This morning I’m returning to the world of esoteric culture, the theosophical society, the world of Madame Blavatsky, the world in which people explore the knowledge of the hidden. And in particular I wanted to think about one important person from that world - the turn of the century Austrian, Rudolf Steiner. His name in this country is most closely associated with education. You may have heard of Steiner Schools, which use the experimental education curriculum designed by Rudolf Steiner. Each day is punctuated with exercise, movement, and dance; it’s an education system which is supposed to be more holistic, spiritual, and focused on creating harmony within society.

Rudolf Steiner was born in 1861, and he was something of a polymath. He traversed a broad landscape of ideas; he was a philosopher, studying, in particular, German idealism, he was a contributor to a literary journal, and he was a Goethe scholar. Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, who we know as the author of Faust, was a very influential German thinker. He’s essentially the Shakespeare, or the Dante, of Germany. Goethe was the archetypal German scholar, and many Germanic scholars have latched on to Goethe and drawn a great deal of inspiration from him, including Georg Hegel, Carl Jung, Sigmund Freud, and Fredrich Nietzsche, to name a few. Carl Jung even pretended, when he was younger, that he was related to Goethe. He created an elaborate story about his grandfather being Goethe’s illegitimate son. Goethe, although most famous today as the author of Faust, did a great deal in his lifetime. He was an advisor to a Saxon duke, he wrote a great deal of poetry and prose, and wrote papers on botany and anatomy. All of these Rudolf Steiner read, studied and catalogued.

When Rudolf Steiner was about forty, his life took a radical turn; he was swept up into the world of theosophy and esoteric culture. This shift began when he wrote an essay on one of Goethe’s short stories, a fairy tale called ‘The Green Snake and the Beautiful Lily’, which we’ll be hearing. The only thing you need to know beforehand is that the story refers to entities called will-o’-wisps – strange ghostly beings from European folklore, which could appear sometimes like normal people, and at other times like orbs of light that float in the air. So, Rudolf Steiner wrote an essay on this fairy tale, attempting to explain some of the symbology within the story. The theosophical society took note of his interesting essay, and this launched him into the more peculiar, second half of his life.





‘The Green Snake and the Beautiful Lily’ (1795) by Johann Goethe (adapted by Lewis Connolly).





In the 18th century when Goethe wrote ‘The Green Snake and the Beautiful Lily’, it was human freedom which was uppermost in his mind. The French Revolution was in full swing, in which liberty and freedom were being championed, but what was freedom? Could freedom really be imposed upon another? Did it not need to arise from within each person? And what of necessity? Or reason? In exploring these ideas, Goethe wrote his fairy tale, using imaginative pictures to show how the human soul could become whole and free. In Goethe’s landscape there are two lands, divided by a Great River. On one side is the land of the senses, in other words the land of ordinary consciousness, our normative sense of perception. And on the other side, the land of the spirit - this is the land not ordinarily accessible by our everyday sense. And by the end, there is a permanent bridge linking these two lands together.