The Rudolf Steiner Archive

12. Instead of Homunculism and Mephistophelemism: Goetheanism

[ 1 ] Through the two reflections I offered in connection with the description of the final Walpurgis Night scene from the second part of Goethe’s Faust, I sought to convey the sense that Goethe was indeed, with his entire inner life, on a path—if one may put it that way—into the supernatural world, and that he succeeded—perhaps more than any other artist or poet—in truly developing artistic creation out of such a spiritual life, so that neither art nor wisdom is neglected in Goethe’s work, but rather each of these realms of the pursuit of wisdom finds its full and harmonious expression in its proper place.

[ 2 ] I do not wish to give the impression that, with everything I have said, I intended to offer an interpretation of this poem; that is not my intention at all. For I consider interpretations to be the most useless thing that can possibly exist in this field. All that such reflections as the two preceding ones attempt to provide is to evoke the possibilities of enjoying and absorbing a poem or a work of art within the very elements in which it was created. In a sense, such a reflection is meant only to teach the language—the language of the mind—in which such a work is written, not to interpret or explain anything, which in most cases is nothing more than a misrepresentation and a misinterpretation.

[ 3 ] If one captures the essence of this matter, then perhaps one may also make the following point. Underlying all striving for knowledge, all human striving directed toward spiritual experience in general, are two fundamental feelings. One of these fundamental feelings arises from the fact that, as human beings spend their lives between birth and death in a physical body, they must think and create mental images. After all, we would not be fully human if we did not think about things and about ourselves. But if we wish to live our lives to the fullest between birth and death in a physical body, we must not only think but also will. Feeling actually lies in the middle, between thinking and willing. Sometimes it is more like thinking and creating mental images; sometimes more like willing. Therefore, if one wishes to undertake the consideration toward which we are now heading, one can set feeling aside, look toward one pole—that of thinking and creating mental images—and also toward the other pole of human activity—that of willing. Human beings are, first and foremost, thinking and willing beings. But there is still a very special aspect to this thinking and willing. The trivial person, the ordinary average citizen, already regards whatever one can arrive at as an achievement if, on the one hand—at least according to his own mental images—he thinks as clearly as possible, thinks as intensely as possible in accordance with his own mental images, and if he wills in accordance with his own needs. But this is precisely what distinguishes the person of true knowledge—who is honest right down to the deepest core of his own being—in that, when he attempts to go further along the path of thought, he ultimately admits to himself: “Ah, with this thinking within the physical body, I can only come so close to that which I am actually striving for.”

[ 4 ] Thinking is just like striving toward a goal; you have the direction, but no clear picture of the goal. You want to rush toward the goal; you know roughly in which direction it might lie, but everything around the goal is still shrouded in darkness. You have a clear mental image of how things will look once you get there; it can only become clear. But just as you feel you are still far from the goal—in fact, at a considerable distance from it—a certain presence behind you, as it were, seizes you and holds you back, preventing you from going any further. And one feels: Thinking and mental images are driving one in a certain direction, but one is being held back. If one simply wants to remain on this path of thought in this direction, one cannot reach the goal that thinking itself—that is, mental images—actually points toward. — Thus does a person reach the one limit set upon their being for life between birth and death. And one can say: In truth, one who has not experienced all the pains and setbacks of fate that arise from being held back in this way from the goal of thought along the very path of thought itself has no deeper life of insight. — One is, in a sense, condemned to remain superficial if, due to one’s inner soul constitution, one believes that one can reach the goal of thought itself through thought. One guards against superficiality only when, precisely by attempting to think with all clarity and all intensity, one is led—through this very clarity and intensity of thought—to feel the obstacle to thinking breathing down one’s neck. This feeling of the obstacle breathing down one’s neck is a profound human experience, and without it, it is actually impossible to move from superficiality into the depths of one’s view of life.

[ 5 ] But this is not the only boundary drawn around the human being’s existence between birth and death; rather, another boundary is established where the will unfolds. Where the will unfolds, that is where, first of all, human desires—which arise from the life of instincts—take root. Human beings are driven to will by hunger and thirst in the grossest sense, by other instincts; and there is then a whole spectrum ranging from the instincts all the way up to the purest spiritual ideals. In all of this—from the coarsest instincts all the way up to the purest spiritual ideal—lie the impulses of volition. But when one attempts to step into life with volition—which was, in essence, Goethe’s very goal in his Faust, to place Faust into life through his will, so that he might experience everything in life that brings joy, everything that shatters life, everything that liberates, and everything that is sinful—if one tries to step into life with the will that passes into action, that translates into deed—then one once again comes to a limit. But now a different sensation arises. It is not so much that, as in thinking, something seizes one by the nape of the neck and holds one back from the goal, but rather that, as one wills, something seizes one and actually always carries on the act of willing in a way that one does not oneself desire. One is, so to speak, torn away from oneself in the act of willing. Then another appears in the act of willing and carries one away with it.

[ 6 ] This is the feeling that, when a person experiences it, leads them back from the superficial to the depths of a worldview. Philistine, complacent people, however, believe that if one merely trains one’s thinking sufficiently and develops one’s will sufficiently, one will reach one’s goal. But in this complacent sense of security on paths that can be fulfilled lies the superficiality of life; it does not contain what makes one capable of withstanding life’s trials—for one is tested when, with due intensity, one envisions the two limits mentioned within the depths of the soul — after due examination, crossing over an abyss, as it were, to enter another world that cannot be experienced with the consciousness that unfolds in life between birth and death. Humanity must first come to understand, precisely through Goetheanism, that what can truly be experienced is not merely the bliss of striving—which one often merely convinces oneself of, and which is often sustained only by illusions—but that what leads the human being to his goal leads him through obstacles, through disappointments, through disillusionments; and whoever resists to experience disillusionment—and thereby resists transforming and metamorphosing the whole human being at certain moments in life—cannot advance toward an understanding of humanity or a grasp of humanity.

[ 7 ] One may safely assume that, in this regard, the Christian worldview and philosophy of life in particular will undergo a significant transformation in the near future. Christianity, as it has developed within various denominations, is actually still only in its initial stage. If one were to describe what Christianity has achieved so far, one could say that it is, in essence, merely the feeling within human beings that a Christ once existed. And this feeling—that a Christ existed—was actually lost again to materialistic research in the 19th century. What Christ brought into the world, and how Christ relates to the human soul’s striving—light is to be shed on these matters in the future through Spiritual Science investigations and a spiritual way of perceiving the world, through supersensible experience, even if, for the time being, in this intellectualistic age, the vast majority of humanity will be able to have this supersensible experience only in mental images, in the images of the imagination.

[ 8 ] But these two fundamental feelings I have alluded to—regarding the two limits of human self-knowledge and self-understanding—must find a way to transition from a more passive Christianity to an active Christianity. Just think for a moment how, for so many people in the past, Christ was really nothing more than a kind of helper in times of need—for those things that people simply did not want to do themselves. That peculiar way in which the Roman Catholic Church, from a certain point onward, forgave sins—one could sin as much as one wanted, as long as one then sincerely repented, felt remorse, and so on; in that way, one was forgiven. After all, Christ was there to help in times of need, to make amends for what one had no real intention of making amends for to any significant degree—this deviation in which one actually remains passive, organizing one’s worldly life and worldly pursuits for oneself, and then, perhaps, simply by believing in Christ—by feeling completely connected to Christ in passivity, allowing oneself to be redeemed by Christ—this twofold passive attitude toward Christ belongs to the past and must belong to the past. And what must take its place must be a relationship with Christ as an active force, a meeting Christ halfway—not so that He does for oneself what one does not like to do, but so that, through His very existence, He gives one the strength to do something oneself. An active—or rather, a Christianity that becomes active—is what must take the place of a Christianity of passivity, where, basically—well, forgive me for putting it so trivially—one does whatever one wants on the physical plane and then lets God be the good man who forgives everything, as long as one returns to him at the right moment.

[ 9 ] This simultaneously marks the dividing line between the age that must have passed—the one that led into a terrible catastrophe for humanity—and the age that must come, which can only be capable of heal all the damage that has already become apparent—and that will become increasingly apparent as a result of the principle of the past. This damage still lies deep within human hearts and souls. And it must be healed if the development of the Earth is to move forward.

[ 10 ] The two fundamental sensations of limits in thinking and in willing can also be described as follows: One limit makes one aware of how one cannot approach one’s own being. — Yes, as human beings we are truly such that, on the one hand, we cannot reach our own human nature, and we cannot reach ourselves through our thinking. In volition, however, we do reach ourselves, for volition truly emanates from us. But there, in turn, another—another worldly being—seizes us, and we lose ourselves. In thinking we do not reach ourselves, and in volition we lose ourselves. Human beings are simply constituted as earthly beings according to the principle of this dualism; they are dual beings, not monads, but dual beings. One aspect of this dualistic being cannot reach itself, while the other aspect of this dualistic being loses itself.

[ 11 ] Therefore, one never truly portrays a human being by depicting them “merely as a monon,” but only by attempting to portray them as a middle state between the inability to attain oneself and the loss of oneself. And when one feels both of these at the same time with full intensity, then one truly feels like an earthly human being. When one feels a kind of oscillation back and forth between the inability to reach oneself and losing oneself, then one feels like an earthly human being. And what one must attain, even while caught up in such an oscillation, is the tranquility of existence. The tranquility of existence is achieved in the physical realm through the pendulum; it achieves equilibrium. In the spiritual-moral realm, human beings must be able to achieve the same state that the pendulum and the balance achieve in their state of rest. A person should not strive for absolute rest; that makes them lazy and causes them to stagnate. A person should strive for the state of rest that is the middle ground between the extremes—between not achieving anything and losing oneself.

[ 12 ] If one wishes to develop such feelings properly, then other feelings about life and reality must also be added in a significant way.

[ 13 ] I have often pointed out to you just how one-sided the concept of development actually is today. Just consider for a moment that the entire process of development is viewed today as if the next stage were always extracted from the previous one. In fact, people today imagine the successive stages of development roughly like a series of cardboard boxes nested one inside the other. And now, as it develops—one cardboard box represents the human being from birth to the age of seven. Then you take out the second one, and you have the person from the seventh to the fourteenth year. Then the third, and you have the person from the fourteenth to the twenty-first year, and so on, one after another. This linear progression in development is what is most comfortable for people today.

[ 14 ] This also underlies all the grotesque mental images we learn in school today, which in the future will be portrayed as the scientific madness of the Enlightenment period of the 19th and 20th centuries. To imagine that there was once a state of primordial mist—the Kant-Laplacean theory—and then, little by little, one thing emerging from another, a cardboard box emerging from another cardboard box, one emerging from the other, with each subsequent state always arising from the previous one—that is the pathological mental image of the present. For that is not how things are. Just consider how the development of an individual human being between birth and death presents itself to you upon reasonably unbiased observation.

[ 15 ] Isn’t it true that the real boundary of the first period of life is the change of teeth—the emergence of the second set of teeth? I have often drawn attention to this. What, then, is this emergence of the second set of teeth around the age of seven, when the first period of life comes to a close? It is a process of consolidation, a hardening of the human being—or rather, this hardening takes shape within the human being. It is like a contraction of all life forces, enabling the body to produce, as a final act, the densest, most mineralized substance: the permanent teeth. It is a genuine contraction of all life forces into density.

[ 16 ] The second stage of life concludes with sexual maturity. Here, the exact opposite is true. There is not, once again, a contraction leading to the hardening of all life forces, but rather, on the contrary, a dilution of all life forces, a drifting apart, a becoming lush. There is an opposite state pulsating within the organism.

[ 17 ] And only slightly refined, but still in the same way, when the third period of life comes to a close around the age of twenty-one. At that point, a person consolidates once more, drawing their strength inward. By the age of twenty-eight, they expand it once again. The twenty-first year: contraction, focusing more on what lives within. The twenty-eighth year: expansion, focusing more on what connects them to the whole wide world. Around the age of thirty-five—roughly speaking—there is once again a kind of contraction. That is, after all, the midpoint of life, the thirty-fifth year.

[ 18 ] So development is not so linear, but rather moves in a wave-like pattern: contraction, hardening; softening, expansion; contraction, hardening; softening, expansion. Essentially, this is also the life of a human being on a grand scale. When we are born into the physical world, we contract so that we are contained within our skin. As we go through the period between death and a new birth, we expand more and more.

[ 19 ] What follows from all this? It follows that the concept of development, which conceives of development only in a linear fashion, is useless; that it misleads humanity and must be discarded. For all development proceeds in rhythm. All development proceeds in a cycle: trough, crest, contraction, expansion.

[ 20 ] Goethe, too, had a premonition of this at a fundamental level. Read his Metamorphosis of Plants; just read the poem “The Metamorphosis of Plants,” and you will see how that peculiar formation—which proceeds from leaf to leaf, then to petal, then to stamen, then to pistil—is depicted by Goethe as a continuous process of expansion and contraction, not only in purely external structures, but also in the sap, whose forces expand, contract, expand again, and concentrate. In the 1880s, when I wrote my first introduction to Goethe’s scientific works, I attempted to reconstruct Goethe’s “primordial plant,” striving to incorporate into the image this process of expansion and contraction, expansion and contraction, all the way up to the flower. Thus, no one can truly grasp life who does not have a mental image of it that is rhythmical, in a rhythmic process. Linear development—this must be emphasized again and again—is an idea that is of no use in truly grasping life.

[ 21 ] And the same is true of our understanding of the historical life of humanity. In the most recent issues of the journal Das Reich, where I have discussed the Ahrimanic and Luciferic aspects of life, I have pointed out how Luciferic and Ahrimanic periods alternate rhythmically in historical development. Life does not proceed in a straight line, but moves from crest to trough. But this is linked to an external change as well, as we move from the crest of a wave to its trough. And only by seeing through these relationships can one arrive at a deeper understanding of life. Those who conceive of evolution as a straight line think: First there were the most imperfect animals, then increasingly perfect ones, then ape-like animals, and from these, human beings evolved. - And when one applies this to morality—I have drawn your attention to this many times before, including in public lectures—when one extends this further, well, then the true, die-hard Darwinist ends up saying: “One can already see moral impulses, instincts, and predispositions in the animal kingdom that then lead to human benevolence and so on!” — Yet another futile mental image, for it takes no account whatsoever of the rhythm of life. It conceives of evolution as a straight line, one cardboard box emerging from another. In truth, the matter is as follows. Imagine the most highly developed animals, with their peculiarities, evolving further—developing in a straight line—and what emerges is not a human being, nor would a human ever emerge from this process, but rather a more highly developed animal that would develop precisely those characteristics that you find appealing in the animal kingdom in the most repulsive way possible. That which you admire in animals—a certain sociability, the beginnings of benevolence, or social behavior—when developed further, rhythmically reverses into its opposite and becomes the principle of evil. Had humankind developed as Haeckel has in his mental image, then a human society would have emerged from the human-like apes that would have fully developed the war of all against all from the very beginning. For within all the predispositions that are still good in animals lies the further impulse of development toward an explosion into the most violent, bloodiest struggle. That is the rhythm! A crest turns into a trough, and no one can see into what nature conceals unless they look at the possibilities of development within the rhythm. Observing what happens from the outside never teaches us to recognize what is truly there. It was only because the possibilities for development inherent in the higher animals did not come to the fore at all, but were met by another wave of world-becoming that stifled the emergence of evil and, in a sense, superimposed upon that emergence what human beings were meant to be from the very beginning—it was only through this that humanity developed. So one must create a mental image: the animal kingdom up to a certain level; meeting it head-on, the other wave, which blunts the emergence of evil.

[ 22 ] Reincarnation can also be viewed from a moral perspective. What do you think would become of human beings if they were simply born over and over again here on the physical plane, if what is born purely physically on the physical plane were not met by that which is constantly received into the spiritual world and sent back down again? If human beings were merely born, if they were not animated by the beings who are continually received into the spiritual world and then sent back down, then human beings would live only in war on Earth, would want to live only in struggle on Earth, and the most terrible instincts for struggle would develop. These instincts for struggle lie dormant at the very foundation of the human soul; they lie dormant within the human organism. And they are tempered by that which—if I may put it this way—comes from above, that which comes from the spiritual world from the human being who is continually received back into the spiritual world.

[ 23 ] This is also reflected in the external form. To the discerning observer, it is downright grotesque when the human head is depicted as if it had gradually evolved from an animal head. For that is utter nonsense. In truth, if the animal head were to develop further, a terrible monster would emerge from what you develop in your lower abdomen in your present incarnation. If that alone were to form the head—if it were to form the head on its own—well, that would be a true monstrosity of a head; it would be a terrible animal monstrosity. For that is where the potential for such an animal monstrosity lies. Only through the spiritual coming from above and folding over does that which is the human head come into being—arising from the union of two forces: that which strives upward from the body and that which strives toward it from the cosmos. This human head is formed as a state of equilibrium. And it is in this state of equilibrium of the human head that we cannot freely dispose of what we bring with us from the spiritual world. We slip into our physical head, and there we cannot fully express what we actually are when we rush into existence through birth. If we could think as we did before our birth—or rather, before our conception—we would not conceive of a homunculus; we would conceive of a human being, a Homo.

[ 24 ] You may recall that I briefly mentioned something like this recently when I gave the Christmas lecture in Basel, where I pointed out that Nicholas of Flüe, before his birth, had glimpsed scenes that he later experienced after his birth. There, he saw himself as a human being before his birth. But if one is born and does not overcome the “sleep of knowledge”—that is, if one cannot develop the state of being awake outside the body—but thinks only with the body, one never conceives of a human being, but only of a homunculus. One does not reach oneself by trying to enter into oneself through the head. (A drawing is made.) It is actually the case that one tries to enter into oneself, is then held back, and—somewhere in the center of the human being—that is where what one cannot reach actually lies. It is within the human being itself. One remains with the homunculus and will not reach the human being.

[ 25 ] And actually, if one had all the technical means at one’s disposal, one would place inside the vial—which is paraded across the stage as the homunculus—a small, and therefore cute, yet terrible little monster, which would in fact be what would arise if it were left solely to the human body to develop something from it. The result would be a creature that is not really an animal, but rather a human monstrosity—one that is on the path to becoming human and yet never quite becomes fully human. That is why one cannot attain it unless one can approach that which is on the path to becoming human and yet never quite becomes fully human. One cannot attain it; one cannot enter into oneself.

[ 26 ] And again, when one becomes absorbed in one’s will, another will immediately takes hold of one. Then one loses oneself, and all sorts of strange motives and impulses arise within that will. Only when one tries to bring one’s inner forces into balance does one attain true humanity.

[ 27 ] Now, compare what I have said with three moments that may come to mind as you read the second part of Faust. That uplifting moment when Faust steps before the Manto. Here, Goethe attempts to imbue this entire moment with that inner peace of the human soul which is evoked by the sensations of a state of equilibrium. Faust wishes neither to succumb to the raptures of abstract mysticism—“Could I”—that is one of his final lines—“remove magic from my path.” He does not want external magic; he wants the inner path leading up into the supernatural world. He is close to it and yet, at the same time, far from it. Goethe, as I explained yesterday, is entirely sincere in the moment when Faust stands before the Mantle. But Faust is not merely kept in abstract tranquility; rather, he is tossed back and forth by the contradictions. Thus, on the one hand, he is constantly thrown back into the contradiction where the human being loses himself by trying to grasp himself through his will. Compare all of this with what happens to Faust in the scenes where he himself, together with Mephisto, unfolds his life. There you always have the Faust of the will, who, however, always loses himself because Mephisto actually seizes his impulses. There you have the instance where the human being strays in the will, where he wants to lose himself. There you have all the dangers that threaten the moral impulses of the human being. And this is expressed with tremendous depth in Goethe’s Faust.

[ 28 ] Consider the moment when Mephisto unites with the Phorcys, when he himself takes on the form of a Phorcys, when, in all his ugliness, he also admits his ugliness—for before that he lies, but afterward, when the Phorcys embrace him, he is forced to admit his own ugliness. The Phorcys do, after all—read the Phorcys’ speech again—admit their ugliness; they are, in a sense, honest about their ugliness. In this moment, you have a moment of contrast to that sacred, sublime moment when Faust stands before Manto. That which causes us to lose ourselves in the motive of the will is so clearly evident when Mephisto appears for the last time in the “Classical Walpurgis Night.” Faust appears for the last time—visibly, outwardly, and dramatically—in the Manto scene; Mephisto in the Phorcys scene. And Goethe, drawing from his deep intuition, wanted to suggest that, fundamentally, that which causes us to lose ourselves in the motive of the will can find healing only if we do not merely abhor it morally, but if we experience it as something ugly that offends our taste. That was, after all, Schiller’s fundamental sentiment as well, when he brought the moral so close to the aesthetic in his “Letters on the Aesthetic Education of Man.”

[ 29 ] That is precisely what is so lamentable: that, in the course of humanity’s recent development, culture once reached such heights as those found, for example, in Schiller’s Aesthetic Letters, and that all of this has been forgotten by humanity. Just imagine that Schiller actually believed he was performing a political act with his Aesthetic Letters, which were originally written to the Duke of Augustenburg. One learns a great deal about the development of humanity by grasping the true depth of these two facts: first, that Schiller wrote his Aesthetic Letters based on his view of Goethe’s “life course”; and second, that this could have been forgotten—and that this forgetting has contributed to the catastrophe facing humanity today. Anyone who takes these two facts to heart truly learns a great deal about the development of humanity.

[ 30 ] And the moment is dramatically powerful when the morally forbidden lives within man as an aesthetically repulsive sensation, depicted in the truly terrifying scene where Mephistopheles stands beneath the Phorcys. There, the impulse—the essential impulse—that drives human beings to lose themselves in the pole of the will is characterized in all its abhorrence. If one does not learn to recognize it, one will fall prey to it. For only recognition frees one from it. You will find this expressed in the final scene of my first Mystery Play, The Gate of Initiation. There it is stated how only knowledge—the direct perception of that which is actually our seducer, our tempter—can also redeem us from seduction, from temptation. In the Age of the Consciousness Soul, into which we have now entered, it is therefore necessary that, in order to overcome temptation and seduction, we strive in a legitimate way for knowledge of the tempter and the seducer, rather than wallowing in a merely external understanding of nature and in a merely abstract mysticism.

[ 31 ] Finally, just as bad is abstract mysticism—the convenient notion of “comprehending the divine human being within oneself”—which results in nothing more than a terrible, selfish abstraction. This abstract mystification is just as bad as materialism.

[ 32 ] Three moments, I said, from Goethe’s Faust. Take, in a truly artistic and intuitive way, what you can feel when Faust stands before Manto; what you can feel when Mephisto, among the Phorkyades, becomes a Phorkyas himself. And now the third moment: when the homunculus shatters against Galatea’s shell chariot, and feel what this homunculus now is. We come from the spiritual world, seeking physical existence through conception and birth. In physical existence, we encounter that which is given to us from physical existence as our body. Every evening we return to the world from which we emerge through birth; every morning we must symbolically renew birth by immersing ourselves once more into the physical body. There we can feel how, coming in from the outside, we do not attain what a human being is, but how only the homunculus—the little human, the embryonic humanity—stands before us, and how difficult it is to become a real human being. We could become a true human being if we could, just before waking—when all the night’s possibilities for development have been exhausted—form a very clear mental image. This clear mental image would be a mental image of the world; this clear mental image would be such that we would feel no boundaries, that we would feel ourselves pouring out over the world; that we would feel ourselves pouring out over all the light of the world, all the sounds of the world, over all the life of the world. Before us lies something like an abyss; beyond the abyss lies the continuation of what we still feel just before we step into the abyss upon waking: warmth. Warmth—it flows across the abyss. But now, as we step across the abyss through waking, we enter into air, water, and earth, which, after all, make up our own organism. However, we draw near to the human being; we have prepared ourselves by having the homunculus fertilized in the spiritual world in order to grasp the human being. But in the ordinary course of life, we do not do what I have just indicated. The living mental image we have—which would be an experiencing of ourselves in the light, in the tone of the world, in the life of the world; which would be a coming together with the beings of the higher hierarchies; which would feel just as connected to the beings of the higher hierarchies as the physical body here feels connected to the mineral, plant, and animal kingdoms— this mental image that we would develop if sleep had done its work just before we awoke—we would have to bring it with us into waking life, we would have to immerse it into our physical human being. Then we would be able to understand what the physical human being is. But, alas:

The gods do not approve.

[ 33 ] We dive beneath the surface. It flares up, it flashes—we hardly notice it. Instead of looking inward, we look out through our eyes; instead of listening inward, we hear out through our ears; instead of feeling inward, we feel out through the tactile nerves of our skin. The homunculus, which would come to life and become human if we did not plunge into that which is accessible only through the physical eyes, through the physical ears, through physical sound, and through physical touch—the homunculus shatters in that very moment against the resistance of the elements. Sight flares up instead of the light of the world; the sound in the ear begins instead of the sound of the world; bodily life begins instead of the life of the world: the homunculus shatters. And when one experiences this consciously, one has experienced the conclusion of “The Classical Walpurgis Night.” Thus, this conclusion of “The Classical Walpurgis Night” is drawn from true, real life.

[ 34 ] These things are not meant merely to be discussed in Sunday afternoon sermons at the Anthroposophical Society; rather, they are truly meant to be gradually understood by humanity, and so that they may permeate, as essential impulses, that which must be incorporated into the future development of humanity if humanity is to move toward salvation and not toward ruin. For human beings can truly find their proper connection with reality only if they begin to acquire new concepts from this moment onward. When they begin to realize that what has always been praised as the great achievement of the 19th century is, in fact, an end.

[ 35 ] It is not surprising that, from a certain point of view, this achievement of the 19th century—which extends into the 20th century—was perceived as perfect. It is not surprising at all. For, isn’t it true that before the tree sheds all its fruit in the fall, it is at the very height of its fruitfulness? This 19th-century science, which still haunts the 20th century, all these technical perfections that have reached a certain height—they are the tree before it sheds its fruit. That upon which all this has grown is, after all, destined to wither away, and it is not enough for this tree to continue growing; rather, a new seed must be sown in the cultivated soil of humanity, and a new tree must be planted. It is not enough for us to think that we have understood the evolution of animals, that we have imagined it continuing a bit further, and then arrived at humanity. It is not enough that more and more such minds appear—who first write brilliant articles about animals and later pen a book on the origin of humankind as if it were a sequel—but it is necessary to break with the linearity of evolution, so that people may come to understand the rhythm of life, which flows in peaks and valleys; that people learn how the path into the innermost being of humanity does not proceed in a straight line, but rather across two boundaries. At one boundary, one feels as if one is about to suffocate, because someone seizes hold of you and does not let you reach the point where your thinking wants to go. On the other hand, one feels as if one were perishing, being dragged down by Mephistophelean Powers. To find the balance between homunculism and Mephistopheleanism—between dissolving into homunculism and the inability to reach oneself, and being seized by Mephistopheles and losing oneself. An understanding of this balance—that is what must come to modern humanity, and that is what Goethe, in a prescient way, lived by as a feeling when he attempted to say, in all honesty, what he had to say about the riddle of humanity in his Faust. To grow beyond what is today figuratively represented by the mental image of the shallow masses—that is precisely what humanity should strive for. Nothing is met with more hostility today than this striving. Nothing harms humanity more than this hostility toward the striving to rise above mundane everyday life. But as long as this opposition to the striving to rise above mundane everyday life is not genuinely countered by those who recognize the necessity of penetrating into the supersensible, there can be no salvation in the development of humanity.

[ 36 ] In his Homunkulus, published at the end of the 19th century, Hamerling attempted—one might say—to issue a final appeal to humanity, one that still stemmed from the old era, by portraying everything that is rotten in this newer humanity as “homunculism.”

[ 37 ] One might imagine this: someone reading Hamerling’s Homunkulus now—which was published in the late 1880s—this Homunkulus about which I have given many lectures and which I certainly spoke of with some significance even before the war. Let’s suppose someone were to read Hamerling’s Homunkulus now, allowing themselves to be moved by what Hamerling envisions regarding the development of his homunculus. He conceived all of this in the late 1880s, when the break with all forms of Goetheanism had already occurred, when people no longer wanted to know anything about Goetheanism. Hamerling depicted the homunculus’s development: how he is completely gripped by materialistic thinking, how he lives in a world where one does not enrich oneself through spiritual treasures, but does become a trillionaire— —the homunculus becomes a trillionaire—in which one engages with the spiritual world in the most frivolous manner, and in which, it must be respectfully noted, that form of journalism was already taking shape, a journalism that has since undergone an even more terrible decline. Suppose someone were to read Hamerling’s Homunculus today. Now he might say to himself: My goodness, this Hamerling—who died in 1889—actually saw humanity, as it was back then on the paths it was rushing down, with nothing but his physical eyes when he wrote his Homunkulus. Let’s suppose—as someone reading this Homunkulus today might say—that people back then had taken something like what Hamerling depicts in his Homunkulus seriously, that they had truly let it sink in a little, not merely as a literary work, but had taken it seriously; then they truly would not have been surprised if someone had said: This global catastrophe must inevitably arise from this humanity. — That is what someone reading The Homunculus today might say to themselves. What, then, is so surprising about the fact that this global catastrophe did occur, since a poet of the 1880s was able to portray the human homunculus in this way?

[ 38 ] But the call contained in this portrayal of the human homunculus is, at the same time, a call not to remain stuck in a life that amounts to nothing more than homunculism, but to cross over the abyss to where Spiritual Science speaks of the supersensible insights that alone can transform the homunculus into a homo. And so one might say: Humanity is placed within homunculism—which is situated in a world into which people today are not so eager to enter—in the scene we are depicting today, between homunculism and Mephistopheleanism, the latter of which, however, leads into the realm of the Phorkyades. —Goethe sensed this and depicted it in his Faust. He already sensed that a path must be forged that avoids both the pitfall of fantastical-abstract mysticism and the other pitfall of a ghostly view of nature detached from reality, but which leads to supersensible knowledge and, from that supersensible knowledge, also finds social impulses once again.

[ 39 ] This is, so to speak, a deeper layer of consciousness. If we penetrate it, if we imbue our perception with it, we learn, so to speak, to understand the language of that layer of consciousness, which comes from the regions where one feels; in thinking, one cannot reach oneself; in willing, one loses oneself. The inability to reach oneself through thinking is homunculic; losing oneself through willing is Mephistophelean. If one senses this, one finds oneself in such profound scenes, with a language that makes one understand precisely what is present in such a scene—such as the scene at the end of “The Classical Walpurgis Night.”

[ 40 ] After all, everyone perceives the world as it can be revealed to them according to the faculties they have been given. But humanity’s current task is to enhance these faculties so that we may perceive aspects of the world that, to the detriment of humanity, have gone unnoticed in recent decades.

[ 41 ] And so, truly immersing oneself in a scene as profound as the one we are now presenting is a way for people to move forward precisely in the direction in which humanity is now meant to progress. Just as Goetheanism in general—not the Goetheanism of professors, not the Goetheanism of the Goethe Society, which is headed not by a Goethe scholar but by a former finance minister with the symptomatic name Kreuzwendedich, not all that people felt compelled to make of Goethe at the end of the 19th century and the beginning of the 20th century—but rather what truly lies at the heart of Goetheanism—must be sought. This will be a positive development and a good impetus for moving humanity forward in the direction it must take if it is to find salvation—and not disaster—in the time to come.