ochs, and
horned Astartes, and many-breasted Cybeles, till in the Hellenic race it
rose to the recognition of the beautiful and bodied forth divinity in
the human form divine, and found its highest ideal of beauty in Helen,
divinely fair of women. This phase in Faust's development--this stage in
his quest for beauty and truth--this delirium of his 'divine madness,'
as Plato calls our ecstasy of yearning after ideal beauty, is symbolized
by the classical _Walpurgisnacht_. (You remember the other
_Walpurgisnacht_--that on the Blocksberg--which I described before.)

Guided by the Mannikin, Faust and Mephistopheles arrive at the
Pharsalian fields--the great plain of Thessaly, renowned for the battle
of Pharsalus, in which Caesar conquered Pompey--renowned too as the
classic ground of witches and wizards. Griffins, Sphinxes and Sirens
meet them. They can tell Faust nothing about Helen, but they direct him
to Cheiron the Centaur (a link, as it were, between the monstrous forms
of barbarous oriental imagination and Hellenic art). Cheiron the Centaur
has himself borne Helen on his back, and excites Faust's passion by the
description of her beauty. He takes Faust to the prophetess Manto,
daughter of the old blind Theban prophet Teiresias, and she conducts him
to a dark fissure--a Bocca dell' Inferno--at the foot of Mount Olympus,
such as that which you may have seen in the Sibyl's cave on Lake
Avernus; and here (as once Orpheus did in search of Eurydice) he
descends to the realms of the dead to seek the help of Persephone, Queen
of Hades, in his quest for Helen. Meanwhile Mephisto has found that in
spite of his distaste for classic art and beauty there are elements in
the classical witches' sabbath not less congenial to him than those of
the Blocksberg with its northern and more modern types of devilry and
bestiality. He is enchanted with the ghoulish vampire Empusa and the
monster Lamia, half-snake half-woman, and at length finds _his_ ideal of
beauty in the loathsome and terrible Phorkyads, daughters of Phorkys, an
old god of the sea. The Phorkyads are sometimes described as identical
with, sometimes as sisters of, the Gorgons, and represent the climax of
all that Greek imagination has created of the horrible. The three
sisters are pictured in Greek mythology as possessing between them only
one eye and one tooth, which they pass round for use. They dwelt in
outer darkness, being too terrible for sun or moon to look upon. Even