The Dornach Building

GA 287 — 25 October 1914, Dornach

Fourth Lecture

Last time and the time before last, we endeavored to interpret the column forms of our building and, among the various possible explanations or interpretations, to give one that is entirely natural to this building.

We have seen that for those entering the building from the west, it is possible to feel completely at home within humanity in this building, because the forces of the individual cultural communities are expressed, as it were, by the capitals, and the mutual relationships between the individual European cultures by what is depicted in the architraves.

Some may have noticed that not all European peoples or cultural communities have been referred to. However, it is not possible to mention everything on every occasion, as the aim is not to provide dogmatic information but to illustrate the principles at stake. In connection with the capital motifs we have discussed, predispositions or impulses of certain European cultural souls have been depicted: the Italian and Spanish cultural souls, or rather the people inhabiting the southern and southwestern peninsulas, and those of Western, Central, and Eastern Europe. And the presentation was given for the reason that, from the cultural communities, those were first selected which have such a character that what is in the cultural community in question can be expressed by a sign, a capital motif. Therefore, there is a relationship between the sign and the cultural community.

In fact, going from west to east, the second column expresses the cultural community of the southern and southwestern European peninsulas; the third column expresses the cultural community of the French region; the fourth column expresses the cultural community of the British region, and so on.

Now, there are also other peoples within Europe. However, I cannot go into everything, but I would like to speak about the principles in relation to this. It can be said that the cultures that have been mentioned first are the simpler cultures, strange as it may seem, at least for the occultist.

For the occultist, for example, the Danish, Swedish, and Norwegian cultures are much more complicated than those mentioned above — because some things are more complicated for the occultist, which might seem much simpler to the observer of the physical plane. So the question may arise, for example, when we talk about Danish culture: How should we relate to our symbols? If we approach the columns from the west, we should first focus our gaze on the capital of the third column and then on the capital of the fifth column, thus viewing the third column through the fifth column, as it were. You see, this is a complicated matter, because two capitals have to be taken into account.

If we go to Sweden, we would have to take the capital of the second column and look at it through the capital of the fifth column.

If we go to Norway, we would have to take the capital of the fourth column and look at it through the capital of the fifth column.

We would have to superimpose these capitals, as it were, and then we would have the same emotional response to Danish, Swedish, and Norwegian culture as we have to Italian-Spanish, French, British, and Central European culture when we look at the individual capitals.

Everything is truly contained in these capital motifs. Once the principle has been explained, it may be quite interesting for some people to study how this applies to Dutch and Swiss culture, for example, and so on. I will leave that to your own occult studies.

So you see that when we speak of our building, we are truly not speaking of anything arbitrary, of anything whose forms and other artistic content have been created in such a way that one can simply, I would say, pause at these forms and contemplate them in the same way that one is compelled to contemplate many other formal motifs or even pictorial motifs that are emerging in the present. But, as I said, everything we have absorbed over the years from spiritual science and much else besides is expressed in this building in a way that is based on feeling, not on theoretical understanding. Therefore, it would be possible to talk about this building forever. But I leave it to your heart to carry out the individual suggestions I give. For the very purpose of the building will be to set hearts and souls in motion when they encounter the forms and their interrelationships, not interpreting them in an intellectual, symbolic way, but letting the heart, mind, and soul speak when you are in and around the building.

What I have to say to you now can be made clear by referring to a specific motif, namely a motif that would represent four columns topped by a dome. However, one would be too narrow-minded to consider each such motif simply by looking at it as if it stood alone, as if it were complete in itself.

Nothing in the world stands alone, not a flower, not an animal, not a human being, but also not such a motif, because it is essential to such a motif that there are forces present that lie entirely outside the geometric context of this motif. Geometrically, these are four columns covered by a dome; but this geometry is only part of it. What belongs to it is a sum of forces that are inherent in the entire structure of the universe and cause the columns to be able to support the dome. The dome rests on the columns, the columns stand on the earth: gravity comes into play here.

When we perceive such a motif, we perceive not only the geometric element, but also the other element, which I have often called the dynamic, the powerful element, this being placed within the configuration of forces of the whole world, namely the earth.

When you look at this motif, you have the peculiarity that you can view it symmetrically from all points of the circumference. It is symmetrical in all directions, in all directions of space — at least as far as the dome is concerned — so that we can say: a motif is placed on the body of the earth, which extends mainly upwards and is symmetrical in its circumference.

Now it is a matter of perceiving such a motif, because what matters is that we perceive motifs artistically. If we try to perceive such a motif correctly, then we will come to the conclusion – of course, it is a matter of really immersing ourselves in the character of the form, immersing ourselves in what the form can say – then we will come to say to ourselves: This motif, which rises from the earth and is symmetrical in all directions of space, at least in its upper part, exerts such an impulse on us as when we go within ourselves and experience our feelings inwardly.

You see, if you want to make progress in occultism, it is necessary to abandon the one-sidedness of abstract, intellectual observation and to shift to a form of observation that is based on experience. Therefore, some of what is said must not be said in the mere forms of the intellect, but in forms of experience.

It is quite difficult for people today to accept forms of experience in the same way as forms of understanding. Now I will tell you about one such form of experience. I can only describe it, but anyone who tries to go through what I describe with their own experience can understand it. How can one perceive such a form and feel what it expresses? One can do so in the following way. When you get out of bed in the morning and start your daily work, you can realize that you have now transitioned from a lying position—some say a reclining position—to standing and walking. This is an experience; however, it is an experience that not many people are aware of, but it is an experience of transitioning from a lying position to a standing or walking position. It is an experience. The experience consists in the fact that when you lie down, gravity acts on you like on a lying sack, say a sack of flour. Gravity really does act in a deeper sense, because when you lie down, you always lie on some surface of your body, and this surface presses on its support, so that you always press on the surface on which you lie. You don't usually feel this pressure, but it is there; it is an impulse that is connected with the whole sensation of gravity, and it acts, as it were, into your astral body. What exists there as a pressure surface acts into the astral body.

When a person begins to perceive what acts as a pressure surface, they simultaneously perceive the elemental spirits of the earth. It is precisely in this way that they are easily perceived, because when standing and walking, they can only be perceived through the pressure exerted by the soles of the feet.

Now, when you stand up, you leave the sphere of this pressure; you face gravity. You place your own body axis in the realm of gravity. You no longer surrender yourself to gravity like a sack; you actively enter the sphere of gravity. This is an experience, an experience that is not like any thought experience of the brain thinking in abstractions.

In the lectures I have given on “Occult Reading and Occult Hearing,” I have actually spoken of three brains. As soon as a person begins to experience with their middle brain, they experience such things very vividly: feeling begins, as it were, to become a middle brain experience.

So you get up and become aware of the experience of getting up: then you have the experience of feeling the world; then you actually know what feeling is. You can do it in many other ways, but you begin to know something about what feeling is when you have the experience of getting up in this way.

Now you have to really bring this experience of getting up into your consciousness, and then you can have the experience of these forms (namely the dome in the drawing on page 51) by saying to yourself: This form differs from myself in that it cannot get up, that it always remains lying down. If it wanted to come to my experience, it would have to stand up, turn ninety degrees in a vertical plane. For what this dome has toward the sky, striving upward through its dome shape, is what a person has when they stand up, in their feeling of the world, especially through their hands. And if a person were lying down and could feel what is above them, they would feel the nature of a dome above them with their hands. What is expressed by such an architectural motif is decided in the sphere of feeling, in the sphere of sensation.

If humans could achieve a state of being attached to the earth while lying down, as it were, and feel out into the world with their hands, they would feel the spiritual world above them as if they were inside a mighty dome, a building that is symmetrical on all sides.

In a certain respect, something similar existed among the Greeks. Greek culture, in a certain respect, having arisen primarily from the intellectual or emotional soul — seemingly a contradiction, but we must familiarize ourselves with this if we are to penetrate into occultism—a culture that arose in the peaceful connection of man with the earth, in which man, connected in peaceful relationship with the earth, felt the sky above him as a spiritual dome.

In our time, our basic tone is not the Greek inner life of impulses, and in particular we do not have within us that which is only now beginning in the evolution of humanity and is to find expression in our constitution. In a sense, the human being rising from tranquility must not only transition to standing, but also to walking. They must artistically become acquainted with the sphere of the will alongside the sphere of the emotions. This can only be achieved by transforming the universally symmetrical into the symmetrical with only one axis of symmetry. So that one can say: at the moment when we transform the building motif into one that has only one axis of symmetry, we have expressed in the building not only the experience of the human being who is moving from rest into feeling, but also that of the human being who is moving from feeling into will, into walking. A progressive motif is the motif of the will.

Therefore, those who enter the building must have the inner experience that they are being “moved forward” by viewing the motifs of the individual column capitals and architraves, that there is a progression. This has been expressed in the manner already indicated in the last and penultimate lectures.

Now, the will of human beings is that which is connected with subconscious experiences, which, one might say, is most directed by the gods in present-day human beings. The will is most directed by the gods, including, of course, Lucifer and Ahriman; which is why there is also an evil will. But it is carried and propelled forward by the gods, and human beings are only in very few cases able to know what is going on in their will. Therefore, what human beings express most involuntarily when they speak is what is predisposed in their will and caused by their will. One may even say: this is correct. Human beings have the least need to be fully conscious when they surrender to the original, elemental nature of their will, when they allow the impulses of the gods to be active in their will. The most elementary impulses are the impulses of the will. Therefore, I would say, human beings can progress in their incarnations from people to people, which is artistically represented in our building by the progression in the sequence of columns.

Human beings can progress from people to people; with each incarnation, they are born into a different people. What they experience from their sphere of will comes, in a sense, from the gods. For at first, they cannot change much in this sphere of will. For those who are born in any place on earth cannot change the fact that they are born in this place, which is represented in some form by the columns. For at this particular place of development, the human being stands through the subconscious foundations of his will life.

This is what we must bear in mind: that what is expressed in this way arises from the subconscious foundations of the will. For example, how members of different nations think about each other, how they “praise” each other, so to speak, is entirely related to what “smokes” up from the foundations of the sphere of will; it springs from nothing other than the impulses of the will.

We can see from what has been developed that we have a possibility of rising above these mere impulses of the will. But then we must follow the other direction, so to speak. The direction of the impulses of the will is this (←), the direction of progress. The direction of the impulses of feeling, however, is from below to above. Human beings can rise above what comes merely from the impulses of the will. And they can do so on the basis of such considerations as were connected with the consideration of the pillars and architrave motifs.

Does this not broaden our view to one that overlooks that in which we otherwise stand? And is not our spiritual science a means of attaining such an overview? Just think how infinitely much could be contributed to people of all cultural communities understanding each other, embracing each other lovingly, if what we developed last time and the time before last is incorporated into living feeling and knowledge. How could a member of one cultural community simply hate and revile a member of another cultural community if he knew what we developed last time and the time before last? How will the limitations of will coming from the sphere of will in a single cultural community be expanded to the harmony of all cultural communities when we know what is assigned to each cultural community!

And we feel the individual cultural communities as our own soul members within ourselves. Artistically, this had to be expressed in the structure of our building from bottom to top! And it is really what is indicated in the first principle of our movement, like a theoretical-ethical principle; it is actually expressed in concrete terms, in detail, in the artistic forms, when one considers these forms in their ascent from bottom to top, both in and on our building.

But now the whole is always in the part, and therefore we have not only the direction of the impulses of the will, the direction of the impulses of feeling, but we also have something else. We have something else in that we cannot go upwards arbitrarily, but have a conclusion at the top.

In speaking to you about this tree motif, I have spoken of the supporting, upward-directed element. But I can also speak of the element that concludes at the top, that covers, that overlaps. So one could say that the entirety of the motifs can be represented: progressing, rising, concluding.

You can also imagine the caduceus. If you carry it forward, it is progressive; if you lift it upward, it is rising; if you press the spiral upward and let it solidify within itself, then you have the upward conclusion. This upward conclusion represents the sphere of thought, just as progression represents the sphere of will and upward movement represents the sphere of feeling.

Human beings will come to feel secure about the whole evolution of humanity when they take in what lies in the form motifs of our columns and architraves, insofar as they rise from below to above. One might say: therein lie the motifs of mutual understanding among the members of the various earthly cultures.

If one wanted to move from the sphere of the will to the sphere of feeling, it would be necessary to rise above isolation, to actually participate in what is expressed in this movement from bottom to top. This will instill in the feelings, sympathies, and antipathies of the members of the various cultural spheres a certain something that will become increasingly necessary in modern development.

Even more than what humans have immediately in their consciousness, the unconscious comes into consideration. The impulses of the will belong to the unconscious. More conscious than the impulses of the will, but still partly unconscious, are the impulses of feeling. The most conscious are the impulses of thought, for what one thinks, one is conscious of; indeed, one is conscious of it, but only if one really thinks, if one really lives in one's thoughts. But we do not always live in our thoughts. When people speak, they express impulses from the sphere of feeling and will; they often speak from the sphere of will or feeling.

It is peculiar to human nature that people can speak and do not always express their thoughts, that what appears as a thought in speech is often maya; it is, in a sense, only a discharge of their sphere of will or feeling. But having thoughts is something else, something more. Although it is the privilege of human beings to have such impulses of thought, it is one of the most difficult things for them to allow their impulses of thought to be permeated by real thoughts. This is still possible in everyday life, but if one wants to have the right thoughts for the great impulses of human evolution, then one must not even stop at what comes from feeling, let alone what comes from the will. One must allow one's thinking to be permeated by something even higher. Specifically speaking, one must not only allow the individual cultural spheres, as they appear one after the other, to have an effect on the soul, but one must also feel what is at work as even deeper impulses in these cultural spheres. This can only be expressed in the effect of the dome.

Therefore, the person who enters the building from west to east will, in the progressive movement, in the succession of columns, have that which expresses the will; and by feeling what goes from bottom to top, he will have the European cultures and much else besides. What will they have in what the dome, the dome painting, will offer them? That which lives on earth as the mysteries of the spiritual development of all humanity. Therefore, one will have to look up at this dome and will have, on the one hand, the mysteries of ancient Indian inspiration: how the Indian rishis infuse into humanity that which should come into humanity from the spiritual spheres in ancient Indian culture. So that which was to come into humanity, into the ancient Indian character, will be painted in one place on the dome. How Zarathustra shaped ancient Persian culture, as it were, fighting the powers of darkness from the sunlight, will be seen in the second place. How the Egyptian-Babylonian-Chaldean culture then gradually ascends to the physical plane, but how astrological and spiritual conditions still permeate it, will be found in the third field of the dome. And finally, standing as if on a slope, the Greek human being, living in the emerging culture of the intellectual or emotional soul; how he comes to understand what the human being is, how he is faced with the necessity of solving the riddle of the Sphinx, how through this solution he plunges the Sphinx into the abyss, that is, into himself, will be depicted in the fourth field. How the eternal divine powers and forces work into this becoming of man will be expressed in what will be depicted in the four cardinal directions, what lies even deeper than the post-Atlantean impulses in the development of humanity, what lies in the Atlantean and Lemurian periods: the Atlantean becoming in the south, the Lemurian becoming in the north of the dome. And finally, the result of Lemurian and Atlantean becoming is depicted, that which is to be our time, in that when one looks from west to east toward the small space, the way the depiction is made, one encounters the impulse that lies in the becoming of the world and is expressed in the “I A O.” Not that the IAO is symbolically represented, but it is expressed in the motif. And when one looks from east to west, what speaks from the depths of the cosmos into the becoming of culture corresponds to how the IAO speaks into the becoming of the soul from within.

But all that I have now described is perceived by the human being when he overcomes this dome that arches over his brain, when he frees the etheric body for his head and looks from the inside out, where what I have described then presents itself to him as a powerful imagination.

What I have said is a reality, seen when the etheric body is freed from its physical basis. One then beholds what is presented inwardly in the etheric brain expanded to the cosmos. There the whole of human becoming on earth is presented.

However, one is only able to have thoughts about what is present in human evolution if one penetrates the mysteries that are to be painted inside our dome. Just as one can only ascend to the sphere of feeling, that is, to unbiased feeling without antipathies and sympathies in the becoming of peoples, if one experiences what is expressed in the column and architrave motifs from bottom to top, so one can penetrate these motifs to what lives in the becoming of man in every hour, in every moment. Only when one knows what the human soul experiences in every moment of human becoming can one know what has evolved over millions of years, for everything that was contained in the Atlantean and Lemurian cultures lives in every soul. No soul would be what it is if it had not absorbed this. One can only understand a human soul in its depths intellectually if one understands it from the perspective of the whole of human development.

Thus, our structure expresses, if I may use the word “express”: willing, feeling, and thinking, but in their evolution, in what they are to become in human nature, which strives for a certain development of itself.

So it is not out of some arbitrariness that the forms are as they are, or that what is made is made, but they are so out of the innermost of what we also want to recognize in spiritual science.

How often have we encountered this when we try to explore the mysteries of human nature: willing, feeling, and thinking. We have built will, feeling, and thinking with our building, and just as it is, will, feeling, and thinking are mysteriously connected in human nature. If I walk from west to east in this building, I move as the sphere of human will moves; if I look up from below and observe the forms of the columns and architraves, I immerse myself in the mysteries of the sphere of feeling in human nature. If I study what is arched in the painting of the dome above what we experience within the building, then we study the mysteries of the human sphere of thinking.

One can see that in a work such as our building, everything corresponds to a certain inner necessity, that everything arises as it must arise. And that is part of the significance of such a work.

My dear friends, how do we actually feel that some imagination, some inspiration, some intuition contains something objective? We feel it because when we have this imagination, inspiration, intuition, we experience it inwardly: they do not present themselves as something that has sprung from us, but they present themselves in the whole cosmos and stand harmoniously within this cosmos. A concept of art, an idea of art, will have to take hold of people in the future, so that they feel an inner necessity: that which is created artistically does not belong to them themselves, but is created in them by the gods, because the gods want it in the world, they want it to be created, they want it to be there.

One can be convinced that the real progress of human nature into the future will depend on such feelings and such ideas gaining more and more ground, replacing the ideas that are actually popular today.

I believe that everyone who works on this building or is in any way connected with it should, above all, take to heart the feeling that it is their task to compare what is intended with this building and what is expressed in this building with what is dominant and prevailing in the world today.

Such a comparison can give rise to a fervent feeling, which we can illustrate with the question: How did Christian culture arise in its original form? I have often pointed out that all such cultural impulses arose in a similar way, namely because the first adherents of such a cultural impulse, the first to join it, were strong enough in their souls to feel this impulse as all-dominant. What would have become of Christianity if the first Christians had not carried the Christian impulses in their souls in an all-dominant way? We know that the dominant culture in the Roman Empire above—in what was, as it were, the physical light of day—was different from the Christian culture that developed below in the darkness of small conventicles, in the catacombs, and then rose up. We know that nothing remained of Roman culture, and that what developed down below in the deepest darkness of the catacombs rose up and became world-dominating. This happened because it was placed in the hearts and souls down below in the catacombs.

Today, it is not the case that we had to hollow out the inside of this Dornach mountain on which we stand so that no one could see what we are doing. We did not need to do that. We do not need to hollow out the mountain and fill it with catacombs; we do not need to hide anything. we do not need to prepare the new culture underground while what is happening now is happening above ground. We do not need that. But spiritually, that is how it is. For what lives of what we want to write here in our hearts, in our souls, and what we want to express in our column forms and images, what lives of that in contemporary culture? No more than early Christianity lived in Roman culture!

And even if we do not physically live in catacombs, spiritually we are still in such catacombs, and we feel correctly when we feel ourselves spiritually in such catacombs, as it were. We only feel our building correctly when we symbolically say to ourselves: Out there in the sunshine, the dome of our building shines with its gray-glistening slate roof. But we are under this vault; above all, spiritually we are under this vault.

I wanted to suggest here again how those who understand the innermost impulse of spiritual science must feel about what is out there. Oh, those first Christians, they listened to what resounded in their souls and hearts as words, which had its starting point in the mystery of Golgotha, and they did not succumb to the temptations of what was happening above the catacombs.

May it be so today within our spiritual movement, may it be so spiritually! For there is a certain difficulty in this word “spiritual.” This difficulty is expressed in the fact that, when one considers the actual circumstances, one might sometimes be tempted — I say “might,” not “may” — to wish that the harsh and strong compulsion to inner contemplation might still be present today, which would mean that we would have been forbidden by all means of contemporary culture to build on the Dornach hill and would have had to work our way into caves and live there in seclusion. Then, as soon as we entered, we would feel more keenly how our own impulses, which are supposed to be the impulses of spiritual science, must differ from what drives and rumbles above it.

Some things can only be expressed in such comparative words as I have just spoken. And some of what is meant by more than these comparative words seem to suggest can be felt in the soul if you respond to these words a little.

May you feel all that I have meant in detail with the words of today's discussion and also, in summary, with the concluding words!