The alchemists’ formula Goethe quotes in Faust: the red Lion is human will, the Lily is Devachan, and the tepid bath is the soul.
What is the Red Lion and the Lily?
The Red Lion and the Lily in Anthroposophy is the alchemists’ marriage formula, read by Rudolf Steiner as a compressed picture of human development in his 1904 lectures on The Story of the Green Serpent and the Beautiful Lily (GA 68c, Berlin and Cologne). Goethe puts the formula in Faust’s mouth during the walking scene of Faust I: a red Lion, a bold wooer, is wedded to the Lily in a tepid bath. Steiner takes each element as a Mystery term rather than a laboratory recipe. The Lion is the human will, the creature in whom will is most strongly developed and who fights for the kingdom. The Lily is Devachan, the spirit-realm between death and rebirth, the state of highest freedom in which nothing happens under compulsion. The tepid bath is the bath of the soul, the warm water in which will and spirit are wedded. The whole line names the mystery of human development.
The Red Lion and the Lily reaches Anthroposophy through alchemy and through Goethe, who handled the alchemists’ books before he was twenty. Steiner treats the pairing as an initiation-map folded into two lines of verse: the will that fights, the spirit-realm it fights toward, and the soul-water it has to cross to arrive. Goethe mocks the chemists who read the formula over a furnace, then builds an entire fairy tale on it.
What did Steiner actually say?
He was also acquainted with the Spiritual realms in which man lives between two incarnations, between death and re-birth; that is Devachan, the Kingdom of the Gods. Man is ceaselessly striving to reach this kingdom. The Alchemists took the chemical processes as the striving after this Spiritual kingdom. They called it “the Lily”, “the realm of the Lily”. And man they called “the Lion” who fights for the kingdom, and the Lily is the bride of the Lion. Goethe indicated this in his Faust, when he says: “Then a red Lion with the Lily wedded, A wooer bold.” Therein Goethe speaks of the marriage of man with the spirit. (“in tepid bath”, the bath of the soul. The soul, the water, the red Lion, man)
What it Means Today
Goethe’s alchemy stopped being treated as a youthful embarrassment in 1952, when Ronald D. Gray published Goethe the Alchemist with Cambridge University Press. Gray went back to what Goethe had actually read: Georg von Welling’s Opus Mago-Cabbalisticum et Theosophicum of 1735 and the Aurea Catena Homeri, worked through during the convalescence in Frankfurt between 1768 and 1770 with Susanna Katharina von Klettenberg, the Pietist friend Goethe later drew as the Beautiful Soul in Wilhelm Meister. Goethe records the reading himself in Book Eight of Dichtung und Wahrheit. Gray’s argument was that the alchemical vocabulary in Faust is not ornament borrowed late, it is first-hand furnace language the poet had handled himself, and that it keeps working structurally long after the laboratory is gone.
Thalira’s synthesis: Gray’s philology and Steiner’s 1904 reading are not rival claims about one line of verse, they are the two halves of a formula written in two registers at once. The recipe named a substance and a soul-condition in the same breath, and the red Lion in the tepid bath was legible as both to anyone prepared to read it. The ridicule in the walking scene is not aimed at the formula. It is aimed at the men who could only ever see the furnace.
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