The Rudolf Steiner Archive

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

[ 1 ] Yesterday, drawing on Goethe’s Faust, I sought first and foremost to make clear that human beings, in their very nature, are more comprehensive—are more than what is perceptible or comprehensible through the intellect and the other spiritual faculties that human beings possess. Goethe himself felt deeply that the spiritual powers one can develop in today’s conscious life do not allow us to go as far as human nature itself extends. Those who believe that what is called science today merely needs to be expanded in order, so to speak, to discern the possible and the impossible, simply say: “Well, with what science offers today, one does indeed arrive at only a very limited understanding of the human being. But this science will expand; this science will advance further and further, and then we will also come to an ever-greater understanding of the human being.”

[ 2 ] This is a very short-sighted view, because it is simply incorrect. It is not the reason that the scientific worldview—which is currently accepted as such—is expanding more and more in order to understand human beings; rather, what matters is that we turn to powers and capacities of cognition other than those employed by contemporary science. No matter how far modern science may advance along its current paths, that which Goethe sensed—namely, that it cannot be comprehended within the essence of the human being—can under no circumstances ever be penetrated by this science. For all science that we have as officially recognized science relates only to earthly essence, to the essence of the Earth. What is today called science can never make a determination about anything other than the processes of the Earth. But the human being is not merely an Earth being; as an Earth being, he has behind him the Saturn, Sun, and Moon stages of development, and within him lies the seed of the Jupiter, Venus, and Vulcan stages of development. Science can know nothing about this other planetary form of life beyond the earthly realm, for the laws of science apply only to the earthly realm. Thus, human beings in their totality cannot be understood through these laws, because they can only be understood by extending one’s knowledge beyond the earthly realm.

[ 3 ] Yesterday I pointed out how human beings live in states of consciousness that lie, so to speak, below the threshold of ordinary consciousness and above the threshold of ordinary consciousness. Below the threshold of ordinary consciousness lies much of what gives rise to dream experiences. However, below this threshold of consciousness also lies a great, great deal of what people experience in their waking daily life, from the moment they wake up until they fall asleep. For a reasonably sufficient degree of self-reflection can show you that people would know much more about dreaming if they made an effort to know a little more about waking life than they currently do. If people made more of an effort to learn about wakefulness, they would discover that they dream far more during this waking state than they actually believe. It is really only an illusion that there is a clear, fixed boundary between wakefulness and sleep. One might say that not only do many people dream while awake, but they also sleep—in a sense—with regard to very, very many things. And, as we know, we are truly awake only in relation to our mental images and a part of our feelings, while a large part of our emotional life—and above all, our volitional life—is, as we “know,” actually always dreamlike and half-asleep. The life of sleep certainly encroaches upon waking life. People could gain much greater insight into the life of dreams if they were to try to examine the difference between the mental images that ebb and flow—that, in a sense, come and go, evoke all manner of things, and bear a striking resemblance to the life of dreams—and those mental images in which one is actively engaged with one’s full will. One will find only a small part of a person’s world of imagination in which one uses one’s full will to link one mental image to another, whereas in daily life a person very often has moments when they surrender to the flow of imagination just as that flow itself dictates. Consider, for example, how—when you surrender yourself in this way to the flow of your imagination, with one mental image evoking another—you recall events long past by focusing on a present mental image, and how this present mental image in turn evokes long-past experiences within you. This is a process that is often not very different from dreaming. Because people have so little—I would say—inner mental capacity to properly follow waking daily life, very few people today possess the proper ability to correctly assess the life of sleep with its bubbling dream life. We do, after all, find that there are “scientifically minded theories” that assert, for example, the following about the life of dreams. The Freudian school and others—certain followers, though not all, of psychoanalysis—say that dreams are mental images brought about by the fact that certain desires of human beings remain unfulfilled in life. A person goes through life desiring the most diverse things, but it is undeniable, these people say, that many of our desires remain unfulfilled in life. When consciousness begins to fade, these desires come to the forefront of the mind. And because people cannot fulfill these desires in reality, they fulfill them in mental images; thus, according to the view of some people today, dreams are desires fulfilled in mental images. I only wish that the people who make such claims would pause to consider how they come to have the dream of being beheaded! All these things, which today often form the content of theories, are the most terrible one-sidednesses. And these one-sided views are bound to permeate people’s minds unless they turn to Spiritual Science investigations into the worlds unknown to the external sensory world and external intellectual thinking—investigations that shed light on what a human being is beyond what his senses and intellect can grasp.

[ 4 ] But from what was said yesterday, you will be able to deduce one thing about dreams with complete certainty. You will be able to deduce that something is weaving and living within the life of dreams that is connected to our human past—to that past in which we existed in a way that was still related to the earth fire and the water-air. In a sense, while we are unconsciously asleep, we recall our past once again. Today, we are not able to consciously transport ourselves into this world using our cerebral consciousness and our ordinary free will. We were also unconscious or subconscious when we went through earlier stages of our development. Yet this is an observation that is actually not all that difficult to make. If you observe your dream life, you will find, however, that it is extraordinarily difficult to interpret the images of your dreams in a meaningful way. The way one dream image follows another usually has a rather chaotic character. But this chaotic character is only on the surface. Beneath this surface, a person lives in a realm that is by no means chaotic, but it is different—totally different—from the experience of waking life. One need only consider one aspect to understand how dream life differs from waking life, and one will immediately see the radical difference. In waking life, it would be very unpleasant if, in terms of one’s relationships with other people, what exists in dreams were also present. For in dreams, a person experiences a bond with almost everyone with whom they have some kind of karmic connection; they experience a sense of togetherness with all the people with whom they have any kind of karmic relationship. From the moment you begin to fall asleep until you wake up again, a force flows from you to countless people, and forces flow from countless people to you. You—I cannot say—speak, because speaking is something one first learns in waking life; but if you do not misunderstand me and, with regard to the communications we have in sleep, understand what I am saying now, then you will also understand when I say that in sleep you speak with countless people, and countless people speak with you. And what you experience in your soul during sleep are the messages of countless people; and what you do during sleep is send your thoughts out to countless people. This connection among people, this interconnection of people with one another, is very, very intimate during sleep. It would be extremely embarrassing if this continued during waking life. That is, after all, the benevolent role of the “Guardian of the Threshold”—to conceal from people what lies beneath the threshold of their consciousness. In your sleep, you usually know when someone is lying to you; you usually know when someone is thinking very badly of you. In general, people know one another relatively well in their sleep, but in a dim state of consciousness. All of this is obscured by waking consciousness, and it must be obscured, for the simple reason that a person would never arrive at the self-conscious thinking that he is meant to learn precisely through his earthly mission, nor at the exercise of free will—which he, in turn, is meant to gain through this earthly mission—if he had continued to live as he did during the Saturn, Sun, and Moon eras, particularly during the Moon era. In those times, he lived his outer life just as he now lives from the moment he falls asleep until he wakes up.

[ 5 ] But now something else comes into play that is significant. Dreams emerge from this life that a person unconsciously experiences from the moment they fall asleep until they wake up. Why aren’t they a true reflection of life down there? Oh, if these dreams were true, direct reflections, they would be all sorts of things. They would be significant messengers about our relationships to the world and to other people; they would also be significant warnings. They would speak to our consciences with tremendous force about this or that matter—matters about which we so readily indulge in illusions in life. The fact that we—I am almost tempted to say—are not exposed to what dreams would do to us if they were true reflections of life beneath consciousness stems from the fact that our waking daily life permeates us so powerfully that it, I might say, casts its shadow over the entire dream life. And so we carry the mental images and ideas of waking life into our dream life—or rather, into our sleep life—and this is how dreams arise. Let’s take, for example, the case where you dream—or might dream—of a figure who sets out to make it clear to you that you have once again done something quite clumsy, something quite inappropriate. This happens. Other figures might also serve as admonishers, appealing to our conscience while we sleep. Based on the experiences and habits of waking life, you have the desire—or, I might even say, the craving—not to listen to such talk. You do not want to hear anything this figure says to you while you sleep. Well, this desire manifests as a darkening of the experience; but if, at the same time, there is such lively mental activity that the image bubbles up, then something else from your waking daily life overlays what you should actually be experiencing as an image: the thought that some good friend—whom you’d rather listen to than the admonisher—is telling you: “Oh, what an extraordinarily kind person you are, always wanting and doing only the best and nicest things!” Sometimes, the exact opposite can be superimposed from waking daily life and its reminiscences in the form of images onto what is actually being experienced. After all, waking daily life is the source of all the illusions and deceptions that arise during the dream life.

[ 6 ] Another point is that, in the current cycle of development, people today can now engage with Spiritual Science. Now, I know there are many who engage with Spiritual Science and say: “I’ve been studying Spiritual Science for years, but it isn’t helping me make progress.” It tells me that one can attain this or that through Spiritual Science, but it isn’t helping me move forward.” — I have often emphasized this: that idea is incorrect. Spiritual Science helps every person move forward, even if it does not unfold an esoteric life, because the very thoughts of Spiritual Science are progressive. But one must pay attention to the subjective experiences that actually take place in the soul. For it is a peculiar feature that what first appears to someone who is entering the path of Spiritual Science does not, at first, differ at all from the dream world in terms of its imagery. What one experiences when becoming a spiritual scientist looks very similar to the rest of the dream world, but upon closer examination, a tremendous difference can be discerned between ordinary dreams and those perceptions that arise from spiritual life consciously taken up in thought. Even among the dream images that the spiritual scientist experiences in his soul, some may appear chaotic. But if one analyzes them according to the guidelines that can indeed be derived from Spiritual Science, one will find that they do in fact become ever more faithful reflections—particularly in their progression—of the human being’s inner experience. And one must certainly take into account this layer of experience, hidden from ordinary understanding and ordinary sensory life, which unfolds like a form of contemplation, like a pensive dream, and which is nevertheless meaningful; and which, when viewed in the right way, provides insight into spiritual mysteries. One must pay attention to how, gradually—I might say—this life, which looks very much like dreaming, takes root in ordinary imaginative life; yet precisely through its meaningful course—if one looks not at the individual images but at the meaningful sequence of the images—it leads one into the spiritual world. If one pays attention to such things, one certainly arrives at that distinction between three layers of consciousness, about which Goethe, as I explained to you yesterday, had such beautiful, intuitive insights.

[ 7 ] A “story of consciousness” is one that, so to speak, unfolds without any intervention on our part, resulting in our having ordinary dreams. If we are not dream interpreters, if we are not superstitious, but rather if we try to seek what lies beyond the dream images, then this dream world will still be able to reveal to us that we, as human beings, have passed through earlier stages of development than those of earthly life.

[ 8 ] Then there is the ordinary waking consciousness that we know—or at least think we know. We know it as a matter of fact; people do not always agree to have it fully explained to them, but we know it as a matter of fact.

[ 9 ] The third layer is the emergence of true supersensible knowledge. This supersensible knowledge is, of course, something that people of the present day and in the future must strive for, for the reasons we have discussed often enough.

[ 10 ] Yesterday I demonstrated how Goethe, in the first part of the scene from the second part of Faust—which is of immediate concern to us—embodies the dream life in all its peculiarity. And from the moment the Oread speaks to Mephistopheles—when the philosophers then appear—we are dealing with the world of ordinary, waking reality. From the moment the Dryad points Mephistopheles toward the Phorcys, we are dealing with a reference to conscious supersensible knowledge. It is these three layers of consciousness that Goethe directs his thinking and mental images toward as he poses the question: How does this homunculus, which is initially accessible to human cognition, become a homo? — Not through the ordinary science of the intellect and the senses, but only by taking refuge in other layers of consciousness. For human beings extend beyond the Earth in their being, and the intellect and the senses are suited only to earthly things.

[ 11 ] But we already discussed yesterday how the Sphinx’s state of equilibrium is still lacking when a person delves into the world of their prehistory, how a person actually feels insecure there—how the homunculus feels insecure. For human beings know—forgive me, but it is simply so—not much more about themselves than they do about a homunculus; after all, they do not truly know anything about a “homo.” And in Goethe’s work, the homunculus does not venture into the workings of the sirens, the Seismos, and so on, because he fears the surging, stormy element into which a person plunges when they leave the sensory world and enter the world from which dreams otherwise bubble up. The homunculus does not dare to venture in there.

[ 12 ] Homunkulus wants to take a more comfortable path toward becoming human. He is following in the footsteps of two philosophers, Anaxagoras and Thales. He wants to learn from them how to bring more into his human existence than someone like Wagner can provide in a laboratory. That is what he wants to learn. We already know that Goethe did not expect to learn such things from more recent philosophers; he has no intention of “patiently leading the people by the rope” and, for example, bringing the homunculus to Königsberg near Kant to obtain information from him on how one can come into being as a human being, how one can expand one’s human nature; rather, Goethe specifically sought to immerse himself in the world of the Greeks from the ground up, because he believed that by immersing oneself in the Greeks’ still malleable, softer mental images, one can grasp human life more readily from other layers of consciousness than through what the modern philosophers derive solely from reason and sensory consciousness. And so he does not place the homunculus in the company of Kant, Leibniz, Hume, or Locke, but rather in the company of those philosophers who were still close to the older views of humanity—the ancient mystery traditions—where, although not from experiences of consciousness as lucid as those of today, but from a more comprehensive experience of consciousness, something could be known about the nature of the human being. But fundamentally, Anaxagoras and Thales are merely stragglers of the ancient mystery wisdom. Anaxagoras still knows more of the ancient mystery knowledge. All of this is shown to us by what Anaxagoras presents in the scene. Thales is actually the inaugurator, the initiator, the pioneer of the newer scientific direction, and he knows only a little about the ancient mysteries. Of course, he knows more than his later philistine followers because he is still closer to the ancient mysteries than they are, but he knows less than Anaxagoras. Thales—as is evident from his speeches—can really only provide information about what happens in his sensory environment, such as how, little by little—one might think Lyell, the modern geologist, is speaking—mountains and other features of the Earth are formed through slow processes. Anaxagoras seeks to explain the present from the past, to explain the earthly from what preceded it, from a time when the Earth was not yet the Earth. Anaxagoras seeks to explain from those times to which, as I explained to you yesterday, ants and beetles belong by their very nature—but to which the Pygmies also belong. Anaxagoras lives entirely in this world, which today is a supersensible or—if you will—sub-sensible one, but without knowledge of which one cannot understand the sensible world. In doing so, Anaxagoras essentially echoes a deep conviction of Goethe’s. For Goethe, in one of his aphorisms, expressed himself beautifully on precisely this point. He said: “What no longer comes into being, we cannot conceive of as coming into being. We do not comprehend what has come into being.” And he says elsewhere in his writings: “Reason depends on what is becoming; the intellect on what has become...”

[ 13 ] That which has come to be is what Thales sees around him. Anaxagoras focuses on the process of becoming that preceded the state of having come to be—on genesis. Goethe therefore makes a strict distinction between the intellect, which is directed toward what we today call the subject matter of science, and reason, which transcends the sensory and the intellectual and extends to the supersensible—that is, also to the supersensible events that took place before the current state of the Earth came into being. It is in Anaxagoras that Goethe sees the representative of a knowledge, an insight, that is directed toward genesis, at home in all that the Pygmies do. In all that such beings do—beings who, though they develop a physical existence in the present, actually belong in essence to prehistory, like the mayflies and so on.

[ 14 ] And now, when the Homunculus approaches him with his request, Anaxagoras wishes to give the Homunculus the opportunity to enrich the human condition through his knowledge. He wants to guide the Homunculus into the world of the Pygmies, the Imsen, and so on; he even wants to make him king there. Anaxagoras already realizes that in the world Thales speaks of—which is merely the world of present circumstances—one cannot gain much to progress from homunculus to homo; but if one enters the world of becoming, the world that preceded our own, then one might gain something to progress from homunculus to homo. But Homunculus is undecided:

What does my Thales say?

[ 15 ] He still harbors the thought of not venturing into the world. When it appeared to him as a dream world, he did not dare to enter it. Now that it confronts him in the thoughts of Anaxagoras, he still does not quite dare to enter it; at least, he still seeks the counsel of Thales. And Thales dissuades him from immersing himself in this world of Anaxagoras’s thoughts. What kind of world is this, the world of Anaxagoras’s thoughts? It is, in essence, the world of the ancient mysteries, but flattened and reduced to the level of human understanding. These are the shadow concepts drawn from the ancient mysteries. Therefore, they cannot stand up to the real world. If one possesses the true, living concepts of becoming, then one already arrives at an understanding of this world; then one is a match for it. But with the shadowy concepts that Anaxagoras holds, Homunculus is now no match for Thales’s objections, for Thales’s objections arise from the present sensory world. And just as the fleeting dreams—which are the reflection of higher spiritual worlds—fade away before a person when the rooster crows or when someone slams the door, so too does that which lives, as in Anaxagoras’s world of thought, fade away very easily when other thoughts—drawn from the present sensory world—assert themselves. Thales need only point out that the present sensory world is, after all, there. He points this out in a very forceful manner. Just as the present world kills off the past world that reappears to us in dreams, so do the cranes kill the pygmies and the waxwings. It is merely a reflection of that. Anaxagoras first turned to the world that appears to humans once more in the world of dreams as an uncertain revelation. After he had to experience that no blessing arose for the homunculus from this world, he turned to the upper world. And in a wondrous speech, he first implores the remnant of earthly antiquity among the celestial phenomena; he implores the moon. After first expounding on his ideas and thoughts regarding what remained from the lunar age—the Imsen, the Pygmies, the Lower Realm—and after failing to achieve his goal with regard to the homunculus, he turns his gaze upward, where the moon remains as a remnant of that ancient lunar age. |

[ 16 ] Just consider how clearly Goethe, especially in this scene, actually points to all these mysteries that underlie earthly becoming. He even has Anaxagoras, drawing on the ancient wisdom of the mysteries, offer his supplication to the moon. In a beautiful speech, Anaxagoras addresses the moon. This speech truly shows how Goethe intended to portray Anaxagoras as a personality who is immersed in the spiritual world, but who is immersed in this spiritual world solely through his intellect—that intellect which, when observing only the present, cannot access the spiritual at all, but which, in Anaxagoras, has still preserved the spiritual from the ancient mysteries. Anaxagoras says:

While I have praised the underworld deities until now,
In this case, I turn my gaze upward...
You! Eternal and ageless one on high,
Three-named and three-formed,
I call upon you in the midst of my people’s sorrow,
Diana, Luna, Hecate!
You who expand the breast, profound in the deepest sense,
You who appear serene, yet are fiercely intense,
Open the dreadful maw of your shadows,
Let the ancient power be revealed without magic!

[ 17 ] But all he has left are the shadows. Instead of achieving anything for the homunculus, he observes how devastation rains down from the moon onto the earth, how even that which had remained alive is now destroyed by a natural phenomenon. Significant for the characterization of Anaxagoras, however, is how he addresses the moon, this remnant of the earth’s prehistory: “Diana, Luna, Hecate.” ” For Anaxagoras, then, the moon is not a unity but a trinity. The moon, insofar as it completes its orbits high in the sky, is Luna. As Luna, it exerts an influence on Earth from the outside.

[ 18 ] Insofar as it is active on Earth itself, it is Diana. The forces that act as cosmic forces through the Moon circling in the sky have, I would say, their counterparts in earthly forces as well. The Moon is not only present in the cosmos, but also on Earth. The same forces that are cosmically bound to the Moon as it orbits the heavens also permeate and animate the earthly realm and are among the important unconscious forces of the human being. They are at work in human nature and are among the important subconscious forces. That which works within the Earth—through which a certain relationship to nature, arising from the subconscious and not fully entering consciousness, prevails within the human being—the Greeks called Diana. It is commonly said that Diana is the goddess of the hunt. Certainly, she is that as well, because this subconscious element also prevails in the joy of the hunt—but it prevails in numerous other human feelings and impulses of the will as well. Diana is not only the goddess of the hunt, but she is the creative and active goddess in everything that is strived for—half unconsciously and half subconsciously, just like the pleasure of the hunt. People do a great deal of this in life. This is the middle path.

[ 19 ] But there also lives within human beings—and above all within the Earth—a third form: the form of Hecate, the subterranean manifestation of the Moon. The forces that act downward from the Moon above also rise up from the Earth’s interior, from the subterranean realm, insofar as the Moon is a celestial phenomenon. Modern humans actually know of this Moon only as an abstract mineral sphere, which they believe orbits the Earth out there in four weeks. The Greeks knew the threefold Moon: Luna, Diana, Hecate. And since the human being is a microcosm, he is a reflection of all possible triads—and thus also a reflection of the threefold Moon: Luna, Diana, Hecate. Have we not come to know the threefold human being? We have come to know the head-human, the head-being. Since the head-human is the result of the Saturn, Sun, and Moon eras—indeed, the result of prehistory as a whole—he can be associated with the heavenly sphere, with Luna. Thus, the head in the human being would correspond, as a microcosm, to the macrocosmic Luna. The middle human, the chest human, would correspond to Diana. It is in the heart that those subconscious impulses arise whose goddess is Diana. And everything that takes place in the human of the extremities—with its continuation in the sexual human—stems from the subterranean power of Hecate: all the dark, purely organic, bodily feelings and impulses that reign within the human. And Goethe alludes to all of this to make the matter quite clear to those who wish to recognize it. To the realm of Hecate, for example, belongs the Empusa, who appears among the Lamia surrounding Mephistopheles in this scene, alongside the Lamia in whom this aspect is not so pronounced—in whom only that which leans more toward Diana is expressed. In Empusa, however, what is more prominent is that which lies in the subterranean realm of the earthly, that which lives microcosmically in the lower nature of human beings and is to be evoked in Mephistopheles. Goethe alludes to this. Anaxagoras, in a sense, wishes to assert his science more strongly than he has done before, having previously referred only to the earthly—but to the earthly in its rudimentary form—to the mayflies, to his “Myrmidons,” as he puts it. He turns to the triple moon, which is, macrocosmically, the same as the microcosmic human being. Did Goethe have any inkling that, in the triple moon, the macrocosmic-real “head man,” “chest man,” “abdomen man,” or “limb man” existed? Well, let us read the following lines:

You, the breast-expanding one—Diana—
You, the profoundly meaningful one—Luna—
You, the one who appears calm yet is fiercely passionate—Hecate—

[ 20 ] Here Goethe fully articulates the three attributes of Luna, Diana, and Hecate—insofar as these three attributes also refer to the threefold human being—and makes them tangible by even describing the middle one with the expression “breast-expanding.”

[ 21 ] As you can see, anyone who claims that Goethe’s intuitive knowledge delved deeply into truths of Spiritual Science has good reasons for doing so. However, what is written in a work such as Goethe’s Faust must be read in its true form. Precisely when you consider this peculiar stance of Goethe—with his intuitive insight into Spiritual Science—you will find it understandable how Goethe, I might say, in a certain sense, time and again perceived the spiritual, the supersensible, as something rather eerie. He stood within his Nordic world, as I said yesterday, and felt in tune with the concepts and mental images that this environment offered. Even if one is the greatest genius—one can only have the same concepts as everyone else. One can combine them differently, but one can only have the same concepts. Thus one does not reach the other two layers of consciousness—the sub-sensory and the supersensory; one does not reach them. The ordinary philistine pays no heed to this; he is glad when he does not have to grapple with the other layers of consciousness. But Goethe, who strove with every fiber of his soul to penetrate the human being, often felt it to be something that very, very much restricted human nature—that he had no mental images, no concepts, with which to look into that world from which the human being nevertheless emerges, and into which he cannot look with his intellect and his ordinary science. And so, from all that he felt through his natural inclinations, from what was otherwise accessible to him, and from what he had observed—particularly in Italy—regarding Greek art, the thought arose in Goethe: If one immerses oneself in Greek mental images and Greek life, one comes closer to the supersensible than through modern mental images. — And this was so deeply rooted in Goethe that, from the 1780s onward, he constantly strove to make his own mental images as flexible as those of the Greeks. He hoped thereby to gain access to the supersensible world. But what did this entail? It entailed that he indeed made great efforts—not to recognize the supernatural world through the observation of Greek life, but to gain mental images that would enable him to bring the supernatural world into his inner life. It is interesting how Goethe, precisely while he was writing these scenes, immersed himself in all manner of things in order to bring Greek life vividly to life before his soul. Today we are no closer to Greek life than we were in Goethe’s time. And Goethe did, at least, find in a work such as Schlosser’s Universal Historical Overview of the History of the Ancient World and Its Culture—published in 1826 and which Goethe read immediately, along with many other works that transported him into Greek life—he did, at least, find the possibility, by seeking to relate to Greek life in a congenial way, of bringing Greek life to life within his own soul. But with what thoughts did he attempt this? Consider what he writes: “It calls upon us to turn our gaze toward the most general, the most distant past, and the unrecoverable aspects of prehistory, and from there to allow the peoples to gradually well up into our field of vision.”

[ 22 ] As early as the late 1820s—the very period in which these scenes from his Faust were being written—Goethe was already deeply engaged in studies that brought the distant past to life in his mind and showed him how it seeps into the present. Goethe is not a poet like many others, who write, so to speak, off the cuff; rather, he is a poet who seeks to immerse himself in the world that leads him into the supernatural, so that, as a poet, he might bear witness to this supernatural realm. And because he believed in the Greek world, his mental image of it was transformed in a certain sense. Because he sought Greek life within his soul, the concepts of truth and goodness drew closer to the concept of beauty for him. And the concept of evil drew closer to the concept of ugliness. This is already difficult for people today to understand. In Greek thought, things were different. “Cosmos” is a word that signifies the beautiful order of the world just as much as the true order of the world. People today no longer think of beauty as so closely linked to truth, or ugliness to evil, as the Greeks did. For the Greeks, beauty was still fused with truth, and ugliness with error and with evil. And through his connection to Greek culture, Goethe came to feel, in a sense, that those who are organized as the Greeks were—who were still closer to the supersensible world—perceive untruth and evil as ugly, turn away from them out of a sense of beauty, and perceive truth as beautiful. Goethe cultivated this sensibility. And he believed that he might come closer to the supersensible if he imbued himself with a sense of the beauty of the world. But then, just as one can only recognize light by its shadow, one must also imbued oneself with a sense of the ugliness of the world. That is what Goethe sought.

[ 23 ] For this reason, he associates Mephistopheles—who is, after all, merely another aspect of Faust’s life—with the archetypes of ugliness, the Phorcys, who are the archetypes of ugliness. In doing so, Goethe touches upon a great mystery of existence. You will have gathered from the lectures I have given here over the years that even in the present day certain people are in possession of certain secrets. Above all, for example, the leadership of Roman Catholicism—the leadership—is in possession of certain secrets. What matters is how one applies these secrets. But certain initiates among the English-speaking population are also in possession of certain secrets. Out of a profound misunderstanding, not only does the Roman Catholic Church—its leaders—keep these secrets from its faithful, but so do certain esoteric initiates among the English-speaking population. They have various reasons for this, and I would now like to speak about one of those reasons.

[ 24 ] The Earth has a past: the Saturn, Sun, and Moon eras; a present: the Earth era; and a future: the Jupiter, Venus, and Vulcan eras. In evolution, there is good and there is evil. From the cosmos, from cosmic evolution, the good can only be recognized in the past—in the Saturn, Sun, and Moon eras, and in the first half of the Earth era. Wisdom and the good are connected with looking back into the past. Wisdom and the good are instilled by those members of the higher hierarchies who belong to humanity during the period of human nature in which this human nature has not yet awakened to full consciousness as it has on Earth. For the period that follows—the Jupiter, Venus, and Vulcan eras, as well as the present Earth era (which is already beginning)—and for the remainder of the half-Earth era, human beings must preserve the good; if they wish to attain the good, they must develop the impulses of this good from within their own nature, for the forces of evil reveal themselves from the surrounding realm, from that which is newly emerging. If these forces of evil did not reveal themselves, humanity would not attain free will. And those initiates to whom I am referring know this significant secret and, because they do not wish to hasten humanity’s maturity, choose not to reveal it to humanity. They know this secret. If the very same thing that arose as human nature on ancient Saturn—which developed through Saturn, the Sun, and the Moon and now continues onward—if this very same thing, which developed for us humans on Saturn and has a past, were now to arise from the conditions of the Earth, it would become radically evil; it would be able to absorb only evil. The external conditions offer only the possibility of absorbing evil. It is precisely because human beings are exposed to this evil that they can attain free will—that they can choose between the evil that approaches them and the good that they can develop from within their own nature, provided they trustingly surrender to what has been embedded in their nature through their prehistory. That is why these initiates tell those they wish to initiate: There are three levels of consciousness. — This is a standard formula found in these English-speaking schools of initiation. If a person delves down into this subconscious, from which dreams well up, then they experience an intimate kinship with other beings—as I described to you earlier: even with other human beings—that cannot extend into the present world. If a person lives, as is the case in the present, with their waking consciousness in the sensory or intellectual world, that is the world through which they pass by way of birth and death. And if a person ascends into the world that he will enter as a physical human being in the future—a world he attains through supersensible knowledge—then that is the world in which he first experiences evil. For it is precisely there that a person’s strength must lie: in being a match for evil, in being able to stand firm in the face of evil. He must be able to come to know evil.

[ 25 ] The true consequence of this fact, of course, is that it is necessary for present-day humanity to shed light on the past—which can only be achieved through Spiritual Science—so that human beings may be prepared to face the inevitable onslaught of evil. These three points are repeatedly emphasized, especially among the initiates of the English-speaking population. This forms the basis for a struggle—one that is very, very significant, even if the outer world knows little of it—between certain people who want what is necessary to happen and for such mysteries to be revealed to humanity, and those who wish to keep humanity in a state of immaturity. So far, the latter have prevailed. It is very important to be aware of these things. You can see from this what harm would be wrought if truths from Spiritual Science were withheld from the world, for humanity is already exposed to evil. They are protected from evil only by immersing themselves in the spiritual life of goodness. If one withholds the spiritual life of goodness from them, then one is not acting in the spirit of humanity—regardless of whether one is a member of any Masonic order or a Jesuit—one is not acting in the spirit of humanity. By withholding spiritual wisdom, one delivers people over to evil. And one may have a certain purpose in doing so. One may have the purpose of knowing only the good within a narrow circle, in order to use this good to dominate helpless humanity, which is being led by evil into the absurdity of life.

[ 26 ] You can imagine that anyone who—like Goethe—has a premonitory understanding of these things will approach them only hesitantly. You will have some idea from various things I have already said in your presence about Goethe’s very peculiar mindset, and from this you will be able to form a concept that Goethe approaches these subtle yet world-shaking matters only with mental images that are truly congruent with the subject matter. That is why, when he conceived his Faust, he did not want to expose himself to the mental image to explicitly point out how a person, if they wish to advance in culture, must fearlessly expose themselves to the sight of evil; rather, he also cloaks this in Greek mental images by exposing Mephistopheles to the sight of primordial ugliness—the sight of the Trinity of the three Phorcys, the primordially ugly Phorcys. Instead of pointing out the reality of evil to people in an unreserved manner—as the Spiritual Science must do—Goethe points to the reality of ugliness alongside beauty. Hence Mephistopheles’ peculiar behavior toward the Phorcys. Had Mephistopheles remained in his Nordic homeland—that is, in a world that is, after all, more advanced than the Greek world in terms of the cosmic order—he would have had to confront the bitter but necessary world from which the evil of the future springs. Instead, Goethe has him confront the archetypes of ugliness in the world of antiquity: the Phorcys. In doing so, he places him, so to speak, even further back in the prehistory of the history of evil. By speaking in Greek terms, he presents a profoundly serious truth to these people in a way that is even more appealing to them. And here, too, Goethe once again proves himself to be a thorough connoisseur of the subject. We know—as you can read in my Secret Science—that the future is, in a certain sense, the re-emergence of the past on a higher level. Jupiter is, in a certain sense, the repetition of the Moon; Venus, the repetition of the Sun; and Vulcan, the repetition of Saturn. The earlier appears on a higher level in the later. The same is true with regard to evil, which arises so that human beings can develop the good within their own nature as fully as possible. But this evil will manifest itself as distorted images, caricatures of prehistoric formations.

[ 27 ] As we are now, we are many things simply because we are symmetrically structured, because the “left-hand person” and the “right-hand person” within us work together. Physicists and physiologists are always pondering why we actually have two eyes and what purpose these two eyes serve. If they knew why we have two hands and what purpose these two hands serve, they would also know why we have two eyes and what purpose these two eyes serve. For if one could not touch the left hand with the right, one would not attain self-consciousness. It is precisely because we are able to embrace the left side of our being with the right, and because we can gain insight into the right side of our being through the left, that we attain self-consciousness and the awareness that the “I” is present. When we look at an object, it is essential that a person have more than one eye. If a person has only one eye—whether by birth, predisposition, or misfortune—this does not hinder the process; what matters is the disposition, the inner powers, not the outward appearance. When we look at a person, the axes of the eyes cross; through this, the “I” is connected to this act of looking: through this crossing of the leftward direction with the rightward direction. And the further back one goes, the greater the kinship becomes, and the more they share in consciousness as well. That is why Goethe has the three Phorkyades share one eye and one tooth—a very appropriate depiction. So the three have one eye and one tooth. They have these because the senses are not yet meant to interact, but are still meant to stand in isolation. On the one hand, this expresses their kinship; on the other hand, it also expresses that the elements do not yet interact, that what occurs, for example, in us through the “left-hand” and “right-hand” human beings cannot yet take place. Goethe expresses precisely what he intends to convey. This points to very, very many things.

[ 28 ] And when you consider—as you know from “Secret Science”—that present-day humanity, with its two sexes, emerged from a single-sex state! The masculine and feminine only took shape in the course of evolution. A regression will take place. By confronting evil in the form of ugliness and joining forces with it, by going with the Phorcids, Mephistopheles says:

I'm already standing there...

[ 29 ] — after he had formed an alliance with the Phorcys —

There I stand,
Chaos’s beloved son!

[ 30 ] Phorkyades:

We are, without a doubt, the Daughters of Chaos.

[ 31 ] And Mephistopheles:

Now they scold me—oh, what a disgrace! Hermaphrodites.

[ 32 ] He even becomes a hermaphrodite, in order to draw attention to this circumstance, which I have now identified as the state preceding bisexuality. Goethe’s description is truly accurate. From this scene alone, one can already see how deeply Goethe intuitively understood the truths of Spiritual Science.

[ 33 ] And now, let me remind you that I said recently: One cannot arrive at a satisfactory worldview if, seduced by what human beings are and must be, one arrives—on the one hand, for example—at abstract ideals that then lack any power—like natural forces that cannot intervene in the physical order of the world, and which must therefore dissipate like mist when the earth reaches its destination, that is, when it reaches its grave—one who is either such an abstract idealist or a materialist will not arrive at a satisfying worldview. — One must be both, I said. One must be able to rise to spiritual ideas, and one must be able to view what is material in a material way and form materialistic mental images of it. One must be able to form both a materialist and an idealist worldview, not by creating a unity through abstract concepts, but rather—by having, on the one hand, the concepts of the natural sciences and, on the other hand, the idealist concepts—one must allow the two to intertwine. Just as spirit and matter intertwine, so too, as I told you, must one in the very process of cognition illuminate and penetrate the material through the ideal, and the ideal through the material.

[ 34 ] Goethe also realized this. He realized how one-sided it is when “people seek, in abstract concepts, a worldview that is either more inclined toward matter or more inclined toward spirit.” And so he was not inclined to seek a worldview in such abstract concepts, but sought to proceed differently. He characterizes this different approach as follows: Since many of our experiences cannot be fully articulated or directly communicated, I have long since chosen the method of revealing the secret meaning to those who pay attention through forms that are set in contrast to one another and, as it were, reflect one another.

[ 35 ] Well, how could one express more clearly that one is not an idealist or a realist, but rather both an idealist and a realist, and that these two worldviews are reflected in one another! Goethe seeks to approach the truth from the most diverse perspectives of the world and to arrive at it through the mutual reflection of concepts. Thus, the path that Spiritual Science must take to lead humanity toward the future—a future of salvation—is already contained within Goethe’s impulses.

[ 36 ] One would like to see this approach build on Goethe’s work. But then, above all else, something like Faust must be read! Yet humanity has, to a greater or lesser extent, lost the habit of reading. The fact is that people will at most say, when they see: Luna, Diana, Hecate—the breast-expanding one, the one with the deepest meaning, the one who appears calm yet is violently intense—well: poetic. You don’t have to go very far with that; you don’t have to get bogged down in overanalyzing every word. People today take comfort when they are offered something they don’t actually need to believe in, because they want to skim over things like that. But the world won’t allow that. If you think of the serious truth that I just had to articulate in connection with Mephistopheles’ encounter with the Phorcys, and which is nevertheless preserved—albeit poorly— in some of today’s occult schools, then—along with much else from which you have the opportunity to recognize the great seriousness of Spiritual Science endeavor, the seriousness that must lie at the heart of this endeavor—you will already begin to understand. Sometimes—one might say only half-consciously—such a sigh wells up from people who have come close to what is necessary for the human being of the future, as it did with Nietzsche when he composed his “Midnight Song”: “The world is deep, and deeper than the day imagines.”

[ 37 ] It must be said: the day gives human beings their awareness of the day, but human beings achieve no more of themselves than a homunculus—not a Homo—if they limit themselves to what the day brings. For the world is deep, and deeper than the day is conceived. And since Goethe did not want to introduce Faust merely to what the day brings, but to what eternities hold, he had to have him take the path in communion with the homunculus and with Mephistopheles, who goes forth toward the supernatural. Goethe, in turn, believed he could draw near to this by immersing himself in Greek mental images and bringing them to life within himself.