The Rudolf Steiner Archive

28. On the Classical Walpurgis Night – Address on Eurythmy II

[ 1 ] Ladies and gentlemen! Before we begin our performance, allow me to extend a warm welcome to our dear friends and the guests present among us, and to express our special delight that these distinguished guests have chosen to join us in watching this performance.

[ 2 ] I will take the liberty of briefly alluding to what underlies this performance. We will be staging the final scene of the second act of the second part of Goethe’s Faust—that is, the conclusion of the so-called “Classical Walpurgis Night.” This is a passage from the great, all-encompassing epic, Faust, through which one perhaps gains the most intense insight—as I am convinced—on the one hand into Goethe’s comprehensive and penetrating worldview and into all the intimacies of his inner being, and, on the other hand, to see how it is possible that the most magnificent achievement is brought about through the most sincere pursuit of knowledge and art, sustained throughout an entire human lifetime. Thus, in this very scene, we have before us something that is, on the one hand, the expression of the most intense pursuit of knowledge, and on the other hand, the expression of the highest artistic mastery. Hardly anywhere else but in Goethe’s work has this been achieved: the ability to ground a poem in impulses of insight without lapsing into the style of didactic poetry. And without merely engaging in formal art, yet—as is the case here—fully doing justice to everything artistic, everything that goes completely beyond the didactic, while still expressing the deepest insight and the deepest human striving.

[ 3 ] It is precisely these aspects of Goethe that draw us—who seek to pursue spiritual science here at this School of Spiritual Science—to him, uniting us with Goethe’s worldview to such an extent that, out of a deep emotional impulse and a sense of intimate kinship, we have recently given this School of Spiritual Science the name “Goetheanum”—to express that what we are pursuing is meant to be a continuation, in the genuine, true sense of the word, of Goetheanism, of Goethe’s worldview. And one can, indeed one may say: It is precisely this scene that Goethe wrote a few years before his death, in his twilight years, following a quest for knowledge and art that lasted six decades—six decades before he wrote down this scene as the expression of his richest aspirations, he had begun his Faust. —An intensely profound quest for knowledge and art, spanning from youth to the very end of his life, accompanied by the deepest artistic and intellectual honesty—this is precisely what defines Goethe’s creative work in this scene, which nevertheless leads us deep into the very core of his being. And this innermost core of his being is such that he always directs his attention toward the truly spiritual world, toward the supersensible world, which complements the sensory world in such a way that human beings, too, with their true, deepest being, belong to this supersensible world.

[ 4 ] And so Goethe was not merely imbued with this belief, but—one might say—deeply scientifically convinced that human beings can only recognize their true nature by ascending from the sensory world into the supersensory, spiritual world. For Goethe proceeded from the premise that he told himself: If a person acquires only the knowledge gained through the senses—that is, through the instrument of the intellect, which is bound to the brain—then that person cannot, in truth, attain self-knowledge through this knowledge. Goethe was among those minds who strove, on the one hand, to transcend a mere external view of nature and, on the other hand, to transcend one-sided, obscurantist mysticism. He sought to avoid both of these aberrations of human nature and, through true self-education, to ascend into the supersensible world. He told himself: If one uses only ordinary reason, ordinary consciousness, one does not arrive at knowledge of the human being, but only at knowledge of a part—an incomplete part—of the human being: the homunculus, not the Homo. This is what accompanied Goethe into his old age—the realization that one needs a different, supersensible kind of knowledge to make the transition from the homunculus, from the unfinished human being—who is an abstraction, an unfinished construct of the intellect—to the true grasping of the whole, internally complete human being.

[ 5 ] This problem now stands before us here on stage: the path of human self-knowledge, the path from the homunculus—the unfinished little human being—to Homo, the perfected human being. Only by gaining a form of knowledge that is free from the body—one that grasps the purely spiritual and soul-like aspects of the human being, freeing itself from the senses and from the physical body—can one, according to Goethe’s conviction, come to know the true human being.

[ 6 ] Goethe seeks to present the path from the homunculus to Homo—through genuine artistic drama and, at the same time, through an honest, most sincere quest for knowledge—as, so to speak, Faust’s development.

[ 7 ] He presents to us the homunculus in the vial, at the side of Thales, the ancient natural philosopher. He accepts this product of medieval chemistry merely as a metaphor. We truly need not think that Goethe had become superstitious and wanted to present an alchemical product! This is merely the image—the image of what Goethe believed the ordinary human mind can attain solely and exclusively. But supersensible knowledge is to add the rest. Thales cannot elucidate this. Thales now accompanies the homunculus into classical Greece—into classical Greece, where Goethe himself had gone to gain insight into that which ordinary knowledge could not provide him. The fact that Thales himself cannot provide the homunculus with any insight into becoming human precisely expresses that Goethe wanted to go beyond one-sided knowledge of nature and natural philosophy.

[ 8 ] And so we see that Goethe calls for a different kind of consciousness for insight—one into which we enter just as we step out of our bodies when we sleep at night, but in which we lose consciousness. This is what Goethe means: When a person is outside their body, as in the state of sleep, but is not unconscious—rather, is conscious—then they move from the homunculus to the homo, and thus attain true self-knowledge.

[ 9 ] This immersion into a sphere of supersensible knowledge is already expressed by the fact that the sirens appear at the very beginning. Goethe himself had expressed this to his friend Eckermann: “He who regards this Faust as an initiate will discover its depths in it; but he who views the sequence of images with a merely naive mind will also get his due—he will simply see a dramatic sequence of images.”

[ 10 ] But Goethe, even though he has the sirens appear—we know them from Greek mythology— he also wanted to express, through the sounds of these sirens, that which leads human beings out of ordinary consciousness and ordinary understanding—which gives them self-knowledge—into those realms where human beings are otherwise only allowed to dream, but where, when they are awake, they attain self-knowledge. And here we see that Goethe—and this is the honest, fundamentally honest aspect of his quest for knowledge and art—told himself: “I cannot bring myself to any kind of imagination.”—Only today’s spiritual science can do that! In Goethe’s time, this was not yet possible, not even for someone as great as Goethe was, but he took refuge in Greek mythology. He knew full well that it is merely a “fable convenue” of scholarship to believe that the mythical images of Egyptian and Greek mythology contain nothing but myth, nothing but poetry, nothing but the product of the imagination. He knew that when one transports oneself to the realm where Greek and Egyptian myths and images of the gods arose, one is in a realm where truth about humanity is both sensed and experienced at the same time.

[ 11 ] And so he brings in the Greek demonic figures, first the Nereids and Tritons—those beings who are the elemental forces of the sea. But they are on their way to something that was more precious to the Greeks than the sea and its demons: They, the Nereids and Tritons, are on their way to Samothrace, where the sacred mysteries of the Cabiri are held. And so we see that Goethe, when he seeks to answer the question: How does what a human being conceives of himself become the truly fulfilled human being in the sense of self-realization, self-comprehension? —there Goethe brings in the highest gods, the sacred Cabiri, who were taught in the mysteries of Samothrace. That was the very mystery of the Greeks; that was the school of the mystery figures from which the Greeks had derived their idea of immortality—the highest principle that illuminated their worldview.

[ 12 ] These peculiar Cabiri—a mystery to modern scholarship—I have attempted to reconstruct them in their primitive simplicity. Primitive images of gods are always extraordinarily simple and extraordinarily distinctive. You will see them as I have attempted to recreate them—those images of gods whom the Greeks revered as the demonic figures associated with the becoming of man, from that fantastical construct—the homunculus—which only the human mind can conceive, all the way to Homo, thus leading to the becoming of man.

[ 13 ] And then we see how Goethe introduces other characters: The homunculus is to ask the old Nereus, the sea demon, with the help of Thales—who himself cannot provide any information—how one can become human. Nereus, elevated to the realm of the demonic, is the representative of the Greek human intellect. But this human intellect leads only to the rejection of the deepest human questions. We will see the sour curmudgeon appear, in his highest form—even endowed with the prophetic gift—the human critical intellect, none of whom can provide any answer as to how one becomes a human being from the little homunculus, to whom the intellect thus turns.

[ 14 ] Then we see how Nereus already points to the appearance of his daughter Galatea. This Galatea, who appears on a chariot of seashells, is accompanied by her sisters, the Dorides; she represents to us the creative power in nature, which is at the same time the creative power in human beings. To connect with her through supersensible experience, through supersensible contemplation—that is what Goethe sought to express.

[ 15 ] For now, reference is made to Proteus, who appears in three forms—the demon of transformation: first as a turtle, then in human form, and finally as a dolphin. Goethe was well aware that comparing the individual forms of nature—the animal and human forms—in their transformations can solve certain mysteries. But at the same time, he was so earnest in his pursuit of truth and knowledge that all of this was not enough for him; even what Proteus could offer through his own metamorphosis—beyond mere transformations—only told him: “This is not how we penetrate the enigma of knowledge.”

[ 16 ] And then he brings forth the Telchines of Rhodes, riding hippocampi and sea dragons, bearing Neptune’s trident—[with the question] whether these ancient divine-human beings, who fashioned the first works of art in human form, might perhaps lead us to the mystery of the Incarnation? That, too, is not enough. The Telchines of Rhodes were the first to depict gods in human form with the highest perfection. Goethe believed, as he gazed upon the Italian works of art, that he had uncovered the essence of Greek art—toward which he sought to gain a perspective—when he said: “There is necessity; there is God.” So he wrote to his friends in Weimar. Goethe believed that a part of the journey from the homunculus to the homo could be accomplished through art. He is an honest seeker of truth. Yet even that does not lead to true human self-knowledge. And so we see how Goethe draws upon everything that transports human beings into a supersensory, spiritual world. He says, as it were: “Yes, there, within, human beings come to know themselves as supersensory, immortal, eternal beings.”

[ 17 ] But this insight—it flees right past you. If one immerses oneself in all that which, as a creative force and creative being, surges like Galatea’s chariot, dividing and uniting humanity, then at the very moment one believes one has grasped something of the mystery of the supersensible human being, one must step back. It is as if one were awakening from a night’s sleep—a night is indeed indicated here, the moon illuminates the entire scene—so one believes, immediately before awakening, to have grasped in a dream—which is more than a dream, which is truth—the supersensible human being: One plunges into the world of the elements, where the eyes see in the ordinary way, where the ears hear, where one feels one’s way in the ordinary way, where fire, water, earth, and air are perceived in an external, material way—and there, once again, what we have grasped of the idea of humanity in the supernatural sense shatters!

[ 18 ] Goethe depicts this with magnificent drama at the end of this scene: how the homunculus, who wishes to become human, shatters against Galatea’s shell-carriage and dissolves into the elements. This is precisely what is truly experienced by those who strive for the highest knowledge of humanity and then wish to bring this knowledge into ordinary life. Knowledge of humanity is not attained in ordinary life; even if one gains it through supersensory experience, it shatters against ordinary experience.

[ 19 ] Goethe portrayed these external experiences—which are so close to the human heart, these supreme experiences of human life—in a poetic way; or rather, they cannot be fully portrayed in a conventional, theatrical manner. We have attempted, with the help of our art of eurythmy—which we cultivate here and which is an art of gesture, consisting of gestures that, unlike other gestures, are not made arbitrarily but have come into being through strict inner laws, just as musical laws themselves have—we have attempted to portray this scene with the help of this art of eurythmy. And so I hope that our esteemed guests, too, will take pleasure in seeing this scene, in which Goethe demonstrates in such a way the greatness of what is possible in poetry and through a profound worldview—a scene in which this is particularly evident.