, and the distraction from activity in the outer world through love as a kind of paradise feeling. However, in this form, the legend has no real focal point. It has nothing that shows us a glimpse of something higher. It arose from earlier views, from the previous form of love. Later, in the early days of Christianity's spiritual development of love, people wanted to shine a light on earlier times and show the contrast between this paradise and the Christian idea of paradise.

[ 7 ] If we want to understand Wagner, we must dig even deeper. We have looked at our fifth root race. After the floods had washed over Atlantis, the sub-races emerged one after the other: the primordial Indian, the primordial Persian, then the Egyptian-Babylonian-Assyrian-Chaldean, then the Greek-Latin, and after the decline of Roman culture, our fifth sub-race emerged, in which we live today and which is actually significant for Christian Europe. It's not as if Richard Wagner knew everything I have just said. But he had an absolutely sure feeling for the world situation of the fifth sub-race, and he felt that the whole task of the present was a religious task, as one could not formulate it better in theosophy.

[ 8 ] You know that each of these “races” was inspired by great initiates and that the original inspiration for the fifth Atlantean race came from the so-called Ur-Semites. You know that when Atlantis was swallowed by the floods, those who emigrated and were saved from the downfall of the race were led by Manu, a divine leader, to Asia, to the Gobi Desert. From here, cultural influences first spread via India to the Near East, Persia, Assyria, Egypt, and then to southern Europe, Greece, Rome, and later also to our regions.

[ 9 ] The first two Semitic cultural influences, those received by the Indian and the original Persian races, can no longer be traced in history. However, if we consider the Chaldean-Egyptian subrace, we must say that a great Semitic impulse took place there, from which the people of Israel got their name. Christianity can be traced back to such a Semitic influence, which then extended into Greek-Latin culture. If we continue to investigate these cultural influences, we find the Semitic influence spread throughout Europe by the Moorish peoples who invaded Spain, from which even Christian monks could not escape. Thus, the original Semitic impulse extends into the fifth subrace. We can see how the original culture was influenced five times by one great current.

[ 10 ] From the south, we have a great spiritual current, which is countered by another current that developed in the north through four stages of the original culture, until the two currents converged. A worldly-naive people is influenced by the culture coming up from the south at the turn of the 12th to the 13th century. The penetration of a new culture was perceived as a spiritual air current. Wolfram von Eschenbach was completely under the influence of this spiritual current.

[ 11 ] The Nordic culture is symbolized by the legend of Tannhäuser, where the impulse also comes from the south. Everywhere we find something that we can describe as the Semitic impulse. But one thing was felt to be powerful: that the Germanic race was the last link in a development, that something completely new was to come, that something completely different was being prepared for the fifth subrace: this is the higher mission of Christianity. At that time, a new kind of Christianity was felt as a longing in the Germanic countries; a new Christianity was to be created, detached from what it had gone through in the south. Christianity was to be recreated in a purer form. During the Crusades, an opposition arose between Rome and Jerusalem. The Crusaders fought under the battle cries “Hie Rom” and “Hie Jerusalem.” One referred to Roman Christianity, which was now only a shell, the other to a pure Christianity that people wanted to restore and for which they saw Jerusalem as a spiritual center. This was the thinking of the great scholastics, and so for Dante in his Divine Comedy, Jerusalem was also a center, but one to be sought more in a spiritual than in an external sense. Thus, the fifth subrace was perceived as a harbinger of the future. The old influences had ceased, something completely new was to come,

[ 12 ] a new whirlwind of world culture was beginning. It was only an attempt to establish true Christianity, but the core of genuine Christianity was to be extracted from this shell. At the turn of the Middle Ages, people sensed something coming to an end, the cessation of something that had been perceived as a blessing, and at the same time they sensed something emerging in their longing for the new. All this lived in Wolfram von Eschenbach.

[ 13 ] Now consider the new era. Imagine this feeling, renewed at a time when decline had set in, and you will find something of what lived in Richard Wagner. By then, much of what had previously been perceived as the decline of the race had come to pass. From the beginning of his conscious life, Richard Wagner felt this declining element particularly vividly. For him, there were many symptoms that decline was upon us and that a new formation had to take place. The chaos that surrounds us today in many respects, the way in which the lower classes in our time are more languishing than living, the misery of the great European masses, whose spiritual life remains in darkness, who are cut off from all education, no one felt more deeply than Richard Wagner, and that is why he became a revolutionary in 1848. We must not think of Wagner as an ordinary revolutionary, but rather understand him as someone who was weighed down by the thought that it is in our hands today to either accelerate the decline, turn the wheel downward, or lead it upward. The revolution of 1848 was only an external opportunity for him.

[ 14 ] If we understand all this, we will understand how Richard Wagner arrived at his ideas about race, as he expresses them in his prose writings. In his work Religion and Art, he says something like this: Over there in Asia, in the Indian people, we find something of the original power of the Aryan race. Something of the high power of spiritual life lives there, but only for an elite, for the Brahmin caste. The lower castes are excluded from this teaching, but in Brahminism a high spiritual level has been reached that is an expression of the original culture. If we look north from there, Richard Wagner says, we find a naive race that has itself gone through four stages of development, a hunting people who, one must imagine, took pleasure in killing their enemies as hunters. For Wagner, the joy of killing living beings is a symptom of decadence. It is a profound, occult fact that life and death are strangely connected with the development of human beings toward the higher, purer, and more spiritual. Everything that human beings accomplish in terms of torment and destruction of life robs their souls of spiritual power. Whatever one may think of individual cultural phenomena, all destruction of life is linked to the snatching away of spiritual powers. Therefore, those who walk the “black path” must destroy life. This is expressed, for example, in the novel “Flita” by Mabel Collins. It is the story of a black magician who destroys unborn life because she needs it for her evil powers. There is a deep connection between life, death, and human development. This is a lesson that had to be learned and experienced by the peoples. It was different when, at a certain stage of development, killing was done in a naive way; at that time, killing allowed people to experience the power that was within them – this was the situation of the ancient Germanic hunter-gatherer peoples.

[ 15 ] But now, after the advent of Christianity, things have changed. Christian teaching prohibits killing; killing is a sin. This is the origin of the view that led Wagner to strict vegetarianism. For him, eating meat became a sign of the decline of a race, and he described the only possibility of advancement as being for people to switch to a diet that no longer tempted them to kill.

[ 16 ] The feeling that a new impulse was needed also prompted Wagner to make his remarks about the influence of Judaism on contemporary culture. Wagner was not anti-Semitic in the senseless, hateful sense that we experience today, but he felt that Judaism had played out its role as such, that the Semitic influences on our culture had to fade away and something new had to take their place. Hence his call for renewal. This is related to how he perceived our present race. He said to himself: We must make a distinction between racial development and soul development. This distinction must be made if one wants to understand development at all.

[ 17 ] We were all once embodied in the Atlantean race; but while the souls have developed further and ascended, the race has fallen into decadence. But every ascent is linked to a descent. For every one who is ennobled, there is one who sinks down. There is a difference between the soul in the racial body and the racial body itself. The more a person becomes like the race, the more he loves what is temporal, transitory, and connected with the characteristics of his race, the more he belongs to the decline of the race. The more he frees himself, the more he stands out from the characteristics of his race, the more the soul has the opportunity to embody itself at a higher level. A spirit such as Wagner, who distinguishes between soul development and racial development, cannot be anti-Semitic. He knows that it is not the souls that have played out their roles, but that the races have played out their roles in the great development of the world. This is what Wagner repeatedly expresses in his writings when he speaks of “Semitism.” Wagner senses decline, the decline of the races and the necessity of the ascent of souls. Medieval souls such as Wolfram von Eschenbach and Hartmann von Aue also felt this necessity.

[ 18 ] Let us return once more to the legend of Poor Henry. We need to look a little deeper into what it means that Poor Henry is healed by a pure virgin. Henry's illness stems from the fact that he initially lived in the sensual realm; his ego was born out of his race, out of what was sensually active in that era. This ego, born out of the sensual, becomes ill when the call to develop higher comes to it – to humanity. The soul becomes ill because it connects itself with what should only live in the race. This is characterised by how love is expressed in a worldly way. Now the higher love must develop out of the lower love living in the race. What lives in the race must be redeemed by something higher, by the higher, pure love that sacrifices itself for the striving soul of the human being, by what Goethe calls the eternal feminine, which draws us upward.

[ 19 ] You know — I have explained this many times before — that the masculine and feminine live in every human being, and that because they are separated, the sensual interferes. Redemption through the “eternal feminine” means that the sensual is overcome. This is also depicted in “Tristan and Isolde.” The historical expression of this overcoming is, for Wolfram von Eschenbach as for Richard Wagner, Parsifal; he is the representative of the new Christianity. Parsifal becomes king of the Holy Grail by redeeming what previously suffered under the bondage of the sensual and by bringing a new principle of love into the world.

[ 20 ] What is the basis of Parsifal? What does the Holy Grail mean? The origin story that we see emerging around the middle of the Middle Ages tells us that the Holy Grail is the cup that Christ used at the Last Supper and in which Joseph of Arimathea then collected the blood that flowed from the wound of Christ Jesus. This cup and the lance that pierced the wound were carried up by angels and kept floating in the air until Titurel found himself on Mount Montsalvat—the mountain of salvation—where he built a castle in which this cup was kept as a sanctuary of spiritual knighthood. Twelve knights are gathered to serve the Holy Grail. It has the power to avert death from these knights and give them what they need to lift their souls up to the spiritual realm. The sight of it gives them spiritual strength anew.

[ 21 ] Now we can immediately turn to the form that Richard Wagner gave to the Parsifal legend. It is essentially the same as that which we already have in Wolfram von Eschenbach. On the one hand, we have the Grail temple with its knights, and on the other, the enchanted castle of Klingsor with his knights, who are the real enemies of the Grail knights. Two types of Christianity are contrasted here: one represents the Grail knights, the other Klingsor and his knights. Klingsor is the one who mutilated himself in order not to succumb to sensuality. However, he has not overcome his desire; he has only made it impossible to satisfy it. Thus, he still lives in the realm of sensuality. He is served by sorceress maidens. Kundry is the real seductress in this realm. She draws everything that comes to Klingsor toward the sensual side, toward what should belong to the past. Klingsor personifies medieval Christianity, which has become ascetic, which has killed sensuality but not desire; it does not save from the seductive power of sensual love, which is personified in Kundry. Something higher was seen in the power of renunciation of higher spirituality, which does not kill sensuality through coercion, but refines it through higher spiritual knowledge and elevates it to the realm of purified love. Amfortas and the Knights of the Grail strive for this, but until then it had not been possible to create this realm. They did not succeed. As long as the right spiritual power was not there, Amfortas had to succumb to Kundry's seduction; the higher disposition in Amfortas fell victim to the lower disposition, Klingsor.

[ 22 ] Thus, the Parsifal legend presents us with two phenomena side by side: on the one hand, Christianity, which has become ascetic but has not been able to attain higher, spiritual knowledge through the mortification of sensuality, and on the other hand, the representatives of the spiritual knighthood, who, however, always fall victim to Klingsor's seduction as long as the savior who defeats Klingsor has not appeared. Amfortas is wounded, loses the holy lance to Klingsor, and must guard the Grail as a king in pain. Thus, higher Christianity also languishes and suffers. It must guard the true secrets, the mysteries of Christianity, which are connected with the Holy Grail, until a savior appears in a new form—and this savior arises in Parsifal. Parsifal must first learn his lessons, he undergoes trials; then he purifies himself and rises to that spiritual power, to the feeling of the great unity of all being. Once again, Richard Wagner unconsciously presents us with profound, occult truths in Parsifal. First, Parsifal goes through the stage where he learns compassion, compassion for our older brothers, the animals. In his impetuous drive to become a knight, he abandoned his mother Herzeleide, who died of grief, he fought and killed the animal. In the animal's dying glance, he felt what it means to kill. This is the first stage of his purification.

[ 23 ] The second stage consists in learning to overcome desire without having to kill the organs of sensual desire externally. He first arrives at the Holy Grail, but does not yet recognize his task. He learns it by receiving the initiation of life. He apparently succumbs to Kundry's temptation, but he passes the test. At the moment when he could succumb to temptation, he tears himself away from the power of desire; a new, pure love shines in him like a rising sun. What we already saw emerging in Götterdämmerung flashes into view. “Et incarnatus est de Spiritu Sancto ex Maria virgine,” born of the Spirit through the Virgin—this is the higher power of love, which is born out of the soul untainted by sensuality, which purifies and ennobles all souls. Man must awaken such a soul within himself, a soul that does not kill the sensual organs, but ennobles everything sensual, because from the virginal matter the I, the Christ, is born. Christ is born in Parsifal A higher, virginal power confronts the seductive Kundry. Kundry, that feminine element which drags the human ego down into the sphere of sexuality, must be overcome. In Kundry, we are confronted with the incarnation of that which has dragged humanity down as the opposite sex. Kundry has been here before as Herodias, who demanded the head of John the Baptist. She has been here in a similar way to Ahasver, as a figure who cannot find peace, who seeks her only salvation in sensual love.

[ 24 ] Liberation from sensual love is what Richard Wagner unconsciously hinted at in his Parsifal. We see how this idea winds its way up through his work. Already in The Flying Dutchman, the intuitive power of his being leads him to the same problem: a man who wanders the seas is redeemed from his long wanderings by the sacrifice of a virgin. This is also the problem of Tannhäuser. Wagner depicted the singers' contest at Wartburg Castle as a battle between the singer of old, sensual love, Heinrich von Ofterdingen, and Wolfram von Eschenbach, who represents the power of renewed, spiritual Christianity. In this legend of the Singers' Contest at Wartburg Castle, it is Heinrich von Ofterdingen who enlists the help of Master Klingsor of Hungary. But both are defeated by the power that emanates from Wolfram von Eschenbach. We now understand Tristan more deeply because we know that it is not the destruction of love that is at stake, but the clarification and purification of the love that lives within him.

[ 25 ] From Schopenhauer's negation of the will, Richard Wagner rose to a reversal and purification of the will into higher spheres. Wagner even expressed this purification in a drama where it does not seem to be contained at all, in “Die Meistersinger.” You can see it, so to speak, between the lines in the purification of Hans Sachs from the temptation he feels toward Eva to win her for himself. This lies not so much in the text itself as in the music; when you listen to the music of Die Meistersinger, you sense something of this purification.

[ 26 ] All of this came together for Richard Wagner in his Parsifal. He looked back to the Brahmanic archetype. With melancholy and pain, he saw the symptoms of decay in the contemporary race. And he wanted to create a new impulse through his art. The redemption of the race through a new spiritual content—that was what he wanted to convey in his festival plays. It was in this spirit that Nietzsche wrote about Dionysian art while he was with Wagner. He felt that something of the renewal of the mystery plays of ancient Greece was alive in the festivals. The “Dionysia” of Aeschylus and Sophocles, which take us back to the dawn of the fourth sub-race, were something that contributed to the emergence of the cultural current of the fifth sub-race. In the depths of the mystery temples of Dionysus, one sensed this redemption of humanity. It was only in the European countries that what had taken place in the mystery temples at that time came to light. We stand before a Dionysus who is embodied in matter, who celebrates his resurrection and his ascension in humanity. In the mystery temples, the Greek initiate sensed the descended God. There was something melancholic in these Greek mysteries when it was said that in the future God would rise again in the hearts of human beings. And in Norse mythology, the initiates, the Druids, spoke of the twilight of the gods, from which a new race would emerge. Christianity was predicted in the ancient mysteries of the Drotten and Druids. Richard Wagner saw the time approaching when Christianity, which had developed within the fourth subrace and emerged in the fifth, would fulfill itself and speak its own language. Now those who have believed must once again become seers.

[ 27 ] Richard Wagner experienced the pulse of the Earth's development, as did Edouard Schur&, who reconstructed the ancient mystery drama of the Eleusinian mysteries from this impulse. Thus, the Bayreuth event shows us the confluence of two cultural currents, the revival of the mysteries of Greece and a new Christianity. This is how Richard Wagner felt, and this is how those around him felt, and this is also how Edouard Schure felt about this art as a first prelude to a union of what had once been separated. In the original drama [of Eleusis], religion, art, and science were united until they split. Art went its own way—Aeschylus, Sophocles—religion and science went their own ways. Three streams grew side by side from the common root of the Greek mysteries. Each of these streams could only become great by first going its own way. Time found a special religious expression for the mind, an artistic expression for the senses, and a scientific expression for reason. This had to happen, because only when man was able to develop each of these abilities separately to their highest level could perfection be achieved. Religion, when it has been raised to the height of the Christian worldview, is ready to reunite with art and science. Poetry, painting, sculpture, and music will only reach their height when they reunite with true religion. And science, which has only reached its full development in modern times, has in truth given the impetus for the unification of these three currents.

[ 28 ] Now, through Richard Wagner, who was one of the first to sense the impulse for a new union of art, science, and religion, this union is being offered as a new consecration to humanity. He felt that Christianity is called upon to reunite what was once divided, and he put this into the form of his Parsifal. The magic of Good Friday, into which Wagner put his Good Friday mood, sounds to our ears like the great sound of a new culture. He recognized that the development of the soul and the development of the race must follow different paths, that it is necessary to elevate and redeem the souls, that the resurrection of the souls must be brought about, despite the tragic fate of being connected to the body of the race, to that which decays. Richard Wagner wanted his work in Bayreuth to fill the world with sounds that point to a new future. At least a small part of humanity should listen to those sounds of the future. It is a living, artistic apocalypse that Wagner proclaimed to his time, as a true prophet who knew that a new era must soon dawn, to which he wanted to point the way. Thus his life's work comes to an end:

[ 29 ] I will tell you the visions that have appeared to me, and the times will come when they will be realized.