Isis
and Madonna
Berlin, 29th April, 1909
Goethe referred repeatedly to the fact that someone who
approaches the secrets of nature longs for the worthiest
interpreter of these secrets, for art. Goethe has shown in his
creations his whole life through how art was an interpreter of
truth to him. However, one is allowed to say that Goethe met
something with this view that went as basic conviction, as
basic motif through all times, through all epochs of human
development.
More or less consciously or unconsciously different
“languages” represent themselves in the different
arts — one could say — to express certain truths,
which live in the souls. These are often just the most
mysterious truths, the most mysterious knowledge which cannot
be easily conceptualised in rigid formulae and which then look
for their expression in the artistic representation.
Such a mysterious truth shall face us today, which wanted to
express itself in art for centuries, which has also found its
scientific formulation in certain narrow circles that will
become popular, however, for wider circles only in certain
future by spiritual science. Goethe himself could approach this
truth with his soul from the most different sides. I referred
in one of the talks, which I held about Goethe here, to the
meaningful moment when Goethe experienced such a secret. I
referred to it in the second talk about Goethe's Faust how
Goethe, reading the Greek author Plutarch, found the strange
story of Nicias who wanted to make a city in Sicily, belonging
to the Carthaginians, inclined to the Romans again and who was
pursued, therefore. On the run he pretended to be mad, and one
recognised by the peculiar call which he exclaimed: “The
mothers, the mothers pursue me!” — that it did not
concern a usual insanity, because in that region a so-called
“temple of the mothers” was established in an old
mysterious way, and, hence, one knew what the expression
“the mothers” meant. When Goethe could put the full
meaning of the term “the mothers” before his soul
again, he also knew that he could not express the dreadful-nice
of this Faust scene better than by the fact that he let Faust
go to the mothers.
What does the way to the mothers represent? We have briefly
mentioned it in that Faust talk. Indeed, Mephisto brings the
key to Faust, but he cannot go into that realm in which the
mothers are enthroned. Mephisto is the spirit of materialism,
the spirit who is included, so to speak, in the forces and
powers of the material existence. He considers the realm of the
mothers as the realm of nothingness. Faust, the spiritual human
being who tends to the spirit can answer: “In your
Nothingness I hope to find my All.”
It
follows that strange, important description of the realm of the
mothers where to us is told how they weave and live in a realm
from which the figures of the visible world are formed. One has
to override everything that lives in time and space if one
wants to penetrate to these mothers. Creation, transformation
is the being of their realm. They are mysterious goddesses who
prevail in a spiritual realm behind the sensuous reality. To
them Faust has to descend at the moment when he should get
knowledge of that which is above all sensuous, above all
physical. Faust can unite the everlasting of Helen with the
temporal in dignity, so that this realm of the mothers opens
itself to his soul. Already in that Faust talk, I referred to
the fact that Goethe understood very well that this realm of
the mothers is the realm into which the human being can
penetrate if he wakes the spiritual forces slumbering in his
soul. This is the great moment for him in which the spiritual
beings and facts reveal themselves which are always round us
which one sees, however, with sensuous eyes just as little as
the blind sees colours and light; where his spiritual eye and
his spiritual ear is opened to a world which is behind the
physical one.
One
calls the entry into this realm the way to the mothers. I
repeatedly referred in these talks to the fact that the human
being — if he applies certain intimate processes to his
soul, certain specified methods of meditation and immersion in
his thinking, feeling and willing — that he receives,
indeed, these spiritual eyes and ears, and with them new realms
open themselves round him. I referred to the fact that someone
who enters this realm is confused by the impressions which work
on him. We have the objects with sharp contours in the physical
world and know a lot about this, we have a bewildering feeling
of creations weaving and floating into each other in the spiritual
world, just as Goethe describes it in the second part of
Faust.
However, from this realm of the mothers has
been born what is given to our senses, as from the ore in the
mountains the metal is born. Because this mysterious realm of
the mothers of all physical and earthly things, the realm which
contains, so to speak, the divine substance of all is
reminiscent with Goethe, the expression “the
mothers” works so fascinating, so eerily-beautifully with
him. That is why he understood what he read with Plutarch,
recognised that if anybody calls “the mothers, the
mothers!” he does not see like a maniac in a senseless,
unsubstantial realm, but in a realm of spiritual reality. So to
speak, the mother problem of the world faced Goethe when he
read Plutarch, and he inserted this mother problem
mysteriously, like many other things, into the second part of
Faust.
Someone who wants to enter this realm of the mothers, the
spiritual world, had to experience something in old times —
beside all the other exercises which you find described in
How Does One Attain Knowledge of the Higher Worlds?
— that one has always called preliminary purification,
the catharsis of the soul. He had to prepare himself in such a
way that his soul from which the higher spiritual forces should
be got out has no longer any compulsion, any passion for the
usual, sensuous world that it has purified itself from all that
attracts it to the sensory appearance and adheres the mind to
the physical body. The soul must be free of it, and then it can
wake the spiritual eye in itself and penetrate into the
spiritual world. One calls the purified soul the higher inside
of the human being where one has known something about this
secret. One said about it: this does not originate from that
which external eyes can observe, this comes from higher, from
spiritual-mental sources, this does not have an earthly
homeland, and this has a heavenly one.
One
imagined this purified soul connected with the true origin of
the human being. Because that which spiritual science was at
all times could not speak about a purely material development,
about something sensually perfect, about something sensually
imperfect in the same sense. Spiritual science does not regard
as wrong what one calls evolution today, the advance from a
sensually lower being up to the most perfect sensual being. It
completely accepts it, as I have often emphasised. The
scientific evolution theory is completely accepted by spiritual
science; but at the same time I have pointed to the fact that
the human being himself does not amount to nothing more than
this evolution that it is only the outside of the human
evolution.
If
we trace back the human being, we realise that, the more we go
back to more imperfect sensuous figures, we arrive at the
spiritual-mental origin of the human being. We have already
repeatedly transported ourselves in a time of human development
when the human being did not yet have physical existence, when
he was still completely secure in mental-spiritual existence. I
have repeatedly drawn your attention to the fact that we have
to imagine the sensuous figure, the physical nature of the
human being like a densification of a once only
spiritual-mental human being.
That spiritual-mental human being has been condensed, so to
speak, to the present human being as water solidifies into ice.
I have also used this picture repeatedly. We imagine a mass of
water; this condenses to ice, so that we have a certain rest of
water and ice in the end; then we have the picture of the
origin of the human being. With the once spiritual-mental human
being, nothing of the physical-sensuous nature existed that
eyes can see and hands can seize today. Bit by bit he becomes
more physical up to his today's physical shaping. Of course,
that time, in which external science can look back, shows the
human being in that physical figure, in which we see him today.
However, spiritual science looks back at the most distant past
when the human being was born out of the spiritual world and
still was of spiritual-mental kind. If we look at his soul
today, we say to ourselves, the human soul is, so to speak, the
last rest of that spiritual-mental which was once. We look at
the inside of the human being, we get to know the soul and the
mind of the human being and say to ourselves, as he is inside,
he was once when he was born out of the womb of the spiritual
world. This soul being is wrapped in the lower sensory world
from without, but it can purify itself, can rise to a view free
of sensuousness, and can thereby reach that spirituality from
which it was born out. This is the purification of spiritual.
Thus, we spiritually see the soul being of the human being, and
while we speak not only figuratively, but also really, we say,
if we recognise this soul being truly, we see that it is not
from this world. We see in the background of this soul being a
divine-spiritual world from which it is born.
We
try now to translate what we have just pronounced into a
sensuous picture. We ask ourselves, have we not transformed
what we have just pronounced into a sensuous picture on which
the spiritual world is sensualised by clouds out of which
spiritual figures are born like heads of angels, which
sensualise the human soul? Do we not have in the Madonna figure
of the Sistine Madonna by Raphael a picture, which was born out
of the divine-spiritual world?
Now
we go on and ask ourselves, what originates from the human
being, who has purified his soul, has ascended to higher
knowledge who has developed the spiritual shapes in his soul,
which enliven the divine of the world in him? The human being
who bears the higher human being in the human being, a human
being that represents a little world in the big world, what is
he? Nothing else than clairvoyance characterises him. Let us
try to visualise the soul, which the higher human being bears
out of himself, out of the spiritual universe, so we only need
to imagine the picture of the Sistine Madonna, the marvellous
child in the arms of the Madonna. We face the Sistine Madonna
as a picture of the human soul, born out of the spiritual
universe; the highest has arisen from this soul that the human
being can produce, his spiritual birth, a reproduction of the
activity of world creation. Let us try to perceive what
clairvoyant consciousness does.
Once the divine spirituality underlay our world building,
because, otherwise, it would be senseless to look for a spirit
in the world if this spirit had not built the world originally.
What surrounds us outdoors in the world has arisen from the
spirit that we search in the soul. Thus, the soul has arisen
from the divine father's spirit who lives through the whole
universe, bearing the son of wisdom, who is similar to this
father's spirit, who is his repetition.
We
understand now how Goethe approached this problem in its whole
mystic meaning when he wanted to unite the whole contents of
Faust
in the Chorus mysticus in which he addressed the
human soul as the eternally-female that draws us up to the
universal spirit of the world. Goethe still stood at the end of
Faust
to his Madonna problem that way. Today one can
hardly recognise from the figure that the presentation of the
Madonna has accepted what has been pronounced now like in a
picture, and which deep truth underlies. However, if we trace
back this Madonna problem to its origin, we recognise that,
indeed, even if often veiled, in the figure of the Madonna the
biggest human problem faces us. Of course, the figures of these
Madonnas have changed, from the simple figures of the first
Christian centuries in the catacombs where we find the Madonna,
the child grasping at the breast of the mother. From this
simple figure that is less artistic it is a long way to the
fifteenth century, when after multiple changes the child and
the Madonna have become more and more artistic, more painterly
in the modern sense, up to Michelangelo and Raphael. However,
it is in such a way, as if these marvellous artists —
although they did not have the complete knowledge — had a
clear feeling of the deeper truth of the Madonna problem.
The
most beautiful sensations come over one if one stands before
the so-called Pietà by Michelangelo in the St. Peter's
Basilica in Rome, where the Madonna sits there with the corpse
on her knees, the Madonna of that age, because Christ has
already gone through death, in youthful beauty. At that time,
it was often discussed why Michelangelo has shown the Madonna
at this age so juvenile. Michelangelo himself was asked, and he
answered — I expressly say that it should not be spoken
about something believed, but about spiritual-scientific
experiences —, it is an experience that maiden women keep
their youthfulness until old age. Why should he not be entitled
to show the Mother of God also at this age still in all
youthfulness? — It is a strange view that Michelangelo
expresses here! Even if not pronounced, we find it,
nevertheless, also expressed in the pictures of Raphael.
However, we can understand this whole view only if we go back
far in the times in which was still externally alive what faces
us in the Madonnas as something unaware-artistic. We could go
far back and we would find the Madonna problem all over the
world. We could go to old India and would find the goddess with
the Krishna child at her breast; we could go to a Chinese
service and find similar pictures there.
However, we do not want to go to those remote regions, but we
want to adhere to that representation of old times which
reproduces that most characteristically which is given to us in
the Madonna so nicely. We want to consider the representation
of Isis with the Horus child. The representations that have
completely grown out of the Egyptian wisdom can be a key to us
in a certain respect for the right understanding of the
Madonna. However, we have to direct our attention to that kind
of wisdom, which has led to this strange divine figure of
ancient Egypt, to Isis, and what that wisdom is to us, which
expresses itself in the legend of Isis and Osiris. This legend
leads us profoundly into the problem of humanity if we
understand it correctly. We may explore the Egyptian religion
here or there, the legend of Osiris is the most significant one
and full of contents. Osiris was the king who ruled in ancient
times as in a golden age among the human beings. He was married
to his sister Isis who has brought happiness and blessing to
the human beings. A human king with divine power and divine
virtue, so he stands before the view of the ancient Egyptian
and rules, until his brother, the bad Set, kills him. He kills
him strangely. At a banquet, the bad brother Set who was later
called Typhon causes to form a box, and by stealth, Osiris is
induced to lie down in this box. Then the box is shut and
thrown into the Nile, so that he is swept away into the
unknown. Isis, his mourning wife, searches her husband
everywhere, until she finds him in Asia after long search. She
brings him back to Egypt, where the bad brother Set dismembers
him; the pieces are buried in many graves. Hence, many Osiris
graves existed in Egypt. Osiris now becomes the king of the
dead human beings, as he was the king of the human beings
living on earth. From the transcendent world, a ray meets the
head of Isis. She bears Horus after it; he becomes the ruler in
this kingdom.
In
the sense of the Egyptian legend, Horus is the posthumous son
of Osiris. Horus, originated by conception from beyond, is the
ruler in the earthly-sensuous world. Osiris is a ruler in the
kingdom of the dead. While the soul is subordinate to the power
of Horus here, while it is enclosed in the body, it comes into
the kingdom of Osiris if it leaves the body — the
Egyptian Book of the Dead testifies this. In an extremely
typical way the soul is addressed at that court which is shown
in the Egyptian Book of the Dead when it arrives beyond:
“Osiris, what have you done?” and so on, so that
the soul matures to become Osiris while it goes through the
gate of death.
We
look in the sense of the ancient Egypt at two kingdoms, at the
kingdom, which we see with our senses, the kingdom of Horus,
and the kingdom that the soul enters after death, in which
Osiris rules. At the same time, however, we know that the
Egyptian initiate who attained clairvoyant abilities enters the
same fields while he is still in life that the soul can enter
only after death that he can be combined with Osiris. The
initiate himself becomes Osiris. He snatches himself from the
physical, renounces all habits of the physical life, all
passions, and desires; he purifies himself of the physical,
becomes a purified soul, and is then combined with Osiris. What
does this legend show? Oh, it is a childish idea if one asserts
there that this legend should present the annual run of the sun
around the earth. Scholarship concocts there on a theoretical
basis that Osiris is the sun, and if it sets, it is overcome by
the wintry physical powers, which should be characterised by
Set, the bad brother Typhon; and in Isis, the moon is
represented which searches the sun to be irradiated by its
light.
Only someone who puts up a theory of physical myths in such a
way from his head is able to assert such a thing. In reality,
the Isis legend is the pictorial expression of a deep truth.
When did Osiris rule over the human beings? When the human
beings were still spiritual-mental beings when they still
stayed in the spiritual-mental world among spiritual-mental
beings. If one speaks about the kingdom of Osiris, it is not
the physical kingdom, but a kingdom of the past in which the
human being lived as a spiritual-mental being. The hostile
brother of Osiris is that being that coated the human with the
physical body, which a part of his spiritual-mental being has
condensed. We see now how the once purely spiritual Osiris is
put into a box. This box is nothing else than the physical
human body. Because Osiris is a being who cannot descend
according to his whole nature to the physical world who should
remain in the divine-spiritual world, this putting into the box
is to Osiris equivalent to death. It is shown here in a wider
sense the transition from that spiritual-mental realm to the
epoch of physical development of humanity. Osiris was not able
to enter this physical realm, that is why Osiris died for the
external physical world and became the king in that realm which
the soul enters when it leaves the physical-sensuous world or
if it develops clairvoyant forces. Hence, the initiate is
combined as a soul with Osiris. What of the spiritual-mental
realm remains to the human being? What has remained to the
human being who did not withdraw from the physical-sensuous
world like Osiris? His soul, his spiritual-mental being which
will always draw him to the old origin of the spiritual-mental,
to Osiris. Isis, the human soul, is in a certain respect the
eternally female that lives in us and draws us up to that realm
from which we are born.
This Isis, if it purifies herself and dismisses all that she
has received from the physical, is fertilised by the spiritual
world and bears the higher human being, the Horus, who is
victorious over all lower human. So we look at Isis as the
representative of the human soul, as that which is born in us
as a divine-spiritual out of the father's All, what has
remained in us, what searches Osiris and what only finds him
with initiation or at death.
We
really look at that realm which lies behind the
sensuous-physical one, while we imagine this Osiris Isis
legend, at that the time when the human being was still with
the mothers, the primal grounds of existence. For Isis was not
yet enclosed in the physical body, was still combined with her
husband Osiris in the golden age. The most beautiful humaneness
appears in it, the highest human ideal is born out of the human
body, fertilised by the eternal world spirit.
How
could something else fit into the realm of the mothers than the
highest ideal, the highest humaneness that is just Christ? In
Goethe's
Faust,
three mothers, sitting on golden
tripods, face us, three mothers! The human soul went through
its development in the times when it was not yet in the human
body. What we today observe with sensuous eyes as human
conception and human birth is only the last symbol of the
former figure of the same process. In the bodily mother, we
see, so to speak, the last physical figure of a spiritual
mother who is behind her, and we see this spiritual mother not
fertilised in the same way as this happens today, but from the
universe, as well as we have also fertilised our soul with the
higher knowledge from the universe. We look back at more and
more spiritual forms of conception and reproduction.
Hence, one speaks, if one speaks in spiritual-scientific sense,
not only about one mother, but also about the mothers, and
imagines that what faces us as a sensuous mother today is the
last arrangement of the spiritual-mental figure from the
spiritual realm. Indeed, there are illustrations of Isis that
do not show one mother, but three mothers to us. In front, we
have a figure, the Isis with the Horus child at her breast,
represented like the oldest Madonna figures. But behind this
figure we have in certain Egyptian presentations another
figure, an Isis who has the known two cow horns and carries
vulture wings, passing a handled cross (ankh) to the child.
There we see what is physical in front, is already more
spiritualised here. Behind this, we still see a third, who
carries the lion head showing the third stage of the human
soul. Thus, these three Isis pictures appear to us one after
the other. Indeed, our human soul carries three natures in
itself: a willing nature, located in the deepest grounds, a
feeling nature and a wisdom nature. These are three soul
mothers; they face us in the three figures of the Egyptian
Isis.
It
is a profound symbol that behind the sensuous mother the
supersensible spiritual mother, the Isis of the spiritual
prehistoric time, appears, and that there with the figures the
vulture wings, the cow horns and the world sphere are mounted
in the middle of the head of Isis. Those who understood
something of the old numerology have always said, the holy
number three represents the divine-male in the universe. The
globe and the cow horns, which are a kind of image of the
Madonna sickle but, actually, an expression of the fertile
effect of the natural force, figuratively represent this holy
number.
The
globe is the expression of the creation in the world. We would
have to speak a lot about it if we wanted to represent an image
of the male in the world. Behind the sensuous Isis her
representative, the supersensible Isis stands who is not
fertilised by her kind, but by the divine-male, which works in
the world. The conception process is still shown as something
that is close to the knowledge process.
The
consciousness that the knowledge process is a kind of
conception process was still alive in older times. You can
still read in the Bible, “Adam recognised his wife, and
she gave birth to ...” What we today absorb as something
spiritual bears the spiritual in the soul; this is something
that still shows the last rest of the old conception. What is
expressed there shows us how we are fertilised today by the
world spirit; we absorb it in the sense of the world spirit in
the human soul to gain human recognising, human feeling, and
human will.
This is shown with Isis. She is fertilised by the divine-male,
so that her head fertilises itself, and not sensuous substance
is passed to the child as with the sensuous Isis, but the
handled cross (ankh), the symbol of life. While the physical
Isis passes the physical substance of life, here the spirit of
life is passed to it as its symbol. Thus, the spiritual mother
of life appears behind the mother of physical life and behind
this the primal force of all life, shown with the vital force
as the will was behind all in the more spiritual, most distant
past. There we have three mothers, and there we have the way in
which these three mothers deliver the stimulating force from
the universe to the sun. There we have a symbolic, if not yet
artistic, expression of a deep universal truth.
In
the newer time, one took up this Egyptian Isis symbol and
transformed it according to the human progress by the
appearance of Christ Jesus on earth. For Christ Jesus was the
great model of everything that the human soul should bear out
of itself. This human soul, fertilised by the world spirit, is
sensualised in the Madonna. Hence, the reborn Isis faces us in
the Madonna, as it were, in an appropriate manner increased and
transfigured.
What we could represent at the beginning of our talk
figuratively faces us as linked with the development of
humanity, ascending from grey antiquity, artistically
transfigured and decorated in the modern pictures which have
been put all over the world before art-loving human souls.
There we realise that, indeed, art becomes the interpreter of
truth as Goethe says. There we realise that basically, if we
look up at the Madonna emotionally, the soul receives something
of the big world riddle. There we realise that our soul as the
eternally female longs devotedly for the divine father's spirit
that is born out of the universe and that we bear as sun in our
soul.
What we are as human beings and how we are connected as human
beings with the world faces us in the pictures of the Madonna.
Hence, these pictures of the Madonna are so holy to us,
completely apart from any religious trend and any religious
dogma. Thereby we can feel it like something born out of the
universe when the uncertain cloudscapes form to angel heads and
the representative of the human soul is born out of the whole.
The Madonna contains what can be born out of the human soul:
the true, higher human being who slumbers in every human being,
the humanely very best, and what as spirit flows through the
world.
Goethe also felt that way when he shaped his
Faust
last when he let him pass the different stages which lead up to
higher knowledge and to higher life. Therefore, he lets Faust
go to the mothers; therefore, the word “Mothers”
sounds to him so eerily-beautifully lets him anticipate that
wisdom which sounds from old times. For only there, Faust can
find the everlasting from which Euphorion can originate.
Because just the human soul seemed to him represented by the
Madonna, Goethe expresses the soul riddle in the Chorus
mysticus with the words: “The eternally-female draws us
upwards.” Therefore, Raphael also succeeded with his
wonderful picture of the Madonna so nicely in leading back
again to the fields to which the old pictures of Isis led.
From that what is spiritual, what one can no longer express as
a human figure because too sensuous figures would originate,
from that Isis, whose force is shown symbolically with the
lion's head, we descend to the human Isis who transfers her
force by the sensuous substance to the Horus child.
Unconsciously Raphael expressed this in his Sistine Madonna;
spiritual science will consciously lead up humanity again to
the spiritual realm from which it has descended.
This year's winter cycle shall show us in two talks how the
human being has descended from spiritual heights and will
ascend to a raised existence again. In both talks with the titles
Old European Clairvoyance
and
The European Mysteries and Their Initiates,
it should become apparent to
us in a strictly scientific way that these pictures of the
Madonna and representations of the Isis are artistic
interpreters of the deepest secrets of nature and spirit. They
are only a paraphrase of the great dictum Plato has spoken:
once the human being was a spiritual being. He descended only
because he was robbed of the spiritual wings and was clothed in
the sensuous body. He will escape from this sensuous body and
ascend again to spiritual-mental worlds.
Plato once announced this philosophically. The pictures of the
Madonna also announce this, while they are in the most
beautiful sense what Goethe wanted to express with the words:
art is the worthiest interpreter of the recognised world
secrets. — One should not be afraid that art becomes
abstract or even allegorical if it is forced again — I
say “forced” — to recognise the higher
spiritual realities; one should not be afraid that it becomes
artistically stiff and lifeless if it can no longer adhere to
external rough models.
Only because the human being has forgotten to recognise the
spiritual, art is also bound to the external senses. However,
if humanity finds the way back again to the spiritual heights
and knowledge, it will also know that true reality is in the
spiritual world, and that who beholds this reality will work
lively, also without adhering slavishly to sensuous models.
Then only one understands Goethe if art and wisdom go with each
other if art is a representation of the spiritual again. Then
knowledge and art are one again, and then their union means
religion. For the spiritual works in its form on the human
hearts again as a divine and produces the true devoutness as
Goethe called it. “Who owns science and art, has religion
too,” Goethe says, “who does not have them both
should have religion.”
Really, someone who owns science of the spiritual secrets of
the world and knows what speaks through the Isis Madonna sees
something originally living in them, something much more living
than any slavishly imitation of exterior-physical human models
can express it. Such a human being who beholds through the
living, which the Madonnas show, like through a veil in the
spiritual can again feel devoutly without any dogmatism,
without any prejudice in entire spiritual freedom. He combines
science or wisdom and art in his soul and bears a real, free
piety or devoutness in himself.
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