Mephistopheles' two devil ranks in Goethe's Faust: fat devils posted to seize the etheric body, scrawny devils to seize the soul-spiritual member.
The Fat and Scrawny Devils in Anthroposophy is Rudolf Steiner's name for the two ranks of lesser demons that Mephistopheles posts around Faust's grave in the Entombment scene of Goethe's Faust, Part Two. Steiner described them in the lecture of 4 September 1916 at Dornach, collected in Faust, the Aspiring Human (GA 272). The fat devils, Dickteufel in German, have short straight horns, block-like necks and heavy bodies; Mephistopheles stations them at the navel and the lower regions to seize the etheric body as it separates after death. The scrawny devils, Dürrteufel, have long crooked horns and stretched claws; they reach upward to catch the soul-spiritual member, what Goethe calls the genius, as it ascends. Together with the Lemurs, who work on bone, tendon and ligament, the two ranks form a threefold assault matched to the threefold human being. Anthroposophical Faust productions treat the passage as blocking, since Steiner gave it to actors who had to play the parts.
The Fat and Scrawny Devils belong to the staging instructions Steiner gave for the Entombment scene, and they are not decoration. Each rank is posted at a different exit. Mephistopheles knows the human being only as the Moon age knew it, in separated members, so he divides the labour of capture between two bodies of demons and a troop of Lemurs.
In Steiner's Own Words
So if Mephisto, in his way, wants to grasp the spiritual essence of Faust, he must actually grasp it in its threefold nature. He must grasp it as the spiritual essence of the physical body; there he must deal with the lemurs. Then he must want to grasp it as the second link in the etheric body, which separates soon after death. He is familiar with that, so he must want to grasp it. And then he must want to grasp it in what passes over into the spiritual world and has detached itself from the etheric body. What has been united through the ego does not yet correspond to his realm; he is not yet at home there, Mephisto; the separateness still exists.
What it Means Today
Goethe's Faust carries a second commentary tradition alongside the anthroposophical one. In 1990 the Jungian analyst Edward F. Edinger published Goethe's Faust: Notes for a Jungian Commentary with Inner City Books in Toronto, in the Studies in Jungian Psychology by Jungian Analysts series. Edinger read the poem as a psychological portrait of the modern psyche and as a symbolic description of a depth analysis, taking its spirits and demons as autonomous contents of one soul rather than as beings met outside it. Read that way, the fat devils and the scrawny devils become two directions of a single appetite, a downward pull toward matter and an upward grasping after spirit, both of them Faust's own.
Steiner's 1916 lecture refuses that move at one precise point. He kept the two ranks objective. The fat devils are not greed in costume. They are beings with a weight of their own, posted at the navel because ether cannot be held by earthly gravity, so something spiritually heavy must hold it. The scrawny devils spin and stretch because what they chase is quicker than they are.
Thalira synthesis: the Jungian reading and the anthroposophical reading describe the same division of the dying human being and differ only over whether the dividing line runs inside the soul or through it, which is why the scene plays as inner drama and as objective event without the blocking changing.
Where to Read More
- Faust, the Aspiring Human, GA 272
- Find Steiner on Faust at SteinerBooks
- Mephistopheles on Wikidata [THALIRA_BLOG_LINKS_PLACEHOLDER]