The Rudolf Steiner Archive

14. Symbolism and Imagination in Relation to the Mystery of “The Trial of the Soul”

[ 1 ] Today we will continue with the second of our mystery plays, The Trial of the Soul.

[ 2 ] You will have seen that all these descriptions—but especially The Trial of the Soul—represent an attempt to bring dramatic processes into alignment with our spiritual-scientific worldview. In this “Trial of the Soul” in particular, an attempt has been made to realistically portray the idea of reincarnation as it works its way into the life of the human soul. I need hardly point out that the events in “The Trial of the Soul” are not purely fictional, but in a certain sense fully correspond to observations of occult life, so that the depiction is, in a certain sense, entirely realistic. What I would like to address first this evening is the fact that it has become necessary to create a kind of transition from Capesius’s life up to now to his immersion into a past life, into a time in which he himself underwent a previous incarnation.

[ 3 ] Since this “Examination of the Soul” was completed, I have often asked myself what could constitute for Capesius the transition from his life in a world in which he has known only—albeit in a spiritual way—what is offered by external sensory perception and that perception of the world which is bound to the instrument of the brain; what, I mean, what could form the transition for him from such a world into the world into which he then immerses himself, a world that can only be accessed through the occult senses? I have often asked myself why the fairy tale with the three figures must form such a transition for Capesius. For, of course, the fairy tale is not placed here out of any intellectual concept or any deliberation, but because the imagination has produced it thus. At most, one can ask afterward why such a fairy tale became necessary? And in connection with the “Examination of the Soul,” certain perspectives arose for me that seem illuminating to me regarding fairy-tale poetry in general and poetry in the context of the anthroposophical worldview in particular.

[ 4 ] Once a person actually incorporates into their own life the fact expressed in the division of the soul into the soul of sensation, the soul of understanding or feeling, and the soul of consciousness, certain mysteries of sensation will arise for them in a purely elemental, emotional way with regard to their position and their relationship to the world; puzzles that cannot be articulated at all in our ordinary language and our ordinary conceptual forms, for the simple reason that we live today in an age that is too intellectualistic to express, through words and all that is possible through words, those subtle relationships that arise between the three soul components. This is much more possible if one chooses a medium through which the soul’s relationship to the world itself appears as ambiguous and yet as quite definite and distinct. What runs through the entire “Trial of the Soul” as a relationship of all events to what is expressed in the three figures of Philia, Astrid, and Luna required an expression not in sharp contours, yet one that, through certain spiritual forces, possesses something capable of making the human relationship to the world vivid. And this could be conveyed in no other way than by showing how the telling of this fairy tale of the three figures evokes in Capesius’s soul a very specific urge, a very specific process that ripens him to now descend into those worlds that are only now beginning once again to become real, actual worlds for human beings.

[ 5 ] We will now begin by presenting this fairy tale so that our discussion can then build upon it.

Once upon a time there was a boy,
Who grew up as the only child of poor foresters
In the solitude of the forest. —
Apart from his parents,
He knew very few people.
He was of frail build:
His skin was almost translucent.
One could gaze long into his eyes;
They held the deepest wonders of the spirit.
And though few people
Entered the boy’s circle of life,
He lacked no friends.
When in the nearby mountains
Golden sunlight glowed,
Then the boy’s pensive eye
The gold of the spirit into his soul:
And the essence of his heart,
It became like the morning sun.
But when through dark clouds
The morning sun’s ray did not penetrate
And a gloomy mood covered all the mountains,
Then the boy’s eye grew dim
And his heart became melancholy—.
Thus he was wholly devoted
To the spiritual fabric of his small world,
Which he felt no more alien to his being
Than the limbs of his own body.
For to him, too, were friends
The trees of the forest and the flowers;
Spiritual beings spoke from the crowns,
The calyxes and the treetops—,
He could understand their murmuring—.
Wonders of secret worlds
Revealed themselves to the boy,
When his soul conversed
With that which is merely lifeless
To most people.
And often, worried, his parents missed him in the evening
Their beloved son. —
He was then in a nearby place,
Where a spring gushed from the rocks
And, atomizing a thousandfold,
The water droplets splashed over stones.
When the silver glow of moonlight
In a magical play of sparkling colors
Was reflected in the stream of water droplets,
Then the boy could linger for hours
By the rocky spring.
And forms, ghostly in shape,
Arose before the boy’s gaze
In the swirling water and the shimmering moonlight.
They became three images of women,
Who spoke to him of those things,
Toward which his soul’s desire was directed. —
And when, on a mild summer night
The boy sat again by the spring,
One of the women gathered many thousands of specks
Of the colorful water-drop essence
And handed them to the second woman.
She fashioned from the droplet specks
A silver-shining chalice
And handed it to the third woman.
She filled it with the silver light of the moon
And thus gave it to the boy.
He had seen all this
With his boyish, clairvoyant gaze. —
He dreamed that night,
Which followed the experience,
How he was robbed of the chalice
By a wild dragon.
After that night, that boy
Experienced the spring miracle only three more times.
Then the women stayed away from him,
Even when the boy sat pondering
By the rocky spring in the silver moonlight.
And when three hundred and sixty weeks
Had passed for the third time,
The boy had long since become a man
And had moved from his parents’ home and the forest glade
To a foreign city.
There he pondered one evening,
Tired from hard work,
What life might yet bring him.
Suddenly the boy felt
Transported back to his rocky spring;
And once again he could see the water nymphs.
And this time hear them speak.
The first one said to him:
Remember me at all times,
When you feel lonely in life.
I draw the gaze of the human soul
To the far reaches of the atmosphere and the vastness of the stars,
And to whoever wishes to feel me,
I shall offer the elixir of hope for life
From my wondrous cup. —
And the second one also spoke:
Do not forget me in moments
That threaten your courage to live.
I guide the impulses of the human heart
Into the depths of the soul and upon the heights of the spirit.
And whoever seeks strength from me,
To them I forge the strength of faith in life
With my magic hammer. —
The third spoke thus:
Lift your spirit’s eye to me,
When life’s riddles assail you.
I weave the threads of thought
In life’s labyrinths and in the depths of the soul,
and whoever places trust in me,
For them I weave the rays of love for life
On my wondrous loom. — — —
He dreamed that night,
Which followed the experience,
The man dreamed that a wild dragon
Crept in circles around him
And could not approach him:
He was protected from that dragon
By the beings he had once seen at the rock spring
And who had journeyed from his homeland
With him to this foreign place.

[ 6 ] The fairy-tale atmosphere is, it seems to me, in fact something that quite justifiably interposes itself between the outer world and all that which human beings once beheld in the spiritual worlds during the ancient era of original human clairvoyance—and which they can still behold today if they are able to rise to the spiritual worlds, for instance through special, exceptional gifts or through properly trained clairvoyance. Between this world and the world of external reality, of the intellect, and of the senses, the world of the fairy tale is perhaps the most legitimate intermediary. It seems necessary to me to find some explanation for the entire position of the fairy tale and the fairy-tale atmosphere between these worlds. Now, it is extraordinarily difficult to truly bridge the gap between these two realms. But then it occurred to me that it could be built through a fairy tale itself. And better than any theoretical explanation, a very simple fairy tale seems to me to truly build this bridge, one that could be told something like this:

[ 7 ] Once upon a time, there was a poor young man. He had a clever cat. And the clever cat helped the poor lad, who had nothing but her, to acquire a great estate. She arranged for word to reach the king that the poor lad possessed a vast, beautiful, and wondrous estate that even a king might view with curiosity. And the clever cat managed to get the king to set out and travel through all sorts of most wondrous regions. Everywhere, thanks to the clever cat’s scheming, the king was led to believe that the vast estate of fields and all manner of structures of the most wondrous kind belonged to this young man. Finally, the king also came upon a large, enchanted castle. But he arrived a little late, given the circumstances of the fairy tale. For the time had already come when the great giant or troll was returning home from his travels around the world and wanted to enter the palace that actually belonged to him. The king was just inside the palace and wanted to look at all the magical and wondrous things. So the clever cat lay down in front of the door so that the king would not realize that all of this belonged to the giant, the troll. As the giant returned home toward morning, the cat began to tell the giant a story, making it clear to him that he had to listen to it. And she told him at great length how the farmer plows his field, how he fertilizes his land, how he must then plow it again, how he then fetches the seeds he intends to scatter in the field, how he then sows the seeds in the field. In short, she told him such a long story that morning came and the sun rose. And then the clever cat said that now the giant, who had never yet seen the golden maiden in the east, must stay and look at the golden maiden, must look at the sun. But—such is the law to which giants are subject—when the giant turned around and looked at the sun, he burst into pieces. And the result was that, because the giant had been held back, the palace had indeed fallen to the poor lad. And not only did he have, through the clever cat’s machinations, all the possessions she had previously promised him, but he now truly owned the giant’s palace and everything that went with it.

[ 8 ] One might say: In fact, one really must find this small, unassuming fairy tale extraordinarily significant—one might even say for the global history of the fairy-tale mood in our time. For truly, when we consider humanity in its development on Earth, among all the people who have developed on Earth, or of all the incarnations through which human beings have passed, or among the souls currently incarnated, most are what one might compare to the poor fellow. Yes, in our present time, compared to other eras, we are truly the poor fellow and have nothing but a clever cat. But we certainly do have the clever cat. For the clever cat is precisely our mind, our intellect. And what humanity currently possesses through its senses, what it has of the external world through the mind bound to the brain, is truly, in relation to the entire cosmic world, to all that humanity has gone through during the Saturn, Sun, and Moon eras, something quite pitiful. We are all, in essence, that poor fellow, and we have only our mind, which can dress itself up a little to claim a certain imaginary possession for us. In short, in our present situation we are the poor fellow, and we have the clever cat. But we are not merely the poor fellow. We are that in our consciousness. Our self, however, is rooted in the hidden depths of the soul’s life. These hidden depths of the soul’s life are connected to countless worlds and countless cosmic events. All of these play a part in human life. Only, the human being of the present has become a poor fellow and knows nothing of all this anymore; at most, he can have the clever cat—through philosophy—explain all sorts of things to him about the meaning and significance of what he sees with his eyes or perceives with his other senses. And when people today do wish to speak of something that transcends the sensory world, when they wish to attain something that transcends the sensory world, they do so—and have been doing so for many centuries—through art and poetry.

[ 9 ] But it is precisely our own time—this transitional period, so remarkable in so many ways—that truly shows us how little humanity can transcend the mood of that poor fellow, even if it can introduce poetry and art into the present world of the senses, just as it is given to us. For in our time, people, driven by a certain disbelief in higher art and higher poetry, have turned toward naturalism, toward a purely external rendering of external reality. And who would deny that our time has something of that mood which, when reality is depicted in the splendor of art and poetry, still sighs again and again: “Ah, all this is but illusion; none of it is truth.” — How much of such a mood is there in our time? So that, in fact, the king within the human being, who arises from the spiritual world, is in great need of persuasion by the clever cat, by the intellect given to modern man, to realize how that which grows and awakens in the imagination through art is, in a certain sense, a true possession of humanity. First, the human being—the king within—is persuaded. But that is not really of much use; it is only good for a certain while. Then, at a certain time—we are now living precisely at the starting point of this time—the necessity arises for humanity to find access once more to the higher, spiritual world, to the true spiritual realm. It is approaching humanity, and everywhere today one can sense how this urge is coming upon people to ascend once more into the spheres of the spiritual world.

[ 10 ] A certain transition must take place. And there is hardly any other way to effect this transition more easily than through a meaningful revival of the fairy-tale spirit. The fairy-tale atmosphere truly possesses, purely from an external standpoint, that which makes it easiest for people of the present day to prepare their souls for the experience of such events that shine forth from higher, supersensory worlds. It is precisely the way in which the fairy tale presents itself to us without pretension—and initially makes no claim to be a reflection of external reality in any way—but rather how the fairy tale boldly sets itself above all the external laws of external reality, that gives the fairy tale the power to prepare the human soul for the rediscovery of the higher, spiritual world. The crude belief in the spiritual world that existed in ancient times—achieved because people were still at a more primitive stage and possessed a certain clairvoyance in their souls—must shatter like the giant Troll before external reality. One can only stave it off through the clever cat questions and the cat tales that are spun out over external reality. Certainly, one can spin such clever cat tales at length and show how, here and there, reality necessitates that one take refuge in spiritual explanations. One can elaborate at length in broad philosophy on how, here and there, certain questions can only be answered by referring to the spiritual world. In this way, one retains something like a memento from ancient times. One holds the giant at bay for a while through what has come down from ancient times. But in the face of the clear language of reality, what has remained from ancient times will not be able to stand; it bursts like the giant in the face of the rising sun. But one must first be familiar with this mood, the bursting of the giant. And here we touch upon something through which the psychology of the fairy tale can be revealed in a certain way. I cannot analyze these things theoretically; I can only analyze the psychological aspect of the fairy tale through soul contemplation, and I would like to say the following on this subject.

[ 11 ] Imagine, for a moment, that various forms from the spiritual world were to appear before a soul in vivid imagination, just as we have recently sketched out in our lectures on Pneumatosophy. Certainly, in the field of anthroposophy, we recount much from the spiritual worlds. This must first stand vividly before any soul. But not much would come of the external presentation if one were to depict only what thrusts itself before the soul—even before the clairvoyant soul. A strange disharmony arises in the soul, not only when one is to weave such truths—as have been expounded here in our branch over the past three hours regarding the Saturn, Sun, and Moon states—into the ghastly webs of present-day thought. There one feels constricted on all sides in relation to the things that stand before the soul. And what must capture the mysteries of the higher worlds seems quite troll-like within the human being. One is actually a clumsy, troll-like giant when one wants to capture the forms of the spiritual world. And in the light of day, one must then, in a certain sense, voluntarily let these forms burst open to adapt them to the mood of the present; one must, so to speak, voluntarily let them burst open clairvoyantly against external reality, though one can retain something. One can retain what the poor fellow retains. What can become the possession of the spiritual world for our immediate present soul is the transformation—but the proper transformation—of the gigantic content of the imaginative world into the ambiguity of a fairy-tale mood. Then this human soul truly feels like the king who is led to what at first does not belong to this soul at all, what does not belong to the poor lad’s soul at all. But it comes into this possession through the fact that the gigantic giant bursts, that one abandons the imaginative world in the face of reality and brings it into the palace that the imagination can build. For while in the old days the imagination of human beings—the imagination of the poor fellow—was nourished by the imaginative world, today it can no longer do so in light of the stage of development our soul has reached. But nevertheless, if one first abandons the entire imaginative world and compresses the whole into the ambiguous fairy-tale atmosphere that does not adhere to external reality, then something may remain for us in the imagination of the fairy-tale play that is a deep, deep truth. That is to say, the poor lad, who really has nothing but the cat—that is, the wise mind—can, precisely within the fairy-tale atmosphere, possess what he needs for the present, so that his soul may be educated to enter the spiritual worlds in a new way.

[ 12 ] It therefore seems to me to be an accurate psychological portrayal of Capesius, who has grown so completely out of the present-day world of ideas that he enters the world of fairy tales from a more spiritualized conception of the present world, a world that is to open up to him as something new, as a real connection to the occult world. Thus, something like a fairy tale must be placed at the point that is to form the transition between Capesius’s standing in the world of external reality and the world into which he is to immerse himself in order to see himself in a previous incarnation.

[ 13 ] What I have just told you, so to speak, purely as a personal insight—as something that occurred to me as the reason why, at that particular time, the necessary inspiration arose to place this fairy tale in this spot—corresponds to what we might call, roughly speaking, the history of the origin of fairy tales in general within human development. It corresponds in an excellent way to the very nature of how fairy tales arose among humanity. When we look back at the earlier times of human development, we find everywhere among the peoples of primeval times a certain primitive clairvoyance, a looking into the spiritual world. We must therefore not only distinguish in those times between the two alternating states of waking and sleeping, or at most, as a chaotic transitional state, dreaming, but we must also assume a transitional state between waking and sleeping among the ancient peoples, which enabled these people not in a dreamlike way, but by looking into a reality, to live with spiritual existence. Modern human beings are present in the world with their consciousness during the waking day, but only with their sensory consciousness and their intellect. They have become as poor as the poor lad who has nothing but the clever cat. Yet they can also be in the spiritual world, namely at night. But then they are asleep; they have no awareness of the spiritual worlds. Between these two states, primitive man still had a third, which conjured up something before his soul like mighty images. He then lived in what the clairvoyant, who has attained the art of clairvoyance, also possesses, only that he has it not in a dreamlike state and not in chaos, but in a real world. Yet the ancient human was able to encompass his imaginings with clear consciousness. In these three states did the primitive human live. And when he felt his soul expanding out into the spiritual universe, connected everywhere with spiritual beings of other kinds, bordering on the hierarchies, on the spiritual beings who live in the elements—in earth, water, air, and fire—when he felt his being expand beyond the narrow limits of his existence, then he felt at home in such intermediate states as the giant, who, however, always burst when the sun rose and he had to pass into the waking state.

[ 14 ] These descriptions, in fact, are not at all unrealistic. Today, when one no longer feels the full weight of words, one might think that “bursting” is merely a thoughtless word thrown in, just as one might string one word after another. But “bursting” figuratively corresponds to a kind of reality. For the ancient person, it was as if they felt their being expanding into a whole sum of worlds, and when the golden maiden approached in the morning and their eye had to adjust to external reality, then the touch of external reality seemed to them like something that drove them apart, that shattered what they had previously seen, that shattered what they had previously been. In a certain sense, this actually corresponds to a kind of fact.

[ 15 ] But that which is active within the human being—that which is the true king of human nature—could not be prevented from bringing something into the world of ordinary reality from the world in which the soul is truly rooted. And what was brought in there is precisely the projection, the shadow image of what has been experienced into our world; it is the world of imagination, of real imagination—not the fantastical kind that simply patches together the scraps of life, but real imagination, which has its seat within the soul and is driven from within to all the details of creation. Naturalistic fantasy would take precisely the opposite path from that which is the path of real imagination. Naturalistic fantasy would pick up a motif here and there, would seek the models for every art form in external reality as well, and would piece together these scraps of reality in the manner produced by a combinatorial imagination, such as exists solely during periods of artistic decline. In that imagination, which is a shadow image of the imagination, something is at work that has neither this nor that individual form, that initially does not know in external forms what it is to create, where the material urges from within toward creation. Then, like a darkening of the light process, there arises that which, devotedly as pictorially recreating art, inclines toward real reality. It is precisely the opposite process to that which is so frequently observed in today’s artistic creation. From a center, everything flows into this fantasy, which stands as a spiritual reality—initially an imaginative reality—behind our sensory reality. And what comes into being there is a fantasy reality. But it is in fact that which can legitimately grow into our reality from the spiritual worlds, which can, so to speak, become the legitimate possession of the poor fellow—that is, of the present-day human being, who is confined to the poverty of the external sensory world. And of all forms of literature, the fairy tale is the least bound to external reality. Let us turn to the saga, the myth, the legend: everywhere we find that the features which follow only supersensible laws are permeated in saga and myth by the laws of real reality, because one moves from the spiritual out into the external world, and that the sources, which are historical sources or are in some way connected with history, are now related to the historical figure. Only the fairy tale cannot be shaped at all like real figures; it operates entirely freely in relation to real figures. It can use everything that exists in reality in any way it chooses, and has done so. Therefore, the fairy tale is the purest offshoot of ancient primitive clairvoyance; it is something like a down payment for the clairvoyance of the past. The sober-minded person, the pedant, who in everything arrives only at a professorial view of existence, may not perceive this; he need not perceive it, for the simple reason that he always asks of every truth: How does it correspond to all reality?

[ 16 ] A figure like Capesius strives above all else for truth. He cannot be satisfied with the question: How does a truth correspond to reality? — For he asks himself: Is a truth dismissed simply because one says it represents something that corresponds to the external world? — Things can be true and true and true, and can be right and right and right, and could have just as much connection to reality as the truth of that village boy carrying bread rolls, who calculated quite correctly, but his calculation had no connection to reality because he calculated that he would only get five rolls for his ten kreuzers. The bread boy did the same as the one who philosophizes about reality. But in that very village, you got a slap for five rolls—that is something no philosophy, no logic can account for; that is a reality. So for Capesius, the question simply does not arise: How does one idea or another, one concept or another, correspond to reality? — But Capesius first asked: What does the human soul experience in connection with any concept it first forms? — Therefore, the human soul experiences, in connection with everything that can only be external reality, a withering, a drying up, a tendency toward continual dying in the soul. That is why Capesius needs the refreshment provided by Mrs. Felicia’s fairy tales; he needs precisely that which, in the sense of external reality, needs least to be true—a content that is real but need not be true in the ordinary sense. This content prepares him to find the path into the occult world.

[ 17 ] In fairy tales, something has remained for humanity that lives on as a descendant of what people once experienced through ancient clairvoyance, in a form that is legitimate precisely because no one whose soul is touched by the fairy tale claims that its features correspond to external reality. And in the fairy-tale imagination, the poor boy, who otherwise has only the clever cat, has a palace that extends into immediate reality. That is why the fairy tale can be wonderful spiritual nourishment for every age. When we tell children the appropriate fairy tales, we stimulate the child’s soul in such a way that it is not merely introduced to reality in a manner that keeps it perpetually fixated on some concept that corresponds to external reality. For such a relationship to reality withers and desolates the soul; on the other hand, the soul is kept alive and fresh, so that it permeates the entire human being, when it feels what is real in the higher sense within the lawful forms of fairy-tale images, which nevertheless lift the soul entirely above the external world. A person becomes more vigorous in life and grasps life more vividly when fairy tales have worked upon their soul in childhood.

[ 18 ] For Capesius, fairy tales are the catalysts for imaginative insight. It is not what they contain or what they convey, but rather how they unfold—how one sequence follows another—that stirs and weaves within his soul. One sequence causes certain soul forces to strive upward, another causes others to strive downward, and yet others cause the upward and downward striving to be crossed. This sets his soul in motion; this draws out of his soul that which ultimately enables him to look into the spiritual world. For many, the fairy tale can be the most stimulating thing of all. That is why, in the fairy tales that originated in earlier times, we always find something that shows how elements of the old clairvoyant consciousness play into the fairy-tale motifs. The first fairy tales did not come into being because someone made them up; only the theories of today’s fairy-tale scholars, who explain the fairy tales, have come into being in this way. Fairy tales are not invented anywhere; they are the last remnants of the old clairvoyance, which were experienced in dreams by people who still possessed the powers for it. What was seen in dreams was told, just as the fairy tale of Puss in Boots is merely a reworking of the fairy tale I told you today. All fairy tales ultimately existed as the last remnants of the original clairvoyance. Therefore, a true fairy tale can only come into being if—either consciously or unconsciously—the imagination is present in the soul of the fairy-tale writer, projecting itself into the soul; otherwise, it is not genuine. A fairy tale invented at random can never be right. If a true fairy tale still arises here and there today through some person, it arises only because a longing awakens in that person for the ancient times that humanity once lived through. This longing is present; it merely sometimes creeps into the very hidden depths of the soul, and in what a person can consciously create, they often fail to recognize how much arises from the hidden depths of the soul’s life, and how much is distorted solely by what a person can do with their present consciousness.

[ 19 ] I would like to point out here as well that anything that can be cast into poetic form can never, in essence, be based on truth unless it stems from a longing fulfilled for the old clairvoyant insight into the world, or unless it is somehow connected to a new, genuine clairvoyance—one that need not fully manifest itself, but can shine hidden in the depths of the soul and reveal itself only in the depths of the soul. Yet this relationship remains. How many people today still feel the necessity of rhyme? How many people today, when a rhyme occurs, still feel the necessity of rhyme? Today, the bad habit of recitation has even taken hold, whereby one suppresses the rhyme if possible, recites over this form, and takes into account only the meaning—that is, what corresponds to external reality. But this form of poetry, the rhyme, is also closely connected to a stage of language development that existed at a time when the old clairvoyance still had its aftereffects.

[ 20 ] The end rhyme is connected to the peculiar state of the soul that manifests itself after humanity has entered the current stage of development through the culture of the emotional soul or the intellectual soul. Essentially, the period in which the intellectual soul or emotional soul entered into human beings during the fourth post-Atlantean cultural epoch is also the time when, in poetry, the memory of ancient times long past began to dawn, times that still reached back into the old worlds of the imagination. This memory is expressed by regularly giving form to what dawns in the intellectual or emotional soul, in the end-rhyme that finds its primary expression in all that has developed in the fourth post-Atlantean cultural period.

[ 21 ] In contrast, everything into which the culture of the fourth post-Atlantean epoch had sunk experienced a very special renewal through Christianity and the aftereffects of the Mystery of Golgotha; and what this poured itself into was the European feeling soul. Within Europe, the culture of the feeling soul, at a less advanced stage, awaited a higher culture, a culture of the intellectual soul, which was emerging from Central and Southern Europe. This lasted beyond the fourth post-Atlantean cultural epoch, so that what had developed in Central and Southern Europe and in the Near East could enter into what was still the old culture of the feeling soul in Central Europe, and what it absorbed into the strength of will and the energy of will that finds its main expression in the culture of the feeling soul. Thus we see how, in all that is cultural influence from the South, end rhyme becomes quite regular in poetry, and that in the culture of the will, into which Christianity is absorbed, the other rhyme—alliteration—is the proper expression. In the Nordic and Central European alliteration, we sense the rolling will that pours into the culture standing at the height of the fourth post-Atlantean cultural epoch, which is a culture of the intellectual or emotional soul.

[ 22 ] It is curious that poets who, drawing on an innate spiritual power, seek to revive the memory of what the original force was in a particular region, sometimes refer back to the past in a completely disjointed manner. This is what happened with Wilhelm Jordan, who in his Nibelungen sought to revive the old alliterative verse, and who achieved a remarkable effect when he traveled about as a rhapsode seeking to bring this alliterative verse back to life. People didn’t quite know what this was all about, because in our intellectualistic age, modern people know language only as an expression of content; they know only the content of language and not what the feeling soul seeks to express in the initial rhyme, nor what the intellectual soul seeks to express in the final rhyme. The conscious soul can actually no longer use the rhyme in its original form; here, the human being must resort to other means. That is why Miss von Sivers [Marie Steiner] will now present the alliterative verse to us in a short sample here, in order to illustrate how an artist like Wilhelm Jordan sought to work, seeking to renew old conditions.

And the Norns drew near, unseen by anyone,
In a silent dance, circling
Around these betrothed. A gentle breeze,
So thought those intoxicated by love,
Whispering its way in from the hearth;
But down to the world of night, to the depths of Nibelheim,
And up to the clouds, to the inhabitants of Valhalla
Resounded now for ears other than earthly ones
As audible as a sea storm, the song of the Norns:

All is yours
Your salvation as well as your doom,
Your will and your delusions
Your thoughts and your being.
Indeed, chained
Into eternal order
Come the larvae of life
The hosts of illusion;
They draw the circles
They point out the goals
They instill the loathing
They awaken the desire;
Yet yours is the thinking
And as you have become
So shall you turn,
We know the choice.
Our fingers shape
From an eternal store
The thread of life
The individual lot.
We spin and wind
And weave and weave
The tapestry of deeds
At the loom of the world.
Drawn long ago
The warp is ours,
The weft is yours,
The pattern, O man!
But the more beautiful your shuttle
The mighty stitches
Joined into an image

The closer the envy.
Surely the gods grant
That the pure light
May gradually increase
The human measure.
But the night world envies
The growth toward Valhalla
And the depths have a share
In mortal matter.
They mix into the pattern
Forbidden images:
Then faith grows dim
Then the oath fades;
Then the knot is tied,
Confusing the fabric
And swiftly it is cut
By the scissors of guilt.

The sun god lowered
Toward the lap of the fairest
Toward the purest striving
The brightest ray.
Then the tempters sent
The lust for gold,
The deceptive dreams
We knew the choice!
All is yours
Your salvation as well as your doom,
The lots
Steer your heart and its inclination. Your star was rising, Now the Norns’ song beckons it to turn, Envied Siegfried,
The Norns’ song.

So it echoed toward heaven and down to Hela,
Like the roar of the surf, broken on the rocks,
Like the roar of the storm, the song of the Three.
Yet unconscious, swept and entwined by fate,
The hero and Krimhilde held each other close
And exchanged their souls in the sweetest ecstasy]
With lips ablaze with lust and happiness.

[ 23 ] Jordan himself still truly brought out the alliteration in his lectures. This is something that modern people certainly perceive as no longer quite relevant to them. For in order to feel what Wilhelm Jordan presented as a kind of program for what he wanted, one would have to experience the old times in the new ones with such imagination as if one were to perceive, enveloped in all the astral currents that express what was spoken there, precisely what took place in our assembly hall at the Architektenhaus during the general meeting in recent days. And then one would have to perceive what took place in various ways in our impulse of knowledge during those days as the pictorial expression of the realization of a word of Jordan’s. Then one would correctly perceive what he described as a kind of program through which he wanted to evoke once again a mood that existed in the old Germanic world:

... the spring of language....
It needs only guidance to flow more fully and sweetly
With a rushing stream of speech to the very brim
To refill the vessels of antiquity
And to rejuvenate, after a thousand years,
The wondrously powerful, ancient wisdom
Of German poetry.

[ 24 ] But this requires something: an ear capable of perceiving sounds. This, however, is intimately connected with the imaginations of the ancient clairvoyant era, for it is there that the sense of sound still originates. But what is sound? Sound itself is still an imagination, an imaginative conception.

[ 25 ] As long as you say “light” and “air” and mean nothing more by them than “brightness” and “the blowing,” you have no imagination. But the words themselves are imagination. And if one still senses their imaginative power, then one senses in a word—when the “i” predominates, as in the word “light”—a radiant, bright indeterminacy, and in the “u,” as in “air,” something fulfilled and self-fulfilling. And because the ray is a thin fulfillment, while the air is a full fulfillment, alliteration shares a fundamental kinship with the fulfilling. And it is not indifferent whether one combines words that have alliteration or do not, as in “light” and “air,” and it is not indifferent whether one simply combines the names of three brothers, or whether one combines them in such a way that one senses that the will of the world has united them itself, as in Gunther, Gernot, Giselher. There the feeling soul perceived the ancient imagination in alliteration.

[ 26 ] And in the end rhyme, the soul of the mind would recognize itself in the old imagination. Therefore, when language is brought to life, that which lingers in the soul through language can even instill certain imaginations into the dream, so that a person can bring into the dream much of what also appears to clairvoyance as a true characteristic, for example, of the elements. It is not always so, but for example with the words “light” and “air,” something arises which, when felt and working into the dream, may under certain circumstances cause something to spring up in the dream imagination itself that can lead to the characteristics of the elements in question, light and air. Only then will human beings recognize the various mysteries of language, when language is traced back to its origin—namely, when it is traced back to imaginative perception itself. For language certainly originates from that age in which human beings were not yet the poor wretches they are today, nor did they possess the cunning of a fox, but rather still lived, in a certain sense, alongside the giant of the imagination and sensed, from the giant’s limbs, that which has sunk into sound as audible imagination. When the sound is grasped by the imagination, pours itself into it to fill it as a shell, then it becomes the sound, the real sound.

[ 27 ] These are things I wanted to share with you today in a very unpretentious and disjointed way. They are meant to show you how, in a certain sense, we must revive what humanity has lost and what has been preserved into our time, but which must be regained—as Capesius does—so that humanity can then grow into the age that lies ahead of us, and in which it can once again participate in the higher worlds.