In Steiner's reading, Solomon's Temple is a building made to picture the cosmos and the future human being, its very ground-plan the body of God in stone.
The Temple of Solomon is, for Rudolf Steiner, far more than a vanished structure in old Jerusalem. He treats its plan as a deliberate symbol: a building shaped to mirror both the great cosmos and the inner anatomy of the human being who is still becoming. Every chamber, pillar and proportion was meant, he says, to express in stone what mankind will one day carry within.
In Steiner's Own Words
We enter the Temple of Solomon. The gate is already characteristic. The square was an ancient symbol. Today, man has emerged from the state of fourness into the state of fivehood as the five-membered human being who becomes aware of his higher self. The inner divine temple is shaped to enclose the five-membered human being. The square is sacred. The gate, the roof and the side posts together form a pentagon. When man awakens from the state of fourness, that is, when he enters within (the within being the most important part of the temple), there is seen an altar of sorts; we behold two cherubs, like two guardian spirits hovering over the Ark of the Covenant, the Holy of Holies; for the fifth principle, which has not yet descended, is to be protected by the two higher entities - Buddhi and Atma.
What it Means Today
Steiner's claim that a building can be an image of the human being did not stay on the lecture page. He acted on it. Between 1913 and 1922 he raised the first Goetheanum at Dornach, near Basel, and after its arson in 1922 designed the second in cast concrete, opened in 1928. He spoke of these halls in exactly the terms he had used for Solomon's Temple twenty years earlier: a structure whose proportions, columns and metamorphosing capitals should express the spiritual anatomy of the person who enters, so that the room itself teaches before a word is said. The General Anthroposophical Society still runs its School of Spiritual Science from that building, and architects of the so-called organic or anthroposophical school, from Erik Asmussen at the Vidarkliniken in Sweden to the studios around the Goetheanum today, work from the same conviction that wall and window shape inner life.
What makes Steiner's Temple reading distinctive, and not merely one more Masonic gloss, is the forward direction. The Cain Pattern that Thalira traces through the legend turns the Temple from a relic into a promise: the four-square base is the body we already have, the pentagonal door is the higher self not yet fully arrived, and the gold-lined Holy of Holies is the dwelling the divine name will take when humanity reaches the sixth epoch. To stand inside such a building, ancient or modern, is to be shown a measure of what one is meant to become.
Where to Read More