Translations:Benutzer:Arian/Klett-Mini-Test/1708/en

were still undivided, concealed together in a dull atavistic-clairvoyant experience. These great ancient civilizations stood, as was shown at the outset, under the guidance of the Mystery-being, in which the wisdom-teachings from the past were as living as an awakening consciousness for Promethean impulses toward the future. Out of this all-encompassing sacramentalism — still wholly turned toward the spiritual world — sacred art released itself, emancipating itself step by step through metamorphoses in each of the succeeding cultures, in the course of humanity's evolution of consciousness, into pure artistic creations. Art established itself progressively as an independent cultural factor alongside religion. In these ages down into the modern era, agriculture was the cultural foundation from which artistic creations sprang. This held most fully for the beginnings of sacred art, with the cultivation of domestic animals and cultivated plants. Further steps of emancipation are then the building of the Egyptian pyramids — descending, as it were, out of the spiritual world and inverting themselves into the earthly — then Greek art, which gave divine realities human form, and after Christ the art of the Middle Ages, with its cathedrals striving upward from below and the devotedly inward gaze of the human being in sculpture and painting.