GOETHE'S FAUST | 2005-12-18
While I am waiting for the input I asked you for, let me turn to a completely different subject.
We have heard of "Faust," the story about the man who gave his soul for knowledge.
In the Medieval version of Faust, Faust was damned and bis body ripped to pieces. Richard Burton, who was a Welshman of the old sort, was obsessed with Hell, and he did a movie "Faust" with Elizabeth Taylor which was the Mediecval version where Faust is damned.
So when people say "Goethe's Faust" they are really talking about something different. Goethe hated the old version of "Faust" and wrote his own which was such a succes that it was crammed down the throat of German schoolchildren to the point that Shakespeare used to be crammed down the throats of English schoolchilren.
We wish now that some of that cramming was still done, but in the 1950s and 1960s I tried to discuss Goethe's Faust with Germans and they were too sick of it to talk about it.
In Goethe's Faust, in total contrast to the Medieval version, Goethe's soul is saved. The angles come down from heaven at the last minute and say, "Der der streben sich bemueht den koennen wir erlosen."
Which means, "He who tries so hard to find what is true, he we can relieve of his sins." And you can't get more sinful than selling your soul to Satan for ANYTHING.
But by trying to find out what was true, Goethe made that absolute sin forgivable.
Jehavah would none of that. Goethe was going back to Wodenism. Woden hung on the World Tree, Ygsradil, to know a few more FACTS. He lost an eye for a bit more knowledge, not more Wisdom.
That concept is incomprehensible to anybody but an Aryan. Everybody elase assumes that gods know EVERYTHING already. They assume a despot is absolute.
In the Old Testament, man was kicked out of the Garden of Eden for eating of the fruit of knowledge of Good and Evil so "He could be like the gods.
Lucifer means "the giver of light." To us that seems like a compliment. In fact, the hero of ancient Greek literature was the god Prometheus, who gave man the secret of making fire, which the gods wanted to keep for themselves. He was the giver of light, too.
But Prometheus was damned. He was forever condemned to be chained down and have birds tear at his insides for his sin against the gods.
The Giver of Light was always damned in every faith but Wodenism.
Goethe was a part of the Romantic Era. He wanted to go back to the Old Gods.
He saw Faust's pursuit of knowledge as a good thing for which Faust should not be damned.
But like everybody in the Romantic Era, he screwed it up. Goethe had Faust pursuing, not knowledge, but his True Love.
Wagner did the same thing. he had a great opera about Woden, but he screwed it up by saying that Woden gave an eye for his True Love, the Goddess Freya, not for simple knowledge.
The trouble with Romantics is that they are so damned romantic.
The word "Romantic," of course, means "Latin." The Germanic Romantics like Faust and Wagner got mixed up with their devotion to the French troubador's idea of True Love and their wanting to get back to the ideas of their own Old Religion.
If they hadn't got those things mixed up, they would have been forgotten. People are much more interested in True Love than in the pursuit of knowledge for its own sake.
So Goethe's Faust was good public relations but it screwed the point up a lot.
None of which surprises any of us who live in the modern day.