Steiner read Madách's 1861 dramatic poem as a reincarnation drama: Lucifer makes Adam dream nine future embodiments, a world run on natural law alone.
The Tragedy of Man (Madach) in Anthroposophy is Rudolf Steiner's reading of Az ember tragédiája, the dramatic poem published in 1861 by the Hungarian nobleman Emmerich Madách, as an unintended reincarnation drama. In his Berlin lectures on Austrian intellectual life, printed in From Central European Intellectual Life (GA 65, 1916), Steiner retells the frame: the Lord hands Lucifer the tree of knowledge and the tree of immortality, Lucifer teaches Adam the invisible cobweb of natural law outside paradise, then makes him dream his own later embodiments through nine cultural images, Pharaoh in Egypt, Miltiades in Athens, a crusader in Constantinople, Kepler at the court of Emperor Rudolf, Danton in revolutionary Paris, and at last a landscape of ice. For Steiner the poem shows what the world would become if Lucifer alone were at work, and its closing counsel, fight and trust, gestures toward the inner activity the dream omits. Marcell Jankovics's animated film of 2011 carries the dream cycle forward.
The Tragedy of Man occupies an unusual place in Steiner's lecturing: a work he did not write, praised with reservations, and read as evidence that reincarnation surfaces wherever a poet thinks world history to its end. Madách composed the poem after four years of political imprisonment and a broken marriage, and Steiner treats that biography as the ground from which its nine dream epochs grew.
In Steiner's Own Words
The Lord hands Lucifer two trees, the tree of knowledge and the tree of immortality. But with these, Lucifer tempts man. And he tempts Adam, thereby causing Adam to lose paradise. And outside of paradise, Lucifer introduces Adam to what in the visions of Madách is the knowledge of the forces of nature, of the whole fabric of forces that can be gained through knowledge of man through the natural phenomena unfolding before the senses. It is the invisible cobweb of natural laws that Lucifer teaches Adam outside of paradise. And then we are shown how Lucifer makes Adam dream of the more distant fate of the world. There we see how Adam is re-embodied as a Pharaoh in ancient Egypt, and Eve, in her re-embodiment, meets him as the wife of a slave who is mistreated.
What it Means Today
The poem Steiner described to a wartime Berlin audience has never left the stage. In Hungary it is the national drama: Ede Paulay gave it its first full staging at the National Theatre in Budapest in 1883, and productions have continued under every regime since. The most illuminating modern treatment, though, is the animated feature by Marcell Jankovics (1941 to 2021), the Hungarian animator best known for Son of the White Mare. Jankovics began adapting Az ember tragédiája in 1988 and released the finished film in 2011, twenty-three years of intermittent work. His solution to the poem's structure is why the film matters here: he drew each of Adam's dream stations in the visual language of its own epoch, Egyptian wall painting for the Pharaoh scene, vase figures for Miltiades in Athens, Byzantine mosaic for Constantinople, engraving for Kepler's Prague. The medium itself re-embodies; the drawing style dies and is born again from scene to scene, a more faithful rendering of Steiner's point than any single-style staging could give. Steiner heard in Madách a poet who arrived at repeated earth-lives from suffering rather than from doctrine, and who portrayed, almost clinically, a world in which only natural law and Lucifer's commentary are active. Thalira synthesis: read through GA 65, The Tragedy of Man works as a photographic negative of human evolution, everything present except the free inner activity of the I, and the blank space where that activity should stand is what Madách's closing counsel, fight and trust, and Jankovics's shape-shifting images both point at without naming.
Where to Read More