From some of Goethe’s notes, still in existence, we learn that during the time when the conception of Faust first occupied his mind (1770–73), he read Welling’s Opus Mago-Cabbalisticum, Paracelsus, Valentinus, the Aurea Catena Homeri, and even the Latin poet Manilius.
Mr. Blackie, in his Notes, quotes a description of the Macrocosm from a Latin work of Robert Fludd, published at Oppenheim in 1619; but the theory had already been given in the Heptaplus of Pico di Mirandola (about 1490). The universe, according to him, consists of three worlds, the earthly, the heavenly, and the super-heavenly. The first includes our planet and its enveloping space, as far as the orbit of the moon; the second, the sun and stars; the third, the governing Divine influences. The same phenomena belong to each, but have different grades of manifestation. Thus the physical element of fire exists in the earthly sphere, the warmth of the sun in the heavenly, and aseraphic, spiritual fire in the empyrean; the first burns, the second quickens, the third loves. “In addition to these three worlds (the Macrocosm),” says Pico, “there is a fourth (the Microcosm), containing all embraced within them. This is Man, in whom are included a body formed of the elements, a heavenly spirit, reason, an angelic soul, and a resemblance to God.”
The work of Cornelius Agrippa, De Occulta Philosophia, which was also known to Goethe, contains many references to these three divisions of the Macrocosm, and their reciprocal influences. The latter are described in the passage commencing: “How each the Whole its substance gives!”
Hayward quotes, as explanatory of these lines, the following sentence from Herder’s Ideen zur Philosophie der Geschichte der Menschheit: “When, therefore, I open the great book of Heaven, and see before me this measureless palace, which alone, and everywhere, the Godhead only has power to fill, I conclude, as undistractedly as I can, from the whole to the particular, and from the particular to the whole.”
The four lines which Faust apparently quotes (“What says the sage, now first I recognize”) are not from Nostra-
