The Characters of the Mystery Dramas
Rudolf Steiner’s four Mystery Dramas — The Portal of Initiation (1910), The Soul’s Probation (1911), The Guardian of the Threshold (1912) and The Souls’ Awakening (1913) — share a common circle of characters. The same people meet one another across all four plays and, in the retrospects, also in earlier lives. This page introduces the most important figures briefly. An outline of the plot is given in The Four Mystery Dramas.
The fairy-tale quality of the plays has to do with their starting point. Steiner developed them from a process that he himself describes as putting Goethe’s Fairy Tale of the Green Snake and the Beautiful Lily on the stage; his own statements and the drafts of the plays (GA 44) show this very clearly. Goethe’s fairy tale in turn takes up Johann Valentin Andreae’s Chymical Wedding of Christian Rosenkreutz (1616). The Mystery Dramas are thus a dramatisation of soul-spiritual experiences and insights in a tradition that leads from Andreae through Goethe to Steiner. Other authors also play a part but remain in the background: Lessing with the Hamburg Dramaturgy and Nathan the Wise, Goethe’s novel of development Wilhelm Meister, and the mythology and legends of Faust.
So, alongside the human beings, the plays bring stage figures that seem like figures from a fairy tale. Some take up historical and mythological figures, others create a new mythology, such as the figures of the soul forces and the temple guardians. These figures are linked to real characters in the plays, but in the soul-spiritual realms they represent something other than themselves — a kind of soul-spiritual alchemy. Lucifer and Ahriman, by contrast, appear as forces outside the human being. They serve human development reluctantly, yet would gladly make human beings useful for their own interests. Thus representatives of ordered and healthy soul-spiritual forces stand opposite reluctant, disordered, disruptive and illness-causing forces (see Spiritual figures).
Johannes and Maria
Johannes Thomasius
A painter and the central developing figure of the four plays. Maria leads him to the path of spiritual training under Benedictus. Johannes is interested in the forces of Lucifer and Ahriman because he recognises them at work within himself, above all Lucifer, who works in beautiful semblance. As a painter, Johannes works in exactly this field. His training therefore aims at distinguishing, within beautiful semblance, what is humane and beneficial from what creates illusion and delusion. In the sense of building a competence, this distinction must succeed not only intellectually but also emotionally and in one’s intentions. In The Guardian of the Threshold he recognises that his being in love was not directed at Theodora but at a projection: he had fallen in love with an image of his own wishes that had merely taken on Theodora’s form. At this moment he meets his Double. In depth: Johannes Thomasius — Porträt einer Entwicklungsfigur .
Maria
A pupil of Benedictus and the one who leads Johannes onto the spiritual path. The retrospects show that this bond has a prehistory: in the fourteenth century Maria’s individuality was a monk, preacher and administrator of the church, and the teacher of young Thomas, Johannes’ earlier incarnation; in the Egyptian retrospect of The Souls’ Awakening she is the youth who, as a neophyte, is to receive the temple’s consecration in order to become counsellor to the king (see Earlier lives).
Forms of knowing
Around Johannes and Maria stand figures who each embody a form of knowing of their own. On one side are two representatives of scientific thinking with different starting points; on the other, three figures who know in imaginative or spiritual ways.
Scientific thinking
Professor Capesius
Capesius represents historically oriented scholarship in the humanities. The Soul’s Probation opens with his shock: „Bin ich denn noch, der ich vordem war?“ (“Am I still the one I was before?”) There follows his retrospect into the fourteenth century, in which he recognises himself as First Preceptor of the Templar order and head of a mine, and in young Thomas his own son.
Doctor Strader
Strader represents modern natural science. In the fourteenth century his individuality appears as Simon, a natural scientist and physician of Jewish culture. In The Souls’ Awakening he dies; in his last lines he writes that the obstacles to his work came not only from outside but also from its own inner shortcomings.
Imaginative and spiritual knowing
Theodora and Felix Balde work with a natural gift and develop their experiences directly. Benedictus, by contrast, joins his experiences to an ordered training.
Theodora
Theodora has a mediumistic gift through which she can grasp spiritual processes imaginatively. In The Guardian of the Threshold Johannes falls in love with her, until he recognises that it was not Theodora he loved but an image of his own wishes that had merely taken on her form.
Felix Balde
Felix Balde has a perceptive gift through which he grasps the processes of nature imaginatively.
Benedictus
The spiritual teacher around whom the community of pupils forms. Benedictus, too, works with imaginative experience, but he raises it to inspired and intuitive forms of knowing. These terms are meant in the sense of Steiner’s stages of higher knowledge (The Stages of Higher Knowledge, GA 12), not in their everyday use. He joins his experiences to an ordered training in the tradition of modern orders and brotherhoods. From this, together with his pupils, he develops a new method of spiritual education. It no longer depends on withdrawal, seclusion and the protection of vows of silence, but seeks to appear and to be effective in public. In The Souls’ Awakening his pupils try to put their spiritual insights into concrete, earthly work.
Spiritual figures
Lucifer and Ahriman
The two adversary powers, shown as forces outside the human being. They serve human development reluctantly, yet seek to make human beings useful for their own interests. Lucifer works in beautiful semblance, in illusion and delusion. Both confront Johannes already in the trials of The Portal of Initiation; in The Guardian of the Threshold he falls under Lucifer’s influence.
The Guardian of the Threshold
The stern watcher at the boundary of the spiritual world, after whom the third play is named. He demands that Johannes free himself from what binds him to everyday life only in outer social and practical life. Beyond the threshold other conditions apply — another logic or culture, as it were. It cannot be grasped or acquired as long as one clings to the familiar conditions as the only possible way of living and experiencing.
The Double
In the moment of his self-knowledge, Johannes’ Double steps towards him: „Erkenne mich – und schaue dich in mir.“ (“Know me – and see yourself in me.”) The scene is a key example of the mirror metaphors through which the plays make encountering oneself the condition of knowledge: Die Spiegelmetaphorik in den Mysteriendramen .
Earlier lives
Two retrospects show the familiar characters in earlier incarnations. The list of characters and the stage directions assign them explicitly.
Fourteenth century (The Soul’s Probation)
- Thomas, a master miner, is the earlier incarnation of Johannes.
- His father, First Preceptor of the Templar order and head of the mine, is the earlier incarnation of Capesius. He had separated from his family early on, before he became a Templar.
- The monk, preacher and administrator of the church, is the earlier incarnation of Maria. He is Thomas’ teacher and upholds the cause of the church against the Templar order.
- Simon, a natural scientist and physician of Jewish culture, is the earlier incarnation of Strader.
Thomas finds his father and at the same time has to recognise that he is his teacher’s opponent: „Ich habe ihn zum zweiten Mal verloren.“ (“I have lost him a second time.”) Between father and teacher, between Templar order and church, stand different views of truth and spirit.
“Third cultural epoch of the earth” (The Souls’ Awakening)
The retrospect leads into a “temple in the Egyptian style”. The individuality of Johannes appears as an Egyptian woman. I read her as the companion of a youth, Maria’s individuality, who as a neophyte is to receive the temple’s consecration in order to become counsellor to the king. With this he enters a different social circle and commits himself to a different way of life.
For the Egyptian woman this means a double separation: social, because her partner leaves their shared circle of life, and inner, because from now on he leads his life by other standards. She laments that he must tear himself away from her „für immer“ (“for ever”), and speaks of „Trauer nur für mich, Entsagung, Leid“ (“grief alone for me, renunciation, sorrow”).
How the plays show these connections rather than explain them is the subject of Karma auf der Bühne on karmaforschung.ch.
Further figures
The circle of characters is larger than this first version shows. Further figures will be added as they are treated in articles of their own.