Steiner's first stage of sacred architecture: the ancient Persian and Babylonian-Assyrian sanctuary whose whole form images a human being rising from the ground toward descending spiritual forces.
The Near Eastern Temple in Anthroposophy is the first stage in Rudolf Steiner's sequence of sacred architecture, the temple form of the ancient Persian, Babylonian, and Babylonian-Assyrian world, described in the lecture he gave in Berlin on 12 December 1911 to the first General Assembly of the Johannesbau-Verein, published in The History of the Johannesbau and Goetheanum Associations (GA 252). Steiner held that almost nothing of this architecture survives except ruins, so its original form has to be reached through the Akashic Chronicle rather than through documents. Its governing motif is one gesture: a human being lying on the ground who raises his forepart and his countenance so that the descending spiritual forces can catch hold of him. The winged wheels, winged animals, columns, and capitals of the facade stand to the temple interior exactly as a human face stands to the inner life behind it.
The Near Eastern Temple is the oldest of the temple types Steiner traced across human history, and the one he could reconstruct least from surviving stone. Where the Egyptian temple poses a riddle and the Greek temple encloses a god in finished perfection, this earlier building announces the human body itself: upright, addressed from above, its facade speaking outward what its interior holds.
In Steiner's Own Words
A person rising up is a Near Eastern temple; not copied, but considered as a motif with all that it evokes in the soul. In so far as we are physical people and the human body can be described spiritually through theosophy, the temple of the ancient Near East is the expression of the human microcosm. Thus, by grasping the human microcosm and striving upwards, that part of human architecture is opened up. This physical human being has his faithful spiritual imprint in those remarkable temples, of which not much else remains except as ruins. In all details, down to the winged wheel and the archetypes of these things, one would be able to prove that this is so. The ages speak to us loudly: Man is the temple!
What it Means Today
Steiner's Berlin audience could check him against the excavations. He spoke in December 1911, while Robert Koldewey's dig at Babylon for the Deutsche Orient-Gesellschaft, begun in 1899, was still sending glazed brick back to the city. The reconstructed Ishtar Gate, with its striding lions and dragons, stands today in Berlin's Pergamon Museum. The winged, human-headed bulls Austen Henry Layard raised at Nimrud in the 1840s stand in the British Museum. The winged disc rides above the doorways at Persepolis. Every one of these is the facade, the part a visitor meets first.
The tradition that takes that reading seriously is architectural phenomenology. Juhani Pallasmaa's The Eyes of the Skin: Architecture and the Senses (1996) argues that a building is met by the whole body before the eye interprets it, and that a facade is encountered the way another person's face is encountered, as an address rather than a surface. Christian Norberg-Schulz had opened the same ground in Genius Loci (1980).
Thalira synthesis: what Pallasmaa recovered in 1996 as a correction to modernist visual bias, Steiner had already placed as a historical stage, an epoch in which architecture was not yet symbolism but posture, and the temple could be built only by builders who knew from the inside what a body does when it rises.
This changes how the ruins are looked at. Stand before an Assyrian relief and read it as gesture rather than ornament: the hands, the wings, the countenance, all turned toward whoever approaches the door.
Where to Read More