Lapis Magazine

The Eternal Feminine: Goethe in Marienbad by Christopher Bamford

Christopher Bamford, editor of SteinerBooks and Lindisfarne Books, is a writer and scholar of Western esotericism, esoteric Christianity and Anthroposophy. He is the author of, most recently, An Endless Trace: The Passionate Pursuit of Wisdom in the West.

This article is a transcription of a talk presented in Kutna Hora, Czech Republic, as part of An Esoteric Quest in Central Europe: From Renaissance Bohemia to Goethe's Weimar.

I want to begin with an epigraph: “Eternal will be for you the one that self divides into the many and, remaining one, remains eternally the only one. Find the many in the one, feel the many as one, then you will have the beginning, the end of art.” 

Now appropriately if only by name, this legendary Bohemian spa, Marienbad, is oddly a place of alchemical associations, harking back to the legendary alchemist Maria Prophetessa (Maria the Jewess), the reputed sister of Moses who was the inventor of many alchemical vessels including the Bain Marie or the double boiler, which is, in German, the Marienbad.

Maria is the source of the central alchemical maxim: “One becomes two, two becomes three and out of the third becomes the fourth as the one.” Or, in another translation: “One becomes two, two becomes three, and by means of the third and the fourth achieves unity. Thus the two are only one.” She also said: “Join the male and the female and you will find what you seek.” Or, more alchemically stated: “Marry gum with gum in true marriage.”

Goethe to my knowledge does not mention Maria but, as we shall see, he certainly lived and loved by her principles. For Goethe’s whole work—all fragments, as he says, of one great biography—is hermetic through and through: his poetry, novels, dramas, no less than his science, which is explicitly so.

And, continuing with alchemical associations, there is the hermetic fact that it was John Joseph Nehr, the doctor of the Premonstratensian monastery of Teplá here, who began to promote the healing properties of the springs, which the monastery owned.  Until that time only the local people had known of it because the springs were in an inaccessible location, way back in the hills. Now the Premonstratensians had always included alchemy, hermeticism and medicine among their interests, and it is therefore not unlikely that a hermetic motive in the larger sense lay behind the foundation of the spa, and inspired both the doctor and the abbot, a friend of Goethe, and inspired them to name the spa with these hermetic associations.

And hermetic and Herculean likewise was the effort to domesticate the inhospitable terrain which would then be the site of the spa. Vast amounts of earth had to be removed, ravines filled in, bogs drained, and a staggering job of landscaping recalling the end of Faust Part II when Faust himself is engaged in just such a project. Now which if any of these associations most appealed to Goethe is unknown, when he began visiting the spa in the summer of 1819, about 11 years after the spa was first built. He had just finished his West/East Divan, his homage to the peerless Persian poet Hafiz, and in fact the only full-length lyrical work that he published during his lifetime.

Celebrated as the first work of world literature, the Divan was intended to overcome the dichotomy of East and West by raising it to a higher unity. The title page of this work is in both German and Persian, as are the half-titles of all the 12 books that make up the collection of more than 200 lyrics. But the title itself in German and the title in Persian are not the same. In typical Goethe fashion, the apparent unity conceals a duality—“the Eastern poetry collection of a Western author.”  The German immediately sounds a dialogical or synthetic note whereas the Persian indicates something more unified—a more integral, monological note. 

The poems themselves, Sufi-like invocations of divine and human love, are dense and illusive in their language and draw on the Bible, the Hebrew Scriptures and the Koran, and Western and Persian traditions. Multiple citations from East and West, from Bible and Koran, from Hafiz and Western poetry, are embedded in the text.  The whole text echoes this arising sense of the eastern origin of the Bible, which suddenly casts doubt for Europeans on the supposed opposition between East and West by demonstrating that religion was one, and Oriental or Eastern in origin. “Who knows self and other will cognize here, that East and West are to be divided no more. The West is God’s, the East is God’s, northern and southern lands rest in the peace of His hands. He, the only just one, makes justice for everyone. Of his one hundred names, let this one be the highest praise. Amen.”

Goethe had always been interested in Oriental studies, and above all, Islam. Over the years he had read and reread the Koran intensively, making his first notes in Hebrew and Arabic when he was only 21. Throughout his life, in fact, he studied and collected Arabic handbooks, grammars, travel books and whatever collections of Eastern poetry and philosophy he could find. As a collector he owned original manuscripts of Rumi, Hafiz, Attar and others.

Now Goethe himself was an accomplished penman. He always prided himself on his penmanship and so admired deeply Arabic calligraphy and was delighted when the page of the last Sura of the Koran came into his possession.

All this interest in Islam came to a head in 1814, when his publisher sent him a copy of a new translation of the complete poems of Hafiz. Overwhelmed, Goethe realized a kindred spirit, “another self.” So close did he feel to Hafiz that he almost believed that, in another lifetime, he himself had lived, loved and strolled in the gardens of Shiraz. In June, he wrote, “So Hafiz, may your charming song, your holy example, lead us as the glasses clink to our Creator’s temple.”

At this time too, Russian Muslim soldiers were quartered in Weimar. “Who would have dared to say a year or two ago,” Goethe wrote to a friend, “that a Mohammedan service would be held in the hall of our Protestant grammar school and the Sura of the Koran would be murmured there.” Perhaps he experienced a kind of conversion there. As he later said: “The poet does not refuse the suspicion that he himself is a Muslim.”

Emotionally, however, this was not a good time for Goethe. His marriage was becoming more difficult, the burdens of his official position oppressed him. So he did what he always had done in such situations—he ran away. He went in search of love.

On July 25, he left Weimar for Frankfurt, which was his old home. The journey was, however, extremely productive. Powerful and inspired poems began to come right away as he left. Above all, and most significantly, the great poem Holy Yearning.

“Tell it to no one, only to the wise, because the crowd will only mock. What lives I will praise, what yearns for death by flame. In the coolness of the love nights that begot you, or you begot, a strange feeling comes over you, while the candle still shines. No longer are you hemmed in by the shadow of darkness. A new longing rends you for higher copulation. No distance is difficult, you fly onward and enchanted, and finally passionate for the light, Butterfly, you are burned. As long as you do not have this die and become, you are but a cloudy guest on the dark earth.”

By the end of August, 30 poems existed; and he had met his old banker friend, Johann Jakob von Willemer, who introduced him to his little friend, his lady Marianne Jung. This “dear little woman” would become Goethe’s inspiration for the divine, his Suleika and a co-conspirator in its production. 

Later, thinking of Marianne, Goethe would speak of a “temporary rejuvenation, a repetition of puberty,” explaining, “This can happen to outstandingly gifted people, even during old age, while other people are young only once.” For Goethe, such a renewal of the springtime of human life was a rule, the means of new birth, of continuously dying and becoming.

Though the relationship with Marianne was completely secret and, in a physical sense, nothing happened, Mr. Willemer must have sensed something, for on September 27, on Goethe’s recommendation, he married Marianne. However, in October, Marianne and Goethe spent nine unforgettable days together in Frankfurt. Poems continued to be written and Goethe, having named her Suleika, named himself Hatem. “Now that you are called Suleika, I should also have a nickname; when you praise your beloved, Hatem is the name to use.”

The following summer he spent six weeks with the Willemers. In the morning, he wrote, appearing at noon in his frock coat; in the afternoons he took a walk; in the evening he dressed in his white flannel robe. The master read poems, mostly from the Divan.   Marianne played her 8-string guitar and sang folk songs. Goethe then gave her a copy of all he had written for the Divan so far. Mysteriously he noted in his journal, “Divan, beginning . . . . end.”  But only he and she knew that it was that he had also given her a poem called “Hatem.” “It’s not opportunity that makes a thief, because it itself is the greatest thief. It stole what was left of the love that still remained in my heart. I handed over to you the sum of all my fortune so that now, penniless, I depend on you alone for sustenance. Already in the jewel of your glance I feel your mercy. I enjoy, within your arms, destiny renewed.”

And a few days later, Marianne returned with a poem of her own, entitled Suleika. Goethe made a few corrections, copied it and placed it with his other manuscripts. Marianne was to write three other poems, which he called the most beautiful poems by a woman in the German language and they, likewise unattributed, slipped within the pages of the Divan. Here truly is unity in duality.

This done, Goethe then hastened to Heidelberg to confer with Orientalists and Bible critics, and to deepen his study of Arabic and Persian. His Grail he sought to discover, and to reconcile in himself a new higher unity in the multiplicity of monotheism’s divine expressions. This unity was always Goethe’s goal, for he well understood the alchemical truth that unity only divides to find itself again in a higher sense. As he wrote in the Color Theory: “Anything that enters the world of phenomenon must divide in order to appear at all. The separated parts seek one another and may find each other and be reunited. In the lower sense, by each mixing with its opposite, that is, by simply coming together with it, in which case the phenomenon is nullified or at least becomes indifferent. But the union can also occur in the higher sense, whereby the separated parts are first developed and heightened, so that the combination of the two sides produces a third higher being of a new and unexpected kind.”

While he was in Heidelberg, the Willemers suddenly appeared there. Goethe took Marianne into the castle grounds where he showed her a gingko tree. Presenting her then with a gingko leaf, he suggested something of a secret meaning by asking (because the gingko leaf is almost two leaves): “Is this one thing that divides into two or two that unite into one?”

On their very last day together, September 26, walking through the park, he inscribed “Suleika” in the sand in Arabic. They would never meet again. Filled with emotion, Goethe plunged again into the study of Persian. However, the next day he sent her a poem, Gingko Biloba, which is also in the Divan and he would place it in the Book of Suleika. “This tree’s leaf,” he writes, “which from the East is entrusted to my garden, let’s taste its secret meaning that edifies the learned. Is it one living being that divides itself in itself? Are there two who selected themselves so that we know them as one? To reply to such a question I have found, I think, a higher sense. Do you not feel that I in my poems, that I am one and doubled?”

The two lovers become one in love and unity, but unity which is love is conditioned by duality. Hatem and Suleika are two, as Goethe is himself who both loves and writes about it. His life is doubly doubled, hermaphroditic and inward-outward. He is both male and female, within and without. He lives and writes as both subject and object, but what he praises and becomes is one, the unity of the lover and the beloved. To achieve this unity requires renunciation. To become love, to love love, he must renounce both himself and the beloved. 

All this is actually hermetic. The opening poem of the Divan announces: “North, West and South are shattering. Thrones burst apart. Empires shake. Flee then to the East. Taste of the air of the Patriarchs. There with love, wine and song, Khidr’s fountain will make you young again.” Now Khidr, for those who don’t know, in Islamic mysticism is the green or emerald One—the source of all greening vegetation, the freshness of spirit, eternal liveliness, what Hildegard of Bingen calls “veriditas,” which Hildegard regards as both caritas and sapienza, wisdom and love. Khidr is a supra-earthly being, the angel of humanity, the true and one single initiator of all saints, sages and prophets, including Moses himself, as the Koran states. His fountain is none other than the fountain of life. His wisdom is drawn from the living sources of life. It is the divine science of life, the science of creation itself, and his disciples formed that invisible trans-historical spiritual order of those who have become truly free. Goethe must have known this when he invoked Khidr in the first stanza of his Divan. And he also knew that Khidr, in Islam, was the sole possessor of the philosopher’s stone and the master of the elixir of life.

So the Divan appeared in 1819. Marianne continued to write to Goethe sporadically, remembering his birthday, sending him important poems and never forgetting the Gingko leaf. “It lets me savor a secret meaning,” she writes, “that edifies the one who loves.” Goethe reciprocated, never forgetting her. In 1832, just before he died, he collected her letters—“Letters,” he wrote, “pointing to the loveliest days of my life”—into a packet and returned them to her saying, “I would only like one promise that you would leave it closed for an undetermined time. Letters of this sort give us the happy feeling that we have really lived. These are the most beautiful documents upon which we may rest.”

Nevertheless, the ending of that beautiful moment for Goethe left a void in his life. His imaginal trip to the East and his travels to Frankfurt and Heidelberg would be the last that he would ever make. He was getting too old for such distances. He was 70 when the Divan was published. He became a legend, a sage, a patriarch, but a lonely one. His wife Christiane Vulpius had died, his home life was completely chaotic. He lived with his son August and his daughter Ottilie and her sister Ulrike, but he could rely on no one.  August was completely useless. Ottilie had no idea of housekeeping at all. She just ran from one affair to another. The house got dustier and dustier! No one took care of Goethe. Meanwhile Weimar had become the Goethe shrine. Visitors came to seem him daily. He felt like a piece of statuary that was being pulled out as a tourist attraction. His creativity wasn’t there. He assembled his Italian journey from his old letters. He edited his campaign in France from his old diaries. He dictated two volumes of his annals, which are incredibly boring. When he did write, he wrote mystical poetry that was extremely obscure.

It was in this mood that he began summering in Marienbad, which had become his favorite spa since he had exhausted the geology of Carlsbad. But it wasn’t only geology that drew him here. In 1821, by apparent chance, he stayed in a pension when he came to Marienbad run by retired Prussian officer whose daughter was Amalie von Levetzow. He had previously met Amalie, years before in 1806, when she was 19. Now she was 35, separated but not divorced (her husband was a Catholic), and she had three daughters. Her partner, who was a count, had built the pension where Goethe stayed.  Goethe took to these daughters immediately. They had the freshness and youthful vitality that he needed. He was particularly taken with Ulrike, the middle one, who was only 17 and just returned from finishing school in Strasbourg where Goethe too had spent his schooldays. So they spent many hours together chatting about the towns where they had both been students and about which Goethe had written at length. But he soon realized that in fact Ulrike had no idea of who he was. She called him a “great scholar” and had never heard of his poems or Faust or any of his works. Yet Goethe just loved her innocence. He would go out every morning geologizing and botanizing and spend his evenings with Ulrike, telling her what he had found. He’d bring all his rocks and things he’d knocked off with his hammer. She didn’t make much of it, so gradually he learned that he had to put chocolate in among the stones. After a while, he brought her flowers instead. So that was the first year.

The following year, he went back. As usual you must remember that while all this is going on, he attends all the receptions. He promenades up and down, greeting all the ladies, but clearly his favorite is Ulrike. Soon everyone is jealous of her because it is only through her that you can get an introduction to the great man. 

Goethe gets more and more interested in her. He notes that he is observing with ever greater emotion all her little behaviors. And gradually what had begun as a mere love interest began to turn into this enormous passion, what he would call “an impassioned state,” though the lover was now 73 and the beloved only 18. Returning home that year, Goethe’s mood became tumultuous. He moved rapidly from ecstasy to complete depression. He fell ill, some said he nearly died. In January, he noted in his diary, “I am imprisoned, as if in a deep, deep tomb.” He was caught. At the same time, he wrote, “If only I could flee from myself, the cup is overfull. Why is it I that always strived for things not meant for me? Ah if only one could be well again! What insufferable pain! Like a wounded serpent it turns and twists one’s heart!”

In February, a darker mood seized him. He lamented the “masses of psychological stuff” that “have burdened me for 3000 years.” By summer however, his feelings overwhelmed him. As a friend said, in an impassioned state he conceived of the idea of marriage and consulted a doctor to find out if this would be detrimental to his health. The doctor, with a smile, said it would not.

Goethe then brought the Grand Duke Karl August into his plans. At first, the Grand Duke wanted no part of it—he teased his old friend. But then he saw that Goethe was deadly serious and was deeply moved by the sight of this white-haired old man—the greatest man in Europe—begging him to be an intermediary. Accordingly he agreed and he paid a formal visit to Frau von Levetzow and presented her with Goethe’s offer of marriage for her daughter, even going so far as to assure the mother that they would all be taken care of—and very handsomely—in the likely event that Goethe would pass first. Gently but firmly she turned him down. However, it must also be said that everyone knew this was going on. Goethe began to talk about it quite openly. He wrote letters to his family darkly alluding to his passion and hinting at the addition possibly of a third or a fourth person their household.  

In the middle of this (this is indicative of Goethe) and before this drama had run its course, Goethe heard the beautiful Polish pianist Szymanowska playing and he fell in love with her too, so unstable, as he says, was his impassioned state. He wrote in her album “verses on reconcilement.” These verses would finally be the concluding section of the Marienbad Trilogy or the Trilogy of Passion.

So in her notebook, before it was over, he wrote: “Passion brings suffering. Who, anxious heart, can soothe you who have lost so much? Where are the hours so swiftly flown by? In vain was the greatest beauty chosen for you, the spirit is clouded, the undertaking confused. How the glorious world disappears from the senses. Then the music soars on angels’ wings, tone upon tone a million notes intertwining, penetrating the core of our inmost being and filling it with eternal beauty, the eyes moistened and you feel with higher longing the divine value of  tones and tears. Thus the heart is made light and quickly sees it still lives and beats. It would still beat more in purest gratitude for this given gift, a willing offering of itself. Then you feel, oh would it last forever—the double joy of music and love.”

Reconciliation however, was not yet Goethe’s state. He would still have to propose marriage himself. Again, gently he was rejected. The Levetzows hastily left Marienbad. This was August 17^th. Three days later, Goethe noted in his diary: “a quiet night, conciliatory dreams.”

Then on the 23^rd, he too left Marienbad, supposedly to visit a friend to gather more mineralogical samples. He was after slate rich in flint and pyrotypical stones of several kinds. He reached his friend and sent Ulrike a poem from there, saying that she dwelt much in his heart and he cannot understand that she is not with him. Meanwhile he talks about mineralogy and geology and visits the pharmacy to view its weather glass. All seems fine but in the diary he also notes “working on the poem.” Finally he arrives at Carlsbad and takes a room at the same inn where the Levetzows are staying. In fact, his rooms are directly above theirs. On the surface, things went smoothly.

August 28^th was Goethe’s 74^th birthday, but he told no one of it. It would be a secret—he would organize an excursion on that day. When he came down to breakfast, he found a cup in which a garland of ivy was painted. “Why the pretty cup?” he asked.  “To remind you of our friendship,” he was told. (Ivy is a symbol of friendship.) Later, at the picnic, he was given a glass on which the names of Frau von Levetzow and her three daughters were engraved. “Despite it all,” she said, “we don’t want to be forgotten.  Remember us all on this occasion.”

The following day unfolded like the others at Marienbad. Ulrike read to him. He didn’t think she had too good a reading style—he thought that she ought to read with more energy and vivacity. Then, on September 15^th, he finally turns home to Weimar after a tumultuous farewell. And, already in the carriage, he begins to write the main section of the Trilogy of Passion.

He had written in his play Torquato Tasso: “When a person is speechless in his pain, the god will help him speak his suffering.” And, by October, the god had spoken. On October 23^rd, he asked Eckermann, his amanuensis and secretary, to stay a little later than usual. As the gloom of the dusk grew darker and deeper, Goethe asked his servant to bring and light two exquisite wax tapers, the best he had. Eckermann would read something. Then Goethe brought in the Trilogy of Passion, calligraphed in perfect Roman characters on his best vellum and fastened with a silk cord into a red Morocco case and sitting between the two candles. Eckermann had to read this poem in the red Moroccan case. Goethe said, using Frankfurt slang: “Gel?” (Which means: “Not bad, ain’t it so? Haven’t I shown you something pretty good?”)

The next month, the pianist Madame Szymanowska played in Weimar and he was asked to propose a toast in her memory. He leapt up, couldn’t contain himself and said: “I suffer not memory in the sense you mean. Whatever enters our life that is great or beautiful or important is not to be remembered merely from without and hunted down, as it were, but from the start it must be woven into the very heart of our being, united with it, so that it might create within us a better self and thus live on in us eternally active. There is no past for which we have a right to long, there is only what is eternally new, formed from expanded elements from what has gone before. True longing must always be productive and must always create something new and better.” Of course at the memorial for Madame Szymanowska, they had no idea what he was talking about.

After he left, he collapsed. Word was that he was near death. But when his friend Werther visited him he saw the truth, noting in his diary: “I stand at the door, is there Death in the house? Ah, what do I find? Someone who looks as if his body is wracked with all the love of youth, with all its agony. Well, if that is what it is, he will get over it.  No he must keep it and he must burn like quicklime.”  Burn he did and rise from the dead he did, and the poem richly unveiled for Ackerman with candles like a sacred text remained for him a numinous thing, a gift of the gods. He gave it three parts: the first, to Werther, was written to celebrate the 50^th birthday of the Sufferings of Werther, which  had made Goethe celebrated throughout Europe and had brought on a rash of suicides for love’s sake. For Goethe this was not an occasion for looking back, for once again he himself is in the same situation. Confused strivings, whether inside or outside, still tear him apart. Perhaps, after all, Werther took the right decision. “I chose to remain, you to depart. You went ahead. You have not lost much.”

After all, as always for Goethe, yet again, the farewell awaits, as if there were no higher life without death. As if life were not, if lived rightly, a continuous dying and becoming. He ends that poem: “You smile to Werther, you smile, friend, full of feeling as befits you. A horrible separation made you famous. We celebrated your wretched ill fate. You left us behind, for better or worse. Then, once again, an uncertain path of passion drew us into its labyrinth, in entangled and repeated need we end once more in separation. Separation is death. How stirring it sounds when the poet sings to avoid the death that separation brings. Half guilty and caught up in such torments may a god giveth to say what we suffer.”

What the god gives him is the Marienbad Elegy itself, which is an astonishing performance (not at all Wordsworthian—there is no emotion recollected in tranquility here.) It’s the thing itself in its own suchness. It begins almost theologically: “What can I hope for from this reunion, from this day’s still closed blossoms. Paradise and Hell   stand open before me. How ficklemindness rules in my heart. But enough of doubt. She steps to Heaven’s door. She lifts me into her arms, and I was received into Paradise as if I deserved eternal beautiful life. No wish, no hope, no desire was left me. Here was the goal of my inmost aspiration—beholding the singular beauty, the source of my yearning tears was overcome.”

But then this splendid tissue of intertwining love was ripped apart. It was as if a fiery cherub drove him out of Paradise. The gate closed, his heart likewise shut as if never opened and yet the world’s beauty in all Nature, in all its fecund glory, was still there.  The canopy of the Cosmos still poured its invisible powers upon the earth. Even in the blue ethers, Seraphim-like, Ulrike floated toward him—the loveliest of forms but that was a fiction, better not to hold her in his heart. How she had welcomed him, how each act had inscribed her in his heart, which would preserve her forever in eternal gratitude. He had thought love was lost until she appeared. Then within his heart she became a sign of hope and renewed hope, faith and peace.

And then she disappears. What does that moment demand? Tears, frenzy a heart split open. A life-and-death struggle—pain, solitude, more tears and then he ends (amazing for Goethe): “Leave me here, true companions. Leave me alone with the rocks, marsh and moss. Hold to your paths. To you the world is open, though earth is wide, the sky sublime and great. Observe, research and gather the details. Nature’s secret will be stuttered out, but I have lost the all. I have lost myself, I who have been the darling of the gods who tested me and gave me Pandora who is so rich in blessings and richer still in dangers. They pressed me to bountiful lips, cut them from me and destroyed me.”

“In every great separation,” Goethe wrote, “lies a seed of madness. One must be careful not to foster it.” Such partings are death and one could die. Goethe of course, does not. There is always a higher longing, a dying into which we are reborn.

Goethe’s great theme in all his work was always unity, multiplicity or division and multiplicity or division in unity. As he put it: “to divide what is united, and unite what is divided is the very life of Nature. This is the eternal systole and diastole, the eternal syncresis and diacrisis; the rhythmical breathing of the world in which we live and move and have our being. Goethe knew—like the old alchemist Maria, to whom Marienbad owes its name—he knew that creation and consciousness arise as primal love between one and two, between unity and duality. He understood that in the moment that unity looks at itself, it sexualizes or polarizes in love and begins the sequential process of expansion and contraction, death and renewal—whereby reuniting, it becomes conscious of itself.

For Goethe, the name of this one/many, many/one is Nature. Goethe’s love was always Nature and Nature was love for him. Nature was for him the “all.” For Goethe, the love that was the greening power of nature for Hildegard of Bingen and the love that moved the stars for Dante was the same love that brought two human beings through the process of encounter and separation into the unity that was love.

One sees in his early poems how this love for nature and love for woman is the same thing. Nature was for Goethe the same as Woman, and it was the “Ewig-Weibliche,” the “eternal womanhood” celebrated at the end of Faust, where he writes: “Everything transitory is only a symbol, the unattainable here becomes event. The indescribable, here it is done, the eternal womanhood drives us on.  In everything Goethe did, whether in science, poetry, drama or fiction, he sought to realize the famous alchemical adage: “Nature rejoices with Nature, Nature conquers Nature, Nature restrains Nature.”

You can see this if you study his metamorphosis of plants, how the whole metamorphic process of plants (as the leaf unfolds from seed to seed)—how the same process goes on. He knew that, as in Nature, so in the poet who was Nature too. He writes in his Divan a poem called Reunion.

“Can it be, Star of Stars, do I press you to my heart again?  Then the night of separation, what abyss, what pain! Yes it is you, my friend, sweet beloved counterpart. I recall past sufferings, I shudder before the Presence. When the world lay in deepest depths in God’s eternal bosom, He had ordained the first hour with creative desire and spoke the word, ‘Let it become.’ And a painful cry rang out as the All, in a gesture, shattered into separate realities. Light opened, shyly darkness departed from it, separated from it; elements dividing flew asunder, each pushed to the distances becoming rigid in unmeasured spaces without longing, without tone. All was mute, still and empty and for the first time, God was lonely. So He created the Dawn, who took pity on the torment of separation and developed, through the gloom, a sounding play of color so that what had fallen apart could now love again. Then, with hasty striving, those belonging to each other sought each other, and feeling and gaze returned to immeasurable life. Let each one seize and even snatch the other, if they can but grasp and hold. Allah needs create no more, for we are now creating this world. Thus with wings of dawn I was drawn to your lips. Star bright night with its thousand seals, now empowers our union. Exemplary are we too on Earth in joy and pain. No second, let it become, will separate us a second time.”

Goethe in this is amazingly prescient. Whoever Dawn is, she is clearly an intermediary and a figure of Sophia or wisdom. She mediates Heaven and Earth, spirit and matter, God and humanity or God and creation. She is in-between—a veil that conceals and reveals both the medium of theophany or revelation and sheer human creativity itself. There is a saying by the prophet Mohammed, attributed to the Creator, which states: “I was a hidden treasure and I longed to be known. Therefore I created creatures to be known in them.”

Perhaps Goethe knew this and knew how the Sufis, interpreting that saying, told the story of how the Creator suffered the solitude and sadness of not being known. And how His sadness and anguish at being unknown—because unnamed, unseen and unembodied—His desire to be known (which is the secret of his creativity) suddenly unfolded in a sophianic sigh of compassion—the Absolute.

This gives you some sense of what Goethe is about. In the last few days I found an interesting quotation that I think says a lot about the eternal feminine in Goethe. “A man has two wives. One is the woman with whom God commanded him to be fruitful and multiply. The second is his holy soul which God placed in man and because of her, man can attain the level of unending greatness.”

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