The Rudolf Steiner Archive

7. Reflections on Spiritual Science in Connection with the “Classical Walpurgis Night”

[ 1 ] Actually, I had intended to follow up today’s performance with some remarks that, in the spirit of an artistic reflection, were to have complemented the scenes from Faust that were to be performed. However, since the performance has been canceled due to several illnesses and the lecture can therefore stand on its own, I will structure things a little differently. I will refer to the scene that is scheduled to be performed here on Sunday at 6:30 p.m., but I will—and I want to make this explicitly clear—not speak about the scene from an artistic standpoint; rather, I will speak about it from a different perspective, more in connection with this scene, by linking the existence of this scene as a work by Goethe to some remarks on Spiritual Science, which in turn relate in a certain way to what has already been said here this fall. Precisely to avoid misunderstandings of this kind, I ask you to bear in mind explicitly that I will not be speaking from an artistic standpoint, but will be linking remarks from Spiritual Science to this scene. Anyone who allows this scene—which will be the subject of my discussion—to pass through their soul has the opportunity to look quite deeply into Goethe’s soul, insofar as this scene, and also the one that follows, which then leads into the Helena phantasmagoria, show quite particularly how Goethe felt and sensed—even if he did not yet have them as articulated ideas—truths of Spiritual Science. A poet whose understanding does not extend into truths of Spiritual Science would certainly not have written these scenes in this way. It would take us too far afield if I were to discuss—even just by way of introduction, which can be done another time—the path by which Goethe arrived at his insights into Spiritual Science. I simply wish to link to the scene that which can make it clear to you how Goethe must have viewed certain aspects of the spiritual world in order to shape the scene as it is. What I explained here a few days ago regarding the development of the human being as a temporal-physical being was certainly not known to Goethe in the form of explicit ideas. One cannot say that Goethe’s own development in any way demonstrates an explicit awareness that it is only in middle age that a human being acquires the capacity for self-knowledge through his or her physical organism. We know from the reflections we have made here in recent weeks that, in a certain sense, it is only around the end of one’s twenties that a human being becomes capable of attaining self-knowledge through the forces developed from within one’s own physical organism. If one wishes to educate oneself properly about these matters, one must recognize that the human being is truly a complex being. One can only understand him if one first realizes to what extent he is—if I may use the term, which is today widely contested by science—a creature, and that this creature points back to his creators, to his spiritual creators.

[ 2 ] Now one can—I would say, in a sense, spiritually-chemically, if I may use that pedantic term — what it is that makes a human being what he is purely by virtue of his being in a certain dependence on his very own spiritual creators, on those beings within the hierarchies of the world order whose special mission in the universe culminates in the creation of the human being, on those beings with whom the human being, as a human being, must therefore feel a very special kinship. If one isolates the human being in this way, one can schematically represent the matter as follows. Let us imagine that, at some point in their development, the human being would be represented by this circle here. If one then traces the human being—whom I wish to represent by this circle—backward in their emergence from their spiritual creators, this would represent the current that I wish to indicate here—in orange. If one were to go back and examine how the human being develops through the Lunar, Solar, and Saturnian epochs and later through the Earth epoch, one would discover the characteristics of the individual beings of the higher hierarchies, as you know them from my Outline of Esoteric Science. One would discover the interplay and interrelationships of these hierarchies, and, upon comprehending the connection between the human being and the hierarchies, one would arrive at an understanding of how the human being is, so to speak, the goal of divine creation—in the manner I depicted this in the second Mystery Drama, in a conversation that Capesius has with the Hierophant right in the first scene. There I also pointed out the perilous aspect of such a realization for the immature human being.

[ 3 ] But precisely when one asks: What would a human being become in the course of his physical life development between birth and death, if he were subject only to the influence of these creators of his—what would he then become? He would then become that kind of being in the physical world who, in a sense, only matures for self-knowledge at the end of his twenties. For these creative beings have set themselves the task of shaping human beings in such a way that, within the course of their earthly development, they attain what they attain on the basis of their physical constitution—that constitution which is itself derived from the earthly realm and is therefore related to earthly substances and to the interplay of earthly forces. I would like to say: Based on their intentions, these divine beings give human beings the opportunity to prepare themselves in a healthy and all-encompassing way—through their physical constitution—up until the end of their twenties, for self-knowledge and for knowledge of the world, which arises from self-knowledge. - And then they would give him the opportunity, in the second half of his life, to pursue this self-knowledge on a completely different scale than human beings can now, as earthly beings, in their present state. If human beings were to truly awaken—as was the intention of the spirits of the hierarchies associated with them—they would indeed awaken late, toward the end of their twenties, to self-knowledge and the associated knowledge of the world; yet they would attain this self-knowledge and associated knowledge of the world in a most radiant way. He would truly be able to gain the deepest inner insight into the question: “What am I as a human being?”—something he cannot do at present under ordinary circumstances. He would also have this self-knowledge as a direct perception, rather than having to acquire it through abstract concepts. Neither of these is present. In the first half of life, that diminished state of consciousness is not present—a state which, I would say, is not one of sleep but of a twilight state, in which the human being would be permeated by a higher intelligence—not his own—and would develop his physical constitution in an entirely different way, only to then awaken to self-knowledge. Not only is this twilight state absent, but a certain—albeit not quite the glorious—self-knowledge intended by humanity’s creators emerges relatively early in a person’s life; nor does that self-knowledge, which could emerge according to the intentions of these creators, appear again after middle age. And when we ask: What is actually to blame for the fact that this is not the case? — then we come to the other currents that influence human beings. We then come to that current which does not actually lie within his being, but which has, so to speak, temporarily united with him; we come to the Luciferic current—yellow—to that current which made it possible for him to already possess, in the first half of his life, a certain degree of self-knowledge, even if not the resplendent kind described.

[ 4 ] And another current—blue—joins it, as you know, a little later. It is the Ahrimanic current, the current that prevents human beings—as they are now as earthly human beings—from attaining, in the second half of life, the glorious self-knowledge intended for them by their creators. Human consciousness is, so to speak, predisposed—according to the intentions of its creators—for a much brighter state than the one into which it enters in the second half of life. It is dimmed by the Ahrimanic current. Of course, we must not believe that the Luciferic current is present only in the first half of life and the Ahrimanic current only in the second half; they persist throughout the entire life. But I would say that during the specified periods of human life, these currents are at work in the ways I have indicated. At other times, they are concerned with something else. It is very important not to draw false conclusions from what is said about these matters. So no one should ever say, for example, that it has been stated here that a person is Luciferic in the first half of life and Ahrimanic in the second half; that would be completely wrong. Such misunderstandings have often arisen, and it is very important not to succumb to them. That is why I emphasize again and again that in Spiritual Science, the aim is to speak precisely. And in Spiritual Science, a great deal of harm is done when what has been said precisely is then carried out into the world in an arbitrarily altered form—a carelessly altered form.

[ 5 ] Thus, human beings are situated within what one might call a threefold current: only one of these currents is the one to which they truly belong. The other two currents are not originally part of human evolution, but rather, if we may put it that way, they join with it over time. We can even specify the time period, and you will find it recorded in my The Secret Science: the Luciferic current in the so-called Lemurian period, the Ahrimanic current in the so-called Atlantean period.

[ 6 ] Now, one cannot say that Goethe knew anything specific about that peculiar phase of human development that begins for a person in midlife. But he sensed—and sensed very clearly—that, due to impulses inherent in the order of the world, a person is, in the second half of life, fundamentally a different being than in the first half. And if one looks at Goethe’s entire longing—to gain something very special for his own life from Southern culture, from Italian culture—with a gaze into the life of the soul that can see deeper than today’s superficiality often allows, and if one then traces the influence he recorded within himself—through this gain from his Italian journey—on his understanding and his artistry, then one also gains a sense of how Goethe sought to make the transition into the second half of his life fruitful for himself through a profound, intense influence—one he believed he could not find if he remained in his old circumstances. Goethe was thus aware that something occurs in the human soul in one’s forties that must shed light on the nature of the human being in a completely different way than such insight can be gained in the first half of life through one’s own human powers. And this intuitive—yet very clear—insight found its way into the creation of the second part of Goethe’s Faust. For Goethe, it was always a particularly difficult challenge to approach the question: How does one attain self-knowledge? — The struggle for self-knowledge can be observed in the most interesting and most significant way when one traces Goethe’s development in the proper light. And little by little—not when he was writing the youthful sections of Faust, but little by little—the creation of his Faust character and the entire Faust epic took on such a character that the struggle for human self-knowledge was to find particular expression in Faust. In connection with this, Goethe conceived the figure of the homunculus. As I said, I am not speaking today from an artistic standpoint, but rather I am making remarks from the perspective of Spiritual Science regarding Goethe’s Faust. Thus, Goethe conceived the figure of the homunculus in connection with the endeavor to portray in Faust the human being struggling for self-knowledge. What did the figure of the homunculus become under the influence of this contemplation of Faust’s self-knowledge? It became that which represents human self-knowledge through the human being. What can one know about human beings when one brings together the knowledge one has about matter and the forces of the Earth? How can one conceive that the very elements of earthly existence that otherwise surround us in the realms of nature come together to form the human being? How can one imagine this? This became a burning question for Goethe.

[ 7 ] Just consider this: when Schiller formed his friendship with Goethe, he wrote a significant letter to Goethe. I have quoted this letter many times because it is characteristic both of Goethe’s and Schiller’s friendship and of Goethe’s entire spiritual character. In it, Schiller writes: “For a long time, though from a considerable distance, I have observed the nature and course of your intellectual life, viewing it with ever-increasing admiration, and I have seen that you strive, as it were, to synthesize all that nature otherwise offers and, from the totality of all natural processes, to ultimately reconstruct humanity in the mind.” “A heroic undertaking,” writes Schiller, “before which every other intellect would be bound to fail. Had you been born a Greek—or even merely an Italian,” Schiller suggests, “the imaginative power to conceive of the human being as a composite of nature’s individual elements would have resided within you from your earliest youth.” But since you were born into this Nordic nature, you were compelled to give birth to a Greece within your soul and, through imagination, to replace that which was not inherent in your nature.

[ 8 ] Schiller, then, attributes to Goethe this pursuit of knowledge of humanity through the synthesis of all the details that can be gleaned from an understanding of the realms of nature. And indeed, for Goethe, such an understanding of humanity stood as the ideal of knowledge. What can one know about human beings? Yet at certain moments, the thought occurred to him that, fundamentally, earthly knowledge yields very little in the way of understanding human nature; that no one becomes truly human through this understanding; that one becomes only a little human, a homunculus. And often the burning, tormenting thought arose in Goethe’s mind: Now we are in the world as human beings, feeling, thinking, and willing as human beings, but we actually know only something—not about the Homo, but about the homunculus. The ideas we form about human beings are, in relation to what a human being truly is, like a tiny little human figure in a glass vial.

[ 9 ] And for Goethe, this burning, agonizing question was joined by another: How can that which, in our understanding, so utterly fails to correspond to natural, cosmic existence, be awakened and brought to life, so that—at least in our understanding—it may come to resemble, even approximately, what the human being actually is—and of which he knows so little that he is not really aware of a Homo, but only of a homunculus? That is why he now has Wagner create this little human being, this homunculus. And he then undertakes, in the further development of his poetry, to reveal what human beings can experience, so that his understanding of human nature may expand, and so that the homunculus may at least come to resemble a homo.

[ 10 ] Now it was a Goethean—I mean to say, a belief—that the mental images one can only gain in the—that is, in Goethe’s—present, the mental images one can derive from the Nordic world, are not actually flexible and adaptable enough to expand our homunculus-like knowledge of human beings. It was Goethe’s belief that one is better off if one tries to clothe that which is, after all, possible for human beings to acquire in their inner life—namely, knowledge about humanity—in mental images such as those of an era still closer to nature, such as the Greek era. It was Goethe’s unwavering belief that one gains a significant, profound, and refreshing impression—and that one’s own mental images gain in truth value—when one immerses oneself in the nature and form of Greek intellectual life. This sentiment underlies his decision to lead Faust toward the Greek world, his desire to take Faust to Greece so that he might live there as a human being and acquire culture. If Goethe—and I’ll put this rather radically—had been asked point-blank: “What do you actually think of what the people around you have thought and felt—or think and feel—about the Greeks?”—he would probably have replied: “Oh, I consider all that to be utter nonsense.” People talk about Greek life, but they have no mental image whatsoever of what that Greek life was really like. What our pedants—as Goethe would have put it—write, think, and publish about the Greek Helen: philistine nonsense! For they do not really get to know this Helen, nor any other Greek man or woman, as the Greeks actually were.—But that was precisely Goethe’s aspiration: to truly draw closer to Greece in his soul. That is why his Faust, in the poem, was also meant to draw closer to Greece, to live as a human being among the Greek people. Helena merely provided the starting point for this—precisely as a Greek woman, as the most beautiful Greek woman, as an outstanding Greek woman around whom so much strife and conflict arose, and so on. The elevation, expansion, and deepening of human understanding and perspective—that is what is meant to develop in Faust.

[ 11 ] Now we must consider that Goethe, in posing such a question to himself with more or less clear intuition—but in this intuitive recognition it became a burning, tormenting issue for him—was aware that the abstract, philosophical, and scientific path to knowledge, which some consider the only correct one, is merely one current of knowledge, and he sensed that there are many such currents. And anyone who believes that Goethe was a rationalistic philistine—as, in essence, all representatives of modern science must be—otherwise science in the modern sense would not be true science, for in the modern sense it is itself pedantic, philistine, and rationalistic—anyone who believes that Goethe was such a pedantic, rationalistic philistine understands nothing of Goethe. Indeed, anyone who believes that Goethe ever for a single moment assumed that one could somehow gain insight into human nature in its fullness and totality through ordinary scientific reasoning understands nothing of Goethe. Goethe knew full well that the human soul cannot find the truth merely through thought or even through activities that take place on the physical plane, but that the human soul must find its way into reality and truth through various paths. Goethe was well acquainted with that approach to truth which takes place, so to speak, one layer deeper than the ordinary waking life of consciousness. This waking life of consciousness, in which our rational mental images flit about—and which is so highly prized by all pedants—is, in essence, quite far removed from all that weaves and flows in the world as the foundation of existence. In a certain sense, a person already comes closer to what weaves and flows beneath the surface of this existence when—and this must not be misunderstood—he feels and observes meaningful dreams rising from his subconscious, however chaotic or sporadic they may be. I elaborated on this several times last year: the content of dreams matters little, but what matters is the inner drama of dreams, the connection between “dream life” and deeper human reality. A philosopher, Johannes Volkelt, dared only tentatively to touch upon this idea in the 1870s in a small booklet titled Die Traumphantasie—that in his dreams, man draws closer to the mystery of the world. Oh, if he hadn’t later corrected this terrible professorial error through thoroughly pedantic epistemological works, he certainly would not have become Professor Johannes Volkelt, who was permitted to teach philosophy in Basel, Würzburg, Jena, and Leipzig! For it is a great sin against modern science to point out that human beings are immersed in a real, essential flow of the universe when they are in the realm of sleep, and that things then emerge from this experience—admittedly only in a pictorial, chaotically, so that one must not accept them in their immediate form—yet they nevertheless reveal that, in the fabric of sleep, a person is in a sphere where they are closer to the full fabric and essence from which the visible and the sensually visible also emerge than they are from the moment of waking until falling asleep.

[ 12 ] When one immerses oneself in this realm—which modern man comes to know only through his dreams, which, even if they are bad, are nonetheless interpreters—when a person immerses themselves in this world, of which dreams are the interpreters—then they stand within the entire world order in a different way than they do when they are in ordinary waking consciousness. Of course, one cannot discern from the mere life of dreams alone what the difference is between life in waking consciousness and the life one experiences when one is down there in the realm from which dreams weave themselves upward and come into being. But Spiritual Science can lead us down into this realm. In this realm, even human language ceases to have its proper meaning. That is why communication is so difficult. Down there in that realm, the words we have formed here for the sensory world no longer refer correctly to what is happening there. One cannot truly express, through words as they are used today by waking consciousness, what is taking place down there. Just take the ordinary elements, as they used to be called; today they are referred to as states of matter and are designated somewhat differently, but we can understand one another if we use the old terms. People used to say: earth, water, air, fire, or heat. We know these things from “Esoteric Science.” We can call that which is solid—that is, has a solid state of matter—the earth-like substance; that which has a liquid state of matter, water; that which has a state of matter such that, when not confined, it expands greatly, air; and that which permeates these three substances, heat or fire. Yes, we can do that when we speak here about our surroundings from the perspective of waking consciousness, because the things—if I may put it that way—that are designated by these words: earth, water, air, fire, are actually there. But if we delve into the world from which dreams arise, then there is no earth, water, air, or fire there. These do not exist there: it no longer makes sense to use these words in the same way as we do here for the world in which we live with our waking consciousness. From this you can already see the relativity of these things as soon as one enters another realm of existence that must be perceived through a different consciousness. There, these things—which ordinary materialistic consciousness regards as absolute—no longer exist at all. Earth is not earth there. In fact, it makes no sense to speak of them at all when one immerses oneself in that world, which is indeed a reality, but one that must be perceived with a different consciousness. However, there is something down there that can be described as a hybrid between air and water. One experiences it in this other state of consciousness through thought forms entirely different from those one normally experiences. Air is not air, and water is not water, but a certain intermediate state between air and water—one might say a kind of watery smoke, as the ancient Hebrew language still called it “Ruach.” But this does not refer to the physical smoke we know today; rather, it refers to this intermediate state between water and air.

[ 13 ] And there is another intermediate state between earth and fire—one that, I would say, you should have in your mental image as our metals gradually becoming so incandescent and fiery that they are, in fact, nothing more than fire; that they are fire through and through. And this intermediate state between earth and fire, and between air and water—it is down there, in a world from which dreams swirl upward. As you will easily understand, we could not exist in this world with our physical bodies. We must enter it with our soul from the moment we fall asleep until we wake up, for with our physical body we could not breathe in this world, since there is no air there. I have described a being that can breathe in this world, but this is a being—you know it from my Mysteries—that does not need air to breathe, but breathes light. So such beings can certainly be described, if one knows them. But human beings must not carry their physical bodies into this world, for they could not breathe and would burn up inside it. Nevertheless, from the moment we fall asleep until we wake up, we are connected to this world, and dreams well up from it.

[ 14 ] This world that human beings encounter—which one might say lies beneath the threshold of their consciousness—is indeed quite unlike the world we experience today, from waking to falling asleep; yet it is not so dissimilar to the earlier worlds from which the present one evolved. Earlier worlds—even the solar world, as you can see from my description in The Secret Science—are structured, even as physical worlds, in such a way that, if I may say so, fire-earth, earth-fire, and water-air seethe together within them, not in the neatly separated form we see today. So when we view the development of the worlds historically, or from a cosmic-historical perspective, we must do so by creating a mental image of the following: If we go back to earlier stages of development in our existence, we must create a mental image of these earlier stages as similar to what we experience today when we immerse ourselves in the world to which we belong—the world between falling asleep and waking up.

[ 15 ] But these worlds—which today are experienced only in a dormant state, yet were once as physically present as our world is now—cannot be approached without conceiving of what is no longer visible in our present world as visible, as manifest. You cannot create a mental image of “water-air” in the same way that you must create a mental image of water and air side by side today. Today you create a mental image of water and air side by side. This has come about because “water-air,” which was formerly substantially unified, has become differentiated. Water-air has split into these two polar opposites, water and air. Water-air used to be a unity, but it was permeated by another pole. Today, human beings have, so to speak, descended and have completely lost the other pole that water-air possessed. In return, water-air itself has split into the two poles of water and air. If one wishes to gain a mental image of what the other pole was to the water-air, one must imagine a certain essential quality that is also experienced in the world in which a human being exists between falling asleep and waking up—the world from which dreams arise. But when one goes back to the ancient solar existence, one must also create a mental image of the water-air alongside which there was something that was spiritually essential, something that belonged to the nature of the elemental spirits. And the elemental spirits that belong to the water-air have been preserved in myth, just as echoes of ancient truths have been preserved in myth and mythology. And among the beings that belong to the water-air are those that Greek mythology—or ancient mythology in general—called sirens. So that one speaks of the world to which we are now referring in the same way when one says: There is water-air and there are sirens within it. —- Just as one speaks accurately about our world when one says: “There is water and air.” “There is water-air and there are sirens.” The sirens thus belong to those elemental beings that constitute the opposite pole of water-air. The other element—which we now call earth, which has completely descended beneath the water, while above there is fire or heat—was in turn a single entity: it was earth-fire or fire-earth. Again, among the entities that, like today’s heat and fire, are polar opposites of the earth, there is, among other elemental spirits, the one whom Goethe, following the Greeks, calls Seismos. By having the Sirens appear in the scene in question, Goethe simultaneously points out—I would say quite vividly—how they are connected to water, though not actually to the water of today, for that has already become denser; it is merely one pole of the ancient water-air. The sirens, too, feel that they belong to water only in a spiritual sense; if one conceives of water as the ancient “water-air,” they are that which belongs to this water just as air belongs to today’s water. And just as the air in the wind develops its sounds in a chaotic manner, so does the spiritual element in the sirens develop that which belongs to water—or rather, to the watery air—the spiritual element that is connected to this watery air just as the air is connected to our water. And the activity of Seismos, conceived as a cosmic force, is that which acts as fire within the household of nature. The Greek myth points to this, and so does Goethe. And just as Goethe presents the matter, anyone familiar with reality senses that Goethe had an intuitive understanding of these things. He knew that this is how the world works—the world we enter from falling asleep to waking up, and which we rediscover when we turn our gaze back, with insight, to the original states of our present existence.

[ 16 ] But consider how frightened you would be if you were suddenly and consciously transported—not as happens in mere dreams, but if you were suddenly and consciously transported into an element, a sphere, where you have no solid ground beneath you. For the ground ceases to exist. Everything that was supposed to be earth is now fiery; there you can melt at will and become cold or warm within the element of fire. And in the watery air, where you cannot breathe, but where you experience only alternating states of light and darkness—just imagine the fear you would initially feel at this uncertainty into which you are plunging, into this surging and swirling! What, then, possessed human beings in that epoch of the world order, when they—as must once have been the case, for in ancient times they were in this surging and weaving element, as I have told you—what, then, possessed human beings that they could stand firm at the very moment the solid Earth was forming? What took hold of human beings? The nature of the Sphinx! It provides the fixed point of equilibrium within the surging element. Simultaneously with that which gave the Earth the form that makes it this solid planet upon which one can stand, the same force wove into humanity that which can be characterized or represented by the nature of the Sphinx.

[ 17 ] In this scene, Goethe depicts something that can actually only be experienced from the moment one falls asleep until one wakes up. And he believes he can best characterize it not by using our modern concepts—which are derived solely from waking life—but by using Greek concepts; he finds these more flexible and appropriate. Therefore, he transposes the entire scene to Greece, where he believes he can more effectively convey the mental images drawn from Greek nature. There, he believes he can better characterize everything that a person experiences today from falling asleep to waking up, as well as what people experienced in ancient times, when water was not opposed by air, nor earth by fire, but rather the water-air was opposed by the sirens, and the earth-fire—or fire-earth—by something like the seismos.

[ 18 ] And now he brings the world onto the stage in his Faust. Why does he bring it onto the stage? His aim is for us to move from the homunculus to the homo, for the homunculus to gain the prospect not merely of remaining a homunculus, but of becoming a homo—in other words, to understand that he can become human. He is thus to experience an expansion within his worldview. And Goethe does this so appropriately that, as he introduces us to this ancient, cosmic world, he immediately sets up the sphinxes:

The sphinxes have taken their seats.

[ 19 ] And the sphinxes form the solid element. All around, things are in turmoil—as they must not be now, for people would be seized by a hopeless fear of it. All around, the waves surge. But even if all hell breaks loose, when the spirits behave like the Sirens, like Seismos, it is countered by the fact that man has found his foothold, his point of equilibrium:

What a repulsive tremor—

[ 20 ] It describes this world I just mentioned.

What an ugly, dreadful premonition!
What swaying, what trembling,
Swaying back and forth!

[ 21 ] You would certainly feel that back-and-forth struggle if you were to immerse yourself in this world!

What an unbearable annoyance!

[ 22 ] But now for some reflection:

But we

[ 23 ] — the sphinxes —

don't change the location,
all hell would break loose.

[ 24 ] Now, something of this kind of view always finds its way into human mental images. People are not aware of it, but their mental images are influenced by what lives in the depths of existence. And this gives rise to theories that are more or less imaginative. The theory that mountains were formed by fire—which is entirely correct for earlier stages of cosmic evolution, but refers to the “earth fire” (not the fire of today)—has crept into contemporary mental images. This gives rise to confused mental images, and most contemporary mental images are confused when viewed from a higher perspective. One can understand them only if—as paradoxical as it sounds, it is true—one translates them. They are expressed in the ordinary, commonly philistine, everyday human language. If one translates them into the language one ought actually to speak from the moment of falling asleep until waking up, only then do these theories make sense, for it becomes apparent that these theories do indeed contain subtle allusions to earlier epochs of the Earth. And one cannot understand the entire scene, as it begins here, in any other way than by realizing that Goethe wanted to bring to light what a person experiences when, from falling asleep to waking up, they become conscious of what they have experienced—to the extent that they thereby develop an awareness of an earlier cosmic state of the Earth.

[ 25 ] Just think how deeply Goethe must have sensed the insights of the Spiritual Science for him to present these things so aptly. But it goes further. The homunculus is to be led into this world. Goethe wants to say, as it were—if I may put it in radical terms again: Well, if I turn to the mental images of philistine science, I naturally cannot achieve anything that could turn the homunculus into a homo; nothing will come of it. But if I draw on such mental images and incorporate them into the human soul—integrating them into the Faust scene—mental images that can be gained when a person consciously experiences the world from falling asleep to waking up—then it may be more likely that one gains a deeper understanding of human nature, that the homunculus becomes a homo. That is why Goethe has the homunculus immerse himself not in the philistine scientific world—in what human beings currently experience—but in another world that he presents here, and which human beings experience from falling asleep to waking up. In this world, however, one also learns many things; curiously enough, one also learns something about just how unequal, in their stages of development, the beings are that dwell right alongside us in the universe. One understands nothing—absolutely nothing—about this world when one views these beings side by side and, I might say, treats them as equals. When one observes ants, bees, indeed this entire peculiar insect kingdom, one arrives at the view—which I have expounded in other places and at other times than in our lectures on Spiritual Science—that these are forms left behind from earlier times, or forms that already foreshadow what is to come in later times, such as the bees and the beehive; these are beings whose forms actually belong to another era, yet extend into our own time. |

[ 26 ] When scientists who lack spiritual insight come along and describe this world—such as Forel, who devoted so much time to studying ants—people end up recounting all sorts of astonishing things about ants. But if they remain stuck in scientific clumsiness and do not turn to the Spiritual Science, then it is only natural that they cannot say anything essential about why one should marvel at this world, which is permeated everywhere by a rationality. It is not the individual ant, but the whole of the anthill and the world of ants itself—the world of bees—that is imbued with cosmic reason, which is far wiser than our intellectual reason; in a certain sense, they all actually belong to an earlier world. Consider how aptly Goethe describes this. In depicting an earlier world, he has the ants and the beetles appear within it. And by having a mountain arise just as it did in earlier cosmic development—as one sees it again in another sphere of reality during the time between falling asleep and waking up—he has ants appear who then engage with what the mountain has brought into existence. But he makes other beings, in particular, the companions of these ants. The ants—and indeed almost the entire insect kingdom—are actually a race that does not quite fit into the present-day Earth. This world of ants actually feels anachronistic in the present world. They have little to do with it; they have no true companions. The other animals are of a completely different nature. There are tremendous differences between the soul-spiritual nature of the insect world—such as the ant colony, for example—and that of other animals. The companions of the ants are not, in fact, the present-day physical forms of animals, but rather the spiritual elemental beings whom Goethe depicts as Pygmies, as dwarves, as Dactyls; to whom they are much more closely related—despite the fact that the ants have attained a physical nature in this earthly existence—than to these present-day beings. Thus, Goethe is aware of this species of ant colony belonging to an ancient cosmic epoch, and he weaves this mystery into this scene.

[ 27 ] Well, how did our world actually come into being? It has, after all, evolved into its present state from its former state. We have just spoken of the former state, and one need only point to the present one, for it is what exists in the physical environment of the Earth. But this did not happen without a struggle. There was a mighty cosmic struggle as the old evolved into the new. The question arises: Can this struggle also be observed? — Yes, this struggle can be observed! One observes it when one can perceive the awakening from a very vividly perceived dream into a state that is not yet fully awake, but rather a state of half-awake consciousness. That is, when one awakens from a deeper state of sleep to a shallower one, when one has not yet fully awakened but is on the path to awakening. There one approaches the sensory world, and one has not yet completely left that world below, and there one becomes caught up in a struggle that is very similar to the struggle that took place when the old world transformed into the new. Goethe proceeds so appropriately here that, by introducing a dream as an expression of the old world order, he also depicts the awakening from this dream, which expresses a struggle in the cosmos. That which belongs to the present enters into conflict with that which belongs to the old era: the pygmies, who belong to the old world, with the herons, who belong to the waters of the present. This battle unfolds. And this witnessing of the battle is, at the same time, an awakening. And Goethe expresses so clearly that this is an awakening that he alludes to what often brings about awakening. One hears something that still appears spiritually in a dream, imaginatively and pictorially, and that then passes into external reality: the approach of Ibycus’s cranes, which do indeed appear in this scene. In the first part of this scene, Goethe shows us what one can experience in dream consciousness when it is fully developed, and what points to earlier earthly states—which he believed he could penetrate more deeply through Greek mental images than through contemporary ones.

[ 28 ] And now the homunculus. It doesn’t go that far! For modern man—as Goethe now makes quite clear—it is not possible to bring what is happening down there into full, clear consciousness. Fear and anxiety prevent man from doing so, even if that anxiety is unconscious. I have often described this. The homunculus does not dare to enter this world; he states this quite clearly. When he reappears, he explains that no, he does not want to enter it; he does want to come into being—that is, he is to become a human being—but he does not want to enter this world.

I float from place to place
And would love to emerge in the best sense of the word,
Eager to shatter my glass in two;
But given what I’ve seen so far,
I wouldn’t dare venture in there.

[ 29 ] So, it is a dangerous world into which the homunculus does not yet want to venture. After all, he would like to begin his journey from homunculus to Homo in a less dangerous world.

[ 30 ] Well, if one had asked Goethe: “Yes, so as for the ‘world of dreams,’ or rather the world of sleep—you don’t think there’s much to be done there if you want to turn the homunculus in the human mind into a homo. But what about philosophy? Philosophers, after all, ponder the mysteries of the world.” What about philosophy? What if one were to inquire about true humanity in Leibniz or Kant?” Goethe would have made a rather skeptical face at that, a rather incredulous face! He attributed all manner of good qualities to modern philosophers, but he did not believe that they could penetrate the essence of the human being, that they could contribute anything such that the homunculus might become a homo in human life. Here, too, he believed that one comes closer to the truth by drawing on Greek mental images. Goethe was familiar with the Greeks, particularly those of the earlier period in which Anaxagoras and Thales lived. With their views, they stood even closer to those ancient mystery teachings, which still knew something of that spiritual world from which only dreams flow up to human beings. —- That is why he has the homunculus encounter two ancient Greek philosophers, one of whom, Anaxagoras, still knows a great deal about the ancient wisdom of the mysteries—particularly about the secrets of the fiery earth. The mental images held by the ancient mysteries—which were connected to the events within the fiery earth—still permeate the thinking and rational philosophy of Anaxagoras.

[ 31 ] Although Thales’s thought still contained echoes of ancient ideas—links to the mysteries of water and air—Goethe makes it clear that Anaxagoras’s views were on the wane, even if they were the more elevated ones, and that a new era began with Thales. Rightly so—I have even stated this in my Riddles of Philosophy—the history of modern philosophy, indeed the history of philosophy itself, begins with Thales. Thales is, in a sense, the archetypal philistine, as Goethe portrays him here, the one who is to usher in the philistine worldview of the fifth post-Atlantean period, which, though it connects in a certain—albeit only obscure—way to the mysteries of water and air.

[ 32 ] Thus, in the first part of this scene—where he is still describing the world of the Seismos, to which the Pygmies belong, based on his experiences in the world of dreams—Goethe characterizes, on the one hand, everything connected with the creative forces of the Seismos. And the element of water, which he has already brought into the present—and thus characterizes not as “water-air” but as water, along with the herons and so on—he contrasts with fire: water, fire, actually “water-air,” “fire-earth.” And a struggle ensues between water and fire: the Pygmies against the herons. And the same struggle, which first takes place between the Pygmies—as representatives of the earth or earth-fire—and the herons—as representatives of water, of water-air—unfolds in the mind in a different form, between Anaxagoras, the philosopher of fire, and Thales, the philosopher of water.

[ 33 ] The parallelism is so beautiful that, in this second stage of his exposition, Goethe vividly illustrates how—now that the homunculus has not dared to descend into the subconscious realm to become a homo—he now flees upward into the conscious realm. And among those who wish to preserve in their consciousness as much as possible of what one would otherwise experience in the subconscious—among the philosophers—the homunculus seeks to learn how one becomes a homo. It turns out that, because philosophers draw their impulses from different realms of experience, they are not in agreement and even become embroiled in such struggles—in such battles of ideas—that play out on the basis of the struggles in the cosmos! Just as between the pygmies and the herons, so too between the concepts of Anaxagoras and those of Thales: the same struggle!

[ 34 ] What does Goethe do? He first describes what is taking place down there in the subconscious world, then leads us up into the world of consciousness, but ties this in with the reminiscences that rise up from the subconscious—reminiscences that are particularly evident in Anaxagoras—which is why Thales also considers Anaxagoras a fantasist.

[ 35 ] But we are already dealing with a second layer of human life—the layer that waking consciousness also possesses, even if some people experience it in a more spiritual way, or—as I have described—in a state that is more or less a mixture of waking and sleeping, or sleeping and waking. One can also experience it as half-awake, half-asleep and half-asleep, half-awake. This is the second layer of experience that is depicted here. And what follows is very significant. Goethe has us experience what happens there in a different way than he had us experience the first part. He simply has the sirens begin. They open the scene. One is in the world of sleep, in the world of dreams; one does not need to do anything to be in this world, so Goethe simply presents it. But now one awakens from this world. By awakening, one enters ordinary consciousness. For a certain reason, Goethe has combined Lucifer and Ahriman into the single figure of Mephistopheles. He depicts this awakening through Mephistopheles’s experience. And it is interesting that Mephistopheles, in a sense, represents a state of not yet being fully awake; there he is still down below, experiencing it through the Greek lamia; then he ascends into conscious life. But if it is to ascend into fully conscious life—if the homunculus Mephisto is truly to enter fully conscious life, the life of the intellect—then the human being must, as it were, rouse himself; he must pull himself together; he must awaken from the dream into reality. That is why, during this awakening, Mephisto encounters the Oread, the Oreas, who very clearly indicates in Goethe’s language that this is precisely what I have described.

Come up here! My mountain is ancient,
Standing in its original form.
Admire the rugged rocky paths,
The outermost branches of Mount Pindus.
I stood there unshaken,
When Pompey fled over me.
Beside it, the figment of delusion
Already vanishes at the crowing of the rooster.

[ 36 ] The Oreas, by shaking one’s sleeping consciousness awake into waking consciousness, draws one’s attention, so to speak, to the fact that one is now emerging from the world—which is otherwise called the world of illusion, even though it is a reality in the sense I have described—into the world where the mountains stand firm, where not everything surges up and down. And Goethe doesn’t really shy away from pointing out very clearly how one awakens from this world. Just think how often one awakens from the world from which dreams bubble up at the crowing of the rooster. So Goethe makes this very clear. Now one ascends into the waking world, where the philosophers have their say, where, through the philosophers’ words, the homunculus is to become a homo.

[ 37 ] There is much to be said here—perhaps tomorrow. I just want to point out that, after this world has been completed, Goethe also points to a third one. And just as it was the mountain nymph Oreas who first pointed to this world of wakefulness, of daytime wakefulness, so it is once again a nymph—that is, an elemental being—who stirs us deeply: the tree nymph, the dryad, who leads Mephistopheles to a third layer of consciousness, a third layer in which reason and clairvoyance are united: the subconscious, the conscious, and the superconscious. Goethe, too, in a certain sense, already points toward the very world to which we now wish to draw attention through Spiritual Science. Only he points to it in a very peculiar way. The beings that Mephistopheles first encounters are the Phorkyads.

[ 38 ] From our descriptions the day after tomorrow, you will see what pleasant, beautiful beings these Phorkyads are, and especially what a vivid, heartfelt language they speak! And yet, anyone who knows what experiences a person must face when consciously venturing into the spiritual world will understand Mephistopheles’ encounter with the Phorcys.

[ 39 ] But I'll talk more about that tomorrow, because this matter can't be settled in a single discussion.