10. The Chthonic and the Eleusinian Mysteries and the Transition from Plato to Aristotle

Look at the metal substance in the Earth today in all its variety! You find it crystallised and surrounded with a kind of crust which is from the Earth. The metal is from the Cosmos; and that which is of the Earth receives with love what comes from the Cosmos. You may see this all around you if you walk about in those parts of the Earth where metals are found, and interest yourself in them. That which came to meet the metal was called ‘Mother’.[^1] The most important of these Earthly substances which, as it were, placed themselves there before the Heavenly metals in order to receive them, were called the Mothers. And this is also one aspect of the ‘Mothers’ to whom Faust descends. He descends at the same time into those pre-earthly periods of the Earth, in order to see there how the mother-like Earth takes into herself what is given, father-like, by the Cosmos.