Paean to the First Goetheanum

 

Paean to the First Goetheanum

Rudolf Steiner wrote: 

“I believe many of those who have tried to enter into spiritual science with all the means now at their disposal will understand how in our Building, for example, the attempt has been made through the concord of the columns with their motifs and, with everything expressed in the forms, to enable the soul to grow beyond what is immediately before it. For a receptive person, beginning to experience what lies in the forms of the Building, the form itself would immediately disappear, and, through the language of the form, a way would open out into the spiritual, into the wide realms of space. Then the Building would have achieved its end. But in order to find this way, much has still to be learned from life.” (October 10, 1914, GA 287) 

Let us carefully approach the first Goetheanum in Imagination. You can feel the smallest breath of a wave of deep red, far off, as you approach the building from the West. The sunlight and clouds, as living pulsing breaths, pull the reflections of the red window facing West, into the fields, mountains, clouds, grasses. Reflection allows the expansion of the artistic color to fly all around the building. The surrounding environment in Switzerland merges with its appearance on earth. Its solidity connects with the depths of the earth, and it makes your feel that the Spirit is anchored, and that you yourself can stand on solid ground. 

You get closer to the building, and the image of the great Red window shows you the human being, with the great spiritual organ of sixteen petals, the cosmic speech organ, prominently displayed, and beneath the heart battle between Michael and the lower forces. Your blood stirs. The Window merges with your blood. The patterns on one are absorbed in the other. The deep rose petals of your blood expand in warmth in devotion, as a wind, that weaves through the building’s columns, architraves, colors. The curtain is withdrawn and you see the those parts of yourself beneath the earth, down in the basement – Unpleasant creatures. Let us not suppose that entering the spiritual world is comfortable. Take courage and calmly behold the fullness of your nature. 

As you enter the First Goetheanum, you realize in the quiet that every tiny noise runs and flashes and flows instantly through the whole wooden structure. The whisper of awe to your friend, becomes a ripple of airy breath that resonates through the whole membrane of wood, glass, metal. Each motion is registered in its cosmic, universal, membrane. 

And it answers, with its reharmonizing, ordering, rhythmic spirit-speech. Its curves re-orient your one-sided thinking, feeling, speaking, walking, and bounce your breath, your ideas, your feelings through this human, spiritual re-tuning instrument. Its great cupolas make it like two intersecting hollow drums or two resonating, thick, crystal glasses. Each wind gust, each human gesture, each animal wandering through the woods in the surroundings, hears it, feels it. It is playing a quiet music. The fields accept it, because it is created from their language. Nature speaks back to the Goetheanum, the building listens to the old yearning of the elements. 

As you enter the auditorium, you realize that each glance of light from the sun, each cloud moving in the sky outside, is now reflected, coaxed, enticed in a gentle way, into the interior of the building. The external light and shadow become interior light and shadow. A certain gesture of light from heaven, is now visible inside the building – but with wonder you realize that now it is colored! And deeply colored in a different way by each marvelous window! As the clouds move outside, and the sun is hidden and revealed, different deep colors pour onto the seats, like organ tones, like woodwind tones. 

Your religious awe, your artistic feelings, your clarity of thought, and your openness to the spirit’s uplifting piety and youthfulness, also swims out and in with this ocean of tone, color, quiet sound. We tune each other, in the harmony of living ideas, of conversation spread wide through humanity, architecture, nature, ideas. 

As you stand by the Saturn column in the auditorium, you look up at its towering form above. But you see that the carved base of the column has a word, a letter, a creative form on it. But you can feel and imagine that this open gesture begins to beat, and the whole of the forms begin to flap like butterflies wings. You see the forms at the bottom of the column climb up to the top, and then spread through the whole of the edifice – accepted, assimilated, balanced, trimmed, grown, and let free again. The architraves are rippling like vines. All the forms which seemed separate, are now like little mice and butterflies, and streams of life, moving everywhere, on all sides. Colored, tonal, life. 

Plant growth, and planetary growth. Language elements, and star-speech. Repetition of form here, but now upside down, backward, shrinking, doubling over, twisting together. One can feel that the substance can become transparent, and each place I look in the Goetheanum becomes a region of soul and spirit memory, where I can trace the record of universal life. The centaur and angel on the ceiling of the cupola above the stage are an image that we must pass through to find the living archetype, and then the beings themselves, over time, and in the future. But the future is where their spiritual potential comes from.