Goethe's grave-digging phantoms, read by Steiner as the earth-bound forces left in bones, tendons and ligaments once the I has departed.
The Lemurs in Anthroposophy is the phrase Rudolf Steiner used for the half-natured beings Mephistopheles summons to dig Faust's grave in the Entombment scene of Goethe's Faust, Part Two. Steiner explained them on 4 September 1916 at Dornach, in the cycle published as GA 272, Faust, the Aspiring Human. They are patched together, in Goethe's words, out of ligaments, tendons and bones, carrying nothing of blood, muscle or nerve. Steiner read this anatomically: bones, tendons and ligaments are the members the earth itself built into the human being during Earth evolution, so they alone stay behind with the earth at death. The Lemurs are the supersensible residue of that skeleton, phantom beings rather than ghosts, with the I standing outside them. Because memory lives where the I meets bone, they hear Mephistopheles call and forget the call at once. The Goetheanum Stage in Dornach still performs the chorus.
The Lemurs are not a species and not a nation. In Steiner's reading of Goethe, they are what is left of a human being once the I has withdrawn: the earth-forces held in bone, tendon and ligament, still able to hold a shovel and follow an order, no longer able to remember why. Mephistopheles commands them because they are the only crew a corpse can supply.
In Steiner's Own Words
Thus an infinitely deep, spiritual thought of nature is expressed in the fact that Mephisto has summoned these underworldly spectres, these pure phantom beings, in whose ranks Faust's phantom also enters. We must, of course, grasp the scene quite spiritually. The interpreters of Faust always believed that there were bone men walking around. But they are only the forces that lie in the bones, tendons and ligaments, the supersensible forces. The scene is to be grasped entirely spiritually, only through spiritual vision, in the manner of spiritual vision. These lemurs have what is in man in that he has an I. But the I is outside.
What it Means Today
The most exact place to meet the Lemurs now is a theatre. The Goetheanum Stage in Dornach, Switzerland, gave the first complete and uncut performance of both parts of Goethe's Faust in 1938, under Marie Steiner's direction, thirteen years after Steiner's death. The lectures collected in GA 272 and GA 273 were the working notes for that project: Steiner was not writing literary criticism, he was telling a company of actors how to stand. His remarks on the Lemurs are staging notes. He tells the ensemble that interpreters of Faust had always imagined bone men walking about, that this is wrong, and that the chorus has to be carried entirely by spiritual vision. In the same lecture he works out how the Fat Devil should move, small and stout, with only the lower arms doing the work, because the actor's body has to make a spiritual fact visible rather than illustrate a costume. The Goetheanum has returned to the full cycle many times since, and its Lemur chorus is still built from that instruction.
Thalira synthesis: the Lemur is Steiner's portrait of instruction without an addressee. A command is given, the form receives it, and nothing holds it, because holding is the work of the I in the bone. Anyone who has watched a clear order dissolve inside an organisation has watched a Lemur chorus. The question is never whether the call was audible. The question is whether anything present was still able to remember it.
Where to Read More
- Faust, the Aspiring Human, GA 272
- Find Steiner on Goethe's Faust at SteinerBooks [THALIRA_BLOG_LINKS_PLACEHOLDER]