Goethe's 1795 fairy tale, which Steiner read as a picture of the threefold social organism and the seed of his first Mystery Drama.
The Green Snake and the Beautiful Lily in Anthroposophy is Rudolf Steiner's reading of Goethe's 1795 prose fairy tale, Das Maerchen, as an imaginative seed-picture of the threefold human being and the threefold social organism, and the direct forerunner of Steiner's own first Mystery Drama. In the lectures gathered as The New Spirituality and the Christ Experience of the Twentieth Century (GA 200, Dornach, October 1920), Steiner read Goethe's Golden, Silver, and Copper Kings as the spiritual, political, and economic members of society, with the collapsing Mixed King standing for the unitary State that cannot endure. He set the tale beside Schiller's Aesthetic Letters, calling it Central Europe's pictorial answer to the question of human freedom, an answer given in images rather than in Schiller's abstract concepts.
The Green Snake and the Beautiful Lily is the short prose fairy tale Goethe published in 1795, which Rudolf Steiner treated as a foundational text of Anthroposophy. Steiner read its riddling images of a river, a temple, and three metal kings as a prophetic picture of the threefold social order and of the soul's path between the sense-world and the spirit, the seed from which his first Mystery Drama grew.
In Steiner's Own Words
Now, however, it is already possible to indicate in a certain way, even though Goethe had not himself yet done so, how the Golden King would correspond to that aspect of the social organism which we call the spiritual aspect: how the King of Semblance, the Silver King, would correspond to the political State: how the King of Power, the Copper King, would correspond to the economic aspect, and how the Mixed King, who disintegrates, represents the 'Uniform State' which can have no permanence in itself.
What it Means Today
Goethe wrote the tale in 1795 as a pictorial reply to Schiller's On the Aesthetic Education of Man, refusing to treat the human being in three dry forces and giving instead some twenty fairy-tale figures whose interplay carries the meaning. Steiner had already lectured on its hidden sense in 1891 to the Vienna Goethe Association, and he returned to it across thirty years as the imaginative root of his own work. In 1910 he staged that root directly: his first Mystery Drama, The Portal of Initiation, treats the same theme of crossing the river between the sense-world and the spirit, but in the form the twentieth century required rather than Goethe's eighteenth-century image.
The bridge that keeps the tale alive today is the Goetheanum stage in Dornach, where the School of Spiritual Science has performed all four of Steiner's Mystery Dramas in cycle, the line of work that began with this fairy tale. The scholar Paul Marshall Allen gathered the English materials in A Christian Rosenkreutz Anthology (1968), and Adam Bittleston's translation kept Goethe's Fairy Tale in print for English readers of Steiner. Thalira synthesis: Steiner treats the Marchen not as decoration but as a working diagram, the Golden, Silver, and Copper Kings naming the very threefolding of spirit, rights, and economy that he would later argue belongs in the actual ordering of society.
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