Northumbria, along the northeastern coast, site of a cultural efflorescence in the 7th and 8th centuries. From here, the Lindisfarne Gospels and Bede’s Ecclesiastical History of the English People, 731 CE, which preserves the first English poem, “Caedmon’s Hymn.” Also, an Anglo-Saxon elegiac lyric, “The Wanderer.”

The 18th century discovery that 1/3 of languages today, including English, derive from the lost language of the Indo-Europeans. The waves of settlement of the British Isles: the Celts, then the Romans, then the Anglo-Saxons, bearing with them what became Old English, the first form of the English language.

Faust and Mephistopheles win a war for the Emperor in Act 4. In Act 5, Faust, now 100, reclaims land from the sea, and is responsible for the death of an aged couple in the process. He dies, angels save his soul in a wildly comic scene, and he is redeemed in the eternity of the Eternal Feminine. He is not yet done striving.

Helen has been rescued from the underworld and taken to a medieval castle by Faust, courting her, uniting with her as a union of opposites, Classical with Medieval/German/Romantic. Their child Euphorion plunges to his death by trying to climb too high.

It is easy to read Act 3 ironically. Faust strives for the archetypal feminine, but their union is an illusion and produces a child who, because ungrounded in the real world, leaps to his death. But there may be a less reductive way of looking at it, not instead of but in addition to the ironic reading.

As Faust disappears to find Helen again, the Homunculus achieves his quest to be embodied at the climax of the Classical Walpurgis Night, the end of Act 2. Alchemical and scientific imagery of the union of fire and water unite with the imagery of evolution as Homunculus "impregnates” the waters of the sea nymph Galatea.

Goethe invented the idea of a Classical Walpurgis Night? Why? Four quests: Faust for Helen (again), Mephistopheles for sex, the Homulculus for a body, and a fourth quest, symbolized by the enigmatic Cabiri. Symbolism of 3 and 4; of fire and water; of life as evolutionary metamorphosis.

The Homunculus, artificial disembodied intelligence created by Wagner, tells the group that Faust is dreaming of Helen’s engendering through the rape of Leda, and that Faust must be revived at the Classical Walpurgis Night, where he will search for a body. The site in Thessaly is the Pharsalian fields, where Julius Caesar defeated Pompey and Cato, victory of future imperialism over freedom, the ironic cycle of history.

Faust descends to the uncanny realm of the Mothers while the Court watches. He attempts to seize Helen of Troy, but an explosion knocks him unconscious. As Act 2 opens, he has been removed to his old study, still in a coma. Wagner has become an alchemist. Serious alchemy as a ritual meditation whose goal was the spiritualization of matter.

To celebrate the solving of the Emperor’s financial crisis, a carnival-masque, dramatizing society’s ultimate value: wealth. Faust as Plutus, god of wealth, on a chariot. The mysterious Boy Charioteer who leads the chariot. Hijinks involving illusions of wealth. The Emperor commands Faust to summon up Helen of Troy. Mephistopheles tells Faust he must descend to the Nothing that is the ground of being, the realm of the Mothers.