The Rudolf Steiner Archive

9. Introduction to Goethe's Fairy Tale of the Green Snake and the Beautiful Lily

[ 1 ] Goethe is one of those figures in world history who have evoked a very peculiar response in observers. When one approaches a poem by Goethe or any other of his works—I emphasize that this also applies to Goethe’s so-called scholarly writings—at any stage of life, one will find beauty and depth, wisdom and art in abundance throughout his entire body of work. One will find satisfaction in reading or in any other form of engagement with his work. If one then returns to the same work by Goethe perhaps years later, having matured in the meantime and come to know the world and its people, one discovers that, when one first encountered Goethe’s work, one overlooked a great deal in it—that one was completely unable to recognize the abundance of wisdom, beauty, depth, and truth contained in Goethe’s works. This is how it is with all the great and significant figures in world history. And one comes to understand the true significance of the truly leading minds precisely because, time and again, whenever one approaches them—depending on one’s own degree of spiritual maturity—one discovers something new in them. And then there is the further fact that these discoveries, so to speak, never come to an end in the course of a human life. With Goethe, it is such that if one studies his truly fundamental works every five years, every five years—provided we continue to develop ourselves and do not remain stagnant at the level we once reached—we will discover something new time and again. We glimpse into a depth that is almost unfathomable when we begin to understand Goethe’s work.

[ 2 ] This is how one feels about Goethe’s Faust. Anyone who has seriously engaged with Goethe’s Faust will be able to say—in a sense quite different from what is often claimed—that Goethe’s Faust truly contains a kind of modern Gospel. If this statement is valid—that Goethe’s Faust contains a kind of modern Gospel—then the following statement is equally valid: that the short poem, which is unfortunately known to only a very few—the so-called fairy tale of the green serpent and the beautiful lily—contains nothing less than Goethe’s Apocalypse, Goethe’s secret revelation.

[ 3 ] This fairy tale of the green snake and the beautiful lily embodies Goethe’s worldview and philosophy of life at its very core. Those who read this fairy tale for the first time will generally not be able to make much of it. But those who try to uncover its meaning will first realize that Goethe intended to convey something special through this tale. You can find this fairy tale of the green snake and the beautiful lily in any major edition of Goethe’s works. I emphasize this because I have been asked time and again: Where exactly is the “fairy tale”? If you look in Conversations of German Emigrants, you will find it at the end. This fairy tale is, so to speak, structured as a completely independent work of poetry.

[ 4 ] Now, before Miss Holger reads the “fairy tale,” let me say just 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 a time when he had cast that profound gaze upon nature that is expressed in his scientific writings. It was the period in which he had completed the first part of “Faust,” which appeared as a fragment in 1790. It was during this time that the idea took root in his mind to develop Faust into a grand, comprehensive portrait of humanity; and it is as such a portrait of the world and humanity—in the sense of a complete worldview—that Goethe’s work, found sealed in his estate after his death—the second part of Faust—presents itself to us. Eckermann spoke repeatedly of this second part of Faust. I would like to highlight just one characteristic statement. Goethe says: “Whoever enjoys my second part of Faust as a series of dramatic images may derive aesthetic pleasure from it. But there will also be those, from time to time, who will intuitively recognize what I have concealed within these images.” And Goethe again hints in his conversations with Eckermann that in the second part of Faust there is a hidden—as we would express it in theosophical language—esoteric meaning. A meaning hidden behind the images, which is then expressed in the way Goethe did in the second part of Faust. When one finds the ordinary language of the intellect—verbal language—too poor, too dry, too barren, too sober, too mundane to express the rich abundance of the spirit that one has to present when one wishes to speak about the life of the world according to one’s own true, deep convictions. The esotericists, the priests of wisdom of all ages, have spoken in a language of images. The deeper we delve into the ancient world of legends, the more we recognize that this world of legends contains symbolic veils over 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.

[ 5 ] It was in the year 1794, he recounted, that he had recently undertaken to solve for himself that problem of humanity which had preoccupied the minds of the time: the problem or question of human destiny, or the problem of freedom. After hearts had been stirred by great struggles for freedom in Germany and France, the problem of freedom had also become the concern of the greatest minds. Schiller took part in this and asked himself: Is a person free who is bound by eternal necessity? Should his actions be understood as occurring out of inner necessity, just as external natural phenomena occur out of external necessity? Just as with a falling stone, or do they spring from within the person himself, making him the author of his own 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 to this circle. The problem of freedom is a matter of the heart. Schiller addressed freedom in a significant work, his Letters on the Aesthetic Education of Man. He defended the view that human beings are tripartite beings: on the one hand, they are subject to nature—and this pertains to their physical nature. Then, at the highest pinnacle of their being, we find human beings as rational beings, as spiritual beings. There, according to Schiller’s extraordinarily insightful explanations, he is governed by the laws of eternal life, eternal truth, and goodness. These laws permeate human life. Human beings cannot escape them because they are fully aware that their destiny can only be fulfilled in the realm of truth and goodness. Body and spirit are the two poles. And Schiller says: Even the spirit is subject to necessity—to logical and duty-bound necessity. In this realm, one cannot speak of freedom, for human beings cannot be free. Nor can the spirit be free, for it would have to voluntarily submit to the laws of truth and goodness. Here we have, on the one hand, the necessity of nature, and on the other, the necessity of the spirit. For Schiller, the human soul interposes itself between nature and the mind. The soul, which is situated in the middle, constitutes the very essence of a person’s individuality as the connecting link between body and mind. It is that which enables a person to experience pleasure and suffering—that which rises above the necessity of nature but has not yet ascended to the iron necessity of reason. On the other hand, there is the duty of eternal truth and eternal goodness, which exerts a compelling force upon human beings. But pleasure and suffering assimilate our laws of goodness and truth in such a way that they develop a spiritual sympathy for them, so that they extend such sympathy toward the spirit. As Schiller says: The necessity of nature is raised up to the spirit, and [truth] and goodness are brought down and perceived as beauty. And in this way, they are integrated. Kant, in the spirit of Schiller, emphasized 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 so willingly, and so it gnaws at me that I am not virtuous

[ 6 ] — because he does not make service a matter of compelling natural necessity. A person should not be so deeply mired in his passions that they drag him down. He should imbue them with spirit and lift them up. On the other hand, he should allow himself to be permeated by the laws of the Good and the True, so that he can surrender to his inclinations, and his inclinations will give him a soul of such a nature that it embodies eternal, necessary truth and goodness. This is Schiller’s problem of natural necessity. At its center lies freedom; that is Schiller’s solution.

[ 7 ] Goethe, however, says that all problems within human beings can only be solved if they are viewed within the broader context of the world. He tells himself: I, too, want to solve the problem, but in a different sense. I need a rich, comprehensive imaginative life to solve this problem. A human being is a small world, and if I view him in the context of the cosmos, then I can solve this problem.

[ 8 ] Goethe therefore harnesses the entire visual world that had become his own through his studies up to that point to the task of resolving this question. At the same time, he draws upon all the experiences he gained as a person who truly participated in the work of Freemasonry in spirit. It was through Freemasonry that the ideas he wished to express came to him. Therefore, one must draw upon all of this in order to somehow unravel this Goethean fairy tale—so rich in content—about the green serpent and the beautiful lily. Attempts were already made to unravel it during Goethe’s lifetime. And Goethe himself said: “I do not wish to speak about the ‘fairy tale’ until there are a hundred interpretations by others.” There were not that many at the time, or they had not reached his ears. But since then, many—far too many—interpretations have emerged. People have tried to unravel it from the standpoint of criticism, of rationalists, from a purely Masonic standpoint, and so on. But all of these are merely individual perspectives and are insufficient. They are one-sided perspectives. If time permits, after Miss Holger’s lecture, we will offer at least a few hints and remarks regarding what Goethe intended to convey with this enigmatic fairy tale. So I will simply say that today, given the limited time, I can only offer hints. For those who wish to delve deeper, I draw your attention to the lecture on “Goethe as a Theosophist,” in which an attempt will be made to reveal the depth of his worldview.