The Circular Flow of Man's Life within the World Of Sense, Soul And Spirit

GA 68b — 4 December 1906, Bonn

21. Richard Wagner and Mysticism

The theosophical worldview is not just intended to satisfy theoretical needs, but what is called the theosophical worldview is conceived as something comprehensive and universal. Even though the Theosophical movement has gained few followers in the last 30 years, it may be said that there is a growing understanding that it is supposed to provide something that sheds light on all branches of spiritual life.

Today, an attempt will be made to show how the personality of Richard Wagner can be understood in a special way from the point of view of the Theosophical worldview.

Today, mysticism is usually understood by people as something that cannot be connected to a clear concept. It has been completely forgotten today that there was a time - the first centuries of the Christian era - when mysticism was called mathesis, because mysticism is said to be the clearest, most vivid, brightest form of knowledge and can only be compared to the clearest, most vivid form, mathematics.

Mysticism is to the supersensible world what mathematics is to the physical world. If one speaks of the way in which one can arrive at the study of the supersensible, one calls it mysticism; if one means more the study without the methods, one calls it theosophy. Theosophy is not meant to be the study of a divine or the study of a god. For the theosophist, the Divine is the all-embracing, underlying principle of the most insignificant and the most comprehensive phenomena in the world. If a person is still at an undeveloped stage, he will recognize only a little of the world; if he is more developed, he will recognize more. However, theosophy will never presume to say that man can recognize the nature of God. We can never speak of a complete knowledge of God; we must be clear that we live, weave and are in God. Knowledge is in the divine, but the divine can never be encompassed by knowledge.

In a Berlin lecture in 1811, Johann Gottlieb Fichte characterized what underlies philosophical endeavor as an attitude, as a view. He said to his audience: “In these lectures I have something very special to tell you, nothing about what the five senses say, what the mind combines. The supersensible objects go beyond sensory perception. A new sense is necessary for this. What matters is that one has the faith that one can gain knowledge of the supersensible world. If someone does not know this spiritual world, then he is like a blind man who can see nothing of color and light. Not in the sense that theosophy and mysticism speak of the supernatural as something outside our world, but in the sense that the blind man who is operated on sees the colors and the world of light, in the sense that man awakens the powers and abilities that are in his soul and lie dormant. It is possible to awaken what are called the spiritual eyes and spiritual ears. He is not immodest who says that one can know something, but he who claims that one cannot know anything. It is for the seeing person, not the blind, to decide about colors. It is for the spiritually seeing person to decide about the supersensible world.

There have always been people who were spiritually enlightened. They are called the initiated or the initiated. They were the missionaries for the world. All religions are based on the teachings of those who have looked into the spiritual worlds. The act of looking into the spiritual worlds is called mysticism or theosophy. There are ways to work out of the spiritual worlds without looking into them with one's own insight. Those who have looked into them without being able to describe the character of the same were the great artists. The great artists, such as Dante, Goethe and Richard Wagner, drew from the spiritual world.

It is not to be said that the ideas that Richard Wagner has drawn from the spiritual worlds would have been understood by him. This is not an objection to the truth of the matter. The plant is also unaware of the ideas that the botanist draws from it or that the poet has in mind. It is unaware of the ideas of the botanist and the poet, but it grows according to what the botanist subsequently thinks about it, it realizes these laws. Just as little as the plant, the poet needs to understand what he carries within him, which then makes him understandable. Just as it would be absurd to believe that a plant knows the laws by which it grows, it would be equally absurd to believe that Richard Wagner knew anything of what can be understood from him.

Richard Wagner was not just a poet and musician; he was the bearer of a new culture. He once said: All truly symphonic instrumental music is capable of making the laws and their interrelationships appear – sometimes the mind can be caught and cornered by the secrets that art reveals to us. – The musical instruments are the organs of nature itself. The artist does not merely depict reality, but truth.

At various times in his life, Richard Wagner searched very earnestly for a solution to the world's greatest problems. He wrote on his house:

This house shall be called Wahnfried,
because here my delusion found peace.

He really was a seeker. He sought throughout his entire life. In the mid-1840s, we find in Richard Wagner a purely Christian spirit, the kind of Christian worldview that has been propagated through the centuries. Then, in the 1840s, something took hold of him – it lasted until the 1850s – like a kind of atheism or materialism. During that period, strong, bold minds had come to realize that the same laws prevail up there in the world as in inorganic nature. This was a world view that the boldest minds of the time had developed. Richard Wagner was also more or less seized by it. But for him, material reality nevertheless took on an ethical or moral character. The true materialist believed that the world of the senses was the be-all and end-all. For Wagner, this belief was associated with a deep morality, like a great vision of the meaning of life. He said: “Man can only become selfless and loving when he says to himself, ‘It will all end with this existence’ — when he is capable of merging into the universe, of comprehending everything for the world, nothing for himself.” So he also wanted to ethically and morally transfigure materialism. But he soon came to a different view through Schopenhauer. Schopenhauer gave him something that was deeply satisfying to him as an artist and as a musician.

Schopenhauer stated that all other arts face the essence of the world much more alien than music. He gives music a very special position among the arts in general. Schopenhauer has basically taken the one guiding principle of his world view:

Life is an unfortunate thing, and I try to make it bearable by thinking about it.

Underlying everything is an unconscious, blind will. It forms the stone and then from the stone the plant and so ever higher forms, because it is always unsatisfied. In human life itself there are great differences. The “savage” living in dull consciousness feels the unsatisfaction of the will much less than the higher-standing man, who can feel the pain of existence much more clearly. Then Schopenhauer says: There is a second thing that man knows besides the will, and that is the idea. It is as if the waves of the sea ripple and reflect the forms of the will, the dark urge. In man, the will rises to the illusory image of the mirage. In it, man creates an image of what is outside of him. The idea is an illusion. Man suffers not only from the unsatisfied will, but also from the fact that he knows how to awaken the idea from the will. But there is a means by which man can come to a kind of release from the blind urge of the will. One means to this end is art. Through art, man is able to transport himself beyond what would otherwise arise from the will as dissatisfaction. When man creates a work of art, he creates out of imagination. While other imaginations are mere images, he looks at art as something different. The genuine artist does not create a copy of nature. When he creates works such as, for example, a Zeus, he has combined many impressions, retained all the merits in his memory and left out all the defects. From many people, he has formed an archetype that is not realized anywhere in nature, but is nevertheless distributed among many individual personalities.

According to Schopenhauer, a kind of essence confronts us in artistic works. By going to the depths of creative nature, as it were, man creates something that is reality. While other arts have to pass through the imagination, thus giving images of the will, for Schopenhauer, sound is an expression of the will itself. He hears the will of nature and reproduces it in tones.

Goethe sees intentions everywhere in nature. This is not a cliché, but rather the fact that Goethe was aware that nature only partially achieves its purpose in every being. There is much more to every being than it expresses. What does not come to light in it is released by the artist from nature; he creates something that goes beyond nature. When man, in creating after nature, creates a higher thing, he goes beyond nature. Goethe sees man as the highest link in the chain of development of beings.

When the healthy nature of man works as a whole, when he feels himself in the world as a great, beautiful, dignified and worthy whole, when the harmonious comfort gives him a pure, free delight: then the universe, if it could feel itself, would exult as it reached its goal and admire the summit of its own being and becoming. (On Winkelmann)

That which is elevated from nature to a work of art by man is such that in the work of art the divine foundation of nature shines towards man. The artist creates and the artistic is enjoyed by those who enjoy it in the Platonic ideas. The artists seek the common archetype of things. They create something higher than imagination, but live and work in the element of imagination. For Schopenhauer, music is something that sounds out of the essence of the world. The person who is artistically active in sound is, as it were, as if he were at the heart of nature with his ear; he perceives the will of nature and reproduces it in sounds. Thus, says Schopenhauer, man has an intimate relationship with the world, for he penetrates into the innermost essence of things. He had assigned music the role of directly representing the essence of the cosmos out of a kind of instinctive insight. He had a kind of instinctive idea of the real facts.

Schopenhauer's view was heartening for Richard Wagner. From this point of view he sought to establish his place in the world as a musician and as a poet. For him, music became a direct expression of the essence of the world.

Richard Wagner looked back to ancient Greece and said: In ancient Greek culture there was also an art. This art was not only music, not only poetry. In this primal art in Greece there was an interaction of dance, poetry and music. —- The movements in dance, those gestures in ancient dance, become for Wagner the expression of what can take place in the human soul. He imagined that the most intimate relationships between lovers, the most noble relationships, were expressed in gestures and movements. For Wagner, dance was originally a sensual reflection of the deepest experiences of love in the soul. What the poet spoke was only another expression of what is going on in the soul. The word is the other means of expression that must be added to the dance. The third means of expression is music. Richard Wagner looked at an original art that was neither music nor poetry nor dance in itself. He said to himself that originally all of humanity was more selfless; it was much more imbued with a sense of being absorbed in one another. Just as a finger, if it had consciousness, would have to feel itself as a limb of an organism, so the Greek citizen was a member of the whole state. Over the centuries, only egoism has emerged, that necessary egoism that has brought about independence. Its idea was that the future would necessarily bring about a reversal from egoism to love.

All people and all human achievements have also passed through the path of egoism. The arts used to belong together and only then separated. They must first come together again to form a whole.

Wagner saw Shakespeare as a role model as a poet and Beethoven as a musician. These were artists of whom he said: If you want to achieve something as an artist, you have to learn from them a musical and poetic creation. He saw in the earlier compositions that the libretto came between the feeling and the music; he wanted to change that. It was clear to him that music is connected to the human being. As an artist, he built on Shakespeare on the one hand and Beethoven on the other.

To understand this, we need to know what the mystical element is in the human being. He is a mystic who is able to see the spiritual in all the world, in all movement. It is possible for the human being to look at the whole cosmos in the same way as one looks at a single person, for example. Everything about a person becomes an expression of the soul within. Behind the veil of the physiognomy, one can see into every person. When the mystic looks at the plant and mineral world, he recognizes in every plant and every stone the expression of the common spirit of nature, one spirit in all entities. Some plants appear to him as the laughing expression of the rejoicing spirit of the earth, others as the tears that express the sorrow of the spirit of the earth. He really does see something moral in what the earth produces, the expression of a spiritual essence. Anyone who is able to live in the right way in the whole world, who feels that what is expressed in the world stands before man as uniformly as mathematics stand before him. The earth spirit of Faust was also a reality for Goethe. When we read the words:

Eminent spirit, thou gavest me, gave me all,
What I requested. Thou didst not in vain
Turn thy face to me in the fire.
Gavest me the glorious nature for a kingdom,
Strength to feel it, to enjoy it. Not
Coldly marveling visit thou only permit,
granting me to look into her deep breast,
as into the bosom of a friend.
You lead the line of the living
past me and teach me my brothers
in the silent bush, in air and water.
And when the storm roars and creaks in the forest,
the giant spruce toppling, crushing neighboring branches
And neighboring trunks squashing down,
And the hill muffled hollow thunders,
Then you lead me to the safe cave, show
Then myself, and my own chest
Secret deep wonders open up.

When we read these words of Goethe, we see how he realizes how man recognizes the divine-spiritual in nature and feels that it rises in his own heart.

In true mysticism, one is led to a real insight. When a person practices meditation and concentration, the time comes when he gains insight into the world of light and color in the astral realm. This world appears as if the colors were floating freely in space and became the expression of spiritual beings. Everything there is permeable, but we have light and we have colors, which are the expression of spiritual beings. The third world is the actual spiritual home of man. This is a world of spiritual sound, into which one soaks in such a way that everything around us appears as a world of flowing sounds.

We can distinguish three states of mind in today's man: first, everyday consciousness, waking consciousness; secondly, unconscious life in sleep; thirdly, in between, dream consciousness.

For the mystic, the awakened one, the soul is not merely there at night, but it is also aware then. It can then perceive a world of flowing tones at night. When he has reached this stage, he must make the transition from sleep consciousness to waking consciousness in such a way that he can also perceive the spiritual world in the waking state. When the practical mystic walks through streets and alleys, he sees not only the physical but also the spiritual everywhere. It is the world of Devachan in which the human being lives and moves during the entire state of sleep. There the soul lives in its true home, in a world of sound, in the world of the harmony of the spheres, the world that resounds and sings through him. For the mystically awakened, a sound becomes audible from the soul of all beings. Theosophy does not regard what the Pythagorean view of the world calls the harmony of the spheres as a dreamt-up construct, but as reality. When we hear music in the physical world of sounds, we are only hearing a shadow image of the spiritual world. The aesthetically appreciative person feels that music is akin to the home of the soul.

Richard Wagner said: If we want to express the soul of man, we can grasp a threefold way of expressing our inner being: in movement, in word and in music. Music is connected to the innermost core of the soul. Until now, music has only expressed the inner being of man, that which is hidden within him. But it is the greatest thing that this is transformed into action.

The symphony describes what a person can experience within themselves. But where the soul's experiences lead to action, where feelings lead to action, music has not been an appropriate expression of the soul. Only once has a symphony – Beethoven's Ninth – been able to express what lives within. There the composer gives in to the power that expresses the inner life in words. There the inner life pushes to become at least words, as an expression of the bubbling up of the inner life.

Shakespeare presents what a person can do when the soul itself has already come to terms with its inner being. The spoken drama has presented the external action, but has kept silent about what lives in the soul. Music has been the portrayal of what remains of the human being within the soul. Richard Wagner said: “Music must not merely compose the poetry, but must stand directly opposite the human being itself.” What overflows into action, he writes in words; what lives in the soul as the reason for action, that is expressed by music.

The mystic knows that man does not live here on earth merely as an individual personality, that the individual human being cannot be there without the other people either. The bond that connects them is spiritual. Those who look into the spiritual worlds can see how individual peoples are members of a whole natural organism. Just as a finger that has been cut off from a hand withers, so too is the individual human being, detached from the earthly organism, something that withers like a finger when separated from the organism.

The idea that one person can redeem another makes no sense if we do not take the mystical ideal into account; for example, we recognize a knowledge of this connection in Hartmann von der Aue's “Poor Henry”. Just as we can fill up the emptiness in a glass by pouring something into it from another vessel, just as we can let warmth flow over, so there is something in humanity that can be transferred from one person to another. All ideas of redemption are based on profound mysticism. Richard Wagner felt the spiritual in man, the ascent beyond man to the superman. In the superhuman figure, he shows how there is a connection within the whole human organism. Thus he brings redemption problems, for example, in the “Flying Dutchman”, where the Dutchman is redeemed by a sacrificing female being. - Tannhäuser is redeemed by Elisabeth.

In this way he weaves the fate of one human being into the fate of another. He shows this most magnificently in the 'Nibelungenring' and in 'Parsifal'. In the Nibelungenring we see how he presents the entire working of the world, how he points to an ancient human past, a humanity that has always been there. In the distant past, there was an ancient clairvoyance at the basis of all human development. Myths and legends arose out of ancient clairvoyance. There was once a clairvoyant consciousness that humanity will regain at a higher level. From the clairvoyant somnambulistic consciousness, humanity passes to the ordinary consciousness and then again to a consciousness where the human being still has the clairvoyant consciousness in addition to the ordinary consciousness. The whole transition from an originally less self-contained personality, which was still clairvoyant, to a sensual view, that is what the conquest of gold means: the conquest of sensual perception and human power. Love turns into selfishness; later it turns back into love. Those who want to bring out the ego must renounce love, and for that they acquire the gold. In his Ring of the Nibelung, Richard Wagner describes how the self develops, the selfish self, and how it emerges from the original state of clear-sightedness to become a loveless human being. As Alberich emerges, we feel the self arise. Richard Wagner wanted to depict the loveless ego in the pedal point in E-flat major in Das Rheingold, and in the subsequent chord we hear the wonderful way it comes to life.

We see how the gods emerge from a primordial consciousness, how it arises like a warning voice. It stands before Wotan in Erda. It stands there for humanity. Wotan calls upon her; he says:

You know
What the depths conceal,
What weaves through mountain and valley,
Air and water. Where there are beings
Your breath blows:
Where minds reflect
Your mind clings:
Everything, they say,
Is known to you.

Then Erda says:

My sleep is dreaming,
my dreaming is musing,
my musing is the rule of knowledge!

Brünhilde brings redemption through sacrifice. The idea of sacrifice, the idea of redemption carried out, is the most magnificent in Parsifal. It was on Good Friday 1857 in the Villa Wesendonck on Lake Zurich that Wagner looked out at the budding, burgeoning, blossoming nature. And in that moment, the connection between the burgeoning nature and the death of Christ on the cross became clear to him. This connection is the secret of the Holy Grail. From that moment on, the thought that he had to send the secret of the Holy Grail out into the world in musical form continued to permeate Richard Wagner's soul.

To understand these thoughts of Richard Wagner, we have to go back several hundred years in the development of mankind. At that time, there were also initiation sites in Europe. Through the wisdom that was imparted to man in the mysteries, he was brought into conscious contact with the gods. Such a person is called an initiate. Only the forms of such teachings change at different times. In the medieval mysteries of Europe, the secret that Richard Wagner sensed was brought to its highest development, namely, how nature's springtime blossoming is connected to the mystery of the cross. This was taught in a special way in the initiation schools of the Middle Ages, which are called Rosicrucian. We can best present this in the form of a conversation. Let us imagine the teacher saying something like the following to the student: Look at the plant, how it is rooted in the earth and holds its leaves and flowers towards the sun. In divine innocence and chastity, it holds its fruit organs towards the sun. And now look at people. Man is the reverse of the plant. He turns his head toward the sun, which corresponds to the root of the plant, and he turns the organs that the plant holds chastely toward the sun toward the earth. Through the soul of the disciple there had to pass the feeling of divine chastity as it is expressed in the plant. He was shown a future for humanity in which man, too, will become desireless and chaste. Then a spiritual chalice will open from above and look down upon man. And as now the sunbeam descends to the plant, so will man's purified power unite with the Divine Chalice. This inverted chalice, as it was presented to the disciple as a fact in the Mysteries, is the real ideal of the Holy Grail. The sunbeam is the holy lance of love.