IN GÖTTERZEICHEN, LIEBESZAUBER, SATANSKULT, Albrecht Schöne argues that Goethe has engaged in a self-censorship of Faust I, offering in the end only a highly condensed, elided version of the full Satanic ritual he initially intended for the “Romantische Walpurgisnacht.” I agree that Goethe engaged in selfcensorship, but Goethe's self-censorship in Faust I is actually more extensive, and profounder, even than that claimed by Schöne. More important, Schöne has him trying to cover up the wrong heresy: Goethe is not a closet Manichaean, and Gretchen is not in any sense a witch. Quite the contrary: I will argue that she represents a lost Hermetic consciousness of nature that has been demonized as the heretical “other” both of orthodox religion, and of science.

There is an uncanny affinity between Goethe's Faust and Freud's Traumdeutung: Freud deservedly won the Goethe Prize, but Goethe also should have won the Freud Prize. In chapter four, Freud famously compares the “dream-work” of the unconscious to the conscious stratagems of displacement and disguise employed by the dissident artist in order to defeat the censor. In the same passage, as a kind of embedded epigraph, Freud quotes Mephisto's displaced hint (“Das Beste, was du wissen kannst / Darfst du den Buben doch nicht sagen”) that there is a latent argument lurking behind Goethe's “manifest” text. And indeed there is.

Unlike Schöne, I prefer to interpret the “Romantische Walpurgisnacht” as a dream that employs precisely the same distorting devices—condensation, displacement, elision—Freud will later elaborate in his Traumdeutung. Although it is disguised as an ascent of the Brocken, what we are really given is a descent into Faust's personal unconscious: the doors through which we enter are Gretchen's swoon, and the onomatopoetic initial description of the landscape that induces vertigo. We see Mephisto working as the dream-censor, whose modus operandi (here as elsewhere) is Entstellung zum Zweck der Verstellung; as the Sphinxes reveal in part two, he is the anti-Oedipus, himself the riddle. And Mephisto's response to the Trödelhexe is especially revealing: he drags Faust away, criticizing her story as too thinly disguised, fearing that Faust might wake up inside his dream, interpret it, and achieve the precious self-knowledge that is one goal of his striving.

In the “Romantische Walpurgisnacht,” Faust's personal unconscious censors his repressed knowledge of his own guilt, offering up the dream of a witch's sabbath.