The Gospel of Hellas - Research Institute for Waldorf Education

the gospel of hellas
Greek Art: “No two buildings are quite alike in the height and diameter of their
columns, the height of the architrave, the intercolumniations. But the unit of
measurement seems to have been the diameter of the column. The dimensions
of all parts were worked out on this basis, as the proportions of the human
body were worked out on the basis of the palm, or breadth of the hand.” 117 And
when the Greeks placed a statue of the god in the cella of the temple, they felt
that this deed spoke for the fact that the divine spirit dwells within the human
mind and body.
The sacred dance was another feature of Greek life which had influence
upon the forms of its art and architecture. In his Ways to a New Architecture, 118
Steiner points to the fact that the sacred dance, connected with the divine service
and far older than the most ancient temples and sculptures, was performed at
a time when the human being still saw the forces of the elements active in the
earth and when he felt the rhythms of nature with his blood and breath alone,
undisturbed by any intellectual reflection. In the sacred processions and in the
rhythmical dances, the human being showed, on the one hand, his relationship
to gravity and, on the other, to the uplifting, sustaining forces of the world. It
was an interplay between the terrestrial and cosmic forces. Steiner hints that
out of this experience of the two forces—the downward pull of gravity and
its counter force, sustaining and uplifting—came the impulse to employ the
palmate and lotus flower ornaments. 119
Lotus motif
(earth, gravity)
Palmate motif
(sun, carrying, sustaining)
In the Orient and in the architecture of ancient Egypt, we find columns
with either a palmate or a lotus ornament. Such columns originated in the
time of pharaoh Cheops, the most ancient epoch of Egyptian history. Similar
palmate and lotus motifs are to be found in Oriental architecture. It is obvious