The Burning of the Ephesian Temple and the Goetheanum

We stand to-day under the sign of a painful memory, and I want to place what we have to take for the theme of our lecture to-day into the sign of that painful memory. The lecture I was able to give exactly a year ago in our old Goetheanum,—those of you who were present will remember how it took its start from descriptions of Nature, of relationships that can be observed in Nature on Earth, and led from these up to the spiritual worlds and the revelations of the spiritual worlds in the writing of the stars. And you will remember how we were able then to bring the human heart, the human soul and spirit in their whole nature and being into close connection with what is found when one follows the path that leads away from the earthly into the distant stellar spaces, wherein the spiritual writes its Cosmic Script. And the words that I then wrote upon the blackboard, writing for the last time in the room that was so soon to be taken from us, bore within them this impulse and this purpose: to lift the human soul into spiritual heights.