The Germanic creation triad Steiner set beside Genesis: three gods shape the ash and the elm into humanity, giving it spirit, intelligence, and outer form.
Wotan, Wile and We in Anthroposophy is the Germanic creation triad that Rudolf Steiner set against the Biblical Paradise account as Europe's own original revelation. In the lecture cycle Artistic and Existential Questions in the Light of Spiritual Science (GA 162, Dornach, 24 July 1915), Steiner retells the northern legend: three gods find two trees on the seashore, the ash and the elm, and fashion them into the first human beings. Wotan gives spirit and life, Wile gives movement and intelligence, and We gives the outer figure, speech, and the power of sight and hearing. Where Genesis leaves humanity expelled after eating from the Tree of Knowledge, this legend leaves humanity carrying a threefold divine gift. Steiner stresses that it was still alive in European feeling while the Mystery of Golgotha was being accomplished in the Orient. Depth psychology met the same figure again in C. G. Jung's 1936 essay on Wotan.
Wotan, Wile and We are the three creating gods of the Germanic legend Steiner treated as Europe's counter-image to Genesis. Finding an ash and an elm on the shore of the sea, they shape the two trees into human beings and endow them threefold: spirit and life from Wotan, movement and intelligence from Wile, figure, speech, sight and hearing from We. In this legend Steiner heard Europe's original revelation of life.
In Steiner's Own Words
But the important thing is that even while over in the Orient the Mystery of Golgotha had been accomplished, this different legend was still alive in the feelings of the inhabitants of Europe. Here, too, we are led to a tree, or rather to trees, which were found on the shore of the sea by the gods Wotan, Wile and We. And men were formed from two trees, the Ash and the Elm. Thus men were created by the trinity of the gods, (although this was Christianised later, it yet points to the European original revelation) by fashioning the two trees into men: Wotan gives men spirit and life; Wile gives men movement and intelligence, and We gives them the outer figure, speech, the power of sight and of hearing.
What it Means Today
The god who leads this triad returned to European attention two decades after the Dornach lecture, and through depth psychology rather than theology. In March 1936, C. G. Jung published the essay Wotan in the Zurich journal Neue Schweizer Rundschau, later collected in Civilization in Transition, volume 10 of his Collected Works. Watching the mass movements then sweeping Germany, Jung argued that Wotan named a real power of the Germanic psyche, an archetype asleep since the conversion of Europe and stirring again as collective seizure.
Jung and Steiner read the same figure in opposite lights, and the difference is the lesson. Jung isolated Wotan the wanderer, the storm-leader who takes hold of a people. Steiner, in 1915, never presents Wotan alone: in the creation legend he works as one member of three, his gift of spirit and life balanced by Wile's mobile intelligence and We's formed senses and speech. Thalira synthesis: the legend carries in its own structure the warning Jung later wrote as diagnosis, since a Wotan split from Wile and We gives a people spirit without intelligence or form, and Europe lived that one-sidedness out in the years after both texts. Read whole, the triad is a picture of soul health: life-force, thought, and expressive form working as one. Whoever studies Steiner's account of the European folk-souls beside Jung's essay meets in this triad the measure against which the deformation was judged.
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