The Rudolf Steiner Archive

16. Isis and Madonna

[ 1 ] Goethe repeatedly pointed out that anyone who draws near to the mysteries of nature longs for the most worthy interpreter of these mysteries: art. And throughout his life, Goethe demonstrated in his works how art served as his interpreter of truth. But it can be said that with this view, Goethe touched upon something that has run as a fundamental conviction, as a fundamental motif, through all times and through all epochs of human development.

[ 2 ] More or less consciously or unconsciously, various “languages”—so to speak—present themselves to us in the different arts in order to express certain truths that live within our souls. It is often precisely the most mysterious truths, the most mysterious insights—those that cannot easily be captured in rigid concepts or clothed in abstract formulas—that then seek expression in artistic representation.

[ 3 ] Today, we are to be presented with such a mysterious truth—one that has sought to express itself through art over the centuries, one that has always found its scientific formulation in certain narrow circles, but one that will only become popular among wider circles at some point in the future through spiritual science. Goethe himself was able to approach this truth with his soul from a wide variety of angles. In one of the lectures I gave here on Goethe, we were able to point out the significant moment in Goethe’s life that represents an experience of such a mystery. In the second of the lectures dealing with Goethe’s *Faust*, it was pointed out how Goethe, while reading the Greek writer Plutarch, came across the remarkable story of Nicias, who sought to win back for the Romans a city in Sicily that belonged to the Carthaginians and was therefore persecuted. While fleeing, he pretended to be mad, and it was recognized from the peculiar cry he uttered: “The Mothers, the Mothers are pursuing me”—that this was no ordinary madness, for in that region a so-called “Temple of the Mothers” had been erected in an ancient, mysterious style, and people therefore knew what the expression “the Mothers” meant. When Goethe was once again able to bring the full meaning of the expression “the Mothers” to the forefront of his soul, he knew that he could not better express the eerie beauty of the Faust scene in the second part—in which he sought to portray the highest reality—than by having Faust himself go to the Mothers.

[ 4 ] What does Faust’s journey to the Mothers represent? We briefly mentioned it in that lecture on Faust. Although Mephisto brings Faust the key, he cannot enter on his own into the realm where the Mothers reign. Mephisto is the spirit of materialism, the spirit that is, so to speak, contained within the forces and powers of material existence as they pertain to human beings. For him, the realm of the Mothers is the realm of nothingness. Faust, the spiritual being inclined toward the spirit, can reply: “In your nothingness I hope to find the universe.” Now follows that thoroughly strange and meaningful description of the realm of the Mothers, where we are told how they weave and live in a realm from which the forms of the visible world are fashioned; how one must set aside everything that lives in time and space if one wishes to reach these Mothers. Creation, transformation—that is the essence of their realm. They are mysterious goddesses who reign in a spiritual realm beyond sensory reality. Faust must descend to them at the very moment when he is to gain insight into that which is exalted above all the sensory, above all the physical. Only by having this realm of the Mothers open up to his soul can Faust bring Helena’s eternal nature into a worthy union with her temporal nature. Even back then, in that lecture on *Faust*, it could be pointed out that Goethe understood very well that this Realm of the Mothers is the realm into which a human being can enter when he awakens the spiritual powers slumbering within his soul. For him, this is the great moment in which the spiritual beings and realities that are always around us—but which we cannot see with our physical eyes any more than a blind person can see color and light—reveal themselves; the moment when his spiritual eye and spiritual ear are opened to a world that lies beyond the physical one. Entry into this realm is symbolized by the journey into the Realm of the Mothers.

[ 5 ] It was repeatedly pointed out in these lectures that when a person applies certain intimate processes to their soul—certain precisely prescribed methods of inner contemplation of their world of imagination, feeling, and will—they do indeed open up these spiritual eyes and ears and, through them, gain access to new realms around them. It was also pointed out that those who enter this realm are bewildered by the impressions that act upon them. While in the physical world objects have sharp contours and we recognize them through these, in the spiritual world we will experience a bewildering sensation of forms floating and weaving into one another, just as Goethe describes in the second part of *Faust*. But what is given to our senses is born from this Mother Realm, just as metal is born from the primordial mother in the mountains. Precisely because this mysterious realm—the Mother Realm of all physical and earthly things, the realm that contains, so to speak, the divine substance of everything—resonates in Goethe’s work, the expression “the Mothers” has such a fascinating, spine-tingling beauty for him. That is why he understood what he read in Plutarch, recognizing that when someone cries out, “The Mothers, the Mothers!” they are not, like a madman, gazing into a nonsensical, insubstantial realm, but into a realm of spiritual reality. So to speak, the “mother problem” of the world stood before Goethe’s eyes as he read Plutarch back then, and he wove this mother problem—like so many other things—into the second part of *Faust*.

[ 6 ] In ancient times, anyone who wished to enter this realm of the mothers—the realm of the spiritual world—had to undergo a certain process—in addition to all the other exercises described in *How to Attain Knowledge of the Higher Worlds* —which has always been called the preparatory purification, the catharsis of the mind. He had to prepare himself in such a way that his soul—from which the higher spiritual powers were to be drawn—no longer felt any compulsion or passion for the ordinary, sensory world; that it had, so to speak, purified and cleansed itself of everything that draws one toward sensory appearances, that which is a feast for the eyes and ears, and that which keeps the mind bound to the physical body. The soul must be free from these things; only then can it awaken the spiritual eye within itself and penetrate the spiritual realm. What is called the purified soul—the soul that has undergone catharsis, the soul no longer turned toward the sensual-physical—has been called, wherever people have known anything of this mystery, the higher inner self of the human being, that inner self of which it has been said: “This does not originate from what external eyes can perceive; it originates from higher, spiritual-soul sources; it has not an earthly, but a heavenly home.” — This purified, refined soul was consistently conceived as being connected to humanity’s true origin; for what spiritual science has always been has never been able to speak in the same sense of a purely material evolution, of a sensually perfect being, or of a sensually imperfect being. What is today called “evolution”—the ascent from a sensually inferior being up to the most perfect sensuous being walking upon our Earth, the sensuous human being—is not regarded by spiritual science as erroneous; it is, as has often been emphasized, fully and completely acknowledged. Spiritual science fully acknowledges the natural scientific theories of evolution and descent; but at the same time it points out that what we call “human” is not exhausted by this development, that it is only the outer aspect of human development.

[ 7 ] If we trace humanity back through the turning point of time, we will find that the further back we go to more imperfect physical forms, the closer we come to the spiritual-soul origin of humanity. We have often transported ourselves back to a time in human evolution when what we today call a human being had no physical existence at all, but was still entirely enshrouded in a spiritual-soul existence. It has been pointed out repeatedly that, in the spirit of spiritual science, we are to conceive of the physical form—the physical body of the human being—as a condensation of a human being who was once purely spiritual and soul-based. That spiritual and soul-based human being has, so to speak, condensed into the present-day human being, just as water solidifies into ice. This image, too, has been used frequently. It has been said: Let us imagine a mass of water; this condenses into ice, so that we are ultimately left with a certain residue of the water mass and the part of it that has been transformed into ice; then we have the image of the origin of the human being. In the human being who was once purely spiritual and soul-based, there was still nothing of the physical-sensory aspect of corporeality that eyes can see and hands can grasp today. Gradually, he became more and more physical until he reached his present physical form. The period, of course, to which external science can look back, shows humanity in the physical form in which we see it today. But spiritual science looks back into the distant past, where humanity was born out of the spiritual world and was still of a spiritual-soul nature. When we look at the human soul today, we tell ourselves that the soul in human beings is, so to speak, the last remnant of that spiritual-soul nature that once was. We look into the inner being of the human being, come to know the human being’s spiritual-soul essence, and say to ourselves: just as the human being is inwardly, so was he once, when he was born from the bosom of the spiritual world. This soul being is enveloped from the outside by the baser aspects of the sensory world, but it can purify and refine itself once more; it can rise to a perception free from sensuality and thereby attain the spirituality from which it itself was born. This is the process of spiritual knowledge, which proceeds through purification and refinement. Thus we perceive soul-beings within the human spirit, and speaking not merely figuratively but in reality, we say: When we recognize this soul-being in its truth, we see that it is not of this world. We see, in the background of this soul-being, a divine-spiritual world from which it was born.

[ 8 ] And now let’s try to translate what we’ve just said into a sensory image. Let us ask ourselves: Have we not transformed what we have just said into a sensory image in which the spiritual world is made tangible through cloud formations, from which spiritual figures—such as angelic heads—emerge, giving tangible form to the human soul? Do we not have, in the figure of the Madonna in Raphael’s Sistine Madonna, an image that was born from the divine-spiritual world?

[ 9 ] Now let us move on and ask ourselves: What becomes of the person who has purified and refined his soul, who has ascended to higher insights, who has brought into being within his soul the spiritual forms that bring to life within him that which, as the Divine, permeates and interweaves the world? The person who gives birth to the higher human within the human—a person who represents a small world within the great world, who, from a purified soul, gives birth to the true higher human—what is this person? He is characterized by nothing other than what we call clairvoyance. If we try to visualize the soul that gives birth to the higher human being from within itself, from the spiritual universe, we need only imagine the image of the Sistine Madonna, the wondrous child in the Madonna’s arms.

[ 10 ] Thus, in the Sistine Madonna, we have before us an image of the human soul, born of the spiritual universe; from this soul springs forth the highest thing that a human being can produce: his spiritual birth, that which is within him—a re-creation of the creative activity of the world. Let us try to awaken within ourselves a sense of what clairvoyant consciousness does.

[ 11 ] Divine spirituality once formed the foundation of our universe; for it would otherwise be nonsensical to seek a spirit in the world if that spirit had not originally created the world. That which surrounds us in the world outside has sprung from the Spirit we seek within the soul. Thus, the soul has sprung from the divine Father Spirit, who permeates and interweaves the entire universe, giving birth to the Son of Wisdom, who is like this Father Spirit and is his reflection.

[ 12 ] Now we understand how Goethe approached this problem in all its mystical significance when he sought to bring together the entire content of *Faust* in the *Chorus mysticus*, in which he addressed the human soul as the Eternal Feminine that draws us toward the universal spirit of the world. Thus, even at the end of *Faust*, Goethe remained committed to his “Madonna problem.” Today, it is hardly possible to fully recognize, from the form that the depiction of the Madonna has taken, what has now been expressed as if in a picture—and which is nevertheless grounded in profound truth. But if we trace this “Madonna problem” back to its origin, we will recognize that, in fact—even if often veiled—the greatest problem of humanity still confronts us today in the form of the Madonna. These Madonnas have, of course, changed from the simple form we see in the catacombs of the early centuries of the Christian world, where we find Madonnas with the Child reaching for the mother’s breast. It is a long way from this simple figure, which has little artistic merit, to the fifteenth century, when—after many transformations—the Child and the Madonna, in the modern sense, became increasingly artistic and painterly, right up to Michelangelo and Raphael. Yet it is as if even these magnificent artists, while perhaps not possessing full knowledge, had nonetheless gained a clear sense of a deeper truth regarding the “Madonna problem.”

[ 13 ] One is overcome by the most beautiful feelings when standing before Michelangelo’s so-called Pietà in St. Peter’s Basilica in Rome, where the Madonna sits with the body on her knees—the Madonna, that is, at the age when Christ has already passed through death, yet still in youthful beauty. At the time, a frequently raised question was why Michelangelo had depicted the Madonna at this age with such youthful beauty. Michelangelo himself was asked about this, and he replied—I emphasize that we are not speaking here of matters of faith, but of spiritual-scientific experiences—that it is a fact that virginal women retain their youthful freshness well into old age; how could he not be justified in depicting the Mother of God, even at this age, still in all her youthful freshness? — What a remarkable view Michelangelo expresses here! Even if not explicitly stated, we find it expressed in Raphael’s paintings as well. But we can only understand this entire view if we go far back to the times when what confronts us in the Madonnas as an unconscious artistic quality was still outwardly alive. We could go back a long way, and we would essentially find the Madonna problem throughout the world. We could go to ancient India and find the goddess with the infant Krishna at her breast; we could attend a Chinese religious service and find similar images there as well.

[ 14 ] But we do not wish to venture into those remote realms; rather, we will stick to that depiction from ancient times which, in the most telling sense, captures what is so beautifully presented to us in the Madonna. Let us consider the depictions of Isis with the child Horus. These depictions, which have grown entirely out of Egyptian wisdom, may in a certain sense serve as a key to a proper understanding of the depiction of the Madonna. In doing so, however, we must turn our attention a little to what this wisdom actually is that led to this remarkable divine figure of ancient Egypt—Isis—and what that wisdom, expressed in the legend of Isis and Osiris, means for us. Profound, if we truly understand it, this legend leads us into the very heart of the human condition. No matter how thoroughly we may explore Egyptian religion here and there, the most significant and meaningful aspect remains the legend of Osiris, the king who reigned among humanity in ancient times—as in a golden age—and who was married to his sister Isis, who brought happiness and blessings to humankind. A human king with divine power and divine virtue—this is how he appears to the ancient Egyptians, and he reigns until he is killed by his brother, the evil Set. He is killed in a strange way. During a banquet, the evil brother Set—who in later times was called Typhon—has a chest made, and through a ruse, Osiris is tricked into lying down inside it. Then the chest is slammed shut and cast into the water, so that he is swept away into the unknown. Isis, his grieving wife, searches everywhere for her husband until, after a long search, she finds him in Asia. She brings him back to Egypt, where his evil brother Set dismembers him, and the pieces are buried in many tombs. Hence the many tombs of Osiris in Egypt. Osiris now becomes the king of the dead, just as he had once been the king of those living on earth. A ray from the afterlife strikes Isis on the head. She then gives birth to Horus, who becomes the ruler of this realm.

[ 15 ] According to Egyptian legend, Horus is the posthumous son of Osiris. Horus, conceived through fertilization from the afterlife, is the ruler of the earthly, sensory world, while Osiris is the ruler of the realm of the dead. While the soul here, as long as it is confined within the body, is subject to the power of Horus, once it leaves the body—as the Egyptian Book of the Dead attests—it enters the realm of Osiris and becomes an Osiris itself. In a most significant way, at the judgment depicted in the Egyptian Book of the Dead, the soul is addressed upon its arrival in the afterlife: “You, Osiris, what have you done?” and so on, so that the soul matures to become an Osiris itself as it passes through the gate of death.

[ 16 ] Thus, in the tradition of ancient Egypt, we look upon two realms: the realm we perceive with our senses—the realm of Horus—and the realm into which the soul enters after death, where Osiris reigns. At the same time, however, we know that it was the belief of the ancient Egyptian initiates that the initiate who attains clairvoyant abilities enters, even during his lifetime, the very realms that the soul can enter only after death—and that he can thus be united with Osiris. The initiate thus becomes an Osiris himself. He breaks free from the physical, renounces all habits of physical life, all passions and desires; he purifies himself in relation to the physical, becomes a purified soul, and as such is united with Osiris. What does this legend represent to us? Oh, it is a childish notion to claim that this legend is meant to represent, for example, the annual course of the sun around the earth. It is concocted at the “green table” of scholarship that Osiris is the sun, and when it sets, this is said to represent its defeat by the winter forces of nature, which are supposedly characterized by Set, the evil brother of Typhon; and Isis is said to represent the moon, which seeks the sun in order to be bathed in its light.

[ 17 ] Only someone who devises a theory of nature myths in this way, from his own mind, can make such a claim. In truth, the Isis legend is the symbolic expression of a profound truth. What are the times in which Osiris ruled over humankind? These are none other than the times when human beings were still spiritual-soul beings, when they still dwelt in the spiritual-soul world among beings who were like them—that is, who were also spiritual-soul beings. So when we speak of the kingdom of Osiris, we do not mean the physical realm, but a realm of the past in which human beings reigned as spiritual-soul beings. And by the hostile brother of Osiris is meant that being who has enveloped the human being in the physical body, who has condensed a part of his spiritual-soul being into the physical body. Now we see how the once purely spiritual Osiris is placed inside a chest. This chest is nothing other than the physical human body. But because Osiris is a being who, by his very nature, cannot descend into the physical world—who is meant to remain in the divine-spiritual world—being placed inside the chest—the human body—is tantamount to death for Osiris. What is depicted here, then, in a broader sense, is the transition from that spiritual-soul realm to the physical epoch of human development. Osiris could not enter this physical realm; thus, Osiris died to the outer physical world and became the king of that realm which the soul enters when it departs from the physical-sensory world or when it develops clairvoyant powers.

[ 18 ] Therefore, the initiate is united with Osiris as a soul. What remains for the human being from that spiritual-soul realm? For the human being who, unlike Osiris, did not, so to speak, withdraw from the physical-sensory world but entered into it—what remains for him? His soul, his spiritual-soul being, which will always draw him toward the primordial seeds of the spiritual-soul realm, toward Osiris. This is the human soul that dwells within us, Isis—in a certain sense, the Eternal Feminine—which dwells within us and draws us toward the realm from which we were born.

[ 19 ] This Isis, when she purifies and cleanses herself, casts off everything she has received from the physical world, is fertilized by the spiritual world, and then gives birth to the higher human being, Horus, who will triumph over all that is base and human. Thus we regard Isis as the representative of the human soul—that which has been born within us as the divine-spiritual essence of the Father-Universe, that which remains within us, that which seeks Osiris, and that which finds him only through initiation or in death. We look directly into that realm that lies beyond the sensory-physical world as we paint this Osiris-Isis legend before our souls, back to the time when humanity was still with the Mothers, the primal sources of existence, when Isis was not yet enclosed within the physical body, but was still united in the Golden Age with her husband, Osiris. In it, we behold that which is born from the human body as the most beautiful humanity, as the highest human ideal, fertilized by the eternal world spirit itself.

[ 20 ] How, then, could anything other than the highest ideal, the highest humanity—Christ himself, for he is the very ideal they represent—be fitted into the realm of mothers? In Goethe’s *Faust*, three mothers, seated on golden tripods, come before us—three mothers! The human soul underwent its development in the times when it was not yet in a human body. What we see today, so to speak, with our physical eyes as human conception and human birth appears to us only as the final symbol and parable of the earlier form of the same process. In the physical mother, we see, so to speak, the final physical form of a spiritual mother who stands behind her, and we see this spiritual mother not conceived in the same way as happens today, but from the cosmos itself—just as we, too, have conceived our soul through higher knowledge from the cosmos. We look back to ever more spiritual forms of conception and procreation.

[ 21 ] Therefore, when speaking in a truly spiritual-scientific sense, one does not speak merely of a mother, but of the mothers, and imagines that what stands before us today as the physical mother is the final manifestation of the spiritual-soul form from the spiritual realm. In fact, there are depictions of Isis that show us not a single mother, but mothers—three mothers. In the foreground we have a figure, Isis with the infant Horus at her breast, as the oldest depictions of the Madonna are also portrayed. But behind this figure, in certain Egyptian depictions, we see another figure—an Isis who has the familiar pair of cow’s horns on her head and wears vulture’s wings, extending the ankh to the child. Here we see what is physical and human in the foreground, already more spiritualized here. Behind this one we see a third, bearing a lion’s head, representing a third stage of the human soul. Thus these three images of Isis appear to us in succession. Our human soul does indeed contain three natures within itself: a volitional nature—its essence lying in the deepest depths—an emotional nature, and a wisdom-like nature. These are the three mothers of the soul; they appear to us in the three forms of the Egyptian Isis.

[ 22 ] The fact that behind the initially physical mother lies the supernatural, spiritual mother—Isis from spiritual antiquity—and that, for example, in the depictions, the vulture’s wings, the cow’s horns, and the globe are placed at the center of Isis’s head is a profound symbol. Those who understood something of the so-called ancient doctrine of numbers have always said, and this corresponds to a profound truth: that the sacred number three represents the divine-masculine in the universe, and figuratively this sacred number three is depicted by the globe and the two cow horns, which, if you will, are a kind of image of the Madonna’s crescent, but actually represent an expression of the fertile power of nature.

[ 23 ] The globe is the symbol of creation in the world. It would take us many hours to discuss this if we were to develop a representation of the masculine in the world. Thus, behind the sensual Isis stands her representative, the supersensual Isis, who is not fertilized by her own kind, but by the Divine-Masculine, which lives through and interweaves the world. The process of fertilization is still depicted as something closely related to the process of cognition.

[ 24 ] The awareness that the process of cognition is a kind of fertilization process was still alive in earlier times. You can still read in the Bible: “Adam knew his wife, and… she gave birth.” What we take in today as spiritual gives birth to the spiritual in the soul; this is something that still represents a final remnant of the ancient mode of fertilization. What is expressed there shows us how we are fertilized today by the World Spirit, how we take it into the human soul in the sense of the World Spirit, in order to attain human cognition, human feeling, and human will.

[ 25 ] This is depicted to us in the figure of Isis. She is fertilized by the Divine Masculine so that her head may be fertilized, and the child is not given sensual matter, as with the sensual Isis, but rather the cross with a handle, the Syastika—that which is the sign of life. While the physical Isis provides the physical substance of life, here the spirit of life is given to it in its symbol. Thus, behind the physical mother of life stands the spiritual mother of life, and behind her the primal force of all life, represented by the life force, just as the Will dwelt behind everything in an even more spiritual, primeval past. There we have the three mothers, and there we also have the way in which these three mothers pass on the life-giving force from the cosmos to the sun. There we have an expression—albeit not yet artistic, but symbolic—of a profound cosmic truth. What has passed through Egyptian development as the Isis symbol was taken up by more recent times and transformed in accordance with the progress humanity has made through the appearance of Christ Jesus on Earth; for in Christ Jesus was given the great model for everything that the human soul is to bring forth from within itself. This human soul, fertilized by the World Spirit, is embodied in the Madonna. In the Madonna, therefore, Isis appears to us as it were reborn, elevated and transfigured in a corresponding manner.

[ 26 ] What we were able to depict visually at the beginning of our lecture now appears before our minds as something connected to the development of humanity, surging forth from ancient times, artistically transfigured and rendered in the modern images that have been placed before the human soul—which yearns for art—all over the world. There we see how art truly becomes the interpreter of truth, as Goethe says. There we see how, fundamentally speaking, when our gaze looks up to the Madonna and when this gaze is imbued with the feeling of the heart, the soul still receives a revelation of the great mystery of the world. There we see how, in such devotion, our soul—as the Eternal Feminine within us—yearns in search of the divine Father Spirit, who is born from the universe itself, and whom we give birth to as the sun within our own soul. What we are as human beings and how we, as human beings, are connected to the world—this is what meets us in the images of the Madonna. That is why these images of the Madonna—quite apart from any religious movement or dogma—are something so sacred to us. Through them, we can perceive it as something born from the cosmos when the formless cloud formations take shape as angelic heads and, from the whole, the representative of the human soul is born. And in turn, the Madonna embodies that which can be born from the human soul: the true, higher human being—that which slumbers within every person, the very best of humanity, and that which, as spirit, floods and interweaves the world.

[ 27 ] Goethe felt the same way when he was putting the final touches on his *Faust*, as he guided the character through the various stages leading up to higher insights and a higher life. That is why he sends Faust to the Mothers; that is why the name “Mothers” sounds so eerily beautiful to him and lets him sense the wisdom that echoes from ancient times. That is why Goethe felt he had to send Faust to the Mothers, that only there could he seek and find the Eternal—that Eternal through which Euphorion can come into being. Precisely because the human soul appeared to him to be represented by the Madonna, Goethe expresses the mystery of the soul in the “Chorus mysticus” with the words: “The Eternal Feminine draws us upward.” That is also why Raphael, in his marvelous painting of the Madonna—whatever our times may say—has so beautifully succeeded in leading us back to the realms to which the ancient images of Isis once led. From that which is spiritual—that which can no longer be expressed through human form, for it would give rise to forms that are too sensual—from that Isis who, as a symbol of her power, is depicted only with a lion’s head, we descend to the human Isis, who transmits her power through the sensual substance to the child Horus. Raphael unconsciously expressed this in his Sistine Madonna; spiritual science will consciously lead humanity back up into the spiritual realm from which it descended.

[ 28 ] This year’s winter lecture series will use two more examples to show us how humanity has descended from spiritual heights and will once again ascend to a higher state of being. In the two lectures titled “Ancient European Clairvoyance” and “The European Mysteries and Their Initiates,” we will see, in a strictly scientific manner, how these images of the Madonna and depictions of Isis are, in fact, clear and distinct artistic interpretations of the deepest mysteries of nature and the spirit—how they are, in essence, merely a paraphrase of the great words spoken by Plato: Once upon a time, human beings were spiritual beings. They descended only because they were stripped of their spiritual wings and clothed in a physical body. They will free themselves from this physical body once more and ascend again into the spiritual and soul worlds. — This is what Plato once proclaimed philosophically. The images of the Madonna also proclaim this, in that they are, in the most beautiful sense, what Goethe sought to express with the words: “Art is the most worthy interpreter of the world’s revealed mysteries.” — Let us not fear that art will become abstract or even allegorical when it is once again compelled—I say compelled!—to acknowledge the higher spiritual realities; let us not fear that it will become artistically stiff and lifeless when it can no longer adhere to coarse external models.

[ 29 ] It is only because human beings have forgotten how to recognize the spiritual that art, too, has become bound to the external senses. But when humanity rediscovers the path to spiritual heights and insights, it will also know that true reality lies in the spiritual world, and that those who perceive this reality will create with vitality, even without slavishly adhering to sensory models. Only then will Goethe be understood—when art and wisdom once again walk hand in hand on a broader scale, when art once more becomes an expression of the spiritual. Then knowledge and art will be one again, and in their union they will be religion. For the spiritual, in its form, will once again work as something divine in human hearts and give rise to what Goethe called true, genuine piety. “Whoever possesses science and art also possesses religion,” says Goethe, “and whoever does not possess these two should have religion.”

[ 30 ] Truly, whoever possesses knowledge of the spiritual mysteries of the world and knows what speaks through the Isis-Madonna sees in them something primal and living, something far more alive than can be expressed through any slavish imitation of outwardly physical human models. And such a person, who looks into the spiritual realm through the living essence embodied by the Madonnas as if through a veil, can once again feel piety without any dogmatism or prejudice, in complete spiritual freedom. He will unite knowledge, wisdom, and art within his soul and give birth once more to a genuine, free religiosity or piety within himself.