5. Ways of Knowing the Eternal Powers of the Human Soul

Many errors and misunderstandings have been spread about this Dornach building. Misunderstandings and errors about it might lead one to believe that even people who have seen it appear as though their eyes had not seen what is there! I have heard it said, for instance, that the interior of this building is completely filled with all kinds of mysterious symbols and magical figures. As I said, if you were to direct your attention to this building and look at it, you would not find a single one of the commonly used magical symbols and figures, none of that stuff at all – just a new way of building, a way of building that makes the building a kind of shell for the thoughts and ideas that are to live in it. And just as earlier buildings were the shell for earlier things, so this building must also have different forms because it is the environment for other things. Just as in ancient Greece the shell was created for Greek thoughts out of the comprehensive that was available to the Greeks, so with our building here something has been created, and not in an inartistic way and manner - for every allegory and symbolism and the like is inartistic - not in an inartistic, but in an artistic way, an attempt was made to create a building in a style appropriate to this spiritual science. For this spiritual science can be poured into forms, can live out its life without thereby wanting to speculate. Without there being symbols or allegories, it can be translated into forms in everything. With artistic feeling, [one can implement that which lives in spiritual science into the outer forms of all the arts - architecture, language, sculpture.]