The Rudolf Steiner Archive

21. Richard Wagner and Mysticism

[ 1 ] The theosophical worldview is not merely intended to satisfy theoretical needs; rather, what is called the theosophical worldview is conceived as something all-encompassing and universal. Although the Theosophical Movement has gained few followers over the past 30 years, it can still be said that understanding of it is growing—that it is meant to offer something that sheds light on all branches of spiritual life.

[ 2 ] Today we will attempt to show how, from the perspective of the theosophical worldview, the personality of Richard Wagner can be understood in a special way.

[ 3 ] By “mysticism,” people today usually mean something that cannot be clearly defined. People today have completely forgotten that there was a time—the first centuries of the Christian era—when mysticism was called “mathesis,” because mysticism is supposed to be the clearest, most vivid, and brightest form of knowledge and can only be compared to the clearest and most vivid of all: mathematics.

[ 4 ] Mysticism is said to be to the supersensible world what mathematics is to the physical world. When one speaks of the way in which one can come to the study of the supersensible, it is called mysticism; when one refers more to the study itself without specific methods, it is called theosophy. Theosophy is not meant to be the study of the divine or the study of a god. For the theosophist, the divine is the all-encompassing principle that underlies both the smallest and the most comprehensive phenomena of the world. If a person is still at an undeveloped stage, they will perceive only a little of the world; if they are more developed, they will perceive more. Theosophy, however, will never presume to say that human beings can know the nature of God. We can never speak of a complete knowledge of God; we must be clear that we live, move, and have our being in God. Knowledge resides within the Divine, but the Divine can never be encompassed by knowledge.

[ 5 ] In a lecture in Berlin in 1811, Johann Gottlieb Fichte characterized what, as a mindset or perspective, underlies the pursuit of philosophy. He said to his audience: “In these lectures, I have something very special to tell you—nothing about what the five senses perceive or what the intellect deduces. Supersensory objects transcend sensory perception. A new sense is necessary for this. — What matters is that one has the belief that one can gain insights into the supersensory world.” If someone is unfamiliar with this spiritual world, they are like a blind person who cannot perceive color or light. Theosophy and mysticism do not speak of the supersensible in the sense that it is something outside our world, but rather in the sense that a blind person who undergoes surgery comes to see colors and the world of light—in the sense that a person awakens the powers and abilities that lie dormant within their soul. It is possible to awaken what are called the spiritual eyes and spiritual ears. It is not the one who says that one can know something who is immodest, but the one who claims that one can know nothing. It is the seeing person who must judge colors, not the blind person. It is the one who is spiritually sighted who must judge the supersensible world.

[ 6 ] There have always been people who were spiritually perceptive. They are called the Initiates. They were the missionaries to the world. All religions are based on the teachings of those who have looked into the spiritual worlds. Gazing into the spiritual worlds is called mysticism or theosophy. There are ways to exert an influence from the spiritual worlds without consciously looking into them oneself. Those who have gazed into them without being able to describe their nature—these were the great artists. The great artists, such as Dante, Goethe, and Richard Wagner, drew inspiration from the spiritual world.

[ 7 ] It is not being claimed that Richard Wagner himself understood the ideas he drew from the spiritual worlds. This is by no means an objection to the truth of the matter. The plant, too, knows nothing of the ideas that the botanist derives from it or that the poet brings to it. It knows nothing of the ideas of the botanist or the poet, yet it grows in accordance with what the botanist later thinks about it; it embodies these laws. Just as the plant does not need to understand what it carries within itself—what ultimately makes it comprehensible—neither does the poet. Just as it would be absurd to believe that the plant itself knows the laws by which it grows, so too would it be absurd to believe that Richard Wagner knew anything of what can be understood from him.

[ 8 ] Richard Wagner was not merely a poet and musician; he was the bearer of a new culture. He once said: “Every truly symphonic instrumental piece is capable of revealing to us the laws of nature and their interrelationships—sometimes, through the mysteries that art unveils to us, the mind can be captivated and driven into a corner.” — “Musical instruments are the organs of nature itself.” — “The artist depicts not merely the real, but the true.”

[ 9 ] At various times in his life, Richard Wagner earnestly sought a solution to the world's greatest problems. He wrote on his house:

Let this house be called Wahnfried,
For here my reverie found peace.

[ 10 ] He was truly a seeker. He sought throughout his entire life. In the mid-1840s, we find in Richard Wagner a purely Christian spirit—the Christian worldview that has been passed down through the centuries. Then, sometime in the 1840s—a phase that lasted into the 1850s—he was seized by a kind of atheism or materialism. At that time, strong, bold minds had come to recognize that the same laws govern the world above as they do in inorganic nature. This was a worldview developed by the boldest minds of the time. Richard Wagner, too, was more or less taken by it. But for him, material reality nevertheless took on an ethical or moral character. The true materialist believed that the sensory world was the be-all and end-all. For Wagner, however, this belief was linked to a profound morality—a grand vision of the meaning of life. He said: “A person can become selfless and loving only when he tells himself that this existence will come to an end—when he is capable of dissolving into the universe, of understanding everything for the world and nothing for himself.” —In this way, he also sought to ethically and morally transfigure materialism. But he soon arrived at a different perspective through Schopenhauer. Schopenhauer gave him something that was deeply satisfying to him as an artist and as a musician.

[ 11 ] Schopenhauer stated that all other arts are much more alien to the essence of the world than music. He assigns music a very special place among the arts in general. Schopenhauer essentially based his worldview on this one leitmotif:

Life is a difficult thing, and I try to make it bearable by reflecting on it.

[ 12 ] Underlying everything is an unconscious, blind will. It forms the stone, and then from the stone the plant, and so on to ever higher forms, because it is always unsatisfied. In human life itself, there are great differences. The “savage,” living in a dull state of consciousness, feels the unsatisfied nature of the will far less than the more highly developed human being, who can perceive the pain of existence much more clearly. Then Schopenhauer says: There is a second thing that humans know besides the will, and that is the idea. It is as if the waves of the sea were rippling, and reflected in them are the forms of the will, of the dark impulse. In human beings, the will rises to the illusory form of a mirage. In it, human beings create an image of what lies outside themselves. Representation is an illusion. Human beings suffer not only from the unsatisfied will, but also from the fact that they know, time and again, how to arouse the idea from the will. There is, however, a means by which a person can attain a kind of liberation from the blind impulse of the will. One such means is art. Through art, a person is able to transcend what would otherwise result from the will as dissatisfaction. When a person creates a work of art, they create from imagination. While other imaginings are merely images, they regard art as something else. The true artist does not create a representation of nature. When he creates works such as, for example, a Zeus, he has combined many impressions, retained all the virtues in his memory, and omitted all the flaws. From many people, he has formed an archetype that is not realized anywhere in nature, but is nevertheless distributed among many individual personalities.

[ 13 ] According to Schopenhauer, a kind of essence is revealed to us in works of art. By delving, as it were, into the depths of creative nature, human beings create something that is reality. While other arts must pass through the realm of the imagination—that is, present images of the will—for Schopenhauer, sound is an expression of the will itself. He perceives the will of nature and reproduces it in sound.

[ 14 ] Goethe sees purpose everywhere in nature. This is not just a figure of speech; rather, Goethe was well aware that nature achieves its purpose only partially in every being. There is much more within every being than it expresses. The artist extracts from nature that which does not come to light within it; he creates something that transcends nature. When a human being, imitating nature, creates a higher form, he goes even beyond nature. Goethe regards human beings as the highest link in the chain of development of all beings.

When the healthy nature of human beings functions as a whole, when they feel at home in the world as part of a great, beautiful, dignified, and valuable whole, when this harmonious contentment grants them pure, free delight—then the universe, if it could perceive itself, would rejoice at having reached its goal and admire the pinnacle of its own being and becoming. (On Winkelmann)

[ 15 ] That which is elevated from nature to a work of art by human beings is such that, in the work of art, the divine foundation of nature shines forth toward humanity. The artist creates, and the one who enjoys the artistic does so in the Platonic Ideas. Artists seek the common archetype of things. They create something higher than imagination, yet they live and weave within the realm of imagination. For Schopenhauer, music is something that resounds from the very essence of the world. The person who is artistically active in sound is, as it were, as if he were pressing his ear to the heart of nature; he perceives the will of nature and renders it in sounds. Thus, says Schopenhauer, the human being stands in an intimate relationship with things-in-themselves, penetrating into the innermost essence of things. Out of a kind of instinctive insight, he had assigned music the role of directly representing the essence of the cosmos. He had a kind of instinctive intuition of the true state of affairs.

[ 16 ] Schopenhauer’s philosophy was inspiring to Richard Wagner. From that point on, he sought to establish his place in the world as a musician and poet. Music became for him a direct expression of the essence of the world.

[ 17 ] Richard Wagner looked back to ancient Greece and said: “In ancient Greek culture, there was also an art form. This art was not merely music, nor merely poetry. In this primordial art of Greece, there was a synergy of dance, poetry, and music.” —- For Wagner, the movements of dance—those gestures of ancient dance—became the expression of what can take place within the human soul. He imagined the intimate relationships between the lover and the beloved—the noblest of relationships—expressed through gesture and movement. For Wagner, dance was originally a sensual reflection of the soul’s deepest experiences of love. What the poet expressed was merely another way of conveying what takes place in the soul. The word is the other means of expression that must be added to dance. The third means of expression is music. Richard Wagner looked toward a primal art that was neither music nor poetry nor dance in and of itself. He told himself that, in the beginning, all of humanity was more selfless; it was much more imbued with a sense of merging into one another. Just as a finger, if it had consciousness, would have to feel itself as a limb of an organism, so the Greek citizen was a limb of the entire state. Over the centuries, egoism gradually emerged—that necessary egoism which brought about independence. His idea was that the future would necessarily bring about a reversal from egoism to love.

[ 18 ] All people and all human creations have also made their way through selfishness. The arts used to be united and only later became separated. They must first come together again to form a whole.

[ 19 ] Wagner looked up to Shakespeare as a role model as a poet and to Beethoven as a musician. These were artists of whom he said: “If one wants to achieve something as an artist, one must learn from them how to create works that are both musical and poetic.” He saw in earlier compositions that the libretto came between the emotion and the music; he wanted to change that. It was clear to him that music is connected to human beings. As an artist, he drew inspiration from Shakespeare on the one hand and from Beethoven on the other.

[ 20 ] To understand this, we must know what the mystical element in human beings is. A mystic is someone who is able to see the spiritual in the whole world, in every movement. It is possible for a person to view the entire cosmos in the same way that one views, for example, a single human being. Everything about a human being becomes an expression of an inner soul life. Through the veil of physiognomy, one can see into every human being. When the mystic looks at the plant world or the mineral world, he comes to recognize in every plant and every stone the expression of the collective spirit of nature—a spirit present in all beings. Some plants appear to him as the laughing expression of the Earth Spirit’s joy, others as the tears that express the Earth Spirit’s sorrow. He truly sees in what the Earth brings forth something moral, the expression of a spiritual reality. Anyone who is able to immerse themselves in the whole world in the right way senses that what is expressed in the world stands before human beings as uniformly as mathematics does. The Earth Spirit in *Faust* was also a reality for Goethe. When we read his words: “/p”

Sublime Spirit, you gave me, gave me everything,
That I asked for. You did not in vain
Turn your face toward me in the fire.
You gave me the magnificent natural world as my kingdom,
The power to feel it, to enjoy it. You do not
do you merely allow me to be a cold, marveling visitor,
but grant me to gaze into its deep bosom,
as into the bosom of a friend.
You lead the procession of the living
past me and teach me to recognize my brothers
in the quiet thicket, in the air, and in the water.
And when the storm roars and creaks in the forest,
The giant spruce, toppling, strikes neighboring branches
And crushes neighboring trunks as it crashes down,
And the hill thunders with a dull, hollow roar at their fall,
Then you lead me to the safe cave, show
Me to myself, and within my own breast
Secret, profound wonders unfold.

[ 21 ] When we read these words by Goethe, we see how it becomes clear to him that human beings recognize the divine-spiritual in nature and feel it blossoming within their own hearts.

[ 22 ] True mysticism leads one to genuine insight. When a person practices meditation and concentration, the time comes when they gain insight into the world of light and color of the astral plane. This world appears as if colors were floating freely in space and serving as expressions of spiritual beings. There, everything is translucent, yet we have light and colors that are the expressions of spiritual beings. The third world is humanity’s true spiritual home. This is a world of spiritual sound, into which one becomes attuned so that everything around us appears as a world of flowing sounds.

[ 23 ] We can distinguish three states of consciousness in modern human beings: first, everyday consciousness, or waking consciousness; second, unconscious life during sleep; and third, in between, dream consciousness.

[ 24 ] For the mystic, the awakened one, the soul is not merely present during the night—it is also self-aware. It can then perceive a world of flowing sounds during the night. Once he has reached this stage, he must navigate the transition from the consciousness of sleep to the consciousness of wakefulness in such a way that he can perceive the spiritual world even while awake. When the practical mystic walks through streets and alleys, he sees not only the physical but also the spiritual everywhere. It is the Devachan world in which a person lives and weaves throughout the entire state of sleep. There the soul lives in its true home, in a world of sound, in the world of spherical harmony—the world that resounds and sings through the soul itself. For the mystically awakened, a sound becomes audible from the soul of all beings. Theosophy sees in what the Pythagorean worldview calls “sphere harmony” not a dream but reality. When one hears music in the physical world of sounds, one hears only a shadow image of the spiritual world. The person who appreciates beauty feels that music is akin to the soul’s true home.

[ 25 ] Richard Wagner said: If we wish to express the human soul, we can draw upon three means of expressing one’s inner self: through movement, through words, and through music. Music is connected to the innermost core of the soul. Until now, music has only expressed the inner self of human beings—that which is hidden within them. But the greatest thing is that this is transformed into action.

[ 26 ] The symphony depicts what a person can experience inwardly. But where what the soul experiences gives way to action, where feeling gives way to actions, music has not yet served as an adequate expression of the soul. Only once has a symphony—Beethoven’s Ninth—managed to express what lives within. Here, the composer yields to the force that the inner self expresses in words. Here, the inner self urges itself to become, at least, words as an expression of the inner self bubbling forth.

[ 27 ] Shakespeare depicts what a person can do when the soul itself has already come to terms with its inner world. Verbal drama has portrayed the external action, but has concealed what lives within the soul. Music has been the medium for expressing what remains of a person within the soul. Richard Wagner said: Music must not merely set poetry to music; rather, it must stand in direct relation to the human being himself. — What spills over into the plot, he expresses in words; what lives in the soul as the basis for the plot, music expresses.

[ 28 ] The mystic knows that human beings do not merely live here on Earth as individual personalities, but that even the individual human being cannot exist without other human beings. The bond that unites them is of a spiritual nature. Anyone who looks into the spiritual worlds can see how individual nations are members of a single natural organism. Just as a finger cut off from the hand withers away, so too is the individual human being, detached from the earthly organism, something that withers away like the finger when it is separated from the organism.

[ 29 ] The idea that one person can redeem another makes no sense unless one takes the mystical ideal into account; for example, we find an understanding of this connection in Hartmann von der Aue’s *Armen Heinrich*. Just as one could fill the emptiness in a glass by pouring something into it from another vessel, just as one can allow heat to flow over, so there is something in humanity that can be transferred from one person to another. All ideas of redemption are rooted in deep mysticism. Richard Wagner sensed the spiritual in human beings—the ascent beyond humanity to the Übermensch. Through the superhuman figure, he demonstrates how there is an interconnectedness within the entire human organism. Thus, he addresses issues of redemption, for example, in *The Flying Dutchman*, where the Dutchman is redeemed by a self-sacrificing female being. — Tannhäuser is redeemed by Elisabeth.

[ 30 ] In this way, he weaves together one human destiny with another. He demonstrates this most magnificently in *The Ring of the Nibelung* and *Parsifal*. In *The Ring of the Nibelung*, one can see how he portrays the entire workings of the world, how he points to an ancient human past, a humanity that has always existed. In the past, an ancient clairvoyance lay at the foundation of all human development. Myths and legends arose from this ancient clairvoyance. There existed that clairvoyant consciousness which humanity will regain on a higher level. From this clairvoyant, somnambulistic consciousness, he leads humanity to ordinary consciousness and then back to a state of consciousness where human beings retain their clairvoyant consciousness alongside ordinary consciousness. The entire transition from an originally less self-contained personality—one that was still clairvoyant—to sensory perception signifies the conquest of gold: the conquest of sensory perception and human power. Love turns into selfishness; later, it turns back into love. One who wishes to bring the “I” to the fore must renounce love, and in exchange he acquires the gold. Richard Wagner depicted in *The Ring of the Nibelung* how the “I”—the selfish “I”—develops; how it emerges from the original state of clairvoyance into a human being who is becoming devoid of love. As Alberich rises up, one senses the emergence of the “I.” Richard Wagner sought to portray the love-deprived “I” in the pedal point in E-flat major in *The Rhine Gold*, and in the following chord we hear it expressing itself wonderfully.

[ 31 ] We see how the gods emerge from a primal consciousness, how it rises up like a warning voice. It stands before Wotan in Erda. It stands there representing humanity. Wotan calls out to it; he says:

You know,
What the depths hold,
What mountains and valleys,
Air and water are interwoven with. Where beings are
Your breath blows:
Where minds ponder
Your mind dwells:
Everything, they say,
Is known to you.

[ 32 ] Erda then says:

My sleep is dreaming,
My dreaming is contemplation,
My contemplation is the reign of knowledge!

[ 33 ] Brünhilde brings redemption through a sacrifice. The most magnificent aspect of *Parsifal* is the idea of sacrifice and the idea of redemption as portrayed in the work. It was on Good Friday, 1857, at the Villa Wesendonck on Lake Zurich, when Wagner looked out upon the sprouting, budding, and blossoming nature. And in that moment, the connection between the sprouting nature and the death of Christ on the cross became clear to him. This connection is the mystery of the Holy Grail. From that moment on, the thought that he must send the mystery of the Holy Grail out into the world in musical form never left Richard Wagner’s mind.

[ 34 ] To understand these thoughts of Richard Wagner, we must go back several hundred years in the development of humanity. At that time, there were also places of initiation in Europe. Through the wisdom imparted to people in the mysteries, they were led to a conscious relationship with the gods. Such a person is called an initiate. Only the forms of such teachings change over time. In the European mysteries of the Middle Ages, the secret that Richard Wagner sensed—namely, how nature sprouting in spring is connected to the mystery of the cross—was brought to its highest expression. This was taught in a special way in the medieval schools of initiation known as the Rosicrucian schools. We can best illustrate this in the form of a conversation. Let us imagine the teacher saying something like the following to the student: Look at the plant, how its roots are embedded in the earth and how it holds its leaves and blossoms toward the sun. In divine innocence and chastity, it holds its reproductive organs toward the sun. And now look at the human being. The human being is the plant in reverse. He turns his head toward the sun—which corresponds to the plant’s root—and turns the organs that the plant chastely holds toward the sun toward the earth. - The feeling of divine chastity, as expressed in the plant, had to pass through the soul of the student. He was shown a future for humanity in which human beings, too, will once again be free of desire and chaste. Then a spiritual chalice will open from above and look down upon humanity. And just as the sunbeam now descends toward the plant, so too will the purified power of humankind unite with the divine chalice. — This inverted calyx, as it was presented to the student as a fact in the Mysteries, is the real ideal of the Holy Grail. The sunbeam is the sacred lance of love.