Those to whom Nature begins to disclose her revealed mystery feel an irresistible longing for her most worthy interpreter, Art     

 --Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe

 

Goethe has expressed in intimate fashion in his fairytale “The Green Snake and the Beautiful Lily” what he regarded as the right impulses of culture, knowledge, feeling and will; that is, what he was obliged to look upon as necessary for the activity of man in the future. He has concealed in his fairy tale what he knew of the spiritually hidden active forces at work in mankind since the fifteenth century, and that will be at work for about two thousand years more. You know, too, how in our Mystery Dramas we have sought to bring to life in all possible detail what Goethe saw when he composed this fairytale “The Green Snake and the Beautiful Lily”. The intention was to bring to expression, in the way in which it can again be brought to expression today, a hundred years later, what inspired Goethe and is to inspire the entire fifth post-Atlantean culture as the highest spiritual treasure. Such depths of soul underlying so great and powerful a work as the fairytale “The Green Snake and the Beautiful Lily”

--Dornach 1916