Two flickering lights in Goethe's fairy tale: the soul quality that absorbs every wisdom life and science offer, then sheds it again unlived.
The Will-o'-the-Wisps in Anthroposophy is Rudolf Steiner's reading of the two dancing flames in Goethe's fairy tale of the Green Snake and the Beautiful Lily, written in 1795 to close the Conversations of German Emigrants. Steiner set out that reading in Goethe's Standard of the Soul (GA 22, 1918), where each figure of the tale stands for a power of the human soul rather than an allegory pinned to a fixed meaning. The Will-o'-the-Wisps carry the soul quality that takes in all the wisdom life and science can give without uniting that wisdom to the inner life. They shake gold from themselves as freely as they swallow it, and the fare they owe the Ferryman has to be paid in fruits of the earth, which they cannot produce. What remains is one-sided knowing, serviceable as an instrument of dogma or criticism, and unfit to nourish the person who holds it. Readers meet the same figure wherever information is gathered faster than it can be lived.
The Will-o'-the-Wisps are the two flame-shaped travellers who open Goethe's tale, dancing round the Ferryman's boat and demanding to cross the river at midnight. Steiner treats them as one of the soul's real powers: the capacity to gather wisdom and keep it as display. Gold passes through them without ever warming them, which is why the Ferryman says the river hates the gold they scatter.
In Steiner's Own Words
But this soul quality does not endeavour to unite wisdom wholly to the inner life. It remains one-sided knowledge, as an instrument of dogma or criticism; it makes a man appear brilliant, or helps to give him a one-sided prominence in life. It makes no effort to bring about a balance through adjustment with the yields of external experience. It becomes superstition as described by Goethe in the Wonder Tales of the Emigrants, because it does not try to harmonise itself to Nature. It becomes learning before it has become life in the inner being of the soul. It is that which false prophets and sophists like to bear through life. All endeavour to assimilate the Goethean life-axiom: "Man must surrender his existence if he would exist" is alien to it.
What it Means Today
Michael Polanyi gave the Gifford Lectures at the University of Aberdeen in 1951 and 1952, and worked them into Personal Knowledge: Towards a Post-Critical Philosophy (1958). His target was the ideal of knowledge held at arm's length, verifiable by anyone, owned by no one. Polanyi argued that all real knowing rests on what he called indwelling: the knower has to inhabit the particulars, the way a pianist inhabits the keys or a blind man the tip of his stick, until those details stop being objects and become the means of seeing. Facts kept outside that indwelling stay inert. They can be recited and defended, and they still tell the holder nothing about his own life.
Steiner reached the same diagnosis forty years earlier, in the language of a fairy tale rather than a philosophy of science. Thalira synthesis: what Polanyi called indwelling, Goethe pictured as the Green Snake swallowing the gold and glowing from within, while the Will-o'-the-Wisps swallow the same gold and shed it again as sparks, so the test of a teaching is not whether you can repeat it but whether it has changed the temperature of the one repeating it. The practical use is small and exacting. After a lecture or an hour of reading, ask what has become an organ of perception and what has only become an opinion.
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