The Rudolf Steiner Archive

Last winter, from this same place, I already tried to speak about the outer, as yet unfinished, emblem of spiritual scientific research, the Dornach building. It is quite understandable that this Dornach building is still the subject of many, many misunderstandings today; for just as it is true that it is based on purely artistic principles and not on anything symbolic or similar, it is equally true that it presents itself to the world as something quite different from what one has been accustomed to seeing in buildings or artistic expression. He contradicts previous artistic views in many respects, just as spiritual science contradicts and must contradict the habits of thinking in the previous scientific view. Why is this the case?

As was shown the day before yesterday, spiritual science, in its entirety, leads to a different way of thinking, or rather, to a transformation of thinking, leading to an activity of the soul that arises from thinking, which lives much more in reality than ordinary pictorial thinking, which wants to give nothing other than a reproduction of external reality. While ordinary thinking must see its value precisely in the fact that the ideas it awakens are faithful replicas of an external reality, nothing directly experienced by oneself, but only something re-experienced from external reality, what develops out of thinking through the spiritual research method must be something that the soul experiences directly. The soul should not have to rise into an image, but into real life, into the objective thought-being of the world. And so it is with what develops out of the will. But through this, the soul also comes to live more fully in what otherwise emerges instinctively as the artistic, as the stylistically appropriate, as the artistic formation. That is the essential thing in soul activities, which come to light in the soul through spiritual research, that the soul becomes more immersed in spiritual reality.

And by becoming immersed in spiritual reality, it also immerses itself differently in the world of forms, in the world of shaping. But through this it is led not to set something other than art in the place of art, but to approach art in a different way. While other art must start from what presents itself to the senses, and what presents itself to the senses can be elevated into the spiritual – so that this art appears as something elevated out of the sensory world, that which one has ascended to, until there is a spiritual molding of the outer sensual reality. What one can call the artistic grasp of the spiritual science is something that takes the opposite path. Man then stands first in the spiritual. He lives vividly the weaving and living of spiritual events, he faces the spirit as spirit. And when there is the possibility of artistic activity in him, when art is to come into being, then, not as happens in other art, as has happened in art up to now, the sense perception is led upwards until one can give it the radiance of the spiritual, but the spiritual is led down into the material.

Above all, this is the essential thing that should be striven for in the architecture of the Dornach building, for example. The first question was: What has to be done here? And in relation to this thought, there was no question of how to create a building out of the previous architectural style, out of what is otherwise common or can be learned in architecture. Instead, there was a completely different question, one whose practical answer shows how one has to deal with spiritual science quite differently in the direct than with ordinary logical thinking or with the ordinary activities of the soul in general.

When a fruit forms a shell around itself, then what is separated as the shell has emerged and grown out of the same life forces as the fruit itself with its individual formations. And anyone who observes, for example, how the kernel of the nut forms the shell around it with all the fine veins, will say to themselves: the nutshell comes from the same forces as the kernel itself. This nutshell is not formed in such a way that one could somehow imagine a style that should give a shell around the nut; the whole is one. And so it must become one: what is done in the Dornach building, the forces that prevail in what will be presentations and representations from the spiritual-scientific world view, what messages are from the spiritual world, what thoughts and ideas are developed. All this is, so to speak, the core life.

But the same forces that prevail in this core life must also be used to form the shell. This must be a unity, just as in every natural fruit, the shell and core are a unity and are formed from the same forces. The question could never arise: Which architectural style can be applied here? Rather, the whole building was given its form by the intention of realizing a spiritual idea in the structure; the two-dome form, which brings everything together (Figs. 1-9), really came about in this way. It had to be a unity. And so, in a certain way, the walls also had to become something other than walls have been up to now (Figs. 10-17). But it is significant, especially for the understanding of the unique art that is to be developed there — still quite primitive in its beginnings — that this is taken into account.

Walls, even those that have been artistically designed and especially these, have meant an end in previous art. Even in the Greek architectural works of art, walls mean an end; they close off from the outside world. Spiritual science, by virtue of what it is, should lead out into spiritual expanses. Therefore, forms must arise on the walls, as sculptural formations and the like, which cause the walls, when looking at the forms, to destroy themselves, so that one has the feeling: By living in the building and directing one's gaze to the forms, one has something in the forms that leads out into the world.

And yet one had to be in touch with all of reality. Therefore, the kind of window art that had existed in the past or still exists today, developed out of the old art, could not be created as window art. Instead, a kind of window etching, if you may call it that, was used (Fig. 102, 103). The figurative is now worked into the variously colored glass panels, each one in a different color, in such a way that the thickening and thinning of the glass achieves what is to be artistically achieved. And then the sunlight shining in will interact with it, that is, that which works and weaves in nature itself, to make the work of art complete. There, nature will intertwine with art to form a unified work of art.

Thus, new approaches had to be taken in the most diverse ways. In painting, which will fill the domes (Figs. 29, 53, 55), the aim was to treat the colors in a very specific way. Of course, I can only hint at these things in a fragmentary way. In treating colors in a figurative way, something should be attempted that is not usually attempted with color. The aim should be to experience color directly. Everything that the soul engages in through spiritual research should be experienced inwardly. The color should not be merely superficial; rather, the color should have inner life and develop this inner life itself, so that life itself arises out of the corresponding color and color composition.

When you look at the painted work of art, you should immediately feel the interaction of the color and that which lives out of the color into the form. You should have the feeling: you live in what is alive in the color, what is alive in the form, you grasp reality in the color, not through the color; you grasp the reality behind the color. Colors should express themselves, forms should express themselves, not something through colors, not something through forms. For this is precisely what living with the spiritual world leads to: not adhering to some model, but bringing what is living and weaving in the spiritual fact and in the spiritual essence into the weaving of the colors and into the life of the forms that one now brings onto the surface. And this special feature had to be striven for, for the reason that the whole of the structure, like the 'shell', was intended for spiritual science, which arises from the same forces as spiritual science itself.

For example, we also had to depart from the principle of placing columns, each of which is always the same as the one before, columns with capitals that are all the same as each other. A certain development had to be followed from the first pair of columns with their capitals to the second and so on (Figs. 31-52). This gives an inner design, an inner development, as nature itself does, by developing the other tones, the second, the third and so on, from the fundamental, from the prime. And just as it is not superstition or some kind of mystical madness to see seven tones in the scale and the eighth tone as a repetition of the fundamental, so it is not something mystically mysterious to seek a progression in the inner motives of the capitals and thereby arrive at the number seven for the columns quite naturally, because in this number we stand in the creative process of the world with the spiritual, just as the creative element in nature lives in the creative process itself. Thus a parallelism emerges between what is present in nature in a primitive form, such as the seven tones of the musical scale and the seven colors of the rainbow, and what occurs in the spiritual realm. The strange thing is that people looked at this building in Dornach and thought that seven columns had been chosen here because of some superstitious belief about the number seven. The same people might also say: What a grotesque superstition it is that the rainbow has seven colors, or that the tone scale has seven tones! It would be the same logic, one as the other. One as the other is demanded by the nature of the facts.

If someone comes and says: Well, yes, you would like to be able to agree with what is there in the building. But that you do such superstitious things or such mystical stuff as seven pillars, and made of seven different woods to boot — anyone who speaks like that is like someone who says: I don't understand why each string on a violin has to be different, they could all be the same. It will be a matter of realizing that what leads from spiritual science to art corresponds, as it were, to the whole purpose of spiritual research work.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The third picture is supposed to show the northeast aspect.

The fourth picture is intended to represent the southwest aspect.

The next picture is supposed to show the northwest aspect.

This is yet another aspect.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

We will now see the second pillar on its own.

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

We will now see the third column on its own.

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

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

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

The fifth column on its own.

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

The sixth motif on its own.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The first column of the small dome.

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

The next one is more complicated again.

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

The next column.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

• 1. See the reference on p. 159.

A public lecture at the Stuttgart Art Building

When the spiritual science, the aims and nature of which I have been honored to present in lectures in Stuttgart every year for almost two decades, gained greater currency, namely when artistic work was created from this spiritual science, the intention arose to create a central building for this spiritual science that would be particularly appropriate for it, somewhere where it would be fitting. This idea has become a reality in that we performed the Mystery Dramas in an ordinary theater in Munich from 1909 to 1913. These plays were intended to be born out of the spirit of this anthroposophically oriented spiritual science in their entire structure and attitude.

What the supporters of this spiritual science had in mind, on the one hand, as the actual meaning of their world view, and, on the other hand, as the artistic expression of this world view, was initially brought about by the intention, just mentioned, to stage their own play, which was to be the representative, the outward representative of this spiritual science. In Munich, this did not succeed due to the lack of cooperation on the part of the relevant artists. Since I have set myself a different task today, I do not want to talk about everything that led to the construction of this building on a hill in a remote location in northwestern Switzerland, in the canton of Solothurn, where, at the time we began building, there were no restrictive building laws and one could build as one wished. As I said, all this has led to the fact that I do not want to go into it today. But I would like to talk about the sense in which the intention should be understood, especially for the spiritual science meant here.

When one speaks of world views, world view directions or world view currents, then one usually has in mind a sum of ideas that often have a more or less theoretical or popular character, but which mostly exhaust themselves in the fact that they simply want to express themselves through communication, through the mere word, and then at most expect from the world that the word, which is formulated in a certain way programmatically, is actually carried out in reality. From the outset, what is meant here as anthroposophically oriented spiritual science is not predisposed in the same way as other world views. It is, if I may express it this way, imbued from beginning to end with a sense of reality. That is why it had to lead, even in difficult times in this present age, to direct penetration into what the attempt at a social reconstruction of modern civilization is. If a world view that is more in the realm of ideas needs a structure of its own for its cultivation, then, depending on one's means, one usually contacts someone whom one assumes to be professionally capable of constructing a structure from the relevant styles. One contacts such a personality or a series of such personalities in order to then create, as it were, a house, a framework for the cultivation of such a worldview. However, this could not have corresponded to the whole structure of our anthroposophically oriented spiritual science, for the simple reason that this spiritual science is not something that expresses itself only in ideas, but because it wants to express itself in all forms of life.

Now I would like to use a simple comparison to suggest how this anthroposophically oriented spiritual science had to express itself in its own framework, both in terms of trees and in artistic terms. Take any fruit, let us say a nut. Inside the nut is the fruit, and around it is the shell. Let us first look at the hard shell inside the green shell. If you study the whole configuration, the shape of the nut shell, you will say to yourself: it could not be any different than it is, because the nut is as it is. You cannot help but think to yourself: the nut creates its shell, and everything about it that is visible through the shell must be an expression of what the nut itself is. Thus, a frame is quite appropriate in nature, in all creation, for what it frames.

If you do not think abstractly, if you do not think theoretically, if you do not think from a world view that moves only in ideas, but that wants to be in all reality and in all life, then you feel compelled to do everything you do in a certain way, as the creative forces in the universe do. And so, if we had built with some alien architectural style, with something that had grown out of those building methods that are common today, a framework for an anthroposophically oriented worldview and its cultivation, there would have been two things: on the one hand, a building that expresses itself entirely from within, that says something for itself, that stands in its own artistic formal language. And then one would have entered and represented something inside, cultivated something that could only relate to the building in a very superficial way. One would hear words spoken in such a building, one would see plays performed on the stage (since these are intended) and other artistic performances; one would have heard and seen and beheld something that wants to present itself as something new in modern civilization. One would have turned one's eye away from what one might have seen on the stage; one would have turned one's ear away from what one might have heard, and one would have looked at the building forms — these would have become two essentially different things. The spiritual science meant here could not aspire to this. It had to strive in harmony with all world-building. It had to trust itself to express itself in artistic forms as well as in building forms. It had to claim that what forms itself into words, what forms itself into drama or into another form of artistic expression, is also capable of directly shaping itself into all the details of what is now the shell. Just as the nut fruit creates its shell out of its own essence, so too did a spiritual science such as this, whose essence is not understood in the broadest circles today because it breathes precisely this spirit of reality, had to create its own framework. Everything that the eye sees in this framework must be a direct expression of what is present as living life in this world view, as must the formed word.

And there were some pitfalls to avoid. For those who have a certain inclination to make a building appropriate to a worldview are often, let us say, somewhat mystical or otherwise inclined, and they then have the urge to express what is expressed in the worldview in external symbols, in some mystical formations. But this merely leads to such a framing becoming something in the most eminent sense inartistic. And if one had performed a building bearing symbols, one would have wanted to express in allegorical or symbolic form what underlies anthroposophically oriented spiritual science, so nothing would have emerged but something in the most eminent sense inartistic.

Indeed, I must even admit that some people who have come to what is referred to here as anthroposophically oriented spiritual science with their views and currents of life, as contributors or advisors, in the early days of our work in Dornach, were quite inclined to express everything that spiritual science contains in old symbolic or similar forms. I might also mention that those people, who are so numerous, who either out of a certain lack of understanding or out of malicious intent talk about the Dornach building, keep coming to the world with the idea that one can find symbols for this or that, allegorical expressions for this or that.

Now, ladies and gentlemen, it must be admitted that even in what I have to show you this evening, anyone who does not look closely and with a lively sense of perception can find something to use as an expression: There are many allegorical or symbolic elements. In reality, there is not a single symbol or allegory in the Dornach building, but everything that is there is there entirely so that the inner experience of the spirit, which on the one hand is to be grasped in ideas that are expressed in lectures or the like, is experience is to be completely dissolved into artistic forms, that nothing else is asked for in artistic creation in Dornach than: what the line is like, what the form is like, what that is which can be shaped as an artistic form of expression in sculpture, in architecture, in painting, and so on. And many a person who comes to Dornach and asks what this or that means is always given the same answer by me: I ask them to look at the things; basically, they all mean nothing other than what flows into the eye. People often say that this or that means this or that. But then I am obliged to talk to them about the distribution of colors and the like.

I have now tried to show how the building, as a shell, very much in the spirit of nature's own creation, forms the framework for anthroposophically oriented spiritual science. But for that very reason the whole idea of the building had to strive for something new. Now, in all that I am going to say today, I ask you to bear in mind that, of course, much criticism can be made of the Dornach building, that many objections can be raised. And I give you the assurance: the person who perhaps objects most of all is myself. For I am fully aware that the Dornach building is a beginning; that the Dornach building stands as a first attempt to create a certain stylistic form that cannot even be characterized in words today, because its details are not formed from abstract thoughts, but from what is experienced in a living way in that beholding of the spirit that is meant by our spiritual science.

I may mention just one difference at the outset: if we compare the various architectural styles, which, in a certain development of form, still find expression today wherever buildings are constructed, it is apparent everywhere that, basically, the mathematical, the geometrical, the symmetrical, that which perhaps follows in the rhythm of the line, the mechanical, the dynamic, etc., all flow into architecture. From the basic feeling – I am not saying from the basic idea, I am saying from the basic feeling – of our spiritual science, the daring attempt was once made, I know it, to create an organic building idea, not a mechanical-dynamic, but to create an organic building idea, and this under the influence of that which Goethe incorporated into his great, powerful view of nature under the influence of the idea of metamorphosis. The Dornach building, as far as this can be realized in architecture, should not merely represent the symmetrical, the dynamic, the mechanical, the geometrical; it should represent something that can be looked at, I do not say grasped, but looked at as a building organism, as the form for something living.

In this case, however, it is a matter of every detail in an organism being exactly as it should be in its place. You cannot imagine the ear lobe in a human organism being formed any differently than it is. So we tried to make our building in Dornach a completely organic, internally organic unit by placing each individual part in the whole in such a way that it appears as a necessary structure in its place; that every detail is an expression of the whole, just as a fingertip or an earlobe is an expression of the whole human organism.

That is one thing that has been attempted. As I said, it is a beginning, an attempt, and I know how many imperfections it has and how much can be objected to from the point of view of architecture and sculpture and so on. The other thing is what I would like to say in advance, namely that our world view itself demands that the whole idea of building be formulated differently from the way in which the idea of building is usually formulated. If we consider ordinary buildings – I will mention just one – we find that they are closed off from the outside by walls to a certain degree. Even the Greek buildings were closed off to a certain degree. What is required by the Dornach building is that the wall itself be treated in a completely different way than it is usually treated. The person who enters the Dornach building should not have the feeling that, having a wall around him, he is closed off in an inner space. Rather, everything should be artistically designed so that, to a certain extent, the wall itself is suspended; that the wall itself - please do not misunderstand me - the wall itself becomes artistically transparent, so that one gets the feeling - transparent is of course only spoken in comparison - you are not closed off, but everything that is wall, everything that is dome, opens up a feeling that it is broken through, that it cancels itself out, that you are in a feeling connection with the whole great universe. Far out into infinity, the soul is meant to feel connected to this through what the forms evoke; the forms of the columns, the walls, the forms of the dome paintings, etc.

The building in Dornach is a double-domed structure, consisting of a small and a large domed space that do not stand side by side but interlock. The small domed room, that is, the circular room covered by a smaller dome, will be used for presenting mystery dramas, for dramatic performances in general, for other artistic performances, such as eurythmy. But there are also other things planned. Then there is the large domed room, which is connected to the smaller one in the segment of the dome. It is intended as an auditorium; so that those who approach this building must immediately be imbued with a certain feeling by this outer form.

We will begin by looking at our building as it presents itself to someone approaching it from the northeast.

So, as you can see, we have a double-domed structure. This is the auditorium, and here is the stage. The two domes are inserted into each other by, if I may say so, a special technical feat, because this insertion was difficult. The person who approaches this building – which, I believe, is particularly appropriate in its artistic expression of the special mountain formation of the Jura region in which it is built – should have the feeling that something is present that reveals itself in a duality. The person who enters the building finds themselves in the large domed room. Inside, he may have the feeling: here something is seen, something heard. And this something, which is experienced in a sense in the heights of spiritual life, which is to reveal itself to an inclined audience, should already express itself as a feeling to those who approach the building.

But initially, every single detail of the outer forms is attuned in such a way that one has an impression from the outside, so to speak – I could not express it in terms of ideas or thoughts – but through the forms, through the artistic language forms, one has an impression from the outside of what is actually being proclaimed inside as spiritual science. I would now like to show you another approach to the building, which presents itself when approaching it from the north:

Here is the building, here the main entrance, here a nearby building that has experienced very special challenges. I would just like to mention in this picture: the lower part of the building is a concrete structure. It has a walkway here. The entire building stands on the concrete rotunda. The entire double-domed structure is a wooden construction.

I note that the task was not only to create a shell for spiritual science in this building, but also to find a style for this very special institution that could be derived from concrete. That, ladies and gentlemen, is what is not really understood today, that we have to create out of the material everywhere. Today we see how sculptors create things that they shape, I would say, by having some kind of novelistic idea or a novelistic harmony of ideas, which are then shaped in any material, in bronze or the like. But we have to come back to having such an intense feeling for the material that we ourselves, even with this brittle, I mean artistically brittle, this abstract concrete material, gain the ability to create forms of design out of the material.

It is certainly the case that today people will not understand you if you say to them: I am going to paint a picture; in the middle I have this or that figure, on the sides this or that figure, I now want to do that, can you do something like that? And one answers: Yes, you can do anything, but it is a matter of what becomes of the colors. You cannot talk about a picture differently than from within the colors. Even in many artistic circles today, there is little understanding when one tries to think that which lives artistically as something quite separate from everything that is not direct contemplation, direct experience of feeling.

As the third picture, I would like to show you another aspect of the building. You can see the small dome, the large dome. Here, seen from the outside, the auditorium. The whole thing sits on the concrete substructure here. Here are the side wings, which fit into the building at the point where the two domes merge.

This is a slightly closer view of the structure. You will be entering from down here. The cloakrooms are located in the concrete substructure. There is a stairwell at the front of the interior. You can come up to this level through the wooden structure, but you can also come up here, where there is a walkway. You can walk around a large part of the structure here during the intervals between performances.

This is the main entrance from the terrace. You can already see that all the forms from the dynamic geometry have been transposed into the organic, into the living. There is nothing in this building that has not been created in the spirit in which I meant the design of the earlobe on the human body earlier. So everything, every detail and the whole, is designed in such a way that not geometric forms, but organic forms are present; but not, I would like to point out, organic forms that are modeled on this or that organic limb. That was not the intention at all. When I had first designed this structure in the wax model, from which the building then emerged, it was not a matter of reproducing anything naturalistically in organic forms, but rather of immersing myself in the creative essence of nature itself, of making what Goethe calls the truth, so to speak, of how nature lives in its creation.

Now, of course, nature does not create such structures. Therefore, one does not find those organic forms in nature that can occur in such a structure, but by having the whole structure like an organic being in its intuition, in its imagination, the inner creation is formed in such detail that detail that, without imitating anything in nature, one is compelled to shape a structure like the one above the main entrance in the same way that a plant leaf is shaped out of the essence of the plant organism. So without imitating anything naturalistically, natural creation should reveal itself everywhere without symbolism and allegory, purely by proceeding in the design of the building forms as one can imagine that nature itself lives in its creation.

Once again, closer to the building. We are in front of the main entrance. This is where people will enter first. These are the cloakrooms. Then you come up through the stairwell and enter a vestibule, which I will also show later. This is the north side. Behind here are the storage rooms, the rooms for the equipment and the cloakrooms for the stage plays.

Another view of the main entrance. Here, the smaller dome is completely covered by the large dome. The two side wings were intended as dressing rooms for the performers.

This is a piece of the side wall. Next to it is the house that the man who was able to give us the land for this building had built. This house was built for him in a style that is certainly, since it is all a beginning, completely thought out in all its individual forms using the concrete material. That is what I would like to say about this house.

Here you can see one of the side wings, which, as I said, are intended to provide dressing rooms for those performing in the stage festival. If you walk around here, you will come to the main entrance. Here is a piece of the facade of such a side wing. It has been attempted to follow Goethe's idea of metamorphosis – not in a pedantic way, but in the spirit of transforming the ever-identical, of transforming the ever-uniform, to form everything as an organic unity, so that the motif above the main entrance is repeated here, but in a different form. As you will see in Dornach in general, what Goethe calls changeability in organic structures has been tried to be expressed in the building idea everywhere.

Here is the floor plan, here is the entrance, and there is the auditorium, which will hold about nine hundred to a thousand people. When you come out of the main entrance here, you walk through the space that is vaulted by the organ room above. You then come in here. The line that goes in this direction is the only symmetrical one in this building. Nothing else is oriented in a symmetrical way except for what lies to the left and right of this axis of symmetry. Therefore, as you enter the room, you see a row of columns. These columns are formed in such a way that only the symmetrical pairs always have the same pedestals, the same capitals and the same decoration in general. The formation of the capital progresses as one moves from the entrance towards the stage, so that each successive capital is formed in such a way from the previous one that the space of the architrave above a column is formed from the spatial design of the architrave above the previous column, so that the metamorphosis view is expressed in the right sense.

It is, I dare say, a great thing to attempt such a thing: here you have a first capital with very definite forms that arise inwardly for you as you shape them. And as you say to yourself, now it is so that it must remain in the place where it is, then the feeling comes: That is also to be transformed, just as in a plant growing out of the ground, a subsequent leaf is something metamorphosed in relation to the preceding leaf. There you shape the next form out of the previous one. There the next form presents itself as something absolutely necessary. People often come to Dornach and ask: What does this or that chapter mean? My task is simply to say: look! It is not a matter of someone finding an abstract, complicated meaning, but of sensing how the following chapter always grows out of the previous one in organic necessity.

The smaller dome, framed by twelve columns, and the fourteen columns here, will provide space for the presentation of stage plays. Often, people also count when they come: one, two, three, four, five, six, seven. Seven columns! Then they say: They are mystics, they bring in the superstitious number seven. I can only say: Then nature is also superstitious. The rainbow has seven color shades, we have seven tones in music, the octave is the repetition of the prime. What is so self-evidently expressed in nature is repeated in the direct experience of creating something metamorphic. And I may well say: it was far from my mind to pursue some mystical number seven, but it was obvious to me to think of one capital out of the other. And then a wonderful thing happened – if I may call it a miracle – that just as there are seven colors in the rainbow, without any mysticism, simply by shaping the form, when you are finished with the seventh form, you can't think of anything more. That's how you get the seven forms. With the seventh, you can't think of a single small artistic idea, so you just know you've finished.

This is a section through the original model. It is cut through the axis of symmetry, so that you can see the formation of the columns in progress, the architraves on top, the bases. So this is the model on which the construction was based.

Another section, a kind of drawing section through the building. Here is the concrete substructure. Here we have to show how the two domes are joined together. But here too, two domes are joined together, leaving the space between them free.

I originally had a specific idea in mind when arranging the double dome. When building such a thing, the most important thing is the acoustics, and I had the idea that if you connect two such domes with a connection that is as light as possible, a kind of soundboard must be created.

Furthermore, not for mystical reasons but for very real ones, I had the seven columns made out of different types of wood. All of this, of course, yields a great deal when one tries to think and feel it all together. But many people know how difficult it is to get the acoustics right in a hall. Basically, everything was thought out, down to the choice of materials – as I said, the columns are made of different types of wood – and into this soundboard, so that both the sound that develops in the musical sense and the sound of the spoken word are accentuated in a beautiful acoustic way throughout the entire room.

Just as the whole thing is an experiment, and one could not think that the most perfect thing could be created in the very first attempt, so I could not indulge in the illusion that the perfect acoustics had been created. But we were able to experience how the intuitions revealed something in the very last few days. The organ was installed as the first musical instrument. It was completed, and it became apparent to us that the entire structure, in terms of music, reveals itself acoustically in a very unique way. And I dare to hope – things are not yet ready, that can prove this – but when everything is there, including the curtain, that then the acoustics, including those for the spoken word, will also reveal themselves. But in any case, the one rehearsal for the intuitive design of a space with regard to the acoustics, the one rehearsal in terms of the music, seems to me – and as it seems to everyone who has heard the organ there in the last few days – to have actually been successful.

A little way into that staircase, which you enter when you come through the main entrance into the interior. You see here a capital above a column. You see this capital formed in a very special way. Every single form, every single surface, every single curve is conceived with the space in which it is located in mind. The line and surface run this way because this is where you come out, because there is little to bear. Here the column braces itself against the building. Here the individual forms must be shaped differently. Just as nature creates differently when it creates a muscle, depending on what it has to bear, so we must experience how the forms must be when each individual link in its place is to be thought of as it can only be in this place through the nature and essence of the whole.

This is the staircase itself. The staircase goes up here. What I showed before is the vestibule above the concrete room. This is where I am standing, and this is where you would stand when you enter the building. Here is the banister for the staircase that leads up from the lower concrete substructure to the building, which is then made of wood, to the actual auditorium. I have tried here to transform a support from the merely geometrically mechanical to the organic.

Let me reiterate: I am, of course, aware of all the objections from the point of view of conventional architecture, but it has at least been attempted, and I have the feeling, however imperfect everything is, however many objections there may be, that a start has been made that paves the way for a new architectural style that will be further developed. Perhaps it will lead to something quite different from what has been built in Dornach, but if you don't even start with something, nothing new will come of it. Therefore, even if it goes completely wrong, something new should be attempted here: the development of the mechanical-dynamic form into organic forms. The concrete is worked in such a way that the beam expresses in its own form what it bears; on the other hand, it is shown here how it only forms outwards, bearing nothing.

Here you can see a radiator screen. The individual radiators are covered at the bottom with concrete screens and at the top with wooden screens. These screens are designed in such a way that their plastic forms reflect something that, in its formation, is, so to speak, in between animal and plant forms. It comes from the earth, as if organically grown, but not symbolically, but artistically designed. In creating this, one has the feeling of something coming into being if the earth itself allowed something like this to grow out of its principle of growth. If you take this staircase, you will come to the room that was shown before, and through that you then enter the actual auditorium.

So this is where you come in, enter the auditorium. Here on the left and right are the first two columns. You can see how the simplest capital structure, the simplest architrave structure, is used here. And now you will see how each subsequent capital structure attempts to create something that necessarily grows out of what has gone before, just as a subsequent plant leaf, which is more complicated and more dissipated in form, always grows out of the one that went before.

Here is the first column individually. It is always important to me that one sees that the essential is not: what does the individual column mean? Some people have done a terrible disservice by always talking about the meanings of the Dornach columns; it is important to me that the artistic form must be questioned. Therefore, I will always show the one column and the next one, so that it becomes clear how simply, artistically, the next form was attempted to be derived from the preceding one.

So here, continuing from the simple column – that is the left aspect – we have the second column. It is designed in such a way that what goes down here goes up there. Just as a plant leaf develops from another, this capital form is derived from the preceding one through artistic experience, and this architrave form from the preceding one.

The second column by itself. Now the following two columns, always to illustrate how the next column is to be artistically designed from the previous one. There now follow several column pictures, initially single ones, then in twos.

Everything that one experiences artistically is actually formed in one's imagination as a matter of course. One cannot help it, it just happens. One can hardly say anything else about it either. But the strange thing is: when one simply transfers one's own experience into the forms, then one gradually feels how one creates in harmony with nature's own creative process. One feels the life that lies in the shaping of one metamorphosis out of another, in intimate harmony with natural creation. And so I believe that those who experience – not intellectually, but with lively feeling – what develops there as one capital out of the other actually get a more vivid sense of development than can be given by anything in modern science. For when we speak of development, we usually mean that each successive structure is more complicated than the one that precedes it. This is not true. When one inwardly experiences a development such as this evolution of columns and architraves, then at first the simple develops into the complicated. But then one reaches a height, and then the structures become simpler again. You are amazed when you see the results of artistic necessity, how you create in harmony with nature. Because that is how it is in nature too. An example: the most perfect eye is the human eye, but it is not the most complicated eye. The animal eye is much more complicated than the human eye; in certain animals there are fans and xiphoid processes; in humans this has been absorbed again. The shape is simplified. You don't follow that when you create something like this from abstract ideas, but it presents itself to you as something self-evident in the form.

The next two columns. Here we come to something that the abstract mystic or mystical abstractor might say: “He formed the caduceus here.” I did not form the caduceus, I let the preceding forms grow. It formed by itself. It emerges organically, by itself, from the preceding form. I had to say to myself: “If the preceding column grows just like that, it will come out like that, one from the other.”

Two consecutive columns showing how the forms become simpler as development progresses.

Here we are already approaching the gap where the auditorium borders on the stage.

Here the first column of the stage area; here the last of the auditorium, here the gap for the curtain.

Here you can see into the small domed room. If you stand in the auditorium and look that way, you get a view similar to this. The top of the dome, initially carved and then painted. We won't look at the painting here, we'll come to that later.

Here I would like to show the order of the individual columns, so that one can get an overview of how the matter progresses from the simplest. All the individual columns are formed individually for each column, and symmetry is only found in relation to the main axis of symmetry of the building.

Here are the figures on the pedestals. I also tried to give the pedestals a metamorphic appearance.

I would like to ask you to take a look at something that is not quite finished yet: the room in which the organ is built. The idea was to avoid making the organ look as if it had simply been placed in the room, and instead to make the whole structure appear to grow out of the room. That is why the architecture around the organ is designed to match the way the organ pipes have to be constructed. It is not finished, as I said. There are still things to be added here.

This is what you see when you enter the small domed room from the auditorium. The end of the small domed room. A number of forms have been carved out of the wood. All of them have been carved out of the rounded surface of the wood, a number of forms that are a summary of the forms found on the capitals and architraves. So that, standing in the auditorium, one has the forms of capitals and architraves, and when one looks up into the small domed space, as a conclusion to all this on a spherical surface, which is like the formal synthesis, the formal synthesis of what can be seen on the individual forms of the architraves and capitals. And now I have to move on to something about which I will have to say a few words.

This is what the small domed room looks like when it is painted. Both domed rooms are painted with motifs that actually only arise when you live very inwardly with what we call anthroposophically oriented spiritual science. When you live very inwardly with this, then, I would like to say again, picturesqueness also emerges all by itself. Just as the word is formed by wanting to express the inner spiritual experience through the word, so this inner spiritual experience, which is truly not so poor that it could only express itself in abstract thoughts and ideas, but can express itself in everything that is a form of life and the purpose of life, is transformed. And motifs that are just as much alive in the one who lives in the inner contemplation of the spiritual world, as it is conveyed through spiritual science, are also painted in the large and small dome in such a way that one does not have the feeling of being closed off by the dome, but rather that one has the feeling, through what is painted on the wall, that the domes form themselves far out into infinity. I want to discuss, because I can't explain everything, only what is painted here in the small domed room, so that you can see it immediately when you look from the auditorium into the small domed room.

There is a central figure. It represents to me, as it were, the representative of humanity as such. At the same time, it is the artistic expression of that which lives in the human form. So that even in its natural human form, the human being must constantly seek balance between two extremes. What the human being actually is is something that should be expressed by the content of all anthroposophically oriented spiritual science. This cannot truly be said in one or even many lectures, but comes to expression in the fullness of all spiritual science. But one can say the following, which is still somewhat abstract but already points to what is experienced as human essence in the human being. One can express it in soul terms as follows:

In fact, human beings are always engaged in an inner battle between something that works in him in such a way that he wants to rise above his station. All that is fanciful, enthusiastic, mystical, theosophical, that seeks to lift man in the wrong way above himself, so that he no longer remains on the firm ground of reality, all that is one extreme. This is what some people tend towards, what every human nature secretly tends towards, and what every human nature must overcome through its health. Enthusiasm, fantasy, one-sided mysticism, one-sided theosophy, in short: everything that makes man want to rise above himself, is one thing in the soul. The other thing that is in the human soul and must be overcome through inner struggle is what constantly pulls him down to earth; expressed in spiritual terms: the philistine, the bourgeois, the materialist, the merely intellectual, the abstract, the calculating. And that is the essence of man, that he seeks to find harmony between the two opposite poles.

In physiological terms: the same thing that appears physically when a person wants to go beyond themselves is also expressed physiologically in the fact that a person can become feverish, develop pleurisy, that human nature is led into dissolution. The other extreme, that which develops in the soul as mere intellect, as narrow-mindedness, as philistinism and materialism, is what causes the ossification of human nature and leads to one-sided calcification, to ossification. Between these two physiological extremes, human nature fluctuates and seeks balance.

The intention is not to present an idea, but rather – both pictorially up there and sculpturally in the group of figures down here – to show how the representative of humanity lives in the middle between the two extremes that I have depicted. And so, above the central figure, which expresses the representative of humanity, there appears, at the top, a luciferic figure that expresses everything that is enthusiastic, fanciful, feverish, and pleurisy-ridden, etc., that wants to lead people beyond their heads. And at the bottom, protruding out of the cave, is the representative of everything ossified, everything philistine, everything that leads to sclerosis in its one-sidedness.

This central figure is designed in such a way that there is nothing aggressive about it. The left arm points upwards, the right downwards. Every effort has been made to represent love embodied in this representative of humanity, right down to the fingertips. And just as I am convinced that the trivial figure of Christ, as we usually see it, bearded, only came into being in the fifth or sixth century, so I am convinced, from spiritual scientific sources, which I can't talk about, but only because of lack of time, I am convinced that the figure that is depicted here is a real image of the one who walked in Palestine at the beginning of our era as the Christ-Jesus figure. And there should be nothing aggressive about it, even if the figure of Lucifer is painted, poetically shaped, falling and even breaking into pieces, not through an attack on the part of Christ Jesus, but because in his Luciferic nature he cannot bear the proximity of embodied love.

And if Ahriman, down there, the representative of the ossifying principle, the being that carries within itself everything that seeks to bind human beings to the earth, everything that does not want to let them go, suffers torment, ground. This is not because the figure of Christ hurls lightning bolts, but because this ahrimanic entity, through its own soul condition, so to speak, out of embodied love, casts lightning bolts for its own torment.

Here I really tried to depict love both plastically and pictorially in this central figure. And in a similar way, the inner experiences of spiritual science are given in the pictures on either side of this central group. But I can only show you the content of what is painted here. But that is not the main thing. In the first of my Mystery Dramas it is stated that in truth only that corresponds to modern ideas about painting in which the form of the color is the work. And here in this small dome an attempt was once made to create everything that was to be created out of color. If someone asks about the meanings, they are at most what one has tried to attach to the color scheme. I have to keep saying: one sees the color spot there or there, and what is in its vicinity as color spots, that is more important to me than what is meant there in a novelistic way.

An attempt has been made to realize this – I know all the counter-arguments – but it has been made, to realize what appears to me to be the case: I actually perceive every line in nature, when it is reproduced by drawing or painting, as a lie. The truth in nature is color. One is not concerned with the horizon line, but above with the blue firmament, below with the green sea, and where the two colors meet, the line and the form arise by themselves. This is how I have tried to paint here: everything from the color. The line should be the creature of the color.

Here you can see a section of the painting more clearly.

Here is a kind of rule of thumb. Here is the only word written out with letters that can be seen as a word in the whole structure. Nowhere is there anything symbolic that could be expressed in words; only here at this point, where an attempt has been made to convey the sensation as an experience through color, which occurred around the 16th century, when humanity developed more and more towards an individualistic soul life; there, knowledge took on very special forms. Those who speak of knowledge in such abstract terms, as many epistemologists do, really know nothing of the inner experience of knowledge. Today, knowledge is only known by those who can see before their soul how, in the process of limiting human life, childhood emerges from the spiritual world.

Here the child and on the other side, death. In the middle, the realization, the realization that brings it to the individualism of the ego-grasping. That which humanity has felt as actual cultural thoughts, for example in the 16th century, is attempted here to be expressed through color. I can only show you the content, which is not the main thing. But I think that precisely because this content is imperfectly depicted here, it evokes the feeling that something is still missing here, without which this thing cannot truly be what it should be. Anyone who sees this should feel that there should be color: here the child in its particularity, here the self, there a kind of fist-like figure, and below that death.

Here a little further. With the first figure we were still touching the auditorium. Here we come to the middle of the small domed room. There we have a figure that is supposed to represent how the spiritual was experienced by a cognizant human being in ancient Greece. The sensations, as they pass through human spiritual culture, should be seen in colors on the wall.

Here is the figure, which is, as it were, the inspiring figure above the Faust figure. You always see the inspired below, with a kind of genius above. Here is the genius of Faust, who appears as a kind of inspirer of Faust.

Here is the figure that can be seen above the Greek figure as an inspiring figure. It was a natural development that the genius of the sentient and cognizant entity was depicted as Apollo with the lyre. This is a higher inspiring entity that is always above the one who is down below, who is sitting down below, as it were, on the column. The inspiring figures are painted in the dome space.

Here below is an Egyptian figure, leading the Egyptian soul-life. The two figures shown before (Fig. 75) stand above her and represent the inspirers; the entities that are meant to pour the soul-life into them. Fig. 44 (Fig. 77):

Here I have tried to show how the civilization that I would describe as that of the Persian Zarathustra culture, which dates back to primeval times and has a view of the world as dual, ambivalent, as a world in which light and darkness cast their effects, how this view of the world has spread from Asia through Central Europe, and how it is still expressed in Goetheanism, where man experiences it. That is the essence of our Germanic-German culture: we always experience this contrast between light and darkness, which is already expressed in the old Zarathustra culture, this contrast that cuts so deeply into our souls when, on the one hand, we feel something that wants to grow beyond us like light; on the other hand, something that, like heaviness, wants to pull us into the earth. This is how the dualism that is felt should be expressed.

Above them you can see two figures. Sometimes you get fed up when you have been working on something like this for months. I got fed up while forming these two figures, in these figures, in which the inadequate and the ugly come to life, to recreate something like Mr. and Mrs. Wilson. That was something like a bugbear. But the other thing is that, basically, something lives in the Germanic-German soul when it experiences the thought of realization, which can only be endured if one recognizes full life in harmony with where life innocently enters physical existence from spiritual worlds.

Here you have, so to speak, an inspiring summary of everything that appears as duality: the being of light, the Luciferic, that which tempts people to fall into raptures; the other is the pedantic, the philistine, the Ahrimanic, which would like to drag people down. No civilization experiences this dualism as deeply and dramatically as the one within which there is a transitional context for contexts that go back to ancient times to the Zarathustra culture and find their expression in all that has become Goetheanism, which we still feel by spiritual science itself compels us to present the representative of humanity as he must seek the balance between the Luciferic, the mystical, the enthusiastic, the theosophical, and the Ahrimanic, the pedantic, ossified, philistine, sclerotic, and so on.

Here is the one figure, the ahrimanic, philistine, pedantic one, with the forehead set far back; the whole built as man would become if he were pure intellect. Only by the heart working its way up into the head do we avoid one extreme, how we would become if we only developed the things that form the skull, but which cannot form themselves according to their own inner forces because this is counteracted by the heart and the whole of the rest of the human being.

Here the other aspect, counteracting the Ahrimanic aspect. Between these two aspects, man must always seek his equilibrium. Christ is the great Master who leads us on the path to find this balance.

Here we come up against the central group. This is what will arise when dualism has developed to the point where the human being feels himself to be twofold, as a higher and a lower human being; that he has his shadow within himself, but as a shadow that he digests spiritually and mentally.

As a kindly genius that is above him.

Here a centaur, inspiring him what needs to be overcome in us as animality. Up here the centaur form, inspiring a future culture, next to the genius, the angelic, what approaches man on the other side.

Here is the central figure, Christ, not by attaching a vignette to him, but by placing him as the central figure. One should feel artistically: this is the figure in which the divine has appeared on earth. One should feel it from the form, from the line, from the surfaces and here from the color.

Figure 53 (illustration unclear): Here, at this point, it has, so to speak, been completely successful, even if it is only an attempt, to create everything out of color, without line.

Here is the head of the Representative of Man. Above it, Luciferic; below, Ahrimanic. This is the head that appears to me, from the spiritual vision – as far as one can form it – as the true form of the one who lived in Palestine at the starting point of Christianity as the Christ.

Here is the figure of Lucifer, collapsing into himself. It is painted in red and worked out of red. Picture 56 (Fig. 86): Below, the figure of Ahriman.

Here is the head, as the human head would be if it were not softened by the rest of the human being.

Here is the lightning bolt that must be drawn from the Christ principle.

Here I then move on to showing an illustration of a group of people. This group of people now also represents the representative of humanity. Above them are two figures, one again representing the rapturous, the mystical and so on. And as paradoxical as it may sound, this is designed in its forms as it presents itself in an inner spiritual vision if one wants to represent what man would be like if he formed himself according to the feverish, the pleuritic, the enthusiastic-fantastic.

Here the head, here the arm, and the peculiar thing that arises: that the larynx, ear and chest come together and merge into the wing. You feel what becomes an expressionist work of art. This is something that the non-understanding person might call symbolic. It is not symbolic, it is observed as only an organic-physical form can be observed.

Here again this figure, and here the figure at the very top on one side of the group of wood. It turned out that we needed something purely to balance the gravity conditions so that the whole group would support itself. It became so that I had to dare to create something quite asymmetrical, a kind of elemental spirit, growing out of the rock form, but here made of wood. If you abandon yourself to the rock formations, look at them and let your imagination create, saying to yourself: nature has decided on their formation, but if they were to continue, what would arise? You end up with something that approaches the higher form but is not it. I tried to create that in this figure. Above are two luciferic figures, below two ahrimanic figures, and up there this entity, which was dared to be formed completely asymmetrical, because it occurs in a place where the symmetrical would be in contradiction to the whole, and which looks somewhat mischievously humorously at what is forming there as the human struggle. I say “mischievously humorous” because there are indeed entities in the spiritual world that look with a certain humor at the inner tragedy of the human soul struggle. Picture 62 (Fig. 94):

Here you see a photograph of my original wax model of the Ahriman figure, the Ahriman head, the original pedant, the original philistine, the head that would have formed if the other human-forming forces had not counteracted the head-forming forces. Once you have created something like this, you know that you have nothing more to add to it. If you then want to create the head for Ahriman, who lives down in the rocky cave and is in conflict with Lucifer, this head also undergoes a metamorphosis, and the place where it needs to be in the body goes through a corresponding metamorphosis.

Here, seen from the side, is the head of the central figure, of whom I have just shown the painted form; that figure, carved out of wood, is, in my opinion, supposed to represent Christ Jesus walking in Palestine.

It is remarkable; while I was creating this, it became clear to me once again that one should actually create all Christian motifs in wood. The warmth of the wood – this statue is made of elm wood – is necessary for Christian motifs. An Apollo, an Athena is better in marble; Christian motifs are better in wood. It was always a real pain for me to see Michelangelo's Pieta in Rome, the mother with the body of Christ on her lap. I would have liked to see this Pieta - which I nevertheless greatly admire, of course - in wood instead of marble. I don't yet know the reasons myself. Such things cannot be easily explained. But I think the Aperçu is correct that everything Christian must be represented in wood.

Now, regarding the group that I just showed, which forms the center of the building, there is one more thing. If we follow the development of architecture, and consider only two or three stages, we must say: let us look at a Greek temple. It is not quite complete if it does not have its god inside. You cannot think of a Greek temple in general, but only of a temple of Apollo, a temple of Athena. It is the god's dwelling.

Let us move from Greek architecture to Gothic. The Gothic cathedral is not complete unless the community is within it.

We live in an age in which the community is becoming individualized. Therefore, the social question is the most important question of our time, because people live according to their individuality. Grasping the deepest nerve of our contemporary culture, we must look at what a building that belongs to a community must be a framework for today: for the people themselves. Therefore, the representative of human self-knowledge, the trinity between man, as he struggles in his soul between the enthusiastic-mystical and the pedantic-philistine, materialistic, this trinity should be placed at the center of the building, just as the god stands in the Greek temple, as the community praises in the Gothic cathedral. In this way, the spectator area should be pervaded by the pictorial and plastic sound of the “know thyself,” not in abstract forms, but artistically embodied in the Trinity of which I have so often spoken and which, in my opinion, is the Trinity of the culture of the future of humanity. Therefore, this wooden figure did not have to be erected at the center of the building, but as the central figure of the building.

Here an adjoining building, a neighboring building. Again a metamorphosis of the two domes. Here the architectural idea has been developed into a different form. The main building has windows for which a special type of glasswork has been invented. What I said earlier – that those inside this building feel at one with the whole universe, not closed off – should be expressed through the windows. That is why all the windows are large panes of glass in a single color. These panes – red, green, blue – are engraved, etched out of the glass, which then gives the glass its visual effect. This visual effect is there when the sun shines through the windows. This glass etching was tried for the first time in this building. And here, with the glass window in front of you without sunlight, you can physically feel a kind of score; together with the sun, it becomes a work of art. And you feel in the building: when the sunlight floods in through red, green, and blue panes, what the sun paints with its light lives in these windows, so that it is a representation of human death, sleep, waking, and so on; but nowhere is it symbolic, rather these states of consciousness are experienced vividly within.

These glass windows were to be made in this smaller building. And because the first person to work there was called Taddäus Rychter, this house was called “the Richter house”. So it does not have this name because we want to implement the threefold social order, as some people have said, and so we would have built a legal building in which we would have had our own jurisdiction. That is not the case. This should be noted by those who have done something wrong; they will be convicted according to Swiss law.

This is the entrance gate. Everything about it, down to the locks and door handles, is designed in line with the organic architectural concept, so that everything has to be the way it is in its place. Hence the need for a separate lock for these structures.

Here you can see the one that has experienced the most challenges. One day I said to myself: there must be a heating house, a firing plant, near the building. One could have done something that would not have been in the spirit of the overall architectural concept of the Goetheanum; a red chimney would have stood there. But I tried to create a utilitarian building out of concrete. I tried, in turn, to form a shell around the heating elements and the firing machines that are inside, just as the nut fruit forms a shell around itself. Also around what comes out as smoke. The whole is only complete when smoke comes out. So there, too, an attempt is made to carry out a building idea in such a way that, despite the utilitarian idea being carried out, what is created out of the utilitarian form is that which, in utilitarian building, the artistic form-giver currently strives for.

The same building from the side.

By now, enough time has passed and I have kept you waiting for a long time with a large number of pictures that were intended to show you something that is being built in Dornach as the Goetheanum, as a free university for spiritual science. What I have shown you in a series of pictures is intended to provide an initial framework for the work that has arisen from the spirit of spiritual science, which I have now been able to present in Stuttgart for almost two decades. A building was to be erected in Dornach that would not only have an external connection to this spiritual science, in that it serves the cultivation of spiritual science, but that would also be an expression in every detail of life in this spiritual science, just as the word that is formed and through which this spiritual science is proclaimed is intended to be a direct expression of the ideal that can be experienced in this spiritual science.

This spiritual science should not be abstract, theoretical, unworldly or unreal. This spiritual science should be able to intervene in reality everywhere. Therefore, it had to create a building style, a framework that emerged from itself just as a nutshell emerges from a nut. Of course, one will rightly be able to object to some things that are also before my mind's eye. But there was always a certain sense of encouragement while I was working on this building idea and all its details, what went through my mind when I was a very young man in the 1880s and heard the Viennese architect von Ferstel, who built the Viennese Votivkirche, give his inaugural address on the development of architectural styles. With a certain emphasis, Ferstel, the great architect, exclaimed: “Architectural styles are not invented, architectural styles arise.

I always said to myself: But then we live today in a time in which everything spiritual must change in the human soul in such a way that a new architectural style must necessarily arise from this change of the spiritual. And that something like this must be possible was always before me. I believed that it must be possible, and therefore I did not shrink from seeking such an architectural style, even if it was initially in a very imperfect design, from anthroposophically oriented spiritual science. A second time, if I were ever to supervise such a building again, it would be quite different. But one only learns by approaching reality, when one wants to deal not with abstract ideas, with something symbolic and allegorical, but with something vividly artistic and real in life. Spiritual science needs at least the beginning of a new architectural style, a new artistic formal language. No matter how imperfect it may be, present-day human civilization demands it! And those who have stood by me in such great numbers have seen it with me and have submitted to the first attempt at realizing this aspiration. And even if many still look with a sneer at what rises up as the Goetheanum, as a free college on the Jura hill in northwestern Switzerland — which is now difficult to reach from here, but otherwise easy to reach because it is only half an hour across the border — what stands there is already visited by thousands and thousands from all countries, especially from Switzerland itself. The eurythmy performances are also well attended, every Saturday and Sunday, and the lectures that I already give for the public in this school enjoy a certain interest even in circles that do not belong to the Anthroposophical Society. Dornach is beginning to open up to the world. It will still cost great sacrifices. We will still need many resources to really develop what is intended. But from what is there today, what is still unfinished, it can be seen that there can be a world view that not only thinks but also builds. On the other hand, we would like to show the world through the Federation for Threefolding that this world view can also have a socially constructive effect on the immediate life of the individual and of humanity. However great the faults of this structure, which is the external representative of our world view, our spiritual-scientific world view, and however much it is still rightly subject to criticism today, it had to be ventured. It had to be placed in our present civilization. And in the face of all contradictions - or rather in the face of all approval of the present - I would like to say, in harmony with all the friends who have helped me in such great numbers in erecting this building, in the face of what is intended here, the modest, summarizing word:

What has been willed must first become the right thing in later times, but a start had to be made. And speaking on behalf of all those who have been active in Dornach, I can summarize the attitude out of which flowed what I have tried to show you today: we dared to do it despite the difficulties, and we will continue to dare to do it!

[ 1 ] As a sort of episode inserted between the lectures now being given, I should like to-day to bring forwards a few things about our building, so that our friends may find in what will be said, a sort of foundation for their own work. We shall have, in the near future, to take strong measures in different directions for the benefit of the cause, so that the Dornach Building, the “Goetheanum”, should be made the centre of the movement for Spiritual Science from the point of view of Anthroposophy for which we intend to work. It would be of great importance if the Goetheanum could also be made known to the outer world, so that those who have not at present an opportunity of seeing it, may become acquainted with it. The very way in which this building is put before the spiritual culture of the present time may, if brought to the consciousness of our contemporaries in the right manner, work in the direction, which we consider is the needful direction for the age. So to-day, when I have said, I wish to provide a foundation for that which others will carry forth into the world, I will once more give you a little of what I have already expounded here in other connections, so that from what is contained in these episodic lectures, a complete conception of the whole may be formed.

[ 2 ] To begin with, it must be stated that the Dornach Building has grown out of the Anthroposophical conception of the world. The Building was able to grow forth from this for the very reason that when this conception is rightly understood, it will itself possess the inner force with which to create its own artistic forms and figures. Once again, I should like to repeat what I have said before in other connections, that if any of the spiritual tendencies of the present, which with their various programmes come before the world to-day, had at any time required a building of their own, some architect or other, and some artist or other would have been approached, who would have built a house in such and such a style, in which the movement it was built for could have been carried on. There would have been an external relation between what went on within it and the building itself, which might be either of the Renaissance period, or of ancient Gothic style.

[ 3 ] There must not be any such merely external relation between the conception of the world which is to be given forth at Dornach and that which encloses its activities. The relation between them is to be an inner one. Every detail connected with the housing of our activities, every detail of form and figure had to proceed from the impulses of this world-conception itself. If you bear this in mind, you will see, that this is connected with the position Spiritual Science or Anthroposophy claims in the whole development of mankind. The life of modern humanity has become simply intellectual; it has become so because for centuries modern humanity has hardly received any other education than that of thought. When forms have to be created, people turn to those already existing to some one or other of the old styles of architecture; just as when they wish to make anything artistic or such-like, they do not turn their minds to the conception of the world, but to something which has been substituted in its place. What actually brought this state of things about? [ 4 ] You see, in everything of note in human culture there have always been two streams flowing together. The presence of those two streams can be traced far back in the historical development of mankind. One of these, which has achieved its greatest intellectual development in the last few centuries, can be traced back to what we may call the Old Testament outlook on the world. We must never lose sight of the fact that one of the essential tenets connected with this was the command: “Thou shalt not make to thyself any graven image of the Lord, thy God”. The pictorial representation of that which is of a spiritual nature, was lacking in the one stream of human development. And this still holds good up to the present day in the modern development of this stream.

[ 5 ] Many schools of thought and of philosophy, many different sciences and popular conceptions of the world have been built up, but none of these have, of themselves, succeeded in creating artistic forms. All that has been achieved is the establishment relationship with the inartistic element of the present day conception of the world. Our modern age is not concerned with creating new forms, or with giving shape to what is capable of representation.

[ 6 ] But really there are two entrances into the world of the spirit; it may be entered in the intellectual way in which it is penetrated by the monotheistic religions, in which case the thought element, the intellectual, is principally developed. By this means great progress can be made along the lines followed in our most recent times. Or, on the other hand, the element which is to be found in the imaginative may be cultivated, the element of vision, of life in course of formation. modern humanity has not much living relation with this latter element. It revives bygone styles, old methods of artistic representation, but never identifies itself with them. Indeed, things have gone so far that, on the one hand those who wished to create artistically had an actual fear of every kind of philosophy, for it is quite reasonable to stand in some sort of fear of the modern world-conception, which is imaginative an intellectual. Put on the other side this has been a great disadvantage in another sense to the development of modern humanity. This disadvantage itself is the sign of decadence of recent times.

Some time ago in this very place, I drew attention to the fact that in all the present struggles of humanity there is something of the Jehovah-striving of the Old Testament, that in a sense an endeavor was being made to make each individual people what the Old Helm wanted to make of themselves and that Christianity, as such, has not fully entered the hearts of modern humanity. And so a certain intellectual thinking, an intellectual feeling concerning humanity as a whole, has in a one-sided way grown up round our social life. But man as man, 0r man as a community, can never be understood from a purely intellectual standpoint.

[ 7 ] What man is, that in him which enables him to take his place in social life, can only be understood if we rise to imaginative conception. Anyone who is acquainted with the law to which such things are subject, is aware that even the Fairy Tales, the legends and various mythologies contain more wisdom concerning the real nature of man than does modern science, which does not even possess the means of giving man an explanation as to himself. People are afraid of the inpouring of the spiritual, which can only manifest in our human civilisation in the form of pictures; they dread it. But our civilised life will never be raised until men's hearts are once again filled with a conception of the world not only capable of forming from itself thoughts, but of creating forms and permeating the whole of life. We want to make a beginning, yet in its own way it is intended to show all that can be accomplished by a really creative conception of the world at the present time and more especially what it must do in the future. In a sense you see before you, in a picture, all that is characteristic of the conception of the world which is studied here, when you are confronted with that which is meant to be representative of it, when you see the Goetheanum on its hill, at Dornach.

[ 8 ] If we wish to describe in a few words the special characteristic of this conception of the world, it is this: The realisation that in this age a new spiritual life must be revealed to man. And as we approach the building which is to stand for the spreading of this new spiritual life, we cannot but feel that a new revelation is to he made. Anyone who draws near to it cannot help feeling that something will reveal itself here, something new in the development of humanity. The very shape of the building impresses you with the sense of something new making its way into the development of man. Two cylinders of circular shape, in neither of which is the circle complete, covered with hemispheres equally incomplete, expresses the duality of that which is revealed and of that which comes to meet it. The very predominance of the two domes conveys an impression to the observer, as he draws near, that something is enclosed herein, something enclosed but which intends to make itself known.

[ 9 ] Do not take what I an now saying in a symbolical sense; take it in an artistic sense and you will then develop the right understanding for it. I shall have to speak further about these things, but this evening we will begin by making a survey of the different effects produced by the contours of the building, seen from without. Let us begin by supposing that someone approaches if from the North-East from any point around the hill on which the Goetheanum is erected. He would then see a Building (Picture 1) which could be in no other form. This is the feeling which ought to be experienced, when directly confronting that which stands as the representative of a new world-conception.

[ 10 ] It is first of all necessary to study the different forms. It was in 1908 that the thought first occurred to me to erect a building with twin domes. But much of the original plan had to be altered, for it had originally been intended to put it in a city, in Munich, where it would have been surrounded by houses, where the outer architecture would not have had to be so much considered. When the building had to be remodelled to stand upon its present hill, it became of course necessary to so plant the outer architecture that it might produce the right effect from the different points of view in the neighbourhood. Here let us begin by noticing that the building stands on a sort of platform, not absolutely on the ground.

[ 11 ] We now draw rather nearer to the Building and this is a picture of the principal entrance. Kindly observe you begin by entering the substructure and that, as we shall see, the staircase by which we ascend to the auditorium belongs to the substructure of the Building. Having ascended that, we then enter by the main door into the real Inner Hall. The Building stands rather above the level of the actual surface of the ground. It will be apparent to anyone who approaches the Building, especially when he finds himself opposite the main door, that an attempt has here been made to depart from the usual purely mathematical-geometrical-mechanical structure forms, and to discover organic ones. Of course those people who are quite accustomed to the old conception and who believe that the geometrical-dynamic can alone rightly hold a place in the art of building and in architecture will have many objections to bring against this introducing the forms of architecture into organic forms. All these objections are known. But here we have actually dared to make the attempt. [ 12 ] Then, however, we had to think the whole thought of the Building as of a living organism. No one will understand what I mean by this, unless he himself really makes the endeavour—which very few people will do as yet—to turn his feelings away from all that is symbolical and intellectual, from everything merely mechanical and mathematical, and allows himself to be carried into a really organic-artistic, a feeling way of thinking. This does not imply that the form of an organic being is symbolically expressed in the structural forms, it means that in order to understand an organic being we must realise that a quite special sort of intuitive thought-form is necessary. We shall have to become accustomed to these intuitive forms of thought. And we then ought to be able to find these architectural forms even coming of themselves quite originally and elementally, out of the intuitive thinking.

[ 13 ] I should like to draw your attention to something of which most people in the present day have no suspicion. It may be said that in nature there are organic forms. Structural forms are made, more or less modelled on some such organic forms in nature, structural forms which in a sense are a symbolical expression of the organic forms of nature. But nothing of that kind has been done. There is no direct prototype in nature of structural forms here. And if a man seeks for such in nature, it only shows that he has failed to understand the whole basic thought of what is in question here.

[ 14 ] To be capable of understanding an organism is a very different thing. For when a man really understands a natural organism, he then possesses a kind of thinking which is able to find organic structural forms quite independently of nature. But such forms as these must be discerned in complete independence, they must be created from out of their own form-essence. They will then, if they result from a real living structural thought, bear the nature of the organic. What then is the nature of the organic? Well, take as an example the most complicated organism, man, and then take merely the lobe of his ear; if you have the right intuitive thinking and feeling, you will say that the lobe of the ear, situated where it, is, could be no other than it is; in its place it must be just as it is. It is the right width, the right height, and is properly rounded off, and so on. And this must be so in every single form in this organically conceived Building. Each detail, in that it represents a part of the whole, must make evident in its own form that it is indispensable. The very smallest appendage in the different parts of the Building must be as manifestly indispensable as the lobe of the ear, or an arm or a hand is to the human organism.

[ 15 ] Nothing here has been copied from nature. And if these forms remind anyone of this, that or the other, it only shows that he is not judging of the Building from the standpoint of Art, but that his opinions are inartistic. If the forms in the Building remind one of anything—and what is there that people have not been reminded of—human eyebrows and eyes and so on—that only proves that he is judging of each thing on its own merit, especially; whereas each detail in the Building only has a significance in its connection with the whole and must be so understood.

The next picture shows the same, a little nearer.

[ 16 ] Below we see the entrance; facing us are the cloakrooms; and to the right and left, where the substructure extends in a circular direction, is the well of the staircase. We then go up the stairs and through the main door, by which we enter the inner building. The motive which we encounter in the main entrance is one if those organic motives to which we have been referring. If you take the various motives that are to be found on the different sides of the Building you will find that they are always formed in accordance with the organic principles of metamorphosis, so that the one always grows forth as a development of the other. For instance, look at the motive here, above the principal entrance. If you can feel it in its forms, you will feel the same form again in the motives of the window of the side-terrace, which you can distinctly see here to the South. (Figure 14) The motives of the windows are apparently quite different. But in studying them you will see that they develop out of that one over the principal Entrance in the same way as, according to Goethe's principle of Metamorphosis, the different organs of the blossom develop from the leaf. It is again a metamorphosis of the same motive. We can only develop a living thought of the Building, if we really inwardly and intuitively grasp the principle of metamorphosis.

[ 17 ] In what is attached right and left of the Principal Entrance you can see that the attempt has been made, just as it is in nature itself, to cause one motive to proceed out of another; although there has been no copying of what is organic. In every line and surface you can see that they all proceed from the same principle—like that same principle which causes the cheek to be carried from the temple of the forehead in a human face. The evolving of the cheek from the temple of the forehead might really be taken as a subject of inner study. Only while doing so we must be free from the purely intellectual ideas of the world. We must be able to view the world in forms, without beginning to symbolise. We then shall be able to see how one surface, one form, proceeds out of the other in such a way that they might really have grown forth; and besides that, they really belong to the place where they are. [ 18 ] Now in the whole of this building there is not a single thing that is mere symbol. At the time when our movement still had many people in it who were full of sectarianism and false mysticism—which tendencies indeed I had to fight over and over again—but when there were these tendencies in the different persons who came into our movement from co many different quarters, persons of artistic natures who happened to come among us were often horrified at this tendency to symbolise. These members valued a Rose-Cross, a cross with seven roses, far higher than a really artistic motive. Now in this building we may say that this has been definitely overcome and that what is really creative in a conception of the world has been expressed in forms without any transition though the symbolical.

[ 19 ] I want you to notice that in the forms, (though of course all this is only a beginning) an attempt has been made so to shape the surfaces that they lean towards the corresponding centres of support. (Kräfte-Lagen). For instance, if you go in at the principal entrance of the substructure, you will see the arches. If you study the forms of these arches you will find them so constructed that their lines follow the distribution of weight of the building. Towards the door, where the weight is less, the arch is wider; where the arch curves towards the building it bends inwards, the curve is arrested. Thus the forms of the arches correspond to the distribution of weight. If you can feel the forms in this way, you have grasped a structural thought.

[ 20 ] We now obtain a view of the North side. In the part between the principal entrance and the one wing, you can see the motive of the principal entrance in metamorphosis. There you can study the metamorphosis of the separate forms, which allows for the motive of the side-wall which is to follow. When you go in at the principal entrance the motive meets you, whereas here you pass it by. An organic structural thought should express whether a motive is one that is to meet the eye, or is to he passed by. It is the same motive, in different states of metamorphosis. Similarly that which finishes it above, which overhangs the motive—is only a metamorphosis of that which is the motive of the main portal. it is differently formed, but has only become different in the course of its metamorphosis; it is the motive of the principal entrance.

[ 21 ] Here you have the side-view of the side-terrace. In the motive of these windows, you can study how organic shapes are formed. The motive completing the windows above is precisely the same as that you have just seen over the windows and the motive over the principal entrance, only in an organic growth it is the case that metamorphosis comes about through that which in the one structure is wider and more forceful, becoming contracted and condensed in the other; what in its earlier state as in a more primitive form, extends to more ramifications. It is just in this that metamorphosis consists, and here you can see it carried out. [ 22 ] And I should like to draw attention here to the fact that in the whole building the endeavour has been made to develop structural truth, architectural truth. That is actually very little understood in the world to-day. You can here see the overcoming of the mere Renaissance idea. The setting of windows is not merely decorative, but as you see it arises from below. In the whole building there is not anything to be
found which does not convey its actual purpose.

Nothing in this building lies, whereas in the present-day conception of architecture there is an enormous amount of untruth and deception. In our civilisation there is so much untruth in our forms that it can hardly be wondered at that so much of what men say is untrue too. Here the endeavour has been made that everything shall absolutely and truthfully express what it actually is. This can never be the case in symbolism, which always contains something arbitrary. I want you to take note of this.

[ 23 ] Here we have the facade of the side terrace. You see in metamorphoses that which is above the principal entrance. Of course, you must bear in mind that whatever you see here is nothing but a new beginning. I always say over and over again, to all who will listen, that if I had to construct the building over again, it would be very different. This is just an attempt. But in its different parts you can see what we really intended, how the organic structural thought has been carried out, and how, for instance, the merely mathematical-geometrical-dynamic column formation has been developed into the organic, so that nowhere is the principle, merely of support or of burden in evidence, but everywhere the principle of growth can be seen, the coming forth of one from another. And as we shall see tomorrow, there is a marked effort to carry out this idea in the architecture of the interior.

This is the juncture seen from the side, seen from the corner.

[ 24 ] The model of the building. Here you have the picture of my original model. I wanted first of all to give you a conception of the idea one receives in approaching the building. I wanted to show you the effect it ought to produce when you walk round it. now show you the inner part, in my original model, carried out in wood and wax. This model was the basis of the whole building. You see it here cut in two through the centre. You can thus see under the great cupola.the seven columns which, in succession, encircle and enclose the auditorium. Here in the middle is the place of the Drop-Scene, and here beneath the smaller cupola you see 6 of the 12 columns which encircle that space. As here seen, the building is divided from West to East. In the East will stand the principal Group: the Representative of Humanity, in the midst of the Luciferic and Ahrimanic elements. Concerning the principle by which these columns with their capitals and architraves were constructed, I shall steak tomorrow.

[ 25 ] Here we have the ground-plan of the building, the principal entrance with the staircase on either side, the auditorium, and the space beneath the small cupola, the place in which the Mystery-plays and the Eurythmic-representations and so on, will be given. These two spaces will be divided by the curtain. On the line dividing the two will be the speaking-desk, on both sides of this dividing line are the two side-alleys, for the use of those engaged in the representations, and their dressing-rooms and so on.

[ 26 ] This ground-plan will show you that certain things were indispensable to the building. Whenever I refer to this ground-plan I am always anxious lest the actual structural thought should be misunderstood. I once gave a lecture in Dornach on this ground-plan and its form, drawing a comparison between it and the human form. Some of my listeners jumped to the conclusion that the building was a symbolical image of the human form. That is absolutely not the case; but if a man is able really to understand the human form and how on the one hand it is an instrument for thinking and on the other hand for willing and that both these are held together by the power of feeling; if he understands the whole human structure, the formation of the head, and limbs and the trunk, with the heart system as the centre, he then would also be able to construct other organic forms. And this is one of these other organic forms. On this account when one sees this and the organic form of man together, it is possible to find a certain relation between them. But there is absolutely no question of the one being modelled on the other, for the Building here is in its organic architectural form constructed from out of that which is organically creative in nature and from cosmic activity itself.

You will be able to see the same in the transverse section that I will now show you.

[ 27 ] The small cupola, as connected with the great cupola. This cut through the centre from East to West. The whole Building has but one axis of symmetry and everything is arranged in accordance with that. That necessitates the structural thought being a living one, for the more highly evolved organism develops along a certain axis. Certain lower organic forms alone evolve from the centre; and we may take it, that as a result of the attempt that has been made here, certain more perfect forms of building than the centrally constructed (Zentralbauten) ones, will be developed, because a first beginning has been made to follow the principle of organic growth along an axis.

[ 28 ] Here you have the vestibule into which one enters through the door of the substructure; and this is the stairway by which one ascends to the terrace. You see that, forming part of and attached to the balustrade of the stairs is a remarkable structure. What this actually is can perhaps only be completely grasped by one who is able to look away from everything merely intellectual, in order to see only the artistic. When this form was about to be made, I said to myself: anyone going up these stairs must have some sort of halting-place, to bring about in him the right frame of mind. Now just look at these three directions of space. But it will not suffice to look at them, you must notice how they droop over and bulge out, how weighty they are, bending over with their own weight. If you take the whole form into your feeling, they will be to you,the expression of the mood which it would be desirable for you to have when you ascend these stairs. Anyone who goes up them will have a premonition that here, in this Goetheanum Building, he will find something which will give firmness, security and strength to his life, which will give him something to his balance. One ought to have that feeling here, for simply from that feeling did the form arise. I might say that besides this, one should feel that the form must be what it is, for although it is not slavishly copied from them, it does resemble the three semi-circular canals which form the small auditory bone of the human ear. If this organ of the human ear is injured a man falls, he loses his balance. It is an organ of balance in the human organism, a diminutive organ of balance.

[ 29 ] Now one cannot help feeling that there must be something here to help us to enter the Hall in a properly balanced frame of mind. This is no puzzled-out idea, it has been really felt. If one takes it as a thought-out thing, it will be his own fault, for it shows he has begun by reflecting and digging down and speculating. There should be no question of speculating or puzzling out, but of feeling the heavy pressure of the overhanging weight of feeling the form and in so doing, of arousing the mood that may come over one while mounting these stairs.

[ 30 ] Here is one of those vaulted arches which can only be understood by organic structural thinking. If you stand here in the Building and feel the Building, that is, feel how you come in or out there, and how you go up the stairs, meeting all the weighty pressure of the whole Building, you will then feel this curve is expressed exactly as it should be: while at the same time you will feel what the whole structure means. The attempt has here been made to give over to the organic the work that is generally done by columns or pillars. There is nothing in this but the feeling for form that comes when one intuitively feels the supporting strength, which this particular form must convey. If anyone is reminded of an elephant or a horse's hoof he may be so but, that only shows that he does not consider it from an artistic point of view, but merely an imitative one. What is important here is the being able to feel that weight has to be supported, while that which is to bear it grows into this form, develops into it, and that this arch could curve in any other direction but this. It is not a question of copying anything, but of trying to feel the weight-carrying, weight-bearing forces, and of moulding such forces as are able to bear weight.

[ 31 ] In the ordinary-structural-conception the geometrical-mechanical-dynamic weight-bearing and carrying, is the only feeling one has. But here in every surface and line should he expressed in the structures, the beginning of the feeling for life. If the things I have mentioned do away with all that is merely speculation, you will have understood the subject in the right way.

[ 32 ] To-morrow we will continue and pass from the outer to the inner architecture. I believe that when all that underlies the conception of our Building is made known to the world, and it is shown that here something really new in the way of artistic forms is growing out of the Anthroposophical conception, we shall be able to arouse a feeling for all that is being done not only in this line, but also in regard to the social question.

[ 1 ] Yesterday we considered the Building from the outside, from different aspects. To-day we will approach it from the inside and will try to bring before our mind the idea of the inside architecture. This idea of the inside architecture might be described something in this way. When one approaches the Building as it appears at present from the outside, the idea called up through the impression that one gets, is, that here is an enclosure that in a way is cut off from the rest of the world, and containing an idea in itself which has to be introduced into the present evolution of humanity; something that has a new element to be brought into the evolution of humanity. The outward forms point to this something that is new in the contemplation of the universe. They aim at a new style. If the Goetheanum had been built in the old style of architecture, it would not have been possible to receive this particular impression that I have to emphasise. This inner architecture is now to be shown in contrast to the outer.

[ 2 ] When we come from the terrace through the main entrance and step into the first Hall, turn round and then towards the West side, we see this picture. We have before our view that which shuts off the space above, the first two pillars to the left and the right. As we go a step further we see here the capital of the first column to the right and left, and above that the architrave. If you will notice that which is essential you will mark the progressive development in the configuration in the capitals of the columns as well as in the architrave over the capitals.

[ 3 ] Yesterday I told you that the chief thing about this Building is that everything is felt to be in its place by reason of an inner necessity, exactly as a limb of an organic body is felt to be in the place determined by an inner necessity of the organism. You can see that everything that is included within the Building is an attempt to express the idea which has inspired the Building, so that it does not appear as a habitation constructed with walls in which something arbitrary here and there is placed. No, everything included in the Building itself is in organic union with its spiritual idea, You can be sure when you look at the next picture (1A) that it is in vital in connection with the one that has gone before. This is the organ left (photographed as you see from the model) which will show that also here the organ is built in full harmony with the rest of the architecture, so that you have not the feeling that it has been added but that it is a part of the whole form, as if the organ had actually grown out of the architecture. That is the fundamental principle upon which the whole Building is carried out.

[ 4 ] In the next picture (31) you see the first pillar and I want to call your special attention to the way in which the motive of every pillar develops out of the one that has gone before in a living metamorphosis. In order to do this we must look at the next picture (32) where the second pillar develops out of the first and where also the architrave motive is transformed in a developing metamorphosis, every succeeding form springing after its own law from the form which precedes it. You see here how the second pillar develops itself out of the first—that is to say when you take the forms which reach up from below and those which reach down from above, and when you picture to yourself how each succeeding leaf of a plant issues through metamorphosis out of the foregoing leaf, then you will realise how the form of the second pillar develops out of the form of the first pillar. The whole of it is to be found in continuing metamorphosis.

[ 5 ] If you would really get an understanding of what is meant, then you will of course be wrong if you attach exaggerated importance to the nomenclature which as a matter of fact only—relates to exterior conditions.

The first pillar has been called Saturn, the second pillar Sun and so forth. Well, that is conceivable and that nomenclature is from a certain standpoint justifiable. But to abide by such nomenclature would of course be most inartistic. The essential thing is the relation of the second pillar to the first and the first to the second pillar. The essential thing is the change from one form into another for it is just in this change from one form into the other that the laws of world order are to be found, and ordain the change from Saturn formation into the Sun formation. I do not mean to say that these pillars are symbolic of Saturn and Sun, I simply mean that the law of change from Saturn to Sun is an inward law whose workings can be seen. This inner law whose workings can be seen has been expressed here in the sequence of the form.

We will now see the second pillar by itself.

In the next picture we show the second and third pillars together with their particular architraves.

[ 6 ] You see how in the first place the capitals are pictured in progressive metamorphosis and also how the architrave motif progresses, each form building itself up out, of the form that has gone before. Whenever you see a curve or a turn you must realise that this is not to be considered only as regards its own form but always in relation with the form that has gone before and that which is to come after. Through the entire development here neither a capital nor an architrave motif can be understood by itself. They exist as a sequence. They exist in their relationship one to the other. That is what we chew here. That is the truth which expresses the life element. Now we shall see the third pillar by itself.

[ 7 ] Now then, we will see the third and fourth pillars together with their architraves. We shall see as we continue that things become more and more complicated. That is in accordance with the nature of evolution. Evolution proceeds from the simple forms to the more complicated. You see here that the fourth motif is really very complicated in relation to the one that has gone before and especially the architrave motif is becoming more and more complicated.

We will now see the fourth pillar by itself.

[ 8 ] As I have said before this pillar and this motif must be seen in their relation to all the rest. That is the essential thing in all the ideas expressed in this Building. Whereas elsewhere one finds repetition, here one has a progressive evolution. This is really the essential new element that has been brought into the idea of this Building. Whereas elsewhere the dynamics of Geometry are put before us in repetition so that like balances like here one is concerned with the growth of the one out of the other. Look at them again - this pillar and the following one—together with their own architraves. Here we see how the moss complicated motif will be found in the capital of the 5th pillar and how the architrave motif becomes extremely complicated as it develops from the simple form which was there at the beginning to these very complicated forms.

We will now look at the 5th capital by itself.

[ 9 ] Perhaps the form of this capital suggests to you the staff of Mercury wound about with snakes but you must not regard it as though it stood by itself - you must look at it as though it were veritably a living metamorphosis from that which precedes it—as a composition that has not come into being as an isolated idea.

You will see if you once again change this form according to law and also according to the principle of progressive change the next form will develop out of this one.

We will now see this with the next once more and the contents of its capital. [ 10 ] You have only to notice how certain lines which wind themselves about this Mercury motifs branch out from one another, how the Mercury motif with its small top and its points directed downwards appears to be growing larger, and notice how that which you see there at the edge grows to meet what is underneath it and is united with the Mercury motif. Then you will understand how forms which are in living movement grow through and grow out of each other, and that the succeeding motive is developed from that which has gone before.

[ 11 ] But I must draw your attention to one thing. Just now when we have passed the middle point and we look at the next motive and compare it with the one that has gone before you might be inclined to say that this is more simple than the previous one. This is a point which must be quite clearly stated. If you follow the idea merely intellectually it may seem to you as if evolution consists in the fact that beginning from the most simple forms it proceeds to more and more complicated forms so that the last form will be a perfection of complexity. That is however not the case. A wholly false idea of evolution has come into being in modern times owing to this mistake. It is just when we follow the idea of evolution in Art asp I had to do in order to model these capitals and architraves one from another that VT identify ourselves with the real principle of evolution in nature and indeed in the world. You have then to model things after the pattern of evolution in the world and in nature, then you get an inner vision of what evolution really is. The marvellous and significant thing is that this trend at first is towards the more complicated forms but just about at the centre, just when you have what is most complicated, this trend is reversed. and turns again towards the simple.

Thus it has been shown in an artistic manner out of its own nature that when the most complicated stage has been achieved there come; a return to the simple and the complicated has to appear again in its most simple manifestations

[ 12 ] I should like very specially to explain to you this principle of evolution. Granted we had to follow the course of evolution through any form of metamorphosis we should say this here is a simple form (see drawing 1st form) Now we go a little further and see how a subsequent form can grow out of this one. Now let us understand how the following form grows out of this one. Here we have an illustration of the complicated which has grown out of the simple (the second form).

[ 13 ] The next still more complicated form could be moulded in this way (see 3rd form). Now you have the third form having grown out of the previous one. Follow the development further so that it becomes apparent to you what is organic and growing and in this way you will feel yourself forced from a certain point onward. Through this relationship (or connection) in which you come with the living principle of evolution you feel yourself forced onward to mould not something apparently more complicated but something like this (see drawing 4th form and the next you would feel obliged to mould in this way (see 3th form); that is if you are really immersed in that which in nature is the origin of the principle of evolution and the power of evolution. Then you would get a development which is really modelled from nature—that is, from the simple to the complicated, then again to the simple. [ 14 ] But this simple form which one now achieves has a certain quality It is indeed apparently simple but if you compare this simple form with the simplicity of the first form you will say to yourself “here is a simple roughly drawn line” (referring to the first one) “but here is a change” and one has the feeling that one can see in it what has gone before so that in a certain sense what has gone before is actually included in it and so you feel that out of the complicated comes the simple, in so far as this simple form builds itself up on a mysteriously complicated element (see the red line). So that the later evolution develops its simplicity out of the complicated.

[ 15 ] It is marvellous how if one traces evolution through Art we identify ourselves with what evolution really is in nature. You see how we are led in this way to something that I have often pointed out If we follow the principles of evolution merely intellectually, then it is easy to believe that humanity is the most perfect result in the development of the organic creation and that it is also the most complicated. This is not true. If we contemplate a human organ—say the eye—we find that the human eye as seen from outside is certainly not the most complicated eye. The eyes of certain lower organisms are much more complicated. They grow organs like the sword appendix; the fan of lower organic beings which if; like the continuation of the blood vessels in the eye.

In man these organs have apparently entirely disappeared and the human eye has returned to a simpler form, but simpler according to the principle of that which I have here shown in Art.

[ 16 ] Now as I have said, if one contemplates this simplicity which develops out of the complicated—one has the feeling that this. line has to be completed in thought (dotted line). Simplicity is created from concealed complexity. Simplicity is what is seen outwardly, that is actually to in nature. Man has no appendix in the eye, and apparently no fan but if one could add to the physical eye the etheric, then there should be added that which in the lower organic beings is developed physically. Just in the same way as (see drawing) I had to add, the dotted line here, just as I had to build up that which is externally visible on the foundation of this by the dotted line, so the human eye in its simplicity, in its physical; simplicity is formed out of a complicated etheric eye-formation: the apparently simple physical out of the complicated etheric.

[ 17 ] This is a proof to you that when we really grow into the inner form in the way that the metamorphosis of forms demands, we grow into the creative principle of nature herself. For then we understand for the first time how evolution progresses in nature, and here, dear friend; you can see how necessary it is in order to understand a certain inward power of development that we must learn to know nature not only in intellectual ideas but to grasp her forms with the imagination of the artist. This is the thing that you must realise as most important in every sense of the word. If one is to try in the way that science till now has done to get at nature with ideas and conceptions of an intellectual kind one will never grasp nature in her fullness of evolution. One will, only grasp nature in her fullness of evolution when one has built up in pictures and in imaginations what are otherwise intellectual ideas and so-called natural laws, for nature creates not in intellectual ideas but in pictures and in imaginations. [ 18 ] This is the main impression produced by our Building that it indicates to what kind, of representation we must progress if we would come to a satisfactory view of the world especially, in relation to the social future of mankind. The old world beliefs were developed from imaginations. You know the root of world beliefs is not to be found in intellectual ideas hut in pictures, in legends, in myths, and through pictures and images man sought to understand the forces which work in human life. And pictures and images were transformed into social impulses. All that originally came from the old pictures is to-day in a process of transformation and has to-day changed into intellectual conceptions; and intellectual conceptions cannot suffice for life. From this comes the present conception of the world with its dead element, with its destructive element containing within it the seed of death. And the conceptions of the world which appear new and young make nothing but sentimental and vogue claims.

[ 19 ] Nothing fruitful for the future can develop out of that which today appears in the form of social ideas. Anything fruitful for the future must be born out of an imaginative conception of the forces of growth. These must ever be comprehended in their actual inner reality by means of such simple forms. In this Building the principle that lives and works creatively in nature can be realised from within. It will be seen then from the moulding of isolated forms that so far as this Building is concerned you have before you that which you really need in order to build up a vies of the world and a social life for the future.

[ 20 ] It was of course a drawback that in the beginning the sectarian feelings of a great many people have given a false meaning to that which this building is meant to express, through over much symbolizing; and there have been people who consider it highly important that we should any that this is the Venus column, that the Saturn etc. These things that have a mystical flavour with which the mind can act a pretty play had to come to an end. In our time the task-of humanity is really something quite different from a mystical playing with ideas. And the main thing is that we deal with the clearest conceptions, and act with fullest consciousness—that is with that which transcends everyday consciousness—what I may call the super-consciousness, but which never descends to sub-consciousness. We must overcome all that pertains to day-dreaming, we must overcome all false and deadening mysticism. For higher than this mysticism, my dear friends, stands the everyday consciousness. For example while a raster Eckhardt or a John Tauler were in harmony with their particular time, to-day anyone who turned to this same consciousness which John Tauler or raster Eckhardt had would be entirely out of place in our world order. For the task of to-day is to get further, to awaken, not to go to sleep. There is much too pronounced an attitude among men for the pseudo-mystical, even among those who believe that they are on a better path But they only believe it. But there is still much too much of the idea that if we want to attain to spiritual truth, we can go to sleep a bit, we can dream a little, one can be a sentimental mystic. That is what is most injurious to the culture of our time. Instead of sinking from every-day consciousness into dreams we cannot sufficiently strive to climb out of the everyday consciousness to the more clear, to the super-consciousness.

[ 21 ] For this reason this Building precisely through its artistic side had to make certain claims. Men to-day when they are confronted with Art tend to become a little dreamy and where possible avoid thinking, which is so very exhausting, when we are following our everyday concerns, cooking or tending machines or planning architecture or anything of the kind, and we think we will rest a little when we are enjoying Art; we think we can sleep a little. This Building is not for that kind of sleeping consciousness. People with this kind of sleeping consciousness come into this Building and they say “we do not understand this.” We understand it in the moment we follow with the eye every turn, every curve—where we with the eye of the soul follow the physical eye—where we do not concern ourselves with all the rubbish about names, Saturn or or Sun, Mercury pillar etc.—where we follow the forms and see how one grows out of the other, how everything lives and interweaves, when we leave our false mysticism behind and really exert ourselves to follow these forms.

[ 22 ] We see that everything is not calculated to induce sleep but is for the purpose of awakening, for a shaking-up and not less for a becoming more aware than in ordinary life. This is the thing for instance, which pains me most. It is when I see again and again that people so love sleep even here in the Anthroposophical Society. They would like to pour out rest over everything and this is really the satisfaction of a selfish desire for sleep. Well, here the thing with which we are concerned is to become wider awake than we are in ordinary life. This Building can only be perceived in its Art form - in its inner artistic mobility when as we enter it we allow ourselves to be profoundly stirred and become more awake and aware than we are in everyday conditions. In ordinary life we sleep a great deal to-day, and it is from this sleep that our principle misfortunes come. [ 23 ] That is why every single form must be conceived actively. We must be able to set ourselves inside these forms and this Building is a living protest against all morbid mysticism. The worst of it is that even from well-intentioned people a certain mystical fog has spread itself around this Building through gossip and chatter, so that other people are able to repeat it: If only we could deal with the objections of our enemies with the reply that those who love this Building are concerned with supremely active life' But we must have a desire for this supremely active life. [ 24 ] We must seek here not soul-spiritual indulgence but soul-spiritual activity.

We must grow and not let ourselves be lulled in dreams. This is the thing which I specially wish to say with regard to this Building. If with the whole soul we actively identify ourselves with the living movement, with every single form which has been built into the whole, then we shall see that while this Building gives the impression from the outside, “here within is something which wants to reveal itself to the world,” in the moment when we enter it the forms will so work that the walls themselves in a certain sense will disappear. That is a new thing, viz, the way in which walls have been conceived in regard to this Building. Up to the present time, walls have always been built in such a way that they form an enclosure. The Art principle in these walls is that they roll themselves up so that we have the feeling the walls do not enclose us, the pillars do not stand there in order to define a limit. But the thing that is expressed in the pillars, the thing that is expressed in the walls break through the walls and leads us into living touch with the whole universe.

The Building is shaped out of the universe. Just as the world itself in its living interweaving life, in its spheric harmony, so is this building intended. That is the thing we aspire to in our eurhythmics. Not to allow that kind of sleep to enter into our eurhythmic forms but that a greater awareness shall take place in the action of eurhythmics than takes place in ordinary life, which we never could express in ordinary life. The performer of Eurhythmics should not be overcome in the struggle he has to wage continually against sleepiness in life.

[ 25 ] We will now continue further with the pictures. This is then the pillar by itself in which you can see how when man comes to this perfection he comes outwardly to the perfection of simplicity.

[ 26 ] Now here you see the last two pillars with their architraves. Everything has become simple although it has arrived at perfection. You see the marvellous thing about this is that through the harmony between nature and creative Art other harmonies now manifest themselves that have not been noticed before. If you take the capital of the first pillar you can place that which was convex into the concave form of the last pillar and vice versa. This was not intentional. This is something which has been born out of itself. The convexity of the first Pillar fit into the concavity of the seventh. The convexity of the third pillar in the concavity of the fifth, and the centre pillar with its capital stands quite independently alone. These are things which are born, just as in nature certain realities are born in progressive metamorphosis which do not need to be foreseen at all but seem like a kind of crux of the experiment which one discovers only at last when one has been creating in the same way as nature herself creates.

Here you see also the most perfect, and apparently also the most simple pillar of all.

[ 27 ] We will now let the seven pillars follow one after another so that we can see how one forms. as a metamorphosis emerges out of the other form—from the simple, the imperfect to the most complicated middle one, then back again to the most simple and the most perfect.

[ 28 ] The first pillar. You have only to imagine the principle of growth transforming this pillar and you will get the next, the second pillar, then the third, the fourth, the fifth, the sixth and then the last.

[ 29 ] Now for the next picture. Here you see the last pillar and the point where the great cupola impinges upon the small cupola. So that you have a glimpse here of the meeting point of the two cupolas, where the architrave of the big cupola impinges upon the architrave of the small cupola, only separated by the aperture in which.the curtain will drop. The little cupola is supported in the same way with pillars and architraves of which I can show you only a little. We have not been able to get good photographs of the others, but this juncture we shall see again in the next picture.

We see here another aspect of this juncture where one cupola impinges on the other.

Here we have another aspect of the pillars and architraves of the little cupola. And now you will see a bit of that part which represents an architrave space to the East in the middle of the small cupola.

[ 30 ] You see a bit of what is in the middle; beneath that will be the sculptured group of the Representative of Humanity with Ahriman and Lucifer in the vicinity. Above is the picture of the same.

[ 31 ] When you observe carefully this bit in the small cupola of which only a small portion is shown, you will see that in the forms of this architrave is included—as in a synthesis—everything that is shown in forms on the capitals and the architraves of the small cupola. This is here a comprehensive expression of all that has been expressed in the capitals and architraves of the small cupola. Here is to be found everything repeated again—of course transformed to accord with the place in which it is found. You will find when you compare that which confronts you in the form of the sculptural group showing the Representative of Humanity, Lucifer and Ahriman with all the different curves and forms and surfaces which are found on the capitals and architraves, contains in itself the whole Building in a certain sense. So that this sculptured central group might be conceived of as the synthetic epitome of the whole Building. Just as for example the human head is a repetition of all the rest of the organism, or, if you like it better, the human larynx and its neighbouring organs is an organic repetition of the whole man. Only that everything is put together in its own place out of an inner organic necessity. In the same way this Building must be grasped as a whole for the parts do not exist alone but each must be considered as a part of the whole.

[ 32 ] I want to draw your attention to the way in which this idea with regard to walls is apparent in a still more material way in the glass windows, the reproductions of which I cannot show you here. The glass windows are only works of art when the light of the sun is shining through them. At other times they are only like a musical score. Thus you will see that. these glass windows (about which I shall speak more fully later on but which I cannot show you now) are in themselves an evidence that the building does not stand as a thing by itself but that the light of the sun is imagined as unity with it. And now in the same way everything connected with the form of this Building is imagined as being in unity with the creative powers of the whole universe The Building itself may be likened to a bit of the whole universe.

[ 33 ] The next picture. This gives you the portal of our glass house underneath. You can observe once more how the effect has been made in everything which belongs to the Building to express in every form of truth that I have again and again pointed out. This glass house (and I have called it a glass house because it was originally built in order that the glass windows might be fashioned there) has also two cupolas. It is indeed a metamorphosis of the great cupola of the main Building.

You have to imagine that the two cupolas of equal size are pulled apart, for you could not unite two equally large cupolas in the same way as you can unite a large one and a small one. It would he against the laws of nature. In order to bring the cupolas together as they are brought together in the main building they must be made of different sizes, the one large and the other small. If they are the same size they must be drawn apart and everything else must be adapted in the same way.

You will see in the formation of the steps, how, in every case each individual line in its own place is the outcome of a law of necessity, and how a part is in every case an expression of the whole.

[ 34 ] Now here you,see that which is to many people a monstrosity. It is the. house which is to contain the apparatus for the lighting and heating. If you were to ask me upon what principle this building is designed, I can only say it is fashioned in accordance with the creative principle of nature. It is formed in a way which, as you will see if you look into it, may be compared, for instance, with the way in which the nut shell correspond: to the kernel of the nut. It is true, is it not, that the kernel of the nut has a certain form? The shell of the nut fits itself exactly to the kernel of the nut. The shell cannot be different so long as the kernel has a determinate form which is the effect of quite a different cause. In designing such a building as we have here we have to consider carefully every detail it contains. What purpose does everything serve that is contained herein? For this is a building whose purpose is pure utility. One has to get a conception of what is here contained and of what purpose it serves—that is the nut. Afterwards one has to consider how to build the corresponding shell of this nut. To the “nut” itself belongs the smoke which escapes, this building is only complete when the smoke is rising. It is only a work of art if this chimney really fulfils its purpose. Then only will one see the necessity of these projections. We shall not look at theM as they were leaves of a plane or anything of that sort, but we shall feel ourselves into the shape and then we experience how this shrine is bound by an inner law of necessity to the crake. As the smoke is linked in organic connection with the building and also that which is happening inside the building, so in the same way we shall realise these globes. Imagine what would be there if we had not attempted to create this form. [ 35 ]I will of course admit that we shall be able to carry out these ideas in a more complete way, but a beginning must be made and everything that follows can become more and more perfect. The beginning must be made, first, to demonstrate that a building which is designed for utility must follow some such inner creative principles. Secondly, it must be built with regard to the adaptability of the most modern material: concrete. For every material demands its definite laws of building. When we build in a certain material we have to observe certain quite definite principles, that are bound up with the very nature of the material. The conception of building must give expression to the idea of utility and also to the demands of the particular material.

[ 36 ] You see it is not to be wondered at that these things which are all more or less new are repudiated by many people. Those who are not familiar with these ideas will not easily follow what I mean. But it becomes easier and easier as time goes on. Every idea that has come into the world in this way has experienced at the outset strongest opposition. But we must always take into account that it is exactly with regard to the things that are at present working that we must not sleep. It is also necessary that we make a certain energetic stand for the essential. We shall not succeed for a long time to come with out the energetic stand even if there are only few people who can follow the things with really inner understanding, for you see how things are. We shall take the opportunity tomorrow when we are speaking of the paintings in the cupola, to speak more of many things about, around and in the Building.

I have already said that you can see from all that with which we have been dealing how far this building represents that for which our anthroposophical ideas stand, and how every detail is born out of the way in which we look at the universe. If that could be brought into the world in the same thoroughness, we should have achieved something. For you see my dear friends, it is impossible for us to succeed to-day with these conceptions with which in past years we thought we should be successful.

[ 37 ] I gave you an example a week ago of the unsavoury lying methods which are being used. Why do they use such lying methods? I assure you that this is only the beginning of opposition. There is going to be lying on a much bigger scale. But I can show you how these lies are being systematically spread and the very lies that people are spreading, themselves, they use as further evidence. This systematic campaign will continue. I know there are many people in our Society who will not believe how low is the condition of morality in the world to-day, but it is necessary that we should not blind ourselves to these things. [ 38 ] But we must realise two things. First the intensity of the campaign comes from the fact that people feel, here is reality, they will not let it evolve. If it was a matter of programmes, as has been so much the case in the past, the people would not take so much trouble to slander us. But people will take the trouble to slander what is born of real force. For because they feel that they are face to face with the future they will slander and they will lie. But it is not a matter of convincing liars of the truth; they will not be convinced; they do not want to hear the truth. The thing is to go to the people who are not yet lying and put things before them in the right way. Those who think that they can counter with arguments and proofs that which the Catholic Church is now spreading abroad against us do us very bad service. For to those who are spreading these slanders it is not a question of this or that truth—it is a question of turning minds against us. And if we were confront them with the truth it would be a matter of complete indifference to them, they would only lie the more. But we have to see through it, dear friends, and then adjust ourselves to the position. It is not a question of convincing those who lie but it is a question of showing to the world that is still uncorrupted, in what way these slanders and falsehoods are spread. [ 39 ] I am more and more astonished (and I have to repeat this very often) that:the pernicious tendency shows itself even within our own Society to occupy ourselves with those who slander and lie and to endeavour to meet them directly, while our real task is to explain to the world what kind of human beings these people are. If we are not able to see right through this thing, dear friends, we shall not get very far because it is incumbent upon us, especially those who live here in the vicinity of this building to become objective and to develop interest in the great objective universe, holding ourselves above cliques and personal feelings, and all these commonplace puerilities. If we cannot become objective in relation to this building and what it stands for, then the movement will really not be able to get very far forward. We must subdue the purely personal; we must be able to put ourselves into the big interests of the world. And in everyone of its particular forms this building is a demand upon us that we shall escape from the, narrow personal points of view and rise to the great interests of the world. [ 40 ] For every single form as a matter of fact expresses what is necessary to humanity for the future.

Look at the abuse which is all around in the world. Do you find anything really pertinent to our cause? It is because people cannot find anything against our cause that they become personal. It is for this reason that they try to bring about the destruction of the ideas of this Movement by personal slander. It would be a sad thing if we were not able to look at these things properly and become aware of the things that are going on around us.

[ 41 ] To-morrow we will consider the pictures in the Cupola.

[ 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.

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.