The Rudolf Steiner Archive

Goethe is one of those minds in world history that have always inspired a very special response in observers. If you approach a poem or any other of Goethe's works, regardless of which one – I emphasize that this also applies to Goethe's so-called scientific writings – at any age, you will find beauty and depth, wisdom and art in abundance in all of his works. You will encounter satisfaction from reading or any other kind of contemplation. If, perhaps after years, you approach the same work of Goethe, having matured in the meantime, having come to know the world and people yourself, you will discover that when you first approached Goethe's work, you overlooked a great deal in it, that you were unable to recognize the abundance of wisdom, beauty, depth and truth in Goethe's works. This is the case with all great and significant people in world history. And one certainly comes to know the actual significance of the truly leading spirits precisely from the circumstance that, when one approaches them, one discovers something new in them again and again, depending on the degree of spiritual maturity that one has attained. And then there is the added fact that these discoveries, so to speak, never reach an end in human life. With Goethe, if we study his truly fundamental works from five to five years, we discover something new every five years, provided that we ourselves continue to develop and do not remain at the level we have once attained. We see into an almost unfathomable depth when we begin to understand Goethe's work.

This is how it is with Goethe's “Faust”. Anyone who has seriously approached Goethe's “Faust” will be able to say, in a completely different sense than is often claimed, that Goethe's “Faust” really does contain a kind of modern gospel. If the statement that a kind of modern gospel is contained in Goethe's Faust is justified, then the statement that the little-known poem, the so-called Fairy Tale of the Green Snake and the Beautiful Lily contains Goethe's apocalypse, Goethe's secret revelation, is equally justified.

This fairy tale of the green snake and the beautiful lily contains Goethe's world view and philosophy of life in their depths. Those who read this fairy tale for the first time will usually be able to make little of it. Those who try to gain the key to it will first recognize that Goethe wanted to express something special through this fairy tale. This fairy tale of the green snake and the beautiful lily can be found in every major edition of Goethe's works. I emphasize this because I have been asked again and again: Where can I find the “fairy tale”? If you look it up in the “Conversations of German Emigrants,” you will find it at the end. This fairy tale is designed, as it were, as a completely independent piece of writing.

Before the reading of the “fairy tale” by Ms. H[olger], let me just say a few words about how Goethe came to write this fairy tale. It was in the mid-1790s, when Goethe was at the height of his creative powers. It was the time when he had gained that deep insight into nature that is expressed in his scientific writings. It was the time when he had completed the first part of Faust, which was published as a fragment in 1790. It was during this time that the idea came to him of developing Faust into a great, comprehensive picture of humanity. This work of Goethe's, which was found sealed in his estate when he died, presents itself to us as the second part of Faust. Eckermann spoke repeatedly about this second part of Faust. I would like to emphasize just one characteristic saying. Goethe says: Those who enjoy my second part of Faust as a series of dramatic images may have an aesthetic pleasure. But there will also be those who, from time to time, will intuitively recognize what I have secretly hidden in these images. And Goethe again indicates in his conversations with Eckermann that in the second part of Faust, there is a hidden, as we would say in theosophical language, an esoteric meaning. A meaning that is hidden behind the images, which one then expresses in the way that Goethe did in the second part of Faust. When we find the ordinary language of the intellect, the language of words, too poor, too dry, too barren, too sober, too mundane to express the rich abundance of the spirit that we have to present when we want to express our own deep opinion about the life of the world. The esotericists, the priests of wisdom of all times, spoke in a pictorial language. The deeper we enter into the world of ancient legends, the more we recognize that this world of legends contains symbolic disguises of great, eternal truths. It was in this sense that Goethe spoke in the second part of Faust. But he spoke even more in this sense in the fairy tale of the green snake and the beautiful lily.

In 1794, he described how he had once again set out to solve for himself the problem that occupied the minds of the time. The problem or question of human destiny, or the problem of freedom. After the great struggles for freedom had stirred hearts in Germany and France, the problem of freedom was also that of the greatest minds. Schiller was involved and he asked himself: Is a person free who is trapped in eternal necessity? Are his actions to be understood as taking place with inner necessity, like external natural phenomena with the external? Like a falling stone, or in such a way that they arise from within the person himself and he is the author of his actions? Is man a free being? That is the question that occupied not only the great minds, but the hearts of all people. Hegel, Fichte, Schelling, Novalis, the Schlegel brothers, and so on, belong in this circle. The problem of freedom is a heart problem. Schiller dealt with freedom in one of his most important works, his “Letters on the Aesthetic Education of Man”. He argued that man is a threefold being, that on the one hand he is subject to nature, and there is man in terms of corporeality. Then, at the highest pinnacle of his being, we have man as a rational being, as a spiritual being. There, according to Schiller's extraordinarily spirited explanations, he is governed by the laws of eternal life, eternal truth and goodness. These laws permeate human life. Man cannot escape them because he is clear about the fact that his destiny can only be achieved in the realm of truth and goodness. Body and mind are the two poles. And Schiller says: even the mind is subject to necessity, to logical and dutiful necessity. In this area, there can be no question of freedom, because man cannot be free. Nor can the spirit be free, for it would have to voluntarily submit to the laws of truth and goodness. On the one hand, we have the necessity of nature, on the other hand, the necessity of the spirit. Between nature and spirit, Schiller interposes the soul of man. The soul, which is in the middle, and as the connecting link between body and spirit, constitutes the actual personality of man. That which causes man to experience joy and sorrow, that which rises above natural necessity and has not yet ascended to the brazen necessity of reason. On the other hand, there is the duty of eternal truth and eternal goodness, which has a compelling effect on man. But joy and sorrow take up our laws of goodness and truth in such a way that they develop sympathy for them in their souls, that they bring them to the spirit. Thus Schiller says: “Nature's necessity is raised up to the spirit and [truth] and goodness are brought down and felt as beauty. And in this way it is incorporated.” In the sense of Schiller, Kant emphasized the eternal necessity too harshly in his categorical imperative. Schiller rejected this with the words: “No categorical imperative!”

I am happy to serve my friend, but unfortunately I do it with inclination, and so it bothers me that I am not virtuous.

– because he does not make service a matter of compelling natural necessity. Man should not be so deeply immersed in his passions that they pull him down. He should inspire them and elevate them. On the other hand, he should allow himself to be imbued by the laws of the good and the true, so that he can surrender himself to his inclinations and his inclinations give him a soul that represents eternal necessary truth and goodness. That is Schiller's problem of natural necessity. At its center stands freedom, that is Schiller's solution.

But Goethe says that all problems in man can only be solved if they are considered in the context of the greater world. He says to himself: I also want to solve the problem, but in a different way. I need a rich, comprehensive imaginative life to solve this problem. Man is a small world, and when I consider him in the context of the cosmos, then I can solve this problem.

Therefore, Goethe puts all the imagery that he has acquired from his studies to date at the service of solving this question. On the other hand, he puts all the experiences he has had as a truly spiritual participant in the work of Freemasonry at this service. It was through Freemasonry that he was able to absorb the ideas he wanted to express. Therefore, all of this must be taken into account in order to somehow solve this Goethean fairy tale of the green snake and the beautiful lily, which is so rich in content. People already tried to solve it during Goethe's lifetime. And Goethe himself said: “I do not want to talk about the ‘fairy tale’ before there are a hundred solutions from others.” There were not that many at the time, or they did not come to his attention. But then many, all too many solutions came. People have tried to solve it from the point of view of criticism, of rationalists, from a purely Masonic point of view and so on. But these are only individual points of view and are not sufficient. They are one-sided points of view. If time permits, we will make at least a few suggestions and comments after the lecture by Miss Holger about what Goethe wants to say with this enigmatic fairy tale. I will therefore only say that today, with the short time, I can only give hints. For those who want to delve deeper, I would like to draw attention to the lecture on “Goethe as a Theosophist,” where I will try to show the depth of his world view.

If Theosophy were to claim that it is something completely new, only having come into the world in the last few decades, then it could easily be dismissed as ineffective. For it is easy for people to believe that individual special truths, new acquisitions in some field of knowledge, could enrich human thought and perception in the advancing age; but not that which concerns man's deepest innermost core, the source of human wisdom, that this should appear as something completely new in any age. This is not to be believed without further ado, and it is therefore only natural that such a belief, as if Theosophy could or wanted to bring something completely new, would have to cause mistrust of the Theosophical movement. But Theosophy has always, since it first tried to influence the modern cultural movement, described itself as an ancient wisdom, as something that people have sought, that they have hoped to attain in the most diverse forms at all times. And it has been the task of the theosophical movement to search in the various religions and world views for the different forms in which people throughout the ages have tried to penetrate to the source of truth. Theosophy has revealed that at different times, even in the most ancient times, there was something deeply related to the wisdom by which man tried to recognize his goal. And so it is indeed. Theosophy makes us modest with regard to the achievements of our own time. The well-known, thoroughly immodest saying that we have come so gloriously far in this 19th century is strangely limited by a consideration of intellectual life in its deepest sense, through the centuries and the millennia.

However, I do not wish to take you back to ancient times; instead, I would like to show you a modern personality who has tried to put into practice the ancient wisdom inscribed on the Greek temple with the words “Know Thyself”, that such a modern personality, who made this saying his own, is fundamentally in complete harmony with what Theosophy describes as its doctrine and belief. This personality is none other than Johann Wolfgang von Goethe. This personality is undoubtedly familiar not only to Germans, but also to many other cultured people of the present day. He is more or less so for each individual. Goethe, however, is a mind that one relates to in a very special way. He is a spirit that one can study at any point in one's life, and one will find much that reveals not only the great artist, the great poet with outstanding qualities, but one will soon, if one delves further, be able to judge Goethe the great sage, with whom one has such an affinity that, if one returns to him after years, one can always discover something new and ever more in him. We find that Goethe is one of those minds that contain an infinite amount. And if we have learned new things time and again to add to our own little treasure trove of wisdom and then we return to Goethe, we are amazed and stand in awe once again at what was previously closed to us because we lacked the echo to the realm that spoke through him. And no matter how much such a person has cultivated his inner life, no matter how much profound wisdom he finds in Goethe when he waits a few more years and delves into his writings again, he will be convinced that he finds something new, greater, even infinite in Goethe's works. Goethe is never exhausted. This is an experience that is particularly made by those who have trust, who have faith in the deep development of the human soul.

It is said that in his “Faust” Goethe has given us a kind of modern gospel. If this saying is to be accepted, then Goethe has also given us, in addition to his gospel, a kind of secret revelation, a kind of apocalypse. This apocalypse is hidden in his works; it forms the conclusion of the “Conversations of German Emigrants” and is read only by a few. I have always been asked where this fairy tale is to be found in Goethe's works. It is in all the editions of Goethe's works and, as I said, forms the conclusion of the “Conversations of German Emigrants”. In this fairy tale, Goethe created a work of art of infinite beauty. I will attempt to give an interpretation of this fairy tale without destroying the immediate pictorial impression of the work of art. Goethe has woven his most intimate thoughts and ideas into the “Fairytale”. In the last years of his life, he said to Eckermann: “My dear friend, I want to tell you something that may be useful to you when you look at my works. My works will not become popular; a few people will understand what I wanted to say, but nothing can make my works popular.” He probably said this with the second part of Faust in mind and meant that those who enjoy Faust can have an immediate artistic impression. But those who get behind the secrets hidden in Faust will also be able to say what is hidden behind these images.

I do not wish to speak about the second part of Faust, but rather about the fairy tale of the green snake and the beautiful lily, in which Goethe expressed himself even more intimately than in the second part of Faust. I would like to speak about what Goethe has secretly hidden in these strange images. But I would also like to speak about why Goethe used the pictorial expression to express his most intimate thoughts. Both questions will be answered in the course of the lecture.

Anyone who understands the Fairy Tale of the Green Snake and the Beautiful Lily knows that in Goethe we have a theosophist, a mystic. Goethe also represented the wisdom and the view of life that Theosophy advocates in a popular form; and the “Fairy Tale” is a fully valid proof of this. But in the times when Goethe was expressing himself, people did not try to clothe the highest truths in words through the power of the intellect in public lectures, as they do today; they did not try to present these most intimate human soul truths in the same way. Those who had insight into such truths expressed them in figurative form, through parables. It was an old custom, a custom that still originated in the Middle Ages, that one cannot arrive at the highest insights in an abstract form, but that for this a kind of initiation is needed. And this initiation made it impossible for those who sensed that a certain mood, a kind of breath of the soul, was needed to grasp such truths, to speak of these higher truths; truths that indeed cannot be perceived with the mind alone. A certain mood is needed, and I call this mood the 'breath of the soul'. The language of reason seemed to them personally too sober, too dry to express the highest truths. Furthermore, they still had some conviction that the one who experiences such things must first make himself worthy of the truth.

This conviction has meant that in ancient times, until about the third century of the Christian era, the truth about the human soul and the human spirit was not presented in such a way that it could be revealed publicly. Instead, those who were to come into possession of the highest truths had to be prepared to receive what was offered in the so-called mystery centers. These mystery temples presented all the secrets of natural and cyclic laws to the mystics as something that we would recognize as sober truth if we expressed it in dry sentences of the mind, but which the disciple had to recognize and live as living truth. It is not a matter of thinking wisdom, but of living wisdom. It is not merely a matter of permeating wisdom with the ardor of the spirit, but of becoming a completely different person. He had to approach the holiest with a certain awe; he had to understand that truth is divine, that it is imbued with the divine blood of the world, that it enters into our personality, that the divine world should revive, that knowledge means the same as what is meant by the word development. This was to be made clear to the mystic, and this he was to achieve at the purification stage of the mysteries. He was to educate himself to have a holy awe for the truth, he was to be weaned away from clinging to the sensual, from the sufferings and joys of life, from that with which everyday life surrounds us. The light of the spirit, which we need when we withdraw from profane life, could only be received when that had been discarded. When we are worthy to receive the light of the spirit, then we have become different, then we love the spirit, then we love with earnest sympathy and devotion that which we otherwise only recognized as a shadowy existence, as an abstract existence: We love the spiritual life, which for the ordinary person is only thought. But the mystic learns to sacrifice the self that clings to the everyday; he learns not only to penetrate truth through thinking, he learns to live it through, he learns to receive it as divine wisdom, as theosophy. Goethe expressed this conviction in the “West-Eastern Divan”:

And so long as you do not have this,
this: Die and become!
If you are just a gloomy guest
on the dark earth.

That was what the mystics of all times strove for: to let the lower die and to let that rise that lives in the spirit. To hold the dying of the sensual reality in low esteem, so that man may ascend into the realm of divine intentions. Dying in order to become. He who does not have this does not know what forces are at work in our world; he is only a dull guest on our earth. Goethe expressed this in the “West-Eastern Divan” and he also seeks to depict this vividly in the fairy tale of the green snake and the beautiful lily. The transformation of man from one level of existence to a higher level was the puzzle he wanted to solve. The question was: how can a person who lives in the everyday, who can only see with his eyes and hear with his ears, grasp this “die and become”? This was the question of mystics of all times. This great question was called the “spiritual alchemy” at all times, the transformation of man from the everyday soul to the spiritual soul, which grasps spiritual things as the ordinary person grasps earthly things, the table, the chair and so on, and considers them real. When this alchemy had taken place with man, then the mystery guides considered him worthy to receive the highest truths. Then they led him into the holy of holies, then he was initiated, then he was endowed with the teachings that teach him about the intentions of nature, about the intentions that permeate the plan of the world. It is such an initiation that Goethe describes [in “Fairytale”]: an initiation of the worthy person into the mysteries.

This arises for two reasons: first, in his youth, Goethe was equally eager to learn the secret that was then called the secret of alchemy. Between his studies in Strasbourg and Leipzig, he already recognized that there is a spiritual side to alchemy, and he knew that ordinary alchemy is only a distortion of the spiritual one. That everything known as alchemy could only exist because the figurative expressions were taken for realities. He meant the alchemy of the human being, which takes place with the forces of inner life. The mystery guides also gave instructions on how this alchemy can be achieved. Since they could only describe this transformation of human inner forces in parables and images, they spoke of one substance transforming into another. In what they said about the transformation of substances, they expressed what develops to a higher level in the life of the human soul, what transforms in a spiritual way. What great minds have shown in the spiritual realm to people attached to everyday life, they have applied to the transmutation of substances, of ordinary substances and metals in retorts, and have endeavored to discover what mysterious means was meant to effect the transmutation of the substance. Goethe has shown in one passage of Faust what he understood of these things. In the first part of Faust, during the walk outside the city gates, he points out exactly what is wrong, what is false and petty in the too materialistic view of alchemy. He mocks those who strive for the discovery of the secret in capricious efforts, and in the company of adepts and according to endless recipes, pour together the adverse:

There was a red lion, a bold suitor,
Married to a lily in the lukewarm bath,
And then both tormented with open flames
From one bridal chamber into another.

What Goethe ridicules here, the marriage with the lily, was what he wanted to show in the fairy tale of the green snake and the beautiful lily. The highest that man can aspire to, the highest that man should transform into, is what Goethe describes with the symbol of the lily. It is synonymous with what we call the highest wisdom, so that a person's actions see through nature, how an evolution has become an eternity. When man also observes the eternal laws, according to which we must perfect the eternal laws of existence, when he also recognizes the eternal development of his freedom, then he finds himself on a level of development, then this represents such a state of mind, such a level of knowledge, which is designated by the symbol of the lily. This lily, the highest of the soul's powers, the highest state of consciousness, where man may be free because he cannot abuse his freedom, because he can never disturb the cycles of freedom, this content of the soul, which was imparted to the mystics in the mysteries by transforming them through purification, this content has always been symbolically designated as the lily. The lily is also used to describe what Spinoza, in his “Ethics”, where he otherwise appears sober and mathematical, expresses enthusiastically and almost poetically at the end, when he says that man has ascended to the higher spheres of existence, that he imbues himself with the laws of nature. Spinoza calls this the realm of divine love in the human soul; the realm where man is no longer forced into anything, but where everything that lies within the realm of human development is done out of freedom and devotion, out of full love; where every compulsion, every arbitrariness is transformed by spiritual alchemy, where all action flows into the realm of freedom. Goethe described this love as the highest form of freedom, as freedom from all the desires and longings of everyday life. He said:

In our pure hearts there surges a striving
to voluntarily give ourselves to a higher, purer, unknown
out of gratitude,
to unravel the eternal unnamed
We call it: being pious! — Such blessed heights
I feel I am part of when I stand before her.

Before her gaze, as before the sun's reign
Before her breath, as before spring breezes
Melts, as long as the icy, rigid hold
The self-will deep in wintery tombs
No self-interest, no self-will lasts
Before her coming, they have shivered away.

This Spinozian love of God, which he seeks to attain by spiritual alchemy, is what the human being, the human will, is to unite with. The human will, which is active at every level, is that which has been referred to at all times as the “lion”, the creature in which this will is most highly strained, in which this will comes to life most strongly, and so mysticism refers to the human will as the lion.

In the Persian mysteries there were seven initiations. They are as follows: First one became a raven, then a secret agent, then a warrior, then a lion. The fifth degree was the one where man already looked at life from the other side, where man was born into the actual human being. Therefore, the Persian calls the one who has overcome the point of view of the lion a “Persian”. The Persian was an initiate of the fifth degree, and the one who had brought it to the point that his actions flow as calmly as the sun completes its course in the vault of heaven, the Persian called a “sunrunner”. And the one who performs the actions out of infinite love, he calls “belonging to the degree of the fathers”. The fourth degree was where man stood at the crossroads, where man has organized himself through the physical body, the etheric double body, which is the carrier of the life force, and the astral body, which is subject to the laws of desire, of passion. According to theosophical terminology, these three bodies form the lower parts of the human being; the lower man is born out of them. The initiate, the one who has seen through this connection, is designated by the Persian as the “lion”. And here the human being stands at a crossroads. Here that which forces him to act out of nature is transformed into a free gift of love. When he ascends to the fifth degree of initiation, when he develops to become the free human being who dares to do out of free love what he was otherwise compelled to do. This connection of the lion with the free loving entity is what alchemy describes as the mystery of human development. Goethe portrays this mystery in his Fairy Tale. He begins by showing how this strong-willed man stands, how he is drawn into the physical world from higher spheres, from spheres he does not know himself. Goethe is aware that man, in his spiritual nature, comes from higher spheres, that he is led into this world, which Goethe presents as the world of material, sensual existence. This world is the land on one bank of the river. In the “Fairytale”, however, there are two lands, this side of the river and the other side of it. From the beyond, the unknown ferryman takes people across to the land of the sensual world; and between the land of the spiritual and the sensual world there is the river, the water, which separates the two lands. With the water, Goethe has symbolized the same thing that mystics of all times have symbolized. Already in Genesis, this expression means the same as in Goethe. We also find this expression in the New Testament. For example, in the conversation that Jesus had with Nicodemus. It says: “He who is not born again of water and the Spirit cannot enter the kingdom of heaven.” Goethe understood the expression “born again of water” very well, and we can see how he understood it from the “Song of the Spirits above the Waters”:

The soul of man,
How like the water you are,
The fate of man,
How like the wind you are.

He places the world of the soul, the world of desire and longing, the world of passions and cravings, between our mind and our senses. These know neither good nor evil, our senses cannot err. The one who engages in these distinctions knows that when we study the laws of nature, we cannot speak of good and evil. When we study nature in the animal kingdom, we find that we can speak of harmful and beneficial animals, but not of good and evil. It is only by man's immersion in the water, in the world of the soul, that he becomes capable of good and evil. This world, which lies between the spiritual and the sensual, is the river over which the spirit comes from unknown spheres. Across the river has come man's innermost being, his actual spiritual core, across the river of passions and desires. And if he does not undergo further development, he is like a will-o'-the-wisp. This person, who is subject to the laws that live within him, when he has come across the river but has not yet received the divine spark to take him across to the other world, is therefore set down by the ferryman who brings people across from the opposite bank of the river to this side. No one can be brought over by the ferryman, but everyone can be brought over. We feel brought over without our intervention, through the forces that lie below our consciousness, that precede our actions. Through such forces we feel placed in the world of the senses, in this world. The ferryman who has brought us across from the spiritual life beyond has placed us in this world and can no longer take us back to the land we must reach, the land of the beautiful lily. (The ferryman is therefore the power through which one unconsciously enters the world of the senses.)

The will-o'-the-wisps want to pay the ferryman the tribute due with gold. But he demands fruits of the earth, which they do not have; they only have gold. But he does not want to be paid in gold. Pieces of gold, he says, are harmful to the river. The river cannot tolerate such gold, that is, wisdom can only be paid for with fruits of the earth. This is a profound wisdom. The gold represents the power of wisdom that lives in man. This power of wisdom that lives in man is his guide through life. This power of wisdom asserts itself when man feels transported into sensuality, as the power of his knowledge, his intellect. But this wisdom is not what brings man to development; it is precisely what makes him selfish, egotistical, when it unites with human nature. If it were to merge with that which flows in the stream, this power of understanding, this knowledge, then passion would throw up tremendous waves; for wherever man does not put his wisdom at the service of selflessness and simply throws it in, indulges his passions, there the stream throws up wild waves. It is impossible to satisfy the stream with gold, with wisdom. So he rejects wisdom that has not yet passed through selflessness. He rejects it into the ravines, where the deep darkness of the earth, where the deep crevices are. There he buries it. We will hear in a moment why he buries it. So the ferryman demands three cabbages, three artichokes, three onions; he demands fruits of the earth.

How can a person achieve their development? By ennobling the lower drives of their nature, by purifying what lives in them as sensual nature, by casting that into the stream and thus nourishing the stream of passions. This is what Schiller so beautifully expressed in his Aesthetic Letters: Only the one who has emancipated his lower nature understands how to be free. When our outer nature, our sensual nature, has been so ennobled, has grown from below, that it itself strives for the good, the beautiful, because passion can no longer lead it astray, because our outer sensual nature can no longer seduce us ; when we no longer throw wisdom into it, but pay for our passions with the fruits of the earth, so that our sensuality itself is absorbed by them, as the fruits of the earth are to be absorbed by the stream, then we have reached the lowest degree of initiation. This is expressed in the words of the ferryman:

You must know that I can only be paid with the fruits of the earth.

Now the will-o'-the-wisps continue in this world, that is, the human being seeks to continue on his path in life. In this world he finds the green snake, the symbol of human striving, of human knowledge. This snake has had a strange experience. The ferryman has previously driven the gold pieces down the stream and hidden them in the crevices of the earth. The snake has found them. The wisdom that helps people to move forward is still a hidden treasure today, shrouded in mystery. That is what Goethe wanted to say. Therefore, the person who wanted to find wisdom had to seek it far from all human selfishness. Then, when the person has made himself worthy of receiving it, it is in the right place. The symbol of the human striving for knowledge, the snake, penetrates itself with gold. This itself penetrates itself completely with wisdom and now becomes luminous. Thus the snake desires from the will-o'-the-wisps that which gives selfish man cause for pride, that with which he then throws around and shows off. This human knowledge, which is destructive in the service of egoism, is attained when man, like the snake, crawls humbly on the ground and strives to recognize reality bit by bit. It cannot be received when man stands proudly and erectly, but only when he, horizontal like the snake, clings to the ground in humility. There is the gold of wisdom in place, there man can imbue himself with wisdom. That is why the will-o'-the-wisp also call the snake their relative, saying:

Of course we are only related on the part of appearance.

– and yes, they are related, related is the snake to the will-o'-the-wisp, related is the wisdom that puts itself at the service of selfishness, to the wisdom that makes itself available in humility.

Now we are told in the “Fairytale” that the snake was down in the crevices of the earth and that it found something of human form there. The snake was in a temple. This is nothing other than the symbol of the mystery temple of all times. This hidden temple, which was in the crevices under the earth, is the symbol of the place of initiation. Here in this temple, the snake has seen the three great priests of initiation, those priests who are endowed with the three highest powers of human nature. Theosophy calls them Atma, Budhi, Manas. Goethe calls what Theosophy calls Atma, Budhi, Manas, the King of Wisdom, the King of Beauty and the King of Strength or the King of Will. In the mystery centers, the spirit was united with these three fundamental powers of the soul, with which the human soul must be initiated. In the Fairy Tale, Goethe describes this process. Down here in the halls of the earth is the snake that will shine from within because it has absorbed the gold of wisdom. And because it has absorbed it in humility, it is illuminated from within. The old man with the lamp is another figure. What does he represent to us? The old man's lamp has the property that it only glows when other light is already present. Because the snake glows, illuminates the interior of the mystery temple with the light radiating from itself, the light of the old man can also shine here. Goethe expresses this thought elsewhere with the words:

If the eye were not solar,
How could we behold the light?
If not the God-own power lives in us,
How can we be enraptured by the divine?

Here he says in poetic words what he expresses in pictures in the “Fairytale”. The realization that we call occult realization in Theosophy is represented by the old man with the lamp. The light appears to no one who has not truly prepared himself to receive it. It does not appear to anyone who has not worked their way up to that higher level of development, so that their self, their selfless nature, shines from within, bringing light to the light. When these two lights, the intuitive light and the light that comes from within the personality, shine towards each other, they give what the person experiences in his transformation as spiritual alchemy. The room around him becomes light, and he learns to recognize what the highest spiritual powers are, the gifts of the three kings: wisdom, beauty and strength. The gift of the golden king is wisdom, the gift of the silver king is beauty, devotion, and the gift of the brazen king is strength, willpower. A person can only understand themselves according to their innermost strengths when the light is reciprocated, the light of the lamp, which can only shine where light is already present. Then the three kings appear in their splendor, and at the same time the meaning of the fourth king becomes clear, that king who is composed of the metals of the other three kings. He is a symbol of the lower nature, in which the noble forces of wisdom, beauty and strength interact in a disorderly and disharmonious way, as in chaos. These three powers, which live in the highly developed soul, are also present in the lower nature, but in a chaotic, disharmonious way. This fourth king is the realm of the present world, the chaotic mixture of wisdom, beauty and strength. The soul powers, which can only achieve the highest in harmonious interaction, act on each other in a chaotic way in the present age. The voice sounds in the temple of initiation:

He will sit down.

The chaotic mixing will have disappeared when that which Goethe so longed for has been brought about: that the temple will no longer be hidden, but will rise in full daylight; that the temple will have risen from the depths and can serve all people as a temple of initiation; that a bridge will be available for all people to cross back and forth. That is the time when all people will have made themselves worthy of the highest wisdom, the highest devotion and the highest will. Then he will have fulfilled this task: the temple will have risen above the flow of passions. These passionate forces will then be so pure and noble that the highest spiritual element will be able to arise in the temple in broad daylight from the stream of desires and passions. Therefore it is necessary that humanity be filled with the “die and become” that Goethe so clearly portrayed in the “West-Eastern Divan”.

Goethe was repeatedly asked what the solution to the riddle was. He said: “What the solution to the riddle is can be found in the ‘fairy tale’ itself, but not in one word. It can be found at the point where we hear in a conversation in the underground temple that the snake is saying something in the old man's ear that we do not hear, by which Goethe suggests it as a confidential secret. This unspoken element is the solution. The solution does not lie in something that can be expressed in words, but in an inner resolve. Goethe also hinted at this in the “Fairy Tale” itself. The snake said quite matter-of-factly: “I want to sacrifice myself, I want to purify my self through selflessness.” This is precisely what must be considered the deepest solution to the fairy tale. It is an act, not a teaching. Until now, there were only two ways to cross the river: either at midday, when the green snake lies across the river and forms a bridge, so that one could cross the river at midday, or at a moment when the sun is at midday for him, when he is ripe to surrender himself to the higher spiritual light. But time and again he is drawn back down from this midday moment of life into the lower world, riven by passions. In such midday moments, the elect of the spirit can cross over from the shore of sensual life to the shore of the spirit.

But there is yet another way to cross the river, namely in the evening, when the shadow of the great giant extends over the river. The shadow of the great giant can also form a bridge over the river, but only at dusk. This shadow of the great giant, what is it? Goethe spoke in greater detail and more profoundly with his trusted friend about the forces that he had symbolically hinted at in the fairy tale. When Schiller once wanted to make a trip to Frankfurt am Main and was in danger of being mixed up in the quarrels of the time, Goethe wrote to Schiller: “I am very glad that you did not come here to the West, because the shadow of the giant could have touched you roughly.” But the meaning of the giant is also clearly expressed in the fairy tale itself. The giant, being weak, is incapable of anything. Only his shadow can build the bridge to the other side. This giant is the raw [mechanical] force of nature. Its shadow is capable of leading the person of raw passions across the river where the light no longer shines so brightly, where the light no longer deceives. These are the people who, by extinguishing their clear consciousness of the day in the various states of the soul, in trance, in somnambulism, in the state of psychic vision and so on, seek to cross over into the land of the spirit. So too, in the wild and raging action through which the people of that time wanted to penetrate into the realm of freedom, their consciousness of the day was extinguished. They wanted to reach the land of the beautiful lily. But the shadow of the giant can only cross over. Only uncertainly, in the twilight of consciousness, can man overcome the passions, that is, deaden them, when he is in an almost unconscious state, when he is not living in bright day-consciousness.

These are the two paths that lead to the other shore: in solemn moments at midday, the snake; and in the twilight of consciousness, in a trance, and so on, the shadow of the giant. But one thing should be striven for here: the snake should sacrifice itself completely, it should not just bend over the river of passions at noon, it should lead from one bank to the other as a bridge at every hour of the day, so that not only some are able to cross over, but that all people can come and go with ease. This is the decision the snake has made, this is the decision Goethe has made. Goethe points to an age of selflessness, where man does not put his strength at the service of the lower self, but at the service of selflessness, desiring no personal benefit.

No self-interest, no self-will lasts,
Before their coming they have shrunk away.

There are a number of other ideas associated with this basic theme of the “Fairytale”. I cannot go into all of them today, but I would like to touch on a few.

We find the old man's wife with the lamp, who is married to the representative of human — occult — knowledge. She tends the old man's house. The will-o'-the-wisps have come to her. These will have licked down all the gold that was on the wall, and they have given up the gold, which they have enriched themselves with, so that the live pug that ate the gold had to suffer death. The old woman is the power of understanding, which brings forth what is useful. Only when the occult power marries what clings to material culture, when the highest marries the lowest in the world, only then can the world take its course of development. Man will not be led away from everyday life, but he will purify everyday culture.

Man is surrounded in the world, in his dwelling, by that which hangs on the walls as gold. All that surrounds him is also gold. So what surrounds him? On the one hand, it is the man of knowledge, on the other, the man of utility. The entire experience of the human race surrounds him. All that has been gathered as the experience of mankind is piled up in human science. Those who strive for it seek what is recorded in the scriptures. There they lick out, as it were, historical wisdom. This is what surrounds man in his striving; it is what man will imbue himself with completely. But it is useless for that which is to live. The living pug gobbles up the gold and dies from it. Wisdom, which only exists as dead bookish wisdom, not made alive by the spirit, kills everything that is alive. Only when it is reunited with the source of wisdom, with the beautiful lily, does it come to life again. Therefore, the old man gives his wife the dead pug to take to the beautiful lily. The lamp has a peculiar property: [dead animals are transformed into gems by it], everything dead is brought to life by it; what is alive is clarified by it to become crystal, bright and transparent. This transformation is brought about in man through knowledge, that is, through occult knowledge.

Furthermore, the old woman is stopped by the will-o'-the-wisps to pay her debts to the ferryman. These three fruits are representatives of human utility, representatives of material culture. Material culture is supposed to pay this tribute to passion. Where else could the actual driving forces of the lower nature come from, if not from technology and the cultivation of material culture? It is interesting that the shadow of the giant, who has just emerged from the river, takes some of the fruits of the earth away, so that the old woman has only two of each fruit instead of three. However, she should have three for the ferryman and must therefore give the river a pledge. At this point, something very significant happens: She has to dip her hand into the river, which makes it black so that it is almost no longer visible; it is still there, but almost invisible. This shows us the connection between external culture and the world of the river, the world of the passions. Material culture must be placed at the service of the astral, the soul. As long as human nature has not been refined enough to be offered as a tribute to the stream of passions, technology is indebted to human flow. Invisible human endeavor is invisible when it is in the service of human passions; invisibly, man works on something that cannot be seen in his ultimate goal. It is invisible, but present; tangible, but not outwardly visible. Everything that man achieves on the way to the great goal, until he has paid his debt to the flow of the soul, everything that he has to throw into the world of passions, takes on the appearance of the invisible hand of the old woman with the lamp. As long as the sensual nature is not completely purified, as long as it is not consumed by the fire of passion, it does not shine, it is invisible. That is what upsets the old woman so much: she no longer gives off any light. This could be expanded upon in more detail. Every word is significant, but it would take us too far afield today.

So let us hasten to the great train, where a youth meets us who has tried too early to embrace the beautiful lily and is thus paralyzed in all his vital strength. Goethe says elsewhere: He who strives for freedom without having already made his inner self free falls even more into the snare of necessity. He who has not freed himself will be killed. Only he who is prepared, purified, as in the mysteries, who has undergone purification in the temple of the mysteries so that he can marry the lily in a dignified manner, will not be killed. He who has died to the lower in order to be reborn in the higher sense can embrace the lily. The present is presented to us through the paralyzed youth who wanted to achieve the highest in a storm. Now he complained to everyone he met that he could not embrace the lily. Now he is to be made ripe, for which purpose all the powers of man must unite, which are symbolized in the participants in the procession. The procession consists of the old man with the lamp, the will-o'-the-wisps and the lily itself. All the beautiful individual powers are thus embraced in this procession, which is led down into the clefts of the earth to the temple of initiation. Yes, it is also a deep feature of the riddle-tale that he lets the will-o'-the-wisps unlock the gate of the temple. Selfish wisdom is not useless; it is a necessary transitional stage. Human selfishness can be overcome by feeding itself on wisdom, by permeating itself with the gold of genuine knowledge. Then this wisdom can serve to unlock this temple. Those who unconsciously serve wisdom in the outer self are led to the actual seats of wisdom. The scholars who only pore over books are the guides there. Goethe did not underestimate science; he knew that it is science that unlocks the temple of wisdom; he knew that one must test this, judge and absorb everything in pure knowledge, and that without this one cannot penetrate into the temples of the highest wisdom. Goethe sought this wisdom everywhere. He considered himself worthy of recognizing the highest in spiritual life in art, after he had passed through science. He sought knowledge in physics, in biology, everywhere. And so he also lets those enter the temple of initiation who are will-o'-the-wisps, who, relying on themselves in a false upright position, confront the one who, after all, has observed through experience and can creep in like a snake. They cause the temple to open up, and the procession now enters the temple.

Now something happens that Goethe longed for all of humanity: The entire temple moves up out of the crevices of the earth. The temple can only be built over the river of the soul, over the river of passions and desires, because the snake has disintegrated into precious stones, which form the pillars for a bridge. And now people can move freely from the sensual world into the spiritual world and from the spiritual world into the sensual world. The marriage of the sensual man with the spiritual is achieved through the selfless man, through the sacrifice of the serpent's self, which arches over the river as a bridge. The temple thus rises out of the crevices of the earth and is accessible to all who cross the bridge, accessible to those with everyday vehicles as well as to pedestrians.

In the temple itself, we see the three kings again. The young man, who has been purified because he has recognized the three soul powers, is endowed with these three soul powers. The golden king approaches him and says:

Recognize the highest;

The silver king approaches him and says:

Feed the sheep.

In this way, Goethe expressed a thought that lay deep in his soul, namely the union of beauty with piety. It is the [invitation] that is in the Bible. He addresses these words to the young man in the sense that he expressed when he saw the Greek deities depicted in Rome and said:

There is necessity, there is God

, and:

I suspect that they [the great artists of the Greeks] proceeded according to the very laws by which nature proceeds and which I am on the trail of.

It is a personal touch of Goethe's when he lets the silver king appear as beauty and piety. And then the king of strength approaches him and says:

The sword on the left, the right free.

The sword should not be used for attack but for protection. Harmony should be brought about, not conflict. After this process, the young man is initiated with the three soul powers. But the fourth king has nothing more to say; he collapses into himself. The temple has risen from obscurity into the bright light of day. In the temple, a small silver temple rises up, which is none other than the transformed hut of the ferryman. It is a significant feature that Goethe allows the hut of the ferryman, who is the one who brings us across from the land of the spirit, to transform into pure, beaten silver, so that it itself has become a small altar, a small temple, a holy of holies. This hut, which represents what is most sacred in man, his deepest core of being, which he has preserved as a memory of the land from which he comes, from which he has come and to which the ferryman cannot take him back. It [the hut] represents what came before our development; it is the memory that we descend from the spirit. This memory stands as the holy of holies in the temple, in its sanctuary.

The giant, that raw natural force that lives in nature, a spirit that could not work through itself, but only as a shadow, has been given a remarkable mission. This giant stands upright and only indicates the hour. When man has discarded everything that belongs to his lower nature, when he has become completely spiritualized, then the raw, lower natural force will no longer appear in its original elementary power as a storm of the natural force living around man. This mechanical, raw natural force will only perform mechanical services. Man will always need these mechanical natural forces, but they will no longer conquer him, but he will instruct them in their service. His work will be the hour hand of spiritual culture, which, like a clock, regularly indicates mechanical necessity. But the giant itself will no longer be necessary.

We must not approach the interpretation of the fairy tale by discussing every single word pedantically, but rather we must empathize with what Goethe wanted to say and expressed in his images. In his “Fairy Tale”, Goethe addresses what Schiller expressed in his “Aesthetic Letters”: the marriage of necessity with freedom. What Schiller was able to express in his letters, Goethe was unable to express in abstract thoughts, but in fairy tale form. If I want to express these thoughts in all their vibrancy, then I need images; images like those used by the ancient priests of initiation in the mysteries. The priests of initiation did not teach by instructing their students with abstract actions, but by presenting the sacred Dionysus drama to them, showing them the great process of human development and the resurrecting Dionysus, as well as showing what was invisibly taking place in the Dionysus drama or the Osiris drama. In this way, Goethe also wanted to express what lived in him, in his drama in images. So, we do not want to interpret Goethe's fairy tale as usual, but we want to understand it as Theosophy explains this process, namely the marriage of the lower nature of man with the higher, as the marriage of the physical and ethereal body, the life force and the passions and desires with the higher nature of man, the three pure spiritual soul forces, namely Atma, Budhi, Manas, which are represented as the three kings. etheric body, of the life-force and of the passions and desires with the higher nature of the human being, the three pure spiritual soul forces, namely Atma, Budhi, Manas, which are represented as the three kings.

This is the development of the human being that extends into the age when every human being will be able to be an initiate. Goethe tried to express this in a truly theosophical way. Just as those mystery priests expressed their wisdom in images, so too did Goethe in his apocalypse, in images, express what human development represents, which will one day be the greatest deed of humankind: the transformation of the lower nature of man into the higher, the transformation of the lower metals, the lower powers of the soul, into the gold of wisdom; the transformation of that which lives in isolation into the pure, noble metal of wisdom, represented by the king, who is embodied in gold. Goethe wanted to express this human alchemy, this spiritual transformation, in a somewhat different way than in his “Faust”. He wanted to express in a slightly different form what he had secretly included in the second part of “Faust”. Goethe was a true theosophist. He had grasped what it means that everything that is transitory, that lives in our senses, is only a parable. But he also realized that what man tries and strives for is impossible to describe, but that it is achieved through an act; that what is inadequate is what keeps us on this side of the river, that it must become an event if the meaning of human development is to be fulfilled. That is why he also expressed this secret in the “Chorus mysticus” and concluded the second part of “Faust” with it. This is the highest life-power of the human being, symbolized in the beautiful lily, with which the male principle, the power of will, unites. He expresses this in the beautiful closing words of the second part of his Faust. These verses are his mystical creed, and they are only fully understood when one has seen his more intimate life unfold in the fairy tale of the Green Snake and the Beautiful Lily. He had already begun working on the second part of Faust at the turn of the 18th century, at the time when his view of nature was transformed to become a view of a higher world. It has the deepest significance if we can understand the words of Goethe in his testament, in the second part of Faust. When he had completed his earthly career and died, this second part was found sealed in his desk. He bequeathed this book to the world as a testament. And this testament concludes with his mystical confession:

All that is
transient is but a simile
The inadequate
Here it becomes an event
The indescribable
Here it is done;
The eternal feminine
Draws us on.

It is repeatedly emphasized that Theosophy is not something new, not something that has only come to mankind in our time. But it is particularly interesting that even personalities close to us face it in such a way that we may count them among the spirits we can call “Theosophists”. Alongside Herder, Jean Paul, Novalis and Lessing, Goethe appears as one of the most outstanding Theosophists. Some people, however, might object to this, because there is not much evidence of theosophy in Goethe's works that we know of. In Goethe's time, it was not yet possible to spread esoteric truths throughout the world. The “higher truths” were only disseminated in a limited society, for example, the Rosicrucians. No one who was not prepared was admitted into this society. But those who belonged to it spoke of it in all kinds of allusions. Thus Goethe at the most diverse places of his writings. Only those who are equipped with theosophical wisdom can read Goethe correctly. For example, “Faust” cannot be understood without that.

The “Fairy Tale” is Goethe's apocalypse, his revelation, in whose symbolic representation the deepest secrets are contained. That Goethe reveals his theosophical worldview in the “Fairy Tale” can only be understood if one knows the reason for it. Schiller had invited Goethe to collaborate on the “Horen”. Schiller himself had contributed the essay “On the Aesthetic Education of Man” to this journal. It poses the question: How does the person who lives in the everyday arrive at the highest ideals, at a mediation between the supersensible and the sensible? Schiller saw in beauty a descent of the highest wisdom into the sensible. He was able to express in a wonderfully vivid way what seemed to him to be a bridge leading from the sensual to the supersensual. Goethe now says that he cannot express himself in philosophical terms about the highest questions of existence, but he wants to do so in a great picture. At that time he contributed the “Fairytale” to the Horen, in which he attempted to solve these questions in his own way.

Goethe also expressed himself in a thoroughly theosophical sense elsewhere. He had already incorporated his views into “Faust” in his early youth. Between his studies in Leipzig and his stay in Strasbourg, Goethe received an initiation from a personality who was deeply initiated into the secrets of the Rosicrucians. From that time on, he speaks in a mystical, theosophical language. In the first part of “Faust” there is a strange phrase that is put in quotation marks: “the sage speaks”. Goethe was already attached to the theosophical idea that there are beings among us today who are already further along than the rest of humanity, that they are the leaders of people from supersensible spheres, although they are also embodied in the body. They have attained a knowledge that goes far beyond what can be understood with the senses. The passage in question reads:

Only now do I realize what the wise man says:
'The spiritual world is not closed,
Your mind is closed, your heart is dead!
Rise up, disciple, unwearied,
Bathe the earthly breast in the morning light!

When you get to know Jacob Böhme, you get to know one of the sources from which Goethe drew his theosophical wisdom. [J. Boehme's “Aurora” is the dawn, the astral world.] We can only understand some of Goethe's work if we grasp it in this sense. In the poem “The Divine”, Goethe speaks of the law that we call karma, and also of those exalted beings:

According to eternal, ironclad
great laws
we must all
complete
our existence

Hail to the unknown,
higher beings
we sense!

If anyone now wants real proof of Goethe's theosophical way of thinking, let them read the poem under “God and the World”, called “Howard's Memorial”. The first line reads:

When Gottheit Camarupa high and lofty

— Kama Rupa is the principle of man, the astral body, as we know it from theosophical teachings. When Goethe spoke intimately to those with whom he was united in the lodge, he spoke of ideal divine beings who shine forth as examples for mankind. This was intended for his close circle, for example, what he says in the poem “Symbolum”:

From the other side
the voices of the spirits are calling you,
the voices of the masters
Do not neglect to practise
the forces of good.

He speaks openly of the masters when he speaks intimately to his fellow masons.

But it is the fairy tale of the green snake and the beautiful lily that most profoundly introduces us to his view. In it, we find a depiction of the three realms in which human beings live: the physical, the soul or astral world, and the spiritual world. The symbol for the astral or soul world is water. For Goethe, water always represents the soul. This is the case in his poem about the soul and fate:

Soul of man,
How like thou art to water!
Fate of man,
How like thou art to wind!

He also knew the mental realm that man experiences between two states of embodiment, between death and birth, the Devachan, the realm of the gods. Man strives unceasingly for this realm. He fights here on earth to reach this realm.

The alchemists regarded the chemical processes as a symbol for the striving for this spiritual realm. They call this realm: the realm of the lily. Man is called the lion who fights for this realm, and the lily is the bride of the lion. Goethe also hinted at this in “Faust”:

My father was a dark
man of honor who, in his own way, reflected on nature and its sacred circles
with sincerity, but in a whimsical way;
who, in the company of adepts,
locked himself in the black kitchen
and, according to endless recipes,
he poured together the adverse. Then a red lion, a bold suitor, was married to the lily in the lukewarm bath.

Here Goethe speaks of the marriage of man with the spirit (in the lukewarm bath is in the soul bath. The soul is the water, the red lion is the human being). In the “Fairytale”, Goethe also depicted the three realms: the sensual realm as the one bank; the soul realm as the river; the Devachan — spiritual realm — as the opposite bank, on which the garden of the beautiful lily is located, which symbolically represents the Devachan for the alchemists. Man's entire relationship to the three realms is brought into a symbolically beautiful presentation. We have come over from the spiritual realm and strive back to it. Goethe has a ferryman bring the will-o'-the-wisps from the spiritual realm to the sensual realm. The ferryman can bring everyone across, but not bring them back. We came over without our will, but we cannot go back the same way. We have to work our way back into the spiritual realm.

The will-o'-the-wisps live on gold. They absorb this gold. It penetrates their bodies. But they immediately throw it off in all directions. They want to throw the gold at the ferryman as a reward. But he says that the river cannot tolerate the gold; it would foam up wildly. Gold always represents wisdom. The will-o'-the-wisps are people who seek wisdom but do not unite with its essence, instead regurgitating it undigested. The river represents the soul's life, the sum of human instincts, drives, passions. If the gold of wisdom is carelessly thrown into the river of passions, the soul is disturbed, stirred up.

Goethe always pointed out that man must first undergo catharsis, purification, in order to become ripe for the reception of wisdom. For if wisdom is brought into unpurified passion, the passion becomes fanatical, and people then remain trapped in their lower ego. The ascent of Kama to Manas is dangerous if it is not connected with a sacrifice of the lower self. Regarding this, Goethe says in the “West-Eastern Divan”:

And so long as you do not have this,
this: Die and Become!
If you are only a dull guest
on the dark earth.

The human being must be willing to sacrifice himself.

The will-o'-the-wisps are still caught in the Ahamkara, in the lower self. Wisdom cannot tolerate this. The soul life must slowly be purified and slowly ascend. In the meadow, the will-o'-the-wisps throw gold around. There they meet the snake. It consumes the pieces of gold. It makes them one with itself. It has the power not to make its ego proud and selfish, not to strive upwards in a vertical, arrogant way, but to move in a horizontal line in the crevices of the rocks and gradually to attain perfection. A temple is depicted, which is located in the crevices of the earth. The snake has already been roaming back and forth through it, groping and sensing that mysterious beings dwell there.

But now the old man comes with the lamp. The snake has become luminous because of the gold. The temple is illuminated by its radiance. The old man's lamp has the property that it only shines where there is already light. There it shines with a very special light. So on the one hand there is the snake that has become luminous because of the gold, and on the other hand there is the man with the lamp, which also shines. The light on both sides makes everything visible in the temple. In the corners are four kings, a golden, a silver, a bronze and a mixed king. The snake could only find these by touching them before, but now they have become visible to it through their own glow. They are the three higher principles of man and the four lower ones. The iron king is Atma, the divine Self; the silver king is Budhi, the love through which man can communicate with all men; and the golden king is Manas, the wisdom that radiates out into the world and that can absorb this radiant wisdom.

When man has acquired wisdom unselfishly, he can see things in their true essence without the veil of Maya. The snake now clearly sees the three higher principles of man. The golden king is Manas, just as the gold everywhere signifies Manas. The four lower principles are represented, symbolized, by the mixed king. In the lower principles, too, Atma, Budhi and Manas have moved into the sphere of appearance, but disharmoniously. Only when it is purified does something develop that cannot exist in disharmony. The temple is the place of initiation, the secret school that only those who bring the light themselves, who are as selfless as the snake, can enter. The temple is to be revealed one day, rising above the river. It is the realm of the future, towards which we are all striving. The secret places of learning shall be led up. Everything that man is shall strive upwards, dissolve in harmony, strive towards the higher principles. What was once taught in the mysteries shall become an obvious secret. The wanderers shall go over and across the river, from the sensual to the supersensible world and back again. All people will be united in harmony.

The old man with the lamp represents where man can already gain knowledge today without having reached the summit of wisdom, namely through the powers of piety, of the mind, the powers of faith. Faith needs light from outside if it is to truly lead to the higher mysteries. The serpent and the old man with the lamp have the powers of the spirit, which already guide [the soul] today and lead into the future. He who already feels these powers today knows this from certain secrets. The old man therefore says that he knows three secrets. But the fourth secret is spoken of in the strangest way. The serpent hisses something in his ear. Then the old man calls out:

The time has come!

The time has come when a great multitude of people will have grasped which is the way. The serpent has said that it is ready to sacrifice itself. It has reached the point where it has recognized that the human being must first die in order to become:

And so long as you do not have this,
this: Die and become!
If you are only a dull guest
on the dark earth.

To be in the full sense of the word, man can only through love, devotion, sacrifice. The snake is ready for that. This will be revealed when man is ready for this sacrifice. Then the temple will stand by the river. The will-o'-the wisp have not been able to pay off their debt; they had to promise the ferryman to pay it later. The river only takes the fruits of the earth: three cabbages, three onions, three artichokes. The will-o'-the wisp come to the old man's wife and behave very strangely there. They have licked up the gold from the walls. They want to stuff themselves full of wisdom and give it back. The pug dog eats some of the gold and dies, as all living things must perish from it. It cannot absorb the wisdom as the snake absorbs and transforms it, so it has a killing effect. The old woman has to promise the will-o'-the-wisps to pay off her debt to the ferryman.

When the old man comes home with the lamp, he sees what has happened. He tells the old woman to keep her promise, but also to take the dead pug to the beautiful lily because she brings everything dead back to life. The old woman goes to the ferryman with the basket. There she encounters two strange things. She finds the great giant on the way, who has the peculiarity of letting his shadow cross the river in the evening, so that the traveler can then cross the river on his shadow. In addition, the path over is conveyed when the snake arches over at midday. The giant can mediate the transition, but so can the snake when the sun is at its highest, when man elevates his ego to the divine through the shining sun of knowledge. In the solemn moments of life, in the moments of complete selflessness, man unites with the deity.

The giant is the rough physical development that man must go through. He also comes into the realm of the beyond through this; but only in the twilight, when his consciousness is extinguished. But this is a dangerous path, taken by those who develop psychic powers within themselves, who put themselves into a trance state. This transition happens in the twilight of the trance state. Schiller also once wrote about the shadow of the giant. These are the dark forces that lead man over.

When the old woman passes the giant, the giant steals a cabbage head, an onion and an artichoke, so that the old woman only has part of them, which she wants to use to pay off the debt of the will-o'-the-wisps. The number three is therefore no longer complete. What we need and have to weave into our soul life is taken away from us by the twilight forces. There is something dangerous in giving oneself to these. The lower forces must be purified by the soul. Only then can the body ascend when the soul fully absorbs it. Everything that surrounds an inner core in the form of shells is a symbol for the human being's shells. Indian allegory refers to these shells as the leaves of the lotus flower. The human physical nature must be purified in the soul. We have to pay off, surrender the lower principles to the soul life. We have expressed the paying off of the debt in the fact that the river has to be paid off. That is the whole process of karma.

Since the river is not satisfied with the payment of the old woman, she has to dip her hand into the river. After that, she can only feel the hand, but no longer see it. That which is external and sensual to us humans, what is visible about a person, is the body; it must be purified by the soul life. This symbolizes that if a person cannot atone for it in the nature of the plant, he must commit a guilt. Then the actual physical nature of the person becomes invisible. Because the old woman cannot atone for her guilt, she becomes invisible. The I can only be seen in the splendor of the day when it is purified by the soul life. The old woman says: Oh, my hand, which is the most beautiful thing about me. It is precisely that which distinguishes man from the animal, that which shines through him as spirit, becomes invisible if he has not purified it through karma.

The beautiful youth had aspired to the realm of the lily – spirituality – and the beautiful lily had paralyzed him. By this, Goethe means the ancient truth that man must first be purified, must first have undergone catharsis, so that he no longer reaches wisdom through guilt, so that he can absorb the splendor of higher spirituality within himself. The youth had not yet been prepared by the purification. All living things that are not yet ripe are killed by the lily. All dead things that have gone through the “Stirb und Werde” are revived by the lily. Goethe now says that one is ripe for freedom who has first freed himself within. Jakob Böhme also says that man must develop out of the lower principles.

He who does not die before he dies
Will perish if he dies.

Man must first mature, must first be purified before he can enter the realm of the spirit, the lily. In the ancient mysteries, man had to pass through stages of purification before he could become a mystic. The youth must first pass through these stages. They lead him to the lily.

The snake signifies development. We see those who are seeking the new path, all those who are striving towards spirituality, gathered around the lily. But first the temple must rise above the river. All move towards the river, the will-o'-the-wisps in front; they unlock the gate. Selfish wisdom is the bridge to selfless wisdom. Through the self, wisdom leads to selflessness. The snake has sacrificed itself. Now one understands what love is, a sacrifice of the lower self for the good of humanity, full brotherhood.

The entire assembly moves towards the temple. The temple rises above the river. The youth is resurrected. He is endowed with Atma, Budhi and Manas. Atma, in the form of the brazen king, steps before the youth and hands him the sword. It is the highest will, not mixed with the others. Atma should work in man so that the sword is on the left and the right is free. Before that, man works in particularity, the war of all against all. But now, when man is purified, peace will take the place of struggle, the sword on the left for protection, the right free to do good.

The second king represents what is known to us as the second principle, as the Budhi – piety, mind, through which man turns to the Highest in faith. Silver is the symbol of piety. The second king says:

Feed the sheep,

because we are dealing here with the power of the mind. The appearance here is the appearance of beauty. Goethe associated a religious reverence with art. He saw in art the revelation of the divine, the realm of beautiful appearance is the realm of piety. The brazen king signifies – without the lower principles – power, the silver king peace, the golden king wisdom. He says:

Recognize the Supreme.

The youth is the four-principled man who develops into the higher principles. The four principles are paralyzed by the spirit before they have undergone the purifying development. Then the three higher principles work in harmony in man. Then he will be strong and powerful; then he may marry the lily. This is the marriage between the soul and the spirit of man. The soul has always been represented as something feminine; the mystery of the eternal, the immortal, is presented here.

The eternal feminine draws us up.

Goethe used the same image here in the “Fairytale”, when the young man marries the beautiful lily.

Now all that is alive passes over the vaulting bridge from the sacrificed human self. Wayfarers pass over and across. All the kingdoms are now connected in beautiful harmony. The old woman is rejuvenated, as is the old man with the lamp; the old has passed away and everything has become new. The ferryman's small hut is now included in the temple in a silver-plated state as a kind of altar. What unconsciously took man across before now takes him across in the conscious state. The composite king has collapsed. The jack-o'-lanterns licked out the gold, for they are still directed towards the low. The giant now indicates the time. What used to be the sensual principle, what led across in the twilight hour, what is sensual, what belongs to the state of nature, now indicates the evenly passing time. As long as man has not developed the three higher principles, the past and the future are in conflict. The giant can then only work in an inharmonious way. Now time has become something harmonious in this ideal state.

The thought fastens that which fluctuates in a lasting way, which is expressed in the following words:

And that which floats in fluctuating appearance
is fastened with lasting thoughts.

What is seen in the Pythagorean school as the rhythm of the universe, the music of the spheres, the sounding of the planets that move rhythmically around the sun, arises through the realization of the divine thought. For the mystic, a planet was a being of a higher order. This is why Goethe also says:

The sun resounds in the ancient way
In the singing of the spheres,
And completes its prescribed journey
With a thunderclap.

That man has the ability within himself to develop to the highest divine, he says in the words:

If the eye were not like the sun,
It could never behold the sun;
If the power of God were not in us,
How could we, being divine, be enraptured?

I. Report in the “Weimarische Zeitung” of December 9, 1904

On Wednesday the Weimar branch of the Theosophical Society organized a lecture in the Erbprinzen on Goethe's fairy tale of the green snake and the beautiful lily.

As we were informed, Dr. Rudolf Steiner showed that this little poem contains the secret of Goethe's world view in a magnificent artistic image. The abundance of figures and events that the poet presents to us represents the soul life of man in his development from the sensual to the highest spiritual existence. For Goethe, human nature consists of body, soul and spirit. The spirit reaches its highest level when its three components: wisdom, mind and will, work together in full harmony within it. By undergoing a complete transformation through the purification of all its lower powers by the fire of selfless love and devotion, the soul achieves this harmony. Goethe thus symbolically represented human worth and human destiny. The harmony of the sensual and spiritual world at the highest levels of existence is initially expressed in an enigmatic, but as soon as one penetrates to the solution of the riddle, captivating way. One only gains a true sense of Goethe's depth when one seeks to unlock one's inner being with the help of this fairy tale. Goethe was inspired to do so by Schiller, who, in his Letters on the Aesthetic Education of Man, had sought in his more philosophical vein to reconcile the sensual and spiritual nature of man. Goethe wanted to express himself poetically about this. In pictures, he could speak as vividly about the riddles of the world as he knew how when he wanted to reveal what lived in his soul about them.

II. Report in “Deutschland” from December 9, 1904

On Wednesday, Dr. Rudolf Steiner gave a lecture at the Erbprinzen on Goethe's riddle fairy tale of the green snake and the beautiful lily, which the Weimar branch of the Theosophical Society had organized.

The lecturer showed how Goethe expressed his deepest thoughts about the nature of man and the meaning of life in this small poem. Schiller, in his Letters on the Aesthetic Education of Man, posed the same question: How can man harmonize his sensual nature with his spiritual nature? He answered this question philosophically, and Goethe was inspired to express what he had to say about it in a powerful poetic image. The deeper one delves into the aforementioned fairy tale, the more one can see that its lively, crafted images contain the abilities and powers that are effective in man, and the action described contains a symbol for the whole development of man from sensuality to spirituality. Body, soul and spirit in their relationships to each other and to the laws of the universe are presented in a colorful way. The three highest powers of the spirit, wisdom, mind and will in their harmonious interaction are the goal of human progress. The soul will be endowed with them in the right way when it has reached its summit. Its path leads from the life in the lower self to that in the higher self. Selfless devotion and loving sacrifice for the spiritual life lead there. Goethe revealed the most mature fruits of his inner experience through this fairy tale. The lecture indicated the direction in which the explanation must be sought, and at the same time pointed out that the more intimately one deals with it, the more surprised one will be by the richness and greatness of this poetry.

[On the banks of the great river, swollen and overflowing after heavy rains, the old ferryman lay in his little hut, tired from the day's exertions, and slept.

The ferryman – the lower forces of nature – rests on the far bank – the mental plane – of the river – the astral desire plan.

Then two will-o'-the-wisps come along: people in whom only Kama-Manas lives, that is, the lower mind, which draws its knowledge from the lower material plane. The will-o'-the-wisps want to pay the ferryman with their gold, which they shake out of themselves. He has no use for that; the lower mind cannot control the lower forces of nature. The ferryman gathers up the gold knowledge in horror.

If a piece of gold had fallen into the water, the stream,

— the passion —

which this metal cannot endure,

— gold and knowledge stir up the passions —

rose in terrible waves, engulfing the ship and me. And who knows how it would have gone for you! Take your money back with you,

says the ferryman.

We cannot take back what we have shaken off,

say the will-o'-the-wisps. Quite right too; earthly wisdom cannot pick up what it has let go. The ferryman demands his reward from the will-o'-the-wisps: fruits of the earth; three cabbages, three onions, three artichokes. The will-o'-the-wisps cannot give them to him, but they promise to get them. The ferryman carefully collects the gold in his cap and sails along the river to a rocky area on the same side where the will-o'-the-wisps are, who call to him in vain once more, where the water can never reach it, and pours the dangerous gold into a huge crevice; then he returns to his hut.

In this crevice [was] the beautiful green snake,

— the higher Manas —

which was awakened from its slumber by the coin falling down.

She devours the gold with eagerness, which melts in her interior and illuminates her, causing her joy and pleasure. Then she seeks the giver of the gold, paying no attention to hardships and dangers.

Very tired, she finally came to a damp reed where our two will-o'-the-wisps were playing now and then.

She is pleased to find kinship in them. The will-o'-the-wisps also greet her warmly, but say that they are

only related by appearance.

The snake feels uncomfortable in the presence of her acquaintance; she cannot stretch up to them and fears losing her own appearance. She asks the gentlemen about the origin of the gold, which she believes came down from the sky as a shower of gold. The will-o'-the-wisps shake with laughter and scatter new gold, which the snake devours with greed and thus becomes ever more radiant, while the will-o'-the-wisps diminish and shrink, but always remain merry. The snake wants to show her gratitude and promises to serve them.

The will-o'-the-wisps ask for directions to the beautiful lily – the highest bliss – and learn to their dismay and sorrow that she lives beyond the water, where they come from. They ask the snake to call the ferryman for them so that he will take them back across. To their dismay, they learn that the ferryman is allowed to ferry anyone across, but no one back across. Into the [earthly] world we are transported by natural forces, but back to the higher world, man must transport himself.

The will-o'-the-wisps ask how this can be done. The snake gives them two options: she herself offers to ferry them across at noon. But this hour does not suit the gentlemen. The second option is offered by the giant – Death – whose body is powerless, but whose shadow – sleep, deep sleep, trance –

much, yes everything

can do. His shadow lies over the river in the evening and in the morning, and the gentlemen could use that as a bridge. The will-o'-the-wisps move away, the snake is glad to be rid of them. She returns to her rocky gorge. There she has already made a strange discovery. Through a crevice in the rocks, she had come to a place where she found things that were foreign to her. Until then, she had only encountered natural products, which she could easily distinguish by touch even in underground spaces: the pointed crystals, the

hooks and hairs of solid silver,

and she also brought many a precious stone up to the light. At the mentioned place, now, to her great astonishment, she found smooth walls and things made by human hands; beautiful columns and so on and human figures, around which she had wrapped herself and looked at them. She now wanted to examine these things, too, by means of her sight, now that she had become luminous, in order to get a complete idea of them. With her light she could not quite illuminate the cave in which she had entered by the familiar route, but she recognized the individual objects she came close to. In a niche stood the portrait of a king, made entirely of pure gold. Although depicted in superhuman size, it seemed to

the likeness of a little rather than a large man.

The golden king

asked, 'Where comest thou?' 'From the crevices,' answered the snake, 'where gold dwells.' 'What is more glorious than gold?' asked the king. 'The light,' replied the snake. 'What is more refreshing than light?' asked the king. 'Conversation,' answered the snake.

In the next niche sat a silver king - Budhi -

of long and rather slight build,

adorned with a magnificent robe,

crown, belt and scepter, adorned with precious stones. He wore the serenity of pride on his face and seemed about to speak when, on the marble wall, a vein that ran dark through it suddenly brightened and a pleasant light spread through the entire temple. In this light, the snake saw the third king, who sat there in the mighty form of a god, leaning on his club, adorned with a laurel wreath, and looking more like a rock than a human being. She wanted to look for the fourth king, who was standing at the greatest distance from her, but the wall opened up, with the illuminated vein flashing like lightning and disappearing.

A man dressed in rustic clothes entered, holding a small lamp,

whose quiet flame one gladly gazed into and which, in a wonderful way, without casting even a single shadow, illuminated the entire cathedral.

The man with the lamp is religion.

“Why do you come when we have light?” asked the golden King, the Thinker. You know that I am not allowed to illuminate the dark.

The power of religion only has an illuminating effect when it is met by another power. Religion must be met by faith, otherwise it cannot illuminate people.

“Is my kingdom coming to an end?” asked the Silver King

— Budhi, the spirit of life, the spiritual body.

“It's either that or never,” replied the old man. “When will I arise?”

— that is, gain my sovereignty — the brazen king — the spirit man, Atma —

to ask. 'Soon,' the old man replied. 'With whom shall I unite?' asked the king. 'With your elder brothers,' said the old man. 'What will become of the youngest?' asked the king. 'He will sit down'

- an expression for the laying down of the rule -

said the old man. 'I am not tired,' cried the fourth king in a hoarse, stammering voice.

The fourth king is a symbol for the four lower, perishable basic parts of man; thus:

firstly, the physical body,

secondly, the etheric body – linga sharira,

thirdly, the sentient soul body – astral body, and fourthly, the mind soul – lower manas, kama manas – that is, the mind, the power of thought, which is still and desires, and is therefore incapable of recognizing the higher, the divine, the higher Manas, the real thinker, the true human being, and even less the spiritual man, Atma. Meanwhile, the snake had crept around the temple

and now saw the fourth king near by. He was leaning against a column, and his stately figure was rather heavy than beautiful. Only the metal from which he was cast could not easily be distinguished. On closer inspection, it was a mixture of the three metals from which his brothers were formed. But at the casting, these materials did not seem to have melted together properly; golden and silver veins ran irregularly through a brazen mass, giving the image an unpleasant appearance.

Meanwhile, the golden king said to the man, “How many secrets do you know?” — “Three,” the old man replied. “Which is the most important?” asked the silver king. “The Manifest,” answered the old man. ‘Will you then reveal it to us?’ asked the brazen king. ‘I will do so as soon as I know the fourth,’ said the old man. ‘What do I care!’ murmured the composite king to himself. ‘I know the fourth,’ said the snake, approaching the old man and hissing something in his ear. ‘It is time!’ shouted the old man in a mighty voice. The temple resounded, the metal statues sounded, and in that moment the old man sank to the west and the snake to the east, each sweeping through the crevices of the rocks with great speed.

The rock that is described here is a description of the ancient mystery temples, where the disciples were initiated into the mysteries of existence. The basic parts of the human being were symbolically depicted there. There are still many such temples in India, and since the spiritual life no longer permeates people as it did in ancient times, when the intellect and reason were not yet developed, they have been abandoned and destroyed and demolished by wild hands; even as ruins, they still make a magnificent, sometimes horrifying impression. The figures that are symbolically depicted there and that present a hideous image to our eyes were once, when viewed with the eye of the mind, a means to first understand the higher life and then, after reaching maturity, to see it for oneself. We Westerners see them only as hideous idols; the Oriental sees through the outer form to the meaning of the symbols. They have not yet developed a sense of beauty for form. In ancient times, when the grotesque images were created, the external form was so unimportant to them that they used it only to express an idea, just as we now use language, written language, as a medium to communicate to our fellow human beings the things we have grasped in our minds. The crude way in which we Westerners often judge these things, the proselytizing that sought its mission in the destruction of “idols,” testifies to a complete ignorance of these things.

The snake whispered in the old man's ear that it was ready to sacrifice itself completely, and then the old man cries:

It is time!

whereupon the temple resounds. We don't need oriental wisdom to understand this “resonance”. Goethe gives us an explanation in his “Faust” prologue in heaven:

The sun resounds in the ancient way
In brotherly spheres of competitive song.

Heaven – the Devachan – is the plane where it resounds. Sound has its realm there.

Resounding for spiritual ears
The new day is already born!

The snake, the intellect that seeks enlightenment, goes east, the man with the lamp – religion – goes west.

All the passageways through which the old man walked were immediately filled with gold behind him; for his lamp had the wonderful property of transforming all stones into gold, all wood into silver, dead animals into precious stones, and crushing all metals. But to show this effect, it had to shine all alone; if another light was beside it, it only had a beautiful, bright glow, and all living things were always refreshed by it.

The old man entered his hut, which was built against the mountain, and found his wife in the greatest distress. She sat by the fire and wept, and could not be consoled. “How unhappy I am,” she exclaimed; “I did not want to let you go today!”

In answer to the husband's question, the wife tells him that during his absence two gentlemen – the will-o'-the-wisps – had been with her and behaved very intrusively.

"And just look around you at the state of the walls; just look at the old stones that I haven't seen in a hundred years: they have licked all the gold off, you wouldn't believe how nimbly, and they kept assuring me that it tastes much better than ordinary gold.

Then they became more and more insolent, caressed her, and called her queen, shook herself so that a quantity of gold pieces were scattered about, and to make matters worse, her pug dog ate some of them, and now he was lying dead by the fireside.

“I only saw it after they had gone, otherwise I would not have promised to pay off her debt to the ferryman.” “What is she indebted for?” asked the old man. “Three cabbages,” said the woman, “

The old woman is the soul, the ordinary sensual life of man. The will-o'-the-wisps – rational science – lick up the gold – historical knowledge – and scatter it again. It flatters the lower nature, but has no invigorating power; the pug that eats of it dies. Natural science denies the power of life, and without the invigorating power of the lamp – the light that religion brings – life dies through dead knowledge. In the first round, the mineral kingdom contains the form for wisdom. Three times three is nine – human sensuality. Three cabbages, three onions, three artichokes. Man has passed through the three kingdoms. The woman pays for the torrent of passions with fruits of the earth. The cabbage, the shellfish, [represents] the leaves; the onion, the essence, which consists of covers, [represents] the root; the artichoke [represents] the fruit. She [the old man's wife with the lamp] has to pay this [tribute] to the stream.

“You may do them the favor,” said the old man; “for they will serve us again on occasion.”

[The old man] extinguishes the fire, carefully collects the remaining gold pieces,

and now his lamp alone was again shining in the most beautiful splendor, the walls were covered with gold, and the pug had become the most beautiful onyx. “Take your basket,” said the old man, “and put the onyx in it; then take the three cabbages, the three artichokes, and the three onions, place them around it, and carry them to the river! About noon let the snake carry you over, and visit the beautiful lily, and give her the onyx! She will bring it to life by her touch, as she kills everything alive by her touch; she will have a faithful companion in it. Tell her not to grieve, her deliverance is near, she may regard the greatest misfortune as the greatest happiness, for the time has come.” The old woman packed her basket and set off during the day. The rising sun shone brightly over the river, which glistened in the distance; the woman walked slowly, for the basket weighed heavily on her head, and yet it was not the onyx that weighed so heavily

, but the fresh vegetables.

She did not feel the dead weight she was carrying; but when she lifted her basket up, it floated above her head. But carrying fresh vegetables or a small, live animal was extremely difficult for her. She had been walking along discontentedly for some time when she suddenly stood still with a start; for she almost stepped on the shadow of the giant that stretched across the plain to her. And now she saw the enormous giant, who had bathed in the river, rising out of the water, and she did not know how to avoid him. As soon as he saw her, he began to greet her playfully, and his shadow's hands immediately reached into the basket. With ease and skill, they took out a cabbage, an artichoke, and an onion and brought them to the giant's mouth, who then went further up the river, leaving the woman the way free.

The old woman considered whether she should turn back and fetch what was missing from her garden, but she kept going until she came to the river and waited a long time for the ferryman. Finally he came. A young, noble, beautiful man got out of the boat.

What do you bring?

the ferryman called.

It is the vegetables that the will-o'-the-wisps owe you,

replied the woman. The ferryman did not want to accept it, as there was a shortage of each kind. Although the woman begged and pleaded to accept the gift, she could not go back the arduous way, but he refused,

by assuring her that it did not even depend on him. “What is due to me, I must leave together for nine hours, and I must not accept anything until I have given a third to the river [...] There is still a remedy. If you want to guarantee against the river and confess as a debtor, I will take the six pieces with me; but there is some danger in it.” “If I keep my word, I shall not be in any danger?” ‘Not the slightest.’ ‘Put your hand into the river, and promise that you will pay off the debt in twenty-four hours.’ The old woman did so, but how frightened she was when she pulled her hand out of the water, as black as coal!

The old woman is very unhappy that her beautiful hand has turned black and is even beginning to fade.

“It only seems so,” said the ferryman; “but if you do not keep your word, it may come true. The hand will gradually fade away, [...] without your losing the use of it. You will be able to do everything with it, only no one will see it.“ — ‘I would rather not be able to use it and not be recognized,’ said the old woman. However, that does not mean anything; I will keep my word to get rid of this black hand and this worry soon.”

Three times three is nine, the number of human sensuality; she has passed through all three realms. The woman pays for the torrent of passions with the fruits of the earth. She must pay the tribute to the torrent. The cabbage symbolizes the leaves, the onion the root, the artichoke the fruit. All three are shell plants.

The soul essence – the woman – loses some of the fruits and shoots that she has acquired through hard work in the garden through sleeping, dreaming and a lack of vigilance. But she has committed to paying the debt of the will-o'-the-wisps – the power of reason. Reason alone cannot produce leaves, flowers or fruits; it leaves that to the soul forces. But the lower natural forces – the ferryman – insist on their right; the stream of passions also wants to be satisfied. However, since the woman lacks the sufficient means to do so, she atones for it with her body. She does not lack the strength, but her body is very disfigured because she has dipped her hand into the stream. If a person gives in to passion, he will suffer damage. It is very indicative of man's low mentality that the woman is much more concerned about appearances – what will people say? – than about the loss of her ability to work, which, according to the ferryman, she does not actually risk.

The woman now picks up the basket again, which floats freely above her head,

and hastened after the young man, who walked gently and thoughtfully along the shore. His magnificent figure and strange attire had made a deep impression on the old woman. His chest was covered with a shiny armor through which all parts of his beautiful body moved. Around his shoulders hung a purple cloak, around his uncovered head waved brown hair in beautiful curls; his sweet face was exposed to the rays of the sun, as were his beautifully built feet. With bare soles, he walked calmly over the hot sand, and a deep pain seemed to blunt all external impressions.

The old woman tried to start a conversation with him, but he barely responded. This bored her and she recommended herself, saying that she had to hurry to cross the river via the green snake and deliver her husband's gift to the beautiful lily. When the young man hears this, he takes courage and runs after the woman.

“You are going to the beautiful lily!” he exclaimed;
“we are going the same way."

On the way, they exchange their fates. The youth describes his miserable state: his armor and purple robes have become only a useless burden and adornment for him, his crown, scepter and sword are gone, he is

naked and destitute as every other son of earth, for her [the lily's] beautiful blue eyes have such an unfortunate effect that they take away the strength of all living beings and those whom her touching hand does not kill feel transported into the state of living shadows.

He envies the pug dog, because it would gain life through her touch.

The youth represents humanity in general. It is sick with longing for life. The eternal feminine draws it on. When man strives for higher knowledge, paralysis overtakes him: without a firm moral foundation, it is dangerous to seek higher knowledge. The stormy assault results in death. Love kills life; but it kills so that true life may arise. Die and become.

He who does not die before he dies, will perish when he dies.

The lower self must die. Thus, death is the root of life.

They now come to the bridge, are amazed at the splendor of the green snake, which sparkles with jewels all over; high arched, it swings over the river. Once across, they notice that several other travelers have crossed over with them – the will-o'-the-wisps, which they cannot see, but whose presence is betrayed by their hissing with the snake, which joins them after the crossing. The woman, youth, and snake now go to the white lily, while the will-o'-the-wisps look around the queen's garden for a while until dusk falls.

The old woman approaches the royal maiden first and is so enchanted by her beauty and her lovely singing to the harp that she breaks out into enthusiastic praise. The lily speaks:

Do not grieve me with untimely praise! I feel only the more strongly my misfortune.

She says that her canary, her greatest joy and delight, was frightened by a hawk, fled to her bosom and died there. She is inconsolable, because the culprit, paralyzed by her gaze, is serving his sentence by the pond, and that cannot help her. Her bird – the prophetic power – is dead and must be buried.

“Be of good cheer, beautiful lily!” cried the woman, [...] “My age bids me tell you [...] that you shall regard the greatest misfortune as a harbinger of the greatest happiness, for the time is at hand.

Then she tells of her misfortune and asks the lily to give her the missing cabbage, onion and artichoke so that she can pay her debt and her hand will turn white again. The lily is happy to give the cabbage and onion [– roots and leaves –], but the garden, in which fresh greenery had sprung up on the grave of her favorite but which never bore fruit, does not have an artichoke – a fruit.

The woman pays little attention to the speech of the beautiful lily; she sees to her horror the hand growing blacker and blacker and fading more and more, and is about to leave when she remembers the pug, which she now gives to the lily.

The beautiful lily looked at the gentle animal with pleasure and, [...] with amazement. 'Many signs are coming together,' she said, 'that inspire some hope in me; but alas! is it not merely an illusion of our nature that when many misfortunes occur we imagine the best is near?'

What good are the many good signs to me?
The bird's death, the friend's black hand?
The pug of precious stone, does it have its match?
And didn't the lamp send it to me?
Removed from sweet human enjoyment,
I am only familiar with misery.
Ah! why is the temple not by the river!
Ah! why has the bridge not been built!'

Impatient with the long song, the woman wants to leave when she is stopped by the appearance of the snake. She approaches the beautiful lily and encourages her:

The prophecy of the bridge is fulfilled!

Much more gloriously than before, it rises above the river, shining with precious stones, says the woman. But the lily does not yet consider the prophecy fulfilled, since only pedestrians can cross the bridge; but the promise is that horses and carriages would also cross a solid bridge – whose pillars would rest in the river – that would rise out of the river.

The old woman, still gazing at her hand, is about to take her leave, when the lily begs her to take her poor canary with her.

"Ask the lamp to change him into a beautiful topaz; I will revive him with my touch, and he, with your good pug, will be my best pastime. But hurry, whatever you can, because at sunset, unbearable rot will take hold of the poor animal and tear apart the beautiful structure of his form forever.” The old woman laid the little corpse among delicate leaves in the basket and hurried away.

The snake continued the conversation:

“The temple is built,” said the Snake. “But it is not yet by the river,” said the Lily. “It still rests in the depths of the earth,” said the Snake. “I have seen and spoken to the kings.” “But when will they rise?” asked the Lily. The Snake said, “I heard the great words resound in the temple: It is time!” A pleasant serenity spread across the face of the beautiful woman. 'I have heard the happy words for the second time today; when will the day come when I hear them three times?'

Now follows the description of her retinue, the three lovely handmaidens. The pug comes to life at her touch, and even if there is only half life in him, he still likes to play with her.

The sad young man approaches, exhausted and pale, he approaches his beloved. He carries the hawk – the symbol of the diviner of the future, prophet of the mysteries – in his hand.

“It is not kind,” cried Lily, “to bring me the hated animal that [...] killed my little singer today.” “Do not scold the unfortunate bird!” replied the youth; “Rather, blame yourself and fate and allow me to keep you company in your misery.”

The young man, jealous of the pug with which the beautiful lily plays and presses to her bosom, awakens the last remnant of his courage. He makes a violent movement, the hawk flies up, but he rushes at the beauty, and the misfortune happens: he falls dead at her feet. In silent despair, the lily looks for help. The snake forms with her body

a wide circle around the corpse, grasped the end of her tail with her teeth and remained still.

The handmaidens, the first of whom brings the chair, approach again, the second lays a fire-colored veil around the head of the mistress, the third brings the harp. The lily had scarcely coaxed a few notes from the instrument when the first servant brought a mirror and held it before the lady, so that she saw her magnificent image, made even more beautiful by her mourning, in it.

Who will create us the man with the lamp,

the snake hissed. The beauty just sobbed. At that moment, the woman came running up, out of breath:

I am lost and maimed!

she exclaimed. Neither the ferryman nor the giant wanted to take her across.

Forget your troubles and help us here. Seek out the will-o'-the-wisps so that the giant's shadow can carry you and you can fetch the man with the lamp.

The lily waited with great sadness, the snake looked impatiently for help. Then,

high up in the air, she saw the hawk with its crimson feathers, whose breast caught the last rays of the sun. She shook with joy at the good omen, and she was not mistaken; for shortly afterwards, the man with the lamp was seen gliding over the lake, as if he were skating.

After he had explained his coming, he said:

“Be calm, most beautiful maiden! Whether I can help, I do not know; a single one does not help, but he who unites with many at the right hour. Let us postpone and hope. Keep your circle closed,” he said to the snake.

He himself sat down on a stone beside it, and let the light of the lamp fall on the corpse.

Bring also the dead canary.

It was laid on the corpse as well. The sun had set; the lamp, the snake, and the maiden's veil shone, each with its own light.

Sorrow and grief were softened by a sure hope.

Only the old woman, who had come with the will-o'-the-wisps, was full of apprehension for her hand. The will-o'-the-wisps chatted with the beautiful lily, and midnight came before anyone knew it.

The old man looked at the stars and then began to speak: 'We are together at a happy hour, each of us performing our duties, each doing our duty, and a general happiness will dissolve the individual pains in itself, like a general misfortune consumes individual joys.

The combined efforts of all were needed to provide relief. Each individual was absorbed in his task and spoke loudly about it, only the three maidservants had fallen asleep from exhaustion.

“Take,” said the old man to the hawk, “the mirror, and with the first ray of the sun illuminate the sleepers and wake them with the reflected light from on high!”

The snake now untied itself and slithered towards the river, the will-o'-the-wisps followed quite earnestly. The old man and his wife stretched the basket, which had its own glow that had not been noticed before, put the body of the youth inside and placed the dead canary on his chest. The basket rose up and hovered above the head of the old woman, who immediately followed the will-o'-the-wisps.

The beautiful lily took the pug on her arm and followed the old woman, the man with the lamp decided the train and the area was illuminated by these many lights in the most peculiar.

When they reached the shore, the company looked in amazement at the wonderful arch that the snake had formed across the river. The gems shone and radiated in wonderful beauty. When everyone had crossed, the snake also moved to the shore and closed the circle around the body again.

The ferryman, who had been looking out from his hut in the distance, gazed in amazement at the glowing circle and the strange lights that passed over it.

The old man bowed to the snake and said:

“What hast thou decided?” — ‘To sacrifice myself before I am sacrificed,’ replied the snake; ‘Promise me that thou wilt leave no stone unturned!’ The old man promised, and then said to the beautiful lily: ‘Touch the snake with thy left hand, and thy lover with thy right hand.’ The lily knelt down and touched the snake and the corpse. In that moment, the body seemed to come to life; it moved in the basket, even rising up and sitting. Lily wanted to embrace him, but the old man held her back, helping the youth to stand up instead and guiding him as he stepped out of the basket and the circle.

The youth stood, the canary fluttered on his shoulder, there was life in both of them again, but the spirit had not yet returned; the beautiful friend had his eyes open and did not see, at least he seemed to look at everything without participation.

When the astonishment at this event had subsided a little, the change that had taken place with the snake was noticed with amazement. The body had crumbled into a thousand and one gems when the old woman had carelessly pushed against them while she reached for her basket. The old man and his wife carefully collected the gems in their basket, carried them to a high place on the bank of the river and poured them into the stream. The old man now led the procession to the sanctuary; he walked ahead with the lamp. The youth followed half mechanically. The lily timidly trailed behind, the old woman sought to bring her hand into the light of the lamp, the will-o'-the-wisps closed the procession. The path led through the rock that opened before them. Soon they came to a large, brazen gate,

whose wings were closed with a golden lock. The old man immediately summoned the will-o'-the-wisps, who [...] busily consumed the lock and bolt with their pointed flames.

The entrance to the higher levels of consciousness must first be sought through the mind.

The ore sounded loudly when the gates quickly sprang open and the dignified images of the kings, illuminated by the incoming light, appeared in the sanctuary. Everyone bowed before the venerable rulers [...]. After a pause, the golden king asked: “Where do you come from?” “From the world,” replied the old man. “Where are you going?” asked the silver king. “Into the world,” said the old man. ‘What do you want with us?’ asked the brazen king. ‘To accompany you,’ said the old man.

The will-o'-the-wisps had approached the golden king. He fought them off and said:

Get away from me! My gold is not for your palate!

After they had lit the silver one, they crept past the brazen one to the mixed one.

“Who will rule the world?” the mixed king cried in a stammering voice. “He who stands on his feet.” answered the old man, “That is I!” said the mixed king. “It will reveal itself,” said the old man; “for the time has come.”

The beautiful lily fell around the neck of the old man and kissed him most warmly. “Holy Father,” she said, “a thousand thanks to you, for this is the third time I have heard the ominous word.” She had hardly finished speaking when she held even tighter to the old man, for the ground began to shake beneath them. The old woman and the youth also held on to each other; only the moving will-o'-the-wisps noticed nothing.

The temple first moved downwards, then passed under the stream, and during the ascent, the debris of the ferryman's small hut fell through the dome of the temple and covered the old man and the youth. The women had jumped aside.

The women screamed loudly, and the temple shook like a ship that suddenly hits the shore. The women wandered anxiously around the hut in the twilight; the door was locked, and no one heard their knocking.

To her amazement, the wood began to resound. Through the power of the closed lamp, the wood had turned to silver, and gradually expanded into a magnificent case of hammered work. Now there stood a small temple or altar in the middle of the large one.

By a staircase that went up from the inside, the noble youth now stepped up, the man with the lamp shone for him, and another seemed to support him, who came forth in a white, short robe and held a silver oar in his hand;

it was the ferryman, the former inhabitant of the transformed hut.

[By crossing the] bridge, which was necessary, the temple should apparently be, that could only happen through the interaction of all forces. Only through the sacrifice of the self was it possible to cross the stream of passions. The will-o'-the-wisps have to unlock the temple; one must have natural knowledge to penetrate the secrets.

The beautiful lily climbed the outer steps that led from the temple to the altar; but still she had to stay away from her lover. The old woman, whose hand

had almost completely disappeared, was very unhappy that with so many miracles, no miracle could save her hand.

Her husband pointed to the open gate and said: 'Behold, day is breaking; hurry and bathe thyself in the river!' – 'What advice!' she cried; 'I shall surely become quite black and disappear altogether; I have not yet paid my debt' – 'Go,' said the old man, 'and follow me! All debts are paid.' The old woman hurried away, and at that moment the light of the rising sun appeared at the crown of the dome; the old man stepped between the youth and the maiden and shouted in a loud voice: 'There are three who rule on earth: wisdom, appearance, and force'. At the first word the golden king rose, at the second the silver one, and at the third the brazen one had slowly raised himself, when the composite king suddenly sat down awkwardly.

The will-o'-the-wisps had been preoccupied with him for a long time and did not rest until they had also extracted the finest veins from his form. But that robbed him of all support and he collapsed, becoming an unformed lump.

The man with the lamp now led the beautiful youth, who was still gazing fixedly ahead, down from the altar and straight towards the brazen king. At the feet of the mighty prince lay a sword in a brazen sheath. The youth girded himself. '

— only for defense, not for attack —

“Right hand free!”

— to give blessings and peace —

the mighty king called out. They then went to the silver king, who inclined his scepter towards the youth. The youth seized it with his left hand, and the king said in a kindly voice: “Feed the sheep!” When they came to the golden king, he pressed the oak wreath on the youth's head with a fatherly, blessing gesture and said: “Recognize the highest!”

The old man, who had observed the youth closely during the proceedings, saw how, after the girding, his chest rose, his arms stretched and his feet stepped firmer;

By taking up the sceptre, his strength seemed to be softened and made even more powerful by an inexpressible charm; but when the oak wreath adorned his curls, his features came to life, his eye sparkled with inexpressible spirit, and the first word from his mouth was: “Lily.” 'Dear lily,' he cried, as he hastened up the silver steps towards her, [...] 'what more could a man, endowed with everything, desire than the innocence and quiet affection that your bosom bestows on me? Oh, my friend, he continued, turning to the old man and looking at the three sacred statues, 'glorious and secure is the kingdom of our fathers, but you have forgotten the fourth power that ruled the world even earlier, more generally, more certainly: the power of love. With these words he fell on his knees before the beautiful maiden; she had thrown aside her veil, and her cheeks were suffused with the most beautiful and most imperishable of all blushes. Then the old man said, smiling: 'Love does not reign, but it creates, and that is more.'

Unbeknownst to them, day had fully broken and the astonished eyes looked through the open gates:

a large square surrounded by columns formed the forecourt, at the end of which one could see a long and magnificent bridge that reached over the river with many arches.

This magnificent bridge was already teeming with all kinds of people on foot and in carriages. Happy in their mutual love, the king and his wife looked on the people with delight.

“Remember the snake with honor!” said the man with the lamp. ”You are its life; your peoples owe it the bridge by which these neighboring shores are first inhabited and connected. Those floating and glowing gems, the remains of her sacrificed body, are the pillars of this magnificent bridge; she built it herself and will sustain herself.” Just as one was about to ask him to explain this strange secret, four beautiful girls entered the temple gate. The harp, parasol and field chair immediately identified them as Lily's companions. But the fourth [...] was an unknown [...]. “Will you believe me more in the future, dear wife?” the man with the lamp said to the beauty. “Happy you and every creature that bathes in the river this morning!” The rejuvenated and beautified old woman [...] embraced [...] the man with the lamp, who accepted her caresses with kindness. ‘If I am too old for you,’ he said smiling, ”then you may choose another husband today; from this day on, no marriage is valid unless it is renewed.” “'Do you not know,' she replied, 'that you have grown younger too?' – 'I am glad if I appear to your young eyes as a worthy youth; I accept your hand anew and would gladly live with you into the next millennium.'"

The great giant, still recovering from his morning nap and staggering across the bridge, brought a disruption to the general happiness. As usual, he wanted to bathe in the river, drowsy as he was, and suddenly found the bridge, on which he clumsily stepped between humans and cattle. His presence was

by all wondered at, but felt by none; when, however, the sun shone in his eyes, and he raised his hands to wipe them, the shadow of his enormous fists passed behind him so powerfully and clumsily under the crowd that men and animals collapsed in large masses, were damaged, and risked being thrown into the river. The king, who saw this outrage, made an involuntary movement for his sword, but he recovered himself and looked calmly first at his scepter, then at the lamp and the oar of his companions. 'I divine your thoughts,' said the man with the lamp; 'but we and our powers are powerless against this powerless one. Be quiet! He is harming for the last time, and fortunately his shadow has turned away from us. Meanwhile, the giant had come closer and closer, had let his hands drop in amazement at what he saw with open eyes, was doing no more harm, and stepped into the forecourt, gawking. He was just walking towards the temple door when he was suddenly held to the ground in the middle of the courtyard. He stood as a colossal, mighty statue of reddish shining stone, and his shadow showed the hours, which were engraved in a circle on the ground around him, not in numbers, but in noble and significant images. The king was not a little pleased to see the shadow of the monster in a useful direction; [...] Meanwhile, the people had crowded around the giant, [...] and marveled at his transformation. From there, the crowd turned to the temple, which they seemed to have only just noticed, and pushed towards the door. At that moment, the hawk with the mirror hovered over the cathedral, caught the light of the sun and threw it over the group standing on the altar.

The hawk, the herald of the future, also teaches us to understand the laws. When these are understood, knowledge can be borne.

The king, the queen and their companions appeared in the twilight vault of the temple, illuminated by a heavenly radiance, and the people fell on their faces. When the crowd had recovered and stood up, the king and his party had descended into the altar to go to his palace through hidden halls, and the people scattered throughout the temple to satisfy their curiosity. They looked at the three upright kings with amazement and awe,

but when they came full of curiosity to the fourth, the shapeless lump was covered with a precious carpet that no one could lift. The people almost crushed each other in the temple if the will-o'-the-wisps had not attracted their attention. It was fun for them to shake off the gold they had sucked in as they moved away, which is why the people fell upon them with jokes and laughter.

The people ran eagerly back and forth for a while, pushing and pulling each other, since no more gold pieces were falling. Finally, they gradually dispersed, went their way, and to this day the bridge is teeming with travelers, and the temple is the most visited in the whole world.

There is still much to be interpreted. The snake that bites its own tail and encloses the dead youth is the Budhi principle, which must be lived and loved. The radiance of the divine - Atma - is peace, harmony, and universal consciousness. It has been achieved through the transformation of desire into love. Everything becomes young again.

The shattered hut of the lower forces is transformed by the spirit of life; now the lower forces can lead across and across. The giant - the forces of nature - have lost their destructive power; that is the conclusion that will only come after a certain period of time. The last enemy to be abolished is death. Then they [the forces of nature] only indicate the rhythmic measures of time. And the bridge over which the people can go unhindered back and forth to the temple? Is it not faith, independent faith, which has only become possible through the sacrificial death of Christ; faith that blesses, even without seeing the mysteries? But the highest is hidden from the eyes of the multitude. The king and queen descend from their throne and hide. All the glory will only become clear and evident to faith when wisdom is added to faith, only then can perfection be attained.

Let us briefly summarize what Goethe wanted to tell us with the “Fairytale”: It is the symbolic representation of the redemption of the individual as well as of the whole human race; the secret of becoming and passing away and of final bliss.

Many have ventured to interpret the “Fairytale”. People asked Goethe to provide an explanation himself. He promised to do so when a hundred explanations had been submitted. Thereupon all the explanations were collected and counted, but Goethe died before the number of a hundred was reached. Thus, a proper interpretation has been lacking until now. It was probably not yet time. The right interpretation can only be given by someone who knows the mysteries.

In the Middle Ages, we can trace a mystical current from Meister Eckhart to Jakob Böhme. Goethe descended into the depths of mystical wisdom. A merely scholarly explanation of Goethe's works is not sufficient. Goethe was a profound connoisseur of mysticism in all its depth. In his gospel, his “Faust”, he provided a picture of his theosophical or mystical worldview.

The theosophist is convinced that man carries a core within himself that is soul, that is spirit. Giordano Bruno was also convinced that the soul and the spirit have a significance that extends beyond the material. That is the conviction of the theosophist. Theosophy elevates religion to wisdom; it elevates faith to knowledge. That there is a God-man in man, who has emerged from the divine womb, develops and returns to the Godhead, is taught by theosophy. It sees in nature an expression of the divine origin.

From his youth, Goethe sought the God in nature and the reflection of the divine being in his own heart. He saw in natural products an expression of the divine spirit. The other science is concerned only with the sensual realm; it knows nothing of the spiritual realm. Man is placed [in nature] and wages his battle in this physical world. Goethe describes [in “Faust”] the great human struggle that leads man to his higher development, through which man gains insight into the spiritual and intellectual world and recognizes that he is forming a divine self, a divine ego. Goethe wants to suggest that the struggle is rooted in the spiritual world, in the prologue in heaven. The struggle takes place between good and evil. It is the battle of spiritual world powers. When the mystic ascends to the highest world, he speaks of the music of the spheres in the sense of the Pythagoreans; he speaks of the fact that this highest world is a world of tones and harmonies.

In the starry sky, the mystic sees the creative world spirit in resounding harmony.

The sun sounds in the old way,

says Goethe. The world is the expression of the divine world thought. The thoughts of men are replicas of the divine world thought.

What floats in fluctuating appearance
is fastened with lasting thoughts.

Faust wants to recognize the spiritual. Spirits are in the world; the human spirit, the planetary spirit, the spirit of the solar system, Goethe quotes the earth spirit. The physical earth is only the expression of a real earth spirit. Goethe's description of the Earth Spirit is appropriate. If we study life on Earth, in its arising and passing away, we find an Earth Spirit that is very different in nature from the spirits of other planets. Working on the divinity of immortal clothing is actually the task of the Earth Spirit.

When we look at the whole striving Faust, we recognize that he wants to penetrate more and more into his inner self. We can only know ourselves when we go through experience. Faust goes through the whole world scene. This is shown in the first part. Theosophy teaches that man acquires human abilities through experience and ascends to higher levels of existence. Faust has experienced everything that a human being, who is a sensual and intellectual being, can learn about. But he wants to know what lies beyond that.

Goethe was convinced that man can approach the highest source of knowledge only as a prepared, purified human being. Faust first goes through all the individual sensual experiences, through the experiences of the lower self. The tempting forces are now represented in Mephistopheles. Only by overcoming resistance does man make himself perfect, better.

When Faust has gone through the struggle of life, he remembers that the earth spirit is at the same time an expression of the divine spirit. This shows him the kinship of man with all of nature and then leads him to self-knowledge. This is the expression of how man is led from the transitory to the lasting. But man must first gain experience. Faust succumbs to temptation. He becomes the seducer. Afterwards, we see him in the deepest contrition and depression, as the inner self cannot come out.

The second part shows a transition in which the spiritual world moves into the sensual world. Goethe shows us how Faust's inner being is stirred when he listens to the spiritual world. Again, the sounding spiritual world appears, in harmony with all mysticism.

Faust is to ascend inwardly to the heights of humanity. We are led to the imperial court. We are shown how Faust, as a human being, works not only for himself but also for the lower self of many people. Faust creates sensual prosperity for people. Faust undergoes a greater lesson, but still within sensuality. He is to be led higher. Faust should be able to show something that cannot be achieved with the senses. What was originally alive is still present in the spirit. The spiritual archetypes are present somewhere. The tempter has been able to lead him through the sensual world. Mephistopheles has the key to the eternal depths of things, to the spiritual world, but not the power to penetrate it himself. That is why he gives Faust the key to the realm of the mothers.

Mysticism throughout the ages has always described the highest soul as feminine. The mystic imagines the whole world as a fertilizing father. The soul is the eternal feminine, which becomes ever more mature through fertilization from outside. The highest soul-spiritual realm is where the deity originally resided. It is the realm of archetypes, of mothers.

The theosophist recognizes that the deepest essence is expressed in three forms. Faust finds the glowing tripod. It corresponds to the deepest essence of man, which the theosophist calls “Atma, Budhi, Manas”. These are the three highest principles of man.

The realm of the Mothers contains the archetypes of all things. Faust is able to bring up the archetypes of all things. Faust has brought up the spirit from Paris and Helena.

How human beings live together as body, soul and spirit is wonderfully depicted in the second part of “Faust”. One may only approach the spirit in purity, not with desire. Man must first be purified from desires, from longing. Faust must still be purified and gain higher insights. This will be explained in more detail. Faust returns to the laboratory. The homunculus is the soul. The spirit dwells with the mothers, the sources of spiritual life. The soul is presented in the homunculus. The soul dwells in the physical body, [like the homunculus in the glass vial], but is itself immortal. It can perceive through the physical body with the senses. The mystic knows through his practical experience of incorporeal vision.

The soul's eye is clairvoyant. The homunculus lacks physical properties, but not soul properties. The homunculus sees Faust's dream. The vivid way in which Goethe describes the homunculus, how he longs for embodiment, for penetration into the physical world, shows how the soul lives in the soul world with such properties as those possessed by the homunculus. The human body in its connection with soul and body is presented here.

In the classical Walpurgis Night, we are told how the homunculus [begins to embody itself] in the lowest realm and develops through all the realms of nature. As the homunculus develops from the mineral kingdom up to the plant kingdom, it is said, to hint at this:

It grunts so.

Then, when sexual life begins, Goethe lets Eros appear. Finally, Homunculus crashes into the shell carriage of Galathea. He has passed through all the realms of nature and connects with the spirit and becomes human.

Now that body, soul and spirit are connected, Helena can appear in the flesh. In Helena, the feminine is presented to us. In her outward form, Helena is to show Faust the soul. It is a development of Faust towards the soul. Then self-knowledge occurs for Faust, a mystical experience. This arises from the fact that in the moments of celebration of life, man can look into a spiritual world. Then he gives birth to the divine spirit within him. In Faust this is represented by the birth of Euphorion. Man unites with his higher self - the feminine, Helena. The son of both is Euphorion. Euphorion represents the way in which each person, in this or that way, gives birth to the spiritual within themselves. For one person it is poetry, for another mystical contemplation. This knowledge of the higher worlds in the solemn moments of life is individual.

When man returns to everyday life and then remembers what he has born in the festive moments of life, then he hears the words:

Let me not, Mother, in the gloomy realm,
leave me alone!

Faust is still not ready for the mystical life to become the cornerstone of his being. But Goethe himself defined his Faust as a mystic. He said to Eckermann about the second part of “Faust”: “For the initiate, the deeper meaning is noticeable.

Faust finally gains the opportunity to live as a selfless person. He wants to become a messenger of divine cosmic activity. But he still clings to the outer, sensual view. He is not yet above all sensuality. He once again causes destruction - destruction of the hut. Now the last step to ascent follows. He still makes progress in doing so. Even when a person has reached a higher level of development, he is still preyed upon by base thoughts and worry. Through worry he grows blind. His outer, sensory perception fades away. But a bright light shines within. His inner sense has been opened. In Faust, Goethe presents everything that a person can recognize and understand. He shows what the soul will be at the beginning and at the end. At the beginning, there is the innocent Gretchen – at the end, Gretchen is once again the feminine in man, the soul. At the pinnacle of development, there is the inadequate event. Faust can see what cannot be seen with the senses. In Faust, we have the development from the lower self to the higher self.

[In these lectures I would like to give a picture of the theosophical world view that is completely free of any dogmatics, by trying to show what is peculiar to our own spiritual life by looking at phenomena of it.]

Those who know how strongly I have resisted anything propagandistic, any kind of propaganda, will also know how strongly I have opposed the view that Theosophy is about importing some alien, oriental world-view into our time, and how I have emphasized that Theosophy must be life; direct, real life. If Theosophy were something that had only come into the world through the Theosophical Society, then one could indeed have very little trust in it. How could it be that humanity would have to wait thousands of years for the new gospel of Theosophy! Rather, it is the renewal of the spiritual current rooted in the human soul that we are dealing with in the Theosophical Society. But what should interest people of the present time most is to see how their favorite geniuses are completely imbued with what is called Theosophy, the theosophical worldview.

Apart from all the rest, there is one great German personality whose work, especially the work of his later life, is completely rooted in this worldview: Goethe. The combination of Goethe and theosophy may initially come as a surprise; but anyone who, like me, has been studying Goethe for more than twenty years, in particular the profound Goethean “Faust” poetry, will become more and more familiar with what I will try to explain today. Over the years, I have come across many explanations of Faust, many Faust researchers, and many attempts to penetrate the marvel of this Faustian poetry. What I will present to you has come to me alone, in the most unforced way, all by itself. In the first of the two lectures I will speak about Goethe's gospel, proceeding from Goethe's “Faust” poetry, and in the next lecture I will give some views of Goethe from this point of view. We will then try, after I have inserted a lecture on the basic concepts of theosophy, to grasp Goethe where he reveals himself to us most profoundly and is least understood: in his fairy tale of the green snake and the beautiful lily, which one only has to understand to get a deep insight into the wisdom of the world on the one hand and into the innermost nature, into the innermost soul of Goethe on the other. In a casual way, these Goethe lectures can be followed by reflections on the great initiates of all times and on Ibsen. I will then try to insert a lecture on the significance of Siegfried, Parzival and Lohengrin.

Goethe was a theosophist by nature, by the innermost meaning of his life. Above all, he was a theosophist because he never accepted any limits to his understanding, any limits to his knowledge and work, but was deeply imbued with the idea that there is no human point of view from which we cannot advance to a higher one, from which the world reveals itself not only in a broader context but also in a more meaningful way. Goethe's entire makeup was determined by the world view we are discussing here. His world view assumed that man stands in a deeply related relationship to the rest of the world and that this rest of the world is not merely material, not merely outwardly physical, but equally spiritual, that a divine, creative, active spirit expresses itself in the whole world. This, one could say, is pantheism. But pantheism assumes that an indeterminate divine essence spreads throughout the world and also animates man. The theosophical world view, however, assumes that it is not an indeterminate, incomprehensible essence, but a spiritual essence to which we can ascend more and more, and that we can enter into a relationship with this spiritual essence; [ascend to a living relationship with the great God].

Goethe was suited to this kind of relationship by his very nature. Even as a seven-year-old boy, he sought out the god. He built an altar with plants and stones and incense on top, took a burning glass, and when the first rays of the rising sun shone in through the window, he collected the sunbeams so that they ignited the incense. Thus this compilation was an altar for him, on which he performed a service to nature, a service to the gods. [He wanted to ignite a sacrificial service from the fire of nature], so innate was this world view for him. When he then got to know more and more about the world itself in Leipzig and delved into the individual sciences, an insight came to him that is entirely theosophical. He tells us about it in “Poetry and Truth”. He says: “When we survey the various religions and philosophies of the world, we find something in common everywhere, a common core of truth. Wherever religion, philosophy, or worldview has emerged, whether in mythical-allegorical or philosophical form, everywhere man seeks to find the connection between his lower self and the deepest part of his soul, which is called the divine and through which he can gain a connection with the divine itself. Thus the wise of all times have shown the pendulum swing between the lower and the higher self, and we see how this is expressed in fairy tales, myths and legends; it can be found everywhere.

When Goethe himself passed the threshold of death after his studies in Leipzig and had returned to Frankfurt, he devoted himself to mystical studies. You can read in “Poetry and Truth” what kind of impact Goethe had from that time, and what emerged in him when he had become thoroughly familiar with natural science during his time in Strasbourg. This is expressed in no better way than in the fact that he decided to express the whole human urge for wisdom and for oneness with the divine nature in a great poem, the “Faust” poem. In doing so, he draws on the world of legends through which the late Middle Ages suggested the contrast between the old and the new era.

Faust is the kind of person who wants to free themselves from all tradition, from the basic ideas of the Middle Ages, and to penetrate from their own breast to a higher knowledge. Goethe did not let Faust perish, as the sixteenth century still did, but rather he redeemed him through the power of his own striving soul. In doing so, he placed the entire problem on a new footing, so that even today we must feel every word of this poem as an expression of our own thoughts and feelings. I will discuss some of the details in the following lectures. For now, I must lead you directly into what this is about.

First of all, after Goethe had presented Faust as a striving human being in his youth and brought his “Faust” poetry with him to Weimar, and had risen to a purer knowledge and worldview, he placed his “Faust” on a new foundation in the 1890s. At the beginning of Faust we find the Prologue in Heaven. Here Goethe wants to show us what his Faust epic is about. He wants to tell us nothing other than this: human destiny is not determined only in this physical world, it is determined in higher, spiritual worlds. If you remember my lectures this winter, I said at the time: the physical world that surrounds us is not the only world; there are higher worlds, the world of the soul or the astral world and what we call the devachanic world, the spiritual world, heaven. That which undergoes a struggle in the outer world is not only significant for the outer world, but is a reflection of forces from the supersensible worlds. When we penetrate into the soul world, we enter into a world of colorful existence. The astral world can be perceived by those whose spiritual senses are open as a world glowing with colors, of a beauty and sublimity, but also of a dreadfulness and cruelty that are never found in our physical world. The devachanic world can be described as a sounding one. The Pythagorean music of the spheres can truly be heard by those whose spiritual ears are open; it is not merely an allegory, but a reality.

It is therefore extremely interesting that Goethe, quite appropriately, I would say using a technical term of the mystic or theosophist, describes this world of Devachan in his “Prologue in Heaven”. The planets and the sun are endowed with souls. Goethe speaks appropriately in the sense of mysticism; so he must also express that he finds that sound in this world. And so he really does begin this “Prologue in Heaven”:

The sun resounds in the ancient way
In brother spheres of competitive song,
And its prescribed journey
It completes with a thunderclap.

The sun does not sound in the physical sense, and anyone who says that it is only an image is saying a superficiality. You can see where Faust, having gone through the purification, is to be raised to Devachan, how precisely Goethe speaks of this devachanic world:

For spiritual ears the new day is already born

Here Goethe speaks of spiritual ears, of the sounds of the spiritual world. We describe it not in the form of poetic images, but in the language of theosophical science. In the “Prologue in Heaven,” almost every word can be interpreted in a way that is consistent with our worldview. In this, we see an important principle of human existence. You all know about the law of karma. You know that when a person passes through the gate of death, they take with them the experiences they have had in this world, and that they then take the fruits of this world with them in such a way that they extract, so to speak, something eternal from this earthly world. Because his thoughts are a reflection of the spiritual world, he can take the fruits with him into the spiritual world. It is entirely in keeping with the law of karma when God calls out to the angels:

And what floats in fluctuating appearance
Attach it with lasting thoughts.

Of course, anyone who wants to can say that these are poetic images. But anyone who, like Goethe, not only dealt with mysticism practically for decades before writing these things, but also became thoroughly acquainted with medieval mysticism, knows that Goethe drew these things from mystical thinking and perception. We know that the theosophical worldview traces its basis back to the great sages, to higher spiritual individuals who have already reached the level that the average person will only rise to in the future. These great sages are the great teachers of humanity. It has been criticized that Theosophy speaks of such unknown sages. Goethe also speaks of such unknown sages when Faust, imbued with the vanity of knowledge in the first monologue, wants to grasp the source of life and has already glimpsed a reflection of divine life.

Only now do I recognize what the wise man says:
'The spiritual world is not closed;
Your mind is closed, your heart is dead!
Rise up, disciple, and bathe unflinchingly
The earthly breast in the dawn!'

This is an expression that occurs in the mystics of all times. Jakob Böhme called the work with which he began his mystical career “Aurora”. Goethe puts “dawn” in quotation marks. He expresses something that he knew from his practical mysticism as an inner experience, not a general phrase, a general saying; he speaks entirely in the technical mystical sense.

If we take a look at Faust, what do we see in the first part? You know that we distinguish between a lower self, the self that experiences the world through the doors of the senses and, purified through many paths, finally ascends to the higher self. If you read through the first part, you will find a description of the struggle of the lower self of man with the surrounding world. Faust must first pass this struggle before he can come to the truly mystical realization within himself. From the very beginning, he strives for this realization. And again, we are faced with some sentences that only those familiar with the theosophical worldview can understand. When Faust recognizes his connection with the higher self, he turns to the earth spirit. This is a masterpiece of the description of the soul's life; [the astral body of the earth, spiritually wrought and woven from the fruits of the immortal soul's garment].

In the flood of life, in the storm of action
I surge and surge, weaving to and fro! Birth and grave, an eternal sea, a changing weaving, a glowing life, so I create at the whirring loom of time and weave the living garment of the Godhead.

This description, especially the last line, is very meaningful for every mystic. It expresses how the soul, from the earlier experiences of this self, works and weaves a form that remains eternal.

Faust must turn away like a timid, twisted worm. He is not yet mature enough to penetrate to the sources of life. He must guide his self through the world by the hand of the tempter Mephistopheles. Goethe gives this a form in the sense of ancient Hebrew mysticism. “Mephis” means “corrupter”, and “Tophel” means “liar”. These are the forces and entities that are always present in the world as obstacles. While man strives forward, they hold him back, and in the moral world they become the tempters. The tempter is Mephistopheles. He leads Faust through the regions of the lower self, through all kinds of experiences of our lower self.

We see how Faust is unsatisfied by the science of the mind. The highest learning can be no more than an occupation with the sensory world. He is then led through passion and so on to purification. Faust now wants to approach the spirit from whom he had to turn away. He encounters this spirit again in the scene “Forest and Cave”. He can now address the spirit in such a way that he can express a fundamental belief, as you can find it in any theosophical book. It appeals to him that this spirit can show him that in all beings we find our brothers, as we are connected to all, and that when we find our kinship with all brothers, we find our own divine self. In a beautiful way, Goethe describes in images the ascent of man in his knowledge.

Sublime Spirit, thou gavest me, gavest me everything,
why I asked. Thou didst not in vain
turn thy face to me in the fire.
Gavest me the glorious nature for my kingdom,
the strength to feel and enjoy it. You do not allow cold, astonished visitors, you grant me the privilege of looking into their deep chests, as into the bosom of a friend. You lead the line of the living before me, and teach me to know my brothers in the silent bush, in air and water.

It is wonderful that Goethe led his Faust to this confession of looking into one's own self. After going through a series of temptations, Faust, who in his lower self sees the transience of life, gains insight into the possibility of truly recognizing the higher self.

Faust, after having been deeply crushed by the misfortunes of life, is now to be led up to higher levels. Before that, he only experienced what can be experienced by the lower egoism. Now he works at the imperial court for the lower self of others. In the midst of this work, in the midst of the transience of the world, Faust is brought to an immediate mystical point of view. Goethe himself rejected the view that the second part of “Faust” is anything other than the purest expression of truly mystical soul life. He was asked by a friend whether he wanted to end his “Faust” as he wrote in the first part:

A good man in his dark urges
Is well aware of the right path.

Oh no, replied Goethe, Faust ends in old age, and in old age one becomes a mystic. But that would be enlightenment. Once Goethe had attained a worldview that allowed a free view into the spiritual world, he could no longer let Faust end in the sense of the Enlightenment. So in 1827, he said to Eckermann about the second part of Faust: I have conceived Faust in such a way that the images are also interesting, dramatic for the mind. Everyone can take pleasure in the images. But for the initiate, there is something quite different in my “Faust”. You will see that many a riddle is hidden in it. Although Goethe did not include anything inscrutable in the second part of “Faust”, there is something that cannot be found for the superficial mind.

At court, the emperor demands that Paris and Helen appear before everyone. We are confronted with a problem that takes us beyond the physical world. Goethe captures it in its deepest sense. Faust must descend to the “mothers”. The scholars have interpreted many things into it. For those who are endowed with mystical knowledge, it is clear what is meant here. In all mysticism, the highest soul of the world has always been described as something feminine. This is quite appropriate, because what man calls knowledge, higher life, arises in his soul when he allows himself to be fertilized by the forces that work in the universe. Knowledge is a fertilization process; that is why all mysticism has sought the eternal in the feminine, in the “mothers”. The theosophical world view sees the highest that the human soul can achieve in the higher, upper trinity, in Sanskrit: Manas, Budhi, Atman; spirit self, life spirit and actual spirit of man. This higher trinity must be developed in man if he is to come to true self-knowledge. But then he attains the connection with the eternal sources of existence. Goethe indicates that this is a trinity by having the tripod set up among the mothers, with fire flowing out of it. Mysticism knows this fire as the primal matter. Faust can use it to bring up the spiritual essence of Paris and Helen. The spiritual essence is not above or below, which is why Mephistopheles says:

Sink then! I could also say: rise!

This shows how that which is eternal, brought up by Paris and Helena, is brought up from the soul-spiritual world.

But in order for man to rise to this pure spiritual level, it is crucial that he is so far purified that the desires of the body, the lower qualities of the soul and the instincts are purified, that man no longer craves this highest spiritual, but that he relates to this highest in a selfless way. When Faust brings it up, he demands it passionately, and that causes an explosion. Faust still needs to be purified and cleansed. He must learn the secret of how human nature is structured, how the three members of body, soul and spirit work together to form a whole. Established psychology only recognizes body and soul. It is a science that has stopped at two-thirds of the human being because it does not recognize the threefold nature of the human being. School psychology may feel very learned, but to anyone who sees through things, it is the most amateurish thing imaginable. Faust is meant to recognize how body, soul and spirit connect, this deep secret of human nature. At this point, we can eavesdrop on Goethe at his most profound, as he has become a complete mystic, as he has immersed himself in the knowledge that is also found in our theosophical textbooks.

First, Faust is to get to know the soul. This is presented to us in a peculiar but appropriate way, by leading Faust back to the laboratory where he was before and where the homunculus is now being created. This homunculus is nothing other than an image of the human soul. And it is wonderfully understandable every word, if you touch the homunculus as a soul without a body, as a soul that has not yet incarnated. The homunculus

does not lack spiritual qualities,
But it is all too lacking in the tangible and practical.

When the soul is free of the body, when it appears without the covers of physicality, then it is clairvoyant, not dependent on seeing through the senses. It sees into the innermost part of human nature. It does not just perceive what has an external color, sounds in external tones, but it perceives the impulses, the most intimate thoughts of the person. This is something that can be perceived clairvoyantly, the extra-physical world. Goethe lets the homunculus be clairvoyant. The entire dream of Faust is described by the homunculus, who sees into the depths of the human soul. We can go through the entire second part of “Faust” in this way: the soul is expressed in the homunculus.

The third part of the human being, the body, is that which has developed from the most imperfect to the most perfect, not only in the sense of natural science, but also in the sense of mysticism. But mysticism does not just look at how the physical has developed from the most imperfect to the most perfect, as modern science does. Mysticism also shows how the physical has developed through the mineral kingdom, the plant kingdom, the animal kingdom, and finally to the human being. The body has developed along this path until it has become capable of connecting with the soul. In the second part of Faust, Goethe presents this gradual development of the physical body in magnificent images. He has the homunculus Mephisto and Faust led to the fields of the 'Classical Walpurgis Night'. There he is brought together with Proteus, who guides the transformation of the physical form, and with the wise men Thales and Anaxagoras, who know how the physical transformations take place. It is shown how this homunculus, as a soul, can acquire a body by living through all the kingdoms of nature. It must begin at the bottom, with the mineral kingdom, and then slowly move on to the higher realms. Goethe describes in a wonderful way how this embodiment rises from the mineral kingdom to the plant kingdom. Goethe coined an expression to describe this so wonderfully vividly:

It grunet so

- the plant structure!

Only at a certain stage of development, what is called sex life, that this connects with all the formative forces that were present earlier. Goethe expresses this by letting Eros connect with the homunculus struggling for design at this stage. This is how Goethe described how the soul is structured until it is ready to receive the spirit. We have reached the end of the second act of the second part of Faust. Faust has learned the secret of how the three parts of human nature are connected: the immortal, the eternal, which is in the realm of the “mothers”, the soul and the body. This is how a person can incarnate. This is how that which also lived physically in the external world and belonged to times long past, Helen, can also incarnate again. We meet her again at the beginning of the third act. She has incarnated, Helen is standing before Faust in the flesh. Thus Faust has passed through mystical knowledge, he has experienced the secret of becoming human.

I have said that in every mysticism the soul in man is presented as something feminine. Then the struggle for the higher, the striving for the higher is expressed precisely in Faust's striving for Helena. Faust unites with Helena. This is initially the symbolic expression of an inner experience. Faust seeks the higher, and there the spiritual is born. Poetry expresses this symbolically through the union of the soul's masculine and feminine, whereby higher spiritual knowledge is begotten: Euphorion. Euphorion represents how the spirit in human nature comes to life in mystical moments. The mystic knows these moments. But there is one thing he still has to learn: At first, what he experiences is only a fleeting moment, only a celebratory moment in life, a moment of mystical insight; then he must return to his profession, to his everyday studies. These mystical insights are celebratory moments; but celebratory moments die quickly: Euphorion dies quickly. What follows is drawn deeply from mystical consciousness. Euphorion, after he has disappeared again into the spiritual realm, calls out to his mother Helena:

Do not leave me alone in the dark realm,
mother!

This is a voice that everyone who has experienced mystical moments has heard at some point. The spiritual always calls to the soul, the “mother”: “Do not leave me alone, seek me!” Here theory cannot speak, only direct experience can speak, in order to recognize the full depth of what is at stake here. The mystical moments of celebration are represented by Euphorion. Faust's serene worldview, in comparison with what has happened at the imperial court, now comes to light. Faust is now to be led to experience not only individual moments of celebration of mystical contemplation, for that is still an imperfect state. The perfect mystic works from the spiritual world; he works selflessly, like a messenger of the deity, as if the deity itself were creating. This is how it is with Faust when he has reached higher levels.

But Faust is not yet so far that he is above all the temptations that the lower self suffers. Nothing must speak to the mystic's senses anymore; the senses must become a gateway for the spiritual. Once again, for the last time, Faust succumbs to temptation. Something disturbs his eye, so he has the hut of Philemon and Baucis removed. That was the last external temptation; henceforth he can no longer be tempted by his senses.

But there is still something in man that appeals to his lower self, that is the memory that still clings to his lower self, that repeatedly pulls him down into this lower world. This is symbolized by the fact that worry approaches Faust. But this trial also comes from him. Faust goes blind. Now it is suggested that, by going blind, Faust becomes a seer: a bright light shines within, while it becomes dark and gloomy on the outside. He has become a mystic in the most beautiful sense, he has become a clairvoyant, he sees into the spiritual world.

Faust has gone through a struggle through the stages of the lower and higher self to the depths of the mystical worldview. This struggle between the lower and higher is a struggle between good and evil. Now, in a spirited riddle in the second part of the first act, Goethe has just hinted at how good and evil work together to allow the human fighter to pass through the middle for purification. Commentators have tried in vain to explain this line.

What is both dreaded and always welcome?
What is longed for and always chased away?
What is constantly defended?
What is harshly scolded and accused?
Whom may you not summon here?
Whom does everyone like to hear named?
What approaches your throne's steps?
What has banished itself away?

You will hardly find a solution to these riddle words in Faust commentaries. But for those who know the deeper meaning of “Faust”, they will be resolved naturally. We can go through line by line and need only say “evil” for the first line and “good” for the second, and we have the complete solution to the riddle. This is how Goethe describes the battle between good and evil in man, and he has Faust become a mystic.

Goethe can only hint at the last stages of development, and he uses mystical symbolism. Every line is deeply significant for the mystical path, the mystical stages that the mystic goes through in practical development. And then, at the end, Goethe indicates to us that this is what he really meant in the second part of “Faust”. He stood there alone when he came to this mystical realization.

If you read “Faust” in your youth, you will find a lot, later you will find more and more and even later still more. Today, I too have been able to describe only a glimpse of what is in “Faust”. The second part of “Faust” is something quite different from what was intended in the first part. The old Goethe is only understood if you take it so deeply. He knew that there were many people around him who would defend the young Goethe against the old one. In a moment of resentment, he spoke out about those who only want to accept the earlier works and what is otherwise easy to understand, saying, “Goethe has grown old.” To them he cries:

They praise Faust
And what else
In my works roars
In their favor.
The old Mick and Mack
That is very happy;
It means the pack of ragamuffins,
One would not be more!

Goethe knew that “he still was it,” also knew that he could not be understood.

In the second part of “Faust”, Goethe has hidden many secrets for the initiate who wants to hear them. And then, to suggest that he wants “Faust” to be understood in a mystical sense, he has closed the second part with the “Chorus mysticus”. There he shows us how he sees nothing in the ephemeral but a parable for the imperishable, for the eternal. That is the view of mysticism or theosophy, that what is present in the senses is only a parable for the imperishable. That which man can never attain in the sensual world, that which he strives for in the sensual world, to recognize the real meaning of life, this “inadequate” becomes an “experience” in the higher world through practical mysticism; and what cannot be described can be experienced. Then the spiritual powers slumbering in man are awakened; he not only perceives with his senses, but is led up into the higher worlds. That which is “indescribable” for the sensual world is done, now in the higher worlds. And that which the mystics of all times have called the 'feminine', the highest, that to which the lower strives, that which Goethe sought in the 'mothers', in the 'feminine', the 'eternally feminine', the highest in the human soul, that draws man upwards. This is the fundamental confession of Goethe, the mystic, which he has expressed here and which shines back on all that he has mysteriously incorporated into his “Faust”:

All that is
transient is but a parable;
The inadequate
Here it becomes an event;
The indescribable
Here it is done;
The eternal feminine
Draws us on.

Eight days ago, I tried to explain Goethe's world view through his “Faust”. We saw that Goethe presents the great struggle of the universe, the spiritual universe, between good and evil, as it unfolds in man and around man, in the way it is in the sense of mysticism or what we call theosophy. We have seen that where Goethe points people to worlds beyond the sensual, he does so in such a way that we can clearly see from his expressions his intimate knowledge of what we in Theosophy hold as our conviction. We have seen this in “Prologue in Heaven” and in the way he lets the Earth Spirit speak, but also in what we can see as a reference to the spiritual world and as a juxtaposition of the lower and higher self. We have taken a closer look at the address to the Earth Spirit and seen how Goethe introduces his Faust to the world, which we have called the world of higher knowledge, by showing how the human being is composed of the physical, the soul and the spiritual. We have been able to show this by the descent of Faust to the “Mothers”, by the characteristic properties of the homunculus, which cannot be made plausible in any other way, and then by the re-humanization of Helena in the “Classical Walpurgis Night”. We have seen how he ascends to knowledge, ascends to the heights of a spiritual Montserrat, to the heights of knowledge and mystical experience, concludes with the words that he has the Chorus mysticus say, and in doing so suggests the sense in which he wants Faust to be understood.

What Goethe expressed here is not a figment of his imagination, nor is it meant in a merely poetic sense, because Goethe has always seen the expression of secret natural laws in art, which he expressed at another time as follows: Art should be based on the deepest foundations of knowledge. There is no doubt that if we follow Goethe to the height of his life, if we look up and look up to the spiritual worlds, then we will be able to demonstrate a continuous increase to truly mystical heights in Goethe himself. Last time, I already pointed out that the direction of Goethe's gaze to the spiritual was not only in his nature, but was already present when he had already established a world view for himself, when he tried to make clear to himself when he entered Weimar, how things in nature are connected, when he sought a spiritual essence that underlies all nature. Last time I already spoke about the “Nature” hymn that he wrote in Weimar. In it, he addresses nature directly, but in such a way that it becomes a direct expression of a spiritual essence for him. You can see from every word in this prose hymn that he addresses nature as a being of a spiritual nature. In the book “On Natural Science” in General, he says about nature:

Nature! We are surrounded and embraced by it, unable to step out of it or to get deeper into it. Uninvited and unwarned, she takes us into the cycle of her dance and carries us away with her until we are tired and fall out of her arms [...] She has thought and is constantly pondering; but not as a human being, but as nature[...] She has no language or speech, but she creates tongues and hearts through which she feels and speaks [...] I did not speak of her. No, what is true and what is false, she has spoken it all. Everything is her fault, everything is her merit.

Thus he places himself in this nature, which he has conceived entirely spiritually, and speaks of nature as the external expression of a spiritual essence. Since Goethe addressed nature in this way, he was bound to ascend. For this is how he presents the physical incarnation: He imagines that the soul is above nature. It is true that it belongs to the great whole of the world, and he therefore also speaks of a higher nature. But by speaking of the lower nature, of the various changes, of the metamorphoses of nature, he builds the world view in the sense of the mystical. To give an example, I mention Paracelsus. Without him, Goethe is inconceivable. Through Paracelsus, Goethe is more understandable. I do not want to claim that Paracelsus' teachings can be adopted wholesale. Do not think that I want to speak in favor of those who today want to speak again as Paracelsus spoke. But we could still learn an infinite amount from such a highly chosen spirit. Goethe also learned an infinite amount from him. Just one word to show how Goethe strove in the spirit of Paracelsus: Paracelsus places himself before the true essence of man, soul and spirit, embodying himself in the archetypes of nature, in the mineral kingdom, plant kingdom, animal kingdom, where it is expressed in a one-sided way, in order to finally express itself in the most versatile way in man. In the various minerals, plants and animals, letters have been created with which the great All-Spirit has ultimately written the human being. This shows the depth of Paracelsus' insight into the human being. When Goethe sets out to study the development of the world's creatures from the imperfect to the perfect, he expresses himself in a similar way to Paracelsus. Every day, Frau von Stein received answers to questions about how his thoughts were maturing. Once, when he thought he was on the trail of a particularly important discovery, he said to her, “My spelling has helped me.” He meant that he had tried to get to know the plants and animals, which, like Paracelsus, were letters for him in solving the great mystery that man represents for man. In this way, Goethe wanted to proceed from the beginning of his study of nature, in order to seek the great spiritual connection in all beings. So, from the outset, he sought what he called the “primordial plant”, which was said to live in all plants and which, in essence, is the spirit of plant existence. Then he rose to the “primordial animal” and sought to prove the “primordial animal” in the animals. Metamorphosis of Plants and Metamorphosis of Animals – you only need to read them to have the most beautiful theosophical treatise on plants and animals you could ever find. It was precisely this attitude that led Goethe, soon after his arrival in Weimar, to an important scientific discovery. Until the time when Goethe became involved in the study of nature, the fact that humans are superior to animals had to be found in the existence of special individual organs. That humans differ in their physical constitution from the higher animals, however, was already addressed by Herder in his “History of Humanity”. Herder was Goethe's teacher to a significant extent. It was said at that time: All higher animals have the upper incisors in a special intermaxillary bone. Only humans do not have such an intermaxillary bone. Goethe said: The difference between humans and other beings is of a spiritual-mental nature. But the difference cannot be found in such a detail, which is why humans must also have an intermaxillary bone. Researchers have long resisted recognizing this discovery by Goethe. But today it is taken for granted that the discovery is based on a full fact. So even then, Goethe made this great scientific discovery out of his own convictions. In Italy, he studied the plant and animal world with the aim of finding ways and means of gaining an overview of these beings. In his Metamorphosis of Plants and Animals, he produced a masterpiece in this regard. The idea that Goethe carried out is an idea that can already be found on a large scale in Giordano Bruno. Giordano Bruno, for example, as is to be expected of anyone who truly sees into the depths of nature and the universe, is one of those who assumes that humans go through various incarnations, who assumes that humans have often been here before and will often return. The body of man, as we see it before us, shows us how soul and spirit expand in space. And when man dies, soul and spirit contract, they become, as it were, punctual, in order to expand again and then contract again. Thus existence alternates between expansion and contraction. Man ascends by becoming more and more perfect with each new expansion, only to contract again and pass through the purely spiritual realm. These thoughts were conceived by Giordano Bruno and were extended by Goethe to include plant and animal life. The whole metamorphosis shows us that the plant consists of the flower and the root in contraction and unfolding. This can also be found in Swedenborg's books, where he noted down the fundamental discoveries he made, which then bore fruit in Goethe and come to us again through him. Now some scholars from the Nordic academies have joined forces to publish Swedenborg's writings, and it remains to be seen how much science in all fields of natural science can be found in Swedenborg. Goethe studied Swedenborg, and there is an interesting doctoral dissertation from the University of Berlin by Hans Schlieper, in which the connection between the writings of Goethe and Swedenborg is demonstrated. If you want to gain insight into how Swedenborg developed these ideas, then you need only read Emerson's “The Representatives of the Human Race” and look up the article on Swedenborg. There you will find the ideas that bore such extraordinary fruit in Goethe. But you will also find that the various kingdoms of nature must ultimately find their culmination in the human being, that ultimately it must be shown how the soul emerges from the small world in order to find its unity in the larger world, in the cosmos. Schiller also expressed this in a magnificent way. In his correspondence with Goethe, Schiller writes on August 23, 1794:

For a long time now, although from a considerable distance, I have been observing the course of your mind and have noted the path you have set out on with ever-renewed admiration. You seek what is necessary in nature, but you seek it by the most difficult route, which any weaker force would do well to avoid. You take all of nature together to get light on the individual; in the totality of its manifestations, you seek the explanation for the individual. From the simple organization, you ascend, step by step, to the more complicated ones, to finally build the most complicated of all, the human being, genetically from the materials of the entire structure of nature. By recreating it, as it were, you seek to penetrate its hidden technology. A great and truly heroic idea that amply demonstrates how your mind holds the rich totality of its ideas together in a beautiful unity. You could never have hoped that your life would be enough for such a goal, but even just embarking on such a path is worth more than any other ending – and you have chosen, like Achilles in the Iliad between Pythia and immortality.

I could read on, and you would find that every single word of Schiller is aptly applied to Goethe. Goethe himself spoke beautifully about the relationship between man as a microcosm and the rest of nature, showing with tremendous power of words how not a single detail but the whole spirit of nature lives in man, how this whole spirit comes to the realization of itself. Whoever remembers the beautiful words spoken by the German mystics will know, among others, the saying: “The Godhead lives in man, and in man God has created an organ to behold Himself.” In his book on Winckelmann, Goethe says, where he speaks of antiquity:

When the healthy nature of man works as a whole, when he feels in the world as in a great, beautiful, dignified and valuable whole, when the harmonious comfort gives him a pure, free delight - then the universe, if it could feel itself, would exult as if it had reached its goal and would admire the summit of its own becoming and being.

What does Goethe say here that is different from what he presents in his “Faust” as the transition of all realms through nature? Goethe was never satisfied with the materialistic view of nature. And when Holbach had created a particularly crass expression in this regard, he opposed him as a young man. Goethe says about it, he [had] found nothing in it but a barren speculation, but not a real explanation of nature. Furthermore, matter was supposed to have existed from eternity, and from eternity it was supposed to have been in motion, and through this motion it was supposed to have produced the phenomena of existence. Thus Goethe dismissed materialism. Goethe always strove to find harmony between what he calls spiritual nature and what the incorporation of spiritual nature represents. Therefore, he was a follower of the doctrine that sees the embodiment of the spirit in our physicality, in the outer forms of nature. Goethe held this point of view throughout his life and elevated this point of view to ever clearer forms. Now, however, this point of view requires something else. It requires that we recognize that the human being is not complete. The realms of perfection must continue beyond the human being. This is the theosophical worldview. Thus, as Theosophists, we do not take the view that the human being is somehow complete. But just as there are also more imperfect beings, we also recognize that we have more perfect and more imperfect human brothers, and that there are some who have progressed far beyond the measure of other people. These are the great teachers who endeavor to lead people up to ever higher and higher worlds. This is a realm from the lowest beings to the gods. We recognize that man will one day rise to divinity, and we already recognize an order today that begins with the lower spirits and does not end until physical existence is exhausted and we look up to heights and beings that fill the gap between human beings and beings that humans only have an inkling of. In this sense, that he looked up to higher spiritual entities, Goethe spoke his poem from the first Weimar period, the well-known poem “The Divine”:

Noble be man,
Helpful and good!
For that alone
Distinguishes him
From all beings
We know.
Hail to the unknown Higher beings We intuit! Man shall be like them! His example teach us Those believe.

This is the poem in which Goethe spoke of the stages of ascent to higher beings. Those who have heard the theosophical lectures here before will know that in theosophy we recognize an unbroken succession of beings, from today's average human being to the higher beings, that we know that among us there are brothers who have reached high levels, who are our teachers, but who have withdrawn from the hustle and bustle of people because they need to have freedom. Only a number of disciples are able to see them. Those who rise to the fervor of deep truths, to a corresponding realization, which must be a free one, can hear these elevated human individualities. Goethe then speaks of these higher individualities. I only need to quote the poem “Symbolum”. In it, he speaks of the holy awe that must permeate us in the face of the truth and the spiritual world. Goethe is therefore speaking here of the voices of the spirits and the masters. This will show you the profound agreement between Goethe and what we call the theosophical world view. Now I would also like to show you that such an agreement really goes very far in Goethe. You know that in the theosophical world view we speak of the fact that human beings do not only have a physical body. This physical body is a subordinate body of the human being. Then we have the etheric double body. This can be seen by those whose psychic organs are open. It can be seen when the physical body is subtracted. Then the same space that the human being occupies is filled by the etheric body. It looks like the color of a peach blossom. Then comes the astral body, the expression of feelings, instincts, desires and passions. The Theosophical worldview calls this body “kama-rupa.” These three superimposed bodies are spoken of today. It is said that there is a parallel in our physical nature. The so-called occultist says that the physical body has an external parallel in what we call solid bodies, that what we call the etheric body has a similarity to the liquid, and that the astral body has a sensual parallel in everything that appears gaseous and airy. Everything that takes shape in the life of the senses and the life of the instincts is referred to as an image of the astral body. In mystical form, we speak of a deity that creates these formations. This is nothing other than 'Kama'. When studying cloud formations, Goethe spoke, entirely in line with this world view, of the fact that for him, too, the expression of the formation of water reveals an image of the soul, a KamaRupa:

When the deity Camarupa, high and holy,

Gathers the folds of the veil, disperses them,
Delights in the changing forms,
Now freezes, then vanishes like a dream,
we marvel and hardly believe our eyes;

With the exception of the term “Camarupa”, you can rediscover Goethe's theosophical worldview. The question now is: How is Goethe connected to what we really call the theosophical movement and how it was not created only by the Theosophical Society. The Theosophical Society merely popularizes the old theosophical teachings that have always been present. Before 1875, the principle was strictly adhered to that the theosophical teachings must be secret, that only those who profess very specific prerequisites and conditions can learn them. In my magazine Luzifer-Gnosis, you will find something discussed that can lead you to higher things. In earlier times, the theosophical teachings were only practiced in the narrowest of circles, in the so-called secret schools. Only those who had attained certain degrees could receive certain teachings. A certain degree of secrets was only imparted to a person when he had attained certain degrees. The most important society was that of the Rosicrucians, a top secret society. Whatever you find about it in books, you can call a hoax, as far as I'm concerned. What can be found in literature and what is accessible to scholarship is not Rosicrucianism. The brothers only knew each other. At the top were twelve initiates. Only the thirteenth was the leader. The outer symbol was the cross with roses. The society had, despite being a secret society, a great influence on the course of intellectual development. In the time when materialism did not yet dominate the major circles, a very great intellectual influence could still be exercised. The Rosicrucian Society is the one whose tradition and inner significance Goethe also knew. He became acquainted with it at an early stage. During the time when he was staying in Frankfurt after a very serious illness during his studies in Leipzig, he was initiated into the secrets of the Rosicrucians by a certain personage. More and more, this mysticism became absorbed in Goethe. Now he wanted to express what he had to say in this regard in a very profound poem. At the time he wrote this poem, he proved himself to be a practical mystic in that he understood life as practical mysticism. Only under certain conditions was he taught the most intimate things. Mrs. von Stein was one of his intimates. He could not imagine this connection any differently, as if he had already belonged to her in a previous life. That is the important thing. Not the dogma of reincarnation; the main thing is to understand life from this point of view. So Goethe once said, to make clear to himself his deep connection, his relationship with Mrs. von Stein: In times gone by, you were surely once my sister or my wife. That is the way he interprets reincarnation here and in other ways. Of course, Goethe regards this as his secret. He speaks of it only to his intimates. That is why you can quote some things from Goethe that seem to contradict him. You can also find this with other mystics. We know that this is the case. Now Goethe has expressed something of an ascent, of a spiritual order in the Rosicrucians in the aforementioned poem. This poem has become so dear to Mrs. von Stein that it is called “The Secrets”. It was never finished. The greatness of the poem should have been much more extensive. He might have been able to express himself if it had had as many verses as there are days in a year. But he did express the following clearly: firstly, this basic idea and, secondly, the view that a kernel of truth can be found in all religions, that all great religions contain a basic teaching, the so-called wisdom religion, and that the various wisdom religions are embodied in individual great initiates who are connected to one another in a brotherhood, that they differ according to their inclinations, the nature of the country and so on. Brahmanism, Buddhism, Confucianism, the teachings of Hermes, Judaism, Christianity; they all contain a common core of truth. They are different because those who truly grasp the human being in his spiritual essence know that it is not a matter of implementing an abstract dogma, but that one must speak to each person in his own way. You only have to possess the core of truth, then you can clothe it in the customs of every country. You will find that our theosophical teachings have rebuilt the ancient teachings of the rishis within the Hindu religion, just as they have in Europe. Even in a form that will again be able to withstand science. So we can speak to every people in their own language. But a common core of truth lives in all these languages. This was also the view of the Rosicrucians, as expressed by Goethe in the poem “The Mysteries”. You will see how much mysticism and theosophy lives in Goethe when we consider his secret revelations in the fairy tale of the green snake and the beautiful lily. But now let us look at this Rosicrucian coloring in his poem, which has remained a fragment. Goethe knows that there will not be many who will be able to understand this poem “The Mysteries”. He also knows that this poem contains so much that no one should dare to believe that they can fully understand it. But he expresses it clearly that he allows us to see into his deepest soul:

A wondrous song is prepared for you;
Listen gladly, and summon everyone!
The path is laid through mountains and valleys;
Here the view is restricted, there it is free again,
And when the path gently slips into the bushes,
do not think that it is a mistake;
We want, when we have climbed enough,
to reach our goal at the right time.

Then he shows how Brother Mark walks to a lonely monastery. In this live twelve hermits, the initiates, led by the thirteenth, whom Goethe calls Humanus, who encompasses all of them. In each of these twelve, one of the great world religions is embodied. Depending on the diversity of countries and times, the different religions are different, and in each of the initiates, each of the religions is different. In a college, however, they work for all of humanity. The leader Humanus is called that because he is such a late incarnation that the highest truth and knowledge is expressed in him in a peculiar way. Those people who are in relatively early incarnations, who have not yet undergone many embodiments, receive the lessons of life and ascend to such an extent that they carry the deepest core of truth within them as a matter of course. Then they do not need to study in the new incarnation, then they are such — through certain signs of their birth this is symbolically foretold — that they, as must be said of the great initiated of humanity, radiate the wisdom of the world. One such incarnation is Humanus. After he has spread the spirit around him in his environment, he ascends to higher spheres. Brother Markus is another such incarnation. When he appeared, Goethe said of him that he gave the impression, for higher reasons, that a higher wisdom must come into the world. Brother Markus appears to be simple. But he is a late iteration of human existence. At the same moment, as Goethe says, Brother Markus is led into the brother lodge, where the twelve are united, when Humanus is allowed to leave the twelve, where only his spirit remains in them, where the spirit ascends to the higher spheres. Brother Markus takes his place. This is the government of humanity that Goethe wanted to depict here.

He sees the emblem gloriously erected,
Which stands for the consolation and hope of the world,
To which many thousands of minds are bound,
To which many thousands of hearts have fervently prayed,
Which destroys the power of bitter death,
Which waves over so many victorious banners:
A fountain of refreshment permeates the weary limbs, He sees the cross and lowers his eyes.

From the very beginning, this poem shows us how Goethe has the spiritual guidance of humanity carried out by the twelve. Thirty years later, a number of students approached him with the request that he provide some explanations. He also tried to say something about this poem. I will only mention a few things to you. He spoke entirely in the theosophical sense:

In order to confess the further intention, indeed the plan in general and thus also the purpose of the poem, I reveal that the reader should be guided through a kind of ideal Montserrat and, after taking his way through the different regions of the mountain, rock and cliff heights, occasionally return to wide and happy plains. Each of the knightly monks would have been visited in his home and, through the climatic and national differences, it would have been learned that the most excellent men from all corners of the earth might gather here, where each of them would quietly worship God in his own way.

Now he shows us how Brother Mark is led into the forecourt. Goethe did not live to depict the actual interior. But then we are shown who Brother Humanus is:

And if you ask me what is the name of the one chosen,
Whom the eye of caution chose?
Whom I often praise, but never enough,
On whom so many incredible things happened?
Humanus is the name of the saint, the wise man,
The best man I have seen with my own eyes:
And his gender, as the princes call it,
You should also know along with his ancestors.

He also shows here how such a leader has risen to such heights. The lower self must have sacrificed itself. We will see this in the sacrifice of the serpent when we speak of the “fairytale”. But here we see how the leader of the twelve chosen ones saves his higher self, his soul. How he has gone through this dying and becoming, and has not remained a dull guest on the dark earth, but has awakened the God-man in himself. He tells us clearly and distinctly that he sees this higher self as a feminine. To save it, the lower self must be killed. In the beautiful symbolism of the poem “The Secrets”, Goethe describes the upward development of a being like the thirteenth. He expresses it like this:

As the third man, I tell more and more freely,
How a spirit of the mother promised him early on,
And how a star at his baptism celebration
shone more brilliantly in the evening sky,
and how a vulture with outstretched wings
settled in the courtyard among the doves;
not striking fiercely and, as usual, doing harm,
he seemed to gently invite them to unity.
Then he modestly kept from telling us
how, as a child, he overcame the adders
Which he found entwined around his sister's arm,
Tightly wound around the sleeping girl.
The nurse fled, leaving the infant lying;
He strangled the snake with a sure hand:
The mother came and saw with joyful trembling
Her son's deeds and her daughter's life.

The sister is the innermost part of the soul, the same as the eternal feminine that draws us in. The adder is what must be shed. He adds the following explanation to the symbolum:

When nature has elevated a person,
It is no wonder that he succeeds in many things;
We must praise the power of the Creator in him,
Who brings weak clay to such honor:
But when a man, when a man, in the hardest test of life,
Conquers himself;
Then we can show him to others with joy
And say: 'That is he, that is his own!'

When the God-man is born in the soul, then all power rushes forward into the distance:

For all power rushes forward into the distance,
To live and work here and there;
On the other hand, from every side, the stream
Of the world narrows and hinders and sweeps us along:
In this inner storm and outer strife,
The spirit hears a word that is hard to understand:
'From the power that binds all beings, Man frees himself who overcomes himself.'

I. Report in the “Mühlheimer Zeitung” of March 20, 1905

On Saturday evening, Dr. Rudolf Steiner, Berlin, General Secretary of the German Section of the Theosophical Society, spoke on 'Goethe's Faust in the Light of the Theosophical World View'. The speaker explained that Goethe cannot be grasped in the full depth of his life's work if Faust is seen only as the poetic expression of the outer life around us and of the soul life in its outer phenomena. Faust offers infinitely more; it aims to provide a picture of the development of man and his place in the world and the universe. Goethe had insight into the teachings of mysticism, which coincide with those of theosophy; in the sense of mysticism, he had given in his Faust a picture of the human being, his development and ascent. He had reproduced the ancient teachings as only a poet could reproduce them, namely in the representation of a poet, and in doing so, he had made use of mystical terminology. Goethe was familiar with the ancient division of the universe into a physical, a mental and a spiritual world, and it was clear to him that man is also composed of three parts: a physical, a mental and a spiritual one. He therefore understood the human being as a microcosm in which the image of the universe, the macrocosm, was reflected. The ancient wisdom teachings of the Indians, Egyptians, Persians and Greeks understood the development of the human being in the same way as Goethe. He paid homage to the view that the human soul was there from the very beginning, that it had developed through all the realms of nature and become the creator of these realms, that on this journey of development through the most diverse states, it had created man in his present form and was now striving to spiritualize him further. To make clear this view of the work of Goethe, the speaker pointed to the many expressions of mystical terminology scattered throughout Faust, such as the passage in the prologue in heaven, which cannot be understood in any other way than in a mystical sense:

The sun resounds according to ancient custom
In the song-contests of the spheres of the brothers,
And its ordained journey
It completes with a thunderclap.

These processes, which can only be perceived in the world of the spirit, where the ear of the spirit listens and the eye of the seer can no longer follow, not to mention the physical eye – they are referred to in mysticism as sounding or resounding. In the first act of the second part, Ariel calls the organ that is to be understood as the organ of perception in these worlds the “ear of the spirit”. Ariel speaks:

Hark! Hark! The hoar-hounds howl!
The new-born day is breaking
For the ears of spirits.
The gates of rocks are creaking and cracking;
The wheels of Phoebus are rolling and clattering;
What a tumult the light brings!
It trumpets, it trombone;
Eye blinks and ear astonishes,
Unheard of does not listen.

The first part of the tragedy, as Dr. Steiner explained, presents man to us in the struggle with the lower physical passions. In the second part, we are shown the development of his soul and his ascent into the purely spiritual. Mephisto is the principle of desire and longing until the soul incites to higher life. The realm of the mothers is understood to mean the spiritual realm, to which Faust descends to attain the spiritual archetypes of things (Helena as a symbol of beauty). In Homunculus, the soul's journey of development is shown through the realms of nature; in Euphorion, the moment of higher enlightenment, which comes to us in happy hours and suddenly disappears again, etc. The captivating explanations, of which we have only been able to reproduce a few here, were met with much applause.

II. Report in the “Kölnische Zeitung” of March 22, 1905

On Saturday evening in the Isabellensaal of the Gürzenich, Dr. Rudolf Steiner of Berlin gave a lecture on “Goethe's Faust, a Picture of His World View from a Theosophical Point of View”. The speaker often uses a mystically opaque mode of expression; in the course of his hour-long speech, he wove into his inwardly spiritualized presentation, which developed in broad strokes into a journey through Goethe's life's work, viewed from a theosophical perspective, reflections on the history and essence of Theosophy. Even though the Theosophical Society as such has existed only for 30 years, the spirit of the world view had already been active first in esoteric Buddhism and later in the most important minds of the Orient and the Occident at all times. From individual basic ideas of the theosophical doctrine, Redrier spread, as in earlier lectures, over the three worlds of theosophy, life, soul and spirit. Regarding the subject itself, he said that Goethe's poem of life could only be understood if one illuminated it with what the theosophical world view meant, which he had expressed in a special way in the secrets and fairy tales of the green snake and the beautiful lily. With advancing age, he had become more and more absorbed in this world and realized that when we know the world, we also know the fragmented details of our being; there is no end to knowledge, only degrees. That is why Goethe had to end Faust as a mystic, after saying in his youth, “A good man in his dark urges is well aware of the right path.” After the speaker had considered the prologue from the mystic's point of view, he described Faust in the first part as tired of the sensual world; all the sciences of the mind did not satisfy him, in his innermost being there was a yearning for a spiritual world in the sense of mysticism. That is why Goethe lets Faust reach the earth spirit in the flame and recognize at the end of the first part that true self-knowledge is knowledge of the world. In the second part, he lets Faust get to know the three worlds of the theosophist. The imperial court embodies the great sensual world – Mephisto, “the impulse of development,” repeatedly draws him back into it – the mothers are the soul principle that is fertilized so that the higher human being may be born in the human being. The mystic also said to the materialist: “In your nothingness, I hope to find the All.” The homunculus, which can also only be understood mystically, is the representative of mystical clairvoyance, the birth and downfall of Euphorion are the mystical moments of celebration that quickly fade away. Finally, it was explained how Faust becomes completely independent of the sensual world, how he goes blind, how darkness is around him, but there is bright light within him. The “Chorus mysticus” is a Goethean creed. The lecture was very well received and was followed by a stimulating discussion.

My dear friends!

On January 29, 1827, Goethe said to his friend Eckermann about the then already advanced second part of “Faust”:

But everything is sensual and, when presented on the stage, will catch everyone's eye. And that is all I wanted. If only the crowd of spectators take pleasure in the appearance; at the same time, the initiated will not miss the higher meaning, as is the case with The Magic Flute and other things.

In this way, Goethe expressed that he himself allows a deeper meaning to be recognized in his works. It is well known that explanations of Goethe's deeper worldview are met with the objection: You yourselves put all sorts of things into the works that Goethe did not mean at all. This objection could easily be refuted. Only someone who does not want to apply all the powers of their soul to get behind the meaning of the poem can say this. We will counter all these objections with what Goethe said in his conversation with Eckermann. Goethe appears to us as one of those artistic figures who did not allow themselves to be inspired by the arbitrariness of fantasy or the randomness of external experience, but rather strove to recognize and explore the great riddles of existence. Goethe was a serious and profound seeker. The direction of his quest can be seen in his very earliest childhood disposition. Nowhere can such a direction confront us as powerfully as in what Goethe told us about the time when he was seven years old. He takes the best minerals and rocks from his father's collection of natural objects and arranges them in a regular form on a music stand. This is the altar on which he wants to offer sacrifices to the god of nature. At the top he places incense cones, which he ignites with the help of a burning glass through the collected rays of the rising morning sun. For him, natural products are the expression of the primal divine forces of nature. Through the rays of the morning sun that he had captured, he had kindled a natural fire, a sacred fire through the essence of the divine forces of nature itself. With this, he wanted to make an offering to the god of nature; in this way, he wanted to come closer to the great god of nature. In this childlike way, Goethe's entire spiritual relationship to the cosmos is expressed. On higher levels, we see young Goethe's confession again in his prose hymn “Nature”, when he was already working in Weimar:

Nature! We are surrounded and embraced by her – unable to step out of her, and unable to get deeper into her. Uninvited and unwarned, she takes us into the cycle of her dance and carries on with us until we are tired and fall out of her arms.

Then he addresses all the beings of nature, how they are revelations of the spirit that is present in nature. Finally, he says:

She has brought me in, she will also lead me out. I trust her. She may do with me as she pleases. She will not hate her work. I did not speak of her. No, what is true and what is false, she has spoken everything. All is her fault and all is her merit.

And before that it says:

With a few draughts from the cup of love, she indemnifies for a life full of toil.

After his student days in Leipzig, Goethe had an important inner experience: on his sickbed, he learned to feel the seriousness of life. In Frankfurt, he then undertook all kinds of strange studies with friends and delved into many mystical and alchemical works. He met people who were involved in mysticism and who sought the God, the Christ, within themselves. Then in Strasbourg he met the other great mind, Herder, by whose side he gained a keen eye for nature, which was then expressed in his scientific studies and writings. When Goethe had moved to Weimar, we often find him in Jena, like a student, listening to the lectures of Loder and other scholars in order to get closer to the divine power in nature. He always sees a manifestation of the spirit in everything that presents itself materially. While he was still in Strasbourg, he came across a book by a materialistic French encyclopedist. It made a great impression on him. He says about it in “Poetry and Truth”:

But how hollow and empty we felt in this dreary atheistic half-night [...] Matter was supposed to have existed from eternity, and moved from eternity, and now, with this movement, right and left and in all directions, it was supposed to produce the infinite phenomena of existence without further ado.

Then he continues:

But he knew as little about nature as we do: for having nailed up a few general concepts, he immediately leaves them behind in order to transform that which appears in nature as higher than nature, or as higher nature, into material, heavy, and indeed moving, but directionless and formless nature, and thereby believes he has gained a great deal.

This is a critique that Goethe could also make of today's materialistic science. Those who immerse themselves in Goethe will soon notice that when he talks about nature, he speaks from great depths, from the spirit that we call the theosophical worldview. It was in the fourteenth century when this was already being cultivated in the Rosicrucian current. Nothing reliable about it has been reported by outsiders. Only the initiates knew what really mattered.

There is a poem by Goethe, “The Mysteries”, where a personality comes to a kind of monastery and meets a gathering of enlightened personalities, twelve in number. A thirteenth is with them, who is about to die. His twelve brothers speak of him in the most beautiful, appreciative terms. Some traits of this great man, who stands as the knower of the world, are then told. It is said that as a boy he had already killed the adder, which signifies the overcoming of the lower nature. Then, after many meaningful words, the lines follow:

From the power that binds all beings,
The man who overcomes himself is freed.

One who has overcome himself is presented in this poem “The Secrets” by Goethe. The whole situation in which the brother, to whom this greatness is being told, is led into, appears to the knowledgeable as the Grail or Parzifal situation. Goethe could not complete the poem, the material was too great. He once gave a student an explanation of it. He hinted at a league of enlightened people who had joined together in a brotherhood. Each of them represents one of the great religious systems of the world. The great emissaries of these are united in a brotherhood, where there must be one of the leaders who sees the unity, the core of wisdom, in the religions. What Goethe says here could be made the principle of the theosophical movement. Goethe points here to what every initiate knows, that there is a secret union. Goethe lets the newcomer see the mysterious symbol at the gate: the cross with the roses entwined. Goethe wanted to point out that there is such a mystery within the modern world, as there have been such initiates in all times.

Goethe then sought God further as an artist during his Italian journey. He sought God in the universe, in all his creations that breathe the divine greatness; he also sought him in the creations of men, in art, which was a continuation of nature for him. He wrote on September 6, 1787 in the diary of his Italian journey:

These great works of art, which are also the greatest works of nature, have been created by man according to true and natural laws. All that is arbitrary and imagined collapses; there is necessity, there is God.

Of Greek art, Goethe says:

I have a suspicion that they proceeded according to the very laws by which nature proceeds and which I am on the trail of.

He expresses the connection between man and nature beautifully in his book about Winckelmann:

When the healthy nature of man works as a whole, when he feels himself in the world as a great, beautiful, dignified and valuable whole, when harmonious comfort gives him pure, free delight – then the universe, if it could feel itself, would exult as if it had reached its goal and would admire the summit of its own becoming and being. For what is the purpose of all the effort of suns and planets and moons, of stars and milky ways, of comets and nebulae, of worlds that have come into being and are still in the process of becoming, if not ultimately for a happy human being to unconsciously enjoy his existence?

That which lives in man, in the depths of man, as a spiritual-mental entity, that is Nature herself, and for man she becomes conscious in the soul of man. It was this intuitive perception that guided Goethe when he attempted to shape the legend of Faust in a new form. This legend expressed what a number of people felt at that time. In the medieval Faust, we see a man who wants to recognize the divine in nature itself. In the Middle Ages, the search for the divine in nature was seen as apostasy. The divine was only to be found in the religious record of the Bible. On the other side was the legend of Faust, who seeks the divine in nature and makes a pact with the devil. On the other side was Luther, who, as the legend goes, threw the devil's inkwell at his head. Faust falls prey to the devil; he became a worldly man and a physician who wants to recognize the great God in nature. In the Middle Ages, such people were called “sons of the devil”. Goethe brings something new to the Faust idea; his guiding principle is:

Whoever strives, we can redeem.

A striving person who seeks the sources of nature, who seeks the spirit of nature, must reach the goal. Goethe is serious about the interpretation. Where man not only seeks something soulful and spiritual in himself, but where he rises to the realization that everything around us is ensouled, there he is on the right path. When we look at the human being, we have to say that our finger, for example, is only conceivable as a limb of our entire organism. Man lives under the illusion of personal self because man devotes himself to the idea that he is independent and self-sufficient, and not a member of the whole earth organism. But if man were to be lifted several miles above the earth, he would no longer be able to live; he would have to [suffer a miserable death by] suffocation and wither away like the finger of my hand if it were to be cut off. Goethe recognizes the earth organism. There is a deep recognition in his desire to let Faust penetrate to the sources of life and to characterize the spirit of the earth with the words:

In the flood of life, in the storm of action
I surge up and down,
weaving back and forth!
Birth and grave,
an eternal sea,
a changing weaving,
a glowing life,
so I create at the whirring loom of time
and weave the living garment of the Godhead.

How Goethe has placed himself in the spirit of the cosmos, how he feels and senses the spirit in the cosmos, and how he also lives in the human heart, is shown when he has Faust speak with the same Earth Spirit elsewhere. There we recognize that Goethe sees the same work in every tree, every plant, as in man:

Exalted Spirit, thou hast given me, given me everything
I asked for. Thou didst not turn thy face to me in fire in vain.
Thou gavest me the glorious kingdom of nature
and the power to feel and enjoy it. Thou dost not
allow only cold, astonished visitors,
granting me to look into her deep chest,
as into the bosom of a friend.
You lead the line of the living
past me, and teach me my brothers
in the silent bush, in air and water.
And when the storm roars and creaks in the forest,
the giant spruce toppling, crushing neighboring branches
And neighboring trunks squashing down,
And her fall dull hollow the hill thunders,
Then you lead me to the safe cave, show
Then myself, and my own chest
Secret deep wonders open up.

We will find the theosophical ideas in Goethe again, without compulsion.

There is talk of Pythagorean music of the spheres. At higher levels of human development, there are experiences that are similar to those of a person born blind who undergoes a successful operation and suddenly gains sight – only much more magnificent and powerful. Such a spiritual operation does exist. In it, we learn about things and beings that are all around us in the world. The world of the spirit, of which Fichte spoke to his audience in 1813, then opens up for us. He says: “A new sense is needed for this.” When one speaks of these worlds to people, it often happens to those who speak as it happens to a seeing person among a group of blind people, to whom he speaks of color, shine and light. Everything that is said theosophically about this spiritual world is spoken entirely in the spirit of Fichte. The theosophist does not speak of a beyond. How many worlds we perceive around us depends on how many organs we have for perceiving these worlds. As many dormant abilities as are awakened in us open up as many new worlds for us. For the human being of today, there is initially a level of consciousness through which he perceives sensual and externally perceptible things. Then there is another level of consciousness for those who have attained the ability of higher vision. A new world of color, splendor and light opens up before their mind's eye. This world is called the astral world. An even higher world can be perceived when one attains continuity of consciousness, where the manifestations of a higher world manifest themselves in a way called sounds. The devachanic world is a sounding world. This world is then taken over into everyday consciousness so that one can also perceive it when walking among everyday things, among tables and chairs. The theosophical worldview speaks of a world of the soul, the astral world, and of a devachanic world, the world of the spirit, which can be perceived by those whose spiritual eyes and ears are open. Where Goethe has Faust placed between the forces of good and evil, he lets the words resound:

The sun resounds in the ancient way
In the spheres of the brothers' song,
And its prescribed journey
It completes with a thunderclap.

When most people say that this is a poetic image, they misunderstand the poet if they think he is making up a phrase. A true poet does not do that. The physical sun does not resound. But if we look at the sun as the expression of a spiritual organism, then we can speak of the sun resounding. In the second part of Faust, Goethe lets him encounter a similar situation. It says:

Hark! Listen to the storm of the hours!
For spiritual ears,
The new day is already being born.
Rock gates creak and rattle,
Phoebus' wheels roll and clatter,
What a roar is brought by the light!
It drums and trumpets, eye blinks and ear is amazed,
unheard-of things are not heard.

These are the depths of wisdom from which Goethe draws. Those who do not know that Goethe sought to draw from the sources of esoteric wisdom do not understand Goethe well. He himself said that the deep meaning of his poetry would not remain hidden.

The second part of “Faust” has always been a big problem for people, also the fact that Mephistopheles, the representative of evil forces, is associated with Faust. Goethe researchers have also written an infinite amount about Mephistopheles. The word is composed of “Mephis” – is equal to Verderber – and “Tophel” – is equal to liar. At the same time, this leads us to the fact that Goethe was able to draw from sources where exactly this meaning of Mephistopheles could be found. We get to know the esoteric Goethe from the second part of “Faust”. People have thought a great deal about the homunculus. Some interpreters of Faust suggest that the homunculus represents humanistic research. Faust scholars can also be seen grappling with the question of what the “mothers” represent.

Occult teachings have always distinguished between the physical, mental and spiritual nature of the human being. Even today's materialistic science regards the physical nature. The soul world belongs to what we have characterized as the astral. The spirit belongs to the devachanic world. As in all mysticism, for Goethe the physical body is the transient one. The soul is that which forms the connection between what is transient in time and the spiritual eternal. For Goethe, the human being is also composed of three parts: body, soul and spirit. For the one who thus considers the structure of human nature, what happens to him when a person enters this world? He comes from the eternal sphere of Devachan. The source of spiritual existence is spoken of as the “Mothers”. The threefold source of the human being is with the Mothers. The eternal corresponds to the spirit. The soul also has an eternal archetype. In Theosophy, this is referred to by the Sanskrit words: Atma, Budhi, Manas. This is referred to as the divine trinity, which is with the mothers, of which man is a threefold image. Goethe wants to depict this, the way in which the threefold nature of man is composed of spirit, soul and body. A long-dead person is to stand before Faust: Helen. The example of Helen is to be used to illustrate the development of humanity. The re-emergence of the spirit in a new form is to be shown there. The three parts of the human being are to come together again.

Goethe depicts the soul itself through the homunculus, which is the astral body of the human being; it longs to be embodied. The spirit must join it; it is with the mothers. Now Goethe actually describes the journey to the mothers in a very appropriate way. Mephisto says to him as Faust enters the realm of the mothers:

Sink away! I could also say: rise!

There is no difference between up and down in Devachan. Then he shows him the tripod, which shows him the way to the mothers, the threefold nature of man. Faust succeeds in bringing up the ghost of the deceased Helena. Faust is not yet ready to fully understand this. When he wants to embrace Helena passionately, an explosion follows.

Homunculus is created; this is precisely the human astral body. This astral body is to receive a physical body. Goethe has him guided down to the ancient Greek philosophers. He wants to have the “thoroughly practical” for the astral soul. Now he is to learn from the Greek philosophers how to come into being and develop. The entire development through stones, plants and up to the human being is then described. The process of passing through the plant kingdom is aptly described as “it grunts so”. Finally, we see the possibility arise that the body connects with the soul when Eros comes. Homunculus is dashed to pieces against the shell carriage of Galathea; as a spirit he no longer exists, he has connected with the elements.

In the great world poem, we see how Goethe embodied his view in it. Goethe describes his view differently in the fairy tale of the green snake and the beautiful lily. The way the “fairy tale” was created should make it clear that what is expressed here is possible. During the time of their friendship, Goethe and Schiller published the Letters on Aesthetic Education as a kind of dowry. Schiller asked Goethe to make a contribution. Goethe wrote to him that he could not express what he had to say in a philosophical way, but that he would present it in a pictorial form. So he wrote the fairy tale of the green snake and the beautiful lily. If we want to understand what Goethe meant by the “fairytale”, we only need to read what Schiller wrote to Goethe at the time. Schiller sees in the realm of beautiful appearance, in the realm of artistic appearance, an intermediate realm that elevates people from the realm of necessity, of sensual nature, to inner freedom. He sees in the artist the person who finds the spiritual in the physical, so that the sensual is spiritualized. In this way, art can help people to rise above the sensual world. It is a means for them to purify and spiritualize their instincts. People may then follow their instincts when they have been so purified that they no longer go against the spirit, so that people cannot help but want the ideal. Goethe presents this in a great image, but one that is drawn from infinite depths. In the will-o'-the-wisp in the fairy tale, who cross a river and have to promise the ferryman to pay for their journey with three onions, three artichokes and three cabbages, we recognize the lower self of man , the ego nature, which has the potential to develop the three-part, higher, future nature, namely the wisdom nature or manas, the kind nature or budhi, piety and the strength nature or atma, strength. The development of man to this higher trinity is called initiation, which is carried out in the mysteries. Gradually, in the great process of evolution of humanity, all people will become initiates.

In all esotericism, water is used to describe the astral world.

Human soul, how like thou art to water!

says Goethe. There are two types of human nature: one that acquires wisdom in selfishness, the other that acquires wisdom by working from experience to experience. If the astral — the river — is to accept the gold, the wisdom acquired in vanity, then it will flare up. In esotericism, the original is represented by the lotus flowers, by something that can be peeled off so that a germ remains. The will-o'-the-wisps represent the human ego that only wants to shine; the snake represents the human ego that identifies itself with wisdom. Goethe once said:

If the eye were not solar
How could we see the light?

When the snake glows from within, it can enter the temple, where humanity acquires the three highest goods, which are represented by three kings: wisdom, piety or beauty and strength. The old man with the lamp represents the way in which most people are now enlightened. Religion is symbolized by the old man's wife. The beautiful lily represents the eternal, which man can only attain when he has been purified. The highest kills all that is living and immature. But through mystical death, man attains the highest spiritual gifts. In this fairy tale, Goethe has embedded the deepest truths of esotericism. In it, he shows how man attains the highest goods of humanity through the sacrifice of his lower nature. The same idea is expressed in the saying that appears in the West-Eastern Divan, in the poem that begins:

Tell no one, only the wise,
Because the crowd would scoff.

In the end, he speaks of the sacrifice of the lower nature and the spiritual rebirth of man:

And so long as you do not have this,
this: Die and become!
If you are only a dull guest
on the dark earth.