The Rudolf Steiner Archive

16. Richard Wagner and his Relationship to Mysticism

[ 1 ] Theosophy or spiritual science should not be something one-sided, merely satisfying human curiosity or thirst for knowledge, but should represent a spiritual current that is called upon to intervene more deeply in everything we call the culture of the present and the near future. We will get a sense of how theosophy can be called upon to do this when we see how what pulsates through it is not only found within it, but is already manifesting itself in our time as a more or less distinct intuition in a wide variety of fields.

[ 2 ] Today we will concern ourselves with the way in which an element similar to what we call theosophy, spiritual science, lived in one of the greatest artists of modern times. No one should believe that everything I have to say about this important artist of modern times, Richard Wagner, was also lived by him in clear, intellectual consciousness. It would be easy to raise the objection that you are saying all sorts of things about Richard Wagner, but we can prove that he never thought this about himself. Anyone who looks at Richard Wagner as we do today can easily raise this objection. In no way am I claiming that what I am about to say lived as explicit ideas in Richard Wagner. It is another matter whether one has the right to say so. It would take too long to derive this right for you in a detailed explanation here. But a comparison, an image, can lead us to prove the validity of these considerations. Does not the botanist think about the plant? Does he not seek the laws according to which it grows and lives? Does he not thereby understand the essence of the plant or seek to understand it? And can anyone, because the plant itself is not conscious of these laws, deny the botanist the right to talk about it in this way? Anyone who pursues this image more deeply will see how what is to be said today applies equally to the artist. This is not to repeat the common phrase that the artist creates unconsciously. But the laws by which we understand the artist in a certain view of the world need no more be expressed by the artist's consciousness than a plant law needs to be expressed by the plant. This must be assumed, because otherwise the objection just characterized could be raised.

[ 3 ] Another objection that can easily arise in the present day is linked to the word “mysticism.” Recently, in a small circle, someone used the word “mysticism,” and a somewhat learned gentleman said: Goethe was actually also a mystic; he admitted that much in the world of human knowledge remains dark and foggy. This man showed that by mysticism, when practiced by human beings, he understood all those ideas that have something nebulous, unclear, and dark about them. A true mystic has never understood mysticism to mean something that is unclear and can only be grasped and intuited with general feelings. We can see this today in learned circles, where it is said: “This is the limit of our clear knowledge; beyond that point, general feelings begin to delve into the secrets of nature, and mysticism begins.” On the contrary, the true mystic sees in this the clearest thing of all, that which is supposed to shine with the brightest rays of the sun into the depths of existence. And when someone speaks of the darkness of mysticism, of all kinds of premonitions, it means nothing other than that people have never taken the trouble to bring to light for themselves what mysticism makes clear. In the first centuries of Christianity, this was called “mathesis,” not because it was supposed to be mathematics, but because what mysticism builds up in ideas and concepts should be as clear and transparent to human beings as the concepts of mathematics. Human beings need only have patience to really find their way into what true mysticism is. Only in this sense can the word “mysticism” be associated with the name Richard Wagner.

[ 4 ] Now let us characterize what is the basic conviction of every spiritual scientist. It is that behind our physical, sensory world there is an invisible world and that human beings are capable of entering this invisible world. What lies in this assumption includes the mystical attitude.

[ 5 ] Did Wagner express such a conviction? Yes, he expressed it clearly! And what is most important is that he expressed it from his point of view as a musician, thereby indicating that music and art were more valuable to him than mere additions to existence, that they were the most important elements of his life. When he talks about symphonic music, he says wonderful things about art. He says that all symphonic music appears like a revelation from another world, which enlightens us in a completely different way about the connections of existence than logic can enlighten us, and that it is the most wonderful thing when we take in the convictions that come to us from these symphonic elements of language and absorb them into ourselves; then they give us a security of feeling that cannot be countered by the judgment of reason about the world.

[ 6 ] These words should not be taken as something said in passing, but must be accepted as something that, from the deepest seriousness of a great human insight, seeks to characterize something. Can we interpret these words by drawing on the fundamental convictions of mysticism? Yes! If you investigate how mystics often characterize the way they perceive, you will find, for example, the following word, which is not a randomly invented word, but a word that you will find again and again as a kind of technical expression used by mystics. Mystics say: In ordinary human cognition, people turn to their intellect to recognize the laws of nature and the spiritual world; but there is a higher form of cognition, in which we do not link concepts together in an intellectual manner, but rather the ideas weave themselves together like spiritual music; this is a different kind of cognition. The true mystic knows the greater certainty of this knowledge than that which is available to the intellect in this field. And strangely enough, every expert would characterize this kind of knowledge by drawing on the image—it is more than an image!—of music. It is not merely an image when the ancient Pythagorean school speaks of the music of the spheres. A shallow school philosophy considers this music of the spheres to be an image, a comparison with something else. But those who know what it is also know that this Pythagorean music of the spheres is a reality and that there is a training of the mind where the sounds of this music can be heard.

[ 7 ] It has often been said that we are surrounded by worlds of a spiritual nature that we cannot see at first, just as the blind man is surrounded by the world of color that he cannot see. When his eyes are operated on, brightness, color, and light that were previously inaccessible to him come to him. Such an opening of spiritual vision exists. It is only a matter of opening the higher senses, then the higher world emerges from the darkness; and we call the next world surrounding us the light world or astral world, and the even higher one the actual spiritual world of the sounds of the spheres. This is a true reality into which human beings can be born in a kind of higher birth, just as a person born blind can see when they undergo an operation.

[ 8 ] Those who are initiated speak openly about this world. We need only remember the words of Goethe. Of course, many will consider what is now being said to be something fantastical. They will even consider it unartistic to say such things, because they want to leave the poet as vague as possible with regard to the understanding of his work. But a great poet like Goethe does not use phrases when he wants to characterize something special by saying, “The sun sounds in the old way...” This is either an allusion to something deeper, or it is a phrase, since the physical sun does not sound. And a poet who works from observation, as Goethe does, cannot be expected to use such a phrase. Goethe, as an initiate, knows that there is such a sounding world, a spiritually sounding world, and he remains within the picture. When he allows Faust, after his wanderings described in the first part, to ascend into the spiritual world, it says again:

"For spiritual ears,
the new day is already being born with a sound.”

[ 9 ] Goethe remains completely within the picture when he wants to characterize the spiritual world.

[ 10 ] For Richard Wagner, the sounds of external music were an expression, a revelation of an inner music, the world of a spiritual sound, of the harmony pulsating through the world. That is what he felt, that is what he experienced. He said so himself, not just once. Where he characterizes the individual instruments, he says:

“The instruments represent the primordial organs of creation and nature; what they express can never be clearly defined or determined, for they reproduce the primal feelings themselves, as they emerged from the chaos of the first creation, when there were perhaps not even human beings who could take them into their hearts.”

[ 11 ] One must not try to squeeze such words with the intellect; one must try to absorb them with all their mood, then one feels how Richard Wagner's whole soul was immersed in what has been called true, genuine mysticism.

[ 12 ] This is how Richard Wagner sees his entire artistic mission. He is not an artist who merely wants to reveal what happens to live in his soul. He wants to feel the necessity of the place where he stands in development. He looks back to the distant human past, to a human past where there was not yet what we call isolated art. Here we touch on a profound point that constantly preoccupied Richard Wagner when he felt his mission, that point which Nietzsche pondered so deeply and which he attempted to characterize in his work The Birth of Tragedy from the Spirit of Music. However, we do not want to pursue what Nietzsche wrote; rather, we want to draw on mysticism, for it has more to say than Nietzsche was able to bring to consciousness about Richard Wagner. It points us back to the primordial states of human development.

[ 13 ] What were the mysteries? All ancient peoples had mystery centers, which could just as well be called temples or schools, among the Egyptians, the Greeks, and so on. Everywhere, mystery was the foundation of a later culture, and mystery contained religion, science, and art at the same time. Let us sketch out the essence of such a mystery. What did those who were admitted after certain trials experience in order to hear the secrets? They experienced something that later emerged in separate branches in the course of development: religion, art, and science, which emerged as three branches, were one at their root in the mystery. Imagine yourself as a spectator and listener of the mystery! Let us take the case of how the mystery of the world was presented to human beings in the mystery. What was presented there was how the spiritual forces descended, how they live in minerals, in plants, how they become more perfect in animals, and how they become self-conscious in human beings. The entire course of the world spirit was presented in such a way that the eyes could see everything. And what the eyes saw and the ears heard, in color, in light, in sound, was wisdom, science. These people did not perceive the laws of the world in abstract ideas as we do today. It was a representation: they saw it happening. The representation was also beautiful. This is how art came into being. Truth was given in the form of art. And it was so embedded in art that the human mind was filled with religious feeling and sank down in worship.

[ 14 ] This has been present in the original state of every great culture. External history does not know much about this and denies it. But that does not matter. In twenty years, it will no longer deny it. And just as these three were united in the original mysteries, so art, so those arts that later went their separate ways, were a whole. Music and dramatic performance were united, and Wagner looked back to a primeval time when the arts were united to form a whole. It was clear to him that, due to the necessary course of human development, these arts had to go their separate ways. Now, however, he believed that the time had come when they must be reunited. He believed himself called upon to bring about a union of the separate currents in the field of his ability in what he called a Gesamtkunstwerk, or total work of art. He felt that the true work of art must have something of a religious inspiration. Thus, for him, the work of art was at the same time a religious service. We must think and feel all this in his feelings. If we follow his thoughts in detail, we will recognize this again. Thus he saw the dramatic-musical work coming together in his mind from separate currents. For him, Shakespeare and Beethoven were two great artists. He saw in Shakespeare the dramatist who, with wonderful inner coherence, brought human actions to the stage as they are lived out in external events. He saw in Beethoven the artist who, with the same wonderful inner coherence, was able to portray what goes on inside the breast, what does not pass into external action, into gesture. And now he said to himself: There is something here that we can follow very precisely, but which must remain unspoken. For there is something between one action and another that stands in the human breast as a mediator, but which cannot be transferred into this kind of dramatic art. And when the inner life of human feeling is expressed symphonically, it must, as it were, remain within itself if the musician is instructed to remain within the realm of sound. We see this in Beethoven's Ninth Symphony, where what lives inwardly in the soul pushes itself out and ultimately becomes language, seeking to unite in a whole what is separate in art but belongs together in human nature.

[ 15 ] This was Wagner's sense of his mission. From this arose his idea of the Gesamtkunstwerk, the total work of art, which is supposed to represent the whole human being in art. It should stand there as he experiences his inner life, and he should have the opportunity to let what lives so inwardly step out as action. What cannot be dramatic on the outside is given to music. What music cannot express goes into the external drama. Richard Wagner represents the synthesis between Shakespeare and Beethoven. This is Richard Wagner's fundamental idea – a fundamental idea that is drawn from the deepest core of human nature. This is how he felt his mission. But now art had been shown a way into the innermost core of human nature. Richard Wagner could not remain an everyday dramatist. It had to be possible to portray the deepest experiences of human beings using the highest means of art – as once in mystery plays.

[ 16 ] When we see how Wagner sees the revelation of an unknown world in symphonic music, how he sees the primordial organs of creation in the instruments, then we soon understand how he feels the need to reveal more in his music dramas than what lives here in the physical world. That is only one part of human nature. Overarching this part is the higher human being who lives within every human being, who is far more than what can be expressed outwardly. This higher human being, who surrounds ordinary human beings in comprehensive glory, is connected to the sources of life in deeper ways than can be clearly seen outwardly. Because Richard Wagner wants to connect with the higher nature of man, he cannot use everyday people; he must turn to those who are given in myth. There, people are presented as they rise above themselves, wanting to become and being far greater than the human being on the physical plane can be and wants to be. This is again connected with Richard Wagner's mission to go beyond everyday people and bring myth onto the stage. In myth, Richard Wagner must at the same time—though not intellectually—allow the deeper laws of the world, the laws and essences of the unknown world, to shine through the dramatic action and the musical element. And that is what he does.

[ 17 ] Of course, we cannot touch on all the details; we can only pick out individual examples. Everywhere it will become apparent how he is connected in his deepest essence with what spiritual science has to say about the world. What, for example, does mysticism have to say about human coexistence? From an external perspective, people stand side by side; we see people influencing each other in the physical world when they talk to each other and become dependent on each other. But there are deeper connections in human nature. What lives as a soul in one breast has a deeply hidden kinship with what lives as a soul in another breast. And the laws that appear on the surface are only the most insignificant ones. What is considered to be a deep network of laws underlying the soul passes from person to person. This is revealed by spiritual science. The artist senses this. That is why he turns to materials with which he can show how a deeper law works from person to person than what the outer eye can see.

[ 18 ] Right from one of his first works, Richard Wagner shows us this urge to reveal mysterious connections. Or do we not feel something that reigns invisibly between people when the Dutchman confronts us with Senta? Are we not reminded of wonderful connections in “Armer Heinrich,” where the sacrifice of a pure virgin has a healing effect? We must take such images as expressions of a deeper truth. There is something truer than the superficial truth of ordinary scholarship. There is something real in the sacrifice that one human being can make for another. This mystical bond, which cannot be grasped by the superficial mind, is expressed, for example, when one speaks of the universal soul. It contains what is expressed in the image of deepest truth when one human being does something for another.

[ 19 ] I am now expressing something that spiritual science can show you in order to lead you to the boundary where this can become apparent. We know that the world is evolving and that, in the course of this evolution, beings are always being repelled. It is a law taught by spiritual science that every upward development is connected with a downward thrust. Later, a balance is restored. For every saint, a sinner must arise. This is necessary for balance. Strange as it may sound, it is true. It is like when two liquids are mixed together. If you want to get one pure, the other must become cloudier. So it is with ascent. Every ascent is linked to a descent. This means that the being that has ascended uses its power to redeem the other, lower being. If this interaction between beings did not exist, there would be no development in the world. This sets development in motion. And when we see one person sacrificing themselves for another, we are reminded of such a mysterious bond that has arisen through one being developing upwards and the other downwards. One can only hint at such a thing. Richard Wagner is already in the midst of this mysterious bond that stretches from soul to soul.

[ 20 ] When we look at his various works, we find that Richard Wagner always drew the fundamental facts from mystical life. Let us approach his central work, the Siegfried cycle and the Nibelungen cycle. If we want to see how deeply they are drawn from world wisdom, we must take up something that theosophy brings to complete clarity, however contradictory it may be to today's science. Our distant ancestors inhabited a land area that was located in the west of Europe, between Africa and America. Even natural science is gradually coming to the conclusion that there was once a land there, a land we call Atlantis. Our ancient ancestors lived there, although they were of course very different in appearance. As I said, natural science is already beginning to talk about this ancient Atlantis. An article about it was published in a magazine called Kosmos, published under the auspices of Haeckel. Of course, it only talks about the animals and plants that lived there. There is no mention yet of the fact that humans also lived there.

[ 21 ] What natural science already suspects, spiritual science tells us clearly. In this ancient Atlantis, there was a completely different atmosphere, completely different conditions. What we know today as the distribution of water and sunshine in the air did not yet exist at that time. Over there in the far west, the air was constantly filled with water vapor, with masses of fog. The sun and moon could only be seen with rainbow-shaped halos. The life of the soul was completely different. People lived in a much more intimate union with nature, with stones, plants, and animals. They were embedded in the fog. It is true to say that the spirit of the deity hovered and brooded over the waters. For what has been preserved in echoes among the peoples who are the descendants of the Atlanteans was very much the case with the Atlanteans themselves: they understood everything around them. The trickling of the spring was not inarticulate; it was the expression of the wisdom of nature. Man heard wisdom in all things around him, for this environment caused this ancient ancestor to be a dull clairvoyant. He did not perceive what extended in space, but rather color phenomena. He had clairvoyant powers. Wisdom wove in the mists, and he perceived this wisdom with his dull powers. One can only hint at this. The development consisted in the mists condensing into water and the air becoming purer and purer. In this way, human beings developed to their present state of consciousness. They became cut off from external nature and became closed beings within themselves. When human beings are still in union with nature, wisdom is unified, and they live as if in a sphere of wisdom; and this establishes a certain brotherhood, for everyone perceives the same wisdom, everyone lives in the soul of the other. With the descent of the fog masses, humans entered into egoistic consciousness, into ego-consciousness, where each person felt their own center within themselves, where one person confronted another and claimed their own sphere for themselves. Brotherhood turns into a struggle for existence.

[ 22 ] Legends and myths are not what are interpreted as fantastic theories at the green table. What are legends and myths? They are the remnants of ancient clairvoyant experiences of our ancestors. That is a fact. It is nonsense to claim today that any myth signifies a struggle between one people and another. Scholars speak of poetic folk imagination; they should get to know the people, whether they transform clouds into gods. That is what people are told; it is fantasy, daydreaming. You can still see for yourself today how myths arise. Legends are still alive today. For example, in various regions there is the legend of the midday woman. It tells us that if any country folk remain in the fields at midday instead of interrupting their work and going home, the midday woman comes and asks them questions. If they cannot answer her by a certain hour, she strangles them. Who would not see in this the image of a dream that befalls people when they lie in the heat of the sun? The dream is the last remnant of the consciousness of that time. Here we see how, even today, legends arise from dreams.

[ 23 ] This is how all the Germanic legends and myths that have come down to us originated. For the most part, these are still legends and myths that arose among the last remnants of the Atlanteans. This is how the old Germanic man remembered the time when his ancestors lived in the West—they did not come from the East—how they moved eastward at the time when the mists of the Atlantic mist land thickened and formed the floods known as the Flood, how the air became clear and today's clear daytime consciousness was formed. The old German looked back at the misty land, at Nifelheim, and said: We have advanced from the old Nifelheim to the present world. But there are certain spiritual beings who have remained behind at the spiritual level that was right at that time; these are the ones who, with all their understanding, have preserved the character and nature of the old Niflheim, the home of the Nibelungs, who have entered our time and become “spirits” because they no longer have physical bodies. We have wonderful interweavings before us. Nowhere here must we proceed pedantically. We must take into account how fantasy and clairvoyance, legend and fact are interwoven. We must not brush away the dew that they must have. One remembers how the mists sank down, and there came the idea that these mists sank down and formed the rivers in the north of central Europe. In the waters of the Rhine, something like remnants of the mists of ancient Atlantis could be seen flowing down. How did it continue? Man gained wisdom from the trickling of the springs. This was a wisdom that was shared, the communal element that excluded egoism. Gold is now an ancient symbol of wisdom. This gold was brought over from ancient Niflheim. What became of this gold? It became the possession of the human ego. What had previously been communal wisdom whispered by nature was now wisdom flowing from human judgment, from the ego, which man faced as an independent being. Now man formed a “ring” around himself. Through this ring, the old brotherhood of men became embroiled in a struggle among themselves. Wisdom as a communal element lived in the great sagas of earlier times in the waters, the last remnant in the Rhine. This wisdom was sunk into it.

[ 24 ] But humans developed an egoistic consciousness. Even the Nibelungs had to develop an ego consciousness. They seized what was communal and formed the ring that surrounds them as a ring of egoism. Here we see – in somewhat sketchy language – how true facts flow into the world of fantasy and how gold, the remnant of ancient wisdom that has passed through the mist, how the wise ego constructs the ring around itself, giving rise to the struggle for existence. This is the deeper foundation of the myth of the Nibelungen hoard.

[ 25 ] This is something that Richard Wagner was able to express in the great dramatic action and in the tones of his music, which express an invisible world behind the visible one. In this way, he recreated the Nibelungen myth in a modern form and gave us this entire development in his Nibelungen poetry. We feel how the new gods who rule humanity have found their transition from the old gods.

[ 26 ] Let us imagine ourselves back in ancient Atlantis: misty clouds, where wisdom spoke from all things. There must be powers ruling among humans, who are no longer guided by common wisdom, but by contracts and commandments, which even the gods themselves have laid down in contracts. This stems from a consciousness full of primordial wisdom. Where the new god Wotan stands in an important position, where Fafner is to return Freia, where Wotan himself is afflicted by ego-wisdom, by the ring, there the ancient, sacred consciousness of humanity once again appeared before him, the earth consciousness that enveloped people when Atlantis was still alive. In Erda, this consciousness of that time, in which everything was embedded, is described to us: their sleep is dreaming, their dreaming is thinking, their thinking is ruling knowledge. There is a cosmological truth in this. This wisdom is in everything, has created everything. It lives in the source, rustles in the leaves, blows in the wind. There it finds the human ego within itself. There it was an all-encompassing consciousness from which all individual consciousness arose: ruling knowledge. The ancient clairvoyance was a reflection of this ruling knowledge. Man was not enclosed in his skin. Consciousness permeated everything. One could not say that the ego-consciousness was here or there—it was embedded in everything. This is wonderfully hinted at in Wagner's intuition:

You know
What lies in the depths,
What interweaves mountain and valley,
Air and water,
Where beings are,
Your breath blows;
Where minds ponder,
Your mind adheres:
Everything, they say,
Is known to you.

[ 27 ] Erda knows everything through this consciousness. And so we can see step by step everywhere how what Wagner took from his intuition and incorporated into the Nibelungen myth appears to us like an imprint of the wisdom of the primeval world.

[ 28 ] Let us place ourselves here—once again, it must be repeated that Richard Wagner himself did not accomplish this consciously—at the moment of transition from the old development to the new. Over in Atlantis, there was a sense of brotherhood. This was followed by the transition to ego-consciousness, the impact of independence on human nature. And now let us place ourselves at the beginning of “The Rhine Gold.” Do we not hear the impact of ego-consciousness in the first notes, in the long chord in E-flat major? And do we not hear how this special consciousness emerges from the general consciousness? Thus we might find motif after motif enlivened by Wagner's own realization that the musical tones reveal a world behind the appearances of the world, that he himself, through his practice, uses the instruments as the primordial organs of nature. I do not wish to present Richard Wagner to you as a man who embodied vague mysticism. His artistic work is immersed in the essence of clear mysticism.

[ 29 ] When we move from this poem to another, to “Lohengrin,” how does the influence of mysticism appear to us? Lohengrin is the messenger of the Holy Grail, who comes from the place of the initiates, where higher wisdom reigns. The Lohengrin legend ties in with the legends we encounter everywhere, which indicate the involvement of the initiated in ordinary human existence. At important points in development, we are everywhere referred to the legend, which is deeper than history. We are made aware of how such forces of the initiated intervene in the course of history. There is no sequence of external facts.

[ 30 ] That was an important time, that transition from general consciousness to individual consciousness. The Lohengrin myth seeks to characterize this upheaval. We see how it is a time when a new spirit is breaking free from the old. Two spirits of the times stand opposed to each other. They are represented in the two women who are in conflict. Elsa, the feminine, always represents the soul striving for the highest. The banal interpretations of Goethe's words in the “Chorus mysticus” do not apply here: “The eternally feminine draws us upward”; this is written from the depths of mysticism. The soul must allow itself to be fertilized by the great events through which new principles enter into development. What enters is represented in the initiates who come from important places. Here, spiritual science speaks of advanced individualities. One is always asked: Why do they not show themselves? — If they showed themselves, they would not be recognized. They would be asked about their ordinary bourgeois names and status. But for those who work from the spiritual worlds, this is the most insignificant thing. For he who, as an initiate, has to proclaim the secrets, is so far above what birth, name, status, and profession are that it is nonsense to ask him about them. When such questions are put to him, the understanding of his profound mission is so far removed that separation must occur.

Never ask me,
Nor seek to know,
From whence I came.
Nor how my name and nature.

[ 31 ] These words of Lohengrin could be spoken by anyone who does not live alone in the ordinary world when asked about their name and status. This is one of the notes struck in “Lohengrin,” where true, clear mysticism shines into the musical-dramatic life.

[ 32 ] Humanity possesses a deep secret, a mystery that reigns in the world. It is symbolically represented in a myth that must be deeply understood: when the spirit that fell away from the spirits guiding humanity at the beginning of our development, when Lucifer fell, a stone fell from his crown, and from this a bowl was formed, the cup from which Christ Jesus took the Last Supper with his disciples, the cup in which the blood was collected at Golgotha by Joseph of Arimathea, who brought it to the West. After many wanderings, the cup came into the hands of Titurel, through whom the Grail Castle was founded. He kept it together with the holy lance of love. Legend has it that all who look into the bowl receive eternity within themselves.

[ 33 ] Let us summarize once more the whole mystery of this myth: a harmony with the progress of human development, as imagined by those who know the secret of the Grail. They say: When human development began on earth, all love was still bound to blood. It was blood ties that bound people together. We find small tribes and find that close marriages prevail in them. Only later did distant marriages come about. The point in time when it became permissible to marry outside the tribe marks an important transition in the life of every people.

[ 34 ] This awareness has been preserved in legends and myths. So, at first, love was bound to blood ties; then the circles within which people married became wider and wider. This is one stream of development: love bound to the equality and community of flesh and blood. Then another principle becomes decisive, one that instills independence. In those ancient times that preceded Christianity, according to the Knights of the Holy Grail, there were two currents: the love of blood brotherhood and the principle of freedom, that which reigns in man as independence, as Lucifer, the power of Yahweh, whose name means: I am who I am. With Christianity, a love independent of blood brotherhood was to be brought into the world. This is how Christ's saying is to be understood: “Whoever does not renounce father and mother cannot be my disciple.” - This means: Whoever cannot replace a love that is bound to flesh and blood with universal human love, which goes from soul to soul, from person to person, and which must gradually develop, cannot be my disciple.

[ 35 ] Thus we see that the shell falls from Lucifer's crown. It connects the Lucifer principle with the Christ principle. In this realization, the Knights of the Grail receive the great power that permeates them with I-life. We find this meaning in the legend of the Holy Grail. And the following was made clear to those who were disciples of the Holy Grail. I will present in simple dialogue form what was gradually made clear to the disciples of the Grail through long exercises. Some will say that this is unbelievable. But the truth is like that of the envoys of civilized states to the courts of barbarians, as Voltaire recounts: they must first endure unworthy treatment before they are recognized.

[ 36 ] So the Grail student was told: Look at the plant. You cannot compare the flower with the human head; with its male and female reproductive organs, it corresponds to the sexual side of the human being. The root corresponds to the head. Darwin already correctly pointed out in a comparison that the root corresponds to the human head. Man is the inverted plant: he has completed the full turn. Chastely, the plant stretches its calyx toward the light, absorbing the rays, the holy spear of love, receiving the pure kiss under which the fruit is formed. The turn is half complete in the animal. The plant burrows its head into the earth, the animal has a horizontal spine, and man walks upright, looking upward (this is drawn on the board). These three, joined together, form the cross. Look, the disciple was told, how Plato proclaims the truth when he says that the world soul lies stretched out, crucified on the body of the world. The world soul, the soul that passes through plants, animals, and humans, is found in the bodies that represent the cross. That is the original meaning of the cross. Everything else is mere talk.

[ 37 ] What caused man to bring about this reversal? When we look at plants, we see that, for the true mystic, plants have the same state of consciousness as sleeping humans. When he sleeps, man has the value of a plant. Man has attained his present consciousness by permeating the pure, chaste plant body with desire, with the body of passion. In this way, he has risen in a certain sense to self-consciousness, but he has paid for this by permeating the pure plant substance with desires and instincts. And now a future state of man was painted before the student, a state in which man will have retained his clear consciousness but will have returned, purified, to pure substance like the plant. He will then have regained his pure, chaste nature. The reproductive organs will be transformed. In the spirit of the Grail Knight, it was imagined that the human beings of the future would have organs that would serve reproduction in such a way that they would not be permeated by desire, but would be pure and chaste like the calyx of a plant that turns toward the spear of love, the ray of the sun. Thus will the ideal of the Grail be realized, where man, in pure chastity, just like the plant, will bring forth his own kind, where he will again create his own image in the higher, pure chalice, when man becomes a creator in the spirit. This real ideal was called the Holy Grail, the transformed reproductive organs of man, which produce man as pure and chaste as today the larynx produces the word, which causes the waves of air.

[ 38 ] And now let us try to show how this great ideal lived on in Richard Wagner's mind. It was in 1857, on Good Friday, when he stood on the balcony of the garden house of Mrs. Wesendonck's villa and looked out at the first plants sprouting. He recorded this memorable moment. In the sprouting of the young plants, he sensed the whole mystery of the Holy Grail, the birth of everything connected with the idea of the Holy Grail. He sensed this in connection with Good Friday. A wonderful mood came over him. Then the first thought of his Parsifal sprang up in him. Much has happened in the time that followed. But the feeling remained. From it he formed the figure of his Parsifal, that figure in which feeling is elevated to knowledge, where one becomes knowing through empathy, “knowing through compassion.” And the whole development of how human nature is wounded by the impure lance—this confronts us in the mystery of Amfortas. We see how the mystical secret of the Holy Grail is illuminated.

[ 39 ] One must not touch such things with coarse hands. One must follow the whole feeling and place the concepts in their totality before the soul. Thus we see everywhere how Richard Wagner, perhaps not thinking mystically, but as an artist and human being, presented everything he did in a mystical way. That is what matters.

[ 40 ] In spiritual science, we should not receive a theory, but something that becomes immediate life. Richard Wagner clearly understood his mission in this sense, so clearly, so mystically, that he could say: “An art such as that which lives in me as an ideal must be a divine service.” He felt the convergence of the three currents and wanted to be a messenger of their interaction. From his mystical insight emerges what has lived as a mystically clear feeling in all great masters and what we feel when we relate the great masters to mysticism. Goethe felt it. Then man becomes healthy again, feels something of what enables him to overcome his self when he lives through what is written in the “Secrets”:

rom the power that binds all beings,
the human being who overcomes himself is freed.

[ 41 ] When this mood of detachment from the ego, of living into the secrets of the world, pulsates through all forces, then the human being is a mystic in all areas. Whether outwardly religious, scientific, or artistic, he struggles to achieve unity in the sense of a unified human nature. This is what Goethe wanted to express as the secret of every whole human being when he summed up his own soul's secret in the words:

He who possesses science and art also possesses religion.
He who does not possess these two, let him have religion.