GA 68 belongs to the public lecture division of Rudolf Steiner's collected works, and like several volumes covering those crowded early years it was catalogued in lettered parts rather than issued as one book. The part numbered GA 68c holds two public lectures on Goethe's late fairy tale, published in English as The Story of the Green Serpent and the Beautiful Lily. Steiner gave the first in Berlin on 4 April 1904 and the second in Cologne on 27 November of the same year. Both take one subject and stay with it: Goethe's short tale of a river, a ferryman, a green serpent, an underground temple and a lily whose touch kills the living, read not as ornament but as a picture of the stages a soul passes on the way to spiritual knowledge. Two lectures, one argument, and the Cologne evening is less a repetition than a tightening.
Place in Steiner's Work
1904 is a hinge year. Steiner was serving as General Secretary of the German Section of the Theosophical Society, writing the essays that would become Knowledge of the Higher Worlds, and preparing Theosophy for print. He was also, and this matters more than it is usually given credit for, a Goethe scholar of nearly twenty years standing. He had edited the scientific writings for the Kürschner edition, worked in the Goethe archive in Weimar, and written two books on Goethe's way of knowing before he spoke publicly about spiritual science at all. So when he opens a lecture on the fairy tale, he is not borrowing a literary text to illustrate a doctrine he arrived at elsewhere. He is returning to the author he knew best and saying that the esoteric content was there the whole time.
That claim is the spine of both lectures. Goethe, Steiner argues, possessed the older wisdom but lived in a century that had no public form for it. What could not be said in open lecture had to be said in pictures, so the tale that closes the Conversations of German Emigrants became, in Steiner's phrase for it, Goethe's Apocalypse: a secret revelation set beside the gospel of Faust. The Cologne lecture adds the circumstance. Schiller had asked Goethe to contribute to the journal Die Horen, where Schiller's own letters on aesthetic education had posed the question of how a person living in the everyday world builds a bridge to the supersensible. Goethe answered in images rather than argument, and the tale is that answer.
These two evenings also sit upstream of a great deal of later work. The images Steiner takes apart here return, reshaped, in the four Mystery Dramas he wrote between 1910 and 1913, and the temple that rises above the river anticipates his lifelong interest in a spiritual architecture set in the middle of ordinary social life. Readers who know only the later, more systematic Steiner will find the 1904 voice notably warmer and more conversational, closer to a man thinking aloud in front of an audience than to a lecturer laying out a completed cosmology. The English text of the Cologne lecture uses the word Anthroposophy where the Berlin text says Theosophy, a later usage rather than a change of position on Steiner's part in 1904.
Themes and Structure
The first lecture walks the tale image by image, and the method is worth watching as closely as the conclusions. Steiner does not decode symbols one at a time into fixed meanings. He treats each picture as a condition the soul can actually be in, and then asks what has to change for the next picture to become possible.
The geography comes first. Two lands lie on either side of a river, and the river is the life of desire and passion that separates sense existence from spiritual existence. Water carries the meaning it carries in Genesis and in the night conversation with Nicodemus, and Steiner takes Goethe's poem on the soul and the water as evidence that Goethe meant it that way. An unknown ferryman carries souls from the far shore into the world of the senses, but he will not carry anyone back. His fare cannot be paid in gold, only in fruits of the earth, which Steiner reads as the first hard condition of the path: what is offered has to be grown, not simply possessed.
Then the figures. The will-o'-the-wisps are restless intellect, quick and self-serving and rich in a gold they cannot spend. The green serpent is human knowledge and endeavour, and it is the serpent, not the wisps, that finds the way underground into the temple in the clefts of the rock, which Steiner reads as the mystery sanctuaries of every age. Inside stand four kings. Gold, silver and bronze give wisdom, beauty and strength, which Steiner names in the theosophical terms then current as Manas, Buddhi and Atma, the three higher members of the human being. The fourth, the mixed king, is what happens when those forces are muddled together rather than developed in order. The old man with the lamp brings the second light, and the rule of that lamp is exact: it shines only where another light is already burning.
The crossings are the heart of it. Before anything permanent is built there are only two ways over the river, and both are temporary. At noon the serpent lays itself down as a bridge, which is the elect hour when knowledge itself carries a person across. At twilight the shadow of a giant falls over the water and forms a passage, and the giant is weak in himself while his shadow does real work, a picture of crude natural force and of the dim mediumistic conditions Steiner treats with open caution. Steiner even cites Goethe's letter warning Schiller away from a journey lest the shadow of the giant catch him unawares.
The resolution is an act rather than a doctrine, and Steiner is emphatic on the point. The serpent resolves to sacrifice itself and be dissolved into the precious stones that become the piers of a permanent bridge. Self-seeking knowledge becomes selfless knowledge, and the crossing is opened to everyone at every hour instead of to a few at noon.
Wisdom leads a man through self to selflessness.Rudolf Steiner, Cologne, 27 November 1904
Two further images complete the picture. The youth who reached for the lily too early was struck down by her, because the lily kills whatever is not yet ripe and revives whatever has passed through dying and becoming. He is restored only after purification, which is where Steiner introduces the Greek term for that preparatory cleansing. And the whole temple rises from under the earth to stand above the river, so that the sanctuary is no longer hidden below ordinary life but spans it. Steiner frames the entire sequence with the alchemical marriage from Faust, where the red lion is wedded to the lily, and insists that alchemy always described the transmutation of human forces rather than of metals in a retort.
Glossary Terms from this Volume
Four entries in the Thalira glossary draw on this volume. Each takes one image from the fairy tale and follows it through Steiner's reading and beyond.
- The Red Lion and the Lily, the alchemical marriage Goethe mocks in Faust and then unfolds in earnest in the tale.
- Katharsis, the purification without which the youth cannot survive contact with the lily.
- The Shadow of the Giant, the twilight bridge formed by a force that is powerless in itself.
- The Temple Raised Above the River, the sanctuary that leaves the clefts of the rock and stands in the open.
Where to Read It
You can read the full text at the Rudolf Steiner Archive, which hosts English translations of both lectures along with the wider body of public lecture cycles: rsarchive.org. Search there for the volume by title rather than by catalogue number, since the lettered parts of GA 68 are shelved under their lecture titles.
For print editions and current translations, search the publisher's catalogue: SteinerBooks. Goethe's fairy tale itself is short and widely available in English, and reading it once straight through before opening the lectures is the single best preparation you can give yourself.
Continue Your Study
- Work through the four entries above in the Thalira glossary, which cross-links each image to the wider vocabulary of initiation.
- Browse the GA Work Library for study guides to the neighbouring volumes of Steiner's public lectures from the same period.
- Read Goethe's tale first, then the Berlin lecture, then the Cologne lecture. The order matters, because Steiner assumes you already hold the pictures in mind.