125. On Artistic Representation as the Visualization of the Spiritual

The Goetheanum was felt to be a physical sign of the formation that the three main interests of humanity strive for in the depths of the human soul. These main interests are the religious-moral, the artistic and the cognitive.

What one feels in this direction can be brought to consciousness by asserting the shaping of these three greatest ideals for three main epochs of humanity's historical development.

In the distant past of pre-Christian human life, the religious, artistic and cognitive aspects proceeded from the instinctive consciousness, which perceived the spiritual and soul-like in the same way as the sensual and physical. When raised to a spiritual level, this consciousness still finds its manifestation in the ancient Indian, ancient Persian, and also the Egyptian and Chaldean spiritual life.

To see this point correctly, it is not enough to follow the historical documents with the intellect; it is necessary to live and empathize with the souls of the people who lived in the successive ages.

When looking at older human soul conditions, one speaks of animism and the like. It is thought that the human souls of older times dreamt spiritual-soul things into the inanimate nature through fantasy. That is just such a rationalized view. One simply adheres to what the present soul must see in nature according to its constitution. One does not consider that the human soul has changed and saw differently in older times than it does today. It did not fantasize by assuming that spiritual-soul forces are present in and outside of nature, but rather it saw these spiritual-soul forces.

But spiritual-religious experience was just as much a matter of course for an older humanity as the experience of the natural is for today's people. They lived with their gods (spirits) as they lived with physical people. But one also saw oneself as a human being transported to Earth, so that one perceived the human body as the covering of a spiritual and soul core that actually belonged to the supersensible worlds. One saw in the supersensible one's spiritual home, from which one had been sent for some time into the sensual-physical existence.

And in the artistic representations, however primitive they may have been for a present-day view, one saw the visualization of the spiritual by people who were particularly imbued with the seeing consciousness of the supersensible. Such men placed the pictures of their vision before others, so that these might be able to penetrate from their presentiment of the spiritual to a more living experience. Much can, of course, be objected to such a view. One can point to primitive artistic forms that certainly arose from different perceptions than those used by other people to visualize the spiritual. But an unprejudiced study of history can show that in such artistic activities, side currents of human development can be seen, while the main currents lie in such primitive representations, one of which has led to Indian visual art and Vedic poetry.