Initiation or Consecration

The person who, within our German education and culture, has established such ideas free of sensuality for areas other than spatial structures in geometry is, once again, Goethe, and what Goethe has achieved with the type of plants, with the archetypal plant, and the type of animals, the archetypal animal, is a wonderful, tremendous achievement of the intellectual life of humanity. What are these ideas? Goethe himself seeks to clarify them in his own way. Many have written about them. But most of it is nonsense, because most people do not have the ability to understand how a spiritually constructed circle, whose laws we can understand, relates to the circle drawn on the blackboard, which is nothing more than a number of chalk particles. But this is how what Goethe calls the primordial plant relates to the plant that can be perceived externally and sensually. Outside are the various plants—so Goethe thought—one looks like this, the other like that. But within us lives an inner spiritual power through which we are able to find the concept of the primordial plant from our inner production. Botanists thought Goethe meant an imperfect plant. That's nonsense! He meant the spiritually perceived plant! That is what I have attempted to reconstruct in one of my books as this archetypal plant, just as one constructs the circle in the mind. Goethe's archetypal plant contains, if one is able to conjure up all its possibilities in the mind, all possible plants; his archetypal animal contains all possible animals. What Goethe created is a spiritual organic whole. It gives us the opportunity to create in the mind that which cannot appear to our senses. However, we are starting from a profound and significant spiritual fact. And Goethe proceeded from this fact, from which he was given what he found as the archetypal plant. For him, this was not a mere idea, but rather the creative force in all plants. For him, the archetypal animal was the creative force in every animal.