Although he was quite busy, in the last years of his life, Rudolf Steiner (1861-1925) found the necessary time to prepare the representation of Faust, part II, in Dornach. And as Goethe mentioned the Cabiri in his drama, one of the impulses that Steiner had was to give a representation of these mysterious gods:

“The images men formed of their gods was the source of plastic art. As an instance of this let us recall the Samothracian Mysteries alluded to by Goethe in the second part of his Faust, where he speaks of the Cabiri. In my workshop in Dornach I tried to make a picture of these Cabiri. And what came of it? It was something very interesting. I simply set myself the task of puzzling out intuitively how the Cabiri must have appeared in the Samothracian Mysteries. And just imagine this: I arrived at three pitchers, but pitchers, it is true, shaped plastically and in accordance with art. At first I astonished myself, although Goethe actually spoke of pitchers.^[1] The matter became clear to me only when I found that these pitchers stood on an altar: then something in the nature of incense was put into them, the sacrificial words were sung, and from the power of the sacrificial words — which in the more ancient times of mankind had a force of vibratory stimulus quite different from anything possible today — the smoke of the incense was formed into the desired image of the divinity. Thus in the ritual you had the accompanying chant immediately expressing itself plastically in the smoke of the incense.”^[2]

^[1] „I see these unformed ones,
Like pitchers of shoddy clay,” See Goethe, Faust, part II.

^[2] Rudolf Steiner, Spiritual Relationships in the Human Organism, GA 218, Stuttgart, 4 December 1922.

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