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  • Goethe as Mystagogue
  • Frederick Amrine

Goethe’s love of mysteries is no secret. Many of these arcana have already been explored in depth: we have multiple fine studies on alchemy, Hermeticism, Freemasonry, and phrenology and even an outstanding book by our late colleague Gloria Flaherty on shamanism.1 Thus, it is surprising how little of the great mountain of Goethe scholarship is devoted to the ultimate Geheimnis (mystery), especially since it is precisely the place where Goethe’s two highest ideals, “das Ewig-Weibliche” (the Eternal Feminine) and the Spinozist concept of “Gott-Natur” (God-Nature), intersect.2 That point is the ancient mystery religions.3 I cannot begin to do justice to such a vast and complex topic but will attempt here to make at least a token payment on this major debt.4

The curious lack of critical attention is all the more surprising given how pervasive the whole theme of mystery religion was within the intellectual life of Goethe’s contemporaries. Even scientists thought in such terms, as evidenced by the frontispiece to Alexander von Humboldt’s Ideen zu einer Geographie der Pflanzen (Ideas for a Geography of Plants, 1807), which he dedicated to Goethe: in Bertel Thorvaldsen’s image, Apollo unveils Artemis/Isis, before whose feet Goethe’s scientific treatise Die Metamorphose der Pflanzen (1790) has been laid (fig. 1).5 When Humboldt wants to pay homage to both Goethe and Nature herself simultaneously, his reflex is to invoke Greek mystery religion.

Hermetic Discourse

This topic is difficult not just because it is huge but also because Goethe’s understanding and treatment of it are so genuine: all communications about the Mysteries were to be veiled in enigmas, “sub aenigmate … proferre,” as Pico della Mirandola expressed it.6 The Mysteries were simultaneously exoteric and esoteric; they all offered not only public displays that were widely known but also secret revelations to small groups of initiates that were so well guarded we can only speculate about their precise nature today. Pico admonished anyone who would discuss the Mysteries to be “editos et non editos”—simultaneously published and unpublished (Wind 11). The Renaissance Neoplatonist Calcagnini believed that it was possible “[b]y a judicious use of enigmatic words and images … to combine speech with silence: and that was the language of the [End Page 19] mysteries” (Wind 12). The spirit proper to such discourse is captured by Edgar Wind’s description of the enigmatic figure of Mercury-Hermes in Botticelli’s Primavera: “He plays with the clouds rather as a Platonic hierophant, touching them but lightly because they are the beneficent veils through which the splendour of transcendent truth may reach the beholder without destroying him. To ‘reveal the mysteries’ is to move the veils while preserving their dimness, so that the truth may penetrate but not glare. The transcendent secret is kept hidden, yet made to transpire through the disguise” (Wind 123). Is this not the same profound insight that Goethe “hineingeheimniß-ed”7 into the end of “Anmutige Gegend” (Charming Landscape)8 in Faust?


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Fig 1.

Detail from frontispiece to Alexander von Humboldt’s Ideen zu einer Geographie der Pflanzen (1807). Goethe’s Die Metamorphose der Pflanzen is shown lying at the feet of Artemis/Isis, who is being unveiled by Apollo. Courtesy of the Yale Collection of German Literature, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library.

Goethe was a master of this veiled, Hermetic discourse. Take, for example, the extraordinary poem “Kore,” with its cryptic subtitle “Nicht gedeutet!,” which can (and surely does) mean both “I haven’t interpreted this” and “Don’t try to interpret this.”9 [End Page 20]

Ob Mutter? Tochter? Schwester? Enkelin?Von Helios gezeugt? Von wer geboren?Wohin gewandert? Wo versteckt? Verloren?Gefunden?—Rätsel ist’s dem Künstler-Sinn.

[Or mother? daughter? sister? daughter’s child?Begot by Helios? brought forth by whom?Whereunto wandered? Hidden where? What doom?Recovered?—Riddle to the artist’s mind.]

Recalling the many competing versions of this ur-myth, in which Kore is identified by turns as the granddaughter of the Great Mother, her daughter (and hence sister of Demeter), and even as an...

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