The Rudolf Steiner Archive

During the time when the construction of our building is proceeding I think it is a very good thing for us to try to grow more and more into its meaning. We have already made a beginning with the two previous lectures and we will try as far as we can, by means of further study, really to become one with what is to be accomplished here.

In the first place I should like to remind you of what I said when we opened the house dedicated to the work of constructing the glass windows. The lecture referred to the evolution of thought and conception underlying the art of building and I will just briefly recapitulate what I was then only able to indicate.

In regard to the Greek Temple, I said that in a certain sense it formed a unity with the whole countryside—the whole countryside was one with it. The Temple stood there as the ‘dwelling place of the God.’ Nothing need be in the Greek Temple save the spiritual presence of the God and his physical image. The essence of the construction of the Temple was the fact that every man engaged in his daily pursuits on the land knew that within the region where he was carrying on his work he was not merely alone with the earth but united with the spiritual world. And the token for the fact that man, as he lived on the earth, was also united with the spiritual world, was the Temple standing there like an altar in the land.

We then saw evidence of progress in architectural thought, in that the Christian art of building separated off the edifice from the land. Everyday life and the mood of exaltation by which man raised himself to the Spirit were separated from each other. The Church of Christendom is no longer actually one with the land; it serves the Spirit, apart from the countryside, and expresses the fact that when man is to rise to the Spirit he must leave the affairs of daily life, repair for a time to a place set apart and there be united with the spirit. The Church of Christendom, therefore, could no longer be what the buildings of Greece and also of Rome were in their real being. The Church of Christendom was in itself a duality, the house of the community and the house set apart for the altar and the priesthood. Man leaves the affairs of everyday life and enters into the precincts where he feels himself gazing upwards to the Spirit which comes to him from the chancel where the altar stands.

This evolution in architectural thought naturally implies the transformation of the ancient Greek form of building (which was derived purely from static and dynamic factors, the factors of space and gravity) into the form corresponding to the conception of the community being set apart.

Passing to the Gothic Cathedral we have a still later form of architectural conception. We have the striving of the community not only to bear their own personalities into the sanctuary but also their individual work, and this is expressed in the forms of Gothic architecture. We feel as if the work performed in the environment has passed into the architectural forms and rises to the Spirit like a prayer, a folding of the hands.

I also said that a real advance in architectural conception must come to pass again in our times and that this is only possible if the nearness to the Spirit which was achieved to an ever-increasing extent from the period of the Greek conception of architecture onwards to that of Gothic building—if this nearness is gradually transformed into a complete union with the Spirit. This means that buildings which should now be dedicated to life in union with the Spirit must in their very form express inner correspondence with the Spiritual. We can indeed say—if we try not to explain the thing in abstractions but to grasp it with the whole of our feeling and soul—‘All that is embodied in our life of soul through Spiritual Science implies an actual penetration into the form that is created. The Spirit is revealed in freedom, having now descended to mankind.’ Whereas the Greek placed the Temple like an altar in the land, the future and, inasmuch as we are working from out of the future in our building, the present, are placing a true expression of the Spirit in the land as the result of what the Spirit expresses in its forms.

A speech which has a message for man of the present day will arise. But all this requires that we endeavour to understand the Spirit in its forms of expression. In order to understand the Greek Temple, we tried, last time, to grasp the purely physical qualities of space and of gravity. But the Spirit does not only work according to the laws of mechanics and dynamics; it does not only reveal itself in conditions of space and energy. The Spirit is living, hence it must be expressed in our building in a living way, a truly living way. We shall not understand this any better by interpreting the Spirit symbolically, but by beginning to feel that the forms are living, that they are organs of speech flowing from the spiritual world.

Is it possible for forms to speak from the spiritual world? It is indeed possible, in many ways. Let us take a thought that is specially near to us because on the one hand it is the expression of the highest, and on the other, in its Luciferic aspect it is submerged in the lowest—let us take the idea of the Ego, of Selfhood.

The mere utterance of the word “I” or “Self” does not as yet evoke much thought in man. Many epochs will have to run their course in human history before a fully conscious idea can arise in the soul when the word “I” or “Self” is uttered. Nevertheless, Selfhood, Ego-hood, can be felt in form, and above all when we pass from a purely mathematical conception of form to a feeling in form we can acquire a perception of Ego-hood, Selfhood, in the perfect circle. If you realise this you will readily understand what follows from it. If the true, living, sentient human being, confronting a circle, senses the feeling of Ego-hood, Selfhood, arising in his soul, or if when he sees a fragment of a circle he feels that it typifies the independent Self, he is learning to live in forms. And the characteristic of really living feeling is the capacity for living in forms. If you keep this in mind you will easily be able to pass on to other things that follow from it.

The first circle I have drawn here has an unbroken line (1).

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This line however can be varied so that it shows these wavy projections (2).

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But we can go further. Let us picture to ourselves a less simple variation (4). The form moves in one direction and becomes action. If we live in this form we have the feeling that it advances, that it moves. In the forms themselves we find the quality of movement. I have here made a simple sketch of something that will appear in a complicated form in the building, but you will find that there is an absolute correspondence. Passing from the entrance at the West and thence towards the smaller structure (at the East) you will find that all the forms in the interior will evoke the feeling that the whole structure is proceeding from the West onwards to the East. This is expressed in the forms. At the West you will feel in thought that you are within a vehicle that is bearing you to the East. The very essence and meaning of these relief variations is that they do not merely appear as dead, dynamic or mechanical forms; we seem to enter a vehicle that bears us onwards. In a spiritual sense we shall not “rest” in our building; we shall be led onwards.

From this you will realise that the basic character of the forms here is quite different from the forms of the three stages of architectural thought which I have described. Up to our time architectural thought has been concerned with the qualities of lifeless, mechanical rest. Now, however architectural thought becomes the thought of speech, of inner movement, of that which draws us along with it. This is what is new in the whole conception, and the basic form must of course correspond to it. In what way does the basic form correspond to it? Now I have said that the most intimate of all impressions is that of the Self, the Ego, as expressed in the circle or sphere. Why is this? It is because the simple circle or sphere is of all forms the most easily perceptible. It is an absolutely simple matter to recognise a circle. All that is necessary is the most trivial thought that everything is equidistant from the central point. As soon as we picture to ourselves points standing at an equal distance from this centre, we have the sphere, or circle. It is the very easiest process that can be carried out in thought. As form, then, the circle is the simplest of all entities. This is also in accordance with external reality, for the Selfhood in every being, from the simplest cell to the complex human being, is the simplest of all impressions, just like the circle or sphere. Behind all this there is something much deeper and I want you now to follow me in a thought that will lead those who really understand it, to great profundities.

Now the form of an ellipse is more complex than that of the circle. I will draw the form of an ordinary ellipse. It need not be exact but merely have the general character of an ellipse. The simplicity of the thought is no longer there when we pass to the ellipse. Although the ellipse is still spherical, we have no longer the nature of equality as in the case of the circle. Here I must ask those who have studied geometry—although for politeness sake we will assume that you all know a little of geometry though you may have forgotten some of it—to try to understand the following ideas. There is also order and regularity in the ellipse. Just as the circle is related to one point, the ellipse is related to two.

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In the case of the circle there is no such feeling of satisfaction, for the circle is so immediately obvious. The ellipse causes us greater joy because there we have to be inwardly active. The more one is inwardly active, the greater joy one has. What is often so difficult to realise is that man, in his inner being, craves for activity. If he wants to be lazy this is merely an affair of his conscious life. The astral body is not only wiser, but also more industrious and would like always to be active.

Now there is another line consisting, of course, always of two portions. Those who have studied geometry will know that the hyperbola consists of two symmetrical curves.

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Man is thus a mathematician in the substrata of his consciousness and by means of subconscious calculation we create for ourselves regularity of form. We add and subtract, but we can also multiply. Here again we have two points. Multiplying the one by the other we again get a line that looks somewhat like the ellipse but is not the same. This line contains an inner process of multiplication.

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This line has something mysterious about it. The circle is a simple entity, the ellipse already more complicated, the hyperbola still more so, for I do not think that the ordinary person sees only one single line in the two curves. The ordinary intellect believes there are two curves. The ordinary intellect believes there are two lines, but in reality this is not so. The other line is mysterious for another reason, for according to what is produced by multiplication the line is changed into this curious form. It is the curve of multiplication, the curve of Cassini, the lemniscate which plays so important a rôle in occult investigations. The line can develop in such a way that it assumes these forms. There are two lines, you see, but in the inner sense there is really one line, and when we feel it as one line in the astral world we know that this form (o-o) is only a specialisation of this form ( ∞ ). But now think—this form ( ∞ ) disappears into the fourth dimension—then appears again and enters the physical world. It is an unity because it ever and again disappears into the fourth dimension. This multiplication process has really three different forms.

We have therefore a line of addition, a line of subtraction, a line of multiplication. Someone may say that there must then be a line of division, the fourth method of calculation.

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We add and get the ellipse.
We subtract and get the hyperbola.
We multiply and get the curves of Cassini, the Lemniscate.
We divide and get the circle.

Now we have something very remarkable indeed. When we really try to penetrate into the depths of nature they appear before the soul in all their wonder. The circle appears to be an utterly simple entity but it is, nevertheless, full of mystery. The circle can also be understood by taking two points and dividing, and inasmuch as the same result is arrived at, we get the circle. The circle is thus something very remarkable. It is the simplest of all entities and yet it is the product of an occult process of division that is brought into consciousness. It is just the same in the case of the self of man: the ordinary self is the simple entity and the higher self the mysterious entity resting in the depths of being—a self that can only be found when we transcend its limits and pay heed to the world with which it is connected. The circle is the same whether we say that it is the simplest of all forms or that the product of division from two points is always the same. Just as we have the same circle, so we have within ourselves a duality: something that belongs to everyday life and is readily perceptible, and something that we only grasp when we go out to the whole universe, conceiving of this entity as the most complicated product of the great cosmic struggle where Ahriman and Lucifer carry out the division and where our own higher self has to maintain itself as the quotient if it is ever to come to expression.

Portions of the ellipse and of the hyperbola and also of the curves of Cassini will be found everywhere in our building, and your astral bodies will have plenty of opportunity to make these calculations! Here I will only mention one instance: when people go into our building and stand in the gallery where the organ and the singers will stand, their souls will be able to carry out this process of multiplication. The soul may not do so consciously but it will feel this process in the depths of its being, because this is the line of the structure around the organ. This line will be found in many places in the building.

After what I have now told you about the twofold meaning of the circle you will be able to realise that when you enter the building from the West and feel yourselves surrounded by the circular structure, by the cupola above, that here is the image of the human self. But the other smaller space in the East is not at first sight so intelligible. The smaller structure will seem to be full of mystery because, although its form is also circular, it must be conceived of as the result of a process of division and it only outwardly resembles the larger space. There are two circles, but the one corresponds to the life of everyday and the other is connected with the whole cosmos. We bear within us a lower self and a higher self. Both again are one. Thus our building had to be a twofold structure. Its form expresses—not in any symbolical sense but in its very being—the dual nature of man. When the curtain in front of the stage is open we shall perceive an image of man not only as he is in everyday life, but as complete man. The forms themselves express a movement from West to East, the path of the lower to the higher Self. All that I have told you can actually be felt in the forms. The erection of a building of this kind reveals how the spiritual form of nature and the higher spiritual world can be expressed. Nobody who begins to think out all kinds of ingenious interpretations will Understand our building. It can only be understood by a living feeling of the development and being of the forms. For this reason I do not want to describe the building pictorially but to speak of the mode of its development, how spiritual being itself has become form and movement and has flowed into it. Suppose anyone were to look at the interior and begin to speculate thus: ‘Yes, two cupolas, two circular structures—lower Self, higher Self; a lower Self, a higher Self—a unity.’ This may be a neat interpretation but it would be of no more value than if it were said that Maria and Johannes Thomasius in the Mystery Plays are really one being. This is a mere speculation, for it results in an abstraction. The unity lies in the living ‘becoming.’ Naturally the living powers of becoming can bring forth both Maria and Thomasius but only as the result of a differentiation. Even in similarity the true occultist will always seek for diversity, for it would be false occultism to desire always to lead back diversity to unity. Hence the example of the circle. The circle is the simplest of all entities, where all points are equidistant from the centre—but it is also the result of division. In the circle we have something that is a unity in the outer world and complex in the spiritual world.

These are some of the remarks I desired to make. On another occasion I shall speak further on these matters. I shall now speak briefly of other things.

Man, as he enters the world, is really a highly complicated being. When he enters the world—as I have often said—he cannot at first stand upright; lie crawls, and at the very beginning of his existence he does not even crawl. Gradually he learns to control the forces which make him able to stand upright.

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The advance from Gothic architecture to that of Spiritual Science may be described as follows: Gothic architecture contains the prayer: ‘O Father of the Universe, may we be united with Thee, in Thy Spirit.’ Those who know what this prayer contains, who really understand the living development of Spiritual Science, will solve the riddle of the evolution of man. And then, when the forms of architectural thought strive to be united with the Spirit—expressing this striving in their very being—man will feel how he has been permeated with the hidden Spirit and can have around him a building which is a direct expression of the living, inner development of his being.

‘We dwell in the land, but the Spirit is among us.’ This is the Greek thought of architecture.

‘We dwell for a season in the sanctuary and the Spirit comes to us.’ This is the thought behind Christian architecture.

‘We dwell for a season in the sanctuary, but we uplift the soul by raising ourselves to the Spirit.’ This is the thought behind Gothic architecture.

‘We enter with reverence into the Spirit in order that we may become one with the Spirit poured out around us in the forms—the Spirit that moves and is active, because behind the Spirits of Form stand the Spirits of Movement.’ This is the thought behind the new architecture.

Existence thus advances through earthly evolution and it is man's task to understand the inner meaning and purport of this existence. He only advances in the wake of true evolution when he endeavours, in every epoch, to experience what the spiritual world bestows in that epoch.

Why do our souls pass through different, successive incarnations? Not in order that we may repeat the same experiences, nor that we may pass through re-birth, re-naissance, again and again, but in order that we may assimilate, ever and again, the new that pours into our souls from out the spiritual worlds. We are standing at a definite point in the evolution of humanity in the sphere of art and in many other spheres of spiritual life—at a point where the Spirit speaks clearly to us of new riddles. And just as in the time of the Renaissance man was destined primarily to orientate himself to the past in order to work his way through to the new, so it is with our own external knowledge and perception of the universe. All that has been produced by the modern age since the sixteenth century is only the preparation for a living experience of the universe in its forms and movements which now stand before us as riddles.

This, then, is all for to-day. In another lecture I will try to approach questions of a still more intimate character—questions relating to the living soul of nature in connection with colour and the art of painting.

In the last lecture we spoke of the Spirit which should pervade the forms in our building. From all that has been said you will have gathered that these forms are no more the result of imitation of the external physical world than of mere speculation. Your feeling will have been that the forms have been derived from the spiritual world of which man is an integral part and of which he may hope to become conscious in the development of his knowledge of Spiritual Science. I want to remind you once again of an important fact, of which mention has already been made, namely, that human life runs its course in periods of approximately seven years each, and—as I tried last time to explain to you from spiritual-scientific cosmology—when we observe the whole course of these periods of seven years, we may say that after each period a certain support is added to man's being. When he has passed through seven such periods, therefore, he has reached approximately his fiftieth year, he possesses seven pairs of these ‘life-supports.’

If we were now to imagine ourselves entering the building from the West, in the first two pillars we have the expression of the supports which man has raised in his own being after the first period of seven years has run its course; the second pair of pillars are an expression of the supports he has added after the second period of seven years; and so it goes on, only it must be remembered that in man these supports are intermingled, whereas in the building they have had to be placed one behind the other in space. We may then be permeated with the feeling that when we pass through the building from the West towards the East, all that works upon us from left and right is a revelation of processes in human life itself. This shows us that there are firmly established cosmic laws of which man is a part but which are infinitely deeper than the so-called ‘natural laws’ of the outer physical world, and furthermore that the forms in our building have been evolved from these deep cosmic laws.

To study every detail from this point of view would lead us very far, although it could be done. In the present materialistic epoch, where there is no knowledge of Spiritual Science, there will be little understanding for these deeper laws of ‘being and becoming.’ We may therefore find ourselves faced with the question—and it is a wholly understandable one from the point of view of external knowledge—‘Why are the columns made of different kinds of wood?’ There is no allegorical or symbolical meaning in this, and anyone who raises such a question merely proves that life has afforded him no opportunity for the contemplation of deeper cosmic laws. The only rejoinder we can make is this: ‘Why, then, do you consider it necessary for a violin not to have only A strings?’ A man who wanted to use only A strings on a violin would be in exactly the same position as one who—perhaps quite unconsciously and naïvely—were to ask as the result of superficial knowledge, why our pillars are made of different woods.

We can develop these matters slowly, for we shall often meet together here. We can allow subjects that may prove fruitful to enter gradually into our feelings. To-day, therefore, I only want to speak of one matter that will help to stimulate our perception of what underlies the laws of true aesthetic form, on the one hand in the cosmos, and on the other in the microcosm, in the constitution of man. Before very long, the so-called science of to-day will undergo an overwhelming expansion, and only then will there be understanding of the true and deeper laws of aesthetic form.

In order to evoke a concrete perception of what I have here mentioned in mere abstract words, let us consider the following. I am going to place before you something that corresponds to a cosmological fact, a mighty cosmic fact.

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Now these three heavenly bodies (see diagram) stand in a certain mutual relationship to each other; they reveal their activities to each other and I want to speak of one particular aspect of these activities. To this end I will first divide the Sun diagrammatically as it actually appears to the occult seer when he directs his attention to these things. The Sun is seen divided into a kind of cross, into four chambers. The remarkable thing is that in the first moments of vision we see a kind of streaming current, but closer scrutiny reveals the fact that here we have to do with hosts of beings passing to and fro. We can see such a stream of spiritual beings passing from a certain “chamber” of the Sun to the Earth, penetrating the Earth and vitalising the Earth with solar essence, that is to say, with the spiritual force of the Sun, and thence streaming to their own chamber in the Sun.

This is cosmic reality but one sees still more—one sees migrations of hosts of spiritual beings who are flowing around and through the Moon (see diagram). They proceed from another chamber of the Sun: but they also flow in the other direction and pour through the Moon. Up to this point we are perceiving the activities of the inhabitants of three chambers in the Sun. Another migration or stream arises from the fact that these beings always return to the Sun after having passed through the Moon; thus a double stream has arisen. On the one hand the beings return into the fourth chamber in the Sun after having poured through the Moon, but another stream is formed because certain beings do not take part in the migration to the Moon; before reaching the Moon they turn back again to the Sun. This configuration reveals to us a kind of mirror-image in the cosmos, but we will leave this image out of consideration for the moment. It would be formed by a symmetrical expansion of the figure that is engraved there in the cosmos. This means, in effect, that there is revealed to clairvoyant consciousness a marvellous combination of forms, a figure engraved in the cosmos representing the interplay between the forces of Sun, Moon and Earth.

Now I will draw the diagram rather differently, with the Sun rather turned (Diagram II). The cross must also be turned.

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Now I will draw the diagram again differently (Diagram III). Here I have assumed hypothetically that Ahriman and Lucifer have entered, bringing disorder in their train. I will draw the Sun, Moon and Earth more irregularly and again trace the connections between them. What have I now drawn? Exactly the same thing as in the other diagrams, only somewhat distorted as a result of the intervention of Ahriman and Lucifer. I have now drawn a sketch of the blood circulation in man, a sketch of how the blood flows from the left ventricle of the heart through the body, on the one hand through the brain on the other through the rest of the body, returning as venous blood; you also see the course of the small circulatory stream through the right ventricle and lungs back again to the so-called left auricle.

Thus we can read from the cosmos what man is as a microcosmos, only it must be remembered that Ahriman and Lucifer have approached him.

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If a figure were made of this diagram—that is to say, a figure copied from the cosmos and expressed in some motif—we should have before us a profound cosmic mystery merely in the combination of form. When a certain combination of lines underlies a figure of this kind—where perhaps only a few of these lines are expressed and the others drawn in quite another way—those who have real feeling and not merely intellectual understanding, will perceive a cosmic mystery in the very form itself. They will say to themselves: ‘What is it that this form expresses? I do not actually know, but I feel that it expresses a mystery.’ It is this that inspires our souls and makes our hearts glow when we look at certain forms. We cannot always be conscious of what lies behind them, but our astral body, our subconscious being, contains the mysteries of the cosmos and senses them in the depths just as it contains the secrets of mathematics, as I told you in the previous lecture. When a man says, ‘I feel beauty here, but I cannot explain to myself what it really is,’ something is taking place in his astral body. This he may express by saying that he senses the existence of deep and mysterious secrets of the cosmos which do not take the form of ideas and thoughts but are expressed in a feeling, ‘Ah, how beautiful this form is.’ The reason why he feels this as warmth pouring through his heart and soul is that if he were as conscious in his astral body as he is in his ego he would have a deep knowledge of the cosmos.

These things must teach us to understand how art has gradually developed in human evolution and to realise that true works of art in the Goethean sense are ‘a manifestation of higher laws of nature than the ordinary intellect of man can divine.’ We find an inkling of the truth of these things more especially when we go back to what modern opinion holds to be the “primitive art” of earlier periods of human evolution. This is because in those olden times a certain primitive, atavistic clairvoyance was a common attribute of humanity and because man then created forms from out of this clairvoyance. Many of the forms to be found in primitive art can only be understood when we realise that they were the outcome of this primordial clairvoyant consciousness. Men experienced the content of their astral bodies as living movement, tried to express it in a kind of noble dance, and then converted it from the Dionysian dance into Apollonian design and painting. Such is the origin of certain forms of early art which often seem to us merely primitive, but which in truth have sprung from a deeper understanding of the spiritual world imparted by the clairvoyance of those times.

This, I think, will show you that in the sense of true, genuine art, the easy phrase ‘there can be no disputing about taste’ is wholly incorrect in its ordinary sense. Fundamentally speaking, of course, one can dispute about everything, even about mathematical principles. When one man applies a mathematical principle and gets a different result from another who also applies it, disputes can naturally arise and even become acute, but one of the two has made an error. The error, of course, is not so easy to discover in the case of beauty or art. Nevertheless man can attain to a point of view which convinces him that the forms and laws of true art are firmly established and based upon the deeper laws of cosmic being. Perhaps it may be admitted that the principle ' there is no disputing about taste' only penetrates into life by dint of effort, that it is a conception only to be evolved very gradually. But in the course of his life a man can be convinced of the truth of it when he realises that art is a manifestation of higher laws of nature which without art would never be revealed. Here again I am using Goethe's words. Man can indeed be convinced that art is this manifestation of higher laws of nature about which there can fundamentally be no disputing.

In the light of what now should be living within us, not so much as thought, but as feeling, we must gradually be able to work our way to another perception. What is really happening to us when we delight in forms that are truly artistic? We are passing out of ourselves, penetrating with the soul into something that is real, outside ourselves. Therefore it is not at all unnatural that in a building which belongs to the present and future we should set out in full consciousness to create forms which will help man to conquer the consciousness of merely physical and material actuality and feel himself expanded out into the cosmos through the architecture, sculpture and all that this work of art may contain. Much will have to be done, however, before this feeling will be able to penetrate into every sphere of art and be admitted by modern science. Darwinism, and all that it brought in its train in the nineteenth century, rendered great service to the progress of human knowledge and culture, but it gave rise to many one-sided conceptions, for instance, in the law of so-called “selection” which has been laid down as a universal law, although it only holds good in one connection. The knowledge of this law is very important, but to lay it down as a universal law is the result of distorted, one-sided conceptions. People have been led to think somewhat as follows. They ask, ‘Why is it that the structure of living beings is contrived in accordance with expediency? What is the origin of this?’ The monistic materialist of the present day answers: ‘We are no longer as stupid as our ancestors. We have great intelligence and do not therefore believe that some spiritual being or other has endowed living organisms with this “expedient” structure. It is part of nature that the expedient and the inexpedient (the fit and the unfit) should originally have arisen, concomitantly. These two elements then entered into the struggle for existence where the fit conquered and the unfit was exterminated. The fit passes down through heredity, so that after a certain time it alone remains.’ The ‘fitness’ of the organic structure was thus explained by the law of causality.

This conception is then applied in a special instance. Some creature lives in a certain environment and has this remarkable characteristic, that its colouring is the same as that of its environment. Certain creatures live, let us say, in sand of a particular colour. In such cases observation shows that the creatures take on the colour of the sand. Those who adhere to the theory of selection and expediency say: ‘It is expedient for these creatures to have the colour of their environment, for their enemies do not see them and hence cannot pursue them. They are not destroyed. They have this advantage over other creatures whose colour differs from that of the sand. Once upon a time there were creatures who colours resembled the sand, while others were of every possible hue. But these latter were seen by their foes and destroyed; they were at a disadvantage in the struggle for existence.’ The others, however, who were, by chance of the same colour as the sand, remained, and this quality was transmitted to the following generations. The creatures who were differently coloured died out and those like the sand maintained themselves in the struggle for existence.' This is a highly plausible train of thought and it has dominated the minds of men for decades. In sandy places hosts of these tiny creatures of exactly the same colour as the sand are to be found. According to materialistic, monistic Darwinism they are supposed to have originated as I have described. But actual facts upset the conclusion, for, in spite of it all, as soon as these creatures show themselves they are destroyed by their foes. The whole conception is based upon a chain of argument that does not reckon with the actual facts. All these materialistic speculations and fantasies will one day be replaced by true insight which may indeed seem grotesque and paradoxical to many people but which will explain, for instance, why the polar bear is white and not black or brown. The insight will arise that there is an astral nature, that every animal has an astral body and that soul processes have their seat in this astral body. The greyish coloured creatures in the sand have of course no ego, but they have an astral body, primitive though it may be. An interplay arises between this astral body and the colour of the environment, and the effects produced by this interplay between the greyness, let us say, of the environment, and the astral body, pass into the dimmer consciousness of the astral body and permeate the whole being. It is just as if you were to look around here and say, ‘This is wood, I know that it is wood.’ The creature lives in the sand, its astral body is permeated with the colour of the sand and the consciousness of the colour of the sand' flows through its whole being. It takes on the colour, saturates itself with the colour of the environment which has been consciously absorbed. The colour is of course modified by every struggle arising between the immediate colour of the environment and the direct light of the sun. The influence of the direct light of the sun on the astral body, however, is such that, by way of the soul nature, something that in turn streams out and permeates the the whole being enters into the astral body. In the very colours of birds' feathers and skins of animals man will recognise the deeper effects of the consciousness, which is the result of the interplay between the astral body and the environment. The living being lives and moves in the flowing ocean of colour and identifies itself with this flowing colour essence. The human being also does this below the threshold of his ego, but in a higher sense. Our life, therefore, is bound up with the life of the flowing sea of colour. As human beings we have the advantage of the animals in one thing only. I can now do no more than hint at it. Think, by way of comparison, of certain animals which always swim under water and never come to the surface. They have water in their environment. They adapt themselves to what they take into themselves from the water. Others have to come to the surface and they too adapt themselves to what is above the surface of the water. Instead of the water, think now of a flowing sea of colour and light. All animals live, as it were, under the surface of the sea of colour and light, hence they adjust their outer covering primarily in accordance with this flowing colour and light. Man with his ego consciousness stretches out beyond the sea of colour and light and the very fact that he can do this gives him his ego consciousness. When man's colouring is influenced, as in the different races, the influence is not, in his case, the outcome of colour and light, but of the conditions of warmth and climate. The reason why humming birds in certain regions are decked with such a variety of colours is very different from the reason which causes human beings in the same region to be of a negroid black. The birds have been worked upon by colour conditions, and man by the warmth condition, because, in effect, the human being with his ego rises above the sea of colour and this only works in his astral body. Otherwise—to use a radical and therefore paradoxical expression—if the agricultural labourer who is perpetually surrounded by green had no ego whereby he reaches beyond the sea of colour, he would go about with a greenish skin; and the skin of the city man, living perpetually among grey houses and seldom leaving them, would have a horrible greyish tint—that is to say if primordial forces were at work., Our astral body none the less is immersed in the flowing sea of colour, but all that the astral body absorbs from this sea of colour has taken on a different activity. Our hair is not coloured, nor if we had feathers would they be coloured by what the astral body absorbs; instead of this, we have perceptions and feelings in connection with colour without diffusing the colours through our being. If we were simply to absorb the green or blue or red into our astral body and diffuse them through our being, thus giving ourselves the colouring of the outer world, we should have quite a different relationship to the world of colour than is actually the case. We do not, however, do this. We absorb the colours into our being in a spiritual sense, so that blue, for instance, becomes the expression of rest; red the expression of all that is passionate, fiery. Colour is changed into flowing perception or feeling in man, because he reaches out with his ego beyond the flowing sea of colour. Here is a proof that we float in the colour essence of the cosmos and that even when we are merely contemplating the colours of nature we must try to perceive in the aesthetic sense, to establish standards of beauty. This however implies that we must learn to grow into colours, to live in them as within our own element. One seldom finds this feeling for colour, even among people who think a great deal about art. Take, for instance, Hildebrand, who is an exceedingly good artist and who has written an ingenious book on the subject of artistic forms. We read there that colour alone cannot suffice for the real portrayal of things; there must first be the design, the drawing. This, however, is not correct. Hildebrand thinks that when he has a coloured wall in front of him, he is simply looking at colour, possibly blue or red, whereas if he draws contours or designs upon it he has an expression of something. If a surface is covered with blue or red it does not express anything definite—at least according to Hildebrand. Nor this is not the case. A surface covered with blue produces an impression which may be expressed in the following way. Instead of the area that appears blue, the feeling arises that blue takes one into greater and greater depths, to distances ever more remote, to the Infinite, as it were. The blue colour takes one along with it—on and on. Red seems to fight with one, to approach.

This of course is somewhat radically expressed, but the whole colour scale thus reveals itself as living being. Just as forms with clear contours express something definite, so does colour place before us something quite definite, differentiated. To fathom these things, however, will be the task of future Art—and in what sense? To understand this we will consider the real nature of the spirit of human evolution.

Human evolution proceeded from conditions of primitive, atavistic clairvoyant consciousness. Man gradually worked his way upwards through the different civilisations until, during the Graeco-Latin age, his ego came to birth in the intellectual or mind-soul. We are now living in an age when the ego rises into the consciousness soul (spiritual soul) and has then gradually to rise to Spirit-Self or Manas. In the ages preceding the birth of the ego, of the ego consciousness, art proceeded from direct inspiration which flowed into man from the spiritual world, and all the different forms in art were an expression of this. Suppose a man went out into the on-coming night and looked at the moon. The atavistic clairvoyant consciousness he still possessed gave him the knowledge that here was a revelation of the connection between his brain and the moon, that his lungs breathed in all that the earth's being was communicating to him. The sun had set, but he knew that in the pulsating beat of his heart he bore the sun workings within him. Then man felt—or rather he ‘saw’ it in the atavistic clairvoyance of those ancient times—he felt: ‘Yes indeed there is a connection between earth, sun and moon. Spiritual Beings are hovering up and down between the sun and moon!’

“Like heavenly forces rising and descending,
Their golden urns reciprocally lending.”

(From Goethe's Faust. Scene I.)

... Then came the age in human evolution when this old clairvoyance gradually passed away; man entered into a condition where he could only perceive the external world of sense. Nothing flowed into him from the spiritual world and it became necessary to resort to a different realm. Every artistic impulse lived originally in the moving being of man himself. He tried to imitate or copy what he perceived in the cosmos by expressing through his hands and with his hands the form that he felt to be living in his hands like a cosmic force. At that time he had to translate into form what he expressed in gestures. It did not occur to him to copy or imitate an object in the external sense. All that lived and pulsated within him, flowing and breathing into him from the cosmos, developed into art without any mere imitation, because the inner life surging within him used him as an instrument. He was the instrument guided by the cosmos itself.

This was no longer the case after the old clairvoyant consciousness, which linked man to the cosmos, ceased. Imitative art came into being, for man no longer possessed within himself the power which guided the lines and other factors of art; he no longer felt, I will draw near to the Godhead. ‘There is the Godhead and I will approach.’ When a man felt himself rising to the Godhead he was conscious of the perception of blue, and if he wanted to give expression to this feeling he used the colour blue. But if he was conscious of the approach of an enemy, an alien being bearing down upon him, then he used red. He experienced the flowing sea of colour within himself and there was no need to imitate or copy. This was no longer the case when atavistic connection with the cosmos ceased. Imitative art came into being and attained its summit, so far as sculpture was concerned, in the Graeco-Latin epoch, and so far as painting was concerned, in the age which marked the transition to the fifth Post-Atlantean period. To those who have eyes to see, external history would also be able to prove the truth of these things. Try to think why it is that peoples from Northern and Central Europe who came into contact with Graeco-Latin culture remained so long in a state of barbarism and could not find their way to art. The reason is that these Celtic, Germanic, Slavonic peoples had remained at an earlier stage of evolution than the Graeco-Latin peoples. They had not reached the stage of the full birth of the ego and understood nothing of true imitative art. They came along afterwards with a reinforcing impulse. Hence when we study the art of the Middle Ages we find that the significant elements there are not those of imitative art. The characteristic qualities of mediaeval art are to be found in architecture where man does not imitate but creates out of his inner being. It is only gradually that the imitative element in art entered into the northern peoples.

Nowadays, however, we are living in an epoch when man must again find his way into the spiritual world, when he must pass over from imitative art to a new form of artistic creation, when there must be a true renewal of art. The imitative arts reached their prime in the sculpture of antiquity, in Raphael, Michelangelo and others. Something different hovers before us now—a consciousness that penetrates into the spiritual world and at the same time brings down all that exists in forms and colours in the cosmic ocean flowing spiritually around us. A beginning must be made. Something that is not achieved by imitation and which is all around us must be brought down from the spiritual world. I have already spoken of the extent to which this conception has flowed into certain forms in our building and on another occasion we will speak of the new conception of the art of painting. To-day I only wanted to try to deepen the feelings and perceptions which must be ours if we are really to understand the transition which must come about before the old forms of art can pass over to the new.

I hope that those friends whose unselfish and devoted labours are revealed each day that passes, will work in such a way towards a mastery of the forms which are necessary to our building, that although it be only a primitive beginning, there will none the less be a real beginning of a spiritualised art. I hope that they will find more and enthusiasm, greater and greater joy, in the consciousness that the World-Spirit demands us to help in the task of establishing in human evolution those things which must be established in our own fifth epoch and during the transition into the sixth. If we understand this, we link ourselves with the World-Spirit working in human evolution, of Whom we try to gain knowledge through true Spiritual Science. All the impulses of this Spiritual Science can pass over into artistic feeling, artistic activity and experience of the cosmos. True enthusiasm and devotion are necessary, but they will grow in us if we lovingly rise to the Spirit Who has guided mankind from the beginning of evolution. That Spirit will not forsake us if we dedicate ourselves to Him with upright hearts and in the real sense—if our labours are not a sentimental prayer, but a true one arising from the power flowing into our inner being from the World-Spirit Who is leading us, and if we are filled with the inspiration of the knowledge that we allow the work of our hands and souls to be guided by the power of the Spirit within us.

In this sense, then, let us continue our work.

To-day we will continue our study of subjects connected with art. The lectures are meant to help us in regard to the kind of thoughts which should permeate the work before us. If we would couple right thoughts with the task which we are here beginning in a primitive fashion, the necessity arises to bring before the soul many things that impress us when we study man's achievements in art and their connection with human civilisation.

Herman Grimm, the very intuitive student of art in the nineteenth century, made a certain apparently radical statement about Goethe. He spoke of the date at which humanity would first have developed a real understanding of Goethe, placing it about the year 2000. According to Grimm's idea, therefore, a long time will have to elapse before mankind will have developed to the point of understanding the real significance of Goethe. And, indeed, when one observes the present age, one does not feel inclined to contradict such a statement. To Grimm, Goethe's greatest significance does not lie in the fact that he was a poet, that he had created this or that particular work of art, but that he always created from a full and complete manhood—the impulse of this full manhood lies behind every detail of his creative activity. Our age is very far from understanding this full manhood that lived, for instance, in Goethe. In saying this I have naturally no wish to speak derogatively of the specialisation that has entered into the study of science, which is indeed often deplored—for from one point of view this specialisation is a necessity. Much more significant than the specialisation in science is that which has crept into modern life itself, for, as a result of this, the individual soul, enclosed within some particular sphere of specialised conceptions or ideas, grows less and less capable of understanding other souls who specialise in a different sphere. In a certain sense all human beings are “specialists” to-day so far as their souls are concerned. More particularly are we struck with this specialised mode of perception when we study the development of art in humanity. And for this very reason it is necessary—although it can only be a primitive beginning—that there shall again come into existence a comprehensive understanding of spiritual life in its totality. True form in art will arise from this comprehensive understanding of spiritual life. We need not enter upon a very far-reaching study in order to prove the truth of this. We shall come to a better understanding if we start from something near at hand, and I will therefore speak of one small point in the numerous irrelevant and often ridiculous attacks made against our spiritual movement at the present time.

It is so cheap for people to try, by means of pure fabrications, to slander us in the eyes of the world, saying, for instance, that we are on the wrong track because here or there we have given to our buildings a form that we consider suitable to our work. We are reproached for having coloured walls in certain of our meeting rooms and we are already tired of hearing about the ‘sensationalism’ in our building—which is said to be quite unnecessary for true ‘Theosophy’—that is how people express it. In certain circles ‘true Theosophy’ is thought to be a kind of psychic hotch-potch, teeming with obscure sensations, glorying to some extent in the fact that the soul can unfold a higher ego within. This, however, is really nothing but egotism. From the point of view of this obscure psychic hotch-potch people think it superfluous for a spiritual current to be expressed in any outer form, although this outer form, it is true, can only be a primitive beginning. Such people think themselves justified in chattering about these psychic matters no matter where they may be. Why, then—so they think—is it necessary to express anything in definite forms? We really cannot expect to find any capacity of real thought in people who hurl this kind of reproach at us—in fact we can expect it from very few people at the present time—but, nevertheless, we must be clear in our own minds on many points if we are to be able at least to give the right answers to questions that arise in our own souls.

I want to draw your attention to Carstens, an artist who made his mark in the sphere of art at the end of the eighteenth century as a designer and painter of decided talent. I do not propose in any way to speak of the value of Carstens' art, nor to describe his work—neither am I going to give you a biographical sketch of his life. I only want to call your attention to the fact that he certainly possessed great talent for design, if not for painting. In the soul of Carstens we find a certain artistic longing, but we can also see what was lacking in him. He wanted to draw ideas, to embody them in painting, but he was not in the position of men like Raphael or Leonardo da Vinci—or to take an example from poetry—of Dante. Raphael, Leonardo and Dante lived within a culture that teemed with import—a culture that penetrated into and at the same time surrounded the soul of man. When Raphael painted his Madonnas they were living in men's hearts and souls and in the very highest sense something streamed from the soul of the public in response to the creations of this great artist. When Dante set out to transport the soul into spiritual realms he had only to draw his material, his substance, from something that was resounding, as it were, in every human soul. These artists possessed in their own souls the substance of the general culture of the age. In any work of the scientific culture of that time—however much it may have fallen into disuse—we shall find connecting links with an element that was living in all human souls, even down to the humblest circles. The learned men of the spheres of culture where Raphael created his Madonnas were fully cognisant of the idea at the back of the figures of the Madonna, nay more, the idea was a living thing within their souls. Thus artistic creations seem to be expressions of a general, uniform spiritual life. This quality came to light again in Goethe as a single individual, in the way that was possible at the turn of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. So little is this understood in our times, that, in Herman Grimm's opinion, as I have already said, it will be necessary to wait until the year 2000 before the world will again reveal such understanding.

Let us turn again to Carstens. He takes the Iliad of Homer, and he impresses into his penciled forms the processes and events of which he reads. What a different relationship there is to the Homeric figures in the eighteenth and the beginning of the nineteenth century from the relationship that existed between the soul of Raphael and the figures of the Madonna and other motifs of that age! In the greatest epochs the content of art was immediately perceptible because it flowed from something that moved the innermost being of man. In the nineteenth century’ it began to be necessary for artists to seek for the content of their creations by dint of effort and we soon find that the artist becomes a kind of ‘cultural hermit,’ one who is only concerned with himself and of whom people ask, ‘What relationship is there between himself and his own particular world of form?’ A study of the history of art in the nineteenth century would reveal the true state of affairs in this connection.

Thus there gradually arose, not only the indifferent attitude to art, but the cold one that exists nowadays. Think of someone in a modern city walking through a picture gallery or exhibition of pictures. The soul is not moved by what is seen, no inner confidence is felt in it. The person is faced by what really amounts to a multitude of riddles—to use a radical expression—riddles which can only be solved if to some extent penetration is made into the particular relationship of this or that artist to nature, or to other things. The soul is faced with purely individual problems or riddles, and the significant thing is, that although people believe they are solving the problems of art, they are, in the vast majority of cases, trying to solve problems not really connected with art itself—to wit, psychological problems. Such problems as: How does this or that artist look on nature—are problems of philosophy or the like and are of no importance when we really penetrate into the great epochs of art. On the contrary, when this penetration is undertaken, the problems that emerge not only for the artist but for the contemplator of the works of art, are truly artistic, truly aesthetic ones. For it is the manner that really concerns the creative artists, while the mere matter, the mere substance, is only the element that flows around him, in which he is immersed. We might even put it thus: our artists are no longer artists. They are contemplators of the world, each from a certain point of view and what they see, what strikes them in the world, this they contrive to shape. But these are theory, problems of history and so forth, while on the other hand our age has almost altogether lost the power—or indeed the heart—to perceive art in its essence, to perceive the manner, not the mere matter.

Our conception of the world—theoretical from its very foundations—is a good deal to blame for this. Practical as men have become in technical, industrial and commercial affairs, they have become eminently theoretical so far as their thinking is concerned. The endeavour to build a bridge between modern science and the conception of the world held by the artist is not only fraught with difficulty, but with the fact that so few people feel there is any need to build it. Words like those of Goethe: “Art is the manifestation of secret laws of nature without which they could never find expression” are wholly unintelligible to our age, although here and there people think they understand them. Our age holds fast to the most external, the most abstract natural laws—laws which are themselves based on utterly abstract mathematical principles—and it will not admit the validity of any penetration into reality which transcends all abstract mathematics or systems of that kind. No wonder our age has lost the living element of soul which feels the working of the very substance of world connections—the substance that must indeed well up from these world connections before art can come into being. The thoughts and ideas evolved by the modern age in regard to the universe are inartistic in their very nature—nay more, they even strive to be so. Colours—what have they become according to modern scientific opinion? Vibrations of the most abstract substance in the ether, etheric vibrations of so many wave lengths. These waves of vibrating ether sought by modern science, how remote they are from the direct, living essence of colour! What else is possible than that man is led wholly to ignore the living essence of colour? I have already told you that this element of colour is, in its very being, fluidic and alive—an element moreover in which our soul lives. And a time will come—as I have also indicated—when man will again perceive the living connection of the flowing sea of colour with the colours of creatures and objects manifested in the external world.

This is difficult for man because, since he has to develop his ego during earthly evolution, he has risen out of this flowing sea of colour to a mode of contemplation that proceeds purely from the ego. With his ego, man rises out of the sea of colour; the animal lives wholly within it and the fact that certain animals have feathers or skins of particular colours is connected with the whole relationship existing between the souls of these animals and the flowing sea of colour. The animal perceives objects with its astral body (as we perceive them with the ego) and into the astral body flow the forces living in the group-soul of the animal. It is nonsense to imagine that animals, even higher animals, behold the world as man beholds it. At the present time there is no understanding of these things. Man imagines that if he is standing near a horse, the horse sees him in exactly the same way as he sees the horse. What is more natural than to think that since the horse has eyes it sees him just as he sees it? This, however, is absolute nonsense. Without a certain clairvoyance a horse would no more see a human being than a human being, being without problems of psychological clairvoyance, would see an angel, for the man simply does not exist for the horse as a physical being, but only as a spiritual being. The horse is possessed of a certain order of clairvoyance and what the horse sees in man is quite different from what man sees in the horse: as we go about we are spectral beings to the horse. If animals could speak in their own language—not in the way they are sometimes made to ‘speak’ nowadays, but in their own language—man would realise that it never by any chance occurs to the animals to contemplate him as a being of similar order but as one who stands higher than themselves—a spectral, ghostlike being. Even if the animals assume their own body to consist of flesh and blood, they certainly have a different conception of the body of man. To the modern mind this of course sounds the purest nonsense—so far is the present age removed from truth!

As a result of the relation between astral body and group-soul, a receptivity to the living, creative power of colour flows into the animal. Just as we may see an object that rouses desire in us and we stretch out towards it by movement of the hand, an impression is made in the whole animal organism by the direct creative power in the colour; this impression flows into the feathers or skin and gives the animal its colour. I have already said that our age cannot understand why it is that the polar bear is white; the white colour is the effect produced by the environment and when the polar bear ‘whitens’ itself, this, at a different level, is practically the same thing as when man stretches out with a movement of his hand to pick a rose in response to a desire. The living creative effects of the environment work upon the polar bear in such a way that an impulse is released within it and it ‘whitens’ itself.

In man, this living weaving and moving in the element of colour has passed into the substrata of his being because he would never have been able to develop his ego if he had remained wholly immersed within the sea of colour and were, for instance, in response to an impression of a rosy hue of dawn to feel the impulse to impress these tints through creative imagination into certain parts of his skin. During the ancient moon period these conditions still obtained. The contemplation of scenes in nature like that of a rosy dawn worked upon man as he then was; this impression was reflected back, as it were, into his own colouring; it penetrated into the being of man in those times and was then outwardly expressed in certain areas of his body. During the earth period, this living bodily existence in the flowing sea of colour had to cease in order that man might be able to evolve his own conception of the world in his ego. So far as his form was concerned he had to become neutral to this sea of colour. The tint of the human skin as it appears in the temperate zones is essentially the expression of the ego, of absolute neutrality in face of the outer waves of colour; it denotes man's ascent above the flowing sea of colour. But even the most elementary facts of Spiritual Science remind us that it is man's task to find the path of return.

Physical body, etheric body, astral body—these were developed during the periods of Saturn, Sun and Moon; the ego has to develop during the earth period. Man must find the ways and means to spiritualise his astral body once again, to permeate it with all that the ego has won for itself. And as he spiritualises his astral body and so discovers the path of return, he must again find the flowing, surging waves of colour out of which he arose in order that his ego might develop—just as a man who rises from the sea only sees what is over the sea. We are indeed already living in an age when this penetration into the spiritual flow of the powers of of nature—that is to say of the spiritual powers behind nature—must begin. It must again be possible for us not merely to look at colours, to reproduce them outwardly here or 'there, but to live with colour, to experience the inner life-force of colour. This cannot be done by merely studying in painting, for instance, the effects of the colours and their interplay as we look at them. It can only be done if once again we sink our soul in the flow of red or blue, for instance, if the flow of the colour really lives—if we are able to ensoul the essence of colour that instead of evolving any kind of colour symbolism (which would of course be the very opposite way of going to work) we really discover what is already living in colour just as the power of laughter exists in a man who laughs. Hence we must seek out the paths of return to the flowing world of colour, for as I have already said, man has risen above it with his ego. If he has no other perception save ‘here is red, here is blue’—which is often the case to-day—he can never press onwards to living experience of the real essence of colour. Still less is this possible when he gives an intellectualistic garb to this inner essence and perceives red as a symbol, blue as another, and so forth. This will never lead to real experience of colour. We must know how to surrender the whole soul to what speaks to us from out of colour. Then, when we are confronted with red we have a sense of attack, aggression—this comes to us from the red. If ladies were all to go about dressed in red, a man possessed of a delicate sense for colour would silently imagine, simply on account of their clothing, that they might at any moment set about him vigourously! In red, then, there is a quality of aggression, something that comes towards us. Blue has an element that seems to pass away from us, to leave us, something after which we gaze with a certain wistfulness, with yearning.

How far the present age is removed from any such living understanding of colour may be realised from what I have already said about Hildebrand, an excellent artist, who expressly states that a colour on a surface is simply that and nothing more; the surface is there, overlaid with colour—that is all—though to be sure it is not quite the same in the case of form which expresses distance, for example. Colour expresses more than mere distance and we cannot help finding it deeply symptomatic of the whole nature of the present age that this is not perceived, even by an artist like Hildebrand. It is impossible to live into the essence of colour if one cannot immediately pass over from repose into movement, realising that a red disc approaches us, and that a blue disc, on the other hand, withdraws. These colours move in opposite directions. When we penetrate deeply into this living essence of colour we are led further and further. We begin to realise—if we really believe in colour—that we simply could not picture two coloured discs of this kind remaining there at rest. To picture such a thing would be to deaden all living feeling, for living feeling immediately changes into the realisation that the red and the blue discs are revolving round each other, the one towards the spectator, the other away from him. The relation between the red that is painted on a figure, in contrast to the blue, is such that the figure takes on life and movement through the very colour itself. The figure is caught up into the universe of life because this is shining in the colours. Form is of course the element that is at rest, stationary; but the moment the form has colour, the inner movement in the colour rises out of the form, and the whirl of the cosmos, the whirl of spirituality passes through the form. If you colour a form you endow it with the soul element of the universe, with cosmic soul, because colour is not only a part of form; the colour you give to a particular form places this form into the whole concatenation of its environment and indeed into the whole universe. In colouring a form we should feel: ‘Now we are endowing form with soul.’ We breathe soul into dead form when, through colour, we make it living.

We need only draw a little nearer to this inner living weaving of colours and we shall feel as if we are not confronting them on a level but as if we were standing either above or below them—again it is as if the colour becomes inwardly alive. To a lover of abstractions, to one who merely gazes at the colours and does not livingly penetrate into them, a red sphere may indeed seem to move around a blue, but he does not feel the need to vary the movement in any sense. He may be a great mathematician, or a great metaphysician, but he does not know how to live with colour because it seems to pass like a dead thing from one place to another. This is not so in reality; colour radiates, changes within itself, and if red moves it will send on before it a kind of orange aura, a yellow aura, a green aura. If blue moves it will send something different on before it.

We have, then, a play of colours as it were. Something actually happens when we experience in colour; thus red seems to attack, blue to pass away. We feel red as something which we want to ward off, blue as something we would pursue as if with longing. And if we could feel in colour in such a way that red and blue really live and move, we should indeed inwardly flow with the surging sea of colour, our souls would feel the eddying vortex of attacks and longings, the sense of flight and the prayer of surrender that intermingle with one another. And if we were to express this in some form, artistically of course, this form, which in itself is at rest, we should tear away from rest and repose. The moment we have a form which we paint, we have, instead of the form which is at rest, living movement that does not only belong to the form but to the forces and weaving being round about the form. Thus through a life of soul we wrest the material form away from its mere repose, from its mere quality of rigid form. Something like this must surely once be painted into this world by the creative elemental powers of the universe. [Note 1] For all that man is destined to receive by way of powers of longing—all this is something that could find expression in the blue. This on the one hand man must bear as a forming, shaping principle in his head, while all that finds expression in the red he must bear within him in a form that rushes upward from the rest of the body to the brain. Two such currents are indeed active in the structure of the human brain. Around man externally is the world—all that for which he longs—and this is perpetually being flooded over by that which surges upward from his own body. By day it happens that all which the blue half contains flows more intensely than the red and yellow: by night, so far as the physical human organism is concerned it is the opposite. And what we are wont to called the two-petalled lotus flower [Note 2] is indeed a true image of what I have here portrayed, for this two-petalled lotus flower does indeed reveal to the seer just such colours and movements. Nobody will really be able to fathom what lives in the world of form as the creative element, as the upper part of the human head, if he is not able to follow this flow of colour that in man is indeed a “hidden” flow of colour.

It must be the endeavour of art again to dive down into the life of the elements. Art has observed and studied nature long enough, has tried long enough to solve all the riddles of nature and to express in another form all that can be observed by this penetration into nature. What lives in the elements is, however, dead so far as modern art is concerned. Air, water, light—all are dead as they are painted to-day; form is dead as is expressed in modern sculpture. A new art will arise when the human soul learns to penetrate to the depths of the elemental world, for this world is living. People may rail against this; they may think that it ought not to be, but such raillery is only the outcome of human inertia. Unless man enters with his whole being into the world of the elements, and absorbs into himself the spirit and soul of the external world art will more and more become a work of the human soul in isolation. This of course may bring many interesting things to light in regard to the psychology of certain souls, but it will never achieve that which art alone can achieve. These things belong to the far, far future but we must go forward to meet this future with eyes that have been opened by Spiritual Science—otherwise we can see in that future nothing but death and paralysis.

This is why we must seek for inner connection between all our forms and colours here and the spiritual knowledge that moves innermost depths of the soul; we must seek that which lives in the Spirit in the same way as the Madonnas lived in Raphael, so lived in him that he was able to paint them as he did. The Madonnas were living in Raphael's very being, just as they were living in the learned men, the labourers in the fields and the craftsmen of his time. That is why he was the true artist of the Madonna. Only when we succeed in bringing into our forms in a purely artistic sense, without symbolism or allegory, all that lives in our idea of the world—not as abstract thought, dead knowledge or science, but as living substance of the soul—only then do we divine something of what the future holds in store.

Thus there must be unity between what is created externally and all that permeates the soul in the innermost depths of her being—a unity that was present in Goethe as the result of a special karma. Bridges must be built between what is still to many people so much abstract conception in Spiritual Science and what arises from hand, chisel and paint brush. To-day the building of these bridges is hindered by a cultural life that is in many respects superficial and abstract, and will not allow life to flow into action. This explains the appearance of the wholly groundless idea that spiritual knowledge might cause the death of art. In many instances of course a paralysing effect has been evident, for instance in all the allegorising and symbolising that goes on, in the perpetual questioning, ‘what does this mean?’ ‘what does that mean?’ I have already said that we should not always be asking what things ‘mean.’ We should not think of asking about the ‘meaning’ of the larynx, for instance. The larynx does not ‘mean’ anything, for it is the living organ of human speech and this is the sense in which we must look at all that lives in forms and colours when they are living organs of the spiritual world. So long as we have not ceased asking about allegorical or symbolical meanings, so long as we interpret myths and sagas allegorically and symbolically instead of feeling the living breath of the Spirit pervading the cosmos, realising how the cosmos lives in the figures of the world of myths and fairy stories—so long have we not attained to real spiritual knowledge.

A beginning, however, must be made, imperfect though it will be. No one should imagine that we take this beginning to be the perfect thing; but like many other objections to our spiritual movement made by the modern age, it is nonsense to say that our building is not an essential part of this spiritual movement. We ourselves are already aware of the facts which people may bring forward. We realise also that all the foolish chatter about the ‘higher self,’ all the rhapsodies in regard to the ‘divinity of the soul of man’ can also be expressed in outer forms of the present age; and of course we know that it is everywhere possible for man to promote Spiritual Science in its mental and intellectual aspects. But over and above this merely intellectual aspect we feel that if Spiritual Science is to pour life into the souls of men it demands a vesture of a different kind from any that may be a product of the dying culture of our day. It is not at all necessary for the outer world to remind us of the cheap truth that Spiritual Science can also be studied in its mental aspect in surroundings of a different kind from those which are made living by our forms. The ideal which Spiritual Science must pour into our souls must be earnest and grow ever more earnest. A great many things are still necessary before this earnestness, this inner driving force of the soul can become part of our very being. It is quite easy to speak of Spiritual Science and its expression in the outer world in such way that its core and nerve are wholly lacking. The form taken by the most vigorous attacks levelled against our spiritual movement creates a strange impression. Those who read some of these attacks will, if they are in their right minds, wonder what on earth they are driving at. They describe all manner of fantastic nonsense which has not the remotest connection with us, and then the opposition is levelled against these absurdities! The world is so little capable of absorbing new spiritual leaven that it invents a wholly grotesque caricature and then sets to work to fight against that. There are even people who think that the whole movement should be done away with. Attack of course is always possible but it is a reductio ab absurdum to do away with an invention that has no resemblance of any kind to what it sets out to depict. It behooves us, however, to realise what kind of sense for truth underlies these things, for this will make us strong to receive all that must flow to us from Spiritual Science, and, made living by this Spiritual Science, shine into material existence. That the world has not grown in tolerance or understanding is shown by the attitude adopted towards Spiritual Science. The world has not grown in either of these qualities.

We can celebrate the inner confluence of the soul with Spiritual Science in no better way than by deepening ourselves in problems like that of the nature and being of colour, for in experience of the living flow of colour we transcend the measure of our own stature and live in cosmic life. Colour is the soul of nature and of the whole cosmos and we partake of this soul as we experience colour.

This was what I wanted to indicate to-day, in order next time to penetrate still more deeply into the nature of the world of colour and the essence of painting.

I could not help interspersing these remarks with references to the attacks that are being made upon us from all sides—attacks emanating from a world incapable of understanding the aims of our Anthroposophical Movement. One can only hope that those within our Movement will be able, by a deepening of their being, to understand something truly symptomatic of our times, the falsehood and untruth that is creeping into man's conception of what is striving to find its place within the spiritual world. We of course have no wish to seclude our spiritual stream, to shut it off from the world; as much as the world is willing to receive, that it can have. But one thing the world must accept if it is to understand us, and that is the unity of the whole nature of man—the unity which makes every human achievement the outcome of this full and complete ‘manhood.’

These words are not meant to be an attack on the present age. I speak them with a certain sense of pain, because the more our will and our efforts increase in this Movement of ours, the more malicious—perhaps not consciously, but more or less unconsciously malicious—do the opposing forces become. I have, moreover, spoken thus because the way in which these things must be looked at is not yet fully understood even among ourselves. The unshakable standpoint must be that something new, a new beginning, is at least intended in our Movement. What lies beyond this ‘intention’ has of course yet to come. We with our building can still do no more than ‘intend.’ Those who can do more than intend—they will come, even though it be not before the time Herman Grimm thinks must elapse before there will be a complete understanding of Goethe. A certain humility is bound up with the understanding of this and there is little humility in modern spiritual life. Spiritual Science is well suited to give this humility and at the same time to bring the soul to a realisation of the gravity of these things.

A painful impression is caused by the opposition arising on all sides against our spiritual Movement, now that the world is now beginning to see real results. So long as the Movement was merely there in a spiritual sense the world could see nothing. Now that it does, and it cannot understand what it sees, dissonant voices are beginning to sound from every side. This opposition will grow stronger and stronger. When we realise its existence we shall naturally at first be filled with a certain sorrow, but an inner power will make us able to intercede on behalf of what is to us not merely conviction, but life itself. The soul will be pervaded by an ethereal, living activity, filled with something more than the theoretical convictions of which modern man is so proud. This earnest mood of soul will bring in its train the sure confidence that the foundations of our world and our existence as human beings are able to sustain us, if we seek for them in the spiritual world. Sometimes we need this confidence more, sometimes less. If we speak of sorrow caused by the echo which our spiritual Movement finds in the world—this mood of sorrow must give birth to the mood of power derived from the knowledge that the roots of man's life are in the Spirit and that the Spirit of man will lead him out beyond all the disharmony that can only cause him pain. Strength will flow into man from this mood of power.

If in these very days one cannot help speaking of things spiritual with a sorrow even greater than that caused by the discrepancy between what we desire in our spiritual Movement and the echo it finds in the world—yet it must be said that the world's disharmonies will take a different course when men realise how human hearts can be kindled by the spiritual light for which we strive in anthroposophy. The sorrow connected with our Movement seems only slight when we look at all the sadness lying in the destiny of Europe. The words I have spoken to you are pervaded with sorrow, but they are spoken with the living conviction that whatever pain may await European humanity in a sear or distant future there may, none the less, live within us a confidence born from the knowledge that the Spirit will lead man victoriously through every wilderness. Even in these days of sorrow, in hours fraught with such gravity, we may in very truth, indeed we must, speak of the holy things of Spiritual Science, for we may believe that however dimly the sun of Spiritual Science is shining to-day, its radiance will ever increase until it is a sun of peace, of love and of harmony among men.

Grave though these words may be, they justify us in thinking of the narrower affairs of Spiritual Science with all the powers of heart and soul, when hours of ordeal are being made manifest through the windows of the world.

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Notes:

Note 1. Translator's Note. Presumably Dr. Steiner was here drawing on the blackboard while he was speaking. The expressions used in the German seem to indicate this.

Note 2. See ‘Knowledge of the Higher Worlds and its Attainment,’ by Rudolf Steiner. Anthrosophical Publishing Co.

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In the lectures which it has been my lot to deliver, I have often drawn attention to an observation which might be made in real life, and which shows the necessity of seeking everywhere below the surface of life's appearances, instead of stopping at first impressions. It runs somewhat as follows.—A man is walking along a river bank and, while still some way off, is seen to pitch headlong into the water. We approach and draw him out of the stream, only to find him dead; we notice a boulder at the point where he fell and conclude at first sight as a matter of course that he stumbled over the stone, fell into the river and was drowned. This conclusion might easily be accepted and handed down to posterity—but all the same it could be very wide of the mark. Closer inspection might reveal that the man had been struck by a heart-attack at the very moment of his coming up to the stone, and was already dead when he fell into the water. If the first conclusion had prevailed and no one had made it his business to find out what actually occurred, a false judgment would have found its way into history—the apparently logical conclusion that the man had met his death through falling into the water. Conclusions of this kind, implying to a greater or lesser degree a reversal of the truth, are quite customary in the world—customary even in scholarship and science, as I have often remarked.

For those who dedicate themselves heart and soul to our spiritual-scientific movement, it is necessary not only to learn from life, but incessantly to make the effort to learn the truth from life, to find out how it is that not only men but also the world of facts may quite naturally transmit untruth and deception. To learn from life must become the motto of all our efforts; otherwise the goals we want to reach through our Building¹ as well as in many other ways will be hard of attainment. Our aim is to play a vital part in the genesis of a world-era; a growth which may well be compared with the beginning of that era which sprang from a still more ancient existence of mankind—let us say the time to which Homer's epics refer. In fact, the entire configuration, artistic nature and spiritual essence of our Building attempts something similar to what was attempted during the happenings of that transitional period from a former age to a later one, as recounted by Homer. It is our wish to learn from life, and, what is more, to learn the truth from life.

There are so very many opportunities to learn from life, if we wee willing. Have we not had such an opportunity even in the last day or two? Are we not justified in making a start with such symptoms, particularly with one that has so deeply moved us? Consider for a moment!² On Wednesday evening last, many of our number either passed by the crossroads or were in the neighbourhood, saw the wagon overturned and lying there, came up to the lecture and were quite naturally, quite as a matter of course, aware of nothing more than that a cart had fallen over. For hours, that was the sole impression—but what was the truth of the matter? The truth was that an eloquent karma in the life of a human being was enacted; that this life so full of promise was in that moment karmically rounded off, having been required back in the worlds by the Spiritual Powers. For at certain times these Powers need uncompleted human lives, whose unexpended forces might have been applied to the physical plane, but have to be conserved for the spiritual worlds for the good of evolution. I would like to put it this way. For one who has saturated himself with spiritual science, it is a plainly evident fact that this particular human life may be regarded as one which the gods require for themselves; that the cart was guided to the spot in order that this karma might be worked out, and overturned in order to consummate the karma of this human life. The way in which this was brought home to us was heartrending, and rightly so. But we must also be capable of submerging ourselves in the ruling wisdom, even when it manifests, unnoticed at first, in something miraculous. From such an event we should learn to look more profoundly into the reality. And how indeed could we raise our thoughts more fittingly to that human life with which we are concerned, and how commemorate more solemnly its departure from earth, than by forthwith allowing ourselves to be instructed by the grave teaching of destiny which has come to us in these days.

Yet it is a human trait to forget only too promptly the lessons which life insistently offers us! It is on this account that we have to call to our aid the practice of meditation, the exercise of concentrated thinking, in order to essay any comprehension of the world at all adequate to spiritual science; we must strive continually towards this. And I would like to interpose this matter now, among the other considerations relative to our Building, because it will serve as an illustration for what is to follow concerning art. For let us not hold the implications of our Building to be less than a demand of history itself—down to its very details.

In order to recognise a fact of this kind in full earnest, it must be our concern to acquire the possibility, through spiritual science, of reforming our concepts and ideas, of winning through to better, loftier, more serious, more penetrating and profound concepts and ideas concerning life, than any we could acquire without spiritual science.

From this standpoint let us ask the downright question What then is history, and what is it that men so often understand by history? Is not what is so often regarded as history nothing more at bottom than the tale of the man who is walking along a river's bank, died from a heart attack, falls into the water, and of whom it is told that he died through drowning? Is not history very often derived from reports of this kind? Certainly, many historical accounts have no firmer foundation. Suppose someone had passed by the cross-roads between 8 and 9 o'clock last Wednesday evening and had had no opportunity of hearing anything about the shattering event which had taken place there: he could have known nothing, only that a cart had been overturned, and that is how he would report it. Many historical accounts are of this kind. The most important things lying beneath the fragments of information remain entirely concealed; they withdraw completely from what is customarily termed history. Sometimes possibly one can go further and say that external reports and documents actually hinder our recognition of the true course of history. That is more particularly so if—as happens in nearly every epoch—the documents present the matter one-sidedly and if there are no documents giving the other side, or if these are lost. You may call this an hypothesis but it is no hypothesis, for what is taught as history at the present time rests for the most part upon such documents as conceal rather than reveal the truth.

The question might occur at this point: How is any approach to the genesis of historical events to be won? In all sorts of ways spiritual science has shown us how, for it does not look to external documents but seeks to discern the impulses which play in from the spiritual worlds. Hence it naturally cannot describe the outward course of events as external history does, It recognises inward impulses everywhere. Moreover, the spiritual investigator must be bold enough, when tracing these impulses on the surface, to hold fast to them in the face of outer traditions. Courage with regard to the truth is essential, if we would take up our stand on the ground of spiritual science, The transition can be made by attempting to approach the secrets of historical “coming into being” otherwise than is usually done.

Consider all the extant 13th and 14th century documents about Italy, from which history is so fondly composed. The tableau, the picture, obtained by thus assembling history out of such documents brings one far less close to the truth one can get by studying Dante and Giotto, and allowing what they created out of their souls to work upon one. Consider also what remains of Scholasticism, of its thoughts, and try to reflect upon, to reproduce in yourself, what Dante, Giotto and Scholasticism severally created—you will get a truer picture of that epoch than is to be had from a collection of external documents. Or someone may set himself the task of studying the rebellion of the Protestant spirit of the North or of Mid-Europe against the Catholicism of the South. What can you not find in documents! Yet it is not a question of isolated facts, but of uniting one's whole soul with the active, ruling, weaving impulses at work. You come to know this rising up of the Protestant spirit against the Catholic spirit through a study of Rembrandt and the peculiar nature of his painting. Much could be brought forward in this way.

And so it comes about that historical documents are often more of a hindrance than a help. Perhaps the type of history bookworm who subsists upon documentary evidence would be elated by a pile of material on Homer's life, or Shakespeare's. From a certain point of view, however, one could say: Thank God there is no such evidence! We must only be wary not to exaggerate a truth of this kind, not to press it too far. We must indeed be grateful to history for leaving us no documents about Homer or Shakespeare. Yet something might here be maintained which is one-sidedly true—one sided, but true, for a one sided truth is nevertheless a truth. Someone might exclaim: How we must long for the time when no external documents about Goethe are available.

Indeed, with Goethe it is often not merely disturbing, but an actual hindrance, to know what he did, not only from day to day but sometimes even from hour to hour. How wonderful it would be to picture for oneself the experience undergone by the soul of a man who at a particular time of life spoke the fateful words:

“ I've studied now Philosophy
And Jurisprudence, Medicine,
And even, alas! Theology,
From end to end, with labour keen;
And here, poor fool! with all my lore
I stand, no wiser than before.”

“Faust”, Part I,
(Tr. Bayard Taylor)

If one wished to find the answer oneself in the case of such men, one might well yearn for the time when all the Leweses, and so on, whatever their names may be, no longer tell us what Goethe did the livelong day in which this or that verse was set down. And what a hindrance in following the flight of Goethe's soul up to the time in which he inscribed these words:

“The sun-orb singe, in emulation
‘Mid brother spheres, his ancient round. . .”

What a hindrance it is that we are able to refer to the many volumes of his notebooks and correspondence, and to read how Goethe spent this period. This view is fully justified from one angle, but not from every angle; for although it is fully justified in the case of Homer, Shakespeare, and so on, it is one sided with regard to Goethe, since Goethe's own works include his “Truth and Poetry” (“Dichtung und Wahrheit”). An inherent trait of this personality is that something about it should be known, since Goethe felt constrained to make this personal confession in “Truth and Poetry”. Hence the time will never come when the poet of “Faust” will appear to humanity in the same light as the poet of the “Iliad” or the “Odyssey”. So we see that a truth brought home to us from one side only can never be given a general application; it bears solely on a particular, quite individual case.

Yet the matter must he grasped still more profoundly. Spiritual science tries to do this. By pointing out certain symptoms, I have repeatedly endeavoured to show that modern culture aspires towards spiritual science. In my Rätsel der Philosophie³ I have tried to show how this is particularly true of philosophy. In the second volume you will notice that the development of philosophy presses on towards what I have sketched in the concluding chapter as “Prospect of an Anthroposophy”. That is the direction taken by the whole book. Of course this could not have been done without some support from our Anthroposophical Society, for the outer world will probably make little of the inner structure of the book as yet.

I said that Goethe must be regarded differently from Homer. On the same grounds I would like to add: Do we then not come to know Homer? Could we get to know him by any better means than through his poems, although he lived not only hundreds but even thousands of years ago? Do we not get to know him far better in that way than we ever could from any documents? Yes, Homer's age was able to bring forth such works, through which the soul of Homer is laid bare. Countless examples could be given. I will mention one only one, however, which is connected with the deepest impulses of that turning-point during the Homeric age, much as we ourselves hope and long for in the change from the materialistic to the anthroposophical culture.

We know that in the first book of the Iliad we are told of the contrast between Agamemnon and Achilles: the voices of these two in front of Troy are vividly portrayed. We know further that the second book begins by telling us that the Greeks feel they have stood before Troy quite long enough, and are yearning to return to their homeland. We know, too, that Homer describes the events as if the Gods were constantly intervening as guiding divine-spiritual powers. The intervention of Zeus is described at the beginning of this second book. The Gods, like the Greeks below, are sleeping peacefully; so peacefully, indeed, that Herman. Grimm, in his witty way, suggests that the very snoring of the heroes, of the Gods and of the Greeks below, is plainly audible. Then the story continues:

Now all other gods and chariot-driving men slept all night long, only Zeus was not holden of sweet sleep; rather was he pondering in his heart how he should do honour to Achilles and destroy many beside the Achaians' ships And this design seemed to his mind the best, to wit, to send a baneful dream upon Agamemnon son of Atreus. So he spake, and uttered to him winged words: ‘Come now, thou baneful Dream, go to the Achaians' fleet ships, enter into the hut of Agamemnon son of Atreus, and tell him every word plainly as A charge thee Bid him call to arms the flowing-haired Achaians with al' speed, for that now he may take the wide-wayed city of the Trojans. For the immortals that dwell in the halls of Olympus are no longer divided in counsel, since Hera hath turned the minds of all by her beseeching, and over the Trojans sorrows hang.’

So spake he, and the Dream went his way when he had heard the charge. With speed he came to the Achaeans' fleet ships, and went to Agamemnon son of Atreus, and found him sleeping in his hut, and ambrosial slumber poured over him. So he stood over his head in seeming like unto the son of Neleus, even Nestor, whom most of all the elders Agamemnon honoured.”⁴

Zeus, then, sends the Dream down from Olympus to Agamemnon. He gives the Dream a commission, The Dream descends to Agamemnon, approaching him in the guise of Nestor, who we have just learned, is one of the heroes in the camp of the allies.

“In his likeness spake to him the heavenly Dream: ‘Sleepest thou, son of wise Atreus tamer of horses? To sleep all night through beseemth not one that is a counsellor, to whom peoples are entrusted and so many cares belong. But now hearken straightway to me, for I am a messenger to thee from Zeus, who though he be afar yet hath great care for thee and pity. He biddeth thee call to arms the flowing-haired Achaians with all speed, for that now thou mayest take the wide-wayed city of the Trojans. For the immortals that dwell in the halls of Olympus are no longer divided in counsel, since Hera hath turned the minds of all by her beseeching, and over the Trojans sorrows hang by the will of Zeus. But do thou keep this in thy heart, nor let forgetfulness come upon thee when honeyed sleep shall leave thee.’ ”

This, then, is what takes place. Zeus, the presiding genius in the events, sends a Dream to Agamemnon in order that he should bestir himself to fresh action. The Dream appears in the likeness of Nestor, a man who is one of the band of heroes among whom Agamemnon is numbered. The figure of Nestor, whose physical appearance is well-known to Agamemnon, confronts him and tells him in the Dream what he should do. We are further told that Agamemnon convenes the elders before he calls an assembly of the people. And to the elders he recounts the Dream just as it had appeared to him:

“Hearken, my friends. A dream from heaven came to me in my sleep through the ambrosial night, and chiefly to goodly Nestor was very like in shape and bulk and stature. And it stood over my head and charged me saying: ‘Sleepest thou, son of wise Atreus tamer of horses?’ ”

(Atreus' son then tells the elders what the Dream had said. None of the elders stands up excepting Nestor alone, the real Nestor, who utters the words:)

“My friends, captains and rulers of the Argives, had any other of the Achaians told us this dream we might deem it a false thing, and rather turn away there from; but now he hath seen it who of all Achaians avoweth himself far greatest. So come, let us call to arms as we may the sons of the Achaians ...”

Do we not gaze unfathomably deep into Homer's soul, when we know—are able to know, to perceive, by means of spiritual science—that he can recount an episode of this kind? Have we not described how what we experience in the spiritual world clothes itself in pictures, and how we have first to interpret the pictures, how we should not permit ourselves to be misled by them? Homer spoke at a time when the present clairvoyance did not yet exist; at a time, rather, when the old form of clairvoyance had just been lost. And in Agamemnon he wanted to portray a man who is still able to experience the old atavistic clairvoyance in certain episodes of life. As a military commander he is still led to his decisions through the old clairvoyance, through dreams. We know what Homer knows and believes and how he regards the men he writes about; and suddenly, in pondering on what is described in this passage, we see that the human soul stands here at the turning-point of an era.

Yet that is not all. We do not only behold in Agamemnon, through Homer, a human soul into which clairvoyance still plays atavistically, nor do we only recognise the pertinent description of this clairvoyance; but the whole situation lies before us in a wonderfully magical light. Homer is humorous enough to show us expressly that it is Nestor who appeared to Agamemnon; the same Nestor who is subsequently present and himself holds forth, Now Nestor has spoken in favour of carrying out the Dream's instructions. The people assemble; but Agamemnon addresses them quite differently from what is implied in the Dream, saying that it is a woeful business, this lingering before Troy: “Let us flee with our ships to our dear native land”, he exclaims. So that the people, seized by the utmost eagerness, hasten to the ships for the journey home. Thus it rests finally with the persuasive arts of Odysseus to effect their about-turn and the beginning of the siege of Troy in real earnest. Here, in fact, we gaze into Homer's soul and discern in Agamemnon a lifelike portrayal of the transition from a man who is still led by the ancient clairvoyance to a man who decides everything out of his own conclusions. And so with an overwhelming sense of humour he shows us how Agamemnon speaks to the elders while under the influence of the Dream, and later how he speaks to the crowd, having bade farewell to the spiritual world and being subject now, to external impressions alone. Homer's way of depicting how Agamemnon outgrows the bygone age and is placed on his own feet, on the spearhead of his own ego, is wonderful indeed. And he further implies that from henceforward everything must undergo a like transition, so that men will act in accordance with what the reason brings to pass, with what we term the Intellectual or Mind Soul, which must be ascribed pre-eminently to the ancient Greeks. Because Agamemnon is only just entering the new era and behaves in a quite erratic and contradictory way, first in accordance with his clairvoyant dream and then out of his own ego, Homer has to call in Odysseus, a man who reaches his decisions solely under the influence of the Intellectual Soul. Wonderful is the way in which two epochs come up against each Other here, and wonderfully apposite is Homers picture of it!

Now I would ask you: Do we know Homer from a certain aspect when we know such a trait? Certainly we know him. And that is how we must come to know him if we want rightly to understand world-history—an impossible task if nothing but external documents were available. Many other traits could be brought forward, out of which the figure of Homer would emerge and stand truly before us. We can come close to him in this way, as we never could with a personality built up only from historical documents. Just think what is really known of ancient Greek history! Yet through traits of this kind we can approach Homer so closely that we get to know him to the very tip of his nose, one might say! At one time there were men who approached Homer in this way, until a crude type of philology came in and spoilt the picture. Thus does one know Socrates, as Plato and Xenophon depict him; so also Plato himself, Aristotle, Phidias. Their personalities can be rounded off in a spiritual sense. And if we thus hold these figures before our mind, a picture arises of Hellenism on the physical plane. To be sure, one must call in the aid of spiritual science. As the sun sheds its light over the landscape, so does spiritual science illumine for us the figure of Homer as he lived, and equally of Aeschylus, Socrates, Plato, Phidias.

Try for a moment to visualise Lycurgus, Solon or Alcibiades as a part of Greek history. How do they present themselves? As nothing but spectres. Whoever has any understanding of an Individuality in the true sense must recognise that in the framework of history they are just like spectres, for the features that history sets itself to portray are so abstract as to have a wholly spectral quality. Nor are the figures of later ages which have been deduced from external documents any less spectral in character.

I am saying all this in the hope that gradually—yes, even in things that people treat as so fixed and stable that the shocks of the present time are treated as mere foolishness—spiritual science in the hearts of our friends may acquire the strength and courage to bring home an understanding that a new impulse is trying to find its way into human evolution. But for this we shall need all our resources; one might say that we shall need the will to penetrate into the true connections that go to make up the world, and the power of judgment to perceive that the true connections do not lie merely on the surface. In this regard it is of surpassing importance that we should learn from life itself. For very often—to a far greater extent than one might at first suppose—error finds its way into the world through a superficial reliance on the external pattern of facts, which really can do nothing but conceal the truth, as we saw in the cases described. In the field of philosophy particularly, it is my hope that precisely through the mode of presentation in the second volume of the “Rätsel der Philosophie” many will find it possible to recognise the connection between the philosophic foundations of a world-conception, as presented in the “Philosophy of Spiritual Activity” and the “Outline of Occult Science”. If on the one hand we are looking for a presentation of the spiritual worlds as this offers itself to clairvoyant knowledge, then on the other hand there must be added to the reception of this knowledge a penetration of the soul with the impulses which arise from the conviction, that man does not confront the truth directly in the world, but must first wrest the truth from it. The truth is accessible only to the man who strives, works, penetrates into things with his own powers; not to the man who is ready to accept the first appearances of things, which are only half real. Such a fact is easily uttered in this abstract form, but the soul is inclined over and over again to back away from accepting the deeper implications of what is said.

I believe many of those who have tried to enter into spiritual science with all the means now at their disposal will understand how in our Building, for example, the attempt has been made through the concord of the columns with their motifs and, with everything expressed in the forms, to enable the soul to grow beyond what is immediately before it. For a receptive person, beginning to experience what lies in the forms of the Building, the form itself would immediately disappear, and, through the language of the form, a way would open out into the spiritual, into the wide realms of space. Then the Building would have achieved its end. But in order to find this way, much has still to be learnt from life.

Is it not a remarkable Karma for all of us, gathered here for the purpose of our Building, to experience through a shattering event the relationship between Karma and apparently external accident? If we call to our aid all the anthroposophical endeavours now at our disposal, we can readily understand that human lives which are prematurely torn away—which have not undergone the cares and manifold coarsenings of life and pass on still undisturbed—are forces within the spiritual world which have a relationship to the whole of human life; which are there in order to work upon human life. I have often said that the earth is not merely a vale of woe to which man is banished from the higher worlds by way of punishment. The earth is here as a training-ground for human souls. If, however, a life lasts but a short while, if it has but a short time of training, then forces are left over which would otherwise have been used up in flowing down from the spiritual world and maintaining the physical body. Through spiritual science we do not become convinced only of the eternality of the soul and of its journey through the spiritual world, but we learn also to recognise what is permanent in the effect of a spiritual force by means of which a man is torn from the physical body like the boy who was torn from our midst on the physical plane. And we honour, we celebrate, his physical departure in a worthy manner if, in the manner indicated and in many other ways, we really learn, learn very much, from our recent experience, Through Anthroposophy, one learns to feel and to perceive from life itself.

• 1. The First Goetheanum, later destroyed by fire.
• 2. Note by translator: A seven-year old boy was smothered by an overturned horse-drawn removal van, quite unnoticed since darkness had already set in. The boy, who was in the habit of running an errand for his mother at this hour, normally went another way.
• 3. Riddles of Philosophy
• 4. The Iliad, Book II. (Macmillan, 1949)

Friends should feel the quality of universality in the style of the Dornach Building. This means that endeavours must be made to transform into feeling the results of spiritual-scientific investigations that have come before our souls in the course of the years. Out of inner feeling we. shall then be able to conceive of the forms in our Building as a universal script, full of meaning

When I last spoke here I drew your attention to clues that help us to acquire a really comprehensive view of the evolution of humanity. I pointed out how in Homer's works we find a figure who represents the transition from ancient times—when everything in human evolution and culture was based upon a certain kind of clairvoyance—to the age in which we are living and into which the rays of the Mystery of Golgotha have radiated.

I said that in Agamemnon and Achilles, Homer has created figures in which he has shown how the ancient cultural life of man, permeated as it was with clairvoyance, passes over to a different kind of feeling, thinking, perception, willing, a different way of acting.

Fundamentally speaking, what has come about since the dawn of the Fourth Post-Atlantean epoch (the Greco-Latin age), and also what has developed among the different peoples as the goal of their strivings, can be understood only if it is conceived as resting on the foundation of ancient clairvoyance.

Certainly, much that is new has been achieved in the Fourth Poet-Atlantean epoch of culture and in the part of the Fifth that has already elapsed. Yet in the root-impulses at work in these epochs—as can be clearly felt by one who is willing to feel it—there still live elements that have come over from ancient times.

It is not so very easy to recognise on the surface of history this ancient heritage of human evolution. But if one is willing to penetrate into those forces which hold sway in human nature either more or less unconsciously, and reach into more recent phases of development, one perceives everywhere how the men of the Fourth and Fifth Post-Atlantean epochs bear, so to say, in their nerves and blood, elements that have come over from the First Post-Atlantean epoch (ancient Indian culture), from the Second (ancient Persian culture), from the Third (Egypto-Chaldean-Babylonian culture) and on into our own times from Greco-Latin culture. The achievements of humanity in these periods of culture are less easy to trace in outer history, but in the characters of men, how men inevitably—I say, inevitably—think and feel, it can be perceived and felt. The man of the Fifth epoch in which we are living is so constituted that his nerves, blood and astral body contain what he has received as a heritage from ancient times. It lives within him as feeling, as a fundamental impulse. He has received, in addition, impulses coming from higher worlds.

As we live in the age when the Ego is developing, when culture based on external reason is the vogue and external philosophy is authoritative; what comes from above into the impulses of men in the physical world; from the guidance and leadership of the spiritual world; meets with little understanding. In order to kindle a feeling for the dynamic, let me indicate by a sketch how the men of the Fifth Post-Atlantean epoch are placed in the whole evolutionary process of mankind. To indicate it in a few strokes, we can choose this motif (one of the carved forms in the Building), representing a force that works from below upwards, and illustrates as can be clearly felt—all those impulses which man bears in the blood; in the nerves, in the etheric body, in the astral body, and which originates in the preceding epochs, actually in the First Post-Atlantean epoch of culture. [ Figure 1 (a) ] As an impulse coming down from above we can indicate the force that works downwards from the spiritual world into the intuition of the individual but with less power than what man bears within him from ancient times.

Spiritual-scientific investigation helps us to understand the conditions in which we ourselves live. This investigation has shown how the different qualities of the soul are distributed among the cultures of the leading peoples of the Fifth Post-Atlantean epoch. The peoples inhabiting the Italian and Spanish peninsulas—as peoples, not as individuals—have absorbed into their culture everything that is connected with the Sentient Soul. Consequently the characteristics of the Sentient Soul predominate in the culture of these two peoples. These peoples represent a particular continuation of the main process indicated in the diagram. In a more concrete, more definite way, they make manifest what lives in the impulses of the blood and the nerves, of the etheric and astral bodies, in the sense referred to everything that came over from ancient times takes exprestion in these peoples and their fundamental impulses in such a way that the forces striving upwards from below take on a more definite configuration. In these peoples there is something inorganic, purely mathematical in the other forces; there is no more than an indication of the impulses of the Fifth Post-Atlantean epoch.

If we are to understand the particular character of the peoples of the Italian and Spanish peninsulas, we must be clear that the impulses working in the blood, the nerves, the etheric and astral bodies, are developed consciously into greater concreteness of form, but with the force of the old. The impulse from below upwards in these peoples can be indicated by elaborating the lower part of the design [ Figure 2a ] and giving it a form that opens upwards like a flower, suggesting at the same time, in what comes down from above as spiritual guidance, the kind of capacity these particular peoples, have for understanding that guidance. All this is connected with the plastic forms on the columns of the Building.

These peoples still have little relation with what is expressed by this central part of the design [ Figure 2b ], but they take over all the qualities and characteristics which the Sentient Soul is able to take over from ancient times, all the secrets of the ancient forms, of the ancient artistic script, if I may put it so. A force that shapes itself into forms enters into the first design, like a renewed gift from above [ Figure 2c ] . The character of these peoplee is expressed by this second design.

Everything we come to know from spiritual science must find verification in the realities of the outer world—when, as is essential, we really survey the outer world. If we are to absorb spiritual science in the right way, we must first take what it says into our hearts and souls and then put the question to the world whether what spiritual science says is actually realised there. This means that we must be able to find in the external culture of the peoples in question the living elements of the Sentient Soul. And we shall expect to find in the culture of the peoples of the Fifth Post-Atlantean epoch a kind of resurrection of something that already existed in earlier times and to which the so-called Sentient Soul peoples gave expression. We shall expect to find a repetition of what lived in the Egypto-Chaldean age, but born anew, in a form corresponding to our age.

What then, was characteristic of the souls of the Egyptian and Chaldean peoples? Abandonment to the outer world—in keeping with the character of the Sentient Soul—so that in the relation of the fixed stars to the planets men felt something that was connected with human destiny. Men looked out into the universe and found in what the stars expressed, the secret of happenings in the life of the human soul and spirit.

The first stage of Fifth Post-Atlantean culture was to repeat what was contained in the former Sentient Soul culture, but now in the soul itself. If, therefore, spiritual science is a trigs guide, we shall expect to find in the peoples of the Italian peninsula something that on the one side expresses the character of the Sentient Soul in the Egypto-Chaldean epoch, but on the other side indicates the great inwardness brought about by the impulse of the Mystery of Golgotha. We shall expect to find something that is a re-creation of the ancient spiritual astrology, but is now applied to the inner world, to the human soul. (Second design.) We must feel everything that approaches from the stars as a blossom springing from the human soul, indicated here at [ Figure 3a ] in the second design the aspiring impulses in man are met by what comes into them from the stars, that is to say, from the spiritual world [ Figure 3b ]. There must be something within the culture of these Southern peoples which represents an astrology applied to the soul—Egypto-Chaidean astrology applied entirely to the soul.

You are naturally thinking of something that provides complete confirmation of what I have just said. It is what Dante has presented in the “Divine Comedy”. Dante is the spirit who has re-awakened the Egypto-Chaldean element in a new form—applied now to the life of soul.

It will be easy for you to designate everything that relates to the basic impulses of ancient times as “Saturnian”.

The fundamental impulse of all connection between the cultures of the Fifth Post-Atlantean period and the ancient cultures, bears the Saturnian character. The Saturnian element works its way upwards from the fundamental impulses of the human soul and receives from above the impulses that can spring from the culture arising from the Intellectual Soul and the Ego.

It will also be easy for you to perceive the impulse that is Sun-like in character [ Figure 2 ]. I have indicated that this Sun-quality is present in Dante, who represents an important impulse of Latin-Italian culture. It need only be added that Italy is the motherland of all that is formative, of the Sun—qualities that come to man through the Sentient Soul. We might even expect a thinker of a distinct character to arise within this culture, one who out of unconscious impulses remembers this Sun-element. In the light of what we have learnt from spiritual sciences this would seem entirely natural.

There might, for example, be a philosopher—perhaps not philsophieally clear about the impulse in his souls but feeling it and allowing it to dominate him—who maintains that the external life of the State must be planned in such a manner that it is irradiated by the Sun-element.—We have no reason to be surprised when we find such a case. Campanella wrote a philosophical treatise on the Sun-State, the solar State.¹ You will become more and more convinced that everything, every details accords with what spiritual science brings down from the spiritual worlds, ad that life can be understood only when it is illuminated by the findings of spiritual science.

We then come to the culture-epoch which, according to the findings of spiritual science, will be designated as that of the Intellectual Soul or Mind Soul. It is the culture that has developed particularly in the region of present-day France.

To find a suitable design for this culture we must realise that it was destined—in a more concrete way than was the case at any point in Italian culture—to lead what comes from above to particular brilliance, to a higher stage of elaboration of the Intellectual Soul. What comes from above [ Figure 3b ] Intellectual Soul culture—brings the earlier culture [ Figure 3a ] to a state of greater concreteness.

If you steep yourselves in the characteristics of this new culture, you will perceive that it is particularly adapted to absorb the culture of the Fourth Greco-Latin culture, permeated with what comes from above trickles into French culture as a liquid might trickle into a chalice [ Figure 3 ] .

Spanish and Italian culture passes over into French culture but in such a way that in the latter, Greek culture undergoes a revival and renewal. I do not think that a better design than this could be found to express the gradual transition from Spanish into French culture. Even the outer quality of finish can be expressed by allowing the central part of the design to be enclosed to right and left by these lines [ Figure 3c ].

Anyone who asks whether the results of spiritual science are also demonstrated in external reality can easily find an answer if he will devote a little study to actual conditions. But it must be emphasised that these things must be judged on the foundation of facts as they are, not on that of pre-conceived ideas.

This has constantly to be stressed at the present time, because everybody wants to pass judgment on everything ignoring, of course, facts which can be understood only by dint of effort. But I advise anyone who wants to gain insight into the very distinctive form in which the Greek element flows into French culture, to study how the Oedipus theme has found its way into French poetry; how Sophocles' Oedipus lives again in the Oedipus of Corneille and also in that of Voltaire. What I have just said can be confirmed down to the very details. It can be clearly discerned in these particular examples, although many could be quoted.

It is, of course, a fact that most editions of Corneille's works no longer include the tragedy of Oedipus and that in those of Voltaire practically no value is attached to this work. But study will show that the new form into which the Oedipus theme has been cast by Corneille and Voltaire is a sign of the revival of the Greek age in French culture.

It will be found that because Greco-Latin culture stands at the dividing line between the age of ancient clairvoyance and the modern age, the element that in Sophocles is received, as it were, out of the spiritual world in the age of ancient Greek heroic culture, has become in Corneille and Voltaire entirely an affair of the human soul itself. Whether Sophocles' Oedipus is more to one's liking than the form given to the story later on must be altogether disregarded; attention must be concentrated upon the trans formation that took place, bearing in mind that this transformation consists in the Oedipus story being reborn entirely out of the personal soul-nature of man.

I said that all antipathy must be put aside. This done, it can be demonstrated quite objectively that what in Sophocles is linked with the figure of Oedipus: is woven into a human-universal destiny: such as can be indicated only by words as momentous me those with which Goethe describes such a destiny: that it exalts man in that it crushes him.

The breath of magic emanating from Sophocles' Oedipus is due to the fact that in this drama the spiritual worlds which guide the destiny of peoples can be sensed: worlds which play into human destiny in a way that men are unable to fathom; therefore what the gods allow to befall may appear to be the most cruel injustice. One can conceive how every Greek was aware of the inscrutability of the fate in which the actual will of the gods was contained. The Greek felt: Yes: this is how the gods deal with man; their will remains inscrutable; fate can befall everyone as it befell Oedipus, but it remains inscrutable.

The breath of magic emanating from Sophocles' tragedy of Oedipus has been drawn right into the sphere of the personal by Corneille and Voltaire: quite as a matter of course. The transition is made in Corneille; in Voltaire the situation has become quite distinct. In Voltaire's Oedipus there is a figure who would be quite unthinkable in ancient drama. This is Philoctetus, the family friend who makes the conjugal alliance into a triangle. Jocaste was already acquainted with Philoctetus before her first marriage; the situation continues until she is widowed and then she marries Oedipus, her own son. These are personal relationships of soul which would be unthinkable in an ancient drama.

But we can go farther; we can try to understand what streamed through the souls of the great French poets, and then we shall find how the Greek element was absorbed. This is clearly expressed, not only in French poetry itself, but also in the theory of poetry. Do we not know how Lessing studied the way in which, as part of its theory, French poetry had taken over from Aristotle, the great Greek philosopher, the principle of the unity of Time, Place and Action, which is a feature in the works of Corneille, Racine and Voltaire?

French classic poetry can be understood only by those who perceive how the spirit of ancient Greece shines into it. And if we want to find concrete evidence in French culture of the indications given by spiritual science, we can do so by asking: Where does the essence of this French culture appear in its most brilliant form? Where is it unparalleled? Where does it reach its highest peak?

To answer this question rightly calls for great objectivity, and objectivity does not come easily to modern man, especially in our days. Nevertheless, for those who look at thinge objectively, the highest peak of French culture is to be found in the works of Molière. However strongly any culture may believe that what Molière achieved could be equalled among a people of a different character—leaving aside what has been achieved by Corneille and Racine, or also by more modern French culture—it would be foolish to assert that the particular perfection to be found in Molière has ever again been reached. In a different sphere there has been equal perfection, admittedly—perhaps even greater perfection—but not in this particular sphere. It would be a fallacy to maintain that Molière's essential quality.—born as it was from the Intellectual Soul or Mind Soul could be achieved again or even an echo of it. Molière represents the highest peak of the culture that is born out of the Intellectual Soul.

Molière's comedy is comedy per se, comedy in its very essence. It cannot be understood inwardly, spiritually, unless one realises that the Intellectual Soul is dominant in it, in a way in which this uniqueness could never be repeated. For everything that arises in the evolution of humanity emerges at a characteristic point once and once only. Just as in one life the age of 18 or 25 is never reached twice, it is equally impossible for mankind to produce twice over that which reached the degree of finish it did in the personality of Molière. All this is indicated and can be felt in this design [ Figure 4 ].

If at this point we make a break and refer to what was said in my lecture-course on the Folk Souls about the European Folk Souls, of the Fifth Post-Atlantean epoch, we can ask other questions of the same kind on the subject of Middle-European culture being the culture of the Ego.

If this Middle-European culture is the Ego culture, its relation to the other cultures of which we have spoken will be similar to the relation of the Ego to the Sentient Soul, the Intellectual Soul and the Consciousness Soul (Spiritual Soul).

Here, too, the outer reality must provide adequate confirmation of the indications given by spiritual science, If Italian culture represents what is received through the Sentient Soul, it must have a particular relationship to the Ego culture, to Middle-European culture: that is to say, Middle-European culture, which works essentially out of the Ego, would have to submerge itself in the Sentient Soul, to be fructified by it, in the way that happens with the Ego and the Sentient Soul in an individual man.

Let us think of the relationship of the Ego to the Sentient Soul in man. The Ego, in which the impulses of its own inmost being are contained, must dive down into the Sentient Soul, otherwise it remains unfructified by what can work upon it from the outer world through the forms of that world. Man must ever and again dive down into his sentient experiences, his feeling. A relationship must be in operation between the impulses of the life of feeling and the Ego. Accordingly we may expect that those who belong to the Ego culture of Middle Europe will try to establish a living link with the Sentient Soul culture in the South; they will seek for a channel of expansion, not only in political but also in higher, spiritual connections.

Look up the history of the Staufer dynasty, look up the events originating in the impulses of the Hohenstaufen and the Guelphs, or the accounts of the constant campaigns of the Saxon and Staufen rulers to Italy. Study all these relations of Middle Europe with Italy, and you have an exact picture of the life of the Sentient Soul in relation to the Ego.

But it can be further ecpected that the Ego-nature will produce forms of art in keeping with the character of man; from the Ego-nature, gnarled, knotty forms must be expected, forms shaped by the characteristics of the Ego. Such forms are to be found in the creations of Holbein and Dürer.

But they are found in Dürer only after he had gone to Italy and had been enriched by the culture born of the Sentient Soul. In more modern times we find the same phenomenon everywhere. From Goethe's journey to Italy, down to Cornelius and Overbeck, and on into our own time, we find evidence of the exchange between the Ego culture and the Sentient Soul culture.

What goes on between Middle Europe and Italy is an image of the relation between the Ego and the Sentient Soul of man. In every detail the outer course of evolution provides confirmation when we study it in the light of the indications resulting from spiritual-scientific research.

Now let us consider the relation between the Ego-nature in the soul and the Intellectual Soul. There too we must expect that what shows itself inwardly in human nature between the Ego and the Intellectual Soul will also make its appearance in external life. The nature of the relation between the Ego and the Sentient Soul is such that the Ego dives down uncritically, as it were into the Sentient Soul, lets itself be fructified by the Sentient Soul culture. Intellectual Soul culture quite naturally assumes a character that is more like an intellectual exchange, a “head” exchange, so to speak. The Intellectual Soul, or Mind Soul, is the middle member of the soul. It is at the same time that out of which the Ego arises and with which the Ego, for its own sake, must come to terms. (Try to form an idea of the nature of the Intellectual Soul from the book Theosophy.) We must expect an inner relationship to exist between Intellectual Soul culture and Ego culture.

One can think of no more graphic illustration of this than the relation to French culture of the philosopher Leibnitz, who was through and through a Middle European in his way of thinking. Leibnitz transposes into the idiom of Middle Europe everything he absorbs from outside—for example, from Giordano Bruno in whom the Italian Sentient Soul is so alive—and also the Monad theory. Leibnitz wrote in French; he formulated a great deal in his philosophy in accordance with the demands of the French language.

A process of exchange between the Ego culture and the Intellectual Soul culture is clearly to be seen when we follow the arguments in Lessing's Hamburgische Dramaturgie We see there the tension between what Lessing was striving for and the elements in French culture originating from Hellenism, from which he wants to free himself. Leseing engages in polemics, in intellectual controversy. This is an exact image of the exchange between the Ego and the Intellectual Soul. Lessing's “Hamburgische Dramaturgie” will be understood only when it is seen in this light.

And there is something else that is apt to be overlooked today. The shape which external conditions have assumed in Middle Europe is in many respects connected with, the rise of the Prussian State, And who would not connect the emergence of the Prussian State with Frederick the Great? Of him it must be said, however, that he clung with every fibre of his being to French culture, and took over a great deal from it into his own. He said that he regarded Voltaire ae a far greater personality than Homer. He considered German culture to be still semi-barbarous He who laid the foundation of modern Prussia strove to promote culture by means of the French element. Frederick the Great must be understood in the light of his relation to the French element, for this still lives in modern Prussia today, just as everything originating from the Intellectual Soul lives in the Ego.

All these things are important for an understanding of the Ego culture, just as an understanding of the Intellectual Soul is important for an understanding of the Ego—This is indicated in the book Theosophy.

It would be extremely desirable if today, particularly, heed were paid to the real foundations of world-events before judgments are passed, so that the remarkable way of judging which has come to a head at the present time could be recognised at least by a few people as unreliable, hollow and superficial, and full of the shallow cynicism of the newspapers and the journalists.

When we follow the course of evolution in the Fifth Post-Atlentean epoch we necessarily come to a further stage of elaboration in the forms of the columns. This advance can be expressed by indicating a powerful development of what comes from above as Intellectual Soul culture, accompanied by a certain shutting off from the Spiritual. This shutting off can be indicated by a dividing motif [ Figure 4c ]above the upper portions of the design.

The element that comes from above flows in with greater definition and bears the stamp of the Fifth Post-Atlantean epoch more distimetly; but it shuts itself off in a certain way. Here we come to the culture of the Consciousness Soul that is in preparation, and is to be especially characteristic of the Fifth Post-Atlantean epoch, Whereas Italian culture has taken over qualities and traits of the Egypto-Chaldean age, and French culture those of the Greco-Latin age, we now come to what expresses the essential character of the Fifth epoch of Post-Atlantean nature which stands entirely and solely upon its own base.

What must necessarily be the attitude of this culture to the outside world? The man who stands on his own base becomes a spectator, an onlooker, and as such he will be in a position to gaze deeply into the configuration of the beings of the world, into their organic structure and mechanism, in order to be able to re-create them from within outwards, so that they stand there as if created by Nature herself. We find there a culture of keen observation, penetration into the nature of beings and things which are then described from the standpoint of the spectator or onlooker. What does this culture produce when it is really great?

One need mention one name only—that of Shakespeare. He is great and unsurpassable as a spectator, an observer of the world. Shakespeare's creations would be unthinkable in any earlier or subeequent culture. When I was describing the characteristic English philosophers in the first edition of my book Welt- und Lebensanschauungen fifteen years ago, I did not take into consideration the aspect we have in mind today But I tried to find an expressive word, which I used in the second volume of the book “Riddlee of Philosophy”. I tried to find a telling word to describe the fundamental character of John Stuart Mill's philosophy. I chose the word “spectator”, a “spectator” of the world. All the indications given by spiritual science are indeed confirmed in outer reality.

The further questien regarding the exchange between the Ego and the Consciousness Soul discloses something very distinctive. We can expect that because the Consciousness Soul itself must tend and foster the Ego, what the Ego wishes to achieve comes to it in many ways from the Consciousness Soul. We can expect that much from the Consciousness Soul will flow into the Ego. But because the Ego wants to preserve and protect its independence, there is a great deal that it must ward off.

It is a wonderful experience to watch the process of how modern physics receives its stamp from Newton, but how, in Goethe, the Ego culture of Europe rebels against the Consciousness Soul culture. Read Goethe's “Theory of Colour”—it is wonderful to see how he rises up in opposition against Newton. It is wonderful to see how two discoverers of the infinitesimal calculus appear contemporaneously in Leibnitz and Newton, entirely in conformity with the relation between the Ego and the Consciousness Soul. The conflict of the Ego with the Consciousness Soul is mirrored here.

Much that is rooted in the nature of the Ego appears in a characteristic form in the spirituality of Jacob Boehme in the 16th century. A great deal is rooted in the Ego for which the Ego cannot immediately find the adequate words. The Consciousness Soul then finds the words, finds the elements that can be outwardly effective. Think of Goethe's efforts to understand the precess of natural development, in the sense of the Ego culture of Middle Europe. He discovers the principle of the natural development of living beings, from the simplest to the most complex. But the world does not understand the profound theory of this natural development because it is a product of the Ego culture. In Goethe's time the theory was not understood. Then a representative of the Consciousness Soul appears on the scene. Darwin produces, out of the Consciousness Soul, the same that Goethe had produced out of the Ego, and all the world understands it; even the Ego culture understands it! It is not possible to understand the drama of the evolution of mankind unless one is able to recognise the actual connections through the guiding lines given by spiritual science. The living forces in the evolution of humanity progrees from culture to culture as if they were based upon the eternal pillars of the primal laws of mankind.

We can divine the progress when in these designs we feel the Saturnian quality in the fundamental character of the Fifth Post-Atlantean culture, the Sun quality in the character of Italian and Spanish cultures, the Moon quality in that of French culture, and then a Mars quality in the culture that develops in the British Isles. It is not possible to understand what really ought to be understood—the symphony of the Post-Atlantean cultures as if in chorus—unless one can feel the distinctive characteristic of those Post-Atlantean cultures.

Those who live with lots of spiritual science should be able to feel the course of human evolution is one great whole. Consequently a dome is to arch overhead, rising over the forms which help us to feel how the evolution of mankind goes forward. The dome or cupola is to show how human beings, how peoples, work together; it is a picture, too, of the interworking of the soul-forces in man himself. It will work upon the soul when we go into our Building with inner, sensitive understanding. For in our Building the endeavor has been made to put aside everything of a personal nature, and in every line, in every form, to represent what is spiritual worlds reveal whether we try to express world-happenings in forms, in order that men may be able to feel the meaning and significance of these happenings.

It must be admitted that the world today is nowhere near the stage of transforming into feeling those things that have now again been spoken of. This requires an ever-increasing spread of spiritual science, a greater and greater understanding of a new style of building that is connected with the secrets of the World-Order, as has been attempted in our Building. Naturally this Building can be a people beginning only—it cannot be more than that. But among individuals there does live, more or less unconsciously, something that can provide the basis for an understanding of the symphony created by the several cultures existing in the Fifth Post-Atlantean epoch.

And so even in our own grievous times certain things may be welcomed with a feeling of elation, because in what is now coming to light we must watch for signs that give some promise of a peaceful culture—culture that will not be inactive, but full of vigour, and can be understood only when efforts are made to promote mutual understanding of the essential qualities of the various peoples.

Although any egoistic relationship to one culture or another falls far short of the ideal of spiritual science, it is nevertheless to be welcomed when some measure of insight is developed into the element that makes for a bond of union—for there lies the force that is truly creative.

And so by the side of much that is so deeply grievous, we may be mindful of other voices which gladden us because they show that the principles of spiritual science can be appreciated also by one who stands outside our circle. Those who are willing to listen to spiritual science are still only few. But I have said that in Herman Grimm there was a longing for spiritual science, and I can also give another example from our own unhappy times.

Among many voices I will quote only one—When some of the young men at a university in Middle Europe were to leave for the Front and some to remain at home, one of the tutors spoke words which cheer the heart and deserve to be known, because, although they were spoken without any knowledge of spiritual science, they reveal impulses of hope and longing for the mutual intercourse among the peoples that must one day result from spiritual science. This tutor said to his students:

“You will come to know that nothing attunes the cultivated soul to Beauty more deeply than efforts to perform heroic deeds. You will come to know that nothing calls to the soul and steels it more effectively for renewed efforts, and that there is no purer bond from soul to soul, than that which resides in the hallowed realm of Beauty. Then, even if, as the most terrible consequence of this war there should remain a hatred among peoples such as was never known before, amid all the enmity you will not forget to love the higher soul of the enemy. You are fighting a good fight for the truth. There is no need for you to engage in the calumny and slander emanating from confused minds. You will receive Shakeapeare as a guest among the good spirits of German culture and know that, in the sense in which he is ours, just so much of English thought belongs your reputedly to our own spiritual life. you will remind yourselves of the noble struggles of the French mind for aesthetic culture in its great refinement. You remember how in Tolstoy and Dostoyevsky, Russia in our time had both her Homer and her Shakespeare. Certainly, the Russian State meted out to these two greatest of her sons nothing but sorrow and sometimes inhuman persecution. What would they think of present developments! Yet through them speaks, unforgettable in its inwardness and sincerity, the eternal evangel of the people of God, of the realm where love is a sustaining, helping power. The meaning of the war lies in the peace to which it leads. As warriors, bear the lofty meeting of the coming peace within you, in order that the hatred among the peoples may ultimately end in a new kingdom of love. The deepest German quality is to love everything that bears the countenance of man, to love every kind of people as a portion of humanity, as a revelation of God. Realm of human love, filled with understanding, is the realm of the German spirit.”

These words were spoken by Eugen Kühnemann, any university tutor, on the 18 August 1914, to his students who were going to war. They are words to rejoice over in these momentous times when one experiences so much that is grievous. These words show great understanding of Shakespeare, who is ours to, in as much as through him English thought becomes part of our spiritual culture; they also show great understanding of French spiritual culture. They emphasize the significance of Tolstoy and Dostoyevsky for the new spiritual culture—and to emphasize that it is a great deal better than what is so often to be heard today from another side.

May such an attitude of mind and heart not disappear in our days! Perhaps our friends may be able to do something to point to the fact that such an attitude does the deed exist and furthermore that it is by no means rare in Middle Europe.

I will now close this lecture, and tomorrow at 7 o'clock I will speak about how the further stage of evolution—represented by Middle European culture and the Russian spirit—is indicated in the forms of the columns in our Building.

• 1. See Karmic Relationships, Vol IV, p. 128.

Continuing our study of the evolution of European Cultures in the Fifth Post-Atlantean epoch, we come to the culture for which I found the following design when I was working out the forms for the columns in our Building. It includes a drop-like motif above (a). The justification for this design can be felt when one studies the Middle-European culture of the Post-Atlantean epoch. I say Middle-European expressly. The reason for this will emerge from the subject-matter itself.

In this Middle-European culture the most varied national elements have for centuries been gathered together, making it impossible to speak of a “national” culture in the same sense as in the case of the cultures of the Southern and Western peoples of Europe.

In considering this Middle-European culture we must bear in mind at the outset that at the present time it is to all appearances composed of the people of two State-organisations. Remember, please, that in these lectures I am not speaking specifically of States but of cultures, and am saying here that the Middle-European culture is composed of two State-organisations—the German Empire and Austria.

In the case of Austria we see immediately that it would be absurd to speak of a national State, for in Austria there is an agglomeration of national cultures of the most varied kinds. This has been brought about by history, and Austrian life really consists in the interplay of these national cultures.

History is also responsible for the fact that the culture of the German Empire appears today in a certain unified form. Let us enquire, to begin with, only into the culture of the German population of Germany, and that of the German population of Austria, which has indeed many connections with that of Germany, geographically too, but on the other hand is geographically separated from it by great mountains. We will think first of the German element in a general sense.

If we ask: What is German?—this question cannot be asked in the same sense as the question: What is French? What is English? What is Italian? This cannot be done, because a member of the German people—if this expression can be used at all—never knows in any particular period under what definition he stands. What he would necessarily express if he were to say: “I am a German”, would quickly change, and in a comparatively short space of time; from age to age he would nave continually to be moairying the concept of “German nationality” (Deutschtum).

It is highly significant that when during Germany's period of distress Johann Gottlieb Fichte gave his famous “Addresses to the German Nation”, in two of these Addresses he struggled to find a concept to express “German-hood” (Deutschheit). It was a struggle to find a concept to express “German-hood”, just as one struggles to find concepts for something one confronts quite objectively—not subjectively, as a people usually confronts the concept of nationality.

There lies in the striving of an inhabitant of Middle Europe a trait that must be described as an “aspiration to become something”, and not as an “aspiration to be something”. To “become” something, not to “be” something—so that in Middle Europe a an who understands his own nature would have to rebel against being classified under some particular concept. He wants to become what he is. What he is to become hovers before him as an ideal. Therefore Goethe's “Faust” characterises the innermost aspiration of Middle Europe in these words:

“Whoe'er aspires unweariedly
Is not beyond redeeming.”

or again:

“He only earns his freedom and existence,
Who daily conquers them anew.”

It is being in a state of becoming, being that is never stationary, perpetually aspirins towerds something, beholding in the far distance what it desires to become.

And so it can be said that the work that is so essentially characteristic of the Middle-European nature was necessarily an outcome of human aspiration. This work is Goethe's “Faust”, which in spite of its many perfections has countless imperfections; it is not a work of art finished and complete in itself. “Faust” could be written again in a later epoch and written quite differently, but even so it would still be an expression of the nature of the man of Middle Europe.

If we ponder deeply upon this we shall get the picture of the upward striving Ego in Middle-European humanity serpent-entwined.

Serpent-entwined! This means, striving with the wisdom that is undetermined, the wisdom that is forming? in process of becoming never living in any certainty of complete fulfilment. Such is the situation of the man of Middle Europe.

And then there is Faust's ascent into the spiritual world at the end of Part II. Through Goethe, Faust becomes a Messenger of the gods—if I may put it so. There can be no more graphic expression of this than the “caduceus”—the staff of Mercury.

But in still another way this German element can best be described by saying that its members are “messengers”. The messenger of the Spirit was Mercury. It is only necessary to consider what has happened, and we shall find that to be a bearer of the message of culture lies in the deep foundations of the character of the German people.

By way of illustration I will quote particular instances connected with Austrian culture. In examining the remarkable, very complicated structure of the Austrian State, we can recognise three filaments of the population. There were once—they have now for the moot part disappeared or are in process of disappearing—the inhabitants of northern Hungary in the Zipser district, certain inhabitants of Siebenbürgen and certain inhabitants of the lower Theiss district, the Banat. Who were these peoples? Thy were peoples who in earlier centuries: migrated from regions more to the West and had brought with them from there their German thinking and their German language. One of these filaments settled south of the Carpathians in northern Hungary. In my youth they were called the “Zipser Germans”. Today they are largely merged in the Magyars, They have entirely surrendered their folk-nature, but it has not entirely disappeared: it lives on in many impulses that are present among the Magyars, but also in the achievements of the industrious people of northern Hungary. They have not clamoured for any especial recognition from ths surrounding people, for they have made no real effort to avoid surrendering their German element to the general nature of their environment.

The inhabitants of Siebenbürgen are Saxons; they are of Rhenish descent. I myself came across them in the year 1887 when I gave a lecture in Hermannstadt. Today they are on the point of being absorbed into the Magyars, like the Zipser Germans. The folk-substance lives on but no claim is made for stress to be laid upon their own national element.

In the southern Theiss region (Banat) the people are pure Swabians who have migraterd. The inhabitants of Württemberg are called Swabians. The seine happened to them as to the people of the Zipser region; they were messengers, in the truest sense, of the element that is now dissipating under the influence of a quite different language. And if one is more closely acquainted with the situation, one knows how necessary it was that these people should be merged in a common Middle-European element, in order that this element might itself thrive.

The same thing could be demonstrated in numbers of other cases. Anyone who wants really to understand and not merely to judge according to stereotyped concepts, will find that such things disclose an overcoming, a suppressing of the nationalistic principle. Everything in Middle Europe is adapted to lift man out of the nationalistic principle and to promote the expression of his own nature as man.

Hence it would be ridiculous to call Faust a German figure, although he could have originated nowhere except in Middle Europe, and in the truest sense the play is to be numbered among the works most truly representative of Middle-European culture.

If these matters are really to be understood, we must bear in mind the many intertwinings that take place in the evolutionary process and disclose themselves when we think, for example, of what was said yesterday: that in French culture there has been a revival of ancient Greek culture. In a certain respect, of course, ancient Greek culture also lives in German art, especially in German poetry and dramatic art. Does not the Greek Iphigenia live again in Goethe's Iphigenia? Did not Goethe write an “Achilleid”, or at any rate a part?

One must always go to the very root of these matters. The Greek element does indeed live in Middle-European culture; but the essential point is how ancient Greek culture, born as it was out of the Intellectual Soul, lives again in the elements of the Intellectual South in French culture. The Greek element does not live in the thinking of the individual Frenchman, in his individuality, but in the way in which the folk-soul takes expression. In the individual Frenchman, indeed, it lives perhaps less consciously than, for example, in its reappearance in Goethe or in Schiller, but it is at work in French culture.

The whole inner impulse of ancient Greek culture lights up in French culture. One can of course refer to some such thing as Voltaire wrote in a letter of the year 1768, where he says: “I have always believed, I still believe and shall continue to believe, that as far as tragedy and comedy are concerned, Athens is surpassed in every respect by Paris. I boldly declare that all Greek tragedies are like the works of tyros compared with the glorious scenes of Corneille and the consummate art of Racine's tragedies.” This sentiment can be compared with what Schiller once wrote to Goethe, saying, in effect: “As you were not born a Greek or an Italian, but in this northern clime, you have had to let an ideal Greece come to birth within you.”—But for all that, one must not suppose that Hellenism appeared in Middle Europe in a form as adequate as that in which it appeared in French culture. In Goethe's “Iphigenia” the yearning for Greek culture can be perceived. Goethe believed that he had acquired a new understanding for art after experiencing it in Italy, yet his “Iphigenia” has something about it that is quite different from anything in a Greek work of art. The essence of the matter is the artistic form in which things are presented. A very great deal could be said on this subject, but in these lectures I am trying merely to give indications. The revival of the Intellectual or Mind soul culture in the French people is shown in their way of living, their modus vivendi.

When we study Voltaire's assessment of the evolutionary history of humanity, he seems to us entirely Greek. Here and there, of course, people have indulged in fantastic notions about ancient Greek culture. but if one known the kind of thing a Greek might have said and then reads a little poem by Voltaire, one can feel what is meant by speaking of the revival of Greek culture. The gist of this little poem is as follows: Full of beauties and of errors, the old Homer has my profoundest respect; he, like every one of his heroes, is garrulous, overdone—yet for all that, sublime.

A Greek, of course, could never have expressed himself about Homer in this way, but about other things, certainly. It is quite typically Greek.

Looking for an expression to use instead of the word “nationality” in the case of Middle-European culture, we find, even from geographical considerations, the words: “Striving after individuality”. And within this striving after individuality we include not the German only, for Middle Europe must be taken to embrace a number of other peoples as well, in all of whom this striving is present in a most marked degree. This striving after individuality is to be found in the Czechs, the Ruthenians, the Slovaks, the Magyars, in spite of all their external differences; and finally it is to be found at the other pole of German culture, in the Poles. In them, the element of individuality is developed to the extreme. Hence the intensely individualistic world-outlook of really great Poles: Tovianski, Slovacki, Mickiewitz. Hence, too, the very essence of Polish philosophy, which emanates entirely from the individual as such. (Whether this philosophy is attractive or the reverse, according to taste, is not the point at all; these things must be looked at objectively.) As for the Polish attitude to religion, the fact that in a given case the one concerned happens to be a Pole can always be ignored. And it is the same in this whole agglomeration of peoples which constitutes Middle European culture; one trait is common to them all a striving after individuality.

Polish Meseianism is only the other pole of this striving; it takes the form more of a philosophical ideal, but it is the same in essence as what comes to expreesion in Goethe's “Faust” as the character of the striving personality, of the single individual.

The following design expresses what is at work in Middle Europe. What comes from above is indicated in this upper, twofold motif; it must be two-fold, because on the one side there is the idealism that is present in Middle Europe and on the other, the sense for the practical. The important thing in the design is not the relative size of the forms but the fact that the one (a) is at the side of the motif and the other (b) arches above the motif. The latter (b) represents what expresses itself in the peculiar, not very strong, kind of tie which the population of Middle Europe has with the soil, in one case more, in another case less marked.

The form at (a) indicates the trait that expresses itself in the thought element of Middle Europe, with its inclination towards philosophical speculation. There was a suggestion of these two motifs, although what they really indicate was but little understood, in a characterisation of the Germans once in in a foreign nation, to this effect: The Germans can till the soil and they can sail in the clouds—(this did not refer to ballooning, but to flights of mind)—but they will never be able to navigate the seas.

This is a strange utterance when one thinks of the German Hanseatic League, but it was actually made. It does, after all, point to two capacities with which the spiritual worlds have endowed the Germans—and these are at the same time Middle-European capacities.

The Ego is that principle in the human soul which has first and foremost to come to terms with itself; consequently there will be a seething and a swirling in this Ego-element. Whatever foreign wars the Germans have waged and will wage, the really characteristic wars are those which Germans have waged against Germans, in order to bring about inner clarification. If one follows the course of the wars fought out inside Germany, one has a faithful picture of what goes on within the enclosed Ego of man himself.

I have pointed out—the thought is to be found in many of my lectures—that the Ego could never have become conscious of itself if it were not kindled anew every morning by the outer world. The Ego wakens into consciousness through being kindled by the outer world; if this did not happen the Ego would be there, certainly, but it would never become a centre of consciousness. Every guiding-line given by Spiritual Science concerning the being of man is confirmed by the external facts.

The configuration assumed by the Middle-European States does not really originate from these States themselves but has been determined from outside. I will speak of Austria first. When I was young, numbers of people there were constantly saying that this agglomeration of peoples which constituted Austria must soon dissolve, that it was ready for dissolution. Those who understood something about world-evolution did not hold this view, because they knew that Austria was not held together from within but from outside. This can be demonstrated in all details by history.

If one were to speak quite objectively of the latest configuration of Middle Europe, of the German Empire; one would have to say: The German has always talked of the ideal of the one united German Empire. But perhaps it would still not be there if the French had not declared war in 1870 and so forced on apace the founding of the German Reich. It was really consolidated frcm outside rather in the way the Ego is kindled each morning by the outside world. Otherwise it might still be a goal to be striven for, an ideal existing, perhaps, only in the minds of the people.

All these things must be weighed quite objectively, particularly by those who adhere to the principles of Spiritual Science. Only so can one survey, calmly and dispassionately, what is taking place in the fifth Post-Atlantean epoch of culture. I can give guiding-lines only, for the subject could obviously not be exhausted in fifty lectures. And every lecture would present further proof of the truth of what can only very briefly be indicated here.

So we may say that the spiritual scientist can acquire a picture of European culture in which he perceives the interworking of Sentient Soul, Intellectual Soul or Mind Soul, Consciousness Soul and Ego. And through this knowledge a lofty ideal can stand before us that of being able to play our part in bringing it about that in place of the present chaos, harmony shall arise in the individual human soul.

This is possible, but only possible if every single individual presses on toward objectivity. The individual man stands at a higher level than the nation. in our time these things are obscured in many ways. It is necessary to say these things, once at any rate. It is my spiritual duty to say them, and only because it is my spiritual duty do I say them at the present time.

We are living in an age when perception of what constitutes the harmony between the soul-members represented by the several peoples, and also of everything that is taking place around us, seems to be more clouded than ever before. In so saying I do not lay the main stress upon what is happening on the battlefields—for that must be judged in the light of other necessities—but upon the judgments now current among the peoples. They all seem to be at utter variance with what ought to be.

I have already spoken here about a symptomatic experience I have had in connection with my last book (“Die Rätsel der Philosopnie”). I had written up to page 206, and then the war broke out. What follows after this point—the brief outline of Anthroposophy—was written actually during the war. I tried to give an objective picture of the philosophy

of Boutroux and of Bergson. I do not believe that anyone could fail to realise the complete objectivity of what I said, even though only a brief space could ba allotted to the subject. It was necessary to call attention to the fact that Bergeon's philosophy is not original and in a certain way is lightly formulated. From pages 199-204, the views of Boutroux and Bergson were set forth without comment, and then on page 204, I said: “Out of easily formulated, easily attainable thoughts, Bergson presents an idea of evolution which, as the outcome of very profound thinking, W. H. Preuss had already presented in his book “Geist und Stoff” (“Spirit and Matter”) in 1882. Then, on pages 205-69 the philosophy of the lonely thinker Preuss is dealt with. It would naturally have been Bergeon's duty to make himself conversant with the ideas of Preuse. I say expressly, it would have been his duty to know something about the philosophy of Preues, for a philosopher ought to be aware of the ideas of his contemporaries if he proposes to write. Please bear in mind that I said, it would have been his duty to know this philosophy—for I may very possibly be accused of having said that Bergson intentionally kept silent about Preuss. I said no such thing and the passage quoted above stands there for all the world to see.

Now suppose that everything the different peoples have said about each other during these last weeks had not been said—in that case the above reference to Bergson would have been considered an objective statement. But now it will in all probability not be so regarded. Naturally, I shall not at any other time be able to speak differently about this matter. Those who stand on the ground of Spiritual Seience must remain objective. At the present time, things that ought to be clearly perceived are clouded over; but when a sufficiently large number of people have taken Spiritual Science to their hearts and are really steeped in it there will emerge out of this obscurity the ideal arising from the truths of Spiritual Science.

What we know of these truths—it is only a question of being steeped in them deeply enough—enables us to develop the right feeling for them. Let those who want to feel the true relationship between the different cultures, read what is contained in the forms of our columns and architraves, let them contemplate the curves and forme, and they will understand the spiritual relationships between the several nations. Not a single motif is accidental. When you look at a motif, when you see how it passes over from the third pillar to the fifth, you have there an expression of the relationship between the peoples corresponding to the two columns. From these architraves you can envisage the inner configuration of the soul-life of the peoples.

You enter the Building by the West door, and as you move towards the East you can feel what makes man truly man, in that he gathers into his soul what is good and admirable in each of the particular cultures—and then, as we hope, it will all sound together in harmony in the second, smaller part of the Building under the small cupola. Those who open their hearts to the Building will find the way out of tie prevailing obscurity; those who do not, will be swept along in it.

As we go towards the East, this next motif links on to the last (see pages 1 and 11). It is evident that this new form has arisen out of the foregoing Staff of Mercury! whereas in the latter the serpent-motif spreads horjzonally into the world, here the main motif points upwards and forks downwards, receiving what comes from above like a blossum opening downwards.

In this, which is the Jupiter motif as the former was the Mercury motif, the East of Europe is expressed. With its tapering slenderness this motif suggests folded hands stretching upwards to what comes from above, and gliding by their side that with which earthly man has to connect himself as it comes down from above like a flower.

It is not at all easy for the European to understand this motif and what lies behind it, because it is connected much more with the future than with the present. On account of the character of modern language it is extremely difficult to find words to characterise what lies behind this motif. For once spoken, the words would immediately have to signify something different, if they were to be really expressive. One cannot speak of the Russian element in the same way as one can speak of the English, French and Italian elements. We have already seen that we cannot speak of a “national” element in the case of Middle-European culture in the same sense as in the case of the cultures of Western Europe; still less can we speak of the Russian element in this sense. For does Russia present a picture similar to that presented by the English, French or Italian peoples? Most, certainly it does not! There is something in the Russian nature that is like a transformation of Western Europe, but a transformation into something totally different.

In the West of Europe we see national cultures whose fundamental character can be discerned by deepening our knowledge of the culture actually existing there. In the German nature we find a state of incompleteness, a striving after something that is not present, but is there as an ideal only. But this striving after the ideal lives in the blood, in the astral body and the etheric body of the man of Middle Europe. Looking over to the East we see a magnificently finished philosophy of religion, a culture that is eminently a religious culture. But can it be called “Russian”? It would be absurd to call it Russian, even though the Russians themselves do so, for it is the culture that came over to them from ancient Byzantium; it is a continuation of what originated there.

Naturally, what lives in the Sentient Soul comes from the Sentient Soul; what lives in the Intellectual Soul comes from the Intellectual Soul; what lives in the Consciousness Soul comes from the Consciousness Soul; and what lives in the Ego, even though it is in flow, in a perpetual state of becoming, proceeds from the Ego. But what comes from the Spirit Self is something that descends out of the Spirit into the Sentient Soul, the Intellectual Soul and the Consciousness Soul.

The Spirit Self comes down from above towards Sentient Soul, Intellectual Soul, Consciousness Soul and Ego. This Spirit Self must announce itself through the fact that something foreign hovers down, as it were, upon the national culture. So we see that, fundamentally, everything it has hitherto experienced as its culture is foreign to tbe Russian soul, and has been foreign over since the time when the Greco-Byzantine culture was received, up to the external institutions that were imported from outside by Peter the Great. So we see bow through the Spirit Self there daecends the force which strives down to the soul-forces; but the Spirit Self will be able to give effect to its true force, its true character, only in the future. The Russian soul has, however, to make preparation for the reception of the Spirit Self.

Quite obviously what has reached the Russian soul from foreign elements is not the Spirit Self that will come in the future. But just as the Byzantine influence, Eastern Christianity, Western culture, have descended upon Russian souls, so, one day, the Spirit Self will descend. At the present time there is nothing more than preparation for it, nothing more than an inclination towards receiving it.

Examples can be given to illustrate everything for which Spiritual Science gives guiding-lines. Here is an example lying close at hand.—I have often spoken of the greatness of the philosopher Solovieff. His greatness was first revealed to me through spiritual observation, for I know that he is even greater, has effected even greater things, since his death in 1900 than he had effected before his death.

But let us consider the facts; you can convince yourselves from Solovieff's own writings. Many of them have been translated. There are the translations by Nina Hoffmann, by Keuchel, and now the excellent translation by Frau von Vacano, “Die geistigen Grundlagen des Lebens”.

If a man of Middle Europe steeps himself in the works of Solovieff, he can have a remarkable experience—especially since the latest translation has become available. It is extraordinarily interesting. One who is really conversant with Western and Middle-European philosophy will ask himself at first: Is there anything new in Solovieff? If we compare Solovieff with Western philosophy, we shall find not a single new thought as far as the actual text is concerned; there is nothing, absolutely nothing, not even in a turn of phrase, that could not equally well have been written in the West. And yet there is something altogether different.

But if you search for this difference in the philosophy itself, in what has been written, reading it as you read an ordinary book, you will not discover what is different. For what is different is something that is not contained in the sentences themselves. It is not in them, and yet it is there. What is contained within and behind the sentences will eventually be found by the sensitive soul, despite the conviction, after reading the book, that it contains nothing that differs from West European philosophy. What is contained in Solovieff's works is a certain nuance of feeling which may seem to the man of Middle Europe like a sultry atmosphere. Sometimes one feels as though one were in an oven, particularly when great and far-reaching questions are involved. If you follow a sentence closely, you will discover that nothing of exactly the same kind emerges as it does in the case of a West European philosopher. There is a certain tone of feeling which resounds as if it were unending expectant; this tone of feeling has a mystical character; certainly, it is still a sultry mysticism which may even contain an element of danger for the man of Western Europe if he allows himself to be affected by it.

But if one knows what lies in the substrata of the human soul—and it is necessary to know this—and really gets to the root of this element of sultriness, then it is certainly not dangerous. I believe that unless anyone has knowledge of the undertones of the life of soul, the essence of the difference in Solovieff's works will escape him and he will simply be convinced that he is reading a philosopher belonging to Western Europe. It is a very strange phenomenon, a phenomenon which clearly shows that what must come out of the East has not yet been uttered, above all has not yet been put into words.

We can recognise the characteristic traits of the European cultures from another angle by considering, for example, the following.—Something of the very essence of French culture, the Intellectual Soul culture, is contained in a certain saying of Voltaire. It will certainly be discerned by anyone who is able to perceive realities from symptoms. The saying, “If God did not exist, he would have to be invented”, is rightly attributed to Voltaire. This presupposes—otherwise the utterance would have no sense that God would have to be believed in; for he would hardly be invented for amusement.

Such a saying could be formulated only by a mind working entirely out of the Intellectual Soul, the Mind Soul, and having confidence in what arises from it—even in the matter of invention; for this belongs to the sphere of the Intellectual Soul.

Now let us take a Russian: Bakunin. He formulated the saying differently—and that is very remarkable. He says, “If God existed, he would have to be abolished.” He discovers that he cannot tolerate the existence of God if he is to claim validity for his own soul.—And another saying of Bakunin is very characteristic: “God is—and man is a slave”—the one alternative. The other is: “Man is free—therefore there is no God.” He cannot conceive a way out of the circle and decides to choose between the two alternatives. He chooses the second: “Man is free—therefore there is no God.”

This is a picture of the contrast between culture in Western and in Eastern Europe. West-European culture can still reconcile the idea of the free man with the idea of God. But in East-European culture there may be no God who coerces me, otherwise I am not free, I am a slave.

One feels the whole cleft between Sentient Soul, Intellectual Soul, Consciousness Soul and Ego on the one side and the Spirit Self, which is present now, as it were, in counterpart, and is only preparing, its true being. We feel the whole cleft in what confronts us from the East, and we feel the lack of kinship of the East with the West when we perceive what effect representative personalities of the East make upon West-European culture. Who in the West, if he is not already a student of East-European culture, could understand what the Devil says to Ivan Karamazov? Who could reallyunderstand what Gorki calls “gruesome, yet veritable truth”?—“Yes, well, what is the truth? Man is the truth! What does it mean—Man? You are not it, nor am I it, and they are not it.—No! But you, I, they, old Luke, Napoleon, Mahomet all of us together are it! That is something quite tremendous! That is something wherein all beginnings are lodged, and all endings.—All in man, all for man. Man alone exists; all else is the work of his hands and of his brain. Man! Simply colossal! The very sound is exalted! MM—A—N! One should respect man! Not take pity on him—not degrade him by pitying him—but respect him!”

And how does one who has been an actor speak about his relationship to the public? And how the convict?—“I have always despised those people who are too much concerned with satiety. Man himself is the main thing! Man stands at a higher level than the satisfied stomach!”

It will be very difficult for the West to understand such things, for they give expression to the mystical suffering of the East; they let the cleft be felt between what is yet to come in the East and what lives in the West and in Middle Europe.

This immense cleft indicates to us that what is there in the East today is not the real East at all. I should have a great deal to say on the subject but can only indicate these things. This East is something of which the East itself still knows little, something concerning which it only dimly senses what it will become in the future

We understand well that it must be difficult for this East of the future to find, the bridge leading to its own true nature, to find itself, for we are confronted by no less a phenomenon than that the East still lives in feeling, still in something that is unutterable; it is seeking for a form of utterance. It seeks it in the East, seeks it in the West. The East was greatly enriched by what the Byzantine element brought to it but when the East gives expression to this, it no longer belongs to the East's own being; it is foreign to the East's own being.

But one thing leads above all clefts, namely, what we know as the true Science of the Spirit. And if what is now going on in West and Middle Europe can show us that without Spiritual Science the further course of evolution must lead ad absurdum, the East shows us that progress is utterly impossible unless understanding is reached through Spiritual Science.

Through Spiritual Science men will find and understand one another—in such a way that not only will their theoretical problems be answered, but the sufferings of culture will also be healed.

Even more than elsewhere there will be opportunity for the East to feel the events of today as a hard testing. For what must needs be felt there in particular strength will be in complete opposition to every impulse, in the East that willed this war. And still more than in the West and still more than in Central Europe does it hold good for the East, that self-identification with the active motives of this war is a denial of its own true being. Everything in the East that has led to this war will have to disappear if the sun of salvation is to rise over the East.

Our Building should become part of our very hearts, my dear friends, for it expresses everything that I try to say about it in sketchy words. More deeply than by any words you can understand what I have now said when you have a right feeling for the Building, when you feel that everything is contained there—in every curve, in every motif.

Our Building should be something that can be called “A Dome of Mutual Understanding among European Humanity”, So it is perhaps in a particular sense—I must say this, for it is my duty to say it—also a contribution towards what is to be found in the preface to my book “Theosophy”, namely, that Spiritual Science is something that our age rejects in the intellect and on the other side longs for in the soul, and of which it is in dire need.

When we contemplate the events of today we can say that Anthroposophy is something from which European humanity in the present epoch is as remote as it ought to be near, is something that it should long for with every fibre of its being. For if Spiritual Science penetrates our hearts in a way that could at the moment only be indicated in interpreting the forms of the columns and architraves, then the souls of European humanity will stand in the right relationship to each other.

If Anthroposophy—and for our immediate present this is still more important—if Anthroposophy fulfils its task in the human soul in having a clarifying effect in the thoughts of men, bringing real clarity into them, permeating and rectifying them, then a very great deal will have been achieved for the immediate future. For as well as the fact that men's hearts are not rightly related to each other in our materialistic age, the karma of which we are experiencing, men's thought, too have gone astray. Men do not want to understand each other; but not only that; they have perhaps never lied about each other to such a colossal extent as they do in our time! That is still worse than what is happening out there on the battlefields, because its effect lasts longer and because it works up even into the spiritual worlds. But at bottom it is sheer slovenliness of thought that has brought us to the pass we have already reached. Therefore Anthroposophy is today the most urgent of all necessities in the evolution of humanity!

Already one can ask the question: Are people today still capable of thinking? And further: Do not people feel that they must first have knowledge of the actual facts about which they want to think and speak?

I raise these two questions today because, as I have said, it is my duty to do so. What is at work in Middle Europe was called “Bernhardism” by the American ex-President Roosevelt. I will not discuss what the ex-President has said but will point to something that is not usually noticed. Fundamentally, this book which I have in my hand and is the one alluded to by Roosevelt, is a very serious book: “Germany and the Next War”, by Friedrich Bernhardi, written in 1912. The author was one who knew a great deal about this impending war from an external, exoteric, point of view, and for this reason the book is extraordinarily instructive. But what kind of thinking do we find in a book that in its own way is honest and sincere? Here is a chapter entitled: “The Right to make War”. Naturally, if one talks of a right to make a war, one must take a standpoint determined by a community of people, not by individuals; in other words, one speaks out of the consciousness of the Luciferic and Ahrimanic spirits. Here is a passage which from the standpoint of the author is well meant, full of good intention. The attempt is made to explain that as long as there are separate nations, these nations have a right to make war on each other. The passage continues: “The individual can perform no nobler moral action than to sacrifice his own existence to the cause which he serves, or even to the conception of the value of ideals to personal morality... Similarly, nations and States can achieve no loftier consummation than to stake their whole power on upholding their independence, their honour, and their reputation.”

The first part of the passage is correct, but the thought behind it as a whole is absurd; States cannot adopt a selfless standpoint, because with them totally different conditions prevail. We must be clear in our minds about this. Imagine yourselves in the shoes of an Austrian statesman after the events which culminated in the assassination of a Serb at Serajevo.—Can one speak there in the sense of the foregoing passage? Most certainly not! A statesman is obliged to act as the egoism of the State demands. And so quite correct utterances are made today while the thought behind them is utterly false. This is only one example. The spiritual-scientific attitude here will he illuminating in the truest sense of the word, if only there are a sufficient number of people to represent it. These are not trivial matters; they are matters of vast significance. For they have all combined into what has now led to this terrible outbreak of war. I say this, becausel I know it. I say it because at the same time I can truly say—so far as anything of this nature can be said in the sense in which an occultist means it—that I have suffered and am still suffering enough from the events of these last weeks. I have gone through enough shattering experiences beginning with the Serajevo assassination and including much else. Never before have I myself seen anything as astounding, nor have I heard from occultists of anything as astounding, as what followed upon the assassination at Serajevo. A soul was there lifted into the spiritual worlds who produced an effect entirely differerst from that produced by any other soul; this soul became, as it were, a cosmic soul, forming a cosmic centre of force around which all the prevailing elements of fear gathered, All the existing elements of fear gravitated towards this soul—and lo! in the spiritual world exactly the opposite effect was produced than had been produced in the physical world. In the physical world, fear held back the war; in the spiritual world it was an element that hastened on the war, hastened it rapidly. To have such experiences for the first time is one of the most shattering moments that can occur in occult observation. If at some time or other, what has happened in the last eight or ten weeks is objectively surveyed, it will be possible, even by following the outer events, to recognise something that is like a mirror-image of what was happening in the spiritual.

It is the task of Anthroposophy, today more than ever, to learn objectivity from the evente of the time—true objectivity, which is so remote from the attitude prevailing today. I tried to bring out this point by asking two questions: “Are people today still capable of thinking?” and “Do people try, do they accustom themselves to look for the real facts when they want to think or speak?” Do they really do this?

Wherever we look—when men and whole nations are lying about each other on such a colossal scale—everywhere it is evident that the feeling of duty to put facts to the test, to go into the real facts, is lacking, even in high places.

This duty to test facts must be deeply engraved in the hearts of anthroposophists. We must learn to realise that among people who are to be taken. seriously, things must no longer happen as they are happening today, so universally.

As anthroposophists we must realise that these things need to be kept firmly in minds for otherwise we shall not emerge from this chaos in cultural life. With strict earnestness we must adhere to our basic principle: “Wisdom is only in the Truth”. Our whole Building is an interpretation of this principle. We must learn to read our Building—that is the important thing. When it is rightly read, an attitude of earnestness, of conscientiousness, of longing for truth, will grow in our hearts in connection with cultural and spiritaal life.

If our friends permeate themselves with the conviction that the truth rests upon the foundation of the facts of evolution, then their activities will bring blessing everywhere, no matter to which nation they belong. But if they themselves adopt a one-sidedly nationalistic standpoint, they will certainly not be able to do what is right in the anthroposophical sense.

The reason why Blavatsky's Theosophy went astray was that from the outset the interests of one portion of humanity—not the English, but the Indian—were placed above the interests of mankind as a whole. And it is true in the deepest sense that only that leads to genuine occult truth which at all times places the interests of humanity as a whole above those of a portion of humanity—but does so earnestly, with the most earnest, deepest feelings. Occult truth is clouded over the very moment the interests of one part of humanity are made to override the interests of the whole. Difficult as this may be at a time like our own, nevertheless it must be striven for by those who in the true sense of the word call themselves anthroposophists.

In the last two lectures an endeavour was made to interpret the sequence of columns in the Buildings to give one of the many possible interpretations to which the Building naturally lends itself.

It is possible for one who enters the Building from the West to feel, as it were, in the very heart of humanity, because the forces working in the various cultural communities are given expression in the forms of the capitals, and the mutual relationships of the single European cultures in the architraves.

It may have occurred to some of you that mention has not been made of all the European peoples. It is of course, impossible on every occasion to present a subject in all its aspects, for it is a matter of indicating the principles involved, not of making dogmatic statements.

In the single motifs of the capitals, artistic expression has been given to the impulses at work in the souls belonging to European civilisations—in the inhabitants of the Italian peninsula, or rather the South-westerly peninsulas, of Western Europe, Middle Europe and Eastern Europe.

The subject was presented as it was because the character of these civilisations enables them to be expressed by a single design, a single motif. The design and the cultural community concerned are therefore related.

From West to East, the second pillar is an expression of the civilisation of the peninsulas in the South-West of Europe; the third pillar of that of France; the fourth of that of the British people, and so on.

But there are also other European peoples. I cannot deal with all of them but will again speak of the underlying principles. It may be said that the cultures already referred to are the simpler cultures, however strange that may seem; they are simpler at any rate as far as the occultist is concerned. For the occultist, the Danish, Swedish and Norwegian cultures, for example, are much more complicated than those already mentioned, for many things which to the observer on the physical plane may seem the simpler, are for the occultist the more complicated. Thus if we are speaking of Danish culture, the queation may arise: How should we approach the designs in this case?

In entering from the West we should have to look, first, at the capital of the third column, and then also at that of the fifth, seeing the third column, as it were, through the fifth.

Obviously there is something more complicated here, for two capitals have to be taken into consideration.

Now take Sweden. There we should have to view the capital of the second column from the West through the capital of the fifth column.

And now, Norway. We should have to take the capital of the fourth column from the West and look at it through that of the fifth.

It would be a matter of superimposing these capitals, and then we should have the same expression of feeling in connection with the cultures of Denmark, Sweden and Norway as we have for the Italian-Spanish, the French, the British and the Middle-European cultures when we look at the corresponding capitals.

Really, everything is contained in these motifs of the capitals. Now that the principle has been explained, it might be very interesting to study for example, how it applies to the civilisations of Holland, Switzerland, and so forth. But I leave that to your own occult studies.

So you see, when we speak of our Building we are truly not speaking of anything arbitrary, of anything whose forms and other artistic content have arisen in such a way that one can remain stationary at these forms and think of them as one is obliged to think of the forms of painting motifs produced at the present time. As I have already said, everything we have absorbed of Spiritual Science in the course of the years, and a great deal more besides, is expressed in this Building—but the appeal is to perceptive feeling, not to theoretical, intellectual cogitation. It would therefore be possible to speak about this Building without ever finishing. But again I leave it to your own hearts to elaborate the indications I have given you. For the aim of the Building is to bring hearts and souls into movement when, in contemplating the forms and their relationships, people do not interpret them intellectually or symbolically but allow the heart and mind and soul to speak when they are inside and outside the Building.

What I now have to say can be explained by taking a particular motif of four columns embraced above by a cupola or dome. To regard any such motif as completely self-contained would be to take too constricted a view. Nothing in the world is completely self-contained—not a blossom, not an animal, not a human being. Neither, then, is a motif such as this, for part of its very essence is that forces are present entirely apart from the geometrical aspects. There are four columns embraced shows by a dome. But this geometrical aspect is only part of the whole. What belongs to the motif in addition is a set of forces which inhere in the whole structure of the universe and enable the columns to support the dome. The dome rests on the columns, the columns stand on the earth; the force of gravity comes into play.

If we really feel this motif, we do not feel the geometrical aspect only, but also the other, which I have often called the dynamic element, or element of force—the insertion into the configuration of forces of the whole universe, more particularly of the earth.

This motif, then, has the peculiarity 0f being symmetrical at every point in its circumference. It is symmetrical in every direction of space, as far at least as the dome is concerned. So we can say: On the body of the earth there is a motif which stretches heavenwards and at its periphery is symmetrical.

The important thing is to have an artistic feeling for such a motif. If we try to feel this motif in the right way—it is of course a matter of really sinking oneself in the character of the forms themselves—we shall come to realise: This motif, which rises upwards from the earth and in its upper part at least is symmetrical in every direction, seems to impel us to go down into ourselves, to experience our feeling inwardly.

If you want to make progress in occultism it is essential to abandon the one-sidedness of an abstract, intellectual approach, and to adopt an approach which originates in actual experience. For this reason many things must be expressed, not in terms of the intellect, but in terms of experience.

It is particularly difficult for the man of the present day to accept forms of experience in the same way that he accepts forms of the intellect. I will tell you what I mean by a form of experience. I can do no more than indicate, but everyone can understand it who makes the effort to go through it as an actual experience of his own. How can one develop a feeling for such a motif and what it expresses? This can be done in the following way.—In the morning, on getting out of bed to set about the day's work, you can say to yourself consciously: “I have now passed from the lying position into the position of standing or walking.”

That is an actual experience—one of which few people make themselves conscious, but it is an experience to pass from the lying position into that of standing and walking. When one is lying down, the force of gravity works upon one as it does upon a sack, let us say a sack of flour. The force of gravity also works in a deeper sense, for when you are lying down you always lie on some area of the body and this area presses upon what is underneath. So pressure is always being exercised upon the area of the body on which you are lying. True, you are not aware of this pressure in the ordinary way, but for all that, it is there; it is connected with your sentient experience of the force of gravity and it works into your astral body.

When a man begins to be conscious of this pressure-experience, he becomes aware at the same time of the elemental spirits of the earth. It is here that he is very well able to be aware of them, for when he is standing or walking the only area of pressure is that of the soles of the feet.

When you stand up after having been lying down, you leave the sphere of the pressure; you assert yourself against the force of gravity; you insert the axis of your own body into the field of gravity, no longer resigning yourself to it like a sack of flour; you enter actively into the sphere of gravity. That is an actual experience different in character from some thought-experience of the brain which thinks in abstractions.

In the lectures I gave on “Occult Reading and Hearing” I spoke of three brains. As soon as a man begins to experience things with his middle brain, he experiences them in a living way; feeling begins to be a middle brain experience.

Very well, then, when we have made ourselves conscious of the experience of standing up, we have the experience of Feeling the World, and we know for the first time what feeling really is. This can be achieved in many other ways too, but we do really begin to realise what feeling is when we make the act of standing up a conscious experience.

If it is brought to consciousness in the real sense this experience will lead us to understand the form here (see diagram). We say to ourselves: This form differs from what I myself am, in that it cannot stand up but must remain always in the lying position. To achieve my experience it would have to turn through 90° into the vertical plane. This dome stretches heavenwards. When man standing upright, has a feeling of the world, this upward stretching impulse works especially through his hands. And if he were to lie down and were able to feel what is above him, he would feel with his hands something of the nature of a cupola arching over him. What comes to expression in this architectural motif is contained in the sphere of feeling.

If man were able to lie bound to the earth, reaching out spiritually into the universe with his hands, he would feel the spiritual world above him as though he were inside a great dome, symmetrical in every direction.

In a certain respect the Greeks had a similar experience. Greek culture, which sprang primarily from the Intellectual Soul, was, in one of it aspects, a, culture born from a peaceful union between man and the earth; while peacefully united with the earth, man felt the heavens above him.—There may appear to be a contradiction here, but when we are, finding our way into occultism such apparent contradictions must be faced and understood.

We in our age have not the impulses that were at work in the inner life of the Greeks, nor have we within us what is now for the first time beginning in the evolution of humanity and is to come to expression in our Building.

A man who rises out of repose must not merely make the transition into the standing position, but he must also begin to move, to go forward. As well as the sphere of feeling he must come to know the sphere of will. This can be expressed in art only by transforming what was symmetrical on all sides (the dome) into something that is symmetrical about a single axis only. We can therefore say that when the dome-motif is transformed into a motif that has only one axis of symmetry, we have expressed in the Building not only what is experienced by the man who passes from repose into the sphere of feeling, but also by the man who pasees from feeling into willing, into progression, going forwards. The motif of will is a motif that leads onward. Hence the experience of one who is looking at the architraves and capitals must also lead him onwards; it must be an experience of progression. This was indicated in the two foregoing lectures.

Now the will is the sphere in man's being that is connected with subconscious experiences. It is that element which, in the case of man as he is at present, is for the most part directed by the gods. Naturally, then, by Lucifer and Ahriman as well. Hence there can also be evil will. Nevertheless, the will is borne onwards by the gods, and only in the rarest of cases is man able to know what goes on in his will. What a man expresses quite involuntarily when he is speaking belongs to what is conditioned in his will- nature and to which his will gives rise. One may even say that this is as it should be. It is not at all necessary, to begin with, for man to be fully conscious when he gives himself up to the primal, fundamental nature of his will, when he allows the impulses of the gods to be active in his will. The impulses of the will are the most fundamental of all. Hence the human being is able in his successive incarnations to progress from nation to nation. This is expressed in our Building through the progression in the series of columns.

Man is able to progress from nation to nation, from people to people with every incarnation he is born into a different people. He experiences what proceeds from the sphere of his will as coming in a certain sense from the gods. Neither, to begin with, can he change very much that belongs to this sphere of the will. A man who is born in some particular place on the earth cannot alter the fact that he is born at some place represented in one or another of the forms of the columns. For he stands at this particular place in the evolutionary process through the subconscious foundations of his life of will.

The way in which the members of the different nations think about each other, the way in which they mutually—let us say—esteem each other, is basically connected with what rises up like smoke out of the substrata of the sphere of will; it springs from nothing else than the impulses of the will.

From what has been said we shall realise that it is possible for us to raise ourselves above these impulses of the will. But then we must naturally take a different direction. The direction of the will-impulses is it ˂—: it is the direction of progression. The direction of the impulses of feelings, however, is from below upwards. Man can raise himself out of what proceeds entirely from the impulses of will. He can do this through contemplating what is expressed in the motifs of the columns and architraves.

Is not our whole mental horizon widened by these thoughts? And is not Spiritual Science a means of attaining this wider mental horizon? Only think of all that could be done to enable men of every cultural community to acquire mutual understanding of one another if what was presented in the two last lectures were to become living feeling, living knowledge. How could a member of one cultural community hate and abuse a member of another if he understood the things that were spoken of in those lectures? The limitations of what springs from the sphere of will in a single cultural community expand into the harmony formed by all such communities together when we know what mission each one has to fulfil.

We begin to feel the single communities as we feel our own soul-members. This too had to be given artistic expression in the structure of our Building, in the direction from below upwards. And what is indicated as a theoretical, ethical principle in the first declared Object of our Movement (the universal brotherhood of peoples) has been given concrete expression in the forms of the Building, when these forms are contemplated in their flow from below upwards, inside and, as well, outside the Building.

Now the whole is always contained in the part, so we have not only the direction of the will impulses ˂—, and the direction of the feeling-impulses (up), but something else as well. We have something else as well through the fact that there is a closure, an endings, overhead.

In referring to this motif I have so far spoken of the supporting force, with its upward direction. But I can also speak of the closure above, the covering, the roofing in. The motifs may thus be described as motifs which progress, ascend, and enclose.

You can also picture the Staff of Mercury. If you carry it, forward, it progresses; if you lift it up, it ascends; if you press the spirals together at the top, allow them to become rigid in themselves you have the closure above. This closure represents the thought-sphere, just as the progression represents the will sphere, and the ascent the feeling nature.

A true feeling of the whole evolution of humanity will develop in one who absorbs what is contained in the form-motifs of our columns and architraves in their flow from below upwards. They are motifs which express the principles of mutual understanding between the members of the different cultures and civilisations on the earth.

To pass from the sphere of the will into the sphere of feeling one must rise above the state of isolation, of separateness; one must actually participate in what is expressed in this movement from below upwards. A certain element which will become more and more essential in the modern age will then be laid into the life of feeling, into the sympathies and antipathies of the members of the different spheres of culture.

The Unconscious is an even stronger factor than what man has in his actual consciousness. The will impulses belong to the Unconscious; the feeling-impulses are more conscious, but still partly unconscious. The thought-impulses belong to the sphere of Consciousness, for a man is conscious of what he is thinking about. He is conscious of it, but only when he is really thinking, when he lives in the thoughts. But he does not always do this; when he is speaking he more often brings the impulses of the spheres of feeling and of will to expression.

It is a peculiarity of man that he can speak but by no means always gives expression to thoughts; what seems to be thought in what he says is often maya—nothing more than an unburdening of the spheres of his will or feeling. To think in the real sense is something different, something more. Despite the fact that it is man's privilege to have thought-impulses, it is nevertheless one of the most difficult things to fill these impulses with real thoughts. Although it suffices for daily intercourse, if one desires to have adequate thoughts about the great impulses at work in the evolution of humanity, it will certainly not do to remain content with what originates from feeling, still less with what originates from the will. Thinking must be irradiated by something still higher; it is not enough merely to let the successive spheres of culture work upon the soul; there is something that works still more deeply in these spheres of culture. This can be brought to expression only in the effect made by the dome, the cupola.

So one who passes through the Building from West to East will have in the progression of the columns the expression of will; and as he becomes aware of what flows from below upwards, he will feel the nature of the several European cultures, and a great deal else as well.

What will come to him from the dome? The secrets of the evolution of all earthly humanity. Therefore, as he looks up into the dome or cupola he will see on the one side the portrayal of the primeval Indian inspiration: how through the Rishis there flowed into mankind what was to come from spiritual spheres into ancient Indian civilisation. What had to come to mankind in those days in conformity with the character of the ancient Indian epoch will be painted in one part of the dome. How Zarathustra gave the ancient Persian culture its stamp—the sunlight battling as it were with the darkness—this will be seen at a second place in the dome. Then how the Egypto-Chaldean culture gradually comes right out to the physical plane but is still permeated with astrological, spiritual realities—this will be found in a third area of the dome. At a fourth place will be portrayed the Greek, as if standing by an abyss. This is the culture born of the Intellectual Soul or Mind Soul. What man is, comes to the fore, how he is faced with the necessity of having to solve the riddle of the Sphinx, how, through solving it, he thrusts the Sphinx down into the abyss—that is to say, down into his own being—this will be portrayed in a fourth area of the dome. How the eternal, divine forces and powers work into this evolution of man will come to expression inasmuch as what lies still deeper in the evolution of humanity than the Post-Atlantean impulses, namely the impulses of the Atlantean and Lemurian epochs, will be portrayed at the points of the compass: Atlantean evolution in the South, Lemurian evolution in the North of the dome.

And finally, the outcome of the Lemurian and Atlantean evolution will be portrayed: namely, our own era. Implicit within it is that impulse in world-evolution which expresses itself in the “J A O”. This will meet the gaze of one who looks from West to East towards the smaller cupola., Not that “J A O” is represented symbolically, but it is expressed in the motif. One who looks from East to West will see that which speaks out of the depths of the Cosmos into the development of culture, just as the “J A O” speaks from within into the development of the soul.

But all that I have described is perceptible to a man only if he overcomes the dome which arches over his brain; if he frees the etheric body of his head and looks from within outwards, then what I have described comes to him as a mighty Imagination.

These things are realities, are actually seen. when the etheric body is liberated from its physical foundation. Then one sees what presents itself inwardly to the etheric brain which has expanded to the Cosmos. The whole earthly evolution of man is represented here. (See sketches for paintings in the large cupola.)

To have thoughts about the realities of the evolution of humanity is possible only when we penetrate the secrets that are to be portrayed in paintings in the interior of our dome. In the same way that we can reach the sphere of feeling—that is to say, unprejudiced feeling devoid of sympathies and antipathies—when we experience what comes to expression from below upwards in the motifs of the columns and architraves, so through these motifs (of the paintings) we can penetrate to what is living reality in human evolution at every hour, every moment. Only when we know what is actively at work in the human soul at every moment, can we know what has been evolved in the course of millions of years. For everything that was contained in the Atlantean and Lemurian cultures lives in every soul—otherwise no soul would be as it now is. A human soul in all its depths can be understood in thought only if it is understood as the product of the whole process of world-evolution.

And so our Building expresses—if I may use the word “expresses”—Willing, Feeling, Thinking, but in their evolution, what they should become in the human being who is striving to achieve a measure of self-development.

Thus neither the forms as they are, nor the things that are done here, are the result of arbitrariness, but everything comes out of the very core of what we also try to grasp in Spiritual Science.

How often, when we are trying to describe the secrets of manes nature, do we not have to consider Willing, Feeling and Thinking? We have portrayed them in our Building and there, just as in man's own nature, willing, feeling and thinking are mysteriously linked with one another. If we go from West to East in this Building, we are moving as the Will-sphere of man moves; if we direct our gaze from below upwards in contemplating the forms of the columns and architraves, we sink down into the Feeling-sphere of human nature; if in what arches over the Building in the painting of the domes we study what we experience inside the Building, then we are studying the secrets of the sphere of human Thinking.

In a production such as this Building, everything corresponds to a certain inner necessity, everything comes into being as it inevitably must. And that is part of the significance of a Building of this kind.

What makes us realise that some Imagination, Inspiration or Intuition contains objective reality? We realise it through the fact that when we have the Imagination, the Inspiration or the Intuition, we have the actual experience that it is not something that has arisen out of ourselves but has its place within the harmony of the whole Cosmos. From now onwards into the future, humanity must have a concept of art which has as its essential characteristic what is felt to be inner necessity. We must feel that a truly artistic creation is not due to ourselves but that the gods create it through us, because it is their will that it shall be in the world.

We may well be convinced that the real progress of 0f human nature will depend upon such feelings and ideas gaining wider and wider recognition and taking the place of those that are current today.

What I mean by saying this, is that everyone who is working on this Building or is in any way connected with it, should feel above all that it is his business to compare what is aimed at here, what is expressed by and in this Building, with what is dominant in the world today.

Such a comparison can give rise to the fervent question; What was it that enabled Christianity in its earliest form to come into being? I have often spoken of this, for all such impulses in cultural life have arisen in the same way: namely, through the fact that in the case of a genuine, initial impulse of culture, those who were the first to ally themselves with it, were sufficiently strong in their souls to let this impulse completely dominate them.

What would have become of Christianity if in the souls of the first Christians the Christian impulses had not been all-powerful? In the Roman world above them, in the physical light of day, a different culture prevailed; we know that Christianity developed in the darkness, down below in the little cells in the catacombs, and then rose above the surface. Nothing of this Roman culture has remained—what developed down below in the catacombs rose up and conquered the world.

This came to pass because Christianity became part of the hearts and souls of those down there in the catacombs. Today the position is not quite the same—if it were, we should have to hollow out this Dornach hill into catacombs so that nobody should see anything of what we are doing. We need not hollow out the hill, we need not keep anything in concealment, we need not prepare the new culture underneath the earth while what is now taking place on the surface runs its course. Spiritually, however, the situation is the same. How much of what we want to inscribe in our hearts and souls is to be found in the culture of the present day? As much as there was of early Christianity in Rome!

Even though we do not worship physically in the catacombs, spiritually we are in the catacombs, and our feeling is true if we realise that this is indeed our situation. Our feeling for the Building is true only if we say to ourselves: There, in the sunshine, the dome of our Building with its glistening grey slate roof gleams. over the countryside. We are under this arching vault, above all, spiritually under it.

By these words I wanted again to indicate what must be the attitude of those who understand the inmost impulse of Spiritual Science towards what is to be found in the outside world. Oh, those early Christians—they heard the Word that resounded through their souls, their hearts, the Word that came from the Mystery of Golgotha, and they did not succumb to the temptation of what was taking place above the catacombs!

May it be the same today—spiritually—within our Movement! A certain difficulty lies in the word “spiritually”. The difficulty is expressed in the fact that if one considers the actual situation, one might sometimes be tempted—I say, might be, not is tempted—to wish that there were still present today the dire compulsion for inner deepening that would be there if we were forbidden by all the means of present-day culture to build on the Dornach hill, so that we should literally have to go into caves and there, in concealment, take up our abode. Confronted with such a prospect we should realise more strongly how our own impulses, which should be those of Spiritual Science, must differ from the blustering racket overhead.

These are things which can be expressed only by analogies such as I have now put into words. You can feel something of what is meant—and more is meant than seems, to be contained, in these analogies—if you penetrate a little into the gist of these words.

May you feel all that I have meant to convey in today's lecture and in these concluding words.

We spoke yesterday of the way in which the impulses of Will, Feeling and Thinking in man are brought to expression in our Building.

It will be apparent to you from many things that have been said here recently that the art in our Building must contain a new element that has not hitherto existed in the evolution of art but is essential for the further progress of humanity.

Admittedly it will be difficult from a purely external point of view to understand the real aim of this Building. A person may say to himself: I really can make nothing of it—and according to the standard of what he has hitherto regarded as artistic he will naturally have criticism to make. But remember, any new impulse in human evolution has always been criticised when it is judged according to the standards of the past.

It will help us to understand the point here if we try to find a formula to express what is entailed by this renewal of the principle of art through the anthroposophical conception of the world. When we review the development of art, we can think of the architectural forms produced by mankind, either in the original Egyptian, Greek or Gothic architecture, or what represents the renewal in a later age of what was there in an earlier one—I mean the Renaissance. We can also think of sculpture, painting, and so forth.

If we compare the effect made upon us by the essential character of these arts with what is aimed at in our Building, we can say; Everything that has been brought into being hitherto is like something in repose which, for us, has been wakened to life. Picture a human being in some fixed position. Somebody comes along and speaks to him - and he begins to walk, to move! This might well apply to the evolution of art up to our own day. We can regard it as something in repose, to which we would fain speak the magic word which rouses it into inner life and activity, into movement.

This is what we want to achieve, because it is demanded by the impulses of transition which are at work in our time and call upon us to find a new impulse for the future evolution of humanity.

To take an example, let us think of a beautiful Greek building. Its essential character consists in the symmetrical structures which mutually bear and support each other, just as the limbs of a human being standing immobile bear and support each other—but everything is at rest.

Compare this with what we have aimed at in our Building. In time, of course, everything will develop, for we have been able to make only very primitive beginnings with the means and help available to us, In the Building we have movement from West to East; we have motifs which grow, as it were, from the simple forms to be seen in the West in the capitals and architraves into greater complication, and then become more inward and simpler again towards the small cupola. What was formerly a merely inorganic principle of symmetry has been brought into movement. What formerly was at rest is now in movement. This will have to come to expression in the painting—as far as it is possible in our age to achieve what must be the goal.

In painting there are two poles. The one pole is that of drawing, the other that of colour, Fundamentally speaking, there are these two poles in all painting. Now a person may be a wonderful draftsman—that is to say, he may have the gift of reproducing in the lines he draws the inner form-quality of his subject, so that a picture of this form-quality is evoked by the drawing.

Now we must be clear that anyone who concentrates on the actual drawing in a painted picture must inevitably be very one-sided in his relation to the Real—or, as is often said, to Nature. Nature does not work with lines only, but has far richer means for giving expression to what is inherent in a living being. Hence the painter or the draftsman, when he is inwardly moved by his subject, must express more in his lines than Nature is able to bring to expression in lines.

But we shall never be able to avoid feeling that drawing in itself is nothing more than a substitute for what Nature can achieve. Whatever we may be capable of expressing through drawing, we can never produce anything that surpasses Nature; we cannot even equal Nature. Whatever we aim at in this respect must always remain a bungling attempt, for the simple reason that with the far richer means at her disposal, Nature is able to bring to expression the inmost essence of her creations.

On this account, drawing can never be anything more than an auxiliary. And I believe that one who is a true draftsman will always feel that in drawing he is only producing something like a scaffolding to be removed later on, and that the less any evidence of it remains, the better. I think that anyone with artistic sensibility, looking at a painting in which the actual drawing is especially conspicuous, would have an impression similar to that made by a building from which the scaffolding has not been removed but still stands in position. Indeed the point can be reached where the actual drawing is felt to be just a clumsy adjunct to the work of art itself.

It is rather different as regards the other pole of painting, the colour pole. Here we must bear in mind that colour is a fixation of something that, fundamentally speaking, is not present in Nature at all, or at most can be captured only momentarily. One cannot really count what is attached to some object, and which one then paints, as belonging to the element of colour in itself; for if a painter is concerned with making a meticulous reproduction of say, the colours of the clothes of people he is painting, he is certainly a bad artist.

But fundamentally speaking, anyone who might try, in the colour of the face, for example, to bring the inner, vital processes of the human organism into evidence, would not be a good artist either. One who paints a pale face—assuming, to take the extreme case, that the pallor is intended to indicate that the person in question is ill—would certainly not have produced anything really artistic, not to speak of how inartistic it would be to depict a wine-bibber by painting him with a red nose!

If it is desired to capture in colour something that is, so to say, stationary, and expresses itself in the world of reality, one is still not working with truly artistic impulses. But if one paints, let us say, a cloud, and in the cloud brings the whole magic of Nature to expression—perhaps the early morning sun and its effect upon the tints of the cloud—then one captures something that is transient in Nature and does not originate from the configuration of the actual cloud itself. What is captured here is something that is transient, but for all that rooted in the conditions prevailing in the whole environment, in the whole Cosmos, in so far as the Cosmos is involved in the phenomenon. In painting a cloud that at a particular hour of the day is brilliantly coloured, we really paint the whole universe as it is at that time. If in painting a human being we attempt to reproduce his inner, organic state, then, as I have said, we are not working with the true artistic impulses. But if we succeed in giving expression to what this human being has experienced—if, for example, we can suggest in the painting something that is the cause of the particular reddening of the countenance - then we are truly in the realm of the artistic; and still more is this the case when we can perceive from the picture itself what the experience has been, when the red of the cheeks tells us what the person must have undergone—again something that is not confined to the individual, but is in the whole environment, in the whole Cosmos.

What I am saying here is connected in a certain way with something I spoke about in the lectures on “Occult Reading and Occult Hearing”. I said there that even in the waking life of day the soul is in reality always outside the body, and that the body is only a mirror by means of which man makes himself conscious of what is out there in the Cosmos. He alone is a true artist who lives, as it were, with the Cosmos and who regards what he has to portray simply as the stimulus to depict his life in the Cosmos.

If we paint a cloud and therewith the whole Cosmos, we are outside the cloud in our life of feeling and ideation, and the cloud is there merely to enable us to project what lives in the whole Cosmos into a single entity.

But if we want to live in this way in the Cosmos when it is a matter of using colour, we must awaken colour to life. Colours confront us as qualities of the beings in outer Nature. When our observation is confined to the physical plane we recognise the colours that are attached to the objects of Nature. If we are to see colours, a foundation is always necessary, with the possible exception of atmospheric phenomena such as a rainbow or other phenomena of the kind. Hence the rainbow has not without reason been regarded as something that unites the heavens, the spiritual, with the earth, because in the rainbow we see the heavens in colours; we actually see colours as such.

I have already said that it is possible to plunge into the flowing world of colours, to live with the colours themselves, liberating them, as it were, from the objects. If we succeed in doing this, colour becomes the revealer of deep mysteries; a whole world resides in the flowing, surging sea of colour.

But the world of colour must first be liberated from the conditions imposed upon it on the physical plane; the creative power of colour must be sought and found.

If painting is to be an organic part of our Building, it must be born out of this impulse; the attempt must be made to portray in colour something that is not to be found on the physical plane, where everything coloured—with the exception of the rainbow and similar phenomena—is attached to objects. It must be possible to live in the colour blue, for instance, with one's whole soul, as if the rest of the world simply were not there; the soul must feel itself flowing out into the blue which fills the whole world.

But if we really penetrate into the surging world of colour, the result will be that we shall not simply brush on tints, for we then discover the creative power of colour; we shall also find inner differentiation in colour. We shall find that blue has something about it that draws and attracts the soul, something in which our soul would like to lose itself, longing and yearning for it without end. We shall also find that forms arise out of the colour blue itself, forms which bring the secrets and the very soul of the universe to expression. From the creative power of colour a world will come into being, a world that has form, inner differentiation. Form will be born out of the colour itself. We shall feel that we are not only living in the colour, but that the colour itself gives birth to the form—in other words, the form is created by the colour.

In this way we shall find our way, through colour, into the creative forces of the world. Only so can we succeed in painting in such a way that what we paint is not merely a covering of surfaces, but leads out into the whole Cosmos, participating in the life of the whole Cosmos. Reference was made yesterday to what the paintings in the two cupolas must represent; the impulses of Lemurian, Atlantean and our own life, as well as the impulses at work in the cultures of ancient India, ancient Persia, Egypt and Chaldea, Greece and Rome. In this way, the subjects will be inwardly understood and this inner understanding of colour, which, as it passes over into the actual painting, simultaneously becomes an understanding of form, will reveal to us what is actively at work in the evolution of humanity.

A review of painting in the past will show that the tendency of this art has been to work with colour attached to objects on the physical plane. But colour must be freed from objects if the paintings in our cupolas are to achieve their aim.

What is essential, therefore, is that the impulse of painting shall be deepened and quickened inwardly. It will he difficult to make our contemporaries understand what is being aimed at here. We shall have to resign ourselves to this for as long as people persist in judging a work of art as “right” or “good”, or I don't know what else, when it reminds them of some real object, so long will our paintings not be understood.

As long as it is possible to say that a tree is well painted because it is naturalistic, giving the impression that one is standing in front of an actual tree—as long as this is the criterion for judging painting and art in general, just so long will people be unable to understand what our painting is intended to be. They will inevitably regard it as nonsense, and be incapable of seeing anything in it.—Why have works of art existed? Surely in order to be looked at! Who has ever supposed anything else? But what we want to create in our Building will certainly not be there merely to be looked at! Indeed, we may be happy if those people who believe, as a result of their previous experience and study, that works of art exist merely for the sake of being looked at, consider our art extremely bad. For one thing is certain: what these people do not want, is the very thing we want to achieve!

Typical incidents often occur in this connection. One of our friends met me one day on the way from the glass-engraving studio to our house, and told me that he had been talking to an old gentleman who said that if the one who had conceived the idea of the domes of our Building had ever seen the Church of St. Peter in Rome, he would have designed them differently. Now the one who conceived the idea of our domes has seen St. Peter's not only once but many times, has admired and appreciated its greatness, but for all that he designed the domes as they are.

It is quite natural that such things should happen. Even St. Peter's in Rome is there to be looked at—but what we are doing in our Building must not only be looked at, it must also be experienced. And what would have been the right answer to give to that old gentleman? The right answer would have been to say to him: Do you know the fairy-tale of the king's son who looked at things only through his window? And do you know what happened when one day he had to “eat of the serpent”? Then he began to understand what the sparrows on the roof-tops and the chickens in the courtyard say to one another.—That old gentleman had obviously not eaten of the serpent! What does it mean, to “eat of the serpent”? It means, not merely to have theoretical ideas about Spiritual Science, but to have been gripped by it in the very fibres of one's heart and soul, so that one feels oneself to be an actual image of this Spiritual Science. If we can feel this with our whole being then we have eaten of the serpent, and we shall know as an actual experience what is intended by our Building. We shall not merely look at it but experience what it aims to achieve; we shall realise that man, dimly and unconsciously in his life of will, passes from incarnation to incarnation, born in one incarnation in this people, in another incarnation in that.

Just as this will-impulse in man can be experienced in the progression of the Building from West to East? in the successive motifs of the columns, capitals, and architraves, so can the element of feeling be experienced in what unfolds in the direction from below upwards—but it must be an actual experience. And the element of thought, when thinking is not merely abstract, cold, prosaic, but is quickened to life by the heart of the Cosmos itself—this should be experienced in the closure denoted by the domes, and also in their details. If, for example, the juxtaposition of one colour to another is one that is never found in Nature, if a being with facial features resembling those of man is portrayed in a colour which it could never have in Nature, one must feel in actual experience that what comes to expression there does so through its own inherent impulse.

This will be achieved for the first time—even if only in the most elementary beginnings—if the attempts made are in any degree successful. In the paintings, particularly, things will not be as they are in Nature, but far rather as they are in the spiritual world.

Two things must be achieved about which very few people nowadays are capable of thinking at all. But the fact that there are still a great many people who do not know, and moreover do not want to know, anything about the great vistas which lie ahead in evolution, certainly does not contribute to the welfare of humanity. To feel as it were in concentrated form those things of which our Building stands as the sign and token, we must quicken our inner life, quicken the soul to life through rich and varied experiences gathered from the manifold sources available in the world.

Let us think of times very different from the present and of the mental horizon of men in those times. Think of the mental horizon of the Greeks and of all that was unknown to them but is well known to men of the present age.

The Greeks did not know of America or Australia; they knew nothing of the Western hemisphere; they knew nothing of a very great many things we now know about Europe, Asia and Africa. Geographically, their horizon was narrow.—See what your feelings are when you study the map which a Greek was able to draw; think at tile same time of the rich inner world of the Greek, of his creative power. Compare what might be called the “geographical” chart of the heavens which the Greek was able to draw with present maps of the heavens. In ancient Greece, the map of the physical configuration of the earth was very meagre, the chart of the heavens very comprehensive. What was present in Greece was still, in essentials, a spiritual experience of the physical plane, geographically—within narrow limits; spiritually—a vista of wide expanses of the heavens.

True, it was no longer as it had been, for example, in Egypt, when men looked out into the Cosmos and in astrological pictures still experienced something of the spiritual Being; whose physical expressions are the stars. Nevertheless, a precipitation of all this was still present in ancient Greece. When we read in Homer's “Iliad” that information is given by Thetis that Zeus can do nothing at the time because he is in Ethiopia and will not return home for twelve days—that still has an astrological meaning—but it is expressed in such a way that the reader does not notice that the description refers to the passage of the heavenly bodies through the Zodiac, When 'the Greek said “Zeus is with the Ethiopians”, he meant: Zeus is in a particular sign of the Zodiac—and the number twelve is also mentioned. All this Indicates a change from an earlier time, but on the other hand there is still an echo of what was revealed to men originally from the wide expanse of his spiritual horizon.

Now let us turn away from Greece and consider the modern age. Geographically , the globe has nearly all been explored and only a few regions today are blank patches in the maps. We see the new age arising. America is included by the Oriental peoples in their earth—the America that simply did not exist for the Greeks. The geographical horizon widens and widens but the spiritual horizon, the map of the heavens, shrivels up completely. What does modern man know of the denizens presented to us in Greek mythology? He knows nothing at all! Europeans really live under the delusion that they still know something about the heritage left by ancient Greece.—What precedes the times of ancient Greece has no more than a spectral character for historians, however much they may investigate it by means of physical records.—But man is at least still a living reality in Greece. When the man of today imbibes what is imparted in the schools, he is assimilating history, and his soul lives in the history he has come to know in such an external way. We drag around with us a great deal of history—a very great deal of history.

It is not so in the case of the Asiatic, nor is it yet so in the case of the American. Although he has his history, it is not a vital part of his life. The American is much less conscious of history than the European. There will be few Americans who attach any great importance to being able to trace back their genealogical tree through centuries, Probably there are very few indeed—but in Europe there are numbers. That is what I mean by “dragging around” with us the history upon which so much depends today in the whole configuration of life, of the social life too.

A time is conceivable in a far distant future—for the occultist more than conceivable—when everything that we carry around with us as history since the Greek age will lie at rest (we will not speak of where it will be resting)—a time is conceivable when the tide of the peoples will have rolled across Asia over the Europe and America, and when men will know as little on the physical plane of all that we now recount and experience as European history as we today know of what happened in Europe four to six thousand years ago. We can look towards a time when this tide of the peoples will have rolled across Asia, a time when a quite different kind of life will develop and when everything that now stirs the very fibres of our hearts will lie as it were in a geological stratum of history. It will then lie as much in the past as what happened in Europe some four thousand years ago lies in the remote past for us.

The time will come when Goethe, let us say, will be “discovered” in the same way as modern man has discovered the ancient world and its happenings from the earliest Egyptian hieroglyphs. For in the outer world there will be physical men who will need to discover Goethe in this way!

We are gazing here at vast perspectives in the evolution of humanity. The Greeks knew nothing of America! In time to come no Greeks will be in existence, and the descendants of the present-day Americans will know of them only as a people belonging to a far, far distant past—or maybe they will know nothing of them at all!

The process of which I have just spoken more as a physical process, also takes place in the spiritual, in the following sense.—In the course of his evolution into the future, man must acquire the faculties which enable him to discover the spiritual again, to know a future spiritual world which for most people today is as unknown as the present continent of America was unknown to the Greeks. We are at the beginning of this voyage of discovery to the spiritual America. In this connection—from the angle of scientific thinking—we stand, spiritually, at the same point where men were standing physically when the first ship sailed from the Old World to America. Spiritually, we are on the voyage of discovery to the other, spiritual half of our human existence.

By saying this I only wanted to give some indication of the importance of Spiritual Science in the evolution of humanity. For now everyone can fill in for himself the gaps that still remain to complete the picture: Suppose for a moment that America had not been discovered, that Europeans were still living in ignorance of the existence of America. Is such a thing conceivable? It is quite inconceivable. But a time will come when it will be just as inconceivable that men were once incapable of discovering the spiritual world through Spiritual Science. This will be utterly inconceivable. And the thought can be carried even further.

What effect has the expansion of the geographical horizon had upon humanity? if we look for the most spiritual culture that has developed on the earth up till now, we must look for it before America was discovered. For with the discovery of America, materialism begins. In a mysterious way, every geographical expansion is bound up with the expansion of materialism. Humanity must again acquire a spiritual knowledge of the world. This will be achieved through discovery of the spiritual America—when the path symbolised in our Building is found by the world outside.

We have spoken of the element of progression in the Building from column to column, from architrave to architrave. That is the progression on the physical plane. But we can also follow the motifs from below upwards, we can look upwards.

What comes to light in the course of history—in so far as we can observe it externally—is expressed for us in the progression. But an inner deepening will become more and more necessary, a deepening of the soul which is at the same time—as in the case of Goethe's Faust who descends to the Mothers—an actual ascent into the spiritual world—naturally into the spiritual world of the good Spirits.

But when man raises himself into the spiritual world, a kind of conclusion will eventually be reached. I say “conclusion”. Let us grasp what this word really implies. The idea of evolution prevailing today is that it is like a barrel that begins to roll and goes on rolling and rolling forever—it is also imagined that there was never any beginning to this process, that it has always been going on. People who talk about evolution today almost invariably imagine that there has always been evolution, that everything has always been evolving, that it has always been so! But in reality this is not the case. It is nothing but a bad habit of the mind, a slovenly kind of thinking, to conceive of evolution as having no limits either in the past or in the future. The geographical, physical evolution of the earth also means evolution for every race, every people, Yes, but that certainly has an ending, a conclusion, at some time or other!

When everything has been discovered, there is an ending. We shall not be able to say then: Now we will equip our ship once again and make further discoveries. it is not true that evolution can continue endlessly; evolution has a conclusion. And just as physical evolution must have an end, so too will spiritual evolution have to have an end; an actual dome will arch one day over what humanity has experienced in the course of history. And true as it is that when the whole globe has been explored, no further ships will be equipped in order to discover still more distant lands on the earth, it is equally true that what is to be spiritually discovered by man will also one day actually have been discovered. The idea that men will go on investigating endlessly is the most erroneous there could possibly be.

It is essential that thinking shall be in accordance with reality if sound ideas are to be developed. But so few people think in accordance with reality in our present age, although they are convinced that they do. One can, for example, come across people who say: When there is nothing more left to investigate, the world will be a very dull place. These people forget that according to the modern idea of evolution, investigation will never come to an end. Yet one day it will, just as geographical exploration of the earth will eventually come to an end. Those people who are tormented by the thought that investigation will one day come to an end and that there will be nothing more to do in this respect and who ask: “What will man do then?”—must be given the answer: That will be plain enough when the time comes, and in any case it will be something quite different from investigation.

I have now given you a number of ideas, the purpose of which may puzzle you. But if you take them together you will be able to recognise this purpose yourselves. We see that the course of all historical life is reflected in the form of our Building. Men live on through the ages, just as in the Building one goes forward from column to column. They rise to a higher level just as one raises one's eyes to the columns, capitals and architraves. And they hope for a consummation—a conclusion—just as one will find it on looking up into the interior of the cupola.

But there is to be a conclusion in history too—it is to be portrayed in the painting of the domes. This painting must not merely be a covering of the surface, but call forth the thought: When you come to the surface of the dome you will discover something.—One must forget that any physical structure is there. The physical element of the paintings must be pierced through; one must see through the surfaces into the expanse of the spiritual worlds. It may possibly be that we shall not succeed in this in the case of our Building, but as the principle is developed, one day, perhaps—as the result of Spiritual Science—men in some future time will behold a mighty dome whose configuration leads their gaze out into the infinitudes of spiritual life.

If we live at some particular place on the earth and want to travel to another—at certain times we may want to do this but are prevented—then it is brought home to us that men can confront each other as enemies, that they can fight with one another about things of the earth, and even more than fight. But they cannot fight about the sun and the stars! Even though the Chinese have called their ruler the Son of the Sun, the Son of Heaven, and although for various reasons they have started wars on the earth, they have never started a war about ownership of the sun; it has never occurred to them to engage in strife with other nations about ownership of the sun. All kinds of things can be the cause of strife in the souls of the peoples spread over the earth; but that which directs men's gaze upwards into the spiritual worlds can never be an inducement to strife. It cannot lead to strife.

It must be realised that a great deal has yet to happen in the course of earth-evolution before humanity will have advanced far enough to have such a vision of the spiritual world that Spiritual Science will be as the sun and the stars are in physical life. Much will be necessary before this point is reached—above all the point where, through Spiritual Science, men will begin to think not only with the instrument that is almost entirely used for thinking today, namely, the head. In a certain sense it is true to say that nothing is more remote from us than our heads! For in all, essentials, the head, as far as its main foundation is concerned, was already completed at the time of the ancient Sun-evolution. The rest is an inheritance, partly from the Saturn-evolution, and has developed to further stages; during the Moon-evolution another important impulse was given. But. what is thought out in the head is in reality as remote from men as is their knowledge of the Saturn-, Sun- and Moon- evolutions,

Although there are often profound truths in many sayings current in everyday life, there is one very common phrase which should not be believed. One often hears it said “I have a mind (German, “head”) of my own.” That is an error. No one has a mind (or “head”) of his own; his head belongs to the Cosmos! If someone were to say: “I have a heart of my own”, he would be talking sense. But he talks nonsense when he speaks of having a head or a “mind” of his own.

Men will have to begin to develop thoughts which are experiences in the way I described yesterday in speaking of the inner experience of rising from the recumbent into the standing position. We experience this too, merely with the head. In reality a stupendous process takes place in us when we raise ourselves out of the recumbent position in which we lie parallel with the surface of the earth, and place ourselves into the direction of the earth's radius—but we experience it in an utterly abstract way. This change of direction from the cross-beam of the cross to the vertical beam—when this becomes a real experience it is a stupendous. process, a cosmic process it is the Cosmic Cross.

This happens every day. But we do not by any means think every day about the fact that through the act of standing up end lying down, this Cross is inscribed into very life.

It is a far cry for man from this abstract process of standing up and lying down, from this assumption of the form of the Cross, to the conception that can be expressed by saying: If man were not so constituted on the earth that he lies down and again stands up, the Mystery of Golgotha would not have been necessary.

If someone utters the sound B—as for example in the word Building—and adopts the sign B for this sound, then the sign signifies the sound B. If someone asks for a sign to express the fact that the Mystery of Golgotha was necessary for earth-evolution, then it is to be found in the Cross, which embodies the acts of lying down and standing up. Because man is so constituted on the earth that he lies down and stands up, the Mystery of Golgotha had to take place.

This will be known when men begin to think with the second brain—not with the “head-brain” but with a second brain to which I referred in the lectures on “Occult Reading and Hearing” when I said: The lobes of the brain must be regarded as arms held in a fixed position. If your arms and hands grew to your sides, you would think in such a way that there would be no possibility of doubting that this Cross is the appropriate sign for the Mystery of Golgotha. It is only the head-brain that is baffled by this kind of thinking. But it is also the head-brain that creates the soil for the many misunderstandings prevailing in the world. The reason why so many misunderstandings arise is because the head-brain alone is active and creative today. But the second brain must also become creative, creative to such a degree that something indicated figuratively a little while ago, is fulfilled. I said that the Greeks did not know of America. But when we go back to other ancient traditions, we find that there were times when the existence of America was indeed known. But then this knowledge was lost. There were also times when that which Spiritual Science is striving again to acquire was present. Spiritual Science knows that a great deal that formerly came to men from subconscious, dreamlike experiences, must come again consciously. Men also had something like a common speech, which only later differentiated. There is profound truth in the biblical legend of the Tower of Babel. But as long as men can only think with their heads they will not be able to be creative in the way they were creative in ancient times, for example, in speech. Spiritual Science, however, has within it the capacity to bring the elements of speech into movement. And when it is said that in our Building the element of art has been brought into movement, it must also be said that life itself must be stirred into movement.

A vista can arise before us of a time when Spiritual Science will be truly creative, when through the thoughts and ideas unfolded in Spiritual Science, speech itself will become creative. Spiritual Science will one day be spread over the whole earth and will give rise to a common speech, corresponding to no speech or language existing at the present time. I am not referring to anything like Esperanto, for that is an artificial, inorganic invention. The speech of the future will come into being when man learns to live in sound itself, just as he can learn to live in colour.

When he learns to live in sound, then the sound itself gives birth to the configuration, so that it becomes possible once again to create speech or language out of actual spiritual experience. We stand only at the very beginning of many things in Spiritual Science but as yet not even at the beginning of what has here been indicated. We must, however, keep it in our minds in order to realise the importance of Spiritual Science and to be aware that Spiritual Science bears within it a new knowledge, a new art, and even a new speech—a speech that will not be compiled artificially, but will be born.

Just as men will never fight about the sun or the stars, they will also never fight about that new speech, by the side of which the other languages still in existence when this new speech has come into being can quite easily continue.

As you will certainly have felt, we have placed a far-reaching ideal before our souls, a very far-reaching ideal. Most materialistic thinkers of the present time would certainly say: This is all airy nonsense, for the fool who can talk like this about the creative power of speech and about Spiritual Science must assuredly have lost all solid ground from under his feet.

It is easy to imagine that if some person of eminence in our time had been listening from a corner to what has been said, he would have burst into derisive laughter at this flight into the clouds without solid ground underfoot. We, however, could have a certain understanding of his attitude, because by placing such lofty ideals before us, we have indeed lost the dense, solid earth underneath us. As long as the earth continues its evolution as a physical planet, this ideal will not be realised. The physical earth will have come to an end before this ideal is fulfilled. But the souls of men will live over into other planetary incarnations, and these souls will experience the fulfilment of this ideal if they become conscious of it in our time.

Yes! Ahriman might stand there and be the arbiter between ourselves and the person we have imagined sitting in the corner, listening and chuckling to himself because he supposes us to have lost all ground from under our feet. Ahriman might well rub his hands and say: “They call that ‘ideals of the future’! They have lost the ground from under their feet; the gentleman up there on the hill says so himself. He mocks himself and knows not how! He is speaking the truth and is not aware that he is doing so”—

But we know that even though we do not stand on the solid soil of the earth, we nevertheless stand in Reality with what we make into the living word of the soul, And why? Because we avow the Mystery of Golgotha in earnest and not with the shallowness that is so general today. We know that Christ lives, and that we can know the truth when we let Him be the great Teacher and Leader in our striving for spiritual wisdom. But He uttered words to this effect: You cannot truly believe in Me in your inmost being until you cease to acknowledge only those words and ideals which will perish together with the earth—(for the whole outer configuration of the earth will perish, the earth in its present form will pass away)—until you hearken to My true words. Of these true words He has said: “Heaven and Earth will pass away, but My words will not pass away”. Therefore in the life of soul we can have firm foundations, even though our ideals cause opponents to say that we no longer stand an the solid ground of the earth. If we are to make true avowal of the mystery of Golgotha we must have ideals which are more enduring than the earth and the configuration of the heavenly bodies circling around the earth in the Cosmos. We must hearken to the revelation of the Mystery of Golgotha which will be there even when the earth no longer exists, nor the heavens which now look down upon the earth.

The meaning of the word that proceed from the Mystery of Golgotha is infinitely deep. And those who will not lift their souls from the ground into the cupola—which should be transparent in order that they may look into the spiritual world—those persons are not living in Reality. For if this dome, this cupola, is to be the expression in architecture of the Mystery of Golgotha, it must itself remind us of the words: “Heaven and Earth will pass away, but My words will not pass away.”

I would like to talk again today about the nature and significance of our building, for the reason that a number of external personalities are among us at the course for medical professionals.

First of all, I would like to note that this building, as a representative of our anthroposophically oriented spiritual science, is intended to be in the world that which really gives an outward image of the significance and inner essence of this movement. If one wants to recognize this movement in its true significance, one must surely become familiar with the fact that this movement wants to enter the most diverse areas of life as something completely new, that its appreciation must arise from the realization that such a new thing is necessary in the face of the fact that old impulses in our present time clearly show how they are moving straight into decadence.

If our movement had not emerged from that which the signs of the times themselves demand, from that which is not now in any human program, but from that which can be read in the spiritual development of humanity that lies behind our physical human movement, even if our movement were like so many other movements that also found societies, set up programs, and set up so-called ideals, then at a certain point this movement would have needed a larger building, larger premises for its membership, and they would have turned to some outside builder to have a house built. The architect would have built something in the traditional style, and the Society would have carried on its work in such a building.

This is not how it should be with us. Rather, since we came to the point of being able to start a building project – which might even be completed one day – it had to be shown, precisely on the basis of this fact, how this spiritual movement, on the one hand, reaches the highest heights of spiritual life and, on the other hand, is a thoroughly practical movement that can directly engage with all aspects of practical life. That means that it had to be shown that our anthroposophically oriented spiritual movement is capable of producing new building forms, a new architectural style, out of itself. It had to be shown that our movement, down to the last detail, is not just a theoretical world-view movement, but something that can have a formative effect on everything that is placed externally in the physical world.

Thus this building was not constructed as an outwardly unimportant house, but was built out of spiritual science, out of its very own feelings, ideas and thoughts, and in every detail it is an expression of what this spiritual science wants to be. It does not want to be some mystical driveling, it does not want to be some abstract theory, but it wants to be something that can deeply intervene in the most everyday life, and must therefore also intervene most in that which is to be its own representative. The whole of this structure should express how it places itself in the present as a living protest against what the centuries, the millennia, have brought to humanity and what is currently leading humanity to decline.

Given that we could not build the structure in Munich due to the narrow-mindedness of the local artistic community, but had to erect it here on the Dornach hill, it must be seen as a stroke of good fortune that, by approaching the hill, this double-domed structure can now really be appreciated. For it is truly not for external reasons that this building has become a double-domed structure. This Goetheanum has become a double-domed structure – a building composed of a larger and a smaller dome – to show that something is to be revealed to contemporary culture and that something is to be received. That which emerges from the depths of spiritual life is represented by the small dome, and the fact of receiving is represented by the large dome. And I think that fate has done well that the one who approaches this hill in Dornach can already have the feeling, through the way in which this double dome rises above the hill, that something new is being added to human development, but something that can also have an effect on human development at the same time. The first pictures we will show you this evening should demonstrate to what extent this is the case.

The first picture we will show is of the building as seen from the north.

Another aspect. Approached from a slightly different angle, the building looks like this.

The third picture is supposed to show the northeast aspect.

The fourth picture is intended to represent the southwest aspect.

The next picture is supposed to show the northwest aspect.

This is yet another aspect.

And now let us visualize how the building appears to someone entering from the west. The building is oriented from west to east. You enter at the bottom, and the cloakrooms are downstairs. You come up to the walkway through a stairwell and enter the building through the gates, which are in the west. The whole building is designed in such a way that it presents an organic architectural concept in contrast to the dynamic-mechanical architectural concept to which one is otherwise accustomed. Therefore, the forms everywhere are such that they blend in with the organism of the whole building, just as I would say that any limb – even the smallest in humans, the earlobe – blends in with the whole organism. Thus, a limb blends into the whole organism in such a way that it must be in its place, as it is, as large and as shaped as it is. In the same way, every detail should be in its place in this building; every detail should take its form from the overall form of the building. Furthermore, without falling back on mystical symbolism, there is not a single symbol in the whole building; everything in the building should be poured into artistic forms and show in artistic forms what task each individual piece has.

The West Gate. The West Gate has the task of welcoming those who enter. This welcoming, this receiving, this welcoming, so to speak, should be expressed in forms that are not geometric, but which should be expressively organic forms.

As I said, you enter the building from below, via a staircase leading to the gallery, from where you then enter through the west gate.

Now the staircase. You are looking here towards the northern side of the staircase. It can be clearly seen from these things how everything here is designed so that it has to be in its place, where it is found. For example, you see how this column capital is perfectly adapted in form to this side, its inclination towards the place where the whole structure must be supported; narrowing on the other side, where the entrance is, where there is nothing more to support.

During on-site explanations, I have often pointed out this structure at the beginning of the staircase: there are three semicircular shapes with their planes perpendicular to each other. It is the shape that emerged in my mind when I tried to imagine how a person walking up these stairs would feel. He would have to feel at the point where the first step of the staircase begins: When I step into it, the external influences of life are calmed. Inner emotional movement will be found inside, which completely calms the outer feeling. In there I will stand on safe ground.

That was what I wanted to express. This presented itself to me because I had to develop this thing here. It is a formation that has an external similarity to the three semi-circular canals in the ear, which, when injured, lead to dizzy spells that thus take away the certainty of the person when they are injured. But that is a discovery that occurred to me only afterwards; the matter itself is formed entirely out of the sensation.

You can also see a radiator cover. These radiator covers are designed in such a way that they represent, on the one hand, growing out of the earth, that is, the forces that grow out of the earth in a supersensible way and permeate the sensible; they are counteracted by other forces coming from above. For those who can perceive this interplay of forces, elemental figures emerge, and these elemental figures are expressed in the forms of these radiator covers, which are otherwise built in their entirety according to Goethe's principle of metamorphosis. Each radiator is the organic metamorphosis of the other. Each was designed to fit exactly into the place in the house where it belongs. But at the same time, the principle of metamorphosis is carried out with the same fidelity as in the plant itself. Every single form, every line, every curve is shaped according to the spatial and functional requirements, and I would say, the original form, which of course is not found here. Every curve is appropriate to the position of the limb of the structure on which the curve is located. A curve that is diverted points to something else in the structure, as opposed to a curve that is bent inward, as you can see here, where the perspective is not even quite right.

There we saw the same thing again, in more detail. You can see here how an attempt has been made to replace the conventional mathematical-dynamic pillar with something organic, which in its form has the character of support, of support through a force that comes from the elementary forces of the earth and is precisely suited to the distribution of the load that is to be supported at this point in the way in which it shapes its forms. Of course, I am well aware of the many objections that can be raised against such designs from the point of view of traditional architecture. But it is high time that an attempt was made to replace the usual dynamic-mechanical building concepts with an organic building concept that is based not on dynamics and mechanics but on organic principles.

Here we have again seen the side on one side of the main entrance, where you can see how they tried to bring out the character of this being a side piece, how it turns towards the center, how it points to the side. This shaping is particularly important.

The next picture. Here you can see the side wing, as it goes north, with its windows. And you can see here how it has been tried to overcome the merely decorative. Here, the support is led down everywhere, so that the windows stand up at the bottom, so that not only the windows are worked out of the wall like a decoration, but that the windows stand up everywhere. But you can also see how, in the room containing the motif in question, the same motif that is above the side windows above the main entrance reappears here at these windows. But if you can properly visualize the metamorphosis internally, then such motifs take on such a form that, from a purely external point of view, they no longer resemble other motifs at all, and yet they are actually the same. Just as the sepals and stamens are no different from the petals and leaves of a flower – even though the leaves take on completely different forms depending on the plant's position – so it is here. Thus, Goethe's idea of metamorphosis has been realized in its entirety in the artistic process.

Here we have the upper part of the side entrance. You see, once again, the same motif above, transformed, but also the motifs that you see everywhere, metamorphosed.

Here you see my original model, cut in half, that is, at the point where the axis of symmetry lies. The forms were first worked into this model. This model was, after all, the basis for the construction.

This is the floor plan of the building. This floor plan shows the extent to which the building is designed as a double-domed structure. The small domed room faces east. The main group will stand here, which all of you already know. Here is the west domed room, the auditorium. You can see that when you come in through the entrance, you enter the auditorium. You first come to a vestibule lined with wood, each individual piece of which is handcrafted, and all surfaces and curves are worked so that their surfaces and curves must be exactly where they are.

You enter below the organ (Fig. 29). The casing and framing are designed so that you can see that the organ is not just placed in the room, but grows organically out of the entire surroundings of the building. Then you always have a walkway on which you can walk around outside and below during intermissions. The auditorium holds about nine hundred or a thousand people. Then the entire perspective of the building is arranged according to an axis of symmetry; you won't find the same axis of symmetry anywhere else, everything is oriented towards this one axis of symmetry, while otherwise the auditorium is arranged, stepping forward, from seven columns on each side. These columns in the auditorium have bases, have capitals, and above them are architraves. Everything that is worked into these columns is done so in strict accordance with the principle of the evolution of nature itself. If you follow how the capitals, bases and architraves of the individual columns grow out of one another, you will see an image of evolution, of development, in the emergence of one motif from another. It is necessary to immerse oneself in the way in which one form grows out of another in these columns, with artistic devotion, with artistic sensitivity, just as one form of nature's development always grows out of another.

It is not good to start from an abstract terminology in a philistine, pedantic way. There are certain reasons why one can name the one column Saturn's column, the other Venus' column, etc. But one must not obscure what is essential in the essence: the belonging together of the seven columns, the emergence of one column from the other. And above all, we must not obscure what lies in the forms themselves, which must be felt by following the line of swing, the curve of the form, by dreaming ourselves into a symbolism that does not exist. This is more inherent in the emergence of the form of one column from the form of the other column than in simply looking at a column.

In the process, it turned out, by recreating nature itself, so to speak, that the idea of development, which is very often understood as if in each development the following stage of development is always more complicated than the one before, that this idea of development is not correct. Every development proceeds in such a way that at first there is a simple form; then a more complicated one develops from it, then an even more complicated one. This reaches a certain culmination; then again the forms begin to become simpler and simpler, and outwardly the most perfect form reveals itself as the one that has been simplified again. It is only an apparent simplification, but it is still a simplification, I would say, in the limbs, and there is a certain complication in the formation of the limbs. This is strictly adhered to here.

You can see how the design of the columns becomes more complex up to the middle column, and then becomes simpler again towards the east, so that the seventh column is relatively simply designed again.

The small domed room is closed off in this way on each side by six columns, the bases of which are designed to hold twelve seats, and here too the principle of development is fully adhered to for the capitals, the bases, the seats and the architraves. When you endeavor to recreate nature, it is the case that you only truly discover your findings in the finished product that you have created. One can – and this is something that only presented itself to me after the design of the matter in the model – one can, if one takes the raised, convex form of the first column, one can place it in the concave form of the seventh column in a truly artistic way, of course with metamorphosis, but with a true one. The second column fits with its raised part into the concave parts of the sixth column, the third into those of the fifth, and the fourth column stands alone as the central column. Of course, the same principle cannot occur in the same way in the six columns. There, the first and the sixth, the second and the fifth, the third and the fourth really correspond to each other as I have just expressed it. It is something that is found throughout nature, that certain polarities occur, and it was interesting that only the idea of development was retained in the formation of the forms, and that the polarities resulted automatically from the pure retention of the developmental idea.

The next picture: Here you have a section through the building in a west-east plane, so that the order of the columns is presented to you exactly as it can be shown in a section.

Here you can see the glass studio in the area below where the windows were cut, which I will talk about later. This glass studio is in some ways a kind of metamorphosis of the whole Goetheanum; only the metamorphosis is brought about by the fact that, firstly, the domes have been pulled apart and a central element has been added, and secondly, the domes have become the same size. For all such inner processes of drawing apart and becoming equally large, metamorphic experiences then arise for the whole organism of a thing. These are then faithfully executed in every detail.

You can also see that the usual geometries in our building have been overcome by the fact that the symmetrical axis has been interrupted to the right and to the left. The idea that each individual piece should be seen in the context of the symmetry of the whole has been applied to the stairs.

You will also see this when you look at the gate for this studio (Fig. 99), with the staircase, the shape of which has been designed in such a way that it really does represent a staircase, precisely because of its shape: you go in, you have a right and a left, while very many stairs that are designed are now really nothing closed, have no right and no left. All these things are to be considered when it comes to a truly artistic creation.

The gate itself is designed in such a way that one recognizes its symmetry as a necessity. When you enter this glass studio, you will also see the lock. It is designed to differ from the usual philistine locks that are otherwise in use and which are really the opposite of anything beautiful.

The next picture: Now you see what has been most contested in a certain way, but which will also be understood over time. It is the building in which the heating and lighting are housed, the boiler house. And it is built according to the principle that what is inside has its envelope in the building. Just as a nutshell is shaped so that it is a shell for a nut, here the shell is entirely appropriate for what is inside, right up to the shapes of the chimney, which is only complete when it is smoking, because the smoke is part of these shapes; it then forms the top of the chimney. So everything is conceived according to the same principle by which nature creates when it forms the nutshell around the nut.

We will now turn our attention to the internal motifs. You have used the organ motif here as a model. The architecture around the organ should be such that the whole structure is organically integrated into it, so that one does not have the feeling that the organ has been placed in some random location, but rather that the organ grows out of the whole organization, as it were.

So, by walking through the space below the model and then turning around, we have the two symmetrical columns in the auditorium with the simplest architrave motif at the top. We will now look at each individual column each time.

And as we advance, we first see here the simplest column, one of the two, and now, after we have let its forms act on our perception, we will look at it in connection with the second column.

We shall see how what is simple here [at the first column] grows downwards, how the lower part grows towards it, and how what grows downwards, what grows from top to bottom, undergoes a certain complication of forms, from top to bottom undergoes a certain complication of forms, thereby pushing forward other rising motifs. This can only be felt by observing the succession of the two columns. It is precisely this succession that must be observed.

You can also see here how the architrave motif becomes more complicated. It is actually the case that by immersing yourself in these forms, you can learn more about the idea of development, the developmental principle, the developmental impulse in nature than through any theoretical discussion. Because nature is such that it creates in images, and it must be emphasized again and again that, even if our philosophers prove that one should work with abstractions, with analyses and with the discursive principle to build a science of nature, then nature simply turns its nose up at this science and does not let itself be grasped in this way; it eludes comprehension and leaves us alone with our abstractions. Because it does not create in natural laws, it creates in images.

But now, when we can rise to imaginations in abstract terms, we enter into nature and understand nature's growth. The entire structure should be designed in such a way that it is simultaneously the great hieroglyph through which the world can be grasped. Wherever you look in this structure, you should have a starting point for understanding the world. That is what is, if I may use the term, secretly woven into this structure, that in looking at these forms, that which, so to speak, governs the world at its core, is presented.

We will now see the second pillar on its own.

And now again the second with the third column in relation, with the modified architrave motifs. You see how here again the forms become more complicated from top to bottom, and how they are met by forms that become more compact towards the bottom. However, these forms can only be produced, one from the other, if the artistic design is based on the same developmental forces that nature uses to form a plant leaf by leaf, or in a series of developing creatures, one species emerges from the other, one species develops out of the other. By imitating nature, such forms are created. And those who immerse themselves in nature will succeed in recognizing the principle of development in nature. Indeed, something has been set up in this building that should inspire people to say: what surrounds me here as something growing, what surrounds me here as something formed, is something that stands as an explanation of the whole surrounding world.

We will now see the third column on its own.

And now we will see the third column in relation to the fourth column again. You can also see that the architrave motifs are becoming more complicated. You just have to imagine how, according to the principle of growth, one emerges from the other, one grows over the other, and you do not need to say: here is a caduceus, but you have a principle of growth that emerges out of it, grows over it, breaks through the overgrowth, and the caduceus does not stand there as an isolated symbol, but as a developmental phenomenon, as a developmental form that emerges from the other. It is the same below with the capital motif.

We will now look at the fourth column on its own.

Now again this column with the following one. You can see how purely by one growing over the other, this caduceus, snake-staff-like structure emerges. It is taken entirely from the growth, not placed as an isolated motif. It is perhaps also cleverer in the usual intellectual sense to throw one motif after the other. That is not what is aimed for here. The aim here is for each motif to emerge from the last, and for the harmony of the motifs to give the actual impression of reality.

The fifth column on its own.

Now again this column with the next. You can see how here, through the continued growth, not a complication occurs, but a simplification. The architrave motifs have long since become simpler; but here you can see how this motif simply continues to grow, grows upwards, and the motif arises in a completely natural way. In growing, there is always a pushing away. The two parts below here grow upwards; this is rejected, and the motif emerges in a natural way. This is eliminated as it grows; on the other hand, this grows downwards and the shape emerges quite organically from what went before.

The sixth motif on its own.

And again this motif together with the next one. You can see how the next motif simply emerges from the previous one by growing further, growing, then overgrowing at the top and finally merging.

Now the seventh motif on its own. Another simplification, but a complication in the lines. Tomorrow I will show you this artistic element, which lies in the complication and simplification, by means of a simple representation on the board.

We have now arrived at the point where the curtain column is, where the large dome space merges into the small one. Here you have the last column, the connection between the large and small dome spaces.

We are now moving further into the small domed room. You can see that it goes into the small domed room.

We have here the order of the columns and the architraves of the small domed room. If you remember how the two motifs were on the other columns, you will see that the forms have been changed to reflect the fact that this is a smaller room with only six columns. You just need to consider the following: If you have seven columns that are supposed to create a unified effect, then you have to give each column a different shape. Then imagine circling the same space with six columns instead of seven. In that case, the distances between the columns, which are one and one-seventh, or 8/7, would be different in relation to the previous ones, and so individual shapes would now be changed. And here, in addition, you have the smaller dome space. This further changed the forms. You see, when something like this is created, you get what I would call a sense of space.

Those who think abstractly – and such thoughts have even appeared in scientific literature – are of the opinion that, for example, one can also imagine a human being as very small, atomistically small, that size itself, the spatial volume, has no relationship to the being. But this is not true. Anyone who has immersed themselves in the essence of artistic creation knows that a particular form can only be reproduced in a particular spatial volume, that the size of the space is in an inner relationship to what is being depicted. If you have conceived of some figure for a particular large space, and you then make it en miniature, it seems distressing. But this feeling must be there. The artistic elements must be coordinated with their spatial content to this extent, otherwise they are not truly artistically designed.

The next picture shows another row of columns from the smaller dome with the corresponding architrave. You can see the slit for the curtain, the first column, the second column and so on. We will study the individual columns in their sequence later.

The first column of the small dome.

The next one will now be more complicated, according to the growth principle.

The next one is more complicated again.

Now it is about simplification, but it is a sham simplification; it is simply an outgrowth.

The next column.

There we come to the two columns that border the east end.

We have the carvings of the east end here. You will see them if you look closely. I would say that the forms here can be felt more than seen. If you look closely, you will find that the carving here in the east end encompasses everything that the other forms of the columns and the architraves contain, but of course modified for the vaulting of the room, metamorphosed. Above it a five-petal flower. Anyone who wants to can imagine a pentagram there, but in the same way that one can imagine one in a five-petal plant leaf in nature. A symbolist would have put any old pentagram there. But then one would be acting according to the principle by which we have often acted. Time and again, we have had to experience that artists came to our branch offices who were unpleasantly touched by the fact that unartistic motifs were found everywhere. A cross that was ugly in design, with seven roses around it, was something that was considered more dignified than something truly alive in artistic forms.

It is precisely when one is able to pour the spiritual out completely into artistic forms that what is to be achieved here is achieved: not intrusive symbols, but a shaping in forms in which the spirit lives. When we describe how the Earth developed from Saturn, the Sun and the Moon [gap in the text], we do so in such a way that what lives in the whole also lives in the ideas of our worldview. However, it does not live by expressing itself symbolically through any form, but rather the forms themselves have real inner forces of growth.

Here you can see this eastern end a little more clearly in its individual forms.

The next picture is a detail of the side of the small domed room.

And now, my dear friends, I have begun to use these pictures to explain something about the building to you. I will continue this discussion tomorrow so that those who are hearing it for the first time will get a complete picture of what our building should be from this presentation. I will continue these reflections tomorrow with the help of more slides.

I would like to start by talking about the principle of development, which I already hinted at yesterday. I said: If we follow the metamorphosis of forces within a developmental series, we first come from the simple into the complicated. So I want to draw a simple [it is drawn]; then a next more complicated one would perhaps be this; then we would come to a third, to a fourth, which would be like this (Fig. 105). Now we might have four stages of development of the same thing.

Now the next one could be somewhat more complicated than the previous form. We would then perhaps get this [fifth] form. But this would not come out, instead this other form will develop. What I have drawn with the thick line, that would then perhaps be visible on the outside. And if it were a real form in nature, one would then progress from this to this form. And yet it is only in the etheric that development continues in such a way that the more complicated forms, which I have indicated with the dots, emerge, while the physical, the externally visible, that which reveals itself again, perhaps simplifies itself again.

The next forms would then perhaps be such that the ethereal forms would be these [sixth]. But it is not this ethereal form that comes to the fore, but rather what remains visible on the outside is this [the thick line], which in turn is a simplification, an essential simplification, so that if you just consider physical development, you go from a stage of 1-2-3-4 in complication, then in simplification. This is also really the principle of development in nature.

For example, we can see how, let us say, the eyes of certain lower animal beings – considered physically and externally – are more complicated than the human eye. Certain lower animals have blood vessel-like organs, a “sword-shaped process” and a “fan” in their eyes. These are also disappearing, and the human eye is relatively simpler in its outward form, but the etheric body has a more complicated form. We can only grasp the principle of evolution correctly if we present it in this way. The principle of development is correctly captured in the evolution of the columns, capitals, architraves and bases that you were shown yesterday.

If you want to understand our building, you also have to bear in mind that the entire treatment is appropriately designed for the new architectural style in terms of character. It is the case, for example, that even the artistic treatment of the wall is different from the way walls were treated in earlier architectural styles: the wall was always conceived as the boundary of the space that one wanted to close off. Here at the Goetheanum, the wall is conceived in such a way that it actually overcomes itself. This is physically achieved in our windows. Our windows, in so far as they are the main windows of the auditorium, are etched out of single-colored glass panes. It is then the case that the artistic works are actually only created by the sunlight shining through. So the processing of the window panes is a preparation, and the whole impression is created by the interrelationship between what has been worked on the pane and the sunlight shining through. In the windows, in particular, what has otherwise been striven for in the entire building has been physically achieved, whether through the design of the columns, the carving on the walls, or the painting: the wall virtually dissolves. So that when you look at the wall, you don't have the feeling that the space is closed off, but that you have the feeling that you are being led out into the cosmos through the wall. With the windows, you must have this feeling physically, because you lead directly, I would say, to the effect of light on the outside, purely through the physical design of the panes; but with the other wall designs, this has also been attempted artistically.

This will give you an idea of how a new stylization of building forms has been striven for here, down to the last detail, how the formal language of our building is to be a new one, so to speak. It is understandable that philistinism cannot immediately comprehend this new design language, my dear friends. Now, it is important that we first show you some of what has been achieved with painting. First of all, I will show you the painting of the small dome, because I only have pictures of it here for now.

Let us look at what our revered friends actually saw. By visualizing this now in non-colored images, we must immediately point out that the essential thing about the painting of the small dome is not the motifs, but the bringing out of the motifs from the colors. There lies, I might say, the very beginning of what painting of the future will have to bring. Man will indeed have to understand more and more that in the details of nature, in essence, there is always something essential. For example, when you immerse yourself in a color, or in a color combination, it is not just this color combination that is present, but the color itself is something alive, something that works out of itself, and it is possible to educate oneself, for example, to live with the color blue. You will then get the feeling that the blue color gives you the impression of the designed, the moving, that which moves or is formed in space. So if you approach it in a creative way, you will get something that you draw out of the blue. The red or yellow gives you the impression that it wants to reveal itself, come towards you, talk to you. While the blue glides past you, the red gives you the impression that it comes towards you.

In this way, being with a color, but especially with many colors, can be invigorated. And all these things actually are in the work of nature. And only someone who educates himself in this immersion in the elements of nature can understand this. Therefore, it is somewhat striking when, let us say, in the current, indeed, in itself quite justified new striving for art, things come across that actually show that one has come out of imitating nature and, isn't it true, into something that one is actually striving for new artistic things in the inartistic. When we see that all manner of expressionist and futurist and so forth things are put together in any old way, or put together differently, what appears in nature in a certain way, then very often – not always, of course – there is something very unjustified in such a combination. For example, someone who forms a human eye cannot help but place the second eye in the right place if they do not merely see, but if they know how to live intimately with the creative forces of nature. This is because the eye is not something in itself, but only exists with the second eye. But one only comes to the inner essential creation of nature when one can live with the entities of nature, for example with colors.

And now, look, how could it not be possible to create from color itself? I just want to know when someone says: I am not interested in something created according to the model, but I am interested in applying the colors, I just want to know why then the form should not emerge from this pure application of the colors as the creature of the color. We have to get away from the model again. We have to get away from being tied to the naturalistic. Art has worked on that long enough. But we have to be able to develop an interest in seeing a light surface simply as a color spot and seeing a dark surface as a color spot. I would like to know how, when you simply have a light and a dark surface in an arrangement [it is drawn], how you could not feel a face turned in this direction, surrounded by hair growth here (Fig. 105).

Everything can be brought out of the color combination. Just as everything can be brought out of the treatment of the surface, of the treatment of the form in sculpture. In contrast to color, if painting wants to work with color, the line, the drawing, is actually an untruth. Because, you see, the horizon is not really and truly present as a line. That is not true at all. It is not a horizon line. What is real is the blue sky, and below it perhaps something shaped by nature, and that borders on each other. It is the contact of two colored surfaces. Whoever draws the line is lying. Whoever paints two colored surfaces, which of course must then have a border, is telling the truth. And it is with things like this that one begins to get used to the truth. Because we, wanting to be naturalistic, have lied so much artistically, that is why we also have the plight that so many lies are currently being told in the other world contexts.

Just think what, let us say, for example, the drama has achieved. Drama, at the end of the 19th century, in the culmination of materialism, began to be materialistic as well. There were people sitting in the auditorium watching dramatic performances of Arno Holz or Gerhart Hauptmann and so on, and now they didn't have something dramatic in the old Shakespearean, Schillerian or Goethean sense, where great series of events that are far apart are summarized, but a back house, a front house, or something like that, which was to be recreated in a very naturalistic way. The people should not talk about anything other than what is usually talked about in three hours. What kind of naturalism is that? It is the naturalism that, just like today's natural science, only takes into account the extra-human, which also, in the artistic, only takes into account the extra-human: can it be seen? If you wanted to be a model for a drama, you would have to remove the third wall so that everyone could see inside; then you could see what happens in three hours and recreate it from the stage.

These things are of course not taken into account at all in the age of naturalism, and one does not find the possibility of really placing the human being back into the whole natural and cosmic context. But this must also happen in art. It is understandable that art has long adhered to the model; but now the time has passed when art can adhere to the model. Art must grow together with the creative forces of nature and work out of the creative forces of nature. For what is the point of recreating nature in a naturalistic way? Whatever is created in a naturalistic way can never be achieved by nature. Every smallest achievement that is made out of something that is not there in the senses can be more significant than anything that appears to be so perfectly created in nature. If you want something realistic, you can say that you are sticking to nature itself. And in addition, in many areas naturalism was even somewhat extraordinarily frivolous. One thinks of Hauptmann's “Weavers”: the well-fed people sat down in the theater to overlook the whole series of scenes in Hauptmann's “Weavers”. This was called “social art”, bringing the misery of life into the theater, something frivolous, a frivolous cultural phenomenon. So we have to turn to the supersensible again. Today, people find it difficult to decide to enter the supersensible in art. But it will not become light in humanity if we do not decide on something like this in all areas.

Because the small cupola room is painted, the motifs are only the novellistic, not even the truly pictorial, artistic. But you have seen the thing itself, and so you might remember, especially in the pictures that I can show here, what you saw. It is perhaps even interesting to note how what is on the dome wall there cannot be reproduced if you only have the motif. But the motif itself, if you have it, must show that there is something incomplete about it. A motif that only appears in black and white is simply not satisfactory, because you have to be able to say what is missing. There must be something missing, because what is actually supposed to be depicted is areas of color, not black and white, and not lines, while what will appear to us is the novellistic element, the thought, which basically does not belong at all.

What you see here is what meets you from the small dome when you enter it. A child, emerging from the indeterminate material forms, flying towards the medieval figure, which has been captured by capturing a kind of Faust figure. It should be captured in a certain sense, the initiation of the Middle Ages. After humanity had gone through the most diverse forms of initiation, this initiation of the Middle Ages came about with all its tragedy.

It is indeed the case that, according to the spiritual conditions of this stage of human development, the human being cannot rise to an understanding of the living unless the realization of death stands beside it. To see through the connection between life and death is what leads, ultimately, from the Middle Ages to our own day, and through it to true knowledge.

In the next picture you see here that which lies further to the east: this medieval initiate himself, who comes to his realization out of reflection, out of turning away from the world. But precisely if we want to experience this turning away from the world, we must experience it by acquiring an understanding of the forces of death that are out there in the whole world. And these forces of death are intimately related to our powers of consciousness. The same thing that confronts us in the human skeleton, that, my dear friends, that is the external image of death, at the same time expresses in external physical form what lives in our nervous system when we experience the reflective consciousness of modern times.

The consciousness of the early Middle Ages and especially the ancient consciousness were such that they did not depend on the human being dying in every moment of their waking lives in order to think. But in return, human beings were filled with images and imaginations in their consciousness, even if they were atavistic. Intellectualism has only developed since the middle of the 15th century. It has developed because our head organs have assumed a formation that, when it takes hold of the whole person, continually leads to death. A battle between life and death is constantly taking place in the human being. The head wants to die. This is prevented by the life forces that continually surge up from the rest of the organization.

This dying of the head, to which we owe our intellectual consciousness, is what should also be expressed through all the colors and everything that has been brought out of the color in this form. This is the only place where the letter, the written word, appears within our entire structure, and rightly so, because it is only in this time that the I, the I-thought of humanity, has become so abstract that it can be pointed to with letters. The I-thought will only be able to be borne more and more by the fact that this I is indeed filled with the Christ. That is why medieval mysticism had the task of developing the Pauline word through a whole series of sermons and reflections such as those of Johannes Tauler and Meister Eckhart. It is fixed for all eternity within the medieval language, which developed in the German-speaking areas after the modern era, that the I: written out, the initials of Christ Jesus: ICH;

For the reasons I have just explained, you see Death beneath the Faust figure; this Death comes from forces that work from the center of the Earth towards us and combine only with the Mercury forces that work from the cosmos towards the Earth. The sight of the Faust-like figure with Death below him would be unbearable if the counter-image were not created in his perception, in the child flying towards Faust and the ego.

The next picture shows us the Greek personality as she lives under the initiation, a more feminine figure, since in fact the Greek initiation spoke more to the feminine. In general, in Greek high culture, the content of the initiation had to be gained by the initiate acquiring what female figures, who to a certain extent intervened in the flow that comes to man from the cosmos, what could be gained from such female figures: The Pythian priestesses in Greece are intimately connected with the whole structure of the Greek initiation. So that then such things appear as these heads, for example, which are worked purely from form.

This already invites us not to ask in the abstract sense: What does something like this mean? This question is an unartistic one when posed in abstract form. At this point, one must look at what color is there and how, according to the principle that I have just explained here, the shapes themselves emerge from the experience of the colors. Everything that belongs to this figure has actually come about in the end through the perception of the colors.

The next picture: you have a larger area to see here, here is the flying child seen earlier; here the small dome connects to the large dome; then this figure of the medieval initiator, and here is death. And here is the figure you just saw, above it the inspiring figure, an Apollo-like figure. Unfortunately, the picture is very imperfect. And at the top there is still the higher inspirer.

In these pictures, there is always what is initiated as a personality. Above it, there is the figure that sinks the imaginations into the personality to be initiated, and above it, there is the figure of a higher hierarchical order that sinks the inspirations into it. So here you have the inspiring figure, which is above the Faust-like figure.

The next picture is unfortunately very unclear. This is the inspiring figure that is above the Greek initiator. If you imagine the one you saw earlier, with the three heads on the shoulder, then this is the figure above it, the one who lets the imaginations flow into the lower figure, and above that the inspirer of the heads of the inspirer. Here is the head of the inspirer, and below that would be this Athena-like figure, who inspires and is inspired and imagined.

And here you have the two figures. The figure at the bottom is that which sends the imaginations down into the Egyptian initiates, and the other figure is that which allows the inspirations to flow into them. And as we move forward, we come to the representation of Egyptian initiation.

So the next picture is the Egyptian initiates; above him are the two figures that have just been seen here.

And so we come to the older Persian-Germanic initiation. This Persian-Germanic initiation is still effective in our time, but it has, as it were, something enclosed within it, the medieval initiation mentioned earlier, that is, the one characterized in the first figure. The medieval initiation is, as it were, shorter, and this one encompasses the whole long period. What matters in it is that the duality in the world - the bright, Luciferic, the dark, Ahrimanic - be seen through in its entire effect on the world. Here you have on the one hand the dark, Ahrimanic: the small head is in fact Ahriman, the other is his shadow, which he carries with him. On the other side: the Lucifer figure. You can see how this is developed in the sculptural group – you have all seen the group. So you can see how the contrast between the head of Ahriman and the head of Lucifer confronts you. And in the painting, one could also clearly express this mutual relationship between Ahriman and Lucifer.

If you see, for example, how the forward thrust of Lucifer's forehead virtually takes away Ahriman's foreheads, or how Ahriman's foreheads are hardened towards the back, then you see the interplay as it is the organizing force of nature. This then goes down. You see how a kind of centaur shape corresponds to Ahriman – a kind of centaur shape also corresponds to Lucifer – that they are connected to each other, want to be apart and cannot, complement each other in the colors, and below that the Persian-Germanic initiate, who carries the child floating on his hand, pointing out how the future and the hope for the future must be taken up in man by seeing through dualism.

The next image: Ahriman is alone with his shadow. The Ahrimanic is therefore everything in man that works in one direction in man. The human being is so essentially that man constantly strives to keep the balance between the Ahrimanic and the Luciferic in him. The Ahrimanic is everything in us that, if we take the matter spiritually, inwardly, strives in us for the sober, prosaic, materialistic, for the philistine, for the bourgeois, for the tantric. That is the Ahrimanic, that which hardens man, that which solidifies man within himself, which prevents him from opening up to the world, which makes him absorbed in his egoism. It is that which draws man to the earth, physiologically speaking, it is that which works in man and by which he would actually be continually exposed to the danger of succumbing to hardening, to sclerosis, to ossification, if it were not for the reciprocal, the Luciferic. He would be constantly in danger of becoming diabetic, for example, or of developing terrible gouty lumps. That is the Ahrimanic. Ahriman suffers greatly from constant gouty lumps, from constant rheumatism, etc. There are things that are physiologically connected with the soul-like philistinism, materialism, bourgeois conformity, and so on, as I characterized it earlier.

This is the Luciferian figure, the complete opposite image. It is the other side of man, that which continually causes man, in his soul, to stray into the mystical and the fantastic, continually causes him, as it were, to be a being that wants to get beyond the human head. All enthusiasm in man is that which is striven for by the forces that are, as such, Luciferian in man.

Now there are two ways in which these contradictions can be present in human nature: One is that man strives to achieve a kind of equilibrium, that is, to facilitate everything that strives within him towards the philistine, the bourgeois, by also developing imagination, by also being able to devote himself to the world, and by also understanding how to bring the artistic into the purely abstract. That is to say, it is possible for a person to achieve such a balance of these two opposing currents that the person becomes one through the two harmoniously blending into each other and becoming one.

But the other is also possible, that the two extremes continue to work in man, so that man does not find a balance in which they flow into one another, but that the two things are active in him. For example, you can meet mystical enthusiasts who ascend to the highest theosophical, symbolic regions, always wanting to rise above their heads, but in ordinary life they are philistines. Loving everything philistine, pedantic, materialistic, tough and so on - yes, tough! - goes quite well with mystical enthusiasm in a person. This, so to speak, obscures the balance deep within the unconscious. There, what is actually a twofold nature comes out in dualism. So in some ways, these two sides can also be present in a person, revealing themselves. One is not a philistine just because one is a dreamer. One can very well be a philistine and a dreamer at the same time. Figure 13 (Fig. 80):

There you see the one who is inspired by the insights of the interaction of the dark and the light world, who must connect what is indicated by the child's hovering.

Here you see that which is already there in a certain way as an initiation principle, but which will only have its task in the future: the way in which the secrets of the upper world can be received in Slavic countries today, a kind of Russian figure that has its own shadow beside it, as so often the Russian invisibly carries its own shadow with it, always has its shadow beside it. What is inspired from above, we will then see more clearly. A centaur figure, something that is already humanly shaped or already superhumanly shaped. There is no need to decide this question, but rather to think in terms of form. In between, as a counter-image, the angelic form. Just as we have Ahriman and Lucifer in the present culture, the Germanic-Persian one, so here, where we go a little further, we have the human form, stuck in the animal, and a superhuman form as its opposite.

You see here above the figure still reminiscent of the animal, so to speak the animal transported into the world of the stars, the animal having become ethereal, which contains within itself the forces of initiation for this future time, when these forces on the other side – these forces, which are more of an Ahrimanic nature – are held in the balance by the superhuman, by the angelic, which approaches this figure from the other side.

Here you have the angelic form together with the animal form, but it is something that is ethereally animal and ethereally superhuman. It is the interaction of the mysteries that work in one form or another that will bring about the initiation for the coming age.

The next picture: Here you have once more, so that you can see more of it, the initiating and the initiated. Thus, an attempt has been made to put together in the dome that which leads to the knowledge of the supersensible from the most diverse human conditions - Egyptian, Greek, medieval, past, future - and from the most diverse temporal conditions. And all of this is worked out of color to such an extent that one can have the impression that the wall is destroying itself, destroying itself with something that actually has no end in the soul, that enters into the spiritual; so that the wall, through its artistic design, cancels itself out.

Here you see the Luciferian figure as it is in the central figure; here is Christ. You will remember that you saw it over there in the building: it is in particular red color, worked out of red and yellow. I wanted to distinguish it from the other colors; so that the whole – if one may say so – the Luciferian experience – is a red-yellow experience, from the burning, phosphorous color, from the hot color, everything that leads people to want to rise above their own heads.

Everything that is otherwise in the dome and in the building in general is as if synthesized in this eastern group, in this Christ-like figure in the center, Lucifer above it, Ahriman below it, which is then completed in the rock group below. The whole mystery of man is there as a mystery: Christ, Lucifer, man, Ahriman, and thus there is a continuation of the building idea, which was found in its various metamorphoses from ancient Greek, Gothic times to our own. The Greek temple, as a dwelling for a god, had only one meaning in that it enclosed the god. One cannot imagine its forms of construction other than as the dwelling of the god. The medieval Gothic cathedral only has a purpose if the community is in it, otherwise it is abandoned. Its walling indicates that it only has a purpose if the community is in it. Inside, there should be that which leads man to self-knowledge, which presents man to himself, what man is: a being that has to seek the Hypomochlion between the Luciferic and the Ahrimanic.

In the next picture, you can see below it the Ahrimanic, which is struck by the rays of fire emanating from the arm of the Representative of Humanity - the Christ Jesus. The Ahrimanic is also held fast by the forces of the earth. It is everything that pushes the human being towards the earth, the heaviness of the earth in the human being, just as the Luciferic is that through which the human being wants to move away from the world. The Ahrimanic: the inward brokenness, the inward heavy suffering. The Luciferic: that which leads the human being to stupefaction, to illusion, to hallucination. Here with Ahriman, everything bony, everything hardening. In Lucifer, everything feverish, pleurisy-like, etc., everything that, if developed one-sidedly by the human being, would cause the human being to burn inwardly through his joy and lust and greed and desire. The Ahrimanic: that which freezes within in pain and therefore endures infinite pain when the rays of fire come over its coldness.

The next picture: the head of the Representative of Man, as I believe it can be fully captured in spiritual science. The usual image that one has of Christ - it was actually only in the sixth century that the bearded Christ emerged - the history of Christ portraits is extremely interesting. The Christ portraits emerged from lively discussions about whether Christ was beautiful or ugly. Of course, these discussions took place at a time when there was no longer a living image of Christ. Then the urge to capture Christ in pictures arose at a time when people could no longer depict beauty in the old Greek sense. We have to try to see Christ spiritually. And as far as I believe I can advocate the matter, it is – precisely by transforming the whole into the spiritual, which can only be seen in what has been preserved in the Akasha Chronicle – the figure of the one who really walked in Palestine at the beginning of our era. But this should not be taken as if there were a portrait study, but it can be felt that the representative of humanity is also connected with history in this way. Everything must follow from the artistic intuition itself.

Now I still have a few figures in the next picture: you see the middle group here. Here the Russian initiation, above it the angel, the centaur; then this Golgotha Way, the threefold path, to Christ, to the two thieves or robbers. Here the Ahriman figure, struck by the rays of fire, then the Christ figure, above it Lucifer. Here again the other side: the angel, the centaur figure, thus the initiating one. Below that, in turn, would be the two initiators that belong together.

Here you see the five-part leaf that I mentioned yesterday. Then you see the Germanic-Persian initiation, the Luciferic-Ahrimanic one, and then the Egyptian initiation. But this is already very unclear in this picture. You can still see the Egyptian initiate. An attempt has been made to photograph the object in a variety of ways. It is of course true that photography can only give the motif in the most diverse ways, which is basically not what it is all about.

I would also like to mention that our building, the double-domed structure, is covered with Norwegian slate. Once, when I was on a lecture tour that took me from Kristiania to Bergen, I looked out of the window of the railway carriage and noticed the beautiful Voss slate from the Voss slate quarries. During that journey, I had the idea that it would be a good idea to use this Voss slate to cover our building – an idea that could then be realized. Those who look at the roofs of our building, as they shine, especially under certain effects of the sun in their grayish-blue, will see that this idea was indeed a justified one, to ship this Norwegian slate to the south just enough to cover this building. It does indeed reflect the sun's rays wonderfully, and the rays of light in turn.

Of course, I can only give a brief description of what was attempted in this building. If you combine what I have been able to discuss, because there are pictures, with what you will see in the future, along with many other things, in general and in detail, you will get an idea of how this building should become a hieroglyph, an immediate revelation in the forms and colors of that which lies in the entire anthroposophically oriented world view. It should be presented as a great hieroglyph to the present day. And something would really be done for our time and for the near future if this building could ever be completed. It has been started with a certain devotion to the cause, started at that time especially from those areas that are now confined to world life, that can no longer really contribute because they are completely impoverished in relation to the rest of the world. Events have brought it about that precisely these regions have become impoverished in the face of world events, which first gave rise to this idea of building, and it would actually be good if so much un-chauvinistic, pure humanity could arise in the world that this building could now really be completed on the part of those regions that have suffered less from the horrors of recent years. It should actually be completed.

However, if you look at everything that has been a motivating factor in the last five to six years, and if you see it continuing to have an effect on the winners and the defeated, if you see how nowhere does the realization dawn that a completely new situation must take hold, then there can be little hope that this edifice will ever be completed. But it is, my dear friends, a demand of the time, it is a demand of the future. It is something that should be understood quite differently than one has been inclined to understand it until now. And it would perhaps be the first sign of a manifestation of the will to heal the world if, let us say, an understanding were to awaken from the English, French, and American sides, precisely for the completion of this building. The first impulse came from Central Europe; the rest would have to come from those who were neutral in the last years or from those who were hostile to Central Europe, if there were real understanding.

But it really seems as if souls want to continue sleeping, as if most of them say to themselves: Oh, what's the point of getting involved in something new! Things will only turn out well if we go back to what was more or less the case until 1914. Many people long for that. My dear friends, that will never come back. And those who want that, and who are working to bring it about, those who cannot rise above the idea that something as new must come among us as the architectural styles of this building here are, they are working towards the downfall of humanity. Isn't it actually, I would say, heartbreaking in terms of the culture of humanity and its development, as Dr. Kolisko had to say here a few days ago, as he had to characterize, as it were, how at the turn of the 18th to the 19th century and well into the 19th century, the Goethe culture had emerged, and that this Goethe culture has completely dried up. It had already dried up in Germany by the 1880s.

Perhaps I may allow myself a subjective judgment in these matters, because I myself came to Weimar for the first time in 1889, then in 1890 to the Goethe-Schiller Archive. Yes, my dear friends, there we really were at the burial place of Goetheanism, at the real burial place of Goetheanism. And in that, there was no difference between the various nations of the world. There the German scholar, by cutting syllables, recalled Faust, together with Calvin Thomas, the American scholar, who cut syllables in the same way. People from all over the world worked there. Science had come to the point where it was far away, where it was concerned with Goethe. Truly, everywhere a cutting up of the living Goethean being, terrible, terrible!

In Austria, however, which already carried the seed of destruction within itself, which, through its state-political system, carried the seeds of destruction within itself, there were still a few isolated developers of Goetheanism, as Dr. Kolisko characterized it here in these days. Then, what once existed was finished, covered up! It is up to humanity itself whether the same fate that befell Goetheanism befalls all of European culture and its American offspring. It is hard to believe, but the question for humanity today is: Do you want something new and thus save the white race from barbarism, or do you want the same fate for the entire culture of the white race as for Goetheanism? And rising above this barbarism of the white race, what will the non-white races, namely the Negroes and similar races, bring about what is now the civilized world? ¹ The question today is: How many people are able to face this problem? How many people feel how serious it is today that it is a matter of the existence or non-existence of contemporary civilization?

This building was intended to be nothing less than a living expression of this. It is the continuation of what European culture has achieved, and this continuation should live, not die! But this building does not appeal to an indeterminate fate, to which one might comfortably surrender, but rather appeals to something actively alive. If people want to save European civilization without this active life, without this impulse for salvation, without this will, without this act of freedom, then this culture will not be saved, and will meet the same fate as Goetheanism in Central Europe. Then one might establish large archives and do philology in these large archives about what once was in Europe. But we should not let it come to archives alone; we should let it come to living buildings, both physical and spiritual, which already announce their liveliness through their forms. I would like that to be read from these forms. Because this name, Goetheanum, was longed for by someone, my dear friends, as the final name for this building here, which has already experienced the difference between a mausoleum of Goetheanism and what could be a living organism for the Goethean spirit, but in its further development, now for 1920, in fifty years for 1970, etc.

That is what I wanted to say to you today, following the description of the building.

• 1. See the reference on p. 159.