The Fairy Tale of the Green Snake and the Beautiful Lily
We present here a paraphrased summary of two lectures by Dr. Rudolf Steiner about Goethe’s Fairy Tale. Steiner has gone beyond Carlyle’s recommendation and attempted an interpretation of the symbols and characters brought forward from Goethe’s imagination. Steiner was the editor of Goethe’s scientific work and thus has an unparalleled understanding of the inner thoughts of Goethe. We can find through Steiner’s decoding of Goethe’s symbols, the flavor of Rosicrucian-Alchemical ideas for which Steiner himself was well known through his philosophy of Anthroposophy.