The carved Christ-figure of the First Goetheanum, holding the balance between Lucifer above and Ahriman below, conceived as the synthetic centre of the whole building.
The Representative of Humanity is the central sculpture of Rudolf Steiner's First Goetheanum: a Christ-being standing upright between Lucifer above and Ahriman below, holding the point of equilibrium between them. Steiner placed this figure at the building's East end as its summary and meaning, the human being who keeps balance between feverish warmth and hardening weight. It is the image of poise that all of Anthroposophy works toward.
The Representative of Humanity in Anthroposophy is the carved central figure of Rudolf Steiner's First Goetheanum, the Christ-being who holds the balance between Lucifer above and Ahriman below. Steiner conceived the wood-carved group, sculpted with the English artist Edith Maryon for the small cupola's East end, in the GA 288 building lectures (1915 to 1920) as the synthetic epitome of the entire Goetheanum, the way the head epitomises the whole organism. The figure stands at the world's centre as the human being in equilibrium, neither hardened into ossification by Ahriman's weight below nor dissolved into feverish warmth by Lucifer's influence above. Nearly nine metres tall, it survived the New Year fire of 1922 because it stood unfinished in a separate studio, and it stands today in the Second Goetheanum at Dornach. As a glossary term it names both the sculpture and the spiritual posture of balance that Anthroposophy cultivates in thinking, feeling, and willing.
In Steiner's Own Words
Here we see the upper portion of the Central Group. The middle figure shows the Representative of Humanity, above it, Lucifer. The real man, who represents the condition of equilibrium, under him Ahriman, above him Lucifer. Hence there could not be a visionary Christ-figure, concerning which one merely enquired its significance, in the central point of our Building, but the Representative of Humanity, in which the Christ to a certain extent appears in his essence.
What it Means Today
The clearest way to meet this term is not through a lecture transcript but through the wood itself. The carved group, nearly nine metres of elm worked by Steiner and the English sculptor Edith Maryon, was meant to stand at the East end of the First Goetheanum's small cupola. On New Year's Eve of 1922 the building burned. The sculpture survived only because it was still unfinished, standing in a separate studio rather than installed under the dome. Maryon had resisted every call to hurry it into place. Because of that delay it lives still, in a purpose-built room of the Second Goetheanum at Dornach, where visitors walk up to it in silence.
Anyone can study the figure closely through Judith von Halle and A. John Wilkes's book The Representative of Humanity: Between Lucifer and Ahriman (Temple Lodge, 2010), which reads the carving as a meditative object rather than a museum piece. Their attention to the asymmetry of the face, the upward pull and the downward drag held in one upright stance, opens the term's practical side. Thalira synthesis: the Representative of Humanity is not a statue of Christ so much as a mirror of the reader, the upright middle that each person carves daily between the warmth that would dissolve them and the weight that would harden them. Esoteric Christianity has always located salvation in that balancing act, and Steiner gave it a face you can stand in front of.
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