The Brocken witches' sabbath of Faust Part One, which Steiner read as a real out-of-body descent of Faust's soul into the sub-sensible world.
The Walpurgis Night is the scene in Faust Part One in which Mephistopheles leads Faust up the Brocken on the night of April 30 to a wild gathering of witches. Rudolf Steiner refused the usual reading of it as a careless mountain ramble. He saw a soul forced out of its body by grief, crossing into a lower spiritual realm it could not have avoided.
In Steiner's Own Words
No, what we are dealing with is a spiritual experience coming to Faust during Walpurgis-night, an experience he could not avoid which came to him as the definite result of the shattering events through which he had passed. We must realize, therefore, that his soul has been snatched out of his body, and has found Mephistopheles in the spiritual world. And it is in the spiritual world that they wandered together to the Brocken, that is to say, they meet with those who are also out of their bodies when they go to the Brocken; for naturally the physical body of those who make this journey remains in bed.
What it Means Today
Read the scene as drama and a problem appears at once. Two days earlier Faust has wrecked the life of Gretchen: her mother dead of a sleeping-draught, her brother slain. Then he goes climbing the Brocken with apparent ease. Even Karl Julius Schröer, the Goethe scholar Steiner names in these 1917 Dornach lectures, could not square that with the man's character. Steiner's answer dissolves the difficulty by changing the plane. The Walpurgis Night is not the next day in Faust's calendar life; it is what becomes of his soul once the catastrophe has torn it loose. Anointed witches once sought the Brocken on the night of April 30 by rubbing on an ointment that loosed the astral body and ego from the sleeping form. Faust crosses the same threshold, not by craft but by suffering.
What he finds there is a hierarchy of the left-behind. Witch-souls glide rather than walk. Voices answer from below, sub-human and instinctual. One being has clambered for three hundred years, a soul stranded since the age of the original Faust legend. Mephistopheles, whom Steiner identifies as an Ahrimanic power, keeps trying to hold Faust among the trivial and to steer him off the track of real evil. This is the root-region of Goethe's poem, the descent into the sub-sensible that every later ascent presupposes. For a reader on a path of inner development, the scene is a sober warning and a map: the soul that leaves the body meets first not the light but the residue, and only a consciousness that refuses to go dim, as Faust's does when the red mouse becomes Gretchen, can pass through it without being claimed.
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