Goethe and the Crisis of the Nineteenth Century

GA 171 — 30 September 1916, Dornach

Seventh Lecture

Following a performance of the scene in the study from “Faust I”

Today I would like to take up the subject of what we have just seen, Goethe's “Faust”, in order to gain a unity from it that will then make it possible to arrive at a more comprehensive consideration tomorrow.

We have seen how the transition from the 14th, 15th to the 16th, 17th century marks an extraordinarily significant turning point in the overall development of humanity, the transition from the Greco- Roman age to our fifth post-Atlantic period, to the period in which we now live, from which our impulses for all knowledge and also for all action flow, to the period that will last until the fourth millennium. Now, from all that you know about Goethe's “Faust” and the connection between Goethe's “Faust” and the Faust figure as it comes from the legend of the 16th century, you will realize that both this Faust figure from the 16th century and that which Goethe's perception formed out of it, is intimately connected with all the transitional impulses that the new age has brought forth in spiritual and thus also in external-material terms. Now in Goethe's case it is really true that precisely this problem of the dawning of the new age and the continued working of the impulses of the old age was so tremendously powerful that he was inspired throughout the sixty years during which he created his Faust by the question: What are the most important tasks, the most important attitudes for modern man? And Goethe could truly look back to the past age, which even science today knows so little about, that past age that ends with the 14th, 15th century. What history reports – I have said it often – about the human soul, about human abilities and needs in earlier centuries, is basically something that is very much a gray theory. In the souls of people in earlier centuries, in the centuries that preceded the age of Faust, things looked very different from the souls of people in the present, from the souls of the present human epoch. And Goethe has truly embodied a figure, a personality in his Faust, who looks back on the state of mind of people in earlier centuries, in centuries long past, and who at the same time looks forward to the tasks of the present, to the tasks of the future.

In that Faust first looks back to the times preceding his own, he can, of course, see only the ruins of a perished culture, a spiritual culture. He can see the ruins. We must first of all consider the sixteenth-century Faust, who is a historical figure who really lived and who then became part of the folk legend. This Faust still lived in the old sciences that he had appropriated, lived in magic, in alchemy and in mysticism, which was the wisdom of earlier centuries, namely the wisdom of the time that preceded Christianity; but in the time in which the historical Faust of the 16th century lived, it was already in a state of profound decline. What was regarded as alchemy, magic, mysticism by those among whom Faust lived in the Faust era was already quite a strange stuff; it was a stuff based on traditions, on legacies from older times, but in which people no longer knew their way around. The wisdom that lived in it was no longer known. One had many sound formulas from ancient times, many correct insights from ancient times, but one understood them only poorly.

Thus, in this respect, the historical Faust was placed in an age of decaying spiritual life. And Goethe continually mixed up what the historical Faust experienced with what he had created for the Faust of the 18th century, the Faust of the 19th century, and even the Faust of many centuries to come. Hence we see Goethe's Faust looking back to the old magic, to the old kind of wisdom, mysticism, which did not practice chemistry in today's materialistic sense, which, through its dealings with nature, wanted to come into contact with a spiritual world, but which no longer had the knowledge to do so in the right way, in the right way of earlier times. What was considered to be medicine in centuries long gone is not as foolish as today's science often wants to believe, but the actual wisdom contained in it has been lost, and it was already partly lost in the age of Faust. Goethe was well acquainted with it. But he did not know it intellectually alone, he knew it with his heart, he knew it with all the powers of his soul, which are attached to the welfare and salvation of humanity and which are particularly relevant for the salvation of humanity. He wanted to answer the questions, the riddles, that arose for him from this, in such a way that one could recognize how, proceeding further and further, one could arrive at other wisdoms regarding the spiritual world that were just as suitable for more recent times, as the ancients knew such wisdom, which, according to the course of human development, must necessarily fade away. Therefore, he lets his Faust become a magician. Faust has surrendered to magic, like the Faust of the 16th century. But he remains unsatisfied for the simple reason that the actual wisdom of ancient magic had already faded away. Ancient medicine also came from this wisdom. All knowledge of prescriptions and all medicine was connected with ancient chemistry, alchemy.

Now, such a question immediately touches on the deepest secrets of humanity: that in truth one cannot cure diseases without at the same time being able to create them, for example. The ways to cure diseases are at the same time the ways to create them. We shall hear presently how the principle held good in ancient wisdom that the healer could at the same time be the producer of disease, and how therefore in ancient times the art of healing was associated with a deeply moral world view. But we shall also see shortly afterwards how little could have developed in these ancient times that is called the more recent freedom of human development, which was actually only tackled by humanity in this, our fifth period, following the Greco-Roman period. We shall see how this should have been if the ancient wisdom had remained.

In all fields, however, this wisdom had to perish, so that man had to start from scratch, so to speak, but in such a way that he could strive for freedom with knowledge and action at the same time. He would not have been able to do so under the influence of the old wisdom. In such times of transition as those in which Faust lived, the decay of the old is there; the new has not yet come. Then such moods arise as can be observed in “Faust” in the scene that precedes the one we presented today. In this scene we see quite clearly how out of step Faust is with the times and how he feels out of step. We see how Faust, accompanied by his servant Wagner, goes out of his cell into the countryside, how he first looks at the people celebrating Easter outdoors, in the countryside, and how he himself gets into the Easter mood. But we immediately see how he does not want to accept the homage that the people offer him. An old farmer appears, steps up to Faust and offers homage because the people believe that Faust, the son of an old adept, an old healer, is also an important healer who can bring healing and blessing to the people. An old farmer steps up to Faust and says:

Truly, it is very well done
That you appear on this happy day;
Have you not always meant well with us
In evil days!
Many a man is still alive here
Whose last fever was snatched from you
snatched from the raging feverishness,
When he set the plague a limit.
Even then you, a young man,
you went to every hospital,
Many a corpse was carried away,
But you came out healthy,
Passed many hard tests:
the helper helped the helper above.

So says the old farmer, remembering how Faust is connected with the old healing arts, which, however, were not only related to the healing of physical illnesses, but also to the healing of the moral evils of the people. Faust knows that he no longer lives in an age in which the old wisdom of mankind was truly helpful, but already in a period of decline. And in his soul glows modesty, but at the same time dejection at the untruthfulness he actually faces; and he says:

Only a few steps up to that stone;
Here we want to rest from our wandering.
Here I often sat alone, thoughtful
And tormented myself with prayers and fasting.
In hope, rich, in faith,
With tears, sighs, hand-wringing
I thought to force the end of that plague
From the Lord of Heaven.
The crowd's applause now sounds like scorn to me.
Oh, could you read my mind,
How little father and son
Were worthy of such fame!
My father was a dark honorable man
Who meditated on nature and its sacred circles
In all honesty, but in his own way,
With whimsical effort;
Who, in the company of adepts,
Locked himself in the black kitchen
And, according to endless recipes,
Poured together the adverse.
Then a red lion, a bold suitor.
who wooed a lily in a lukewarm bath.
And then both of them, with open flames,
were tormented from one bridal chamber into another.

Goethe had studied very well how they proceeded in those days, how they treated the “red lion”, the mercury oxide, sulfur mercury, how they treated the various chemicals that were mixed together and left to their processes, how they made medicines out of them. But all this no longer corresponded to the old wisdom. Goethe also knew the terminology; what you had to represent was definitely represented in images. The compounds of substances were depicted as a marriage. That is why he says:

Tormented from one bridal chamber to another.
Then the young queen appeared in the glass with bright colors.

• that was an artistic expression. Just as in today's chemistry, when certain substances have reached a certain state and color, they are called “the young queen”.

Here was the medicine, the patients died.

They died at that time from the fist, as they still do today from many medicines.

Here was the medicine, the patients died,
And no one asked who recovered.
So we have raged with hellish Latwergen
In these valleys, these mountains
Far worse than the plague.
I myself have given the poison to thousands,
They have withered away, I must live to see
That the impudent murderers are praised!

This is Faust's self-knowledge. Faust now stands before himself, he who you know has dabbled in old magical lore in order to penetrate the secrets of nature and the spirit. But through all this he has become spiritualized. Just as Wagner, his familiar, who has been satisfied with the newer wisdom that rests in the written works, that rests in letters, Faust cannot do so. Wagner, on the other hand, is a personality who makes far fewer demands on wisdom and life. And while Faust wants to dream himself into nature to find the spirit of nature, Wagner only thinks of the spirit that flows from the theories, the parchment, the books; what comes over Faust he calls “whimsical hours”:

I myself have often had whimsical hours,

• says Wagner —

but I have never felt such an urge.
One easily gets enough of the forest and fields,
I will never envy the bird's wings.

He never wants to fly out into the world with the bird and see the world!

How differently the joys of the mind carry us
From book to book, from leaf to leaf!
Winter nights become mild and beautiful,
A blissful life warms all the limbs,
And oh! if you unroll a worthy parchment,
Then the whole of heaven descends upon you!

A complete bookworm, a complete theorist!

So, after the people have left, they now stand there: the one who wants to go into the sources of life, who wants to connect his own being with the mysterious forces of nature in order to experience these mysterious forces of nature, Faust, and the one who sees nothing but the external material life and that which is recorded in the books precisely through matter. We need not reflect much on what has gone on in Faust's inner life through all that he has experienced up to this moment, as Goethe presents it to us; but we may say, after all that we find in Faust, that his inner life one might say, has been transformed and reversed, that a real development of the soul has taken place in Faust, that he has attained a certain inner vision; otherwise he would not have been able to call up the earth spirit, which surges up and down in a storm of activity. A certain ability to see the outer world not only in terms of its external appearances, but to see the spirit that lives and moves in everything, that is what Faust has acquired. Then, from afar, a poodle rushes towards them, Faust and Wagner. The way they both see the poodle – an ordinary poodle – the way Faust sees it and the way Wagner sees it, characterizes the two people completely. After Faust has dreamt himself into the living spirit of nature, he sees the poodle:

Do you see the black dog roaming through the crops and stubble? Wagner: I saw him long ago, he seemed unimportant to me. Faust: Look at him closely! What do you think the animal is? Wagner: For a poodle, who in his own way
Plagues himself on the trail of his master. The poodle goes around in circles. Faust: Do you notice how in a wide snail's circle
He chases us around and closer and closer?
And if I am not mistaken, a whirlpool of fire is drawing behind him in his tracks.

Faust does not just see the poodle, but something stirs inside Faust; he sees something that belongs to the poodle like a spiritual. That is what Faust sees. Wagner, of course, does not see it. After all, you can't see what Faust sees with your physical eyes.

Wagner: I see nothing but a black poodle;
It may well be an optical illusion for you. Faust: It seems to me that it magically draws silent loops
Around our feet to bind us in the future. Wagner: I see him circling around us uncertainly and fearfully,
because he sees two unknowns instead of his master.

Thus, in this simple manifestation, Faust also sees something spiritual. Let us hold on to that. Faust, whose mind is gripped by a certain spiritual connection with this poodle, now goes to his study. Now, of course, Goethe dramatically presents the scene in such a way that the poodle is as he is; that is also good, the drama must present it that way. But basically, we are dealing with something that Faust experiences inwardly. And the way this scene unfolds, how Faust experiences something inwardly here, is truly masterfully expressed by Goethe in every word. They remained outside, Faust and Wagner, until late into the night, when the external light no longer works, when only the twilight has worked. In the twilight, Faust sees what he wants to see spiritually. Now he comes home to his cell. Now he is alone with himself. A person like Faust, after going through all this, left alone with himself, is able to experience self-knowledge, that is, the life of the spirit in one's own self. He expresses how his innermost being has been stirred, but in a spiritual way:

I left the fields and meadows,
Which a deep night covers,
With foreboding, holy horror
In us the better soul awakens.
Now wild instincts have fallen asleep
With every impetuous deed;
Human love stirs,
The love of God stirs now.

The poodle growls. But let us be clear: these are inner experiences; even the poodle's growling is an inner experience, even if it is dramatically portrayed externally. Faust has entered into decaying magic, into an alliance with Mephistopheles. Mephistopheles is not a spirit who leads him into progressive, regular spiritual forces; Mephistopheles is the spirit that Faust must first overcome, who is sent to him to overcome him, who is given to him for trial, not for instruction. That is to say, we now see Faust standing before us, on the one hand aspiring to enter into the spiritual world of divinity, which carries forward the evolution of the world, and on the other hand, the forces in his soul are stirring, drawing him down into the ordinary life of instinct, which diverts man from spiritual striving. Precisely when something sacred stirs in his soul, it scoffs; the opposing instincts scoff. This is now wonderfully presented in the form of external events: Faust, so to speak, striving for the divine-spiritual with all his knowledge, and his own instincts, which growl against it, just as the materialistic sense of man growls against spiritual striving. And when Faust says, “Be quiet, Poodle, don't growl,” he is basically calming himself. And now Faust speaks – that is, in this case, Goethe allows Faust to speak in a wonderful way. Only when one delves into the individual words does one find how wonderfully Goethe knows the inner life of the human being in spiritual development:

Oh, when in our narrow cell
The friendly lamp burns again,
Then it becomes light in our bosom,
In the heart that knows itself.

— that is, seeks the spirit in its own self.

Reason begins to speak again

— a very meaningful sentence! For the one who undergoes spiritual development, who is brought into contact with Faust through his life, knows that reason is not just something dead within, who not only knows rational reason, who knows how alive reason becomes, how inner spiritual weaving becomes reason and really speaks. This is not just a poetic image:

Reason begins to speak again,
And hope begins to flourish again.

“Reason begins to speak again” - about the past that has remained alive from the past, “And hope begins to flourish again”, that is, we find our will transformed so that we know: we shall pass through the portal of death as a spiritually living being. The future and the past combine wonderfully. Goethe wants Faust to say that Faust knows how to find the inner life of the spirit through self-knowledge.

One longs for the streams of life,
alas! for the source of life.

And now Faust seeks to get closer to what he is yearning for: the source of life. He first seeks one path: the path of religious uplift; he reaches for the New Testament. And the way he reaches for the New Testament is a wonderful representation of Goethe's wisdom-filled drama. He reaches for the one containing the most profound words of wisdom of modern times, the Gospel of John. He wants to translate this into his “beloved German”. The fact that Goethe chooses the moment of translation is significant. He who is familiar with the workings of deep world and spiritual realities knows that when wisdom is transferred from one language to another, all spirits of confusion arise and intervene. In the borderlands of life, the powers that oppose human development and human salvation are particularly evident. Goethe deliberately chooses the translation to place the spirit of wrongdoing, even the spirit of lies, which is still in the poodle, next to the spirit of truth. If you consider the feelings and sensations that can flow out of such a scene, the wonderful spiritual depth that lives in these scenes becomes apparent. All the temptations that I have just characterized, which come from what is in the poodle, which rise up to distort the truth into untruth, all this has an ongoing effect and has an effect precisely in an act of Faust, which gives one the opportunity to distort truth into untruth. And how little we actually notice that Goethe intended this is shown today by the various interpreters of Faust, for what do these various interpreters of Faust say about this scene? Well, you can read it; it says: Goethe is a man of the outer life, for whom the “word” is not enough. He has to correct the Gospel of John, he has to find a more correct translation; not: “In the beginning was the word,” the Logos, but: “In the beginning was the deed!” That is what Faust finds out after much hesitation. That is a profound Goethean wisdom. This wisdom is not a Faustian wisdom, it is a genuine Wagnerian wisdom, a true Wagnerian wisdom, just like the wisdom that is so often emphasized that Faust later says such beautiful words to Gretchen about religious life: Who can name him, who confess him, the all-embracing one who holds and carries everything, and so on, is a Gretchen wisdom. What Faust says to Gretchen has been quoted over and over again, and it is repeatedly presented as a profound piece of wisdom by the gentlemen who cite it, the learned gentlemen.

Who may name it?
And who confess:
I believe it?
Who feel
And dare
To say: I do not believe it?
The All-embracing,
The All-sustaining,
Does it not embrace and sustain
You, me, itself?
Does not the sky arch up there?
Does not the earth lie down here firmly?
And do not friendly looking
eternal stars rise up?
Do I not look you in the eye,
and does not everything
press towards you as head and heart

and so on. What Faust says is often presented as a profound piece of wisdom. Now, if Goethe had meant it to be the very deepest wisdom, he would not have put it into Faust's mouth at the moment when he wants to educate the sixteen-year-old Gretchen. It is a piece of wisdom for the ages! You just have to take things seriously. The scholars have only been taken in. They have taken what is a Gretchen saying for profound philosophy. And so, too, what appears as a translation of the Bible in Faust is taken for a particularly profound saying, whereas Goethe intends to depict nothing other than how truth and error toss man to and fro when he sets about such a task. Goethe has portrayed these two souls of Faust in great depth in this translation of the Bible.

It is written: “In the beginning was the Word!”

We know that it is the Greek Logos. This is really written in the Gospel of John. In contrast to this, that which is symbolized by the poodle rears up in Faust and does not want to let him come to the deeper meaning of the Gospel of John. Why did the writer of the Gospel of John choose the word, the Logos? Because the writer of the Gospel of John wants to emphasize that what is most important in human development on earth, what really makes man outwardly human in his development on earth, did not develop gradually, but was there in the very beginning. What distinguishes man from all other beings? Because he can speak, all other creatures, animals, plants, minerals cannot. The materialist believes that man has only come to the word, that is, to language, to the Logos, which is permeated by thinking, after he has gone through the animal development. The Gospel of John takes the matter deeper and says: No, in the beginning was the word. That means: Man's evolution is originally predisposed; man is not merely the highest peak of the animal world in the materialistic-Darwinian sense, but in the very first intentions of the earth's evolution, in the very beginning, in the beginning was the word. And only through this can man develop an ego on earth, which animals do not achieve, that the word is interwoven with human evolution. The word stands for the human ego. But the spirit that is given to Faust, the spirit of untruth, rebels against this truth, and it must go deeper down; it cannot yet understand the profound wisdom that lies in the words of John.

Here I already falter!

But it is actually the poodle, the dog in him, and what is in the poodle that makes him falter. He does not get any higher, on the contrary, he gets lower.

Here I stand still! Who will help me further on?
I cannot possibly value the word so highly;
I must translate it differently
when I am properly enlightened by the spirit.

While he sees Mephistopheles drawing near to him, he believes that he is enlightened by the spirit; but he is darkened by the spirit of darkness and comes down.

Written is: “In the beginning was the mind.”

This is no higher than the word. Sense prevails, as we can easily demonstrate, even in the lives of animals; but the animal does not come to the human word. Man is capable of sense through having an astral body. Faust descends deeper into himself, from the ego into the astral body.

“In the beginning was Sense.”
Consider well the first line,
Lest thy pen be over-hasty.

He thinks he is rising higher, but he is descending lower.

Is it Sense that works and creates all?

No, he descends even lower, from the astral to the denser material etheric body, and writes:

“In the beginning was the power!”

Power is that which lives in the etheric body.

But even as I write this down,
something is already warning me not to dwell on it.
The spirit helps me!

The spirit that is in the poodle!

Suddenly I see the counsel
And write with confidence: “In the beginning was the deed!”

And now he has arrived at complete materialism; now he is at the physical body through which the outer deed is accomplished.

Logos, Word: I
Sense: Astral body
Strength: Etheric body
Deed: Physical body

So you have Faust alive and well in a piece of self-knowledge. He translates the Bible wrongly because the various members of the human being, which we have discussed so often, I, astral body, etheric body, physical body, work together in him in a chaotic way through the Mephistophelian spirit. Now it also shows how these instincts prevail, because the outer barking of the poodle is what rebels against the truth in him. In his knowledge, he cannot yet recognize the wisdom of Christianity. We see this in the way he relates word, meaning, power and deed. But the urge to embrace Christianity is already alive in him. By making active that which lives in him as the Christ, he conquers the opposing spirit. At first he tries what he has retained from ancient magic. The spirit does not retreat, it does not show itself in its true form. He invokes the four elements and their spirits: salamander, sylph, undine, gnome; none of this distracts the spirit that is in the poodle. But when he invokes the Christ-figure, the “maliciously pierced one, poured out through all the heavens,” the poodle must show its true form.

All this is basically self-knowledge, a self-knowledge that Goethe makes very clear. What happens? A traveling scholastic! Faust is truly practicing self-knowledge; he is basically confronting himself. First, in the form of the poodle, the wild instincts that have rebelled against the truth have taken effect, and now, to a certain extent, he becomes clear, clearly unclear: the traveling scholastic stands before him; but it is only the other self of Faust. He himself has become little more than a wandering scholastic with all the fallacies that are to be found in the wandering scholastic. Only now, through his union with the spiritual world, he has come to know the drives more precisely, and so the wandering scholastic, that is, his own self, as he has appropriated it so far, now confronts him more crudely and thoroughly. He has learned like a scholastic, like Faust; only then he has surrendered to magic, and through magic, scholasticism has been demonized. What has become of the old good Faust, when he was still a wandering scholastic, he has only become through the fact that he has still relied on the old magic. The wandering scholastic is still in him; he confronts him in a transformed form. It is only his own self. This wandering Scholastic is also the self. The struggle to get rid of everything that rode up as the self is now contained in the further scene.

Goethe always tries to show only Faust's other self in the various forms in which Faust appears together, so that Faust recognizes more and more of himself. Perhaps some of the listeners remember that in earlier lectures I explained how Wagner is also in Faust himself, how Wagner is also only another self of Faust. Even Mephistopheles is only another self. All of this is self-knowledge! Self-knowledge is practiced through knowledge of the world. But all of this is not present in Faust in clear spiritual knowledge; it is all contained in Faust in unclear, dull spiritual-visionary power that one might say is still influenced by ancient atavistic clairvoyance. It is not clarified. It is not bright knowledge; it is dream-like knowledge. We are shown how the dream spirits, which are actually group souls of all those beings that accompany Mephistopheles, beguile Faust, and how he finally awakens. And there Goethe says, there Goethe lets Faust say very clearly:

Am I then again deceived?
Does the ghostly urge thus vanish,
That a dream lied to me about the devil,
And that a poodle sprang from me?

Goethe repeatedly uses the method of hinting at the truth again and again. That he actually means it as an inner experience of Faust is clearly enough expressed in these four lines. This scene also shows us how Goethe struggled to understand the transition from the old age to the new one in which he himself lived, from the fourth post-Atlantic period to the fifth post-Atlantic period. The boundary is in the 14th, 15th, 16th century. As I said earlier, anyone who lives in today's thinking cannot, unless they do special studies, get a good idea of the development of the soul in past centuries. And in Faust's time, only the ruins remained.

You see, we often experience that today people do not want to approach the newer spiritual research that we are striving for, but want to reheat the old wisdom. Many a person believes that by rehashing the knowledge of the ancients, they can arrive at a deeper, magical-mystical wisdom about nature. I would like to say that two fallacies are extremely close to all of man's spiritual endeavors. The first is that people buy old, ancient books, which they then study and value more highly than newer science. They usually value them more only because they do not understand them, because the language can really no longer be understood. That is the one nonsense, that one comes again and again with the content of the old books, which has become gibberish, when one wants to talk about spiritual research. The other thing is that one wants to give the newer endeavors old names if possible and thereby sanctify them. Look at some of the societies that call themselves occult or secret or whatever: their whole endeavor is to date themselves back as far as possible, to explain as much as possible about a legendary past, to take pleasure in old naming. That is the second nonsense. You don't need to go along with any of this if you really understand the needs and impulses of our time and the necessary future. You can open any book from the time when traditions were still present, so to speak. You can pick out any book where traditions were still present: from the way it is presented, you can see that legacies, traditions, were present from an ancient, primordial wisdom that humanity possessed, but that this wisdom had fallen into decline. The language, everything is still there, even quite late.

I have a book at hand that was printed in 1740, so it was only published in the 18th century. I would like to read a short passage from it, a passage that is certain to make many people who are seeking spiritual knowledge today think, “Abyssmal, profound wisdom!” Oh, what is contained in it all! - There are even some who believe that they understand such a passage. Now, I will first read the passage I mean:

"The king's crone shall be of pure gold, and a chaste bride shall be given him in marriage.” Therefore, if you want to work through our bodies, take the ravenous gray wolf, which is subjugated to the warlike Mars in name but is by birth a child of the old Saturn, found in the valleys and mountains of the world, and possessed of great hunger. Cast him for the body of the king, that he may have his sustenance."

That is how these chemical processes that were set up were called in ancient times; that is how certain chemical processes were spoken of, which Faust also alludes to when he talks about how a red lion marries the lily in the glass and so on. It is not proper to mock these things, for the simple reason that the way chemistry is spoken of today will sound to people who come later just as it does to us. But we should be clear that this has also just emerged, even in a very late period of decline. The term “gray wolf” is used; this refers to a certain ore that can be found everywhere in the mountains and that is subjected to a certain procedure. “King” was the term used to describe a certain state of substances; and what is being described here is meant to indicate a certain handling. They took the gray ore and treated it in a certain way; this gray ore was called the “gluttonous gray wolf,” and the other was the “golden king,” where the gold, after being treated in a certain way, was the “golden king.” And so a connection arose. He describes this connection as follows:

And when he had swallowed the king – so it happens that the “gray, ferocious wolf”, that is, the gray ore that had been found in the mountains, merged with the golden king – that is a certain state of the gold after it has been chemically treated; the gold has disappeared into the gray ore. He depicts it:

“And when he has swallowed the king, make a great fire and throw the wolf into it.

– So the wolf that has eaten the gold, the golden king, is thrown into the fire –

”so that he may be completely consumed by the fire, and the king will be redeemed again.

The gold appears again!

“When this happens three times, the lion has conquered the wolf and will find nothing more to consume in him; then our body is complete, at the beginning of our work.”

So he does something in this way. If you wanted to know what he does, you would have to describe these procedures in great detail, especially how the golden king is made, but it cannot be described here. These procedures are no longer carried out today. But what does the man expect to achieve by this? He promises himself something that is not entirely out of thin air, because he has now done something. What did he actually do it for? That is, the person who had it printed will probably not have done it at all, but will have copied it from old books. But why was it done in the time when people still understood the things? You can see this from the following:

“And know that this alone is the right way to thoroughly cleanse our bodies, for Leo cleanses himself with the blood of Wolf, and the blood tincture combines wonderfully with the tincture of the lion, because the two bloods are closely related in the family tree.”

So now he praises what he has created. He has received a kind of medicine.

“And when the lion has gorged himself, his spirit has become stronger than before, and his eyes give off a proud glow like the bright sun.”

That is all the property of what he has in the test tube!

"His inner being can do a lot, and is useful for all the things he is required to do, and when he is brought to his readiness, the children of men, burdened with serious illnesses and multiple plagues, follow him, desiring to drink of the blood of his soul, and all who have ailments rejoice greatly in his spirit; for whoever drinks from this golden fountain feels a complete renewal of nature, an acceptance of evil, a strengthening of the blood, a vigor of the heart, and a perfect health of all limbs.

You see, it is indicated that you are dealing with a medicine; but it is also sufficiently indicated here that it has something to do with what appears as a moral quality in man. Because, of course, if someone who is healthy takes it in the appropriate amount, then what the man describes occurs. That is what he means, and that is how it was with the ancients who still understood something about these things.

“For whoever drinks from this golden fountain will feel a complete renewal of nature”

– in other words, through this art, which he has described, he has striven for a tincture through which real vital energy enters the human being:

“Heart strength, blood strength and perfect health of all limbs, whether they are closed inside or sensitive outside the body, for it opens up all the nerves and pores so that evil can be expelled and the good can dwell there in peace.”

I read this out first to show how even in these ruins of an old wisdom, there is a reflection of what was aspired to in ancient times. They strove to stimulate the body through external means that they had created from nature, that is, to achieve certain abilities not only through inner, moral striving, but through means of nature itself, which they had created. Hold on to that for a moment, because it leads us to something important that distinguishes our period from earlier ones. Today, it is quite easy to scoff at ancient superstition, because then you are rewarded for it by being considered an intelligent person before the whole world; whereas otherwise you are not considered an intelligent person if you see something sensible in ancient knowledge. Something that has even been lost to mankind and was bound to be lost for certain reasons, because in this pursuit of the ancient times, people could never have come to freedom. But look, you will find in old books, which now go back to older times than this book, which belongs to a very late period of decay, you will find in old books, which you know well, sun and gold with a common sign, with this sign: ©; you find moon and silver with this sign: €. For today's man, this sign, applied to gold and sun, and this sign, applied to moon and silver, for soul abilities that today's man necessarily has, is of course complete nonsense; and it is complete nonsense how literature, which often also calls itself “esoteric” literature, about these things, because most of the time one does not have the means to recognize why in ancient times the sun and gold and the moon and silver were designated with the same sign.

Let us start with moon and silver with this sign: €. You see, if we go back in time, say a few millennia before the Mystery of Golgotha, before the Christian era, then people not only had the abilities that were already in ruins at the time when such things came into being, but they had even higher abilities. When a person of the Egyptian-Chaldean culture said “silver”, they did not mean what we mean when we say silver. When a person used the word in his ancient language that meant silver to him, he applied it quite differently. Such a person had inner abilities and meant a certain kind of power that is not only found in a piece of silver, but he meant something that basically extends over the whole earth. He meant: We live in gold, we live in copper, we live in silver. He meant certain types of forces that live there and that in particular flowed strongly towards him from the moon, and he sensed that in the coarsest material sense, sensitively, also in the piece of silver. He really found the same forces emanating from the moon, but also on the whole earth, and particularly in the material sense in the piece of silver. Now, today's enlightened man says: Yes, the moon, it shines so silvery white; they just believed that it was made of silver. — It was not, but rather, one had an inner soul experience with the moon, something that lived in the entire earth's sphere as a force, and, translated into the material, with the piece of silver. So the power contained in the silver must be spread over the whole earth, so to speak.

Today, of course, people consider this to be complete nonsense when you tell them, and yet in terms of today's science it is not complete nonsense. It is not nonsense at all, not nonsense at all, because I will tell you one thing that science knows today, even if it does not always say it. Modern science knows that a body, thought of as a cube, one English nautical mile long, contains a little over four pounds of silver, finely distributed. This is simply a scientific truth that can be tested today. The ocean contains two million tons of silver, finely distributed, in the most extreme homeopathic dilution, one might say. It is truly as if the silver were spread out over the Earth. Today, when we verify this with normal knowledge, we do so by scooping up seawater and methodically testing it with all kinds of meticulous examinations. But then, using the means of today's science, we find that the world's oceans contain two million tons of silver. These two million tons of silver are not contained in it in such a way that they have somehow dissolved or something similar, but they belong to the world ocean; they belong to its nature and essence. And this was known to ancient wisdom; it knew this through the still existing fine, sensitive powers that came from ancient clairvoyance. And it knew that when one imagines the earth, one does not have to imagine this earth merely as today's geology imagines it, but that silver is dissolved in this earth in the finest way.

I could go on now, and show how gold is also dissolved, how all these metals, in addition to being deposited here and there materially, are really contained in the earth in a fine dissolution. So the ancient wisdom was not wrong when it spoke of silver. That is contained in the earth's sphere. But it was known as a force, as certain types of force. The sphere of silver contains other forces, the sphere of gold contains other forces, and so on. Much more was known about what is spread out as silver in the sphere of the earth; it was known that the power that causes the tides lies in this silver, because a certain vitalizing power of this entire terrestrial body lies in this silver, or is identical with this silver. Otherwise, there would be no tides; this peculiar movement of the sea is originally fueled by the silver content. This has nothing to do with the moon, but the moon has to do with the same force. Therefore, the tides occur in a certain relationship with the lunar movements, because both, lunar movements and tides, depend on the same system of forces. And these forces lie in the silver content of the universe.

One can, even without clairvoyant insight, merely go into such things and one will be able to prove with a certainty of proof, which is otherwise not attained in any field of science except at most in mathematics, that there was an ancient science that knew such things, that knew such things well. And connected with this knowledge and skill was what ancient wisdom was, that wisdom which really dominated nature and which must first be won again through spiritual research from the present into the future. We are living in the very age in which an old kind of wisdom has been lost and a new kind of wisdom is only just emerging. What was the consequence of this old wisdom? It had the consequence that I have already indicated. If you really knew the secrets of the universe, you could make your own human being more efficient. Do you think that people could be made more capable through external means! So the possibility existed that a person could acquire abilities simply by taking certain substances in the appropriate quantities, which today we rightly assume that a person can only have as innate abilities, as genius, as talent, and so on. It is not the fantastic dreams of Darwinism that are at the beginning of the development of the Earth, but the possibility of dominating nature and giving man moral and spiritual abilities through the treatment of nature. You will now understand that this treatment of nature must therefore be kept within very definite limits; hence the secrets of the most ancient mysteries. Whoever was to attain such knowledge, which really had something to do with these secrets of nature, which were not merely concepts and ideas and sensations, not merely beliefs, who was to attain such knowledge had first to prove himself to be completely suited to it, to want to achieve nothing, but also nothing at all for himself with this knowledge, but to apply these insights, these skills, which he acquired through this knowledge, solely in the service of the social order. That is why these insights were kept so secret, let us say, in the Egyptian mysteries. The preparation consisted of the fact that the one to whom such knowledge was transmitted gave a guarantee that he would continue to live the life he had led before in exactly the same way, that he would not gain the slightest advantage for himself, but would merely apply the proficiency he now acquired in the treatment of nature in the service of the social order. Under this condition, individuals were allowed to become initiates, who then led that ancient culture, whose wonders can be seen and are not understood because it is not known from what they arose.

But humanity could never have become free in this way. Man would have had to be turned into an automaton through the influence of nature, so to speak. An age had to come when man would work through mere inner moral forces. Thus nature is veiled from him, as it were, because he would have profaned it by releasing his instincts in the new age. And his instincts have been most released since the 14th, 15th century. Therefore the old wisdom fades away; there remains only a bookish wisdom that is not understood. For no one today would be deterred if he really understood such things as only the sentence I read to you, no one today would be deterred from using these things for his own benefit. But that would give rise to the worst instincts in human society, worse instincts than those groping advances that are produced in the scientific work of today, where one finds out in the laboratory, without being able to see into things, that this substance affects the other in this way, — where one finds out something without looking into things, well, that is now the content of chemistry. We are thus adrift; and spiritual science will first have to find its way into the secrets of nature again. But at the same time it will have to found a social order that is quite different from today's social order, so that man can recognize what holds nature together at its core without therefore being seduced into the struggle of the wildest instincts.

There is meaning and there is wisdom in human development, and that is what I have been trying to prove to you through a series of lectures. What happens in history happens, even if often through destructive forces, but in such a way that there is a meaning to historical development, even if it is often not the meaning that people dream up, and even if people have to suffer a lot as a result of the paths that the meaning of history often takes. Everything that happens in the course of time, it certainly happens so that the pendulum sometimes swings after evil, sometimes after less evil; but through this swinging, certain states of equilibrium are nevertheless achieved. And so it was that at least a few natural forces were known about until the 14th or 15th century, knowledge of which has been lost because people in more recent times would not have the right attitude towards it.

You see, it is beautifully described in the symbol that expresses the power of nature in the Egyptian legend of Isis. This image of Isis makes a moving impression on us when we imagine it standing there in stone, but at the same time veiled from top to bottom: the veiled image at Sais. And the inscription reads: I am the past, the present and the future; no mortal has yet lifted my veil. This has led to an extremely clever explanation, although very clever people have taken this clever explanation, it must be said. It is said that Isis thus expresses the symbol of wisdom, which can never be attained by man. Behind this veil is a being that must remain hidden forever, for the veil cannot be lifted. — And yet the inscription is this: I am the past, the present and the future; no mortal has yet lifted my veil. All the clever people who say, “You cannot fathom the essence” are saying, logically, roughly the same thing as someone saying, “My name is Miller; you will never learn my name.” It is exactly the same as what you always hear people say about this picture: “My name is Miller; you will never learn my name.” If you interpret “I am the past, the present and the future; no mortal has yet lifted my veil,” then, of course, this interpretation is complete nonsense. Because it says what Isis is: past, present and future – flowing time! We will talk about these things in more detail tomorrow. It is flowing time. But something quite different from what this so-called ingenious explanation wants is expressed in the words: No mortal has yet lifted my veil. What is meant is that one must approach this wisdom as one would those women who had taken the veil, whose virginity had to remain intact: with reverence, with an attitude that excludes all selfish urges. That is what is meant. She is like a veiled nun, this wisdom of earlier times. The attitude is indicated by speaking of this veil.

And so it was important that in the times when ancient wisdom was alive, people approached this wisdom in the appropriate way, or were not allowed at all if they did not approach it in the appropriate way. But in more recent times, man had to be left to his own devices. He could not have the wisdom of ancient times, the forms of wisdom of ancient times. Knowledge of certain natural forces was lost, those natural forces that cannot be recognized without simultaneously experiencing them inwardly, without simultaneously experiencing them inwardly. And in the age in which, as I explained to you eight days ago, materialism reached a certain peak, in the 19th century, at the beginning of the 19th century, a natural force arose that is characterized in its special nature by the fact that everyone today says: We have the natural force, but one cannot understand it; for science it is hidden. You know how the natural force of electricity in particular came into human use; and electrical power is such a force that man cannot experience it internally through his normal powers, it remains external to him. And more than one might think has come into being in the nineteenth century through electricity. It would be easy to show how much, how infinitely much, depends on electrical power in our present culture, and how much more will depend in the future when electrical power is used in the modern way, without going into the inner being. Much more! But it is precisely electricity that has been put in the place of the old, familiar power in the development of human culture, and through which man is to mature in a moral sense. Today, he does not think of any morality when using it. Wisdom is in the continuous historical development of humanity. Man will mature by developing still deeper damage for a while — and damage, as our days show, is sufficiently available — in his lower ego-bearer, in wild egoism; if man still had the old powers, that would be completely out of the question. It is precisely the electrical power as a cultural force that makes this possible; steam power in a certain way too, but it is even less the case there.

Now the situation is such that, as I explained to you earlier, the first fifth of our cultural period, which will last into the 4th millennium, is over. Materialism has reached a certain peak. The social forms in which we live, which have led to such sad events in our years, are really such that they will no longer sustain humanity for fifty years without a fundamental change in human souls. For those who have a spiritual understanding of world development, the electrical age is at the same time an invitation to seek a spiritual deepening, a real spiritual deepening. For the spiritual power must be added to that power, which remains unknown on the outside for sensory observation, in the souls, which rests so hidden in the deepest interior, like the electrical forces, which must also first be awakened. Imagine how mysterious the electrical power is; it was only brought out of its secret hiding places by Galvani, Volta. Something similar is true of the hidden forces that lie in human souls and are the subject of spiritual science. The two must come together, like north and south poles. And just as the discovery of electricity as a hidden force in nature was inevitable, so the power that spiritual science seeks as the hidden force in the soul will inevitably be discovered. Although many people today what spiritual science wants, now, as roughly one would have confessed at the time when Galvani was preparing the frogs and noticed from the twitching of the leg that a force was at work in this twitching frog's leg. Did science know then that this frog's leg contained everything there is to be known about electricity, including static electricity? Imagine the time when Galvani was in his simple experimental house, hanging his frog's leg outside the window hook and it began to twitch, and he observed this for the first time! It is not a question of electricity, is it, which is excited, but of contact electricity. When Galvani first realized this, could he assume: With the power with which the frog's leg is attracted, one day trains will be driven over the earth, with that power one day one will be able to send thoughts around the globe? It is not so very long ago that Galvani observed this force in his frog legs. Anyone who had already said at that time what would flow from this knowledge would certainly have been considered a fool. So it also happened that today someone who has to present the first beginnings of a spiritual science is considered a fool. A time will come when that which proceeds from spiritual science will be just as significant for the world, but now the moral, spiritual and soul world, as that which proceeded from the Galvani frog's leg was for the material world, for material culture. This is how progress is made in human development. Only if we pay attention to such things do we also develop the will to go along with what can only be in its beginnings. If the other power, the electrical power, which has been drawn from its hiddenness, is only of importance for the outer material culture and only indirectly for the moral world, then that which comes from spiritual science will have the greatest social significance. For the social orders of the future will be regulated by what spiritual science can give to people, and everything that will be external material culture will also be indirectly stimulated by this spiritual science. Today, at the end, I can only point this out.

Tomorrow we will expand the image of Faust, who, as I have already mentioned, is still half in the old and half in the new era, to create a kind of worldview image.