In Goethe's fairy tale, the Ferryman is the unconscious soul power that carried every human being down into sense existence and cannot carry anyone back.
The Ferryman in Anthroposophy is Rudolf Steiner's name for the unconscious soul powers that carried humanity out of the supersensible world into sense existence. He is a figure in Goethe's Das Märchen von der grünen Schlange und der schönen Lilie (1795), the old boatman who lives on the river dividing the two kingdoms. In Goethe's Standard of the Soul (GA 22, 1918) Steiner reads him strictly: the Ferryman can bring anyone from the far bank to the near one, and no one in the other direction. Every person crossed involuntarily, before waking to the crossing, and the way back cannot be bought. The Ferryman refuses gold, the wisdom the Will-o'-the-Wisps scatter, and accepts only three cabbages, three artichokes and three onions, the fruits of the earth. Steiner reads that produce as self-created life wisdom, the one currency that discharges the debt a soul owes the river.
The Ferryman stands at the one crossing every soul has already made. Goethe put him in the opening scene of his 1795 fairy tale, ferrying two Will-o'-the-Wisps over a flooded river at midnight. Steiner, writing in 1918, recognised in that old boatman the soul's own involuntary descent. The traffic runs one way. Whatever carried us here has no return route, and the fare it will accept is not the gold we are holding.
In Steiner's Own Words
The unconscious soul powers, the Ferryman, transport man, whose origin is in the supersensible kingdom, into the material world. Here in the first place he finds himself in a realm wherein the powers of conception and remembrance have created conditions in which he has to live. But they separate him from the supersensible world; he feels himself beholden to them when he must approach the power (the Ferryman) that has brought him unconsciously out of the supersensible world into the material sense world. He can only break the power which these conditions have over him, and which is revealed in the deprivation of his freedom, when with the “Fruits of the Earth” that is to say, with self-created life wisdom, he frees himself from the obligation imposed upon him by the conditions, from coercion.
What it Means Today
Anthroposophic biography work took the Ferryman's asymmetry as a working assumption. Bernard Lievegoed (1905 to 1992), the Dutch physician and psychiatrist who founded the NPI institute in the Netherlands in 1954, built his book Phases around one observation drawn from decades of counselling adults: until roughly the middle thirties, a person is carried. Inherited vitality, family, schooling, talent and temperament deliver a biography without being asked to. Then the carrying stops. Lievegoed watched what follows in managers, teachers and clinicians who kept trying to pay for the second half of life with the currency of the first, more effort, more cleverness, more of the gold that had always worked. That is exactly what the Ferryman will not take. His fare has to be grown rather than found: three cabbages, three artichokes, three onions, produce that someone planted and tended in their own ground. The answer Lievegoed put to his clients, and the ground of the biography-work practice that grew out of his teaching, is that the return journey runs on self-created wisdom, the harvest of what a person has actually lived through and digested.
Thalira synthesis: the Ferryman is the only figure in Goethe's tale who names a price, and he prices the crossing so that the successful cannot afford it, since gold is the one thing he refuses.
Where to Read More