The Origin and Goal of the Human Being

GA 53 — 16 February 1905, Berlin

Goethe's Secret Revelation I

The Fairy Tale of the Green Snake and the Beautiful Lily

In this and the following two lectures, we will deal with what, according to Goethe's own expression, can be called his apocalypse, his secret revelation.

We have seen to what high brotherhood Goethe counted himself. It was his conviction that knowledge is not something established once and for all from a human standpoint, but that human cognitive ability can develop and that this development of the soul is subject to a law of which man need know nothing at first, just as a plant knows nothing of the laws according to which it develops. The general theosophical teachings on the development of the human soul's capacity for knowledge are entirely consistent with Goethe's view of life. Goethe expressed this view in many ways.

He now answered a question that he had attempted to resolve in an infinitely profound way, which he approached as his friendship with Schiller grew ever closer. This bond was difficult to form, as these two personalities stood on very different intellectual ground. It was not until the mid-1890s that they found common ground and complemented each other.

220 and complemented each other. At that time, Schiller invited Goethe to collaborate on Die Horen, a magazine in which the finest products of German intellectual life were to be made accessible to the public. Goethe agreed to collaborate, and his first contribution to this magazine was his apocalypse, his “secret revelation”: The Fairy Tale of the Green Snake and the Beautiful Lily (1794/95).

This deals with the great connection between the physical and the spiritual, the earthly and the supernatural, which he wanted to explain, as well as the path that man must take through his developing cognitive abilities if he wants to ascend from the earthly to the spiritual.

This is a question that human beings must always ask themselves. Schiller had presented this problem in his own witty way in his “Letters on the Aesthetic Education of Man.” This treatise, little known and studied, is a treasure trove for those who set out to solve this riddle. Goethe was inspired by it to comment on the same question, and he did so in the fairy tale “The Green Snake and the Beautiful Lily,” which he later added to his “Conversations of German Emigrants.”

This fairy tale leads deep into theosophy. Theosophy also says that the content of our soul's knowledge is always dependent on our ability to know, and that we as human beings can develop this ability to know ever higher, so that we can gradually come to have nothing subjective in our soul as the content of our knowledge, but that we can experience an objective world content in our soul. The fairy tale “The Green Snake and the Beautiful Lily” shows the development of the human soul toward ever higher insight through the fact that all human soul forces can develop, not just the human faculty of thinking. All soul forces, including feeling and willing, can penetrate the objective secrets of the world. But they must learn to eliminate everything personal.

This fairy tale is so profound that it is worth treating it in more detail. It leads us into the depths of Goethe's worldview. Goethe himself said to Riemer that it was like the Revelation of St. John, that few would find the truth in it. Goethe put his deepest knowledge of human destiny into it. He was always very reticent about it: he said that if he could find a hundred people who understood it correctly, he would give an explanation. By the time of his death, not a hundred people had been found who could provide a solution, and the explanation was not communicated. After Goethe's death, a large number of attempts at explanation were made, which were collected by Meyer-von Waldeck. Some of them are valuable as building blocks, but they are not able to fathom the deeper meaning.

The question may arise: Why did Goethe place the secret of his life in such a fairy tale? He himself said that he could only express himself on such a question in images. In doing so, he did the same as all the great teachers of humanity who did not want to teach in abstract words, who dealt with the highest questions in images, in a symbolic way.

Even until the founding of the Theosophical Society, it was not possible to convey these highest truths other than in pictorial form. This brings about what Schopenhauer so beautifully called the “choir of spirits” when, as if through hieroglyphs, the spark is ignited in those who understand them. Where Goethe's worldview has become a very personal, very intimate one, he can only express himself in this form. Twice in Goethe's “Conversations with Eckermann” there are important references to this.

Later, Goethe expressed himself even more intimately in two other fairy tales, in “The New Melusine” (1807) and then in “The New Paris” (1810). These three fairy tales are the deepest expression of Goethe's worldview. In “The New Paris,” he says at the end: " Whether I can tell you what happens next, or whether I am expressly forbidden to do so, I cannot say. This is intended to be a hint as to the sources from which this fairy tale originates.

These fairy tales are revelations of Goethe's most intimate views on life and his worldview. The fairy tale for boys, “New Paris,” clearly points to the sources from which it originates. It begins: All the boy's clothes fall from his body, everything that man has acquired within the culture in which he lives falls away from him. A man, young and handsome, approaches the boy. The boy welcomes him joyfully. The man asks: Do you know me? And the boy replies: You are Mercury. That is who I am, and I have been sent by the gods with an important mission for you!

Let us consider these three fairy tales as Goethe's deepest revelations. First, the fairy tale of “The Green Snake and the Beautiful Lily.” The fairy tale begins in a mysterious way. Three realms are presented to us: one in this world, one in the next world, and between them is the river. It depicts the world of body, soul, and spirit, and man's path to the supernatural world. The earthly shore is the physical world, the otherworldly shore, the land of the beautiful lily, is the world of the spirit; between them is the river, the astral world, the world of desire.

Theosophy speaks of the life of the soul in the physical world, the here and now, then of Devachan, in which the soul experiences itself after death, but also when it has already freed itself from everything personal through occult development here in the physical world. Then it can ascend to the beyond, to the realm of the beautiful lily; it then finds the way to the other shore, to where human beings constantly strive, the way to the home of their soul and spirit. The stream in between, the astral world, the stream of desires and passions that separate human beings from the spiritual world, must be overcome.

A bridge is now built across the river and man enters the realm of the beautiful lily. That is the goal to which man strives. Goethe knew exactly what the lily meant in medieval mysticism. He had been initiated into the secrets of mystical worldview and was familiar with the alchemical endeavors of the Middle Ages. Having recognized the depth of mysticism on the one hand, he also encountered its trivial reflection in the distorted images of literature.

In the first part of “Faust,” he shows us in a humorous way that he was aware of the problem of man's connection with the beautiful lily. In the Easter Walk—before he meets Mephistopheles—he writes about man's endeavors in a distorted alchemy:

My father was a dark man of honor,
who pondered nature and its sacred circles,
in honesty, but in his own way,
with capricious effort;...
there was a red lion, a bold suitor,
married in the warm bath of the lily.

This is a technical term in alchemy: lily means Mercury. In theosophical worldview, Mercury is the symbol of wisdom, which man strives for, and lily is the state of consciousness in which man finds himself when he has reached the highest, has found himself. The marriage of the masculine and feminine in the human soul is depicted here. “In the warm bath” means, in the sense of alchemy, “freed from the fire of desires.” In theosophy, we speak of Ahamkara, the human ego striving to embrace the highest. This human principle, which initially strives for selfhood, is represented in alchemy as the lion, which, freed from selfhood, desires, and passions, is allowed to unite with the lily. Even though not much was known about true alchemy in the Middle Ages, the terms had been preserved. All higher truths stand before us in ethereal splendor when we, freed from stormy desires, from the lion of desires that have cooled down in the lukewarm bath, approach them. Then the human spirit can find the lily, the eternal feminine that draws us upward; it can unite with these truths of the spiritual worlds. This is a path that souls have always walked, in complete clarity. A mystic is one who strives for clarity, loftiness, and purity of vision.

There must be no sympathy or antipathy for wisdom, but only a selfless immersion in it. Because no passion is felt in the truths of mathematics, no dispute about them is possible; if human feelings were taken into account, there would also be disputes about whether two times two equals four. All higher truths stand before us in the same ethereal splendor when we express this attitude. And it was this serenity in everything that Pythagoras called catharsis, purification. Goethe described this entire path with its intimate secrets in his fairy tale, because our everyday language is truly incapable of depicting these things. Only when we succeed in describing in colorful images what lives in the soul of the mystic do we also find the linguistic path to the highest form of human consciousness, to the lily.

People like to portray mysticism as something unclear. But only those who cannot find the path to the heights are unclear. Free from brutal immediate reality, in pure ethereal heights, the mystic strives for the most precious clarity of concepts. We first need to acquire the concepts that lead us to this land of clarity. Goethe searched for this land of clarity; he strove for mathematical knowledge. Fifteen years ago, I found a notebook in Goethe's estate that confirmed that Goethe continued to engage in mathematical studies in his later years, even tackling the most difficult problems. He also conducted his studies of nature and the human soul in the spirit of a true Gnostic. From his intuitive spirit, for example, he also came up with the idea of the archetypal plant.

But just as he was difficult to understand with regard to the archetypal plant and animal, he was even more difficult to understand with regard to the life of the soul. I recall here the conversation with Schiller in Jena in 1794. Goethe expressed himself to Schiller in such a way that he said it might well be possible to find a way of looking at the world and its contents that does not, as science does, pick things apart, but rather shows the unified bond that underlies everything, pointing to something higher, something unified behind everything sensual. And Goethe drew his archetypal plant, a structure that resembled a plant, but not a living one that can be perceived with the external senses, and he said to Schiller: this is the plant nature, the archetypal plant, this is what connects plants; but this archetypal plant does not live in any single plant, but in all plant beings. This is the objective nature of all plants. — To Schiller's objection that what he called the primordial plant was an idea, he replied: “If that is an idea, then I see my ideas with my eyes.” At that time, Goethe showed how he stood in relation to the spirit; for him, there is an intuitively perceived plant that lives in every plant being. Only intuitive perception can perceive the objective behind all sensory things; only thinking free of sensuality can achieve this. The will-o'-the-wisps in fairy tales show us how thinking can develop into objectivity. Those who cannot rise to Goethe's view do not understand what he means; even Schiller did not really understand what Goethe meant at the time, but he made every effort to penetrate Goethe's worldview. Then came the letter of August 23, 1794. That was the breaking of the ice between the two minds.

Goethe incorporated much of the higher spiritual vision that lived within him into this fairy tale. Let us now try to penetrate the fairy tale.

It says: In the middle of the night, two will-o'-the-wisps wake the old ferryman, who is sleeping on the other side of the river — that is, in the spiritual world — and want to be ferried across. He ferries them across the storm-tossed river from the realm of the lily. They behave badly, dancing in the boat so wildly that the ferryman has to tell them the boat will capsize. Finally, after they have reached the other bank with difficulty, they want to pay him with many pieces of gold, which they shake off themselves. The ferryman refuses and says grumpily: "It's a good thing you didn't throw it into the river, it can't tolerate gold and would have foamed wildly and swallowed you up. I must now bury the gold. But I myself can only be paid with the fruits of the earth. And he does not let them go until they promise him three cabbage heads, three artichokes, and three onions. The ferryman then hides the gold in the crevices of the earth where the green snake lives. The snake consumes the gold and becomes luminous from within. It can now walk in its own light and sees how everything around it is transfigured by this light. The will-o'-the-wisps meet with it and say to it: You are our aunt from the horizontal line. The will-o'-the-wisps are its cousins, who come from the vertical line. These are ancient expressions, vertical and horizontal, which have always been used in mysticism for certain states of the soul.

How do we get to the beautiful lily? — the will-o'-the-wisps now ask. Oh, she lives on the other shore, replies the snake. - Oh dear, we've made ourselves a nice bed there, that's where we come from! - The snake informs them that the ferryman is allowed to bring everyone across, but no one back. “Are there no other ways?” “Yes, at noon I myself form a bridge,” says the green snake. But the will-o'-the-wisps do not like this time, and so the snake directs them to the shadow of the giant, who is powerless himself, but whose shadow can do anything. At sunrise and sunset, the shadow lies across the river like a bridge.

After the will-o'-the-wisps had departed, the snake sought to satisfy a curiosity that had long tormented her. On her wanderings through the rocks, she had discovered smooth walls and human-like figures through her senses, which she now hoped to recognize through her new light.

It creeps through the rocks and finds a chamber in which the portraits of four kings are displayed. The first of the kings is made of gold and adorned with an oak wreath. He asks the snake where it comes from: From the crevices where gold dwells! “What is more glorious than gold?” asks the king. “Light,” replies the snake. “What is more refreshing than light?” “Conversation,” replies the snake. Then she looks at the other kings, the second of whom is made of silver and adorned with a crown, the third of bronze and adorned with a laurel wreath, while the fourth is misshapen and composed of all these metals.

Now a bright light spreads; an old man with a lamp appears in the vault.

Why do you come, since we have light? — asks the golden king. — You know that I am not allowed to illuminate the darkness. — Is my reign coming to an end? — asks the silver king. “Late or never,” replies the old man. The bronze king begins: “When will I rise?” “Soon,” replies the old man. “With whom should I unite?” asks the silver king. “With your older brothers,” says the old man. “What will become of the youngest?” “He will sit down.”

While they were talking, the snake looked around the temple.

Meanwhile, the golden king says to the old man: How many secrets do you know? — Three — replies the old man. — Which is the most important? — asks the silver king. “The obvious one,” replies the old man. “Will you reveal it to us too?” asks the bronze king. “As soon as I know the fourth,” says the old man. “What do I care?” mutters the composite king to himself. “I know the fourth,” says the snake, approaching the old man and hissing something in his ear. “It is time!” cries the old man in a mighty voice. The temple echoes, the metal statues ring, and at that moment the old man sinks to the west and the snake to the east, each darting with great speed through the crevices of the rocks.

So much for the content of the fairy tale. “The audience will learn many things; the resolution is in the fairy tale itself,” Schiller writes to Cotta. We are at a point where we want to begin with the resolution. In order not to digress too far, we must first clarify some ancient expressions of the secret doctrine in order to understand the images: flames have a very specific meaning for the mystic. What did Goethe represent in the flames, the will-o'-the-wisps? The flames, which are will-o'-the-wisps, symbolically represent the fire of passions, sensual desires, drives, and instincts. This is the fire that lives only in warm-blooded animals and in humans. There was once a time when humans did not yet have the form they have today. This fire did not exist before the Lemurian race; before it was incarnated in the human body, there were no desires or instincts of this kind. A desiring, wishing being – that is what humans have become through the permeation of warm-bloodedness, Kamamanas. Fish and reptiles belong to the cold-blooded animals. Mysticism therefore distinguishes much more than natural science between fish-blooded and warm-blooded beings.

At that time, in the middle of the Lemurian epoch, there came a moment when humans evolved from a lower to a higher state. This moment is described in the myths, in the legend of Prometheus, as the bringing down of fire. It is said that Prometheus brought it down from heaven and was chained to the rock — the physical, mineral human body.

The sum of drives, feelings, instincts, and passions is the fire that urges humans to new “deeds.” In theosophy, this flame is called the wellspring of human self-awareness, the ability to say “I” to oneself. If humans had not come to become flame, they would not have been able to develop self-awareness and thus ascend to the knowledge of the divine. There is a lower self-awareness, the self-consciousness, and a higher one. The lower nature of the drives and the higher nature of consciousness are connected in humans. The physical human being has come into being through the permeation of his self with blood, with flame. The flame formations of the will-o'-the-wisps show the welling up of self-consciousness within the instincts, desires, and passions. This is Kamamanas, as we say in Theosophy. With this, the human being first lives in the physical world, this side of the stream.

But the home of the human being, where he dwells before he is born, is beyond the stream, in the spiritual world. The ferryman leads the human being from this spiritual world across the stream of the astral world into physical, earthly existence. The seeking soul, however, strives incessantly to return to the land beyond the stream; but the ferryman — nature — cannot take it there. It is said that even if it met him on this side of the shore, he would not take it, for he is allowed to bring everyone across, but no one back. So says the serpent to the will-o'-the-wisps. Natural forces have brought human beings into the physical world through birth. If human beings want to return to the higher worlds during their lifetime, they must do so themselves. There is a way back. The ego is capable of gathering knowledge. In occultism, knowledge is always symbolized by gold. Gold and wisdom — knowledge — correspond to each other. The gold of knowledge, represented by the will-o'-the-wisps, also has a lower humanity, which becomes a will-o'-the-wisp when it cannot find the right path. There is a lower wisdom that human beings acquire within the sensory world by observing the things and beings of this sensory world, forming mental images about them, and combining them through their thinking. But this is mere intellectual wisdom. The will-o'-the-wisps want to pay the ferryman with this gold, which they easily take up and easily throw away again. But the ferryman rejects it. Intellectual wisdom does not satisfy nature; only that gift which is connected with the living forces of nature can work in nature. Wisdom received prematurely causes the astral flow to foam; it does not accept it, it rejects it. The ferryman demands the fruits of the earth as payment. The will-o'-the-wisps have never enjoyed these; they do not have them. They have never sought to penetrate the depths of nature, but they must nevertheless pay their tribute to nature. They must promise to satisfy the ferryman's demand soon. This demand consists of fruits of the earth: three cabbage heads, three artichokes, and three large onions. What are these fruits of the earth? Goethe takes these fruits, which have shells that serve as a mental image of human shells.

Human beings have three shells, three bodies: the physical body, the etheric body, and the astral body. Within these shells lives the core of the human being, the self. In these bodies, which surround it like shells, the self must gather the fruits of one incarnation after another. It is the fruits of the earth that it must gather. These fruits do not consist of intellectual knowledge. The ferryman demands these three shell-shaped bodies as a tribute to nature. Goethe has subtly woven this teaching into his fairy tale.

The gold comes to the snake. This is the gold of true wisdom. The snake has always been the symbol of the self that does not remain within itself, but can selflessly absorb the divine within itself, can sacrifice itself; which humbly and selflessly gathers earthly wisdom by crawling around in the “cracks of the earth,” which ascends to the divine by not developing egoism and vanity, but by seeking to make itself similar to the divine. The serpent, in its selfless striving, absorbs the gold of wisdom, permeates itself completely with the gold, and thereby becomes luminous from within. It becomes luminous, as the self becomes when it has worked its way up to the level of inspiration, where the human being has become luminous and full of light within, and light flows toward light. The snake notices that it has become transparent and luminous. It had long been assured that this phenomenon was possible. Whereas it was green before, it is now luminous. The snake is green because it is in sympathy with the beings around it, with the whole of nature. Where this sympathy lives, the aura appears in a light green shade. Green is the color in which the aura of human beings appears when selfless, devoted striving lives predominantly in the soul. Now that it has become luminous from within, the snake sees; before, it only groped in its striving efforts. All the leaves seem to be made of emerald, all the flowers are transfigured in the most wonderful way. It sees all things in a new, transfigured light. Things appear to us in such a brilliant emerald color when the spirit flows out of them toward us, when light flows toward light.

Now that she has become luminous, now that she has absorbed the higher divine nature within herself, she also finds her way to the underground temple.

Deeply hidden were the places where truths were taught in times past, deeply hidden in the caves and crevices of the earth stood the mystery temples. There, light meets light.

The serpent had previously been forced to crawl through these abysses without light; but it was able to distinguish objects by feeling. Through feeling, it had perceived objects that betrayed the creative hand of man, especially human figures. Now it is in possession of light, and light comes to meet it. It finds the temple and in it the four kings, and the old man with the lamp comes to meet it. The man with the lamp represents ancient wisdom, the ancient wisdom of humanity, which is only light and casts no shadow, which contains something that modern science cannot comprehend. Goethe profoundly says that the lamp of the human soul only shines when it is met with another light, which the soul must generate within itself. It is the same view that he expresses in the saying he placed at the beginning of his theory of colors, which he says are the words of an ancient mystic:

Were not the eye sunlike,
How could we behold the light?
If God's own power did not live within us,
How could the divine delight us?

When the serpent's eye has become sun-like, when the light of the divine has been kindled in the serpent, it shines forth the light of the ancient wisdom of the world.

The fire of passion has been transformed into light. Fire that has been transformed into the light of wisdom outside in the earthly realm can shine back at the bringer of wisdom, the “old man with the lamp.”

As the fairy tale continues, the four kings are presented to us.

The four kings gaze at the snake with astonishment and awe. Astonishment and awe are always the powers of the soul that bring people forward and upward. She first looks at the golden king, and he begins to speak: Where do you come from? — From the crevices — replies the snake — where the gold dwells. “What is more glorious than gold?” asks the king. “Light,” replies the serpent. “What is more refreshing than light?” asks the king. “Conversation,” replies the serpent. In conversation, wisdom emerges in an intimate way for human beings, which is more refreshing than great revelation. — Doesn't this conversation between the king and the snake remind you of Plato's dialogues? Here, too, the secrets of the world are revealed in just a few words, a few sentences. Goethe wants to show that what is in the temple and what takes place there are the highest secrets of human development.

What alchemy is it that transforms things in this way? It is initiation. Even modern evolutionary theory assumes the constant transformation of things. The temple must first be underground, that is, closed to most people; but now the moment is approaching when it will open to all people. It wants to send the gold of wisdom, which has become light, from person to person.

Who is the golden king, and who are the other three kings, the silver, the bronze, and the mixed king? — The golden king is Manas, wisdom itself, which until now could only develop higher in the mystery temple. This is the soul power that man can attain through purified, sensuality-free thinking. The silver king points to an element even higher than wisdom: he is love, the creative word of the world Buddhi, the God shining in love. His kingdom is called the kingdom of light; this refers to what Christianity calls glory (Gloria in excelsis). It points to a time that will only be reached later; then Buddhi will rule humanity. The brazen king, whom the serpent does not yet see, who seems of little value, is of enormous stature and powerful in appearance. He looks more like a rock than a human form. This is the king who expresses the will-like soul power that lies hidden in man. He represents Atma, that with which the striving human being is ultimately endowed, that which he ultimately finds.

In this beautiful image, Goethe has depicted the gift of man with the three highest virtues that will one day be bestowed upon him. In earlier times, no one was admitted to initiation without having attained this maturity.

Then there is a fourth king, heavy in stature; He consists of a mixture of gold, silver, and ore, but the metals did not seem to have melted together properly during casting; nothing in him matches anything else. This is the soul of the undeveloped human being who has not yet developed any higher aspirations, in whom thinking, feeling, and willing are chaotically mixed together and “give the image an unpleasant appearance.” The power of thought, still clouded by sensory impressions; the fire of the soul, which does not develop love but lives in desires and drives; the disordered will of man—this is what the fourth king represents.

Let us recall the conversation between the kings and the man with the lamp. The golden king asks the old man: How many secrets do you know? — Three — replied the old man. — Which is the most important? — asked the silver king. “The obvious one,” replied the old man. “Will you reveal it to us too?” asked the bronze king. “As soon as I know the fourth,” said the old man. “I know the fourth,” said the snake, approaching the old man and hissing something in his ear. “The time has come!” cried the old man in a mighty voice.

There are three secrets — the most important is the obvious one. When that is revealed, the fourth can be known! This is the most important word in the whole fairy tale and at the same time the key to it — as Goethe said to Schiller in a conversation. The old man knows three secrets, which are the secrets of the three kingdoms of nature. The kingdoms of nature have become stationary in their development. But human beings continue to develop. They can do this because the spirit, the self, lives within them. The three secrets known to the old man explain the laws of the mineral kingdom, the plant kingdom, and the animal kingdom. The law that must live in the human soul if it wants to reach the maturity for initiation must be found by the soul itself, through its own efforts. The serpent has found it. It hisses it into the ear of the old man. What did the serpent say to the old man? That it has the will to sacrifice itself! Sacrifice is the law of the spiritual world! Only those who do not seek higher knowledge for its own sake, but in the service of humanity, can walk the path to higher knowledge. All true mystics know this path of the soul; they have all gone through this experience of sacrificing the snake. As soon as the words “I want to sacrifice myself!” are heard in the temple, the old man says, “Now is the time!”

The words of the Elder point to the distant future, when the whole of humanity will have reached maturity: The time has come! Then it will be time for the temple to rise above the river, for the whole of humanity to share in the wisdom, to participate in the initiation that was otherwise only granted to a few in the temples and in the caves.

For those who, like me, have been studying this fairy tale for twenty years, it reveals ever deeper wisdom, its lines repeatedly pointing to an even deeper source. There are still rich treasures to be unearthed here, but we must unearth them. We must only be careful not to allow Goethe to do something to us that

Goethe himself characterizes in “Faust” through Mephisto:

Whoever wants to recognize and describe something alive,
First seeks to drive out the spirit,
Then he has the parts in his hand,
Unfortunately, only the spiritual bond is missing!

Let us search for this spiritual bond in Goethe's creations!