Peer Gynt and the Button-Moulder.
The themes that touch on death have undergone an intense transformation in European history over the past millennia. During Celtic civilisation, people did not experience death as a barrier. A large proportion of them were still clear-sighted at that time. They never wholly lost conscious contact with their origins during their earthly phase of life.
Clear-sightedness and death
The knowledge of the druids and the stories of the bards were experienced by people at that time as impulses whose resonance they consciously experienced in their more profound layers of consciousness. The rites and stories developed an intense guiding force. They helped them to utilise the difficult time of contraction of their soul in its material dress for their own soul development. They saw earthly birth as a painful contraction of the soul, which only dissolved again through death and could be experienced as a relaxing expansion of the soul (see the series of articles on www.logon.media, “The Life of the Celts”):
Most Celts remained aware of their immortal origin during their life in matter. They knew where they came from and where they would one day return to. Perhaps this clear-sightedness had to evaporate at some point so that the path into a deeper dimension of matter could open up, promising man new experiences of growing individualisation.
The spiritual sun to which the Celts bore witness over time became the physical sun, the star around which the earth revolves. With the decline of clear-sightedness, death became a barrier. Soon after birth, man forgot his origins, and death became a subject of fear. Intuition still conveyed something of the fascination of death as a passageway to other spheres of the world. Still, conscious knowledge evaporated and was increasingly replaced by speculation.
In Western culture, the preoccupation with finiteness and death was increasingly banished from daily life. In the art and literature of the Middle Ages, he appears as the Grim Reaper, the grim, sometimes grinning skeleton who comes suddenly without warning and cuts the threads of life.
An interesting variant of the Grim Reaper in Nordic mythology is the Button-Moulder, as depicted by Hendrik Ibsen in his Norwegian national epic Peer Gynt in short dialogues at the end of his poem. Here, Ibsen describes a partially different view of dying and living than is visible in the symbolism of the Grim Reaper. Peer Gynt is often called the “Faust of the North”. In Goethe’s poetry, Faust is the scholar concerned with the essential truths of man and nature who wants to open them up for himself. However, his consciousness cannot satisfy his longing for truth. So he experiences rejection from the earth spirit and receives an answer:
You are like the spirit you comprehend, not like me.
From the beginning, Peer Gynt is the braggart and impostor who lies, cheats and deceives people. He kidnaps the bride, Solveig, at the wedding of a farmer’s son in his village. She follows him into the mountains, only to be rejected by him again soon after, while he gets involved with the mountain trolls. However, the brief, intense encounter with Solveig is enough for a part of his soul to connect with her. He moves away into the world while she protects his soul in a life turned towards eternity and waits for him to return.
One life, two biographies
Peer dreams of a pure life with Solveig but is swept away by the fascination of earthly life even before their future together begins. The fascination with earthly diversity lures him in and sweeps him away. The “eternal”, “pure” thing that bound him to Solveig in his youth fades and dies bit by bit every day. However, he bonded with Solveig before beginning his journey into the wider world. Hence, a small part of him remains with her, unforgotten as a living seed in her heart.
Solveig lives his “second biography”. So there are two biographies, two life architectures that belong together, Solveig and Peer. Peer lives his life into the world; in him, eternity fades away, and Solveig lives and “dies” into eternity simultaneously; in her, the world fades away. She is blind at the end of her life and waits for the one who has lost himself in time. She sings her song daily, thus preserving Peer’s immortality in her heart.
The Button-Moulder demands the soul.
Peer Gynt returns to Norway one day, impoverished and old. Driven by his memory, he is on his way to Solveig and, thus, to the part still alive in his youth when he unexpectedly encounters the Button-Moulder, the judicial authority tasked with fetching him. The Button-Moulder explains to him the three options open to everyone at the end of their life. He can become one of the heroes of humanity if he has done wondrous deeds for the good of humankind, which would save him from the Button-Moulder’s melting spoon. The passport to the “blue”, i.e. to heaven, would then already be in his pocket.
On the other hand, those who have committed great sins are allowed to go to hell. They would also be safe from the melting spoon and retain the individuality they have acquired in life, and they would not have to start all over again in a new life. However, those who have acquired neither the one nor the other end up in the reject pot, end up in the melting spoon of the button moulder and are remelted without any individuality. From the substance, a person can seek their fortune in the world as a “new button”, a new imprint.
The button moulder wants to know whether Peer Gynt has been himself all his life. Only he who has been himself, whether for good or evil, is spared from the melting spoon. The rest of the dialogue shows that Peer Gynt fears the melting spoon, this de-individualisation, more than hell. He would rather spend a hundred years in hell as Peer than experience his death without return in the button moulder’s melting spoon.
The essence of life experience
He has to defend himself as the essence of experiences in which eternity bears witness to his presence in time. The monad, the spiritual self, makes itself visible on the canvas of matter and connects with it. The eternal creates a history in its connection with matter. This gives rise to a self that attempts to attain immortality. However, this is only possible if it can reunite with its monadic origin. Everything that does not rise above a certain level must pass away again. The quality of the essence of life, the Button-Moulder explains, is now the basis for his decision to claim the soul for the melting spoon at the end of life. The Button-Moulder asks:
Peer, have you always been yourself? Have you always been just Peer?
Be yourself!
Peer Gynt has obviously not been “himself” enough. But the poetry shows another way. He has never come to terms with death and the quality of his life and is now confronted with his actions at the end of his life. He always sought to escape his own mortality. He avoided both his dark side, earthly nature, and his light side, heavenly nature. So his life was lukewarm and will now end in the melting spoon. Only one question comes to Peer’s mind, which he asks the Button-Moulder:
PG:
Just one more question.
What is this “be yourself” in essence?
BM:
A strange question, especially coming from someone
from someone who has only recently –
PG:
Answer me then!
BM:
To be yourself means to kill yourself.
But perhaps you need a more precise picture? –
The master’s will as a shield
Soldered to the hilt of his sword of life.
Peer can show the button moulder neither a register of his good deeds nor his sins. All he has is the unconscious connection to Solveig from his youth. She has the “passport to the blue” in her pocket. The third path, this “be yourself”, ultimately lies in the union of Solveig and Peer through the bond of unconditional love and devotion with which they are firmly connected.
Peer draws closer to his mate, who has waited a lifetime for him, and throws himself at her feet. With this unconditional repentance on the one hand and the unconditional acceptance of a soul that has waited a lifetime for him on the other, Peer jumps out of the Butto-Moulder’s melting spoon.
In his symphonic arrangement of the epic, Edvard Grieg makes bells ring at this point. In the symphony, the music opens a door to a new life.
Every person carries the two traits of Peer and Solveig within them. One turns longingly towards eternity, while the other tries to live out his life in the world. And every human being, squeezed into earthly life, tries to do justice to both sides. The Greek philosopher Pythagoras, at the cradle of Western civilisation, demanded this in his rules of life:
Remember every day that you are mortal.
As a consequence of this, Angelus Silesius declared:
“He who does not die before he dies perishes when he dies.”
Awareness of your own mortality
This awareness of one’s mortality and this “be yourself” has evaporated over the last 2000 years, allowing humanity to increasingly slip into superficiality and leaving the field to the Button-Moulder for utilisation at the end of life.
Awareness of our mortality has degenerated into a fascination with media productions in the news, films and computer games. Every evening, millions of people watch people die on their screens in their own homes without coming to terms with their own mortality – and end up facing it completely unprepared.
Perhaps an emerging new clear-sightedness can make people more aware of their own immortality during their life in matter. This would undoubtedly result in a significant change in the zeitgeist.
Wikipedia contributors. (n.d.). Zeitgeist. Wikipedia, The Free Encyclopedia. Retrieved January 26, 2025, from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zeitgeist
Unknown author. (n.d.). Goethe and Ibsen’s Button-moulder. PMLA, Cambridge University Press. Retrieved from
Goethe and Ibsen’s Button-Moulder | PMLA | Cambridge Core
