The Rudolf Steiner Archive

[ 1 ] Passing on to-day to the paintings in the smaller dome, it has not been possible to make lantern slides from the photographs of the paintings of the larger dome—as we pass on to the paintings in the smaller dome, I am indeed in a peculiar position, and everyone will be in this position who wishes to present an idea from these copies of what is meant by the paintings of the dome, to the wider public who has not first seen them here. The attempt has been made in accordance with that artistic point of view referred to, in my Mystery Play The Portal of Initiation, to evolve form in the painting entirely out of colour, so that, as regards the painting of the smaller dome, as far as possible, the influence of this point of view is actually felt—even then of course everything is only at the initial stages. [ 2 ] To allow form to appear as the creation of colour is that which is aimed at here. If we follow the history of painting we see that this fundamental principle to draw forth all that is pictorial from colour, can really only be at the very beginning of its development. Men tried in the art of painting because it offers the special temptation—this was even so in the most brilliant period—to express some naturalistic theme in reproduction. Even though it must be admitted—and who would not willingly admit, in reference to the production of Raphael, Leonardo, Michael Angelo and others?—that the greatest heights of pictorial art have been reached in striving for expression in this way, and it must be admitted that the whole modern cosmic conception which is unspiritual can scarcely do otherwise than somehow strive for expression, yet the time has come when a spiritualization of our cosmic conception must be sought; another principle, another way of artistic thinking, especially in the art of painting must make itself felt. [ 3 ] This artistic feeling certainly will only be admitted by him who has a presentiment that in this world each element represents a creative whole. If we have a right sense for the world of colour we find something truly world-creative in colour. Anyone able to sink himself into the world of colour is able to soar up to the feeling, that from this mysterious world of colour a world of beings spring up, that the colour itself through its own inherent forces will develop into a world of beings. I might say: as we see the growing man in embryo in the little child, so can we see a world of beings in embryo if we have a right sense for the world of colour.

[ 4 ] Certainly it does not mean that we should have merely a feeling for the single colour; the single colour, as a rule, establishes only a relationship between man and colour as such. To see blue means to feel an intense desire, longing, to go out into the space in which the colour is manifesting, to follow the colour; to look at red calls forth a feeling of being attacked, as if one had to defend oneself against something, and so on with the other colours. Colours have also a certain relation with that which can be formed in colour, if we are able to draw the form out of the colour. Blue, for instance will always help if we wish to express movement, red will always help if we wish to express physiognomy. But what I mean has to do much less with single colours at with what the colours have to say to one another, whet red has to say to blue, green to blue, green to red, orange to lilac, etc. In this exchange, I might say, of speech, and exchange of activity between the colours, an entirely new world would come to expression. And we do not fully perceive this interchange of speech and interplay of: colours, if me are not. able to perceive colours as ocean-waves rising and falling, and at the same to perceive, playing upon the waves of colour, coming into life from the colour-waves, the elemental beings which develop their forms of themselves out from the colour-waves.

[ 5 ] Thus the attempt has been made to show in painting the secret of how to create out of the very nature of colour. For a greater part of that which is living, which we look out on, is born wholly out of the creative colour-world. As our vegetation has sprung forth from the ocean, so that which is living grows out of the colour-world.

[ 6 ] I might say, it is always pitiful to see how those who are possessed of artistic feeling truly feel that the old forms of art are bankrupt, that they can go no further, and how in spite of this the world is not willing to respond to the impulse which can only be explained through the anthroposophical interpretation of the world. Certainly this anthroposophical interpretation of the world must be something more than a mere intellectual idealistic set of ideas. It must be an intuitive perception. We must be able to think in colours, in forms, just as we think in ideas and thoughts. We must be able to live in colours, in forms. [ 7 ] If our Building is to be what it is intended to be, it must in a certain sense, bring to expression, as in one living being, the spiritual, the psychic and the physical. The spiritual is essentially brought to expression in the forms of the pillars, the architrave and the capitals, etc. In these is reflected the spirit, out of itself creating form. The psychic finds its manifestation, for example, in the glass-windows. In this interplay of the external light with the engraving on the coloured sheets of glass may be dimly apprehended by the play of the psychic, and the physical, that shows itself in its own configuration if one has the right-vision for what is painted in the domes. The paintings in the domes express to a certain extent the physical substantiality. It is, of course, the case that in the arrangement of the Building, which strives to give an understanding of the world to come extent, there is a reversed order, as compared with the ordinary comprehension of the three world principles. This follows naturally in contrast to what one generally imagines, i.e. the spiritual above, the physical below. In that which should develop in the human soul as force of inspiration through the whole artistic structure of the Building there must be a reversed relationship.

[ 8 ] But this very creation from colours is of course just what I cannot show you in lantern slides, and therefore with lantern slides we do not get what is really essentially purposed in the painting in the domes. We get as it were inartistic ideas, effects of what is intended to he artistic. But of course that cannot be helped, and it is to be hoped that those who see these lantern slides of colour-pictures will regard there pictures as it were as crying out for something else, as not really giving expression to that which is intended. If we take them in the right way we must say, as regards these lantern slides of colour-pictures somewhat as follows: “What is really in these pictures, really wishes to speak to us in a totally different language”, and then we shall be led to see the Building itself in the original conception of it. And out of the contemplation of these lantern slides, this will be a longing that will then arise in him who has artistic perception. Hence I do not think it quite superfluous to produce even these lantern slides.

[ 9 ] We start from here in the small dome, where as a beginning there is, on the surface of the walls, a kind of flying child, immediately at the junction of the large and small domes. You see this flying child, which in its composition belongs to what follows on here on your left. The composition is of course entirely derived from the colour; yet it also forms an element in the configuration of the small dome. You understand the whole figure of this child here if you keep in mind the two adjacent forms.

We will now put on the next picture.

[ 10 ] You see here as it were a figure of Faust. Here we are in the riddle Ages, just at the time when our fifth post-Atlantean age begins and here you find the only word written in letters, the Ich or I or Ego. In the whole Building you find nothing anywhere expressed in written letters. The intellectual method of representing a word, of this foundation word I or Ego, has so far its justification here, in that, with the commencement of the fifth post-Atlantean civilisation that in which ourselves stand—in the 15th century, developing further into the time of Faust, in the 16th century, that which was invisible appeared, that which expressed by mere symbols, by what had detached itself from Reality. That which lay at the bottom of the real ego-being of man was not grasped. In the universal spiritual evolution of humanity no image of the ego had been evolved. For, when man said “I” he had only an abstract idea in his mind. This is therefore the justification for introducing a wholly unreal representation of the ego through letters. And it falls into place naturally by the side of the Faust-figure. [ 11 ] Do not, I beg you, attach any special value to my expression Faust-figure. The main thing is that in the whole composition this figure expresses what the spirit of the age in that very epoch produces in the seeking man. You see it brought to expression especially in the eye, in the countenance, in the attitude of the hand, you see it expressed in the whole gesture of the figure. That we are reminded of Faust is what one might say—purely arbitrary. It is the man who in the fifth our post-Atlantean age actually seeks, which is the characteristic of our age. Of the real fundamental character of this seeking few men as yet are conscious. Since the 15th century we have evolved ever more a sort of philosophy of death, which is no longer capable of grappling with life. [ 12 ] This is the result of the whole training which humanity had to pass through at the beginning of the fifth post-Atlantean period. During this period humanity has to develop the inner force of freedom. self-consciousness. Humanity can only do this by breaking adrift from nature. But to break adrift from nature means to identify oneself with the forces which in perceiving, alone understand death, recognise what is dead. All our ideas, all concepts which are the actual concepts of civilisation lead to death, are concerned with what is dead. And he who to-day is not himself dead, as most learned men are in soul, he who to-day is not himself dead as regards his seeking, finds in the seeking of these principles an incentive to what makes man free but is at the same time, I might say, the abyss or the dead. He has constantly the feeling: Thou makest thyself indeed free, but in so doing thou comest into proximity with death. Thus Death had to be brought into proximity with the Faust-figure.

[ 13 ] This is below. Hero you see the seeking man, who to-day is under the impress, under the feeling of death, death which always accompanies the most important ideals in the search for knowledge. It would be unbearable to a feeling soul to have a sort of Faust-figure above and below to have death, and no counterpart in the composition. Therefore, before we come to this composition of Faust and Death, we have this flying child, which to some extent represents the contrast to the feeling of Death. Thus a Trinity is to be understood: Death, the Seeking Man and the young Child full of life. With this is painted in the small dome what may be presented as the Initiation of the fifth post-Atlantean time. The Initiation-wisdom of the fifth-post Atlantean time is not to be won without one's having as it were full consciousness of the significance of Death, not only in human life, but in the life of the whole world as well. We possess indeed our powers of thinking because we continually bear the forces of death in our head. Were these forces which are active in our head for the purpose of thinking to penetrate our whole organism we should not be able to live, we should continually die. We only live because the tendency in our head to death is continually balanced by the tendency to life in the rest of our organism. That is, I may say briefly and lightly expressed in the abstract, the law of our time. [ 14 ] When I tell you this, I can understand that it does not penetrate specially deeply into your hearts, into your souls. To have experienced, signifies something fearful; to have experienced that impulse which in every effort for knowledge says: What thou canst acquire as knowledge at the present time, thou owest to Death which penetrates more and more into the earth-life. What really must enter into the earth-life of humanity will only enter when this initiation-principle, now at the very beginning of its growth—the power of Death!—extends further and further and engenders the vital longing of the newer future humanity for the compensating spirit, for a youth who is already Jupiter, which is no longer earth-youth, which is already the youth of the next planetary embodiment of the earth.

[ 15 ] We now go back to what can-be pictorially represented of the fourth post-Atlantean (the Graeco-Latin) period of civilisation. A sort of form is given here in the paintings of the small dome, which in its whole configuration - you will particularly feel this when you look at the colouring of this figure in the small dome—which, in its whole configuration, in its whole nature, portrays the shining-in of the spiritual world into humanity during the fourth post-Atlantean period, as it was to be at that time. Above this figure you find those who gave the inspiration, of which I have not been able to obtain lantern slides from the photographs. You always find those who inspire, over the corresponding figures, only in the case of the fifth post-Atlantean period of civilisation, Death itself, appears from below and approaching man above is the real Being which inspires.

[ 16 ] Here you see above a kind of God, an Apollo-like form, as the inspirer. That which, through inspiration, is able to enter a human form of the fourth post-Atlantean period of civilisation comes into this figure. Thus you see the actual human history of the inner soul-development is painted in the small dome. Of course you must give up asking inartistic questions. When an artist paints a form on the wall, there is nothing in his soul that,can meet such a question as: What does this or that mean? The inartistic man will stand before this figure and say: What do there two or three heads mean on the left of the principal figure? That it not the question of an artist; it is the question which he who paints it will least of all be willing to answer, because for him visions have to form pictorially, they simply appear in space as forms in a vision. He perceives nothing whatever with which to meet the question: What does that mean?—but he feels a necessity from the creative cosmic forces to place a form, which is inspired just like this one, in the neighbourhood of that which has already been-represented in human form.

[ 17 ] I spoke of the creative forces themselves inherent in the colour-world. At the present time, if one sees any painting, one always has the image in one's mind. This is just what must be overcome. There are many more elementary impressions which must possess the artistic soul. (I will explain more clearly in detail what I have to say). Suppose I simply make a smudge of colour, a yellow smudge, and add to it a blue smudge (see illustration). He who perceives colour as something actually living cannot experience other than, when he so perceives a colour in this way, a yellow smudge with a blue border, to see a head in profile.

[ 18 ] This follows of itself for him who carries the life of colour within him. Just two smudges of colour are, to him who possesses the creative idea of colour, that which at the came time leads to the experience of its essence. But anyone cannot, let us say, paint a face according to colour in such a way that he can say: I have seen a face, or indeed, have a model, and after this model I have formed a face, and it resembles it. Not in this way will painting be done in the future, but colour will be experienced, and the artist will turn away from everything naturalistic, from all copying, and from the colour itself that will be drawn out which already lies in it and which must necessarily be drawn out, if one has a living feeling with the life of colour itself.

[ 19 ] Here you find a combination of what you have seen singly before: here above, the Flying Child, this Figure of the 16th century, below Death, the remainder less distinct. You see here above, the one inspiring, you can recognise him the higher inspirer of the figure you have just seen on this sheet but which is here very indistinct. It is, of course, difficult to reproduce in this rough way of colourless pictures things which have really only been lightly breathed into the colours on the walls. Such can only be understood, I might say, as a description of what is actually intended.

[ 20 ] Here you see the inspiring figures of the third post-Atlantean (the Egyptians) period of civilisation, those which inspire from the spiritual world that figure which will now appear in the next picture.

We have here, inspired by the previous figures, the Initiates of the third post-Atlantean period of civilisation.

[ 21 ] Thus in the small dome the actual psychic evolution of humanity is painted, certainly not according to historical time, that you will see at once, but in an inner way. For now we are not going back simply to the earlier second post-Atlantean period of civilisation, but we are going back indeed to the Persian principle of Initiation, which also had developed out of the primeval Persian principle of Initiation, and is the Germanic principle of Initiation.

So when we pass on to the next picture we have the Germanic principle of Initiation. This Germanic-Persian principle of Initiation is founded on a dualism, and everything depends on the understanding of the fact that the initiation of of the period of civilisation which took its rise in the primeval Persian period, continued its development in the Goethean period of civilisation. It spread geographically from Asia Minor, across the Black Sea northwards into Europe, and this Initiation-stream reaches its fulfilment in recognising the principle of man's effort to seek the balance between Lucifer, whom you see on the right, and Ahriman on the left. The essential point is that we understand that this current of civilisation crust derive all force in the finding of the condition of equilibrium between the Luciferic and the Ahrimanic. And an attempt has been made, in this very figure, which is inspired by the Ahrimanic-Luciferic principle itself, by that which you see here on the right as Luciferic, and here on the left as Ahrimanic, to show in the attitude, in the whole physiognomy, that spirituality that must result from the realisation of this dualism, the Luciferic and the Ahrimanic, between which man has to find the balance.

[ 22 ] The fact that you see here the child as it were held up by the Initiate, for this there is no good foundation. For what flows into man through the inspiration of the dual principle, could not be endured, it would kill him inwardly, if he had not always the vision of youth, of the child. When you see this in the dome, you will observe that an earnest attempt has been made to draw out of the colours just what is meant here. An attempt has been made to draw out of the colours even the contrast between what is Luciferic and what is Ahrimanic. Only you must not analyse minutely, but seek what is essential in the artistic perception.

[ 23 ] Picture 8: Here you see Ahriman presented. There are not two Ahrimans, but Ahriman and his shadow. That is to say, Ahriman does not go about without his constant shadow accompanying him. Ahriman himself would be a much too freezing, too drying-up a principle of he appeared for instance in his full nature. It is most necessary to have near him his shadow which qualifies his freezing influence. If you study the colours in the small dome, you will see that in this particular shade of colour, the brownish-green, an attempt has been made to expr ess the freezing effect of Ahriman; an attempt has been made to bring everything out of the colour.

[ 24 ] Here you see the Lucifer-theme. You will only understand the Luciferic and Ahrimanic principles fully if you see them in connection. If you simply look at Ahriman alone and Lucifer alone you will really understand neither; only when you have them side by side, because really Ahriman and Lucifer create and work in such a way in the universe that always whatever the one accomplishes is taken and made use of by the other, and vice versa. Thus their figures can only be rightly understood if one sees them in their living relationship to each other.

The inspiration that come from these will be shown in the next picture.

[ 25 ] I had hoped to express in this countenance with its adequate colour what is possible to express in a figure standing under the influence of this dual principle. It is the need,of inner stability, and at the same time self-possession in temperament, in character and the joyous inclination towards that which is young and childlike, in order to bear all that which one experiences under the actual inspiring influence of the dual principle.

Here we have the same again in another aspect.

[ 26 ] Here you see that into which our Period of civilisation will resolve itself. This picture is to be found nearer to the central Group, that of the representative of Humanity with Ahriman and Lucifer We have attempted to represent what had to be shown here as an Initiate, i.e. such a man who could embody the spiritual revelation of the coming 6th post-Atlantean period of civilisation, even now in advance, and we have attempted to represent such an Initiate through the medium of form and colour. For this reason we had to picture not a Russian of to-day: but that which is to be seen to a certain extent in every Russian to-day. every such Russian has his own shadow continually as his companion. He has always his second self who accompanies him, and that is what is here expressed.

[ 27 ] But you must realise that that which is here inspiring him is more spiritual compared with the earlier source of inspiration. Hence this angel-like form which here appears in its whole outline growing out of the blue. You will see more clearly in the next picture the kind of centaur-figure which is essentially necessary to the inspiring Being. You see, this inspiration leads at the same time out into the starry world. We recognise again man in his connection with that in the Cosmos which is external to the earth. But the Being which inspires is no longer to be conceived of in human likeness. In our attempt to show form we come to figures which are no longer human-like which have certain qualities of form which recall the qualities and temperament of man but are no longer human as such.

[ 28 ] Here is this inspiring figure which is a figure of the Cosmos and at the same time in connection with that which still tends towards the human, but is an angel-like Being born wholly out of the colour of the clouds. This is what we see as the colour Inspirer.

The same Being; only there is more to see; the Initiates are here to be seen. Of course the whole effect lies in the colour composition, which, naturally, is here wholly lacking.

[ 29 ] Here we see the upper portion of the Central Group. The middle figure shows the Representative of Humanity, above it, Lucifer.

The middle figure is represented in the painting—under it the Group which is the Chief Group stands—is here represented in painting where the space is small, so as to represent the Luciferic and Ahrimanic principles in one figure only; while, in the plastic Group, on account of the weight, on account of the proportions of the space they are given in double form.

This figure is only to be understood through the colours, through the Red colour out of which it is chiefly composed together with some other shades of colour. And here we are shown how man is seeking the state of equilibrium between that which is Luciferic and that which is Ahrimanic. This search for the state of balance is to certain extent to be found in man as much physically and physiologically as also in his soul and spirit.

[ 30 ] From a physiological, from a physical point of view, man is not that simple growing being that he is often represented to be in superficial science. an inclines continually on the one hand towards ossification, and on the other hand towards .a softening gelatinous condition.

The tendency in a man towards softening, which arises when the blood gains the upper hand, comes from Luciferic influences. Where the Luciferic influence tends to gain the upper hand physiologically in the human being, where feverish phenomena appears physiologically in man as actual formative principles, the Luciferic influence is predominant. As a result, the human form approximates more and more to this form. Man had this form during the ancient-moon period. In other words: if that principle which is specially the principle of growth in heart and lungs were alone to rule the human being, man would preserve such a form. Only through the fact that the Ahrimanic principle is found at the opposite pole to the Luciferic, the physiological state of equilibrium is maintained between that which the blood brings about and that which is produced by the ossifying tendency. This is the case viewed physiologically, from the point of view of the physical body.

[ 31 ] From the point of view of the soul one may say: man is continually on the search for the state of balance between excessive enthusiasm, which is Luciferic, and that which is prosaic, materialistic, abstract, which is Ahrimanic. From the point of view of the spirit: man is continually seeking the balance between theca conditions of consciousness which are specially permeated with Light where the consciousness is awakened through the irradiation, through the illumination of the soul; through the Luciferic. And the opposite pole is that through which weight, gravity, electricity, magnetism, in short, all that which holds one down, bring about the consciousness of self, the attainment of consciousness: all this is Ahrimanic. Man is always seeking the balance between these two conditions, and we may observe how that all that man can make man more conscious, that can bring him away, from the middle.path always inclines either to the one side or the other, the Luciferic or Ahrimanic. It would be of immense importance even for the study of human physical organism, if we discarded the merely theoretical principle of growth, that of the One principle, and took into consideration that polarically-opposed impulses of growth are present in man as if interwoven, intermingled with each other. The other impulse of growth is Ahrimanic.

[ 32 ] Picture 17: Here is the exact opposite. In every shape, in every line you will see the exact opposite of Lucifer, in this Ahriman, who as it were grows out of the masses of rock, i.e. out of the solid conditions of the earth. His aim is to approach man and so lay hold of him with his force of gravity, (his solidity) that at the same time he slays him with ossification or presses him to death in barren materialism. This is what is expressed in this figure of Ahriman. He appears as if slain by light, hence the rays of which bind him wit) cords so that he is fettered by them. In between we have man - man himself.

[ 33 ] The real man, who represents the condition of equilibrium, under him Ahriman, above him Lucifer.

I expressly draw your attention to this, that here again it is not essential to aim at the visionary conception of the Christ. The essential is that we feel what is here presented in this figure. Then we shall arrive ourselves, through the art representation, to the Christ. That is, we shall discover the central being of all earth's existence, the Christ, when we experience that which is to be felt in this form. The Christ may to-day discovered purely spiritually. But we must rightly understand man and rightly perceive him.

[ 34 ] On the other hand it may be said: he who to-day understands and smypathises with that which man can suffer, with that which he can enjoy, he who fully realises how man can go astray or raise himself towards one side or the other, he who is striving after a real self-knowledge, if he only goes far enough along the road of feeling, perception and will, he will discover the Christ. And he will then be able to find again in the Gospels, in all historical documents, the Christ he has discovered. We cannot to-day really attain to true knowledge of man without attaining to the knowledge of the Christ.

[ 35 ] Even along physiological, biological lines if we rightly conceive of man in his physical form we shall come to the understanding of the Christ. It is just the task of the fifth post-Atlantean time to attain more and more to this understanding of the Christ. Hence there could not be a visionary Christ-figure, concerning which one merely enquired its significance, in the central point of our Building, but the Representative of Humanity, in which the Christ to a certain extent appears in his essence. This is what I would beg you always to consider concerning these things; not to start out from the prosaic intellectual, but from the symbolic, not from the visionary to set out from that which is really there on the wall, not from that which may be imagined about it. That which should fill our thought should come forth from that which is on the wall itself.

[ 36 ] Of course that which is on the wall is only imperfectly executed, but every beginning must be imperfect; even the gothic architecture, when it first appeared was imperfect. The perfect will undoubtedly follow out of that which has here been attempted. This is not to say that earnest effort has not been made to find the true Representative of, Humanity by every means of the art of occult investigation. You see, that figure of Christ which is the traditional one arose only in the 6th century after Christ. For myself, I only give this out as a fact, but do not require from anyone that he accept it as a dogma of belief, for myself I am quite clear on the point, it is for me a fact, that the Christ Jesus who walked in Palestine had this countenance, which you may see on the carved figure. And the attempt has only been made to represent in the expressive gesture that which one sees more when the etheric body is observed than when one observes the physical body. Hence also, the strongly-marked asymmetry which we have dared to portray. This asymmetry is present in every human countenance, naturally not in this strength, but the human countenance is thus indeed, especially as at present man wears in many respects an untrue mask. When humanity will have reached a certain spiritualisation in the 6th and specially the 7th post-Atlantean period where physical man will no longer live on the earth, then man will wear his true countenance, i.e. will express in his countenance what he is really worth within.

[ 37 ] But all this—I should like to point out—is very difficult for the paint-brush or chisel to represent in the painting and sculpture and that which we have attempted to express as the Representative of Humanity. As imperfect as these things may be, he who studies them will find that the secrets, the mysteries of human evolution are actually sainted in this little cupola. He will certainly find that which is meant to be expressed., may be experienced from out of the colour, and that these pictures can only indicate to you what you are capable of feeling, when, on receiving the information which I have given you to-day, you expect nothing symbolic, nothing about which man can enquire the meaning, but when you—rather, with the information I have given you to-day, seek to feel that which is painted into this little cupola.

[ 38 ] Picture 19: Now I want to show the other view of the heating-house. Yesterday I showed the front view, and you see that this heating-house is thought out as a whole, so that its side-view to a certain extent stands full in harmony with the whole, as I yesterday, through the comparison with the nutshell, explained to you.

[ 39 ] I have tried to give you to-day what we have up to the present in pictures. I should like to say that the actual attempt has been made with this Building to make the conception of the Building as far as possible a unity. For example, you see the Building covered over with Norwegian slate. Once when I was travelling on a lecture tour from Christiania to Bergen, I saw on the mountain slopes the wonderful slate-quarries of the neighbourhood of Voss, and the thought came to me that our Building must be covered with this slate. You will find, if you strike a favourable day, and desire to see the thing, that the particular blue-grey glistening of the dome—the covering of this slate—in the sun, makes an impression which is suited to the Building in its dignity.

[ 40 ] This is what I am able to say concerning the Building, in reference to these pictures. I wanted.to make this Building comprehensible to our friends who are willing to undertake the,risk of making it known to and understood by those to whom the Goetheanum in Dornach is perhaps nothing but a name they have heard, and to whom the place is only a geographical idea. I wanted to give this exhibition for those friends who are willing to bring before the understanding of those who are thus placed what will proceed from the Goetheanum for , the future of the evolution of humanity. It is of great importance that this visible token of Spiritual Science from the point of view of Anthroposophy should be accurately brought to the knowledge of the world, and that it is made to a certain extent the centre-point of our considerations and of our feeling within our anthroposophical world-conception.

[ 41 ] He who truly feels at what a turning-point the evolution of humanity has arrived in the present day, he will really indeed find within himself the necessary stimulus to make known what is here being carried out in Dornach. There are not many to-day who see how strongly the forces of human historical forms, coming from the past, act as destructive forces. We have indeed submitted to the destructive forces in Europe during the last 4 or 5 years; only the very few have wished actually to think over and appreciate what really happened. Those who do appreciate it will surely feel that nothing is to be gained for the further development of humanity from that which has been brought over from old times, that literally the new revelation which presses in upon us since the last third of the 19th century must be received by this world of ours.

[ 42 ] No one can think socially to-day without taking up the impulses which come to us from this knowledge which has been described. We must painfully, really painfully, realise, when we hear that there are to-day men who say: Oh Spiritual Science according to Anthroposophy was very pleasant, as long as it was Spiritual Science ,as long as it did not bother itself with outride things, as for example, “The Threefold State” does. There have arisen individual men among the earlier followers of Anthroposophical Spiritual Science who say: Spiritual Science was very acceptable to us by itself; with the social aspect we cannot and will not identify ourselves. Such an attitude of mind is sectarian, and that is what our movement truly never wished to be; this sectarianism only strives after a certain spiritual voluptuousness. I should like to know how anyone can be so without heart, so terribly heartless in the presence of such impulses as are appearing in the evolution of humanity as to say: I want something that comforts my soul, that assures me of immortality, but I won't touch it if this spiritual striving is to have a practical social result. Is it not heartless in such a time as this, not to wish for a practical result from that for which we are striving spiritually?

[ 43 ] Is it not the most confused mysticism to as it were fold the hands and say to oneself: For my soul I will have Spiritual Science but this Spiritual Science must have no social result. It is heartlessness. For how terrible it is to think that to anyone this Spiritual Science should be the most important thing in life, and that it should have no counsel to give in the present-day burdened social condition of humanity. That is the good of this Spiritual Science if it contains no help towards which humanity to-day may turn! Shall it be quite unfruitful, this Spiritual Science, for life? Does it only exist to pour into men a spiritual bliss? No, only thus can it preserve itself, by creating out of itself actual practical results. And it means that true Spiritual Science is not understood if men will not advance to practical results. And Spiritual Science must not be mere visionary knowledge, Spiritual Science must be actual life. Therefore it is always such a great pain that not very many more human souls are able to rouse themselves out of the impulses of Spiritual Science to the great interests of humanity to-day. To-day that which affects the individual is of such infinitesimal importance as compared with that which is fermenting and working in humanity, and the moment one occupies oneself with anything personal, the thought is immediately directed the great interests of humanity. But how many people think like this? For I must remember, how necessary it really is to communicate certain esoteric truths to humanity, and yet how impossible this is because there is really no set of people in whom really the impersonal objective principles have the value that they should have. It is a pressing necessity to communicate certain truths of Initiation to humanity. Only it cannot be done, when one has to do with men who the whole day long are only occupied with their own personal interests, as if they were of the highest importance. To turn our eyes to the human interests, that is what is of such immense importance. He who does this will see very very much to-day.

[ 44 ] I have to draw your attention again and again to the beginning of this battle-storm which will arise with all sorts of slander and lies against Anthroposophical Spiritual Science. Men do not want to believe this, but it is true; Spiritual Science will not be fought primarily on account of its faults; these would be forgiven it; Spiritual Science will be attacked just when it succeeds in accomplishing something good. And the hottest and most infamous attack will be directed against that which Spiritual Science can do of good.

[ 45 ] Each one must examine himself, whilst continually observing with true inner force that which can only be criticised as relentless opposition to Spiritual Science, whether he does not perhaps carry in himself too much of that attitude which does not attack the failings but rather the good sides of Spiritual Science. Much of this sort might be pondered over to-day: And this sort of thing must continually be pointed out. And the time must certainly come firstly, in which it will be possible not to have to approach closed doors with the communication of certain esoteric truths, because men are only occupied with their own personal interests, and secondly in which it will also be possible to bring the most important things when they are spoken, actually home to the hearts of men. As a rule one may proclaim things of the greatest significance—men take them only as a kind of theoretical knowledge, and hence they do not penetrate into, their hearts and affect them deeply; whilst everyday things, humdrum things even perhaps relatively big things, penetrate easily into the hearts of men.

[ 46 ] This is what we must before all else strive for; that that which is drawn from the Spirit shall truly penetrate right into the heart, into the soul, that it does not remain merely in our understanding. Much of the most important of that which has been spoken to-day, which may already be found in the teachings of Spiritual Science or Anthroposophy, bears no fruit on this account, that men let it get no further than their understanding, and then they say perhaps: This is something which should only be grasped by the understanding: But that is their own desire—to leave it only to the understanding, because they only take it as a wisdom for the head, and do not let it reach their hearts. This observation I wish to link on to the Introduction I have given you of the Building.

Over a period of three hours I shall have the opportunity of speaking to you about the building idea of Dornach. In this first lecture, it is my task to characterize how this building idea emerged from the anthroposophically oriented spiritual movement, and then, over eight days and in a fortnight, to go into more detail about the style and the whole formal language of this our building, the framework and the external representative of our spiritual scientific movement. By speaking about the genesis of the Dornach building, I would like to perhaps touch on something personal by way of introduction.

I spent the 1880s in Vienna. It was the Vienna in which the ideas were developed that could then be seen in the Votivkirche, in the Vienna City Hall, in the Hansen Building of the Austrian Parliament, in the museums, in the Burgtheater building, that is to say in those monumental buildings that were created in Vienna in the second half of the last century and which, to a certain extent, represent the most mature products of the architecture of the past era of human development. I would like to say that I heard the words of one of the architects involved in these buildings resound from the views from which these monumental buildings were created. When I was studying at the Vienna Technical University, Heinrich Ferstel, the architect of the Votivkirche, had just taken up his post as rector. In his inaugural address, he said something that I would like to say still echoes in my mind today, and it has echoed throughout my subsequent life. Ferstel said something at the time that summarized the most diverse views that had emerged in art at the time, especially in the art of architecture. He said: architectural styles are not invented, architectural styles are born out of the overall views, out of the overall development of the time and the emotional soulfulness of entire peoples and eras.

On the one hand, such a sentence is extremely correct, and on the other hand, it is extremely inflammatory for the human mind. And anyone who has ever immersed themselves with artistic sensibility in the whole world of vision from which this remarkable Gothic structure of the Votive Church in Vienna, translated into miniature, was created by Ferstel himself, anyone who has felt the Vienna City Hall by Schmidt, anyone who has felt the Austrian Parliament in particular, which, through Hansen's genius, has achieved a certain freedom of style, at the time when this same view had not yet been spoiled by the hideous female figure that was later placed on the ramp. Those who had experienced the artistic heyday of Gottfried Semper's mature architecture at the Vienna Burgtheater could truly feel the background from which such an artistic view emerged as that of Heinrich Ferstel, which has just been characterized. In all that was built, one sees ripe fruits, but basically one sees only the renewal of the styles of past epochs of humanity.

And I was able to feel this, I would like to say, inwardly inciting fact, for example, when I heard the lectures of the excellent esthete Joseph Bayer, who, out of the same spirit that Ferstel, Hansen, cathedral architect Schmidt, but especially Gottfried Semper, created with, tried to illustrate the forms of architectural art, the forms of ceramics, and so on.

Such a fact, such a world of ideas, is inspiring for the human mind, I say this because perhaps, when faced with such an idea, “architectural styles are not invented, but born out of an overall spiritual life” in the human mind - when one sees: this view has achieved something magnificent and powerful, but from a mere renewal, from a renaissance of old architectural styles, old artistic perceptions, so to speak - because then the question arises before the soul: Are we perhaps such a barren time after all that we cannot give birth to something new in this sense from our overall view, from the scope of our world view?

At the same time as all that could so richly fill the souls from these buildings when they immersed themselves in these views, from which the buildings arose, something else, though characteristic of the time, was concentrated in Vienna. In its soul body, Vienna had at that time also absorbed a certain height of precisely the newer medical progress. Skoda, Oppolzer and others represented a flowering of the development of medical science in the second half of the 19th century. At that time, especially if you lived among those who had to deal with such things, you could often hear a saying – and this saying also stayed with me: We live in a time in which medical nihilism has developed.

This medical nihilism, which had emerged precisely in the heyday of pathology, actually culminated in the fact that the great physicians mainly studied those forms of disease that could be observed in their course merely through pathology, in which nature's healing process only needed to be helped along by all sorts of measures, but in which little could be done for the patient by taking remedies. Thus, precisely out of this medical school arose a disbelief in therapy, a skepticism about therapy. And when pathology had developed to its highest peak that it could reach at that time, people actually despaired of the possibility of real healing and, especially in initiated circles, spoke of medical nihilism. That is what one could feel. Our world view, where it was to prove fruitful in a certain area of practical life, led to nihilism and a certain powerlessness in the face of that practical life.

Anyone with the ability to feel and perceive these things will, in the subsequent period of European civilization, be able to fully sense how, basically, those impulses, which on the one hand found expression in the fact that an architect as important as Heinrich Ferstel had to say, “Architectural styles are not invented, but are born out of the overall development of the time,” and yet still built in the sense of an old architectural style, on the other hand, expressed itself in the fact that in a practical area of life, people's views have led to nihilism.

What developed from this in the period that followed was basically a continuation of what had been expressed in this way. Through the most diverse circumstances, seemingly, but probably through a necessary connection, I was confronted with the necessity of setting up impulses of a new spiritual life everywhere in the face of the appearance of what lay in the lines of development I have indicated. This new spiritual life would in turn draw from such original sources of human thought , human feeling and human will, as they repeatedly existed in the epochs of human development and as they proved fruitful in order to give rise to the artistic, the religious and the cognitive.

If we want to feel in an even deeper way what the human mind was actually like at a time when, in art, only a kind of renaissance was living in the highest expressions of the artistic, and when, even in practical areas, views have led to a kind of nihilism When we delve into what was actually taking place in the soul and spirit during this time, we have to say that the spiritual matters that directly concern the human being, the scientific, and even to a high degree the religious life, had taken on an abstract, intellectual character. Man had come to cultivate less that which can arise from his entire human essence, his powers and impulses. In this most recent period, he had come to establish a mere head culture, a mere intellectualistic culture, to live in abstractions.

This is something that occurs as a parallel phenomenon in the materialistic age: on the one hand, people believe that they can completely immerse themselves in the workings of material processes; but on the other hand, precisely because of this striving for immersion in a tendency towards abstraction, a tendency towards mere intellectualism, a tendency through which the urge to shape something that can directly reach into the full reality of existence fades from the most intimate affairs of the human soul. One withdraws into an abstract corner of one's soul life, leaving one's religious feelings to take place there. They withdraw into the closed rooms of the laboratory and the observatory, and devote themselves to specialized investigations in these fields, but in so doing they distance themselves from a truly living understanding of the totality of the world. One withdraws as a human being from real cooperation with practical life, and as a result one arrives at a closed intellectuality. And finally, everything that we see emerging in the fields of philosophy or world view in this period bears a distinctly abstract, a distinctly intellectual character.

I believed that anthroposophically oriented spiritual science had to be placed in this current. It was not surprising that this spiritual science, when it was first placed in an intellectualist age, when it had to speak to people who, in the broadest sense, were fundamentally oriented towards intellectualist abstraction, initially had to appear as a worldview as if it itself had arisen only from abstraction, from mere thinking. And so it was that in our work for our anthroposophically oriented spiritual science, that phase arose which filled the first decade of the twentieth century and of which I would like to say: it was inevitable that our anthroposophically oriented world view should take on a certain intellectual character through the very nature of the people who were inclined towards it. It had to speak to people who, above all, believed that if you wanted to ascend to the spiritual and divine, you had to do so completely detached from the lower reality, you even had to arm yourself with a certain world-contempt, with a certain unreality of life. This was already an attitude that was alive in those who, out of their inclinations, had found their way into the current of anthroposophically oriented spiritual science.

And on the other hand, the world's judgment of this anthroposophically oriented spiritual science arose: Oh, they are dreamers, they are visionaries, they are people who are not relevant to practical life. This judgment arose - such things are very difficult to destroy - and still lives on today in most people who want to judge anthroposophically oriented spiritual science. Of course, people saw that something different was alive in what appeared at that time as this anthroposophically oriented spiritual science than in their theories, in their world-view ideas. And since they regarded what they had sucked out of their bloodless abstractions from their materialistic orientation as the only spiritual reality to be attained by man himself, what the anthroposophically oriented spiritual science spoke to the world from completely different foundations seemed to them to be something fanciful, something fantastic.

But a quite different phenomenon was involved. What was spoken at that time out of truly shaped spiritual science oriented to anthroposophy is not the speech of fantasy or enthusiasm. It is the speech of spiritual research that can give an account of the nature of its research to the most exacting mathematician, as I said at another time. But it is true: what has been spoken here out of spiritual realities sounded different from the bloodless world views of modern times. It sounded different, not because it was more abstract, or because it ascended to regions of the spirit more bloodless and frozen than those which have given rise to the theories developed out of the modern way of thinking, but it sounded different because it proceeded from spiritual realities, because it proceeded from those regions of man where one not only thinks, where one feels and wills, but does not feel and will in a dark way, not in the way that modern psychology considers to be the only one because it only knows this; not out of dark feeling, but out of feeling that is just as bright, as bright as the purest thinking itself. And the words were spoken out of a will that is suffused with a light that is striven for as the bright clarity of pure thoughts is striven for, and these thoughts are grasped when we seek to comprehend reality. Thus, in this anthroposophically oriented spiritual science, there lived that which wanted to come from the whole person, which therefore also wanted to take hold of the whole person, to take hold of the thinking, feeling and willing human being.

When one was able to speak in this way from the innermost being of the whole person, one often felt the inadequacy of even modern modes of expression. Anyone who has felt this way knows how to speak about it. One felt that modern times had also brought something into external language that leads words into abstract regions, and that speaking in the way language has now become itself invites abstraction. And one experiences, I would say, the inwardly tragic phenomenon of carrying within oneself something that one would like to express in broad content and sharp contours and developed with inner life, but that one is then rejected back to what modern language, which is coming out of an age of abstraction and is theoretical, alone knows how to say. And then one feels the urge for other means of expression. One feels the urge to express oneself more fully about what one actually carries within oneself than can be done through the theoretical debates in which modern humanity has been trained for three to four centuries, the theoretical debates that have shaped our concepts, our words, in which even our lyricists, our playwrights, our epic poets live more than they realize. One feels the necessity for a fuller, more vivid presentation.

Out of such feelings, the need arose for me to say what was said in the first phase of our anthroposophical movement, which was clothed in more intellectual forms, through my mystery festival plays. I tried to present, in a theatrical way, in scenes and images that were to embrace the whole of human life, the physical, soul and spiritual life, what can be seen in the course of the world, what is contained in the course of the world as a partial solution to our great world riddles, but which can never be expressed in the abstract formulas into which the laws of nature can be expressed. This is how that which I then tried to depict in my mystery dramas came about. I had to resort to images to depict what comes from the whole human being. For only from the human being in his head comes what modern language has created for our science and our popular literature, and what today's people, if you listen to them, are able to understand. You have to touch the deeper sides of their minds if you want to speak to them what anthroposophical spiritual science actually has to say.

This is how the need for these mystery dramas arose. These mystery dramas were first performed in Munich, in the surroundings, in the setting of ordinary theaters. Just as it literally blew apart the inside of the soul when one had to express the anthroposophically oriented spiritual science in the formulas of modern philosophy or world view, so it blew apart one's aesthetic sensation when one had to present in an ordinary theater, in an ordinary stage space, what was now to be depicted in a pictorial way: the spiritual content of the anthroposophical worldview and world feeling, of the anthroposophical world will. And when we worked in Munich on the theatrical presentation of these mystery plays in ordinary theaters, the idea arose to create a space of our own, to perform a building of our own, in which there would no longer be the sense of confinement that one in the manner just described for anthroposophically oriented spiritual science, but in which there is a framework that is itself the expression of what lives in anthroposophically oriented spiritual science.

Therefore, this building was not created in the sense of an old architectural style, where one would have gone to any architect and had a house created for what anthroposophically oriented spiritual science is to work out, but rather it had to arise from the innermost being of anthroposophically oriented spiritual science, because it did not merely work out of thinking and feeling, but out of the will itself, a structure had to arise out of this living existence of anthroposophically oriented spiritual science as a framework, which, as a style, as a formal language, gives the same as the spiritual-soul gives the spoken word of anthroposophically oriented spiritual science. A unity had to be created between the building as an art form and the living element present in this spiritual science.

But if there is such a living element, if there is a living element that is not merely theoretical and abstract, if there is a truly living spiritual element, then it creates its own framework, because with such a spiritual element one lives within the creative forces of nature, within the creative forces of the soul, within the creative forces of the spiritual. And just as the shell of the nut is formed out of the same creative forces as the inside, which we then consume as a nut, just as the nutshell cannot be other than it is because it follows the laws the nut kernel comes into being, so this structure here in all its individual forms is such that it cannot be otherwise, because it is nothing other than a shell that has come into being, been formed, created according to the same laws as spiritual science itself.

If I may express myself hyperbolically, it seems to me that at the end of my life I would not have been haunted by Heinrich Ferstel's thought that “architectural styles cannot be invented” if the truth contained in it had not been clearly reckoned with. Yes, architectural styles cannot be invented, they must arise out of an overall spiritual life. But if such a spiritual life as a whole exists, then it may dare, even if in a modest way, even with weak forces, to also gain an art style from the same spirituality from which this spirituality itself is created.

I believe that I know better than anyone else what the faults of this building are, and I can assure you that I do not think immodestly about what has been created. I know everything I would do differently if I were to build such a structure again. I know how much this building is a beginning, how much of what is intended by it in the sense of its style may have to be realized quite differently. In any case, I do not want to think immodestly about this building. But with regard to what is intended by it, it may be pointed out how it wants to prove that architectural styles cannot be invented, but that they can be born if, instead of the nihilism of world view, a spiritual positivism is set, if, instead of the decadent decline of old world views, new sources of world view are sought. This building has therefore been created with a certain inner necessity. Just as feeling led us to present our world view in the mystery plays, as if feeling were to be taken into account in addition to thinking, so should the will, which is inherent in anthroposophically oriented spiritual science, first express itself artistically in this building.

The fact that there is life in this spiritual science should, however, be shown in an equally modest way, just as a beginning – I always have to emphasize this – by the fact that we do not want to use this building to shut ourselves away and, as it were, strive for a higher world view as if it were a satisfaction of our inner soulful desires. No, in the next lectures on this building I will show you how all the building forms here live in such a way that they basically do not represent walls, but something artistically transparent. This is how the wall, which is designed here, differs from the walls that one is accustomed to in other architectural walls. The latter are final; one knows oneself inside a space that is limited in a certain way. Here, however, everything is shaped in such a way that, by looking at the frame, one can get the feeling, if one feels the thing in the right way, of how everything cancels itself out. Just as glass physically negates itself and becomes transparent, so the artistic forms of the walls are meant to negate themselves in order to become transparent; so painting and sculpture are meant to negate themselves in order to become transparent, so as not to lock up the soul in a room, but to lead the soul out into the world. And out of this tendency there also arose the impulse, still modest, which I call the social impulse and which in my book The Core of the Social Question should be presented to the world, not as a theory but as a call to action.

Spiritual science could not remain with intellectuality. In its first phase it had to take human habits into account, had to speak to those people who were still educated entirely in abstract intellectualism. But it had to progress from thinking to feeling in order to present to the world what was to be expressed not only through the abstract word, but also through the dramatic play, the dramatic action, the dramatic image. But this spiritual science could not stop at mere feeling. It had to progress to the realm of will. It had to overcome and shape matter, it had to give form and life to matter. Therefore, a new framework, a new formal language, indeed a new architectural style, had to be sought for the mystery plays and for everything that wants to express itself through them, including the living anthroposophically oriented spiritual science itself. In order to affirm what lives as the deepest impulse in this anthroposophically oriented spiritual science, the social impulse also arose quite naturally in the time when adversity taught people to replace the tendency of decline with the tendency of ascent. We wanted to gain through this building, even through its style, that state of mind through which the human being goes out to experience all of social existence, goes out to be able to participate in the necessary social reconstruction of our time with living soul content.

Thus, I believe, this structure can be seen as standing within what reveals itself as the deepest needs of our time, which in turn want to lead people out of mere abstractness and the materialism associated with it, out of mere thinking and into living feeling, and into active will. And we believe that in this way we also have what must be the substance, as it were, for what is so urgently demanded of us today, for what we know: If we humans are unable to accomplish it, the slide into barbarism will continue. A worldview that encompasses the whole person, the thinking, feeling and willing human being, must also be able to provide the state of mind that enables people to work together on what is a vital necessity of the present and the near future: social action.

In today's lecture, my task will be to contribute something to the understanding of what lies in the artistic impulses that carry the building idea of Dornach, in order to then develop this building idea in more detail in the next of these lectures. It will be necessary for me to say something about these artistic impulses, so to speak, because strong misunderstandings have spread about them.

The point is, and this is clear from what I said here eight days ago about the development of the Dornach building from our entire anthroposophical movement, that the Dornach building should in no way create something that could be called the carrying of abstract spirituality into what is actually artistic. The Dornach building should be created entirely by artistic forces. And this building should mark the beginning of a development towards this goal, so that what works in spiritual science as a spiritual being can also flow out, stream out into artistic forms, into artistic designs and so on. This is something that had to be fought for against certain tendencies that very easily run in the opposite direction, especially in such a movement as anthroposophy.

It is very easy for all kinds of mystifying elements to enter into such a movement. These elements push towards the abstract through a false mystification, and which actually – because the artistic element must express itself in the shaping and forming of the external – bypass this artistic element and strive towards the symbolic, towards the allegorical. They want to keep the spirit in its abstract form, so to speak, and see in the outwardly shaped and formed only a symbolic illustration of the spiritual.

This leads to a killing, a paralysis of everything truly artistic. In this direction, due to the penetration of false mysticism from the theosophical into the anthroposophical movement, one has had to experience all sorts of things. For example, a play like “Hamlet”, which is an artistic creation, was interpreted allegorically and mystically, so that one figure was understood as the spiritual self, the other as the astral body, and so on. There is endless allegorizing among those who would like to profess such a spiritual movement, and I once had to experience the following, for example: When I tried to discuss the well-known painting 'Melancholy' by Dürer in such a way that I traced everything that lives in this painting back to the chiaroscuro and showed how Dürer wanted to penetrate the secrets of the chiaroscuro, of the chiaroscuro, to contrast the light with the dark, the darkness with the light, in the most varied of ways, a voice was heard from the audience saying, “Yes, but can't we understand this picture on an even deeper level?” The deep interpretation was obviously sought in the fact that one wanted to extract from the artistically captured chiaroscuro an abstract-allegorical interpretation of what is depicted in the picture, which Dürer has already forbidden by placing the polyhedron in the picture to suggest how important it was to him to express the chiaroscuro variety that becomes visible when you compare differently directed surfaces, differently positioned surfaces of a polyhedron or the different surface layers of a sphere with any spreading light. That it is infinitely deeper to look into this working and weaving of light and darkness and to spread one's own spirit over this weaving of light and darkness, that for the one who feels artistically, it can be infinitely deeper than the abstract-intellectual allegorical interpretation of such images, such an interrupter had no understanding.

And so what is present in this building had to be seen as an initial, weak attempt, in many respects fought for in the face of those aspirations that strive towards allegory and symbolism. These can be seen sufficiently when one enters some particularly solemnly decorated rooms where Anthroposophical spiritual science is practised and sees that attempts are being made to begin with colours and all kinds of paintings and drawings, but that these attempts ultimately leads to nothing other than offending every artistic feeling by painting a hideous rose cross, when what matters is only the allegory of showing some symbolism in seven roses painted in a certain way on a cross. I must mention this so that, if anthroposophically oriented spiritual science is also to show its artistic fertility to the world, it is known that what is attempted artistically must not be confused with all the abominations that easily arise from symbolizing and allegorizing, especially on such mystical ground as I have indicated.

It is absolutely essential that the true spiritual scientist should realize through direct insight what the essence of the ideal consists in, so that he can find the transition from the ideal to what must be expressed in prose words, even though these prose words are only an inadequate means of revelation for the rich revelation of the spiritual world itself, and that this necessary prose presentation, which must also take on certain forms if it is to do justice to the spiritual world, is sharply contrasted with the actual artistic presentation, including that of the supersensible vision, which has nothing of symbolizing or allegorizing in it.

That is why I had to point out in the lecture I gave to you on declamation and recitation that it is nonsense to fantasize and allegorize all sorts of things into my mystery dramas that are actually anthroposophical theory. The point of the dramas is to be understood artistically; and I myself, if I may make this personal comment, suffer the most unspeakable pain when someone presents me with abstract concepts that are supposed to “explain” these mystery dramas. These mystery dramas have been seen and experienced down to the last word, down to the tone of voice, as they stand, and the one who introduces allegorization does not understand them. He cannot really bring out the measure of super-sensibility that lies in them, for he only imprints the intellectual concepts into what should actually be experienced in the artistic sense. And so it is with everything else that is to arise artistically from those impulses from which spiritual science itself arises.

I would like to say it clearly, although it may sound a little pedantic: no art can of course arise from spiritual science itself, as it is communicated in words; only allegory and symbolization can arise from it. But from those spiritual impulses that stand behind spiritual science, that drive spiritual science itself out of themselves like a branch, from those, as another branch from the same origin, artistic creation also arises. Therefore, those who understand spiritual science in the abstract and then want to translate it into art will never be able to create anything other than straw-like allegories or lifeless symbols.

It has been said many times that symbols and allegories can be found in this building. If you look at the building properly, you won't be able to find a single symbol or allegory in it. Everything is meant to be – although some things have been left in initial attempts – in such a way that it has flowed into the form, the design, the color. And because misunderstandings can easily arise in this regard, I would like to discuss a few artistic matters with you today, so that, as I said, I can get to the actual building idea next time and characterize it in very specific terms.

I would like to assume that, when we once had to perform that scene from the second part of Goethe's “Faust” in the carpentry workshop, in which the Kabirs appear, I tried to create the three Kabirs plastically from the supersensible vision that arises when one tries to penetrate the mysteries of Samothrace. So I tried to visualize these Kabirs in order to be able to bring them on stage. Now these three Kabirs were there in three dimensions. Then a personage who was very close to our movement wanted to give some other people an idea of these Kabirs, who could not see them here, or who wanted to have a souvenir of the way in which the Kabirs were vividly reconstructed here, and the question arose as to whether these Kabir sculptures should be photographed.

For someone who has a feeling for sculpture, however, every photograph of a sculpture is a killing of the actual sculptural work of art. And so I decided to simply reproduce these Kabir statues in a drawing, in chiaroscuro, that is, using a different technique. So from the outset they were conceived two-dimensionally on the surface, and so it was possible to photograph them and disseminate them through photography. So you see: if you really stand on the soil of those life forces that pulsate in spiritual science, then above all you acquire a truly artistic feeling for the artistic means you use, and you acquire emotionally, not intellectually, what lives in existence.

Let me mention the following example, which leads us more into the intimacies of the artistic empathy of the world process, which we then try to shape. Let us assume that one wanted to create a kind of sculptural representation of humanity, as I attempted in my sculptural group, which includes a figure similar to Christ (Figs. 94-98). If you want to create a sculpture of this representative of humanity, you would be led to feel quite differently about what is present in the formation of the head than about what is present in the rest of the human being's form, which lives outside the head.

In sculpting, you feel what appears as a huge difference in the human being. In sculpting, where one is dealing with the shaping of surfaces, one feels that a formative impulse must be at work in the head, which, as it were, pushes inwards, draws away from the outside, but which shapes from within; and one feels that in the rest of the human being, one encounters that which is shaped in precisely the opposite sense. It is not so important to say that one thing happens from within and the other from without – that would lead to an abstract, intellectual description again – but rather it is important to have the opposite feelings when developing any form out of the depths of the world process develops some form that can only be shaped from the inside out, or when one takes out a form that can only be shaped from the outside in, in which one can see, as it were, how the external world forces concentrate and shape from the outside in.

If one continues in this feeling and sensing, then one comes to understand how, through having different feelings for the head than for the rest of the organism, one experiences something as a sculptor that is neither gravity nor vertically acting buoyancy nor even spreading force. Pure spreading force is what we feel in the light. Gravity alone is what we feel in our own weight and experience in particular in the aging of the human being, if one can take a look at this aging in true introspection. Of these two forces, gravity and buoyancy, one senses a kind of interaction in such a way that, I would say, the buoyancy forces, those forces that tear the plastic away from the earthly, can be felt more in the head, and the forces that work upwards from the earth's gravity and, as it were, drive the body upwards, these are felt more in the shaping, in the plastic formation of the rest of the body.

But, my dear attendees, when one has really felt this, and – especially when one has metamorphosed this feeling into artistic creation – when one really lives not in an abstract idea, but in this feeling and endeavors to bring into the material that which one feels there, then one feels a strong difference... [gap in the shorthand]. For example, in sculpture there is something to be sensed, such as the balance of two forces, of which the sculptor himself need know nothing. Even someone who knows about such forces as spreading force, gravity and buoyancy force, completely forgets it in sculpting; it is none of his business there, he lives purely in feeling the spreading of the forces of the surface, in feeling how the surface expands in space, or in shaping the surface itself. If you have not appropriated anything abstractly conceptual – that is, if you can completely shed the cloak of the ideal when you immerse yourself in artistic creation – then, in a sense, you become a different person emotionally when you immerse yourself in artistic creation; then you also acquire a feeling for the diversity of artistic means of expression.

And when one moves from working with sculpture to working with painting, one comes to say to oneself: All that one has to say about sculpture in terms of the way in which forces acting vertically and in the direction of propagation interact, of heavy elements and light elements, all that one has to have put aside when dealing with color and its nuances in painting. Because there it is about creating not out of the line, not out of the form, but out of the color, so that one completely stops feeling differently towards the head than towards the rest of the organism, as the sculptor does. In painting, one feels that difference disappear that arose for the sculptor between the head and what is not the head in a human being. This completely balances out and becomes something completely different, an inner intensity that cannot be represented by a contrast of lines, but can only be represented by penetrating into the intensity of the color nuances, so that it is not possible to go into detail, for example, on what still stands out very strongly in sculpture.

And if you want to overcome it, you can only do so if you push the sculpture to a certain degree of consciousness, as I did with my central group for this building. But if you move on to painting, it is a matter of thoroughly rejecting any thinking in lines and moving on to the feeling that creates purely from color. And however strange it may seem to someone who speaks of a spiritualization of art in a falsely abstract sense, it must still be said: for someone who thinks in terms of painting, the most important thing is that there is a certain color nuance at a certain point on a certain surface and that, when one moves from this color nuance to another point on the surface, other color nuances are there. It is about creating from color.

In this creative process, however, the artist is supported by what I would call the experience of color, the experience of blue, the experience of yellow, the experience of red. What the artist has, in experiencing yellow and red as if they were attacking him, and experiencing blue as if he had to chase after it with his soul, as if he had to expand himself, is what transforms into creativity within him and what then gives him the opportunity to transform the sensation into what is to become a work of art. If, for example, one is faced with the task of painting any surface, then it is a matter of nuancing between so-called light, warm colors and dark, cold colors. If one has the color experience, one can create out of this color experience, just as the musician creates out of the sound experience. Then it is a matter of the form arising out of the color itself, so that one does not draw and then smear color into the spaces created by the drawing spaces that arise through drawing, smearing the color in, but rather it is a matter of starting from the color experience and allowing the line experience, the form, to arise from the color experience. That is why I said at one point in the first of my mystery dramas - that is, I had a character say it, to whom I put it in the mouth - that the form must be “the color's work”.

Fundamentally, we must be aware that all drawing and all thinking in drawing is actually a lie compared to painting. For example, when I see the blue sky, with the sea-green of the surface of the sea below, I have the blue of the sky above, the green of the sea below, and the line of the horizon simply arises from seeing, from the experience of color. And I am actually lying when I draw a horizon line that is not actually there (Fig. 114). This must now be thoroughly examined, otherwise one will not be able to enter into that world, which can be experienced through all the means of artistic expression, through the colors and their nuances, as well as through the concepts and ideas, if these concepts and ideas are really rooted in the spiritual and are not abstracted from ordinary human consciousness.

You see, here it is not so much a matter of expressing spiritual science in all kinds of forms, but rather of gaining impulses for artistic observation, which are just as necessary in the course of human development as spiritual science itself. But they are required as something special. It is the case that on the one hand there is the spiritual-scientific stream and on the other hand there is the artistic stream, which in a certain way must now also take on new forms. Therefore, I say to everyone who stands before this group, which is to become the central group here: One can feel something in the central figure like the Christ-figure, but it must be felt, it must not be thought that the name Christ is there. It will certainly not be written on the outside, but it does not even have to be thought, rather, the intuitive experience must take place within us, which draws our attention to how we must look at the matter, so that we develop reverence, develop high regard, develop the intuitive perception of the depths of the human being. So there should be nothing but feeling, nothing but experiencing in feeling, the same feelings that we experience, for example, when we immerse ourselves spiritually in the figure of Christ. But everything we experience spiritually when we immerse ourselves in the figure of Christ through spiritual science must not be carried over into what is formed plastically or pictorially. What is formed plastically or pictorially must be born out of form, out of line, out of surface. And this life in form, in line, in surface, in color, in word itself, is what later develops such forms, such painting, as it is to appear here in this building before you.

What I have said now has little to do with the building itself, but only with the artistic attitude and artistic feeling that underlies the entire building idea of Dornach. It should always be borne in mind that it is at the beginning of the development of that architectural style, that artistic language of form, which can be expected to flourish in a special way in the future. Because I would not rebuild this building in the same way a second time. Not because I consider the artistic attitude on which it is based to be misguided – that is not the case – but because everything that is alive is also constantly evolving, so that a second time all those mistakes would be avoided and everything that could be said in terms of impulses for perfection could be taken into account. But I see all this myself and take it much more seriously than those who often call themselves critics of the building. I know the mistakes very well today and know what could be avoided if the building were to be rebuilt, and what could be brought into it if it were to be rebuilt. And it is necessary that all the details of the building idea from Dornach be taken up in this way.

To take one detail, I would like to mention the small dome (Fig. 57). Later, at the end of this hour, we will raise the curtain and you can then take a look at the small dome. Above all, I would like this small dome to be understood in such a way that nothing abstract is fantasized into it. For in this small dome, in which I myself am essentially involved – this is of course not to say anything special about the also in turn initial and in many respects perhaps amateurish in the painting of this small dome – an attempt has been made to paint really out of color, out of the color experience. In fact, this color experience should be understood in such a way that one sees, above all, the color nuance at a particular point. It could not be a matter of, for example, at a certain point where, let us say, the blue was to be emphasized, where the blue was experienced according to its position near the opening, further away from the center, contrasting with the color effects in the center, of thinking of a fist (Fig. 70) and paint it there because one feels a kinship of the nature of the fist with the blue color, but it could only be a matter of developing the color experience of the blue at this point and then letting the form, the shape, the essence arise out of the color. It had to become what it is there out of necessity.

From this you can see that it is not important to the person who originally gave rise to the idea of forming a figure out of the color experience of blue at this point, which then leads the feeling back to the sixteenth century, reminiscent of the Faust figure, but rather that it is important to him to give birth to form and essence out of the living color. And if, in the end, interpretations are attributed to the works, then one must be aware that these are interpretations from the outside, that they may help one or another subjectivity to experience this or that; but I myself prefer it if you completely forget, when facing this small dome, that there is something Faustian, something Apollonian ( Fig. 76) or of any doppelgänger (Fig. 84) and the like, and that you first surrender to the pure color experience from which the whole is born, and that you are initially just as indifferent to whether there is a Faust crouching there or some other figure, just as the person who wanted to create from the color was indifferent to whether this figure emerged. It just came out because the world lives in color.

But one must not take the starting point from the linear or symbolic boundaries of the being; rather, one must take the starting point from painting from the color experience, from moving in color, so that the color and especially the color harmonization and disharmonization come to life as such. One will then see that one narrows one's view of the world if one tries to translate the intellectually abstract world view — even one that arises as spiritual science — simply symbolically, allegorically into color or into form. Rather, one will see that when one immerses oneself in color, the whole richness of the life of color overflows one and that in this immersion in the world of color one has, that one still discovers a new world. While with every allegory you only bring the world you already have into the colorful world, if you start from the colored experience itself, you discover a new world that is as creative in itself as the world you have in mind when you summarize the external natural fact in abstractions or in natural laws.

In this description – because everything artistic, when it is discussed, must be described – I had to show you how an attempt has been made here in this building, not to secretly incorporate anything into the plastic forms, into the color nuances, but to experience the secrets of these worlds ourselves, which give us the means to express them artistically. And when one experiences the secrets of these worlds, then one gradually frees oneself from all straw-like allegorizing and straw-like symbolizing. In painting, for example, one learns to overcome the line, even in the representation of the copperplate engraving or the woodcut, and to allow form to arise purely out of the contrast between light and dark. It is out of such experiences, not out of abstract thought, that the building idea of Dornach has come into being, out of what can be experienced in colour, in form, in surface, what can be felt as that which strives upwards, freeing itself from burdens, as that which works downwards, bearing burdens, bringing them to life within itself.

All this is here in architecture, sculpture, painting, even in the window panes - the nature of which I will also discuss next time - felt, experienced, not thought; because all abstract thinking is the death of art. The life of art is born only out of form, out of color, out of the burdened, out of the carrying, out of the rounded, out of the angular – I now mean “rounded” and “angular” as a verb. And when one can live in the round, in the angular, in the burden, in the carrying, in the arching, in the covering and opening, in the plastically rounding, in the surface giving, in the expressing the interior in the exterior through the special surface treatment, when one can experience what arises like beings in the waves from the surface of the sea, when one experiences from the living colors, then the forms are formed in such a way that they are a creation of the color. Then there is truly no allegorization, no symbolization; then, alongside that world of abstraction or the merely non-sensuous spiritual, a completely new world arises, a world that Goethe called the sensuous-suprasensible world. This world is not, however, killed by the merely intellectual, and it is brought to life when one knows how to set the spirit within oneself in motion, not by going so far in the contemplation of the external that the sensual contemplation leads to the linking of thoughts, but in such a way that one sees the supersensible directly in the external, in the sensual. When the inner life, which in Expressionism always seeks to give rise to thought, is restrained to such an extent that it does not reach thought, but remains in the mere experience of the formative, of that which permeates the surface with the intensity of color and when the world is experienced in this way, as it can only be experienced in the element of sensation, not in the element of thought, then this experience can truly provide the stimulus for a new art.

It may be clear from the two observations already made here about the building idea of Dornach how this building idea has arisen out of the same life from which that is to arise which is meant here as spiritual science. But this building idea did not arise in such a way that, in the building, what lives in thought form, in idea form, in spiritual science, is to be found again, only in outwardly symbolic pictorial form. Rather, the building was to arise out of the feelings and perceptions that can be harbored by someone who feels inspired by this spiritual science. To some extent the intention was there: on the one hand, the spiritual-scientific impulse wants to express itself in the form of ideas. But that is not enough, that does not reveal its life in a complete way, and another branch must sprout from the common root. That is precisely the artistic branch, that is what manifests itself out of feeling and perception in the building idea of Dornach.

Those approaching this building from the outside will at first perceive a kind of duality: a larger dome structure as an auditorium; a smaller dome structure, which to a certain extent cuts through the larger one , as a space for performances, also conceived as the space towards which everything in the auditorium tends, and from which, in turn, everything that the auditorium is inclined to absorb should radiate. Our future development will depend on whether humanity is able to commit itself to a truly essential development in all its soul-forming aspects, to commit itself to development in such a way that one says to oneself: What one has inherited or acquired through ordinary life does not yet lead to what gives the human being a truly dignified existence. From a certain point onwards, the development of the inner life must be taken up in order to lead beyond what the outer consciousness alone can bring. But there must be something to meet what one is approaching and which one expects, as it were, from unknown depths of the spirit. And it is the feeling of this interaction between the receiving human being and the creating human being within himself that was then able to be lived out in the building idea of Dornach.

From the outset, wherever domed rooms of different sizes adjoin or even intersect, one cannot help but feel that a close interaction is taking place between the person to whom the one part is dedicated and the person to whom the other part is dedicated. To a certain extent, the aim was to evoke the sensation of a rhythm that exists between the larger and the smaller component. This lively sensation, or perhaps it would be better to say this invigoration of sensation through the forms of the building, could hardly be evoked by two rooms adjacent to one another in a different way. But now that is adapted to what interior design is and from which I would like to start initially.

You know that in the case of all the buildings that are actually designed to enclose something, we are dealing with a completely different architecture. Perhaps we can reach an understanding if we point to older building forms that draw their style, their architectural concept, from completely different premises. The Greek “temple is conceived as the dwelling of the god, and a Greek temple in which there is no statue of the god, of Zeus, Apollo or Athena, would not be a complete work of art. But how did this style actually come about? It arose, so to speak, from the idea of God acting from a specific point in the universe. It is intended to envelop the activity of this god; it is therefore conceived in its entirety as a covering, as an enclosure.

If we go a little further, skipping other architectural styles, to the architecture of the later Middle Ages, to the Gothic cathedral, we have to say that anyone entering a Gothic cathedral cannot feel that this building is complete if it is empty. A Gothic building that is not conceived as a temple but as a cathedral, that is, as a gathering and confluence of the faithful, is only complete when the faithful are assembled in it, when they are inside, just as a Greek temple is only complete when the statue of the god is inside. Accordingly, the entire Gothic architectural style is conceived in this way.

And now, penetrating into our times, one is led to say: the internalization of the human being is what must be the essential impulse of the present and the near future. Man himself, with his inwardly divine-spiritual essence, is at the center of all striving, but he kills this inner impulse of his modern striving if he does not find his way into the development in a living way. And it is from this feeling of the modern human being that the building idea here has arisen. The mere all-round principle of symmetry of Greek architecture, the enclosure, had to be dissolved, and the abstract idea of the upward striving of the crowd gathering in the cathedral also had to be dissolved. Closure had to be found, so to speak, in the upward infinity of the spherical form, development in the complete feeling for that which animates the individual form.

It is perhaps partly due to external motives that part of this building is a wooden structure; it could just as easily be a concrete structure, but not, for example, a marble building. Now that it is a wooden building, I only need to speak about the peculiarity as a wooden building, which essentially presents the interior design. When working with wood as a material for architecture, for sculpture, one notices that this work in wood is something quite different from working in marble, for example, or in any material that reveals itself on the surface like marble or stone. This will be particularly apparent when the central group in the right light is seen standing in this small domed room on the east side (Fig. 92). It has become a sculptural wooden group in keeping with the overall interior design. So it was worked in wood. Of course, it was he who made a model first, since no single person can work on a nine-and-a-half-meter-high wooden group. I would not have been surprised if the people who saw this model, which was made in plasticine, had actually found it hideous, especially the central figure, the representative of humanity himself. For it goes without saying that the final design in wood must already have been present in the plasticine version.

But now, when working on stone – or on a surface that can resemble stone – one is obliged to carve out the form from the raised parts, from what bulges out of the plane, what confronts one from the plane; one is therefore obliged, so to speak, to place it on the plane, on the surface. When working with wood, you have to avoid working on the wood itself and instead work out of the wood. One must work not towards the convex but towards the concave. With stone and everything that resembles stone, it is that which emerges from the surface, the convex, that is effective. With everything that is made of wood, it is that which withdraws from the surface, that which is thus, as it were, cut out, hollowed out of the wood.

Therefore, it is necessary – and I ask you to visualize the whole type, let us say, of the Roman Caesar heads, which can be seen everywhere in casts in museums, in relation to what I am about to say – therefore, when you sculpt the human form out of a stone-like material, you have to work the whole thing out from the face, from the head, and the rest of the human form that is not the head is actually, artistically speaking, just an appendix to the head. One must not, so to speak, sin against the natural forms of the human head, and one must shape the entire organism of the limbs and trunk out of what is laid down in the head. All this is required, for example, of marble, all this is required of stone.

If one works in wood, then one has the necessity to work in the opposite sense. You have to work from the whole human figure, from the movement of the limbs, from the feeling of the torso. You can dare to shape an upward arm movement, a downward arm movement in such a way that it continues in an asymmetrical forehead, as was attempted with this group. This was only possible because it is a wood group, because when you work in wood, you bring out the hollows in the material and do not place what is raised on the surface. Only by being completely immersed in the material, with all one's feelings, especially in the human form, can such a treatment of the material emerge.

And what is most vividly apparent when the human form is sculpted is apparent in the overall treatment of the wood here in this interior design. In stone, the progression of the columns from the simplest capital and pedestal forms to the more complicated middle forms, and then back to the simple forms again, would represent the dissolution of the symmetry on all sides into a developmental metamorphic progression. In stone, all of this would be nonsense; because stone demands to be more comprehensive, stone demands symmetry on all sides. Only wood allows for the development that was attempted here. As I said, it could also have been done in concrete, which, due to its nature, overcomes stone; only the form would look somewhat different. But wood allows for the introduction of development into the shape of the capital.

And here I would like to say that the underlying idea was to implement Goethe's concept of metamorphosis in the purely artistic. One must, however, completely immerse oneself in the creative powers of nature and create forms out of the creative powers of nature if one dares to attempt to progress from the simplest capital forms, which you can find here at the two columns at the entrance, to ever more complicated forms. But that came about all by itself, that came about for the senses, that was not contrived. Those personalities who in earlier times were often led here in this building were told: this column means this, that column means that; they were spoken of Mercury, Mars columns and the like, and in these things, which actually only serve an abstract understanding, one has seen the main thing. The main thing is not in that. The main thing is how the second capital motif - but now for artistic perception - emerges from the first with the same necessity as the higher-lying leaf or blossom emerges from the lower-lying leaf according to the principle of natural growth, or the petal from the leaf. When forming such a concept, one looks at nature theoretically. Here it is a matter of having nothing to do with theory, but of experiencing the development as one form arises from the other. I may say: everything that you see here in the way of capitals and architraves is felt to be absolutely pure, and anyone who speculates about it, who makes symbolic interpretations about it, misunderstands the whole thing.

But it is strange how, when you are working, this interweaving with the creative powers of nature brings surprises. When I was working on the model for this building (Fig. 22), I merely had the feeling that one capital would emerge from the other, that the next architrave motif would always emerge from the previous metamorphosis, and so on with the base motifs and so on. It soon became clear to me that this developmental impulse does not lead to a progression from the simpler to the more complicated, but that the most complicated is achieved right in the middle, as you can see here on the central columns, and that, in turn, when you have taken complexity to its ultimate height, to its culmination, you are compelled to move on to something simpler. Therefore, you do not see here, for example, an abstract development that starts with the simplest and progresses to the most complicated, so that the last would be the most complicated, but you see the greatest complication of the motifs in the middle.

And then I may also reveal to you here that it was certainly not intended from the outset to be a staff of Mercury entwined by snakes (Figs. 41, 42). No, that arose out of the artistic experience as something that cannot be otherwise if one ascends to the complicated in development and then has to turn around in order to descend again into the simpler. Likewise, I was surprised, for example, when – having arrived at the seventh column – I found that the sublimities of the first column, if you think of it as being turned inside out like a glove – not geometrically, but artistically turned inside out — fit exactly into the cavities of the last column; how, in turn, the same is the case with the second and sixth columns, as it is with the third and fifth columns, and the fourth column is in the middle.

It was not a case of pursuing some abstract, mystical principle of seven from the outset; rather, just as the tone scale is a seven-part entity, here the columns had to be formed in such a way that, so to speak, an octave of feeling in the form is fulfilled in a seven-part structure. For the eighth would be the octave; there it has to merge into the other kind of feeling, which one then finds in the small domed room, which contains something that accommodates development as an absorption. Therefore, the capital motifs of the small dome (Figs. 58-63) are not presented in their developed form as they are here, but are rather presented as a single entity, so to speak, opening its arms to what hastens towards it as a development.

But all this is not said beforehand, because beforehand one is dealing with something else, with life in form, with life in the plane itself. This is said afterwards, to give some indication of what has been created. Nothing here has grown out of any newer theoretical world view, not even out of the world of ideas of spiritual science itself. And I believe that it can be achieved, at least to a certain extent, that those who enter this building have the feeling: here, for the time being, one can forget everything one has absorbed in one's head in the way of spiritual-scientific ideas and thoughts. There is no need to talk about it, but one can feel it, feel it from the forms and from the treatment of the forms.

So that one can feel something like this: When you enter a Greek temple, you feel the encompassing nature of this Greek temple. The stone form reigns in wisdom. From the macrocosm comes the wisdom that builds this macrocosm, pushes through the wall, as it were, and works in the stone's sublimity, in the convexities, and there encompasses the externally resting God, who is only active in the spirit for the world. One could feel in a similar way that which is striven for in a Gothic building. It is the community with its group soul, which, by being gathered in the cathedral, actually has around it that which it itself has built, bricked, chiseled, carpentered, and so on. When one enters a Gothic cathedral, one always has the feeling that, in contrast to the Greek temple, which arose from a purely aristocratic way of thinking, the Gothic cathedral is the product of a class-conscious thinking, of the structure of medieval life, which expresses itself through the search for humanity, which also expresses itself in its forms in this search for humanity.

Those people who cannot bring themselves to look at it impartially speak of the Temple of Dornach. What has been built here is the opposite of any temple. There is nothing temple-like here, nothing that can be related to a church or a cathedral. And anyone who speaks of the temple of Dornach is only expressing how they have remained with Greek architecture in their whole feeling, not even having progressed to the Gothic. Here, however, what had to be tackled was that which creates forms that are basically only the continuation of what is spoken here, what is played here, what is declaimed here, what is artistically presented here. And just as the speaker stands here at the lectern, just as the organ sounds from above, just as the recitative tones vibrate through the room, so that which originates from the word, from the sound, from the thought must continue to speak through the framing, through the enclosure, which is not an enclosure but only continues the spoken, the sounded word. In the Greek temple we are dealing with an enclosure; here we are dealing with a self-expression. Therefore, above all, the whole form must be such that it lovingly embraces what is happening here, but that it does not close it off, but that this building stands as a symbol that what is being worked on here in Dornach should reach out to all of humanity.

If you study the columns here, together with the back wall, which signifies enclosure, you will see that The whole can now be felt in such a way that nowhere does one have the feeling of being enclosed and speaking only to the wall; rather, one has the feeling that one is speaking and the forms of the wall, these capitals, these architraves, these column forms absorb the vibrations of the word and actually want to carry them out into the world. They do not want to close off, but want to be artistically transparent. And just as the wood here is cut in such forms that make the wood artistically permeable, so it is suggested in these windows, I would say in a more natural material way, how what is here inside should be connected with the outside. These windows are not works of art in themselves; these windows, whose technique is essentially a glass etching technique, are only works of art when sunlight shines through them, when a connection is created between what has been scratched out of the glass and the sunlight shining through. That doesn't close, that lets the sun in, that is the living mediator with the whole, with the light that floods the cosmos, and is only something if you look at it in connection with this light.

If you approach it in such an artistic way, then you can also dare to develop the motifs that are in these windows.

I cannot go into details, of course, but I would refer you to that blue window there (Fig. 111), where you can see the human form in both casement windows, the human form in two situations. In one case, all the qualities that live in the hunter when he aims at the animal he wants to shoot live in the person. In what has been scratched out of the glass, you will find the entire inner life of the person depicted, you will find everything that lives in him poured into the figurative. When you come to a certain stage of inner experience, you cannot help but give shape to what lives inside as passion. And if you then think of the metamorphosis as having progressed, the whole picture shows the following in the right-hand window: the person has progressed from intending to shoot the bird down to actually doing it: he has taken aim and is shooting. What happened earlier is transformed into the other part, which is then scraped out of the glass and together with the sunlight gives the work of art. In this way, each individual window could be treated. But the point here is not to come up with more interpretations, but to surrender to what is on the glass, to feel it. Precisely when one strives for the art of interpretation, one overlooks the actual artistic intention therein.

And when you look at this dome painting (Fig. 57) and see how everything that is painted in the small dome is brought out of the color, then you will also have the aspiration there to feel your way out of the closed space into the cosmos. It is painted in such a way that the painting on the surface is suspended, as if you are entering through a portal into a living thing. If you have a vivid sense of color, you can draw that out of the color. Of course, there are people who would prefer to see naturalistic figures up there; that would spare them the discomfort of first having to feel things. Because what you can feel in a beautifully—what we call “beautifully”—painted naturalistic human figure is something you have felt since childhood, and it is comfortable to see it again. But when you come here, you don't have the opportunity to rediscover what you have felt since childhood and say that it resembles this or that, but rather, here you have to, so to speak, go through all the that you have gone through in your entire life, in order to grasp in a lively way what emerges from the colors and the forms – which are, after all, the work of the color; they want to be nothing else – and to have the feeling: it does not shut you out, it carries what you feel here out into the whole world, it connects you with the world. Nothing about this building is conceived as anything other than an organic formation.

It was certainly a daring move to transfer mechanical forms of construction into the organic. If you want to develop something organic, everything has to be so that it could not be any different at the place where it occurs. Take something as insignificant as a human earlobe, which is certainly something very insignificant in the human organism. But according to the nature of the human organism, this earlobe, with its very specific shape, must form at this location here, and of course a similar organ could not develop, say, at the tip of the little finger or elsewhere. Each has its shape in its own place.

This has been developed here as a building idea. Everything you see formed here (Fig. 27) has been thought out from the whole, has been thought and felt into the place where it stands. The column is dissolved in such a way that one can see the supporting function of the dissolved column in its form. If you see any motif outside at the entrance, you will see from its forms: This is towards the entrance. If you step a few steps further inside, what the column has to bear is no longer there in the same way. But if you go from the outside world into what such a column structure has to bear, the load-bearing and pushing of the whole structure against each column structure should be felt and, in turn, the relief against the outside world. What we are seeking here is an inner dynamism that strives towards life. And we live in a time when such a metamorphosis must be striven for in all fields of human endeavor, as was rightly felt in the past.

I am reminded of Schlegel, who, looking at the past forms that the “Renaissance men” repeatedly wanted to bring back, coined the beautiful phrase: “Architecture is frozen music.” It is a beautiful phrase for everything that has gone before in architecture, and an extraordinarily apt one. One has the feeling that music lives in these building thoughts. How could one see more beautifully than in the building forms of the Greek temple! How could one feel Bach, prophetically foresaw, differently than in the forms of the Gothic cathedral! The fugue already lives in the pointed arch. There it was frozen, and Friedrich Schlegel was right to call architecture, which he knew, frozen music.

But today we live in a momentous moment of human development. We live in the moment when all creativity must take on a different form. And so we must also thaw and melt the frozen form of architecture. But it would dissolve into the indefinite if it were not imbued with soul in the melting process. And so we must have, alongside the frozen music, a thawing music that looks at us and demands: Give me soul! That, you see, is something of the building idea at Dornach, which spoke out of the development of humanity: thaw me, I am the frozen music! But I would melt into nothingness if, in thawing, the soul, the soul that is intensely moved within, did not lead into all forms. Not mere symmetry-proportionality should live in the forms, not merely that which one capital places in symmetry and proportionality next to the other, but living, intense movement, which allows one capital to grow out of the other like one petal of a flower out of another, metamorphosically transforming the form.

I know all the arguments that can be used against this transfer of the idea of construction from the dynamic-mathematical to the organic-living, and I understand every one of the artists who cling to the old in this direction; I feel for them. But a start had to be made sometime with what time, from its depths, demands of us humans in the present and for the near future. And so only those who experience it as a need of their own soul, which has struggled to meet the demands of the present and the near future, will feel this structure. Of course, there is still a lot that is imperfect, and if it were to be performed a second time, this building would look quite different. But nevertheless, you can see from the attempt, at least, how the attempt has been made down to the smallest detail to transfer the dynamical-mathematical into the organic.

Take a look at the radiators (Fig. 26). See how they are created from an organic, living elementary form, as if certain forces, which mysteriously work in the earth's interior, wanted to continue to work over the earth's surface. A few days ago, you were given a hint here as to how electricity continues to work in a mysterious way in the earth, when what is only transmitted through a wire is closed to the power circuit through the earth line, as it were, the whole earth replaces in its powers what would have to be there in a second wire line. Oh, there is much that is mysterious in the earth. But what is mysterious in the earth can be unraveled, not intellectually but intuitively. When it is shaped into forms, which should not be slavish imitations of animal or plant forms, but which are quite independent forms, then one perceives them as being alive. You can then form a wide, low stove screen and make the shape differently than if you were making a narrow, tall stove screen. You have the metamorphosing principle within you; it passes into the creative hand.

Of course, these are all things that people of the present day may still find repulsive. Let them do it. Those who cling to the old have always found what has emerged as something new repulsive. But such an experiment must be ventured some time. Here it was not even ventured out of the abstract, but it was undertaken because a second, an artistic branch wanted to emerge from the same roots from which spiritual science itself emerged. And I would like to emphasize once again: you will not find a single symbol in this room. If anything here appears to you as a symbol, it could at most be the five-petalled flower leaf at the back in the small domed room (Figs. 55 above, 57), which could appear to you as something that is meant to be symbolic when the curtain is raised later. Just as the five petals do not symbolize a pentagram, nothing here is meant to be symbolic. But everything has been so carefully thought out that every detail, every artistic line, is derived from the form of the whole.

If I have been permitted to characterize the building idea of Dornach in this way, it must be understood that I must at the same time add that what I have said is only the beginning of an attempt. And you can be sure of this: those who are working on this building, those from whom this building idea has arisen, do not think of it in an immodest way. They think about it in such a way that they would certainly retain the impulse, principle and style, the essentials, but create something completely different after they have learned what can be learned in the process of creating this building. A lot could be learned here. Because you truly do not learn more thoroughly than when you are forced to let what lives in your soul flow into concrete action. It is relatively easy to contrive abstract ideals with great perfection. But if one is compelled, already at the very first steps that an idea, an impulse inwardly takes in the soul, to shape this idea, this impulse in such a way that it can weave in the outer material, so that the work in which it embodies itself, does not become allegorical, then it requires something quite different in inner experience, then it requires a growing together with the world thought, with the world impulses, with that which lives in the world.

Therefore, the Greeks, who were able not only to think about the world but also to feel it, took the word “cosmos”, with which they designated the universe, not from theory but from feeling. In the word “cosmos” lies the sense of beauty that is aroused in us when we look at the outer universe. But today, anyone who carries the thought of building in reality in their soul must be able to experience and grasp human development itself in a cosmic artistic way. We place ourselves in the sight of the portal of a Greek temple. We enter the temple. We experience the forms that surround us as a fence around the image of the god. We feel something like wisdom cast in form, that wisdom that flows through the whole world and that once had to emerge artistically in external forms, that had to be felt and that was felt in the highest way when the temple was created as the dwelling place of the Greek god.

We must have a different material from the stone that allows us to shape world wisdom in its sublimity; we must have a different material when we work from the innermost being of the modern human being; for a different force must radiate out into the universe than wisdom is. We receive wisdom; it radiates towards us from what we place on the surface in terms of sublimity, of convexities. When we stand before the soft wood, we hollow into it that which lives in us, and we give something of ourselves to the cosmos. But as human beings, if we do not want to sin against the whole spirit of the world, we must carry nothing into it but what is carried into the universe on the stream of love.

And anyone who can feel artistically, feels when he shapes the marble out of the flat surface, how wisdom comes over him in his consciousness when he carries out the building idea of the marble. The person who executes such a building idea as the one here feels that he must create what can be created by carving into the soft wood, what can live in the concavity, in true devotion to the greatness of the universe. One may only carve into it if one carves into it with love for the universe. No one should actually be able to form a surface with a relief without being overwhelmed by the wisdom of the universe. No one should dare to commit the sin of imprinting their own human essence on the material, of hollowing out the material, who does not do it with love for the universe. These, however, are the two poles of all human development: idea or wisdom and love. When we read Goethe's sayings in prose, it sounds to us like a fundamental solution to the riddle of the world when Goethe says: The highest that man can feel is the harmony of idea and love.

We are aware that this harmony has been achieved here, for the time being only, I would almost say haltingly, in what we have now been able to do. But according to the intentions from which its idea has flowed, this structure does not want to be anything other than a germ. But a germ must not be judged only by what it initially presents itself as; a germ must be judged by what can grow out of it. These courses have been organized to help get this germ growing. And we have called you here because you are part of this building idea from Dornach. For whatever I might relate to you about the building idea of Dornach, it would all have to be unfinished, because this building idea can only be completed by those who have felt it going out into the world and - each in his own place - accomplishing that to which this building idea, with all that can be cultivated in the building, is to be the germ. I can only speak to you of something unfinished.

To complete what is intended here, that cannot be done in Dornach, not by those who would work here, however fully; that can only be done effectively by you, by going out into the world and completing what can be hinted at here but must remain unfinished. You are not called upon to admire or evaluate the building, but to complete it, to be the further material in which the world spirit itself works, in which it is freely grasped by you so that in today's social distress, in today's decisive moment in world history, something may be done for the further development of humanity that leads not to barbarism but to a new, luminous ascent of human development. We would like the walls, columns, windows and domed spaces to speak to you: become the fulfillers of the architectural vision of Dornach! For it is in this sense that we have truly counted on you.

I would like to say a few words about the building concept, with the direct support of the building. From the outset, the view could arise that if one has to talk about such a building, it indicates that it does not make the necessary impression as an artistic work; and in many cases, what is thought about the building of Dornach, about the Goetheanum in the world, is thought from a false point of view influenced by a [one-sided] view. For example, the opinion has been spread that the building in Dornach wants to symbolize all kinds of things, that it is a symbolizing building. In reality, you will not find a single symbol in it when you look at it, as they are popular in mystical and theosophical societies. The building should be able to be experienced entirely from the ki-based feeling and has also been created from these artistic feelings in its forms, in all its details. Therefore, it must only work through what it is itself.

Explaining has become popular, and one then complies with such requests for explanations; but in mentioning this here before you, I also say that such an explanation of an artistic work always seems to me to be not only half, but almost completely unartistic, and that I will now give you a kind of lecture in front of the building, a lecture that I fundamentally dislike, if only because I have to speak to you in abstract terms about what emerged in my mind as details when designing the building, the models and so on, and what was created from life. I would rather speak to you about the building as little as possible.

It is already the case that a new style, a new artistic form of expression, is viewed with a certain mistrust in the present day. I can still hear a word that I heard many decades ago when I was studying at the Technical University [in Vienna], where Ferstel gave his lectures. In one of them, he says: “Architectural styles are not invented, an architectural style grows out of the character of a nation.” Therefore, Ferstel is also opposed to any invention of a desired new architectural style, a new type of construction. What is true about this idea is that the style, which is supposed to stylize the characteristics of a people, must emerge not from an abstraction, but from a living world view, which is at the same time a world experience and, from this point of view, comprehensively encompasses the chaotic spiritual life of contemporary humanity. On the basis of this thoroughly correct idea, it becomes necessary to transform what was characteristic of previous architectural styles into organic building forms by incorporating the symmetrical, the geometric-static, and so on.

I am well aware of what can be said – and, from a certain point of view, justifiably said – by those who have become psychologically attuned to previous architectural styles against what has been attempted here in Dornach as an architectural style: the transference of geometrical-symmetrical-static forms into organic forms. But it has been attempted. And so you can see in these forms of building that this building here is an as yet inadequate first attempt to express the transition from these geometric forms of building to the organic. It is certain, of course, that the development of humanity is moving towards these forms of building, and when we again have the impulses of clairvoyant experience, I believe that these forms of building will play the first, leading role.

This building should be understood in the same way through its relationship with the organizing forces of nature as the previous buildings are understood through their relationship with the geometric-static-symmetrizing forces of nature. This building is to be viewed from this point of view, and from this point of view you will understand how every detail within the building idea for Dornach must be completely individualized here. Just think of your earlobe: it is a very small part of the human organism, but you cannot imagine that an organic form like the earlobe is suitable for growing on the big toe. This organ is bound to its place within the organism. Just as you find that within the whole organism a supporting organ is always shaped in such a way that it can have a static-dynamic effect within the organism, so too the individual forms in our building in Dornach had to be such that they could serve the static-dynamic forces. Every single form had to be organized in such a way that it could and had to be in its place what it now appears to be. Look at each arch from this point of view, how it is formed, how it flattens out towards the exit, for example, how it curves inwards towards the building itself, where it not only has to support but also to express support in an organic way, thereby helping to develop what only appears to be unnecessary in organic formation. Ordinary architecture leaves out what the organism develops, that which goes beyond the static. But one senses that the idea of building has been transferred to the organic design of the forms, and that this is also necessary.

You will have to consider every column from this point of view; then you will also understand that the ordinary column, which is taken out of the geometric-static, has been replaced by one that does not imitate the organic - everything is so that it is not imitated naturalistically - but transferred into organically made structures. It is not imitating an organic structure. You will not find it if you look for a model in nature. But you will find it if you understand how human beings can live together with the forces that have an organizing effect in nature, and how, apart from what nature itself creates, such organizing forms can arise. So you will see in these column supports how the expansion of the structure, the support, the inward pointing, and, in the same way as, say, in the upper end of the human thigh, the support, the walking, the walking and so on, is embodied statically, but organically and statically.

From this point of view, I would also ask you to consider something like the structure with the three perpendicular formations at the top of the stairs here below (Figs. 23, 24). The feeling arises here of how a person feels when he is striving to ascend the stairs. He must have a feeling of security, of spiritual unity in all that goes on in this building, indeed in all that he sees in this building. Everything came to me entirely from my feelings. Believe it or not, this form came to me entirely from my artistic feelings. As I said, you may believe it or not, it was only afterwards that it occurred to me that this form is somewhat reminiscent of the form of the three semicircular circles in the human ear, which, when injured, cause fainting, so that they immediately express what gives a person stability. This expression, that a person should be given stability in this building, comes about in the experience of the three perpendicular directions. This can be experienced in this structure without having to engage in abstract thought. One can remain entirely in the artistic realm.

If you look at the wall-like structures, you will find that natural-looking forces have been poured into the forms, but in such a way that in these forms, which are radiator covers (Fig. 26), the concrete material of the structure is worked out first, and then, further up, the material of the wood, so that they are metamorphosed. You will find that in these structures, the process of metamorphosis is elevated to the artistic. It is the idea of the building that should have a definite effect on such radiator covers, which are designed in such a way that you immediately feel the purpose and do not need to explore it intellectually first. This is how these elementary forms, half plant-like, half animal-like, came to be felt. One only realizes that they must be so when one has shaped them out of the material. And it also follows that it is necessary to metamorphose them depending on whether they are in one place or another, depending on whether they are long and low or narrower and higher. All this is not the result of calculating the form, but the forms shape themselves out of the feeling in their metamorphosis, as for example here, where we have come so far, where the building is a concrete structure in its basement and where one has to empathize with the design of what the concrete is. You enter here at the west gate. Here is the room for checking in your coat. The staircase, which leads up on the left and right, takes you up to the wooden structure containing the auditorium, the stage and adjoining rooms. Please follow me up the stairs to the auditorium.

We first enter a kind of vestibule (Fig. 27). You will feel the very different impression that the wooden paneling creates compared to the concrete paneling on the lower floor. I would like to note here: When one has to work with stone, concrete or other hard materials, one has to approach it differently than when one has to work with a soft material, for example, wood. The material of wood makes it necessary to focus one's entire perception on the fact that one has to scrape corners, concaves, and hollows out of the soft material, if I may use the expression. It is scraping, scraping out. You deepen the material, and only by doing so can you enter into this relationship with the material, which is a truly artistic relationship. While when working with wood you can only coax out of the material what gives the forms if you focus your attention on deepening, when working with hard material you do not have to do with the recesses. You can only develop a relationship with the hard material by applying it, by working convexly, by applying raised areas to the base surfaces, for example when working with stone. Grasping this is an essential part of artistic creation, and it has been partially lost in more recent times.

You will see when we enter the auditorium how each individual surface, each chapter, is treated individually. In this organic structure, a chapter can only be such that one feels: In what follows each other, no kind of repetition can be created, as is otherwise the case with symmetrical-geometric-static architectural styles. In this building, based on organic ideas, you have only a single axis of symmetry, which goes from west to east. You will only find a symmetrical arrangement in relation to this, just as you can only find a single axis of symmetry for a higher organism, not out of arbitrariness, but out of the inner organization of forces of the being in question.

At this point, I would also like to mention that the treatment of the walls also had to be completely different under the influence of the organic building idea than it was before. A wall was for earlier architects what demarcates a space. It had the effect of being inside the room. This feeling had to be abandoned in this building. The walls had to be designed in such a way that they were not felt as a boundary, but as something that carries you out into the vastness of the macrocosm; you have to feel as if you are absorbed, as if you are standing inside the vastness of the cosmos. Walls had to be made transparent, so to speak, whereas in the past every effort was made to give the wall such artificial forms that it was closed, opaque. You will see that the transparent is used artistically at all, and that was driven out of elementary backgrounds into the physical in these windows that you see here and that you will see in the building.

If you see windows in the sense of the earlier architectural style, you will actually have to have the healthy sense: they break through the walls, they do not fit into the architectural forms, but they only fit in through the principle of utility. Here, artistic feeling will be needed down to the last detail. It was necessary to present the wall in such a way that it is not something closed, but something that expands outwards, towards infinity. I could only achieve this by remembering that you can scratch out designs from single-colored window panes, as if using an erasing method, a glass etching method. And so, monochromatic window panes were purchased, which were then processed in such a way that the motifs one wanted to have were scratched out with the diamond stylus. So for this purpose, an actual glass etching technique was conceived, and from this the windows emerged.

When you consider the motifs of the windows, you must not think that you are dealing with purely symbolic designs. You can see it already on this larger windowpane (Fig. 109): nothing is designed on these window panes other than what the imagination produces. There are mystics who develop a mysticism with superficial sentences and strange ideas and constantly explain that the physical-sensual outer world is a kind of maja, an illusion. Often people approach you and say that so-and-so is a great mystic because he always declaims that the outer world is a maja. The human physical countenance has something that is maya, that is absolutely false, that is something quite different in truth. What appears on this windowpane is not something that symbolizes; it is an essence that is envisaged, which only does not look to the spiritual observer as it appears to the senses. The larynx is the organ of vision for the etheric; the larynx is already Maja as a physical larynx, and that which is a merely physical-sensual vision is not reality.

What is the spiritual meaning behind this? The spiritual fact is that the human being is truly being whispered in the ear, left and right, what the secrets of the world are. So that one can say: the bull speaks in the left ear, the lion in the right ear. If one wants to depict something like this as a motif in a picture or in words, one can only put into the word what is already in the picture itself. It must be clearly understood, however, that such a picture can only be understood by someone who lives in the world view from which it originated. A person who does not have a living Christian feeling will not be able to relate to the pictorial representations that Christian art has produced.

The artist experiences a great deal when he immerses himself in a vision; but such an experience must not be translated into abstract thoughts, otherwise it will immediately begin to fade. One example of the artist's experience is this: when Leonardo da Vinci painted his Last Supper, which has now fallen into such disrepair that it can no longer be appreciated artistically, people thought it took too long. He couldn't finish the Judas because this Judas was supposed to emerge from the darkness. Leonardo worked on this painting for almost twenty years and still hadn't finished it. Then a new prior came to Milan and looked at the work. He wasn't an artist; he said that Leonardo, this servant of the church, had to finally finish his work. Leonardo replied that he could do it now; he had always only sketched the figure of Judas because he had not found the model for it; now that the prior was there, he had found the model for Judas in him, and the picture would now be quickly finished. — There you have such an external, concrete experience. Such external, concrete experiences play a much greater role in all the artist's work than can be expressed in such brief descriptions.

You have [now] entered the building through the room below the organ and the room for musical instruments, dear attendees. If you look around after entering, you will find the building idea initially characterized by the fact that the floor plan (Fig. 20) represents two not quite completed circles that interlock in their segments. It seems to me that the necessity for shaping the building in this way can already be seen when approaching the building from a certain distance and if one has an idea of what is actually supposed to take place in the building. I will now explain further what is connected with the building idea. First of all, I would like to point out that you can see seven columns arranged in symmetry solely against the west-east axis, closing the auditorium on the left and right as you move forward. These seven columns are not formed in such a way that a capital shape, a pedestal shape or an architrave shape above it is repeated, but the capital, pedestal and architrave shapes are in a continuous development. The two columns at the back of the organ room have the simplest capital and pedestal motifs (Figs. 28, 33): forms that, as it were, strive from top to bottom, with others striving towards them from bottom to top. This most primitive form of interaction between above and below is then metamorphosed in the following architrave, capital and pedestal forms (Figs. 35-54).

This progressive metamorphosis came about through the fact that, when I was forming the model (Fig. 22), I tried to recreate what occurs in nature by force. What happens in nature, where an unnotched leaf with primitive forms is first formed at the bottom of the plant, and then this primitive form metamorphoses the higher you go, into the indented, more intricately designed leaf, even transformed into a petal, stamen and pistil, which must be imitated - although not in a naturalistic way - one must place oneself inwardly and vitally into it and then create from within, as nature creates and transforms, as it produces and metamorphoses. Then, without reflection, but from much deeper soul forces than from reflection, one gets such transformations of the second from the first, the third from the second, and so on.

It is possible to misunderstand that, for example, in the fifth column and in the architrave motifs above the fourth column, something like a caduceus appears (Figs. 41, 42). One could now believe that the caduceus was stuck in these two places by the intellect. I believe that someone who had worked from the intellect would probably have placed the caduceus in the architrave motif and, because the intellect has a symmetrical effect, the column motif with the caduceus below it. Someone who works as we have here finds something different. Here, with the motif that you see as the fourth capital motif, this Mercury staff emerged just as a petal emerges from the sepal, only through sensing the metamorphosing transformation, without me even remotely thinking of forming a Mercury staff. I did not think of a past style, but of the transformation of the fourth capital motif from the third. One can see how the forms that have gradually emerged in the development of humanity have developed quite naturally.

Then we come to the epoch when the human being intervenes in his or her psychological development. If we work this into the column in an individualizing way, what is worked on earlier on the surface of the architrave comes later. That is why you see the caduceus on the capital later than on the architrave. A plant that is thin and delicate develops different leaf shapes than a sturdy one. Compare just a shepherd's purse with a cactus, and you will see how the filling and shaping of space is expressed in the figurative design.

At the same time, a cosmic secret arises in this way of feeling evolution through. There has been much talk of evolution in recent times, but little feeling about it. One only thinks it through with the mind. One speaks of the evolution of the perfect from the imperfect. Herbert Spencer and others have done much harm to this, and the thought has arisen that is completely justified in front of the mind, but which does not do justice to the observation of nature: In intellectual thinking, one assumes that in evolution, the simpler forms are at the beginning and that these then become more and more differentiated and differentiated. Spencer, in particular, worked with such evolutionary ideas. But evolution does not show it that way. There is, however, a differentiation, a complication of the forms; but then one comes to a center, and then the forms simplify again. What follows is not more complicated, but what follows is simpler again. You can see this in nature itself. The human eye, which is the most perfect, has, so to speak, achieved greater simplicity than the eye forms of certain animals, which, for example, have the xiphoid process, the fan, which has disappeared again as the eye in evolution moved further up to become human.

It is therefore necessary for man to connect with the power of nature, to feel the power of nature, to make the power of nature his own power and to create from this feeling. Thus, an attempt has been made to design this building in an entirely organic way, to design every detail in its place as it must be individualized from the whole. So you can see, for example, that the organ (Figs. 28-30) is surrounded by plastic motifs that make it appear as if the organ is not simply placed in the space, but that it works out of the whole remaining organic design, as if growing out of it. So everything in this building must be tried to be made in this way.

Here you see the lectern (Fig. 68) on which I am standing. Initially, the idea was to create something here that would, as it were, grow out of the other forms of construction, but in such a way that it would also express the fact that from here, through the word, one strives to express everything that is to be expressed in the building. At the moment when a person speaks here, the forms of what is spoken must continue in such a way that, just as the nose betrays in its form what the whole person is through his or her countenance, so too can the forms of what is spoken continue in such a way that the whole human being is revealed through the form of the nose. Anyone who has made artistically inspired nose studies can create the 'architectural style', the physiognomy of the whole human being, from a nose study. No one can ever have a different nose than they have, and there could never be a different lectern than the one that is here. However, if you claim this, it is meant according to your own view; you can only act according to your own view.

That an attempt has been made here to truly metamorphose the body can be seen from the fact that the motifs here in the glass windows are in part really such motifs that arise as images of the soul's life. For example, look at the pink window here (Fig. 113). You will see on the left wing something coming out like the west portal of the building; on the right wing you see a kind of head. There you see a person sitting on a slope, looking towards the building, and another person looking towards the head. This has nothing to do with speculative mysticism; it has to do with an immediate inner visual experience. This building could not have been created in any other way than by sensing the shape of the human head in a mysterious way, and the organic power on the one hand and the shape of the human head on the other hand result in the intuitive shape of the building. Therefore, the person sitting on the slope sees the metamorphosis of the building in his soul, sometimes as a human head, sometimes as the building revealing itself to the outside world. This provides a motif that leads, if I may say so, to an inner experience.

There you will find in the blue windowpane (Fig. 111) a person who is aiming to shoot a bird in flight. In the right-hand pane you will see that the person has fired. The bird in the left-hand field is in a sphere of light. Around the man you find all kinds of figures vividly alive in the astral body, one when he is about to shoot, the other when he has shot. This is reality, but it is from mundane life. I can imagine that those who always want to be dripping with inner elevation take offence when they experience such things as they are meant here, that a human shooting is simply depicted. Yes, I was pleased when an Italian friend once used a somewhat crude expression about theosophists, who are such mystics. The friend who had already died said it, and I may say it in the very esteemed company here, because the person concerned was a princess, and what a princess says can certainly be said. She glossed such people, who always want to live in a kind of inner elevation, by saying that they are people with a “face up to their stomachs”. I also do not repeat her not quite correct German.

Now, dear attendees, the same idea was then also implemented in painting. I can only talk about the actual painting, about spiritual painting, by referring to the small dome. Only in the small dome was it possible for me to carry out what I have indicated as the challenge of a newer painting: that here, behind the emergence from the color experience, drawing disappears altogether. I had one of my characters in the first mystery drama express this as follows: that the forms appear to be the work of color. For when one feels with the feeling for painting, then one feels the drawing, which is carried into the pictorial, as a lie. When I draw a horizontal line, it is actually a reproduction of something that is not there at all. When I apply the blue sky as a surface and the green below, the form arises from the experience of the color itself. In this way, every pictorial element can be formed. Within the world of color itself lies a creative world, and the one who feels the colors paints what the colors say to each other in creation. He does not need to stick to a naturalistic model; he can create the figures from the colors themselves. It is the case that nature and also human life already have a certain right to shape the moral out of the colored with a necessity.

Yesterday, Mr. Uehli quite rightly pointed out how newer painters already have an intuitive sense of such effects created by light and dark, by the colors themselves, and how they come to paint a double bass next to a tin can. They are pursuing the right thing in and of itself, that it is more important to see how the light gradates in its becoming colored when it falls on a double bass and then continues to fall on a tin can. That is the right thing. But the wrong thing is that this is again based on naturalistic experience. If you really live in the colors, something other than a tin can and a bass violin arises from the colors. The colors are creative, and how they come together is a necessity arising from the mere colors, which you have to experience. Then you don't put a tin can next to a bass violin because that is outside the colors.

So here I have tried to paint entirely from the colors. If you see the reddish-orange spot and the black spot next to the blue spot, it is first of all a vivid impression from the colors. But then the colors come to life, then figures emerge from them, which can even be interpreted afterwards. But just as little as one can make plants here with the human mind, one can just as little paint something on them that one has thought up with the human mind. One must first think when the colors are there, just as the plant must first grow before one can see it.

And so a Faust figure with Death and the Child came into being (Figs. 69-74). The whole head emerged out of the colors, with all the figures in it. Only in the realm of the human soul does something spiritually real take shape of its own accord. For example, you can see above the organ motif how something is painted (Fig. 31) that a person with a philistine attachment to the sensual world would naturally perceive as madness. But you will no longer perceive it as madness when I tell you the following: if you close your eyes, you will, as it were, feel something like two eyes looking at each other, inside the eye. What takes place inwardly can certainly be further developed in a certain way. Then what, when viewed in a primitive way, looks like two eyes glowing out of the darkness and what is seen when it is experienced inwardly, can be projected outwards and experienced in such a way that an entire beyond, an entire world-genesis can be seen in it. Here again an attempt has been made to create out of color what the eye experiences when it looks into the darkness and sees itself. One need not merely read the secrets intellectually, one can see them – suddenly they are there.

In a similar way, attempts were made to bring other motifs into reality, again not from the naturalistic imitation of signs and forms, but entirely from color. The ancient Indians and their inspiration, the seven Rishis, who in turn were inspired by the stars, to paint with an open-topped head (Fig. 32, far right) is, if you do it that way, abstract, actually nonsense; I say that quite openly. But when one experiences what was experienced in the ancient Indian culture in the relationship between the disciple and the guru, the teacher, one feels as if the ancient Indian did not have a skullcap, but as if it had evaporated and as if he were not the one human being who lives in his skin, but one feels as a sevenfold being, as if his soul power was composed of the seven soul rays of the holy Rishis of ancient Atlantis, enlightening him, and that he then communicated to his world that which he revealed, not from his own spirit but from the spirit of the holy Rishis. The more one works out what is said here, the more one comes closer to what has been painted here. The intuitive perception has first placed itself in ancient India, in ancient Atlantis. That which can be seen there has been painted on the wall here, and only afterwards can one speculate when it is there. This is how the message can relate to artistic creation. This is how everything in this building should actually come about.

You will find this building covered with Nordic slate. The building idea must be felt through to the point of radiating outwards. The slate, or the material used to cover it, must shine in a certain way in the sunlight. It seemed to happen by chance here – but of course there is always an inner necessity underlying it. When I saw the Nordic slate in Norway from the train, I knew that it was the right thing to cover the building with. We were then able to have the slate shipped from Norway in the pre-war period. You will feel the effect when you look at the building from a distance in good sunshine.

My main concern during the construction was the acoustics. The building was of course also provided with scaffolding on the inside during construction so that work could be carried out above. This did not produce any acoustics, the acoustics were quite different, that is, it was a caricature of acoustics. Now it so happens that the acoustics of the building were also conceived from the same building idea. My idea was that I had to expect that the acoustic question for the lecturer could be solved from occult research. You know how difficult it is; you cannot calculate the acoustics. You will see how it has been done, but to a certain degree of perfection in the acoustics.

You may now ask how these seven pillars, which contain the secret of the construction, are related to the acoustics. The two domes within our building are so lightly connected that they form a kind of soundboard, just as the soundboard of a violin plays a role in the richness of the sound. Of course, since the whole, both the columns and the dome, are made of wood, the acoustics will only reach perfection over the years, just as the acoustics of a violin only develop over the years. We must first find a way to have a profound effect on the material in order to be able to feel through the building idea what is now sensed as the acoustics of this building. You will understand that the acoustics must be sensed best from the organ podium. You will also see that when two people talk to each other here in the middle, an echo can be heard coming down from the ceiling. This seems to be an indication from the world essence that one should only speak from the stage or the lectern within the building and that the building itself does not actually tolerate useless chatter from any point.

Now, dear attendees, I have tried to tell you what can be said in this regard while looking at the building. I will have to supplement what I have spoken today in my presentation of the building idea, which I will give at the final event next Saturday. Then I will say what can still be said. Now we have to clear the hall for the next lecture.

Dear attendees!

With your permission, I would like to expand on what I said during the tour of the Goetheanum by saying a few more words about our building today. For many years, our anthroposophical movement held its meetings in ordinary halls, just as they are available today. And even when we were able to present dramatic performances based on the impulses of the anthroposophical worldview, starting in 1909, we initially had to limit ourselves to having these performances in ordinary theaters and under ordinary theater conditions. As our anthroposophical movement grew, a large number of our friends came up with the idea of building a house for anthroposophy. And now I was given the task, so to speak, of creating a home for the anthroposophical movement. I would like to make it clear that the order to build did not come from me, but from friends of the anthroposophical worldview.

The question now arose: how should the construction of such a house be approached? If any other society, an association with any task or objective, builds a house for itself today – and today there are all kinds of associations with all kinds of objectives – then it consults with some architect. They agree on the style in which such a house is to be built: Greek, Gothic, Renaissance or some other style. This is the usual procedure today. If anthroposophy were a movement like all the others, it could have proceeded in this way. But anthroposophy takes into account the great demands of our time for a thorough renewal of our entire culture, and therefore it could not be built in this way.

Furthermore, anthroposophy is not a one-sided body of ideas, but the body of ideas of anthroposophy arises from the whole of human experience, from deep sources of the human being. And that which lives in the ideas of anthroposophy has sprung from a primeval source, just as it did in the case of the older cultures. And just as the words of Anthroposophy can be proclaimed by human mouths and given as teachings, so too can that which flows from the sources from which the Anthroposophical ideas also flow be given for direct artistic contemplation. It is not a matter of translating or applying anthroposophical ideas to art, but rather of another branch growing out of the same source of life from which anthroposophical ideas come, and developing as art. What Anthroposophy has to reveal can be said from a podium in words that signify ideas. But it can also speak from the forms, from plastic forms, from painting, without sculpture or painting becoming symbolism or allegory, but rather within the sphere of the purely artistic. But that means nothing other than: If anthroposophy creates a physical shell for itself in which it is to work, then it must give this physical shell its own style, just as older world views have given their physical shells the corresponding style.

Take the Greek architectural style, as it has partly been realized in the Greek temple: This Greek temple has grown entirely out of the same world view that gave rise to Greek drama, Greek epic poetry, and Greek conceptions of the gods. The Greek felt that in creating his temple, he was building a dwelling for the god. And the god is again nothing other than what older cultural views saw in the human soul that had passed through death in its further development; a certain qualitative relationship between the god and the human soul that has passed through death was felt in older cultural currents. And so, as in ancient times, when people believed that the human soul had passed through death, they built dwellings for it while still on earth, thus constructing houses for the dead, they designed something similar for the older times, as the Greeks then designed in their temples at a later stage. The temple is the dwelling of the god, that is, not of the human soul that has passed through death itself, but of that soul which belongs to a different hierarchy, to a different world order.

Those who can see forms artistically can still feel in the forms that have been created by carrying and other loads for the Greek temple, as in older times the dead, who still remained on earth after death, who, so to speak, as a chthonic deity, as an earthly deity, this house was formed out of this earth; so that a continuation of the gravitational forces of the earth, as they can be felt by man when he somehow looks through his limbs, such a connection of forces as a temple was erected. The Greek temple is only to be regarded as complete when one looks at it in such a way that the statue of the god is inside. Those with a sense of form cannot imagine an empty Greek temple as complete. They can only imagine, they can feel, that this shell contains the statue of Athena, Zeus, Apollo and so on.

Let's skip some of the art historical development and look at the Gothic building. If you feel the Gothic building with its forms, with its peculiar windows that let in the light in a unique way, you actually always feel that when you enter the empty Gothic cathedral, it is not a totality, nothing complete: the Gothic cathedral is only complete when the community is inside, whose souls resonate in harmony in their effects. A Greek temple is the wrapping of the god who dwells on earth through his statue in the people; a Gothic cathedral is in all its forms that which encloses the community in harmony and with thoughts directed towards the eternal.

Greek world view, world view that created form in the Gothic, are dead worlds for humanity. Only the degenerate forces of decline that originated from them can still live today. We need a new culture, but one that is not only expressed in a one-sided way in knowledge and ideas, but one that can also express itself in a new art. And so the development of art history also points to the necessity of a building style for anthroposophy, which wants to bring a new form of culture.

The way in which Anthroposophy is to be lived is based on the idea that a higher being, which is in fact the human being himself, speaks to the person who lives in the ordinary life that unfolds between birth and death. By feeling this, the two-dome structure presented itself to me as the necessary building envelope for this basic impulse of the anthroposophical world view. In the small dome, what is inwardly large and wide is, as it were, physically compressed; in the large dome, what is inwardly less wide, what inwardly belongs to the life we lead between birth and death, is spatially expanded.

And when a person enters this structure in the sense of such an anthroposophical worldview, they must find their own being. This is based on what has just been said. And while he is inside, he must feel the structure in such a way that he, as a human being, as a microcosm, does not feel constrained by the structure, but is externally connected to the universe, to the macrocosm, through the entire structure. But if you look at the structure from the outside, you must have the feeling: Something is going on in there that brings something unearthly, something extraterrestrial, to earthly existence. Something is going on in there that is hidden in the earthly itself. So it must be possible to look at the building in terms of its overall form and also in terms of the sculptural extensions, which, as I said over there, must represent organic structure.

I ask you to view the slides from this perspective, which I will now take the liberty of showing you. Of course, they show nothing other than what you have already seen; they are only intended to conclusively present what can be seen of the building. We will start by showing an exterior view looking towards the west portal.

The building seen from a little further away (Fig. 6), looking towards the west portal.

The next picture (Fig. 7): looking more towards the south portal, the west and south portals seen more together.

Here (Fig. 2) is a view of the building from the east, with a simultaneous view of the building that contains the lighting and heating units for the building. This boiler house is, of course, particularly controversial in its form because it looks different from the buildings we are accustomed to seeing today. And this boiler house is not built according to any principle other than everything that has been built here at all. The original idea was to have a number of heating and lighting systems. That is, in a sense, the nut. And now, as with the nut, only the nutshell can arise as a covering from an inner, logical necessity, and that, when one has such a utilitarian building, one cannot proceed otherwise than that one perceives everything that must be inside this structure in its essence and then makes a shell that corresponds to this content in the same way that the nutshell corresponds to the nut.

Of course, this can only be felt; it cannot be discussed. Another person may feel differently. But if one criticizes the ground, I would like to ask the people who do so to consider what would be there if no attempt had been made – even if it was not immediately successful at the first attempt – to find the right covering for heating and lighting, but had stuck with the current one, then there might be a red chimney here. Perhaps the philistines would have liked it more, but art would have been less satisfied.

The next picture (Fig. 4) will show a view from a greater distance of the north-west portal.

The next picture (Fig. 1) is supposed to show the building from an even greater distance.

It was always my intention, despite the fact that the building was not originally intended for here, but in the middle of houses, to design it here so that it fits into the overall configuration of the landscape, the Jura landscape. I cannot, while trying to avoid any illusion, but say otherwise than that I think the building is already growing out of the plastic forms of the landscape.

Here I take the liberty of showing you the ground plan (Fig. 20), which expresses exactly what I have just said. The point was to feel through the effect, I would like to say, of one side of the human being on the other, in the ground plan and in the whole form of the building.

What now follows is a cross-section through the entire structure (Fig. 21).

Now I will try to show this cross-section; I will try to show what can be built on this cross-section by showing you the model that I originally made (Fig. 22). This is the original model of the construction, the large dome, the small dome, as I made it here from the fall of 1913. It is largely made of wax, insofar as one is dealing with plastic forms, and partly of wood.

The next one will show a side wing, seen from the side (Fig. 13), where you can particularly see the metamorphosis that the motif, which can be seen above the west portal, can undergo in a smaller form. The forms become quite different on the outside, but according to the idea, they are the same on the inside.

The next motif is depicted in the piece above the south portal, which is above the southern entrance door (Fig. 11): the same motif as on the west portal, but in a simpler, more primitive metamorphosis. Next, we present part of the room that one enters when going down into the concrete sub-room, which is intended for depositing the clothes (Fig. 23). One goes up there via the stairs. In any case, all the honored attendees have become aware of the underlying feelings behind the design of this room.

The staircase with its surroundings (Fig. 24), which we can pass over particularly quickly because they are only intended for recapitulation. The next thing I bring is a column from the interior, which one enters when one has gone up the stairs, that is, before one enters the main room (Fig. 27). Everything that is worked here is already worked in wood.

Here I present the organ motif, but not as you see it now, but as it was as a model (Fig. 30). It is a photograph of the organ motif model and you can see it here (Fig. 29) in an unfinished state at the same time. I said in the description over in the building that an attempt was made to design the whole sculpture around the organ so that the organ does not appear to be inserted into the space, but rather to have grown out of it. Here you can see the work of this organ sculpture still half-finished. First, I had to work out the general shape, and only later did I adapt the general forms to fit exactly with what emerged as the lines through the ends of the organ pipes upwards.

We now see in the next picture [the capital of the first column in the west] (Fig. 33), and I ask you to pay attention to the next three pictures. They are presented here to show two consecutive capitals. You should note that a single capital is actually not something that can be viewed on its own. The thing on which everything is based is the way in which each subsequent capital emerges from a preceding one. Therefore, I show two capitals emerging from each other [of the second and third columns] (Figs. 36, 38), and in between the two together [with the architrave above] (Fig. 37), thus each individual one in succession and in between the two together.

We see here the fourth capital (Fig. 40). Now the two capitals in succession, the fourth and fifth (Fig. 41). Now the fifth alone (Fig. 42).

Likewise, I will now show two bases that have been formed one after the other, again the individual one is not to be understood in isolation, but only as emerging from what has gone before.

The first pedestal, the fifth (Fig. 52).

Now the sixth (Fig. 53). The next picture will show the motif that arises when we look east, standing in the building and see what is in the east (Fig. 57).

A column order: This is the view after the organ motif when standing in the building, looking from east to west (Fig. 29).

Here you can see the motif carved into the wood above the curtain slit (Fig. 55). The curtain is open, we look into the small domed room, and below we can also see the carving of the small domed room, only a little indistinctly, and above it the painting.

The next one shows the motif that was carved in the small domed room: as a kind of synthetic conclusion of the individual forms (Fig. 67). If you look from the auditorium into the small domed room, you will see, immediately below the painted Christ-like figure, with Lucifer above him and Ahriman below him, a wood carving that combines all the forms that are otherwise distributed throughout the building – but initially, I would like to say, only in an organic, not yet spiritualized way.

Psychically, it is only summarized in the Christ group (Fig. 93), which is a nine-meter-high wooden group that will stand in the far east and show the representative of humanity in the middle, who can be understood as the Christ – but must be understood in the feeling – [and] has the Luciferic principle above him and the Ahrimanic principle below him. Psychically, this will synthesize all the individual forms.

I will now describe some of the motifs in the small cupola painting.

First, you see the child, depicted in an orange tone (Fig. 72), in front of the blue figure, which looks like a fist (Fig. 70), holding a tablet with the “I” – the only word that will be found in the entire structure, for very specific reasons. I would be pleased, ladies and gentlemen, if you would feel something absurd from these pictures, which, after all, could only be viewed in black and white, because here the painting is done in such a way that everything is brought out in color. You can actually only give something in the reproduction in which, according to perception, something must be missing, something absurd. Perhaps one should see here that something quite unfinished, something absurd stands before one, and then one should give oneself the answer: it must actually be so, because the thing has meaning only in color. Whoever understands the inner meaning of the colored world will thoroughly grasp that even the figurative can, to a certain degree, be created entirely out of color. Those who see the blue above in the neighborhood of the other colors will perceive it purely as a possible creation from the color that a kind of Faust figure appears here. The next picture (Fig. 71) shows Death below Faust. The modern discerning person is placed between Death, the end of life, and Birth, the other end of life, which has been depicted in the child.

The next image (Fig. 78): a kind of figure that resembles an Egyptian initiate.

The inspirers hovering above him, initiating world powers (Fig. 77). From the way the treatment is presented, it will be clear that I may say: Although Figural is distinguished here from the colored, what I have said about the creative in color still applies.

Here you can see a detail, a kind of ahriman head (Fig. 81). It is only conceivable to paint from the color used in the dome above: a peculiar brown-yellow.

Here together: Ahriman head and Lucifer head (Fig. 79). They are only truly contrasted in color. The lower one shows what is inspired by Lucifer and Ahriman when they are grasped in their objectivity, when one is not grasped by them oneself, which is then particularly effective in man or can become so because man is of a special kind, who stands to the child as indicated in the lower figure.

The next picture shows Lucifer's head on its own (Fig. 80), that is, painted; in sculpture, it looks different.

Here (Fig. 82) you see the [Germanic] man with the child, who has Ahriman and Lucifer above him, as shown earlier.

Here (Fig. 87) you can see Lucifer in a reddish-yellow painting above the representative of humanity in the central image of the small dome.

The next image (Fig. 88) then represents Ahriman under the representative of humanity – Ahriman, who is embraced with his love rays as if by a crushing lightning bolt.

This is the painted Representative of Man, that is, the head of it (Fig. 90). This (Fig. 91) represents my model as it is initially worked in profile view of the Representative of Man; while what was shown earlier is a painting, this here is a sculpture. This is the first model of the Representative of Humanity in sculpture, the Representative of Humanity who can be felt as Christ.

The next part will show the plastic group (Fig. 98). At the top left, this elemental being will show itself, an elemental being that has, to a certain extent, grown out of the forces of the rock. Below, you can see Lucifer striving upwards. The elemental being has grown out of the forces of the rock here in the wood group, whereby it becomes clear how one first dared here to work out ways of overcoming mere composition through organic design by means of asymmetry work out ways of overcoming mere composition through organic design, thus working in asymmetry. What is important here is that the form is worked out precisely from the place, with all its asymmetries, from the place where this being is located in the nine-meter-high group.

I will now show you my first Ahriman model (Fig. 99), which was created in 1915 in wax. The other Ahriman heads here are modeled after this Ahriman head. I would just like to note: This is what a person would look like if he had no heart at all and only reason. For the Ahrimanic represents the super-intellectual, the super-rational in man.

I will now show two views of the boiler house, the boiler and lighting house (Figs. 106, 107).

Now we come to the glass house below, in which you have held many a meeting here (Fig. 103). You can see the double-dome structure in a different form, a metamorphosis of the large building, metamorphosed in such a way that the two domes have to be the same size and do not adjoin each other, but are separate. I would like to illustrate the fact that everything about these buildings is individualized down to the last detail by showing you the gate of this glass house (Fig. 104), where you will see the individualization down to the stairs and the woodcarving.

Now another picture (Fig. 110 or 112), which should show how what is intended by scratching out the colored glass pane, what is created from the feel of the material, so that it can only appear in the color in question. I ask you to look at this and see for yourself that if this appears uncolored, it is hideous.

In recapitulating these things, I believe I have once again been able to point out how anthroposophy does not want to be just a science, but wants to be something that can act creatively in culture, that can speak in words, but that can also reveal itself in artistic forms. And now I just want to add at this point that perhaps it has emerged to you from what we have seen here in the building, what you have heard here in the building, what is intended and how it is connected with the signs of the times. The project that has come to fruition could only be realized through the great willingness of some of our members to make sacrifices; but the exchange rate situation in the world and the poverty of the Mediterranean countries have led us to a point where I I had to say, which was also spread by a small brochure that was sent to members: If we do not receive active help from the world, we will not be able to complete the building, but the building will have to come to a halt. If our members apply themselves with the same zeal to the completion of the building as they did to the founding of the World School Association, which is intimately connected with the building idea of Dornach, then we will soon be able to see a torso in the fall, which can be seen as a torso.

Since your time is limited, in particular the time of some of our esteemed visitors, I will not add anything further to what has been said, but ask you to come over to the building, where I will then take the liberty of saying a few closing words for this summer event.

[ 2 ] The building of the Goetheanum became necessary at a time when the anthroposophical movement had expanded to such an extent that it needed its own space. According to the whole nature of the anthroposophical movement, it could not be a question of having a building for its purposes constructed in this or that style. A movement which merely expresses itself in ideas and maxims can be wrapped up in any desired form, but not so a spiritual movement which is predisposed from the outset to let its currents flow into the whole of cultural life. The anthroposophical movement wants its impulses to flow into the artistic, religious and social spheres as well as into the scientific. When it speaks, its words, its ideas, are to come from the whole human being, and these ideas are to be only the outer language for experienced spiritual reality. But this experience of spiritual reality, of spiritual being, can also express itself in artistic forms, in outer social life, etc.

It had to be so, that in a place where that which stands behind the anthroposophical movement resounds in thoughts, resounds in words and ideas, is also revealed in the forms which surround the listeners, in the paintings which speak down from the walls.

[ 3 ] This is how it has always been when a civilisation, a culture wanted to manifest itself in the world. The content of such a culture does not form one-sidedly, but forms a cosmic or human totality. And the individual fields, science, art, etc., appear only as the individual members of such a totality, just as in an organism the individual members appear as born out of the totality of the organism.

Therefore, the anthroposophical movement had to create its own artistic style, just as it had to create a certain way of expressing itself in ideas. [ 4 ] The latter is still little considered today. It is, for example, necessary that anthroposophical spiritual-science should be expressed in a different way from what has hitherto been customarily contained in human civilisation.

Anthroposophy, for example, must in many respects depart from the principle, still habitually held today, of rigidly, one-sidedly, adopting a single point of view. Today, people are still often a materialist or a spiritualist, a realist or an idealist, and so on. For an unprejudiced, complete world-view this only means that when someone says “I am a materialist”, they are expressing just one side of reality, when someone says “I am a spiritualist”, they are expressing another side of reality. And anthroposophy requires all-sidedness. One is a materialist for material processes, a spiritualist for the spiritual, an idealist for the ideal, a realist for the real, and so on. Just as a tree, when seen from different standpoints, is always the same tree, but the representations of it are quite different, so the world can be represented differently from the most diverse points of view. [ 5 ] Therefore, in the field of anthroposophy, one must simply take this path when considering some spiritual or material aspect of reality. One then chooses a point of view from which to illuminate it, one feels and thereby shows a one-sidedness, but one then characterises the same thing from the opposite point of view. So that it is often necessary—let us say—to begin a lecture by speaking from the one side, and then to let the style of the lecture flow over into a characterisation using the converse forms of thought.

But this can also be necessary in an individual sentence! [ 6 ] And something else is necessary for the anthroposophical world-view. A world-view which adheres to the outer, naturalistic aspect, it can preferably work subjectively in, let us say, for example, one which is juxtaposed to it. Anthroposophy must make many things fluid, which are otherwise presented with rigid outlines, so that the sentence becomes elastic, inwardly mobile.

One then experiences that people call this style "terrible" because they have not got used to the fact that a particular spirituality also demands a particular form of expression. [ 7 ] However, it also happens, and this may perhaps be said, that from some quarters, spiritual-scientific content is taken up but clothed in the stylistic form which people are accustomed to today. Then, of course, it looks like a person wearing clothes that do not fit. Such presentations of anthroposophical content, which look like a person wearing ill-fitting clothes, are not even very rare today.

But all of this is only a sign that with anthroposophy something is to be created which is not only a new instance, a new standpoint, but which is a new, complete world-conception.

[ 8 ] And this is connected with the fact that the style, the artistic, architectural, painting and sculptural style, which had to be used in the Goetheanum, had to stand out from what had hitherto existed in the world in terms of style. In accordance with the fact that anthroposophy expresses the spiritual content of the present, which must represent progress in comparison with the spiritual content of earlier times, it was necessary to transform the old architectural styles, which were based on geometry, symmetry, a certain regularity, in short, on that which has a mathematical character, into an organic architectural style, a style which passes from the geometric-dynamic into the organic-living.

[ 9 ] I can well understand that those who feel firmly rooted in the older styles of architecture, and who see in these older styles something which they once had brought to a certain understanding, feel that what is now departing in such a radical way from everything they were accustomed to before is dilettantish. I can fully understand that. But we had to take the risk of transforming the more mathematical-dynamic style into an organic-living style.

This may still have happened as imperfectly as possible today, but a beginning had to be made. And it is as an expression of these efforts that the "Goetheanum" confronts you.

[ 10 ] Whoever approaches the "Goetheanum" from any direction will already find in its outer form that it is, without falling into abstract symbolism or arid allegory, a revelation of the particular spiritual life which wants to realise itself here. This spiritual life is more concerned with the human being as an expression of the world, a revelation of the world, than earlier stages of our human civilisation have been. This is expressed in the way the building is divided into two parts.

[ 11 ] In our present age, the human being is more dependent on sensory impressions than was the case in earlier times. In Greece, for example, human beings still had a life that perceived thoughts in the external world in the same way as we perceive only colours or sounds today, or sensory impressions in general. Just as we see red today, for example, the Greek still saw a thought expressing itself. The Greek did not have the feeling that the thought was something that they formed in their inner being, that they experienced in their inner being as separate from external reality. The separation of the human being, and with it the increase in the individuality of the human being, has progressed in the course of human evolution.

I explained this in the first chapter of my "Riddles of Philosophy". And so, it was quite natural—as I said, without symbolism, without allegorising—to perceive the building as something in two parts: as one part that contains within itself that which the human being experiences more when turned inwards, that which the human being experiences when contemplatively turned inwards, and the other part which the human being experiences when turned outward towards the world. This complete architectural idea of Dornach is not somehow thought out, symbolised, or spun from groundless thoughts, but is purely felt. It had to become so, this building, if it was thought and felt as that which should be in it. Entirely in accordance with the natural principle which I have already characterised on another occasion during these days. Just as the nutshell gets its form from the same forces which formed the nut inside, just as one can only feel that the nutshell corresponds to the nut that is inside it, so also this shell had to be the sheath for what pulsates here as art, as knowledge.

I have often used another comparison that looks more trivial, but I did not mean it trivially. I said, the building in Dornach must be like what they call a Gugelhupf mould in Vienna, pardon the expression. A Gugelhupf is a special kind of cake, a baked cake that has a special shape, baked from flour and eggs and many other beautiful things. And it has to be baked in a mould. This mould must be formed in a very specific way, because it is precisely this mould that gives the Gugelhupf its shape. So, there must always be a lovely Gugelhupf mould around the cake: that is, it must be there in the first place. The cake is baked in it, so the mould must be conceived and felt in such a way that the right thing can be baked.

Anthroposophy strives to bring into a living flow the ideas which are more adapted to the fixed forms of nature, and thus to bring into a living flow the mechanical-geometric style of architecture. Therefore, when you enter the building and look at its various areas, you will find everywhere that the attempt has been made to continue the geometric-symmetrical design in such a way that organic forms or forms reminiscent of organic forms are present everywhere.

First go to the main door, you will find that there is something like an organic form above the door. This organic form is not felt in a naturalistic way, by reproducing this or that organic thing, but is based on a living surrender to organic creation in general.

One cannot, as mere naturalists do, obtain a stylistic form by imitating leaf-like, flower-like, horn-like or eye-like forms, but by bringing oneself, with one's own soul-life, into such an inner movement as corresponds to the creation of the organic. Then, when one erects a building, which of course is not a plant or an animal, then, when the whole is conceived from the organic-living, natural forms do not arise, but forms that remind one of the natural, and which nowhere imitate the natural, but which remind one of the same.

And when you have entered the building, then go through the gallery, you will find certain forms which are intended to serve as heating elements. These forms are shaped in such a way that you have the feeling that they are growing out of the earth, that there is a living growth force in them, something that is not a plant, not an animal, but something that is growing, something organic. That takes shape. That even takes shape in such a dual form. It is something like beings speaking to each other, and their mutual relationship is also expressed.

All of this, by itself, creates according to the principle of Goethean metamorphosis, which was first created by Goethe in order to gain a cognitive overview of the organic. The organic is such that it repeats certain forms, but it does not repeat them in the same way. Goethe expresses this in such a way that in the living-organic the individual organs, let us say the leaves of a plant from the bottom up into the flower, the stamens, the pistils, and into the fruit organs, are according to the idea the same, but in their outer forms, appear in the most varied ways.

When one delves into the living, one does indeed have to form things in such a way that something which is only taken hold of spiritually, ideally, can, in its external shape, form itself in the most manifold ways. This, in turn, can be led up into the artistic, whereas Goethe first of all developed it cognitively to comprehend the organs, and must be led up into the artistic if the geometric, symmetrical, dynamic style of architecture is to be transferred into the organic style of architecture. The essential thing in such an organic style of architecture is that the whole is not only a unity through the repetition of the individual parts, but is also a unity as a whole. This means that each individual element that is there, must be as it can only be in that place.

Just think, my dear guests, your earlobe—a small organ on you, it can only be at that place where it appears on the organism. It cannot be anywhere else on the organism. But it also cannot be formed in any other way than it is there. This earlobe could not be where the big toe is now, nor could it be shaped here like the big toe. In an organism, each element is in its place and can only be shaped in the way it is shaped in that place.

You will find this adhered to in this building. Wherever you look, you will feel (certainly, individual things are still imperfect, but this is the idea of the building) that the place for each individual thing is only found out of the whole and it can only be in this place.

If you look at the balustrades of the staircase with their curves, you will see that the curves are formed in a quite definite way where the building opens outwards, where nothing can be held in place, so to speak, by the forces; on the other hand, the forms dam up towards the building, they contract, as is also quite the case with the organic.

Therefore, the venture had to be undertaken to replace the columns and pillars with something organic in design. So, you see the attempt: in the staircase you see the balustrades supported by organic forms that appear as supports, which in turn are not modelled on anything natural, but which are found out of the architectural idea itself. And each individual thickening, each individual thinning, then again, the circumference of such a pillar-like structure are absolutely conceived in their size in the sense of the whole, and again conceived in such a way as they must be in their place.

I can understand that something like the two organically formed pillars in the concrete porch still seem strange to those who are not used to such things. A critic once went into this building and found it strange that such a thing should be placed there. He could only think: something must have been copied!—There is nothing imitated at all, the whole thing is just formed out of the architectural idea through original feeling. Nothing at all is copied. But the critic, who prefers to stick to the old, does not like to get involved in this creative-productive process. And so, it occurred to him: this must be an elephant's foot. But it seems that with one eye he saw an elephant's foot out there, but with the other eye it didn't seem like an elephant's foot, because as an elephant's foot it's too small for the building. What is too small for something appears rickety in the organic, and that is why he said with a strange inner contradiction: one sees "rickety elephant feet" in the anteroom!

The lower part of the building is made of concrete. Even today, when building in concrete, it is necessary to first find the forms out of the concrete material. This is something that is of the utmost importance for artistic creation: that one must build out of the feeling of the material, out of the feeling for the material. You have to build differently out of wood than out of any stone material. And of course, you have to create differently out of concrete than you would out of marble.

When you form sculpturally and you form out of stone, you have to consider, for example, that which is raised in the form. When you work out of the stone, you have to work out the elevations, the convexities in particular. If you are shaping the eyes of a sculptural figure of a human being, and you have stone as your material, then direct your attention to the elevations, to the convexities, and work the whole eye out of the convexities. If you make a figure in wood, you cannot proceed in this way, then you must direct your attention everywhere to the depressions, to the concavities, and you must, as it were, carve out what is becoming deeper from the wood. This must be out of feeling. It must come from the feeling for the material.

For concrete, one must find very particular forms. Our friends the Großheintz, provided us with the site for this building, and the house that is built outside for Dr Großheintz and his family is made of concrete. For this house, this very special concrete style had first to be used, as it still can today, given the imperfections. Perhaps it is precisely in such a building that one can see the struggle for an architectural style, for an artistic style out of the material.

This aspiration was therefore the basis for the lower part of the building, which is made of concrete. The upper part is made of wood. When you go up the stairs, you enter the anteroom. And here you can already see how the ceiling and the side walls are formed differently from what you were used to. And I would like to mention that, in accordance with this new architectural style, the details have also been given a different meaning than in previous styles. This is expressed, for example, in the treatment of the wall.

What is a wall in buildings of the past? That which closes off to the outside. Here the wall does not close off to the outside, here the wall becomes, to a certain extent, transparent to feeling, it does not close off, but opens feeling to the vastness of the world. There is a profound difference between the formation of the wall as we have been accustomed to it up to now and the formation of the wall here. Everywhere else, the formation of walls closes you off from the world. But here you should have the feeling that you are not closed off. Just as you can see through glass, you feel artistically through the forms that are artistically created, and you feel in harmony with the whole cosmos.

We were therefore able to use artificial lighting for the entire building. One might have the feeling that compared to the open buildings of Greece, something like this, which reflects artificial lighting, is like a closed off cave. Well, that may be, but that is due to the conditions of modern life. We are not within the culture of ancient Greece.

But if on the one hand, as is always the case in anthroposophy, one accepts our present civilisation, if in this way one relates quite positively to our present civilisation, then one must in turn also draw on all the consequences of this civilisation. That is why the walls here do not close off, but open one in the spirit to the whole cosmos. Even the paintings on the ceilings should not be such that they merely shine inwards with what they express in their colours, so that one merely has a painted ceiling that tells one something inwards. That should not be. Such a ceiling is first thought of in this way: there is the ceiling, there is the human being. It is painted in such a way that what is painted confronts you. That is not the case here. Here the colour is placed on the wall for the purpose of looking through the painting and having a connection with the whole cosmos. This is carried through to the physical form. You can see it in the windows that close off the building down here.

These windows are designed in such a way that they are created from single-coloured glass panes according to a method that one could call glass engraving: a single-coloured glass pane, from which the form is carved out with a diamond bit. This sheet of glass, when it is finished and placed somewhere, is of course not a work of art, any more than a score is a work of art. Only when it is put in its right place and the light of the sun shines through, then the work of art is there. Only with outer nature, with the outer world, does it make sense.

And so, it is with all the details here: they only have meaning together with the whole world, with the totality of the world. There is no need to ramble on in thought, interpreting this or that in this or, that way. One should feel, completely naturally, naively, then one will find one's way best here in this building. Because that's how the whole thing is felt. Better still than to speak of the architectural idea of Dornach, I could speak of the architectural feeling of Dornach.

It has been said many times: "Up there on the Dornach hill, there is a building with all kinds of symbols.” There is not a single symbol here. Everything is poured out in artistic forms, everything is felt, nothing is thought. However, all kinds of symbols live in the imagination of some people. Yes, I could also imagine that some anthroposophists, who still have some theosophical airs about them, have even been annoyed by the fact that there is no symbolism here at all, that nothing symbolic can be spun from fantastic thoughts here, but that everything is to be understood in a purely artistic way.

It was precisely on this occasion that the real way in which the anthroposophical impulse streams into art had to be shown. First of all, a movement of this kind, which leads to the spiritual, is naturally predisposed, as is the case with sectarian movements, to seek a meaning, an inner meaning in everything.

You experience the most amazing things there. We have performed mystery plays in Munich, in which characters appear, created characters, which one should understand as they walk across the stage. I was asked whether this character in these plays meant the etheric body, another manas, another buddhi. Yes, there are even treatises that have emerged from the theosophical movement, where "Hamlet" is interpreted in such a way that the individual characters, Hamlet himself—mean this or that: one character is the etheric body, another the astral body, another manas, another buddhi. Please forgive me for not being able to explain this in detail with regard to Hamlet, for I have never been able to really read through such a treatise.

And so, it was naturally also something unfortunate that one came into the various anthroposophical working groups where there were still theosophical airs and graces, and one found all kinds of symbolic designs, black crosses with seven red splotches, which were supposed to represent roses, trafficked all around. One imagined there was something great about it! The whole thing was enough to drive one crazy! But these are—one might say—the dross that first brings forth a movement. That's what it's all about, that real artistic feeling came out of all this dross, that something was attempted in which there is nothing at all of a pale symbolism, of an empty allegory, but where at least the attempt is made to shape everything artistically.

It is precisely the artistic that then becomes natural. You can see that in these columns. Column capitals are usually constructed according to the principle of geometric repetition. Column capitals usually repeat themselves. An organic style of architecture does not allow this. How did these column capitals, the architraves above them and the plinths, come about? They came about through the real incorporation of the principle of organic growth.

Here at the entrance—the simplest capital: a form is attempted that descends from above, another form that comes up to meet it. But all this is not thought out, but every surface, every line of the form is felt. And if one advances from the first column to the second column, and looks at the capital: it is the same feeling translated into the artistic, to which one must devote oneself to the sense of Goethean metamorphosis, when one has the simply formed leaves at the bottom of a plant and must find the transition to the leaves somewhat higher up. It reshapes itself, metamorphoses itself.

But if you look at these capitals, you will see that they really represent artistically that which appears so distinctly in abstract thoughts in the modern worldview: evolution, development. The second capital develops from the first, and so on.

But one peculiarity confronts you. If you look at the successive capitals, it contradicts the abstract idea of evolution, as it is often expressed. You will also find in Herbert Spencer, for example, the idea of evolution expressed in such a way that the first simply differentiates, then integrates again. But that is not how it is. That contradicts the natural course of evolution. Whoever delves into natural evolution will find that evolution rises to certain complicated forms, then again becomes simple, and the perfect is not that which is the most complicated, but the simple into which the complicated has again been transformed.

If I am to represent this in a simple way, I would have to represent it as follows: The middle form is the more complicated, the last form is the most perfect. You can see this, for example, in the evolution of the eye. The eyes of the lower animals are relatively simple, undifferentiated. In the middle series of animals, you find very complicated eyes, with the blade process and the fan inside the eye. These organs are again dissolved inside the human eye: the human eye is more perfect than that of the lower, the middle animal stage, but again more simplified. That which is in the middle stage is also spiritually within in the simplified form, but the perfect stage is again simplified for external observation. This simplification, however, is such that, as is the case with the capitals of the columns, with the architraves above, one feels in the simple that it has become, that it has been infused with that which was complicated.

I did not arrive at this design—if I may make this remark—when I worked out the model of this building, by trying to reproduce this abstract thought, which I have just expressed, externally in a symbolic way, but I arrived at it by surrendering myself to the creative forces of nature and trying to form something out of the same creative forces from which nature itself shapes. And that is how these forms came into being.

The most important thing that one encounters in the process is this: one creates quite naïve forms out of feeling. When they are finished, they show you all kinds of things that you did not intend to put into them at the beginning, just as natural forms show you all kinds of things that you discover in them. If, for example, you take the simple forms of base and capital there, and you accordingly make them somewhat elastic, then you can put the convexity of the first form into the concave part here. What is convex there is concave here, what is concave there is convex here. So that I later concluded—I did not intend it—that in terms of convexity and concavity the first column corresponds to the seventh column, the second column to the sixth column, the third column to the fifth column, and the middle one stands for itself.

That is precisely what is characteristic of artistic creation: that what one initially has in the mind is not everything that one then puts into the object. One is actually outside of oneself when creating artistically. One has only a little of what the creative forces are in one's consciousness. You create with the little that is alive, which then goes into the material. But what emerges surprises you, because you don't actually create alone, because you create together with the productive forces of the cosmos.

And purely out of feeling, the individual parts then acquire the character by which they fit into the whole, just as the members of an organism fit into the totality of the organism.

Look at this lectern here. You must feel, when you look at it, that it is a continuation of what proceeds from the mouth as the spoken word: there the words come down to you, but these forms say the same thing.

And again, if you take the columns as they are leaning here and think further about their form, if you combine them here: then the combination again becomes what stands here as a lectern. On the one hand, it leans towards the auditorium, on the other hand, it is a conclusion of what is present in the auditorium. The individual forms are conceived on this basis. However, the geometric-mathematical style of older forms is thereby transformed into a spatial-musical quality. But that, in turn, means something for human evolution, that the geometrical gradually passes over into the musical, so that the musical also confronts us in space.

However, if one wants to grasp this idea in its full livingness, one must not attach too much importance to the fact that the musical can be expressed in mathematical formulae. As a one-sided abstract scholar, one can be delighted when, let us say, a sequence of tones can be expressed by their mathematically calculated pitches and tonal ratios; one can feel that one has only now translated it into real knowledge. One can also feel it differently. One can also feel that when one has transferred the musical experience into the mathematical, one has buried the music, and that one finally has the corpse of the musical in the mathematical formulae.

These things must really be taken seriously here. The cognitive must be lifted up into artistic experience. Only by attempting this could these forms come about.

This Goetheanum is already felt to accord in many ways with Goethean impulses, but not according to the Goethean impulses that died with Goethe in 1832 within the physical world, but according to the impulses of that Goethe who is still lives today. Not as he is, however, according to the sense of ordinary Goethe scholars, but he is truly the reality of Goethe. For today's Goethe scholars, the very name "Goetheanum" is an abomination. One can understand that. The most one can do is to reply in private that everything that exists today as the "Goethe-Bund" and the "Goethe-Gesellschaft" is in turn—well, in private, you don't have to bring it out in the open—quite fatal to you. But something should be felt here of what Goethe meant when he travelled to Italy, out of a deep longing to find more intimate artistic impulses, to find the real essence of art. After looking at the works of art he saw in Italy, still feeling the after-effects of the Greek artistic principle, he wrote to his friends in Weimar: After what I see here in the works of art, I believe I have discovered the secret of Greek artistic creation. The Greeks followed the same laws in their artistic creation that nature itself follows.—And the pure abstract philosophy, which to his delight he encountered in Weimar through Herder, from the works of Spinoza, e.g. from the work "God" by Spinoza, this spiritual, essential quality in the world, this is what Goethe felt when he was confronted with the ideal works of art, and he wrote to his friends: There is necessity, there is God. And among his sayings we find the characteristic one: To whom nature reveals her open secrets, feels a deep longing for her most worthy interpreter, art.

That which appears in forms can be the same for a completely contemplated artistic impulse as that which expresses itself in thoughts. Only then the thoughts must be full of life and the forms must breathe spirit.

Translated by Peter Stewart

Allow me today to add something about the architectural idea of Dornach to what I said a few days ago. I have tried to interpret the sequence of columns and column capitals. The question can be raised: Why are there progressively seven columns on each side of the building? And one can think of all kinds of nebulous mysticism in relation to the number seven - just as anthroposophy is generally accused of bringing up all kinds of such things, which one thinks are rooted in all kinds of superstition. But to interpret the seven columns in any other than an artistic way would contradict what lay at the basis of the model's elaboration, of the original work. If one proceeds in such a way that the individual capitals emerge from one another, that is, each successive capital emerges from the previous one, as I described last time, then one concludes that in a certain respect a kind of conclusion is reached with the seventh column. This simply corresponds to the successive feelings in the creation of the form. If one wanted to make an eighth column, one would have to repeat the form - albeit on a higher level. And since everything in an organic building must be based on connecting with the creative forces of nature and of the world-being in general, it is only understandable that that number should emerge which is, so to speak, the leading number for manifold natural phenomena.

We have seven tones in the musical scale. The octave is the repetition of the prime. If we place the phenomenon of light in front of us in the familiar way, we have seven colours in the well-known colour scale where the light shades into colour. The newer chemistry sets up the so-called periodic system, which is also a structure of the atomic weights and properties of the chemical elements according to the number seven. And one who follows organic life finds these numbers everywhere. It is not some superstitious prejudice, but the result of deep observation. And if one's feeling is such that one simply surrenders oneself to observation, dreaming nothing, mystifying nothing, then one will also be able to find the right relationship to the sevenfold-ness of the columns. Everything here has been attempted in such a way that the principle of the organic has been firmly established.

Here you see how the organ has been placed within the whole building in such a way that it does not stand in a corner, but that it has grown out of the forms with the building, so to speak, so that the architecture and sculpture of the building approach the forms created by the arrangement of the organ pipes, do not encompass them, but let them grow out of themselves, so to speak.

What must be considered in such architecture and sculpture is the feeling for the material. It is absolutely a question of the fact that, especially when working in wood, this feeling for the material is perceived on the one hand as something connected with the specific quality of the material in which one is working. But then in wood, because one has essentially a soft form in which one works, one has at the same time, that which makes it easiest to overcome the form as such, and which makes that which is to be revealed, that which is to be revealed artistically, emerges most in such a way that when one works in wood one must directly enter into the secrets of the world's existence.

I just want to draw attention to the following. Assume that one wants to sculpt the human figure in wood. The building will finally be completed here in the east by the fact that under this motif, which is painted in the middle, there will be a wooden sculpture of the same motif.¹ There you will also see the figure of the Christ in connection with Luciferic and Ahrimanic beings. So, it was a question of creating a thoroughly idealised and spiritualised human figure out of the wood. With the prerequisites I have just described, it is quite different to work on the head of the human form than on the rest of the organism. These things cannot be approached with abstract knowledge.

The shaping, the forming, is of course just as much within the laws of nature as everything else that in some way arranges nature according to number, measure and the like. When one forms the human head, one has the feeling everywhere: one must work out the form from within, one must try to base it on the feeling that the head is formed from the centre outwards. With the rest of the human organism one has the feeling that one must enter from the outside and, as it were, form the outer surfaces from the outside. One has the feeling that in the case of the head the essential surface is that which lies below, which is therefore inside, which gives itself its curves, its surfaces, from the inside outwards; whereas in the case of the rest of the organism one must consider the outer surfaces as the most important.

By feeling such things, one comes close to the secrets of nature, especially in art. And it must be emphasised again and again that what is called knowledge today cannot lead at all to a real unveiling of the secrets of nature, that in a living comprehension of the ideas which are given to one in laws of nature and the like, one always feels the necessity of ascending from these ideas to that which can only be grasped in an artistic contemplation. And basically, one must not think of the mysteries of the world in any other way than in such a way that so-called scientific knowledge is a stage, but that it must rise to a living artistic comprehension of the world if one really wants to come close to the mysteries of the world. We must not think as we often think today, that art has nothing to reveal of the mysteries of the world, that everything must be left to science.

The only real natural view is the one on which Goethe's conception of the world was based, and which I have already characterised from various sides, - the one that led Goethe to say: art is a revelation of the secret laws of nature, - which would not reveal themselves without the very existence of art.

And so, one could say: In a building like this, a kind of extract of the world's secrets is at the same time presented to the human being. For this reason, many artistic problems arose during the construction of this building. They arose as something self-evident, above all the problem of painting.

On the one hand, it was necessary to express the feelings that could recognise a portrayal of certain mysteries of the world, but on the other hand, one had to direct attention to the artistic means of expression. You do not see in the paintings of the large dome anything symbolic or fantastically speculative, however much some people might believe that. If you look at the painting here at the west end, you will see that there is something in the compositions of colours that looks peculiar.

Now you all know that when you close your eyes, you see something like a mysterious shadow-eye opposite the eye. That which every human being can have before them in this way when the eye is closed, like a kind of shadow-eye, can, however, when one’s inner seeing is particularly formed, come before the soul in a much more elaborate, much more substantial way. It is then, however, no longer as robust, as coarse as the two eyes which one sees as shadow-eyes when one's real eyes are closed, but it contains that which, in a certain way, can be seen spiritually when one's inner attention is directed towards that part of the periphery of the human being which is situated towards the eyes. It is that which then appears to this inspired inner gaze, one might say - a whole world. And the sensation already arises: by looking, as it were, into one's own power of vision, into one's own visual space with one's eyes closed as a human being, one sees before oneself something that is like the beginning of creation.

The beginning of creation is what confronts you here at the west end of the large dome.² And it is not a mere figment of the imagination that up there is the Tree of Paradise, above it a kind of Father-God, that then these two eye-shaped forms appear. All this is something that definitely comes before the inner eye, before the soul's eye with a deepened inner feeling.

In the same way, what you see in the large dome at the eastern end is a kind of impression of the self. This I, which is, if one may say so, a kind of trinity, also reveals itself in these inner perceptions in such a way that it goes on the one hand to the luminous clarity and transparency of the thinking I, on the other hand, at the other pole, as it were, to the will side, to the willing I, and in the middle to the feeling I. At first, this can be expressed abstractly as the thinking, feeling, willing I, as I have just said it, but it is to be felt concretely as a human being who is able to look with love at the colours of nature, who is able to look with devoted love at everything that confronts them in nature for all the senses. When one experiences the I in such a way that at the same time one lets it flow out into the whole of nature, one is aware of the following perceptions:

If you look at a plant in its green colour, in the colour of its blossom, then what you bring before your soul as an image of the plant is basically what you also find when you look, as it is called, into your own inner being. That which is spread out in nature as a carpet of colour, colours itself in that you look into your inner being. And if you, as a human being who loves the world, turn your gaze outwards, turn towards the vastness of the daylight, which stretches into infinite expanses of space, then you feel connected with these expanses of space. By connecting the colours and sounds of these expanses of space with yourself, and by feeling all the configurations that present themselves to you, you feel something that you cannot translate into a symbol with your intellect, but which you can also directly paint artistically and intuitively.

And again, when you let your gaze wander in the direction of the earth's surface, this horizontal plane, let it wander over trees that cover the earth, over all that which expresses itself in the moving trees when the wind rushes through them, then you feel your feeling I, and you get the impulse not to construct this I an abstract design, but to paint it in colours.

If you direct your gaze downwards, so that you feel connected with all that is fruitful on earth, you then feel the need to express your willing I in a colour that imposes itself on you quite naturally.

One must think of the configuration of the ceiling as having been expressed in this way. And because in this way the mystery of the world, which expresses itself in the relationship of the human being to the world, as it can be felt, has been brought here to the ceiling, it was natural that onto this ceiling was also painted some of that which can be felt out of these mysteries of the world.

You will therefore find individual areas covered with that which results from a spiritual cognition of world evolution. These figures that you see here on the left and on the right, which seem to represent mythological figures, they are meant to represent approximately the situation as it was before the great Atlantean catastrophe.

The materialistic theory of evolution is not at all correct in the light of spiritual observation. If we go back in the evolution of humanity, we first come back to the Greek-Latin period, which begins around the eighth century BC. We then come back to the Egyptian-Chaldean period, which begins around the turn of the fourth and third millennia before Christ. We return to older periods, and finally we come back to a time which, in terms of spiritual science, must be called the time of the Atlantean catastrophe. There was a great rearrangement of the continents. We gaze back in contemplation to a time in the evolution of the earth when that which is now covered by the Atlantic Ocean was covered by land. But at the same time, one comes back to a period of earthly evolution in which the human being could not yet have existed in the form in which they now exist, in a form shaped in the same way as the muscles and bones of today. If, for instance, you take sea creatures, jellyfish, which you can hardly distinguish from their surroundings, then you come to the material form in which the human being once was on earth, during the old Atlantean time, in which the earth was still covered everywhere with a permanent, dense fog, in which the human being lived and was therefore also had a completely different organic nature. And to the contemplative gaze, the clairvoyant gaze, there arise - if the word is not misunderstood - precisely these forms which are painted here on the left and right of the ceiling.

Something else has been attempted, I would like to say, as a painterly venture. Here you see a head.³ It is not true that when one paints naturalistically, a head must be closed off at the top because that is simply the way naturalistic human heads are. Here the head is not closed off at the top, for the soul and spirit of the ancient Indian, the first civilised human being after the Atlantean catastrophe, is painted here on the wall. And it was necessary to take the risk of not closing off the top of the head, but to leave it open, because in fact, when the Indian is grasped in their time, they present themselves in such a way that they feel in touch with the heavens through their primeval wisdom, that for them, I would like to say, the physical top of the head is lost in the unconscious, and they feel their soul to be reaching out into the vastness of the heavens. That is captured here in painterly form. And this ancient Indian felt connected with the so-called seven Rishis, who poured into them the wisdom of the world in seven rays.

Such things have been tried to be captured here on the ceiling of the auditorium through colours. You can see the truly artistic element that was to be attempted here in this building with regard to painting in the small dome here.

Attempts have been made to create what I would like to call - albeit in an as yet imperfect form - painting out of colour itself. And that seems to me to be connected with the future of the art of painting in general. On the one hand, in the further progress of humanity, we will come closer and closer to the spirit, and on the other hand we will strive more and more to find the spiritual in outer sensory reality.

Then, however, one will be compelled to penetrate oneself inwardly with that which is particularly needed in art: an intense sense of reality. With an intense sense of truth, artistically conceived, one is led to see the true essence of painting in that which is coloured. Is the line a truth? Is the drawing a truth: actually, it is not. Let us look at the line of the horizon: it is there when we capture in colours the blue sky above and the green sea below. If we paint the blue sky at the top and the green sea at the bottom, then the line comes into being by itself as the boundary of the two. But if I draw the line of the horizon with a pencil, that is actually an artistic lie. And you will find that if you have a feeling for the infinite fullness revealed by colour, you can actually create a whole world out of what is coloured.

Red is not just red, red is that which, when one confronts it, means an experience like an attack on our self from the outside world. Red is that which causes one’s soul to flee from that which thus reveals itself as red. Blue is that which invites us to follow it, and a harmony of red and blue can then result in a balance between moving backward and moving forward. In short, if the coloured is experienced, it produces a whole world. And out of the coloured, one can create the form by merely letting the colour in its mutual relationships have an effect on one.

In my first mystery drama, I had a person say that the form of the colour must be the deed in the kind of painting that we are striving toward.⁴ If you look at the small dome here, and if the tinting is just so, that you cannot see the individual figures with it at all, but merely let what is brought as a patches of colour onto this small dome have an effect on each other in their mutual relationships, then you will also get an impression: the impression of a ground of surging colours.

This is first of all that out of which the various forms arise. For those who are able to live into the life of the coloured within themselves, the truly human form, the actions between human forms, the relationships between human forms arise out of the coloured. One has the need to have a blue patch in a certain place, and orange and red nearby. And if one studies this inwardly, intuitively, something like this Faust-like figure, with a floating, angel-like figure in front of it, emerges of its own accord. And one gradually comes to the conclusion, that the blue patch of colour forms itself into a figure reminiscent of the medieval Faust. You will see everywhere in the painting of the small dome that the colouring is the essential thing, and that the forms that are with it have arisen from the colour. Whoever would say: Yes, but one must first think, interpret, if one really wants to feel these individual motifs - is right in a certain sense, if they feel at the same time that here is realised that which I have just characterised as an experiencing of the world of colours.

You can then see how this blue Faust-like figure has emerged here,⁵ underneath it a kind of skeleton, the brown figure, then this orange angel, actually a child, floating towards the face of Faust.

If one first takes the coloured as a basis and then rises from the coloured to the living, then, however, one is faced with the riddle of knowledge of the present human being. The figure of Faust is something that has survived from the 16th century. I would like to say that Faust expresses the protest of the modern human being, who seeks the secrets of the world within themself, versus the human being, who in the Middle Ages still stood in a completely different relationship to the world. The legend of Faust is not something that merely stands for itself alone.

Goethe took up this Faust legend because Goethe was a truly modern human being. But he also transformed the Faust legend of the 16th century. This Faust legend culminates in Faust's encounter with the devil, Faust's confrontation with the forces of the adversary of humanity, his struggle with them. This was intended to express how, as the human being approached modern times, they really became entangled in this struggle. The sixteenth century still felt that those who were brought into this struggle with the devil had to be defeated if they became involved with the devil in any way.

We have the polar opposite of the Faust legend in the Luther legend. Luther at the Wartburg - he is tempted by the devil just like Faust, but he throws the inkwell at the devil's head and drives him away. The Luther legend and the Faust legend are polar opposites for the 16th century.

As you know, anyone who comes to Wartburg Castle will still find the stain preserved from the ink that Luther poured on the devil's head. The custodians tell you, however, that this is always renewed from time to time. But it is there for the visitors.

After Lessing had already pointed out this necessary alteration of the Faust legend, Goethe then transformed the Faust legend of the sixteenth century and portrayed the man Faust as the one who, however, wrestles with the adversary of humanity, with Mephistopheles, but who does not fall prey to him, despite the fact that he responds to him in a certain way, but who achieves his human victory over this adversary who is hostile to humanity.

In this Faust legend, in the whole figure of Faust, is contained the riddle of knowledge of the modern human being. Really, what is called scientific knowledge is basically a caricature of knowledge. That which we develop today by taking possession of the laws of nature and expressing them in abstract propositions, is basically something in which, if we feel it profoundly, we feel to be completely lifeless. When we give ourselves over to abstract ideas, we feel something like a dead soul in us, like a soul corpse. And one who has enough lively feeling, feels in this soul corpse, precisely in what is valued today as the correct, as logical knowledge, something like the approach of death.

This is the feeling that underlies this figure here. And as the counter pole to death, there is the angel-like child floating towards us in orange.

Then the other figures, which are hidden in the whole harmony, are such that the next figures are more or less the figures of a Greek wisdom initiation: a kind of Pallas-Athena figure with the inspiring Apollo, an Egyptian initiate further up, with its inspiring being. Then we come to the whole region of evolving humanity, which strives to experience the human by perceiving duality in the world, good and evil, the Luciferic and the Ahrimanic. It is represented where this figure below, carrying a child in its hand, has above it the bright, seducing Lucifer and the dark, sinister Ahriman.⁶

This corresponds to the whole region of humanity which extends from Persia to Central Europe and the West, where the human being, if they strive cognitively, has to struggle with dualism, where all the doubts which are caused by being caught between truth and error, between good and evil, are triggered in one’s feelings.

If we approach the middle, in the east, we have this double form there. It is that which will one day grow out of the chaotic Russian. In the Russian soul we have, so to speak, the preparation for the soul-nature of the future, even if it has to work its way through the most diverse chaotic conditions. The human being exists in such a way that they basically always have a second person with them, and this also reveals itself to the contemplative gaze. Every Russian actually has their own human shadow which they carry with them. This then leads to feeling something like an inspiration from the gloomy soul, as is attempted here in the blue, on the other side in the orange angel figure and in the centaur-like figure that is above it. That relationship to nature and to the world, which the Russian soul has as a kind of soul of the future, is depicted there.

And all of this should come together to form the central image, which will then have its counterpart below in the wooden sculpture already mentioned. In the middle, in the east, you see the figure of Christ, above it the figure of Lucifer in red hues, below it, in various shades of brown, the figure of Ahriman. In this is to be felt what actually represents the essence of the human being.⁷

One does not get to know the human being if one only looks at how the human being’s external contours appear to the physical eye. In the physical, the soul and the spirit, the human being carries a trinity within. Physically the human being bears a trinity in the following way. Physically we have within us everything that constantly causes us to age while we are alive, that makes us sclerotic, that makes our limbs calcify, that makes death, as it were, always present in us with its force. That is the physical-ahrimanic working. If this were to get the upper hand, we would fall into old age even as children. But it works in us, and it works physically precisely because it is the solidifying, heavy, calcifying element that leads us towards death.

Above the figure of Christ, we see the figure of Lucifer. It is that physical element in the human being which brings about fever and pleurisy, which in a certain sense always cause us to dissolve, these are the forces of youth, which, if they alone were present, would dissolve the human being.

This polar, circular opposition can be perceived throughout the whole human being. If one feels it in colour, then one feels the luciferic upwards in a red hue, the ahrimanic downwards in a brown hue. And the human being themself is the equilibrium between the two. The human being is actually always the inner state of equilibrium, which, however, must be sought for at every moment, between that which dissolves in warmth, in fever-fire, and the hardening, petrification and solidification which brings death. One will only have a real physiology of the human being when one sees this polarity in each individual organ. Heart, lungs, liver, everything becomes comprehensible only when one sees them in this polarity.

Well, I mean, you can feel all that in what is painted on the ceiling. One could say: so these are symbols after all! - The Austrian poet, Robert Hamerling, composed a poem "Ahasver", in which he did not depict human figures in a naturalistic way, but in a spiritual way. He was accused of creating symbols and not real people. He defended himself by saying: "If at the same time one feels so vividly that the figures are living people after all, then they may make a symbolic impression, for who can prevent Nero from being a symbol of cruelty? But one cannot say that Nero was not a real human being because of that!”

These things must be seen in the right light. And to those who do not want something like this to emerge in a new way from the experience of colour, who find it too complicated to look into these things, one must answer: Yes, what should someone who has no sense of anything Christian experience, for example, in Leonardo da Vinci's Last Supper or Raphael's Sistine Madonna? Just as Christianity is necessary there, but even then, when Christianity is present, everything can be perceived from the coloured elements on the surface: so, when there is that very elementary, natural way of looking at the world, to which this building wants to bear witness, all that can be grasped not in abstract terms but in direct, living contemplation.

And that is what is really important about this building: that it is not fantasised about, not interpreted, but that the people who enter it, or who look at it from the outside, become absorbed in the forms, in the colours, and take in what is there in their immediate inner perception. Then we shall see, when we gradually find our way into this building, that it does indeed represent at least an attempt - everything is imperfect at the beginning - at least an attempt to come so close to the meaning of human evolution that it produces, precisely out of the spiritual life necessary for the present, something artistic, just as the various ages have produced something artistic out of their particular conception of the world.

Let us put ourselves back for a moment into the Greek heart, into the Greek soul. Let us put ourselves back into that soul which, with inner sincerity and honesty, could make the traditional statement: Better a beggar here on earth than a king in the kingdom of shadows. The Greek felt bound to the earth by the peculiarity of the spirit of the age. If one may say so, the Greeks appreciated everything that was on earth through the forces of the earth's gravity as something that adorned and covered this earth. They felt the forces of the earth's gravity. And in the building of their temples they expressed how they experienced the forces of this earthly gravity. When in primeval times, the human being looked up to the immortal, to the eternal in the human soul, they looked back to the ancestors. Those souls, which were the souls of the ancestors, the souls of the forefathers, gradually became for them the souls of the gods. And the graves of the ancestors remained for them a sacred place which enclosed something spiritual within itself. For a certain cultural current, the tomb is the first building, the building of the human soul that has left the earthly. In the construction of the Greek temple, one still feels something of an echo of the construction of the tomb. And the melancholy building of the tomb has risen in a joyful way in the building of the Greek temple, in that the departed human soul, which was once divinely worshipped as the ancestral soul, has become the god. The building over the ancestral grave, where the soul, the divinely worshipped ancestral soul was to be given a resting place, became the temple of the god Apollo, Zeus, Athena. And the temple enclosure became the extension of that which once existed as an ancestral tomb. As the ancestral soul became the god, so the tomb became the Greek temple. Just as the ancestral soul was looked upon as the past, and the building of the tomb thus took on a tragic aspect, so the building of the tomb became the building of the temple in its cheerfulness, in its joyfulness, because it had now become the envelope not of the departed soul but of the immortal soul of the gods existing in the present.

One can only think of a Greek temple as the dwelling house of the god. The Greek temple is not perfect in itself. There can only be a temple of Apollo, a temple of Zeus, a temple of Athena. The Greek went to the temple knowing that this was where the god lived.

If we leave out some of the architectural styles, we can then move on to the example of the Gothic building, the cathedral. Let us look again at the form of the cathedral: We no longer see in it any reminiscence of the tomb, at most this is preserved in an inorganic way through tradition, in that the altar is reminiscent of the gravestone, but this is brought into the whole in an inorganic way; the Gothic architectural idea is something different. The Greek temple is that which has shaped its forms through the conquest of the earth's gravitational forces. How could one form that which grows out of the construction of the tomb, that which rises over the earthly tomb, over that which has been lowered into the earth, in any other way than by conquering the forces of the earth's gravity through the force-dynamics, through the form of the building, by mastering in the supporting column, in the supported beam, the forces of gravity which are the forces of the earth. Later, feeling does not go to the earth, not to the ancestral soul that has disappeared: it lifts itself out and goes into the expanses of the world to the God above. Accordingly, the Gothic architectural forms take on their special form.

The striving form of the gothic building is not the overcoming of weight: the most important thing in the form of the gothic building is mutual support. Nowhere do we actually see bearing, we see striving upward. We do not see weight, but a striving upwards toward heaven.

Therefore, the Gothic cathedral is not the dwelling place of any gods, like the Greek temple, but the Gothic cathedral is the meeting place of the faithful, the meeting place of the congregation. If one enters a Greek temple from which the image of the god has been removed, the Greek temple has no meaning. A Greek temple without the image of the god is meaningless. The image of the god must be supplemented in the imagination. If you go into a Gothic cathedral without mass being said and preached, or without a congregation praying together - it is not complete. The living congregation belongs there. And the word for cathedral, “Dom”, also expresses the flowing together of the congregation. Duma and Dom have the same origin. And when the Narodnaya Duma got its name, it was out of the feeling of working together, just as the Gothic cathedral got its name out of the feeling that people must flow together with their souls and together direct their feelings upwards in the direction of the striving Gothic forms.

We see how the perception of artistic forms demonstrates a certain progress in the course of human evolution. Today we no longer live in a time in which one feels as one did in the period when the Gothic flourished. Today we live in a time in which the human being must penetrate deeper into their own inner being. Today we can only establish a social community by each person experiencing "know thyself" in a higher sense than was previously the case - even if it resounds through the ages as the old Apollonian demand of "know thyself" - and fulfilling it in a deeper sense. Only by becoming individualities in the most intensive sense can we form human communities today.

When one immerses oneself in the forms of this Goetheanum, in a feeling way, what do they speak to us? What do they reveal to our gaze? If we want to speak about them, we must try to place before the human soul exactly the same thing that can be expressed through the anthroposophical world view as the mystery of the human being and the mystery of the world, as they reveal themselves to the human being, precisely through ideas, through concepts. The Greek temple represented the dwelling place of the God who descended to earth. The Gothic cathedral represented that which evokes in one the urge to feel "know thyself" and to be together with other people precisely out of this recognition.

When you enter this house, you should have the feeling: In the forms, in the paintings, in everything that is there, one finds the mystery of the human being, and one likes to unite with other people here, because here everyone finds that which reveals their human value, their human dignity, in which one likes to unite lovingly with other people.

In this way, this building wants to welcome all those who enter it, who approach it.

• 1. See the illustration in Der Baugedanke der Goetheanum. Published by Philos.-Anthrop. Verlag.
• 2. See the designs for the painting of the large dome in the first Goetheanum, picture 2 and 3.
• 3. See Rudolf Steiner's designs for the large dome in the first Goetheanum (an art portfolio executed by Alinari in Florence), Plate VI: The Indian. (Philos.-Anthropos. Verlag)
• 4. The Portal of Initiation. A Rosicrucian Mystery, through Rudolf Steiner. (Philos.-Anthropos. Verlag)
• 5. See: Spiritual Science explanations of Goethe's Faust, Volume I (with 2 picture supplements: Faust, Flying child from the small dome of the burnt Goetheanum) Faust, the striving human being, and Der Baugedanke der Goetheanum, with 104 illustrations. Philos. Anthropos. Verlag.
• 6. See Der Baugedanke der Goetheanum, Figure 75-79.
• 7. We refer to the colour print by Hanfstaengl of the design sketched by R. Steiner for this picture of the painting of the dome. (Philos.-Anthropos. Verlag am Goetheanum)

Herman Grimm, the cultured Art-Critic of the nineteenth century, has pronounced what one might call a profound utterance about Goethe. He has aid that mankind would not realize the full importance of Goethe till the year 2000. A goodish time, you will agree. And when one looks at our epoch, one is hardly inclined to contradict such a statement. For what does Herman Grimm consider as the most important fact about Goethe? Not that he was a poet, nor that he produced this or that particular work of art, but that he created all he did out of the complete man, that the impulses of his full manhood underlay every detail of his creations. One may say that our epoch is very far from comprehending this full manhood that lived in Goethe. In saying this I do not want in any way to refer to the oft-denounced specialized method of observation of Science. This method is to a certain extent a necessity. There is, however, something much more striking than the specialization of Science, and that is the specialization of our life! For it leads to the situation that the soul which is confined to this or that specialized circle of ideas or sensations can understand less and less the other soul which is specialized in another direction. And to a certain extent all men are now specialists. This aspect of the specialist and soul particularly strikes us when we consider the Art-development of mankind. And precisely for this reason is it necessary—if only in primitive beginnings—that a kind of pulling together of spiritual life will result in artistic form. We need not take a very comprehensive view to prove what I have said. AS we shall probably understand each other best if we proceed from something close at hand, I should like to refer to one of the many instances of those misunderstanding and often ridiculous attacks on our spiritual movement which are at present so conspicuous.

In quarters where they are anxious to blacken us before the world, it is considered cheap and common-place in us to make our rooms as we please. We are reproached for decorating our meeting places with coloured walls and are ridiculed for what is called the freakishness of the (first) Goetheanum at Dornach, which is said to be quite unnecessary for a real Theosophy, as the expression goes. Well, in certain circles, one considers as a “true Theosophy” a physic hotch-potch, interspersed with all sorts of dark feelings, and which revels in the fact that the soul can unfold in itself a higher ego, though all the time having no other than egoistic ideas in view. And from the point of view of this psychic hotch-potch, this cloudy dreaming, it is found unnecessary for a spiritual movement to express itself in an outward form, even if this outward form has to be admittedly a tentative and primitive one. In these circles it is imagined that one could chatter wherever one happened to be about this hotch-potch and this misty dreaming about the divine ego in man. Why is it necessary, therefore, that all sorts and kinds of expression in such peculiar forms should be attempted?

Well, my dear friends, it is of course not to be expected that such people who turn this sort of thing into a reproach are also capable of thinking: such a demand can only be made of a very few. But we must get clear on many points, so that we can answer the questions raised at least in our own souls rightly.

I want to draw your spiritual attention to an artist of the eighteenth century, who was greatly gifted as draughtsman and painter, Carstens. I do not want to discuss the value of his art, to unroll the tale of his activity or give you his life-story, but I want you to note that in Carstens lay a great gift for drawing, if not for painting. If we look into his soul, and at an artistic longing there, we can in a way see what was wrong. He wants to set pencil to paper, he wants to draw ideas and embody them in paint, only he is not in the position in which—let me say—Raphael or Leonardo still were, or to take an example from poetry, in which Dante was. Raphael, Leonardo and Dante lived in a full, rich culture, one which was really alive in men's souls, and surrounded them. When Raphael painted Madonnas, there lived in human hearts and souls the understanding for a Madonna, and—be it said in the noblest sense—out of the people's soul there streamed something towards the creations of these artists. When Dante led the human soul into spiritual realms, he needed only to take his matter and material from something that in a way echoed in every human soul. One might say these artists had some substance in their own souls which was present in the general culture. If one picks up some even obscure work of science of the time, one will find there is everywhere some kind of connection between it and what was alive in all souls, even in the lowest circles. The educated people of those circles of culture from which Raphael created his Madonnas recognized fully the idea of the Madonna, and in such a way that this idea of Madonnas lived in them. Thus the creations of art appear as an expression of the universal and unified spiritual life. This is what arose again in a single man, in Goethe, as he was at the turn of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. And it is this which is so little understood in our time, namely, that Herman Grimm was inclined to wait for the year 2000 for such an understanding to become possible for the world again.

On the other hand let us look at Carstens. He takes Homer's Iliad and imprints its events he reads into the forms his pencil creates. Just think how different was the attitude of the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries to the Homeric figures from Raphael to the figures of the Madonnas or the other motives of the time! One might say the content of art was inevitable in the great periods because it flowed from things that touched the very inmost hearts of men. In the nineteenth century the time began when the artist had to look for the content of what he purposed to create. It was not long before the artist became a kind of cultural hermit who was really dependent only on himself, of whom one might ask: What is his own relation to his world of forms? One could unroll the history of human art in the nineteenth century to see how Art stands in this respect.

And so it has come about that not only that cool, but cold relationship of mankind to Art began which exists at present. One may imagine a man today going through a picture gallery or exhibition in a modern city. Well, my dear friends, he is not faced with something that moves his soul, something that echoes inwardly, but he is faced with a number of riddles which he can solve only when he has deeply studied the special attitude of this or that artist to Nature or to something else. We are confronted with a lot of individual problems or tasks. And—this is the significant thing—while one thinks one is solving artistic problems, one is solving really for the most part problems that are not artistic ones but psychological. The way in which this or that artist regards Nature today is an exercise in philosophy or something of the sort, which simply does not come into account at all when one steeps oneself in the great Art-periods. On the contrary there enter these real artistic questions, for the onlooker also, because the “How” is something which makes the artist creative, whereas the substance is merely something that surrounds him, in which he is steeped. We may say that our artists are not artists at all any more, they are world observers from a particular point of view, and they put into form what they see and what strikes them. But these are psychological tasks, tasks of historical interpretation and so on; the essential thing about the artistic view of “How” has disappeared almost completely from our time. The heart is often lacking for such artistic considerations as “How.”

A great deal of the blame for all this to which I have briefly drawn your attention must be ascribed to our thoroughly theoretic world-philosophy. Men have become as theoretic in their thought as they have become practical in their industry and technique and commercial relations. To build a bridge between, for example, the pursuits of modern science and the artist's conception of the world is not only difficult, but also few people feel the need to do it. And a saying like Goethe's: “The beautiful is a manifestation of the secret laws of Nature, which, without this revelation, would for ever have remained hid.” Is completely unintelligible to our time, even if here and there somebody believes he understands it. For our time clings to the most superficial, most abstract laws of Nature, to those which approach, one might say, the most abstract Mathematics, and will allow no importance to any research into reality which transcends the abstract-mathematical, or anything that is similar to the abstract-mathematical. And so it is not surprising if our time has lost that living element in the soul which finds that substantiality in world relationships which must spring from them actively if Art is to arise at all.

Art can never be evolved from scientific concepts, or abstract-theosophical concepts, at the most it would be an allegory of straw or a stiff symbolism. The representations that the present time makes of the world is in itself inartistic, and makes an effort to be inartistic. Colours—what have they become in our scientific view? Vibrations of the most abstract kind in the material of the ether, vibrations of the ether-waves so and so much in length, etc. Imagine how far removed the waves of vibrating ether, which are science seeks today, are from the direct and living colour. How is it possible to do anything but forget completely to pay any attention to this living element in colour? We have already pointed out how this element in colour is fundamentally a flowing, living one, in which we with our sols are also living. And a time will come (I have pointed this out)_ in which the living connection of the flowing colour-world with coloured beings and objects will again be realized.

It is difficult for man, my dear friends, because man, on account of having to perfect his ego in the course of earth's evolution, has risen from this flowing sea of colour to a pure Ego perception. Man raises himself from this sea of colour with his ego; the animal-world is still deep in it, and the fact that an animal has feathers or hair of this or that colour, is connected with the animal's soul-relation with this flowing sea of colour. An animal regards objects with its astral body (as we do with the ego) and there flows into this astral body whatever forces there are in the group-souls of animals. It is nonsense to believe that even the higher animals see the world as man sees it. But the truth of this point is quite unintelligible to modern man. He believes that if he is standing beside a horse, it sees him exactly as he sees it. What is more natural? And yet, it is complete nonsense. For just as little as a man sees an angel without clairvoyance, does a horse see a man without clairvoyance, for the man is not a physical being to the horse, but a spiritual being, and only because the horse is endowed with a certain clairvoyance does he perceive man as a kind of angel. What the horse sees in man is quite different from what we see in the horse. As we humans wander about, we are very ghostly beings to the higher animals. If they could talk a real language of their own, man would soon see that it does not occur to animals at all to regard man as a similar being to themselves, but as a higher, ghostly being. If they regard their own body as consisting of flesh and blood, they certainly would not regard man as consisting of flesh and blood. If one expresses this today, it sounds to modern minds the purest rubbish—so far is the present age removed from truth.

The susceptibility for the living, creative element of colour flows into animals because of their peculiar connection between astral body and group-soul. And just as we look at an object which rouses our desire and seize it with a movement of the hand, so in the case of animals, the whole of their organization is such that the directly creative element of colour makes an impression, and it flows into the feathers or wool and colours the animal. I have already expressed my opinion that our time cannot even realize why the polar bear is white; the whiteness is the product of his environment and that the polar bear makes himself white has approximately the same significance, on another plane, as when, through desire, a man stretches out his hand to pick a rose. The living productive element in his environment works on the polar-bear in such a way that it releases in him an impulse and he completely “whitens” himself.

Now this living weaving and existence in colour is suppressed in man, for he would never have been able to perfect his ego if he had stayed in the colour-sea, and he would never, for example, have developed the urge regarding a certain red colour, let us say the red of dawn, to impress it on certain parts of his skin. Such was still the case during the old Moon-Period. Then the effect of contemplating such a drama of nature as the red of dawn was such that it impressed the man of that time and the reflection of the impression was at the same time thrown back into his own colouring, it permeated his being and then expressed itself again outwardly in certain parts of his body. Man had to lose this immersion of his body in this flowing colour-sea during his earth-period, so that he could develop in his ego his own world-outlook. And man had to be come in his form neutral towards the flowing colour-sea. The colour man's skin in the temperate zones is in essentials the expression of the ego, the expression of absolute neutrality towards the colour-waves streaming without, and it denotes the rising above the flowing colour-sea. But, my dear friends, if we take even primitive scientific knowledge, we shall remember that it is man's task to find the way back again. Physical, etheric and astral body were formed during the epochs of Saturn, Sun and Moon respectively, the ego during the earth-period. Man must find the means to spiritualize the astral body again, to permeate it with what the ego gains for itself by working upon it. And in spiritualizing the astral body and thus finding the way back again, man must once more find the flowing and ebbing colour-waves, from which he arose in order to develop the ego, just as when he rises out of the ocean, he sees only what is outside. And we really do live at a time when a beginning must be made—unless man's living in accordance with the universe is to cease altogether—with this diving down into the spiritual waters of Nature's forces, what is, the spiritual forces that lie behind Nature. We must make it again possible not merely to look at colours and to apply them outwardly, but to “live” with the colour, to share its inner power of life. We cannot do it if we study the effect of this or that colour from a painter's point of view, as we stare at it; we can do it only if we experience with our souls the manner in which red, for example, or blue flows; if this flowing of colour becomes directly alive for us. We can only do it, my dear friends, if we are able so to instill life into the colour, that we do not produce mere symbolism in colour—that would of course be the worse way—but that we really discover what actually lies in the colour itself, as the power to laugh lies in a laughing man.

If a man in feeling the sensation of red or blue has no other reaction to it than in feeling—here is red, and here is blue, he can never proceed onwards to a living experience of the real nature of colour. Still less can he do so if he clothes the colour-content with intelligence and finds one symbol behind the red, and another behind the blue; that would lead still less to experiencing the element of colour. The point is we must know how to surrender our whole soul to the message of colour. Then, in approaching red, we shall feel something aggressive towards ourselves, something that attacks us. Red seems to “come for” us. If all ladies went about the streets in red, anyone with a fine feeling for the colour might inwardly believe that they might all fall upon him, on account of their red clothes. Blue, on the contrary, has something in it which goes away from us, which leaves us looking after I with a certain sadness, perhaps even with a kind of longing.

How far the present day is from such a living understanding of colour can be seen from something I have already pointed out: in the case of the excellent artist Hildebrandt it was expressly emphasized that the colour is on the surface, and there is nothing else but surface-colour, thus differing from form, which gives us, for example, distance. But colour gives us more than distance, and that an artist like Hildebrandt does not feel this must be taken as a deep symbol of the whole modern manner. It is impossible to steep oneself in the living nature of colour, if one cannot have a direct transition from immobility to movement, if one is not directly made aware that the red disk is coming nearer and the blue retreating; they move in opposite directions. In steeping oneself in this living element of colour, one gets to a stage of realizing that if we had two coloured balls, for instance, of this kind, one is quite unable to conceive the possibility of their standing still; it is inconceivable. If it were conceived it would mean the death of living feeling, which gives the direct idea that the red and the blue balls are revolving, one towards the spectator, the other away from him. And the red on a figure, in opposition to the blue, results in giving to a figure composition life and movement through colour. And what is portrayed, my dear friends, is made part of the living world, because it shines in colour. If you have

The form before you, it is restful, it remains stationary; but the moment the form receives colour, the inner movement of the colour stands out from the form, and the whirl of the world, the whirl of spirituality, permeates it. If you colour a figure you vivify it directly with soul, with the world-soul, because the colour does not belong only to the form, the colour which you apportion to the single figure places the latter in its full relationships with its environment, yes, in its full relationship with the world. One might say that when one colours a form one must have the feeling: “Now you are going to approach the form so that you endow it with soul.” You breathe soul into the dead form, when you animate it with colour.

You need only get a little closer to this inner weaving of colour to feel as if you are not approaching it directly, but are standing slightly above or below it; one feels how living the colour itself inwardly becomes. For a lover of the abstract, who stares at the colour without that living inner sympathy, a red ball can revolve round a blue one and he has no desire to alter the movement in any way. He may be the greatest mathematician or the greatest metaphysician, but he does not understand how to live with colour, because for him it moves from one place to another like a dead substance. In reality, if one lives with it, colour does not do this. It radiates, it changes in itself, and a colour such as the red colour drives in its advance something before it like an orange or yellow or green aura. And the blue in its movement drives something different before it.

So you have here a kind of colour-game. You experience something, when you enter into the life of colours, which makes the red appear to be attacking and the blue retreating—which makes you feel that you must flee from the red and follow the blue with longing. And when you can feel all this, you would also actually feel yourself in harmony with the living, moving flow of colour. You would feel in your soul also the onslaughts and longings superimposed on each other as in a vortex, the fleeing and the prayer of devotion, which follow each other and pass by. And if you were to transform this into a detail on a figure, of course as an artist would do, you would tear away the figure from its natural repose. The moment you paint, let us say, a figure in repose, you would have a living weaving movement, which belongs not merely to the form, but also to the forces and weaving elements round the figure: this is what you would have. You take away the mere immobility of the figure, its mere form, by means of soul. One would like to say that something of this sort must some day be painted into this world, something depicting the elementary powers of this world; for all that man is able to receive through the power of longing could be expressed in the blue colour. Man would have to represent this plastically in his head, and everything that is expressed in red, man would have to have in such a form that it flows out of his organism up to the brain: outside him the world, the object of his longing, which is ever permeated by that which rises upwards from his own body. By day the blue half flows stronger than the red, or the yellow half. At night it is the reverse in the human organism. An accurate reproduction of this is what we usually call the two-leaved lotus flower, (See Knowledge of the Higher Worlds and its Attainment by Rudolf Steiner) in which the beholder sees both such movement and such colouring. And no one will ever be able to investigate what lives in the world of form as the productive element, as the upper part of the human head, unless he is in a position to follow this flow of colour which is hidden in man.

Art, my dear friends, must make an effort again to get down to the bottom of elemental life; it has studied Nature long enough, and tried long enough to solve all kinds of enigmas in Nature, and to reproduce in works of art in another form what can be seen by penetration into Nature. But that which lives in the elements, that is still dead for modern Art: air and water and light, as they are painted today are dead; form, as exemplified in modern sculpture, is dead. A new Art will arise when the human soul learns to steep itself in the living elemental world. One can argue against this, one can be of the opinion that one should not do this. But it is only human indolence arguing against it; for either man will come to live with his whole manhood in the elemental world and its forces, will acknowledge the spirit and soul or outer things, or else Art will become more and more the hermit-like work of the individual soul., whereby perhaps extremely interesting things may appear for the psychology of this or that soul, but never will those things be attained with Art alone can attain. One speaks of a very distant future, my dear friends, in speaking thus, but we have to approach this future with an eye strengthened by spiritual science, otherwise we look out only upon what is dead and decaying in the future of mankind.

Therefore it is that an inner connection must be sought between all that in form and colour is created in our domain, and that which stirs our soul in its deepest depths as spiritual knowledge, as something that lives in our spirit, just as the Madonnas lived in Raphael, so that he could thus become the painter of Madonnas, because they lived in him as they did in the scholar, the peasant and the artisan of his time. This is what made him the true painter of Madonnas. Only if we succeed in bringing into form livingly, artistically, without symbolism or allegory, what in our whole world outlook lives in us, not as abstract thoughts, not as lifeless knowledge, nor as science, but as the living substance of the soul, can we get an idea of what is meant by this future to which I have just alluded.

For this there must be a unity, as there was, one might say, with Goethe through a special Karma, between outward creation and what permeates the deepest recesses of the soul. Bridges must be thrown between what or many is still today abstract idea in the content of spiritual science, and the produce of our hand, our chisel, and our paint-brush. The obstacle to building this bridge today is the superficial, abstract culture, which does not allow what is being done to become living. Only so is it comprehensible that the completely unfounded belief has grown up that spiritual knowledge can kill Art. It has certainly killed much in many people; all the dead allegorizing and symbolizing, all the inquiry—what is the meaning of this, or of that? I have already pointed out that one should not always be asking: What does this or that mean? We do not have to ask what the larynx “means,” we know it is the living organ of human speech, and in the same way we must look upon what lives in form and in colour as the living organ of the spiritual world. As long as we have not accustomed ourselves to stop asking about symbols and allegories, as long as we represent myths and sagas allegorically and symbolically, instead of feeling the living breath of the spirit surging through the whole Cosmos, and realizing how the cosmic content enters livingly into the figures of the myths and legends, we shall never attain a true spiritual knowledge.

But a beginning must be made! It will be imperfect. No one must think that we regard the beginning as perfect: but the objection is as silly as many other objections which the present age makes against our spiritual movement, namely that what we have tried to do in our building has nothing to do with this spiritual stream. What these people think they can prove, we know already ourselves. That all the silly nonsense about the “higher Ego,” all the sentimental talking about the “spiritualization of the human soul,” that all this can of course be babbled about in the present-day outward forms, we know ourselves also. And we know of course as well that spiritual science can be pursued in its ideal and conceptual character anywhere. But we feel that a living spiritual science demands an environment which is different from that supplied by a dying culture, if it is to be pursued beyond theory. And there is really no need for that platitude to be announced to us by the outer world, that one can carry on spiritual science in the ideal sense in other rooms than those enlivened by our forms. But the ideal of our spiritual science, my dear friends, must be poured into our souls seriously and ever more seriously. And we still require much in order to instill this seriousness, this inner psychic energy completely into ourselves. It is easy to talk of this spiritual science and its practice in the outer world in such a way as to miss its nature and its nerve. When one often sees nowadays how the strongest attacks against our movement are formed, and how they are only directed at us, one has a remarkable sensation. One reads this or that onslaught, and if one is of sound mind, one must say to oneself: what is really being described here? All sorts of fantastic things are described which have not the remotest connection with us! And then these are attacked. There is so little capacity in the world to accept a new spiritual element, that it sketches a completely unlike caricature, discusses this and marches into battle against it. There are even some who think that we should refute these matters. We might reply, though we cannot refute every sort of thing which a person may imagine for himself and which has no resemblance whatever to that which he wishes to describe. But whatever sense of truth and sincerity lies at the bottom of such matters, this, my dear friends, we must carefully and earnestly consider. For thereby we may become strong in that which ought to arise in us through Spiritual Science—in that which out of spiritual Science, I would say, should with living force come to realization externally in material existence. That the world has not grown more tolerant in understanding is shown precisely in the attitude it takes up towards this spiritual science.

Perhaps we can celebrate the more intimate union of our souls with spiritual science in no greater way than in steeping ourselves in such problems as the problem of colour. For by experiencing the living element in the flow of colour we come, one might say, out of our own form, and share the cosmic life. Colour is the soul of nature and of the whole Cosmos, and by experiencing the life of colour, we participate in this soul.

I wanted to allude to these things today, in order to investigate next time further into the nature of colour and of painting.

My dear friends, I had to introduce into these remarks some allusions to the attacks which are now pouring in upon us from all sides. They originate in a world which cannot have any idea of what is the object of our movement. One can only wish, my dear friends, that through a deepening in all directions those who are in the movement will find the possibility of being clear about a fact which is indeed symptomatic of our time: the intrusion of unreality and untruthfulness in the comprehension of what is trying to find its place in the spiritual world. We shall certainly not be the cause of shutting out our spiritual movement from the world; it can have as much of it as it wishes. But what it will have to accept, if it wishes to understand our direction, is the unifying principle in the whole nature of man, whereby every detail of human accomplishment arises from the whole of man's nature.

What I have been saying is not an attack on the present age, but I have said it with a certain sadness because one sees that the wider our movement spreads, the more spiteful the forces of opposition become—perhaps not consciously, but more or less unconsciously and because the way one should judge such things is not sufficiently known, even in our ranks, for one should earnestly take up the standpoint that something new, that a new beginning is at least intended in our movement. One can only wish, my dear friends, that through a deepening in all directions those who are in the movement will find the possibility of being clear about a fact which is indeed symptomatic of our time: the intrusion of unreality and untruthfulness in the comprehension of what is trying to find its place in the spiritual world. We shall certainly not be the cause of shutting out our spiritual movement from the world; it can have as much of it as it wishes. But what it will have to accept, if it wishes to understand our direction, is the unifying principle in the whole nature of man, whereby every detail of human accomplishment arises from the whole of man's nature.

What I have been saying is not an attack on the present age, but I have said it with a certain sadness because one sees that the wider our movement spreads, the more spiteful the forces of opposition become—perhaps not consciously, but more or less unconsciously and because the way one should judge such things is not sufficiently known, even in our ranks, for one should earnestly take up the standpoint that something new, that a new beginning is at least intended in our movement. What the “intention” will lead to will no doubt appear. And also our “building” is surely only expressive of an “intention.” People will come who can do more than “intend”—if perhaps only at the date Herman Grimm assumes that Goethe will be fully understood. A certain modestly is requisite to understand such a saying and this is rare in the intellectual life of today. Spiritual science is well adapted to bring this modesty, as well as the earnestness of the situation, near to our souls.

These attacks from all sides on our spiritual movement make a saddening impression, since the world is beginning to see something of it; as long as it was only spiritually there, the world could see nothing; now, when it can see something it cannot understand, it begins to blow its cacophonous sounds from all nooks and corners; and this will become ever stronger and stronger. If we are able to see this, we shall at first be filled with a certain sadness; but the strength to stand for what we accept, not merely as a conviction but as life itself, will increase in us. Etheric life will also permeate the human soul, and what will live in it will be more than theoretic conviction, of which the people of today are still so proud. The man who imbues his soul with such earnestness, will find also the assurance that the foundations of our world, the foundations of our human existence can support us if they are sought in the spiritual world—and one needs this assurance, my dear friends, at one time more, at another time less.

And if one can speak of regrets, in considering the relation of our spiritual movement to the echo it finds in the world, if this is regret, then from this mood of melancholy must proceed the feeling of strength which rises from the knowledge that the sources of human life are in the spirit, and that the spirit will lead man out of everything concerning which, like disharmony, he can feel only regret. From this mood of strength one will also receive strength.

One would have to speak today, my dear friends, of spiritual affairs with a still greater regret than is caused by the discrepancy between the intentions in our spiritual movement and the echo which they arouse in the world. The disharmony in the world would disappear in another way if mankind once realized what our spiritual science means by the spiritual light which can illuminate in the human heart. And if we look at the fate of Europe today, the anxiety concerning our movement is but relatively small. Filled and shaken by this anxiety, I have spoken these words to you, but at the same time I am filled with the living conviction that with whatever painful experiences Europe is faced in the near or distant future, we can be reassured by the living knowledge that the spirit will lead man victoriously through all perplexities. Truly in days of anxiety, in hours so fraught with seriousness as these, we not only may, we must speak of the sacred concerns of our spiritual science, for we may believe that however small its sun appears today, it will grow and grow and become brighter and brighter—a sun of peace, a sun of love and harmony over all men.

These are earnest words, my dear friends, but they are such as justify us in thinking of the narrower affairs of spiritual science with all our souls and hearts, just because such terribly serious times are looking in at our windows.

The understanding of the spiritual-scientific view of life not merely with the mind but with the heart has as a result a corresponding revolution in artistic creation and enjoyment. The forces which we derive from this world-outlook can also flow into the understanding of the world from the point of view of Art. We have recently tried to indicate with our building (the Goetheanum at Dornach) at least a small part of the spiritual-scientific impulses which can flow into artistic forms. We would see a time, before us, if we examine closely the experiences and feelings to be derived from spiritual science, when the path to Art would be in many respects different from what it has been in the past, when the means of artistic creation will be experienced in the human soul much more intensively than before, when colours and sounds will be much more intimately felt in the soul, when, as it were, colours and sounds can be felt morally and spiritually in the soul, and when in the creations of the artists we shall meet the traces of their souls' experiences in the Cosmos.

In essentials the attitude of artistic creation and artistic appreciation in the past epoch was a kind of external observation, an appeal to something that affects the artist from outside. The need to refer to Nature and to the model for outward observation has become greater and greater. Not that in the Art of the future there is to be any one-sided rejection of Nature and outward reality. Far from it, but there will be a much more intimate union with the external world; so strong a union with it, that it covers not merely the external impression of colours and sound and form, but that which one can experience behind the sound and colour and form, in what is revealed by them.

In this respect mankind will make important discoveries in the future; it will unite its moral-spiritual nature with the results of sense-perception. An endless deepening of the human soul can be foreseen in this domain. Let us take first of all a single point. We will take the case when we direct our gaze to a surface evenly covered with vermilion. Let us assume we succeed in forgetting everything else round us and concentrating entirely on experiencing this colour, so that we have the colour in front of us not merely as something that works upon us, but as something wherein we ourselves are, with which we ourselves are one. We shall then be able to have the experience: you are now in the world, you yourself have become colour in this world, your innermost soul has become colour. Wherever you go in the world, your soul will be filled with red, everywhere you live in red and with red and out of red. But we will not be able to experience this in intensive soul-life, unless the feeling is transformed into the corresponding moral experience, into real moral experience. If we float through the world as red, and have become identical with red, we shall not be able to help feeling that this red world in which one is oneself red is pierced with the substance of divine wrath, which pours upon us from every direction on account of all the possibilities of evil and sin in us. We shall be able to feel we are in the illimitable red spaces as in a judgment court of God, and our moral feelings will be like what a moral experience of our soul would become in all-embracing “illimitable” space. Then when the reaction comes, when something rises in our soul one can only describe it by saying that one learns to pray.

If one can experience in the colour red the radiation and fusion of the divine wrath with all that can lie in the soul as the possibility of evil, and if one can experience in red how one learns to pray, then the experience of the colour red is enormously deepened. Then we can also experience how red can express itself plastically in space.

We can then understand how we can experience a Being who radiates goodness, who is filled with divine goodness and mercy, a Being such as we long to experience in space. Then we shall feel the need of expressing this divine mercy and goodness in a form which arises out of the colour itself. We shall feel the need of allowing space to recede, so that the goodness and mercy may shine forth. As clouds are driven asunder so space is rent by goodness and mercy and we shall get the feeling: you must make that a red which is fleeing.

Here we shall have to indicate faintly a kind of rose-violet streaming into the fleeing red. We shall then be taking part with our whole soul in a self-forming of colour, and with our whole soul shall feel an echo of what those beings have felt who specially belong to our earth, and who, when they had ascended to the Elohim-existence, learnt to fashion the world of forms out of colours. We shall learn to experience something of the Spirits of Form, who as spirits are the Elohim. And we shall then understand how the forms of the colours can be realities as is indicated in my first and second Mystery Plays, and we shall understand a little of how the colour-surface becomes something we have overcome, because we go out with colour into the Universe. If this is accompanied by strong desire, a feeling can arise like that in Strader when, looking at the picture of Capesius, he says: “I fain would pierce this canvas through and through ...”

If you consider this you will see that an attempt has been made in these Mystery Plays to present something of this sort really artistically, how something appears before our soul when it attempts to expand in the cosmic forces, when it feels one with the cosmic spirits. That was in fact the beginning of all art. Then the materialistic time had to come, and this old art, with its inner divine subtlety, had to be changed into the secondary “After-Art, Post-Art” which is essentially the art of the materialistic age, the art which cannot create, but only imitate. It is the sign of all secondary art, all derivative art that it can only imitate, and that it does not create form directly out of the material itself.

Let us assume something else, that we do what we did with the red surface, only with a more orange colour. We shall have quite different experiences with it. If we sink ourselves in the orange surface and become one with it, we shall not have the feeling of the divine wrath bearing down upon us; we shall rather have the feeling that what meets us here, though having something of the seriousness of wrath in a modified form, is yet desirous of imparting something to us, instead of merely punishing us, is desirous of arming us with inner power. If we go out into the Universe and become one with the orange colour we move in such a way that with every step we take we feel that this experience, this living in the orange forces, gives us the impression of becoming stronger and stronger, not merely that the judgment-seat is shattering us. So that orange gives us something strengthening, and does not bring only punishment with it. Thus we experience orange in the Universe.

We feel then the longing to understand the inner side of things and to unite it with ourselves. By living the red we learn to pray, and by living in the orange we experience the desire for knowledge of the inner nature of things. And if it is a yellow surface, and we do the same thing, we feel ourselves transferred to the beginning of our time-cycle. We feel: now you are living with the forces out of which you have been created, when you entered upon your first earth-incarnation. One feels an affinity between what one was during the whole of the earth's existence, and what comes towards one from the world into which one carries the yellow oneself.

And if one identifies oneself with green, and goes with it through the Universe, which can quiet easily be done by gazing at a green field, and by shutting out all else and concentrating entirely upon it, and by then trying to dive down into it—as if green were the surface of a coloured sea—one experiences an inner increase of strength in what one happens to be in that one incarnation. One experiences a feeling of inner health, but a the same time of inner selfishness—a stimulus of the inner egoistic forces.

And if one did the same with a blue surface, one would go through the world with the desire, as one proceeded, to overcome the egoism, to become macro-cosmic. One would feel the desire to develop self-surrender, and one would feel happy to remain in this condition to meet the divine mercy. Thus one would go through the world feeling as I blessed with the divine mercy.

So one learns to know the inner nature of colour, and as I said, we can get an idea of a time when the preparation through which the painter as artists will go, will mean a moral experience in colour of this kind; when the experience preparatory to artistic creation will be much more inward, much more intimate than it has ever been.

These are, after all, only a few indications I am giving you, which will be developed much further in the future, and will take hold of the souls of men and instigate them to artistic production. The adaptation of the material culture of old to modern times has dried up the soul and made it passive. Souls must be taken hold of and stimulated again by the inner forces of things.