When we inquire into the origins of the Mystery Dramas, which Rudolf Steiner wrote from 1910 onwards, we find that the first drama is based entirely on Goethe’s fairy tale [The Green Snake and the Beautiful Lily]. Each character corresponds to a character from the fairy tale; the entire dramatic plot corresponds to that of the fairy tale. But where does the fairy tale come from? Goethe wrote it in response to Schiller’s magnum opus, Letters on the Aesthetic Education of Man. What Schiller formulated in philosophical concepts, Goethe incorporated into an imagination. And when we investigate how Schiller’s letters came about, we find that they were a response to what he saw as a failed attempt at social transformation: the French Revolution.

This highlights the dynamic that lives in Rudolf Steiner’s Mystery Dramas: a process of social transformation. Not political social change, but an internalized social transformation based on the development of the individual and their cognitive abilities. And since we know that the Goetheanum was originally built as a venue for the performance of these Mystery Dramas, the significance of the Goetheanum also becomes more appreciable: it is a place destined to support the social processes through which a socially transformative spiritual science can develop and be realized. This is what the Mystery Dramas tell us.

Translation Laura Liska
Image Mystery Dramas 2023. Photo: Georg Tedeschi