Among the early esoteric lecture cycles of Rudolf Steiner, few range as widely as The Temple Legend, the volume catalogued as GA 93. It gathers twenty members' lectures and addresses delivered in Berlin between May 1904 and January 1906, during the years when Steiner led the German Section of the Theosophical Society and was beginning to shape the independent spiritual science that would later become Anthroposophy. The core subject is the hidden meaning of myth, scripture, and Masonic symbol: how the legend of the Temple of Solomon and its architect, the story of Cain and Abel, the Prometheus saga, and the symbols of the building crafts all encode one teaching about the human task of remaking the world. The full German title, Die Tempellegende und die Goldene Legende, names the two great narratives that run through the cycle and give it its shape.
Place in Steiner's Work
GA 93 belongs to the first phase of Steiner's esoteric teaching, the period before the 1913 break with Theosophy. Its vocabulary still carries terms drawn from the Theosophical literature of the day, and Steiner openly references H. P. Blavatsky's The Secret Doctrine and the Sanskrit names for the human members, from the physical body up through what he calls the spirit-self, life-spirit, and spirit-man. Yet the cycle already shows the direction his own research would take. He treats the Bible, the sagas, and the rituals of secret societies not as poetry or superstition but as records left by initiates, written so their inner meaning would be grasped only by those prepared to read them. This is the same method he applied later to the Gospels and to Greek and Egyptian myth.
Two features set the volume apart from a purely Theosophical inheritance. The first is its insistence that the legends point to deeds rather than to doctrines. Steiner repeatedly asks his listeners not to learn the Temple Legend as information but to let it order their thinking, so that the story becomes a force shaping how they act. The second is the turn toward the practical. He argues that spiritual knowledge must enter ordinary work, architecture, law, and social life, comparing the building of a just society to the engineering of a tunnel that demands mathematics, geology, and a finished plan before the first stone is cut. This emphasis on a plan that precedes the detail anticipates his later writing on the threefold social order. Readers who know his book on the path of knowledge, GA 10, will recognise the same inner development described here through the symbols of the trowel and the square.
Themes and Structure
The cycle opens at Whitsuntide with a lecture on the liberation of the human spirit, then moves through a sequence of myths and esoteric narratives. Steiner reads the story of Cain and Abel as the account of two streams within humanity. Abel, the shepherd, receives the world as the gods have given it and offers back what was bestowed on him. Cain, the tiller of the soil, creates from inanimate matter through his own labour and art, and from his line descend the workers in stone and metal, including the architect Hiram Abiff. These two attitudes, the one that preserves and the one that builds, form the hidden axis of the whole volume.
From there the lectures take up the Druid mysteries and the manner of initiation Steiner ascribes to the northern priesthoods. The Prometheus saga follows, read as a Greek image of the fire-bringing creative spirit, with Heracles cast as the initiate whose twelve labours are the trials of the candidate and Chiron the one who sacrifices himself to set the bound Titan free. Steiner then turns to the teaching known to the Rosicrucians and to Manicheism, with its difficult question of how evil is to be redeemed and absorbed rather than merely fought and opposed. He also devotes lectures to the idea of evolution and involution that he says underlies the secret societies, reading the seven kings of early Rome as an image of the seven members of the human being and of a social order built to a sevenfold law.
A central group of four lectures, given in 1905 and titled "Concerning the Lost Temple and How it is to be Restored," draws these threads together with the Golden Legend of the wood of the cross. Here Steiner retells the Temple Legend in full. One of the Elohim unites with Eve, and Cain is born; from Cain descend the workers who till the earth and transform dead matter through craft, the line that includes Tubal-Cain the smith and Hiram the architect. Abel, the shepherd, keeps what the gods have given. Solomon, of the line of Abel, is divinely handsome but lacks the art to build, and so he summons Hiram, of the line of Cain. The casting of the great Molten Sea is sabotaged by three failed apprentices, and in despair Hiram is about to throw himself into the flames when he hears the voice of Cain from the centre of the earth, who hands him the hammer of the world's divine wisdom to set the work right. The image is not a tale about masonry alone but a picture of the human calling to shape outer life into a temple of the spirit.
Several lectures examine Freemasonry itself, which Steiner calls the Royal Art, distinguishing its true significance from both the literalists who reduce it to a builders' guild and those who treat its tools as mere metaphors for soul work. He summarises its deepest words simply:
Wisdom, Beauty, Strength are the three fundamental words of all Freemasonry.
The later lectures broaden into cosmology. Two addresses on atoms and the Logos set out Steiner's view that the smallest particle is not dead matter but a point at which the creative word of the cosmos is concentrated, a teaching the glossary tracks under the heading of the occult atom. A pair of lectures on Freemasonry and human evolution, originally given to men and to women separately, examine how the two streams of humanity bear on the development of the soul, and the cycle closes in January 1906 with "The Royal Art in a New Form." There Steiner clears away the lurid nineteenth-century fictions about secret lodges, including the notorious Taxil hoax, in order to recover what he holds the building symbols truly mean: the perfecting of the human being and the world together. Throughout the volume he is summarising and interpreting rather than transcribing ritual, and he asks his listeners to let the legends work on their thinking instead of taking them as literal history.
Glossary Terms from this Volume
This page serves as the hub for the Thalira glossary entries that draw on GA 93. Each term below is treated in its own entry, where the legend, figure, or doctrine is explained in detail:
The Temple Legend The Temple of Solomon Hiram Abiff Cain and Abel The Two Streams The Prometheus Saga The Golden Legend Manicheism The Occult Atom
Where to Read It
You can read the full text of these lectures free of charge at the Rudolf Steiner Archive, which hosts the English translation alongside the original German. For a printed edition, search the publisher's catalogue through SteinerBooks. Because the lectures were given to members and reconstructed from listeners' notes, different printings vary in wording, so comparing the archive text with a published volume is often useful when a passage matters.
Continue Your Study
- Begin with the keystone entry on The Temple Legend to see how the Hiram and Solomon narrative frames the whole cycle, then follow it to Cain and Abel and The Two Streams.
- Browse the full Steiner glossary for related figures, mysteries, and esoteric terms across the lecture cycles.
- Return to the GA Work Library to find study guides to the volumes Steiner gave before and after this one.