Developing the Future100 years of eurythmy

Rudolf Steiner‘s Concept of Artin the professional realms of

stage art · education · social domain · therapy

Professional Conference for Eurythmy April 25 - 29, 2011 | € 5.00 | CHF 7.50

Upper left to lower right:Marie Savitch (1892-1975), Daffi de Jaager (1914-1985), Lea van der Pals (1909-2002), Emica Mohr-Senft (1893-1976), 2x Else Klink (1907-1994), Elena Zuccoli (1901-1996)

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EuRythmy: woRkShop of thE futuRE

Editorial

Professional Conference for Eurythmy 2011

Social art, as the future task of an aware, culture-sustaining social impulse is something described by R. Steiner as early as 1894 in his Philosophy of Freedom, and in further lectures (1906, GA 93), as well as in his “Impulse for Social Threefolding” (1919). Eurythmy has the decisive task of collaborating, in the most diverse realms of human co-existence, on the artistic configuration of social tasks.

In the preparatory group we pursued the question of the importance assigned by R. Steiner to art and the understanding of art as a form of awareness within anthroposophic spiritual science. Besides speaking of stage-performance art, he also refers to the arts of education, healing and social dynamics; and from this it is clear that the concept of art must be extended beyond

100 years of eurythmy (1911/12) are reason enough to pause for reflection in many places, in relation to many initiatives, and celebrate eurythmy festivals of the most diverse hues.

In inter-section discussions, the decision was made in September 2009 to initiate, at the Goetheanum too, an internal professional conference and forum amongst eurythmists at Easter 2011. This was to review and reflect on what had been achieved, on the one hand; and on the other to awaken impulses for the future.

The three professional fields of eurythmy inaugurated by Rudolf Steiner – for stage, education and therapy – have developed over the past century into independent professional disciplines with specialized further training qualifications.

Preparatory group

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its usual parameters. Art as spiritually creative, fluid, transforming and transformative power includes the thinking, feeling and acting human being as participant in the creation of culture.

Eurythmy is an art form that unites all arts within itself. Over and above this it is not only an art but also bears within it the potential to be “science” and “religion” too.

Against this background, it seemed a good idea to us to allow the form of the conference to arise in an open process through all participants’ immediate presence of mind and configuring impulses. This was to be a eurythmy workshop in which something new could be stimulated and experienced.

Since the way a process is going to unfold cannot be

predicted in advance, it required courage to choose this conference form – but we felt this to be in accord with the contemporary zeitgeist.

Perceiving and coming to know the different approaches of the specialist eurythmy professions invoked powers of impetus on the one hand, and on the other allowed the encompassing being of eurythmy to manifest through the four days of shared work.

The 500 or so eurythmists left Dornach at the end of the conference with new insights and threshold experiences, new questions and much enthusiasm for nurturing, protecting and further unfolding the “being of eurythmy” in their places of work. May this help to give new impulses for eurythmy throughout the world.

For the Medical SectionAngelika Jaschke

For the Speech and Music SectionMargrethe Solstad

Organisation team

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Lisa Tillmann

Short reporthuman”, in which, using among other things a pair of compasses and a set square, the ground plan of the first Goetheanum was constructed – an unforgettable experience!

I didn’t read a single line of my book, nor crumple a single grass stalk – there was no opportunity to do so. There was too much on offer which I didn’t wish to miss: reports on doctoral theses and research, presentation of initiatives, information and sales stands.

The highlight and lowpoint of the conference both occurred on the same day, the one dedicated to “Eurythmy in the social domain”. The day started with a deeply resonant lecture by Herr Debus about eurythmy’s anthroposophic task, which left me in silent reverence; and ended with a scandal that ensured no end of discussion. In my mind, the “Night side of eurythmy” referred to by Herr Debus in the morning could not have come to clearer expression.

Thus the conference was a well-rounded whole. I learned much and gained much impetus for my work, especially as regards eurythmy’s 100th birthday.

For stage eurythmists, this year’s conference seemed not so interesting at first glance. But I was still in no doubt about traveling to Dornach – even if only to see the farewell performance by the previous eurythmy stage group “… in apocalyptic times”, and to hear what Herr Zimmermann had to say about the concept of art in stage eurythmy.

Late arrivals found only a manageable number of available courses left from the great quantity of them, which made choosing that much easier. (And if need be, one could have spent the time with a book on the beautiful flowering Goetheanum meadows.)

One positive surprise followed another, in quite natural-seeming and unspectacular fashion: I found very pleasant and appropriate the allocation of the four domains of eurythmy to each of the four days of the conference, beginning each morning with a lecture by a “luminary”, and concluding with an evening performance, and also the four changing tutors in the same morning course.

In the afternoon I took the opportunity to participate in the course by Dr. Sebastian, “And the edifice becomes

pEoplE And piCtuRES

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Jürgen Frank

Overall impressionto see in which direction colleagues are seeking, what their questions are and how they pursue them. Of all the demonstrations one image remains in my mind: the incredible stream of colleagues’ movements as they emerged from the eurythmy therapy session: this was like a living, walking M, and incomparably striking!

I was gripped above all by the conference idea of dedicating different days to the different professional domains – this was a really good way of doing it. The research talks were extremely stimulating, and these alone were worth the trip. In my view, this could be further expanded in future, for it is really very exciting

Rachel Maeder

Group reports“The gods descend to us in our actions”, is a phrase attributed to Ita Wegman. A hint of this mood could be felt at this year’s eurythmy profession conference – a cheerful openness, and yet also intense and serious study in the countless workshops and courses. Each morning lecture led us into the theme of a corresponding specialist domain. These talks were impressive, full of real content, and provided the spiritual foundation for

practical work. An entirely new development was that each morning four course leaders – from the diverse specialist areas of art, education, social eurythmy and eurythmy therapy – worked together on a self-chosen theme.

In the afternoon groups, we then engaged in a four-day, ongoing elaboration of a particular theme from the specialist domains.

Editor’s notESince the reports from the many morning and afternoon groups, the detailed reports of the conference and the plenum on Friday morning are very extensive and specific, we have decided not to include them in the booklet. Instead the reports in their entirety will be available for all on the website of the ET / Medical Section Forum (www.forumHE-medsektion.net) and the Section for the Art of Eurythmy, Speech, Drama and Music www.goetheanum.org/4576.html as downloadable PDF.

The printed version can be ordered for a costs contribution of €3 plus shipping costs. Please contact Marcel Sorge (marcel.sorge@goetheanum.ch), Schöneckstr. 4, 79104 Freiburg, Germany.

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thE SpiRit flowing in SubStAnCE

Roland Halfen

The concept of art in eurythmy

connection with the sources of eurythmy. There was confidence that one could participate in an immediate way in the stream of eurythmy through direct imitation of such people.

After the death of Marie Steiner (post-1948) a second phase followed, which again lasted between three and four decades. Here people took their lead very strongly from the authority of those who had studied with the first eurythmists. These were individuals who, by virtue of being both teachers and pupils, emanated a great dedication and power of leadership: One drew sustenance from them and they were scarcely ever questioned.

After a further three decades, and thus at the end of the sixties, through into the seventies and above all in the eighties, developments underwent a phase of increasing resistance to belief in this type of authority. People wanted to form their own judgment and not simply accept what was done because this was normal amongst prominent individuals. At this time people sought to distance themselves in diverse ways from what they either were unable to or did not wish to (any longer) fully understand; they wanted to make it their own, form their own views. This happened with the instinctive sense of inner necessity, but also on occasion

By way of introduction I’d first like to say a few words about the conference title, “Rudolf Steiner’s Concept of Art”. Anyone who reads the phrase “Concept of art” in the program may think it refers to something that has been thought out in the head and subsequently realized. This formulation, which arose during preparations for the conference, always made me feel a little uneasy, and I’d like to examine it for a moment. Please be patient for a moment if you were hoping to hear something specific about eurythmy straight away. First of all I want to discuss some fundamental ideas relating to Rudolf Steiner’s concept of art, as the basis for some further possible thoughts.

i. thE history of Eurythmy: dEvElopmEntal qualitiEsThis year we are celebrating the 150th year since Rudolf Steiner’s birth. In striking fashion this anniversary at the same time marks our ever-increasing historical distance from the founder of anthroposophy. The period from Rudolf Steiner’s death until today can be divided into various phases or eras, whose traits reveal noticeable parallels with human development through the first four seven-year periods.

From 1911 until the death of Marie Steiner, at the end of the forties, people involved in eurythmy had a direct

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with the puberty-type emotions that can be associated with such rejection. Thus it was often a question of doing something new and different – yet repeatedly also with the serious impulse of coming closer to the sources of eurythmy, and of being authentic in what one did.

This third phase, which shows significant parallels with the qualities of the third seven-year period, now seems to me to be gradually fading. A new approach with new qualities is emerging, for 150 years after Rudolf Steiner’s birth, and 86 years after his death, the fruits of anthroposophy have gradually grown from being a cultural yeast to an inseparable part of our European culture. Everywhere we encounter elements of this, even in places one would least expect it, such as at AC Milan football club’s training camp where, according to the training leader, only biodynamic produce is used “for the same reason that you wouldn’t fill up a formula 1 racing car at an ordinary gasoline station.”

ii. thE nEEd to find onE’s own approach, and thE opportunitiEs this offErsAt the same time, though, our historical distance from the founder of anthroposophy has become so great that many people can approach these things quite neutrally, from without, but therefore with all the more open-mindedness – and this is inevitable. By the beginning

of the 21st century at the latest, the individuals who personally experienced Rudolf Steiner, and were his pupils, are no longer on the earth. These resources have therefore been exhausted, and since the start of the third millennium we now find ourselves in an entirely new situation.

The great opportunity of this new phase consists in the fact that those who passed on their experience, who were directly imitated, are no longer the prime or even sole source of access to eurythmy and other fields. As time moves on, the need will become ever greater for people to find their own approach to the sources of anthroposophy, and thus also eurythmy. This demands not only a high degree of spiritual activity but also bears within it the possibility of discovering and drawing on potentials previously overlooked, and newly developing them.

This means that we increasingly need to penetrate and study anew the available texts for our own times, if we are to understand them authentically. This includes repeatedly asking ourselves how we can clearly distinguish what was connected with former conditions from what is important today, or even may increasingly become important.

Else Klink1907-1994

Tatiana Kisselev1881-1970

Trude Thetter1907-1982

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iii. quEstions about rudolf stEinEr’s concEpt of art Against this background, I would like to ask a few fundamental questions; firstly:

What is Rudolf Steiner’s concept of art?

This is not an idle, theoretical question but one increasingly coming into focus, as if by itself – yet also one asked by people approaching the movement from without, for instance in the context of Waldorf education in relation to what Rudolf Steiner called the “art of education”. Initially, while one might define the artistic element very generally as the opposite of pedantry, this does not yet take us very far even if it is easy to grasp intuitively. After all, other things are the opposite of pedantry too – such as chaos.

Even if we don’t straightaway comprehensively interpret the texts which are important in this regard, we can at least occupy ourselves with them and become aware that this medium will allow us to endeavor to come closer to the heart of the matter. In deprecating such an approach as “theoretical” or “abstract”, far-removed from or even in conflict with art, we should calmly consider that we can hardly come closer to Rudolf Steiner than by thinking one of his thoughts. Even if Rudolf Steiner were now to enter this room, though this might be stimulating we still could not be closer to him than by thinking one of his thoughts. When we think – and understand - someone else’s thought we come closer to him than we could ever come through mere outward imitation.

In this context we now need to ask:

What do we find when reading Rudolf Steiner which could indicate to us a specific concept of art, a specific view of art and esthetics?

iv. stEinEr’s fundamEntal tExt on thE concEpt of art At the end of the 1880s, Rudolf Steiner gave a lecture in Vienna to the Goethe Association there on “Goethe as the Father of a New Esthetics”. Rudolf Steiner himself set great store by this lecture for he himself put it down in written form and published it the following year; and then brought out new editions of it repeatedly in later years. The first time he did so, interestingly, was 21 years later in 1909, when Edouard Schuré’s play “The Children of Lucifer” was first performed in Munich. The short text of Steiner’s lecture was reissued unchanged up to 1921. In his foreword to the new edition of 1909, Rudolf

Steiner already stated: “What I wrote here seems to me, however paradoxical this sounds, still truer than it did originally.”

In this lecture Rudolf Steiner seeks to resolve a dilemma or to find a way out of a quandary. On the one hand he was aware of the necessity of giving a clear answer to the question of what happens when someone has an esthetic experience – i.e. when he experiences something that in some way touches him esthetically. This could be a face, a natural phenomenon, a picture or a piece of music. Irrespective of whether it involves a natural phenomenon or a human artwork, this question needs a conceptually satisfactory answer. At the same time, though, an answer to this question poses the risk of doing something potentially fatal to art’s development – that is, formulating fixed criteria for what is “beautiful”. The moment we start to define what is beautiful in this way, and then use this conceptual definition to produce art also, this can only ultimately go wrong. Rudolf Steiner himself saw this as the great problem of a conceptually formulated esthetics.

Today we no longer so commonly use the term “beauty”. In the pictorial arts this expression tends to be mocked even, though it continues to be used without further thought in relation to human beings and nature: we speak of a beautiful woman, a beautiful garden or landscape. If we wish to discuss this issue as comprehensively as possible today, we have to ask what speaks to us esthetically, or in other words what an “esthetic experience” actually is. What happens there?

The answer Rudolf Steiner gave in his lecture was one he later said was only cautiously hinted at in concepts, using thoughts as though they were dumb gestures indicating a path whereby the question can be answered as to what actually occurs in an esthetic experience. With a well-founded reluctance against establishing fixed esthetic criteria, he used his concepts here only as a way of directing the seeker’s gaze in a certain direction.

v. facilitating EsthEtic ExpEriEncEs: thE ambivalEncE of sophistication A fundamental aspect connected with a study of esthetics, which still has a certain contact with art, is that both the artist and the art academic are seeking nothing other than to facilitate esthetic experiences. Thus in fact an art academic and an artist can be united in one person.

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The artist tries to facilitate esthetic experiences by practicing his art.

The art academic tries to facilitate esthetic experiences by removing obstacles to such experiences.

One of the greatest obstacles to esthetic experience is often that one brings with one a whole number of criteria, either well- or ill-founded, and then may tend to think one knows what art is and what it should be like. There’s nothing particularly wrong with this up to a certain point: it’s a sign of being cultivated. The problem begins where the underlying criteria are generalized. For instance, Hans Sedlmayr was a well-known art historian specializing in the art of the Renaissance; so one really could not say he did not know what art is. Nevertheless, based exclusively on this knowledge he developed criteria which ultimately meant he simply no longer understood the contemporary art of that time. He coined the expression “Loss of the Middle” – which, for instance, he saw in Impressionism. In relation to 20th century art, it seems he had buried his head in the sand.

We must therefore take care, in analyzing the qualities of art that already exists, that we do not then unconsciously carry these criteria around with us and impose them on anything new and unknown which we see. It may be that these very criteria cloud our gaze for the new and unique work we might otherwise see, hear or experience. What we bring with us in this case, our own connoisseurship, can be an obstacle. When building the first Goetheanum, Rudolf Steiner had fewer problems with lay people in relation to issues of art than with certain trained artists who had internalized how “one” should realize something artistic, and therefore found it difficult to discover the potential of the new, at the same time floundering when it came to execution.

vi. KEEping concEpts alivE This fact points to a remarkable characteristic of our concepts: that initially they can open something up, reveal connections, allow relationships to become clear; but that after some time, if not developed further, they can also hinder and obscure perception. This is comparable to a living organism: either our concepts are cultivated, watered and nourished, given light and warmth, or they start drying up without us noticing. Then they wither and can even prevent us having new, fruitful experiences of art, new and developing esthetic experiences, quite irrespective of how grandiose the art may be which we have already seen and maybe have formulated in clear concepts.

This is therefore the great dilemma of a philosophy of esthetics: that it ought to answer the question as to the nature of esthetic experience without establishing a catalog of criteria that dictate what a work must contain in order to be art. In thinking in accordance with living art, in contrast, we have to form our ideas in accordance with human development, creating perspectives with which we can both understand already existing artworks and also as yet unknown art. The latter, therefore, is art where we experience something we have never experienced before. So it starts to be clear how difficult such a task is.

vii. bEauty and truth In his lecture, Steiner mustered good arguments against attempts to explain beauty in terms of truth – a line of reasoning with a long tradition, which Hegel developed in the most elaborate form. Still today there are highly regarded proponents of the view that beauty is in fact a manifestation of truth. For instance, you can also find this in a highly developed form in Martin Heidegger,

“in thinking someone’s thought we are closer to him than we could ever be through mere outward imitation.”

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when he says that the artwork is a “setting-into-work” of truth. Hegel, as was traditional in his day, drew on etymology when he said that: Beauty (in German “das Schöne”, derived from “scheinen” = appear or shine through) is the sensory appearance or manifestation of the idea.” Put more simply, this means that beauty is the manifestation of truth.i In Hegel this connection necessarily leads to the “end of art”; for this would be the consequence if art were nothing other than a manifestation of truth. At the moment – or in the era – when we gain direct access to the truth of the idea through our thinking insight, we would naturally no longer need art if it were nothing but a manifestation of truth.

This explanation of beauty ultimately means that the independent quality of beauty would vanish. If we examine this view also in relation to the esthetic aspects of daily life and nature, the esthetic experiences we gather there can scarcely be explained by it. Above all, we would have to ask of everything that touches us esthetically what idea was being manifested through a particular phenomenon. In other words, we would have to overleap the experience itself in order to reach the idea underlying it, and thereby come to an understanding of why it touched us. This would be firstly a fairly wearisome endeavor; and secondly it would continually lead us away from the immediate art experience. We would first have to reach the underlying idea before we could understand esthetic experience with its help.

viii. bEauty as liKEnEss of thE spiritRudolf Steiner, by contrast, took an opposing stance which he likewise formulated in etymological terms, also showing that the expression “beautiful” is derived from “appearance” or “likeness”. But in this case it was not a matter of the manifestation of something, but of appearing like. In other words, beauty is not, as Hegel suggested, the “sensory appearing of the idea” (in its manifesting) but a “sensory reality that appears like idea”. Thus we are not concerned with a something (the idea that is made manifest) but with a manner or mode of appearance, with qualities rather than contents. The phrase “like idea” does not refer to the content of a specific idea, grasped as mental picture but to the qualitative character of the idea sphere or, as

i Translator’s note: In Keats’s poem “Ode on a Grecian Urn”, the penultimate line contains the much-debated words: “Beauty is truth, truth beauty ...” -

Rudolf Steiner later said, of the spirit. To put it succinctly, beauty is the quality of the spirit which seems to have a sensory aspect. And the artist “lends”, as he says there, the likeness of spirit to a sensory reality.

In relation to esthetic experience, Rudolf Steiner was thus only using his conceptual gestures to stimulate observation, in an esthetic experience, of the specific characteristics of what is experienced – thus not predetermining the actual experience – and then finding specific insight into the qualities experienced there. As answer he does not point to some ideal content but to the ideal sphere and its qualities.

To formulate the whole thing somewhat less philoso-phically: When I have an esthetic experience, something sensory seems to possess the qualities of the spirit – which are qualities or properties I know from my own inner experience. The sensory phenomenon seems to possess spiritual qualities. This is very important, for only through this concept of appearance or likeness can we explain why beauty does not affect each person in the same way. If beauty was something purely sensory, we could not explain why two people can stand in a winter landscape and one of them say only “I’m cold!” while the other calls out, “How beautiful this landscape is!” The second discovers something in sensory reality that cannot be attributed to sensory perception. It is this that makes esthetic experiences so mysterious: they appear to be sensory yet have spiritual character.

If we now ask about the specific qualities of the spirit, Steiner only gives very few examples. A quality of the spirit which can characterize an esthetic experience, is “endlessness”, the infinite; we might also say the unlimited. Thus something limited in sensory space such as a wall can acquire a boundless quality through artistic treatment – for instance by lazuring it, so that it gains a transparent quality, seemingly unlimited and permeable. All this corresponds to the character of the ideal sphere, the qualitative character of the spirit. Real transparency and boundlessness can of course always only be found in the spirit, in pure and immediate form. And this is something you can observe directly, even if you may not see it in this way at present because your thinking often appears limited to you. But you can ask:

What element do I think with?

Which factor brings about the limited nature of my thinking? Does this limitation lie in the nature of thinking itself, or rather in factors which lie outside of thinking?

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ix. thE ExpEriEncE of quEstioning thinKingIn pondering meditatively on these questions, you can certainly make your own observations which are fully valid experiences of the spirit. You must just attend to what can be observed qualitatively in your awareness while you are thinking. For instance, if you read a text by Rudolf Steiner and do not only attend to the content but also to the relationships and connections between the ideas expressed, and if these appear transparent and consistent to you, then you have already had a real, fully valid spiritual experience. Everyone can do this – it isn’t too difficult. This property of the spirit, as described by Rudolf Steiner, is thus not transcendental and inaccessible. We just do not usually notice it, or in other words: it does not appear graphically before us because we are so entirely subsumed in it, living in it as something intrinsically ours. Our whole consciousness is ultimately nourished by the spirit, and therefore our waking consciousness is “transparent” for us. It is this, after all, that enables us to use our thinking to solve problems, to create connections and to answer questions. Thus we certainly have the capacity to observe our own thinking, to investigate it and at the same time grasp hold of it.

The boundaries which we repeatedly also experience in the process, arise through our personally limited capacity for understanding, and the limited nature of single thoughts. But thinking itself, as spiritual medium, is not limited. And it is precisely this quality that you can find yourself and observe in the “ideal sphere”. Thus you are also able to gain sufficient insight yourself into why something has touched you esthetically - why for instance, “clarity” and “transparency” are esthetic qualities for you. Something touches me because it has the appearance of spirit; or in other words, because it reminds me of a spiritual experience which I have already had, but of which I was not yet conscious.

The special value of this mode of response is that, while giving an answer to the question of what underlies esthetic experience, ultimately we do not, when referred to the ideal sphere, gain through it a series of criteria which we then carry around with us like a programmatic catalog. Over and above this, such an approach can also enable us to trace back to their original source other qualities that were important criteria for artworks in the esthetic tradition.

x. intEgrity, proportion, clarityAs example we might name the qualities which Thomas Aquinas cites as bring characteristic of an artwork:

“Integritas”, or unified integrity: this quality states that the artwork is an integral whole, from which no part can be removed without it falling asunder. This is a common experience, certainly, in the realm of music.

“Proportio“, proportion or “consonantia“, harmony of the proportions of the parts in relation to each other: this quality is still today an intuitive criterion for art – that all parts accord with each other, fit together. This becomes apparent in the feeling that the whole thing alters if one element is changed.

“Claritas“, clarity or transparency, is a third quality which Thomas Aquinas exemplifies through precious stones, though does not limit it to them. Such “clarity” can be found wherever we have the impression that an experience contains all we need. Nothing opposes it: we have all that is necessary for an experience.

These three characteristics can, like boundlessness, be traced back to qualities of the spirit which are accessible to direct observation, and thus can be seen as some- thing real.

The fruitful nature of Rudolf Steiner’s answer to the question posed at the beginning – What actually

“The artist lends the appearance of spirit to a sensory reality.”

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happens when something touches me esthetically? – therefore lies in the fact that many traditional, historical criteria relating to art can only be properly understood if one can show where they actually originate. And this can be shown not through conceptual contents, complexes of mental pictures, ideas or suchlike, but through real qualities of the spirit which can be detected through observation – and thus empirically.

xi. consEquEncEs of opEnnEssIn this way we can in each instance gain new and adequate insight into what esthetic experience means for us personally. This is an empirical stance insofar as art is not explained according to a pre-ordained model but through always first awaiting what happens when we have an art experience, so that only what we actually experience reveals its source to us.

We gain an answer to the question as to what touches us by focusing on the quality itself, and then turning our gaze to the realm of spirit accessible to us through direct experience. What is spiritually inaccessible to us does not touch us either, and vice versa.

The distinctive characteristic of the spirit is that it is not embodied as a limited and defined entity with properties which one could then read off from it entirely. One can observe an unlimited number of qualities and the spirit itself is also qualitatively inexhaustible. In 50 years, probably, people will experience other qualities through the spirit than we do today. And drawing on these altered experiences of the spirit they will also have different esthetic experiences from us.

You will now be able to understand that this answer by Rudolf Steiner – “Beauty is sensory reality that appears like idea” – is entirely capable of allowing us to really understand esthetic experiences, but without thereby regimenting art or our criteria of it. No conclusive catalog of criteria can be developed from the spiritual realm, for the spirit is always open, always spontaneous, always capable of bringing forth something new that we do not yet know. It is therefore also capable of allowing new artworks to be created that go beyond what we have known previously.

It is thus important that we are clear, on the one hand, what qualities personally touch us, i.e. that we seek to ascertain why something has spoken to us esthetically; and on the other hand that we do not then draw the conclusion that this gives us all the valid criteria for

art – which would be to blind ourselves to new artistic experiences. In consequence of the stance described by Rudolf Steiner, I can say to myself, rather, that I will try to directly experience as many qualities of the spirit as possible so that this increasingly opens me to new esthetic experiences. Someone with diverse spiritual experiences is also best prepared for diverse esthetic experiences. The reverse is likewise true: a narrow concept of art suggests a lack of direct spiritual experience.

xii. artists, artworKs and viEwErs/audiEncE Rudolf Steiner repeatedly urged artists to engage fully, indeed immerse themselves – also in the case of a literary work – in the material of the artwork, so as to release the “flowing spirit” in this material itself, giving the emerging work ever more of the character of spirit. But in this process one has to keep recalling that this character of the spirit within the sensory world is always only likeness, for today the spirit itself is no longer drawn in together with sensory experience. From Rudolf Steiner’s research we know that today the spirit no longer streams into the soul directly from the sensory world – except when, through listening while actively thinking with the help of the sense of thinking, we follow someone who is present before us. That is the significant exception.

As an artist, therefore, one cannot do anything other than configure something of a sensory nature in such a way that it acquires a spiritual character. But this does not in any way mean that it is “finished”, for only when someone looks at it does he unfold the artwork’s spiritual character through his attention – which is why art always requires correspondingly prepared, that is attentive, well-disposed viewers and audience who are open to art. This does not in the least involve ordinary sensory perception in the sense of transmitter – message – recipient, but, on the viewer’s part, the capacity to take up and perfect the artwork’s inherent possibilities.

In his lectures on the first Goetheanum building, Rudolf Steiner repeatedly made clear that the artwork only arises in the soul of the observer through his own activity. Just as a cake takes the form of the cake tin it is baked in, and is then eaten, so the decisive thing about an artwork is not the observed form of the object – in other words what exists outwardly in space – but what occurs in the soul of the viewer as he views it by attending actively to the object and invoking into reality the artistic potential

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informing it. Thus he is the one who realizes the likeness to spirit in his own, entirely personal way.

xiii. spEcifics rElating to thE art of Eurythmy I would now like to apply more specifically to eurythmy what has been said so far, inasmuch as the time remaining will allow this. The various lectures on the concept of art in education etc. will be able to elaborate on this in more detail.

It is striking that Rudolf Steiner says almost nothing in his lecture about what an artist must do to endow sensory reality with the character of spirit. This may have led to the fact that for many years the model of the sculptor was presented as archetype, where the artist endows a resting, material object with a different character by changing its form from without. However, this model is not even satisfactory as explanation of the so-called spatial arts. Think for example of the art of gardening in the English garden: there an artwork arises in a quite different way from carving. No form is

altered from without but through planting the whole thing is arranged in such a way that the trees appear as natural as possible – as if their shapes are not limited or restricted; though in fact this is also the appearance of boundlessness. The same thing applies to a still greater extent to the “technique” of the art of education. This does not inform a material with an already preconceived picture (perhaps the ideal human being) but “leads out”, supports, allows to flourish so that a young person can develop in accord with his own being.

The distinctive thing about eurythmy is that the art material, the tool – in other words the means used to work on the material – and the artist himself, are one and the same: the whole person. Rudolf Steiner coined the phrase, “I do it with my whole human being”. This is a very beautiful and at the same time very profound phrase: I and my human being. Who is speaking there?

In his basic position on esthetics, Rudolf Steiner also rejected the concept of beauty as the “manifestation of the idea” because this would lead to trying to impose

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on a material the idea one already has in one’s head; and merely recognizing this idea in the material would then already mean that the work was beautiful, quite irrespective of how it was realized and what qualities it possessed. Diametrically opposed to this is the fundamental spiritual gesture one can find in Goethe’s scientific writings and also in his artistic works: an unreserved immersion in matter with openness to what is experienced there; immersion in materiality, in the experiential world, so that gradually, through growing familiarity with this material, its appearance is altered and is endowed with the character and qualities of the spirit. In a novel, for instance, this material is not sensory in a coarser sense, but is nevertheless “material” from which the artist (author) develops its intrinsic possibilities to produce, say, the story of Goethe’s Faust.

xiv. unity of shapEr and shapEd in Eurythmy In eurythmy therefore, the material in which one immerses oneself, with which one becomes familiar, encompasses the shaping person himself. This leads us to the question of where, in fact, the person ends who is doing the shaping or configuring, and where what is shaped begins. From one second to the next, the transition occurs from the person who is shaping to the one who is shaped.

The following example can illustrate how subtle these relationships are in comparison with the classic spatial arts such as carving or sculpting. During rehearsals of a eurythmy program for a performance, a eurythmist once said to Steiner that in one instance she was no longer able to do the “E” [eh] of the word in question alongside the other sounds (forgive me this stumbling formulation). Steiner replied to her: “Then do it with your eyes!”

This shows that even attentiveness can form material in and with which the eurythmist is shaping. You can in fact certainly look in a way that has the quality of “A” [ah], or also with the quality of “E” [eh]. The material configured by the artist thus extends to the attentiveness he brings to bear on his own movements. He configures his own gaze, or in other words his particular type of attentiveness, in such a way that one can sense that it conveys an “A” [ah] or an “E”[eh].

Rudolf Steiner considered all this possible; but you will notice of course the great demands this places on the artist. No longer is a course, sensory and unliving material involved, from which one can easily distance

oneself. We must therefore say, really, that the person who configures is continually passing over into the one who is configured. The transitions between the person shaping and the person shaped can only be perceived if there is someone who can observe his own attention. There must therefore be someone who is attentive to how he is attentive. And one can ask who that actually is. Clearly it can be no one other than the person who is working with his “whole human being”.

Today, the traditional model of a subject here, and an object there in the outer world is no longer adequate as an explanation of artistic experiences in which a person is one with the material he is shaping. Under certain circumstances this can go so far that he himself says, in a naïve but nevertheless authentic mode: “I seek always in my work to come to the point where the material itself starts to think” – as the British sculptor Tony Cragg stated.

This is a paradox but a very fitting description of what he experiences as he creates and forms his material: he immerses himself so deeply in the material he is working on that it seems to him this material is starting to develop a will of its own, to make decisions – though not of an arbitrary nature but based on objective grounds and considerations, as though it itself is thinking.

The artist can thus have the experience of something spirit-related which is capable of thinking within the material by guiding and regulating changes during the artistic process. These formulations are paradoxical but sometimes much closer to reality than the model of: an I here in the head versus an object out there in the world, and I try to work my way into the object and somehow externally connect with it.

xv. original unity of i and worldA hundred years ago, in a lecture to the Philosophers’ Congress in Bologna, Rudolf Steiner proposed an alternative to this model, one which I believe is far better suited to understanding the artistic or esthetic experiences of artists. This involved the perspective that the I is already in the world and forms an original unity with it. And this is precisely what is revealed to the artist at the special moments when he experiences unity with the world as he creates. The unity does not arise through addition but a kind of subtraction, through the falling away of what is inessential, of what sunders and can be fragmented. This could better illustrate the experiences of creative artists than, for instance, a model according

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to which two factors approach each other and in some way connect externally.

To assume that there is an original unity of world and I would be a model better corresponding to the spiritual cosmos in which the artist works: his I is already in the world and can be accessed and revealed through his own activity. At some moments the fact that the I is already in the world flashes up, but mostly it is still in some way obscured. The quantitative relationship between the two modes says nothing however about their degree of reality. You can see this for yourself whenever you observe your own awareness: it does not slowly march its way out of your head into the world, but you look at something and are suddenly there with your awareness, in whatever you are looking at – without having taken a “path” to get there.

Another example: if you watch a film, you are in the film. We are prevented from taking this seriously by our theoretical model, according to which we observe our I like a sphere in our head, and must elaborate it from there. This is not entirely false, but may only be a special state and thus one that cannot act as a model to explain all phenomena that can actually be experienced. Here, therefore, there would still be much to do to develop concepts that are not simply set up to oppose previous theories but can integrate these into a more encompassing whole.

xiv. thE rElationship bEtwEEn art and thEoryFinally I’d like to suggest one important consequence which follows from what I have elaborated here. When he was answering questions on August 26, 1921 in Dornach (GA 77b, p. 104 [German edition]), Rudolf

Steiner directly addressed this; and today it is still as important as it was then. Someone, who clearly already recognized a potentially dangerous tendency, asked the following question:

Dear Herr Dr. Steiner, would art not tend to become more uniform under the influence of anthroposophic teachings? This would not be very interesting. Isn’t there a danger that art would bear an anthroposophic stamp, as though from a particular school of painting?

Steiner replied:

If one rightly grasps what can really emerge as art from the spiritual orientation of anthroposophy, such a question will not, in my view, arise; and one will not be tempted to believe that anthroposophy could ever strive to influence art through anthroposophic teachings. Really the anthroposophic outlook does not acknowledge any other way of thinking than one whereby art emerges from an experience of the spirit flowing through the material, of our living with this material.

Steiner then briefly spoke of the many paintings of the Rose Cross, and said that this involved an attempt to express an idea of something inward. He even called this “nonsense”. Then he continued:

But what is really anthroposophy, whether one grasps it through teachings or through art, leads to the inward experience of something far more direct and original than anthroposophic teachings or anthroposophic art; of something that is alive and lies further back in us.

This aspect that “lies further back in us” could simply be called “spirit”, for this is after all more original and originating than anthroposophic teaching and anthroposophic art, which only arise from it. It leads us

“Beauty is a sensory reality that appears like idea.”

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toward the “material” - which in the eurythmist is his whole being – “in which spirit flows”.

If we create artistic forms on the one hand, which have nothing to do with anthroposophic teachings, and then in turn attune to the word, the thought, we are creating contexts of ideas out of the same subterranean sources.

The forms of thoughts on the one hand, and artistic forms on the other are both autonomous and entirely independent elaborations of the same spirit, but

precisely for this reason are not the elaborations of already developed ideas. They are the two branches from one spiritual root, though we cannot take one and implant it in the other, as was attempted by those who, as mentioned at the beginning, sought to combine beauty and truth. Both draw from the same source, the living and creative spirit, and both seek to approach this source. When they discover it they do not find something unknown but rather something with which they are originally and inseparably united.

Dr. Phil. Roland Halfen is co-editor of Rudolf Steiner’s artistic work in the Rudolf Steiner Collected Works (GA). He is an art and cultural historian and known, among other things, for publications and events relating to Chartres Cathedral and the School of Chartres, art history, and contemporary art.

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fRom SEnSoRy to SupERSEnSiblE REAlmS

Heinz Zimmermann

The concept of art in stage eurythmy

one should not just focus on the sudden flash of safety pins, nor the performers’ hairstyles, the lines on a face or any other such detail but should try to attend to the movements themselves. This is extremely difficult. But only then do we gain a sense of the whole, integrating all the separate aspects into a unity. If we succeed in doing this, the separate sense impressions of color, speech, movement and veils form a whole together. When we listen to a symphony, we do not usually follow each separate instrument. To absorb it we likewise have to integrate separate things into one. The diverse sensory realms that come together in eurythmy do in fact make this a special challenge.

This means that we have to turn to a sphere where sensory realms separated in the physical domain become a living, harmoniously integrated process. We are raised up into this sphere and know that it is not the same as that where daily life unfolds.

intrinsic EfficacyIn 1990 I witnessed a very special performance that I will never forget, given by the Goetheanum stage group in Leipzig to an audience of 800 people, most of whom were seeing eurythmy for the first time. Rudolf Steiner’s “12 Moods”1 formed part of the performance. One might have thought this was a crazy undertaking, for if one reads the 12 Moods one understands nothing to start with. And then to meet this text at the same time as first encountering eurythmy2!

collaboration of pErformErs and audiEncE Stage art could not exist without an audience. In former times the audience simply had to accept what was offered. Today, in the contemporary world, there is a desire for the stage and the audience to interact more strongly. The artwork is a joint creation, arising through the collaboration of both sides – not through the audience leaping onto the stage or the performers coming into the auditorium but by meeting one another in a shared space so that something new arises. This modern audience perspective is something I myself wish to adopt in what follows.

It corresponds to the idea informing the building of the Goetheanum: that the two spaces should interpenetrate so that what comes from the East is shaped and configured by what comes from the West.

I would first like to refer to two audience experiences that can lead us into this theme. Sometimes people take someone who is not an anthroposophist with them to a eurythmy performance. Afterwards the person in question may say: “I’m completely confused; I didn’t know where to look - at which of the five people on the stage who were all moving in different ways? Then there were the different colors, the music that came from somewhere or other, and on top of it all the spoken words. How on earth was I meant to follow all of this?”

thE intEgrating factorThis is a major problem which shows how important it is for an audience to watch in the right way. It means that

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The astonishing thing was however – after a brief intro-duction about the realm in which the whole thing unfolds – that there was stunned silence for the whole 20 minutes, followed by rapturous applause. Asking a few people afterwards about their impression, they just said: “It was wonderful!” But they had no idea what exactly they had found wonderful. The work has an intrinsic effect that communicates directly. This is particularly true of the zodiac gestures which Rudolf Steiner did not give in 1915 when he first produced a performance of the 12 Moods, but only in 1924. Precisely this shows the relationship which Rudolf Steiner had to these gestures: that he took a long time before passing them on, because of their significance. They have an intrinsic effect, so that each person knows they embody a power which comes from a sphere beyond that of earthly space and time. Intrinsic efficacy.

In retrospect it became known that these 12 zodiac gestures, like the seven planetary movements, already existed in 1914. In 1914 Rudolf Steiner wished to produce a fifth Mystery play, part of which would have involved a star dance in the Greek era. Erna Wolfram was to rehearse the gestures for this star dance. Steiner gave them to her on two sheets, and naturally she practiced them. But then the First World War broke out, and the fifth play was not written.

But one might have thought he would have got people to rehearse these gestures in the White Room of the first Goetheanum alongside the 12 Moods. Certainly not. He had the five fully trained eurythmists perform

the corresponding speech sounds – the consonants – and the other eurythmists, who were not so advanced, simply did vowels. This shows the respect with which he himself treated these forms.

starting from thE sEnsory phEnomEnonNot until ten years later, in the speech eurythmy course3 in 1924, did he introduce these gestures.

How did he introduce them?

This is very interesting in methodological terms. He did not say: “Now let us learn the gestures of the 12 zodiac beings.” He called the eurythmists on stage and showed them 12 different gestures; that is, he started from the sensory phenomenon, the gesture; and only much later, during his lecture, did they learn their significance. Only then were the drawings added. In other words, he started from the sensory realm and led it into the supersensible, just as Herr Halfen did yesterday in relation to the concept of art. Thus it is not a matter of illustrating something supersensible in sensory terms, but the reverse: of configuring sensory gesture in a way that makes it seem that these mighty 12 powers of the cosmos are working through them.

The text of these 12 Moods offers a monumental cosmic picture of how the human being, who forms himself out of these 12 powers of the cosmic Word in seven different moods, was created out of the universal Word. The human being, a result of the universal Word, is capable of speech because the universal Word implanted these powers in him. Rudolf Steiner drew the whole of

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eurythmy out of this sphere. Following the 12 Moods, he had the satirical “Song of Initiation” performed – a text, likewise in 12 stanzas, which pokes fun at the esoteric affectations of some anthroposophists. The two poems belong together, and reveal the whole range of eurythmy stage art: from Mystery verses of the highest spirituality through to imaginative and stylish joking.

thE miraclE of spEEchHuman speech involves an interplay of very rapid movements. A study by Eric H. Lenneberg in his classic “Physiological Foundations of Speech” describes this precisely. A hundred different muscles in our speech apparatus are active when we speak. Roughly 14 different innervations occur every second, giving 1000 possible muscle movements per minute, which must also occur in the right sequence. It would be impossible to undertake such a thing voluntarily. That is the miracle of speech production: the movements of the larynx are the fastest movements in our whole organism. Transferred to the whole human being – though somewhat slowed down - you have eurythmy.

The comments that follow are a description from the point of view of an active audience member who sees eurythmy appearing on stage and, as anthroposophist, endeavors to engage with it from a quite different angle. At the same time, the connection of stage art with the being of eurythmy and anthroposophy, from which it draws its inspirations, is repeatedly represented here. A being or entity incarnates in space, but this being – whether a poem, a piece of music or a human being – comes from a non-spatial world. This is also true of eurythmy, which is the incarnation of something non-spatial in a spatial element. The powers which render us capable of speech, as outcome of the universal Logos, come from the world of life which adjoins our sensory world and is today under such endless attack. This world of life, the world of formative forces and of imaginative perception, is the source of eurythmy gestures. This world must come to visibility within the space of the stage.

thE procEss of bEcoming humanWe come to earth headfirst; then we stand up so that the head is upright – and this gives rise to something quite particular: a threefold quality. At first we are only an organ of movement: when an infant drinks milk, its little foot is drinking too; the infant forms a unity in which all is in motion. In the course of further development,

the head comes to rest, while the legs now come into movement – “The word of the feet” – so that the head becomes free for reflecting and thinking, and a new center is formed. Only by standing upright does an independent middle system arise, making the “singing of the hands” possible – the emancipation of the arms from the forces of gravity.

But something else occurs too as we develop.

Where is the infant’s I located?

The I of the infant is not yet directly connected with the body but is still in the periphery, outside the body. This is why the young child can still imitate so wonderfully, perhaps to the horror of parents when he simply repeats at an inappropriate moment what they just said and in the intonations they used. The young child’s being is as yet not at all incarnated.

As we awaken in the head the world starts to be critically observed from the center of the reflected I, which is located in the head. We heard about these two “I”s yesterday: so now we are speaking of the I that is capable of asserting itself and can think.

As first gesture it sees what should be different, what is wrong. Thinking awakens at the “critical death pole”.

Now of course we can ask:

Can the human being get back from focused awareness to the I in the periphery which he has left – although in a different form because it occurs consciously?

The path of anthroposophy, the path of knowledge and art, is nothing other than the attempt to reach back again to the periphery.

stEpping bEtwEEn Earthbound and EarthfrEEdIn the social sphere we can ask:

How can I develop empathy as well as egotism?

How can I reach the periphery where my true I is, basically, still located?

The I in the head is only an earthly, transient, everyday I, and not the true I. The same question arises for eurythmy performance as for the shaping of art.

If we consider eurythmy from a phenomenological perspective, it becomes the archetype of the consciously stepping person. Yesterday evening we saw such stepping: it requires a certain strength to step in a way that does not proceed from the sensory world but takes

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effect within it. Since the audience member co-enacts this primal movement semi-consciously, he feels the harmonizing effect that is passing to him from the stage.

What constitutes human walking?

Whenever I lift a leg, the other leg presses all the more firmly on the earth. If I then carry the leg forward and then place it again on the ground, the leg that was previously firmly connected with the earth releases itself and moves forward while the other leg stays firm. Natural walking is a rhythm between being earthbound and freed from the earth. In stylized form in eurythmy, it becomes stepping. This is a rhythm which one can transform into speech: the earthbound aspect corresponds to the sculptural nature of the consonant, while the carrying corresponds to the musical, to the vowel: MA-MA, PA-PA – closure of the consonant alternating with the greatest possible opening in the “A” [ah].

These primal words are nothing other than the human being’s internalized stepping.

intErplay of thE strEams of futurE and past But something else also becomes visible in this stepping: as we carry the leg forward, the other leg remains behind. We always have something that strives forward into the future, and something else that desires to stay behind, clinging to the past. Then the roles change rhythmically: the other leg comes and overtakes the first, which now stays put – and this produces the next step.

So we can speak of a dual stream, one more past-related and one more future-oriented. Stepping is therefore also an interplay of the streams of future and past.

When one watches good eurythmists one can notice that when they step forward something that is behind goes with the movement, and at the same time something comes toward them that is in front of them. The gesture is never just forward-oriented as though seeking to

fetch something, but both are always present together, so that a continual rhythmic balancing occurs between these two streams of time.

We can sketch this schematically as a stream from the past and an opposite stream from the future: both are there. This drawing is incomplete because we walk upright; so I must also draw a vertical line. That is the stance which facilitates presence of mind between the two other poles. Here are expressed the vertical, the I’s directing, and the two streams of future and past.

qualitiEs of thE lifE world, thE world of thE ElEmEnts What appears here to be eurythmically modified in the dynamic of movement is the conquest of a space, of a world that lies beyond the sensory world but which directly adjoins it: the world of the elements.

The impulses for movement are drawn from this world of life, as illustrated here by a small example. Naturally I can’t go into detail here but I would like to note that this sphere of life, of imagination, is the source of movement that becomes visible in space, which we can therefore see. We can discover this in the diverse fields of anthroposophy. But through stage art this other space becomes available to the experience of the person watching – as long as it is actually created.

I will now make a small digression inasmuch as I would like to describe this quality of life by citing several simple examples from other domains, which can however in turn indirectly illumine eurythmy. I will leave it to your own imagination to find the relationship of these examples to stage art.

thE ExclusivE principlE and thE principlE of mEtamorphosis Picture a circle of a particular size. Enlarge this circle in your imagination. As it becomes ever bigger the curvature

“The world of imagination is the source of eurythmy gesture.”

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becomes ever less. Then you come to a boundary where the original circle becomes a straight line, which you naturally cannot see. On the ocean you can stand on a ship and gaze at the horizon all around. But you cannot see the circle and the straight line at the same time. The place where the circle becomes a straight line is situated at the boundary of the sensory world.

You can also do the opposite, starting from the circle and allowing it to become ever smaller in your mind until it becomes a point. Again this is to picture a boundary.

With a logic of space and time you can now say that a circle is not a straight line, a straight line is not a point and a point is not a circle. This characterizes the exclusive principle, the ‘side-by-side’ nature of space.

You can also say that the circle gives rise to the straight line, and to the point, and the point in turn gives rise to the circle – the evolutionary principle. From a process-oriented, non-goal-oriented perspective, the one emerges from the other.

This corresponds to what happens on the stage when good eurythmy is performed: in relation to the various gestures one can never say when one stops and the other begins. They pass into each other – the principle of metamorphosis.

sourcE and rivEr mouth from divErsE pErspEctivEs A second example of approaching this world of life forces in thought: in relation to the two phenomena of a river’s source and mouth, you can say, when you are standing on a bridge and see the water flowing past:

The source is far away, and previously the water was emerging from the source. The source is the past.

Then you look toward the river mouth, into the future, and say: now the water is flowing further. The future is the river mouth, the past is the spring.

But you can also ask:

Whence comes the renewal of the river, the water?

It comes from the source. Which again means that the future of the water lies in the source. What has flowed away toward the river mouth is over, is past.

Thus you have two statements which are diametrically opposed because one is taking different standpoints. Which one can do.

mEtamorphosis and transition in timE A further example that can illustrate how one can enter the imaginative realm from the daily world of time and space: In school we learned that there are three main types of words: verb, adjective and noun. We probably had to be able to distinguish clearly between them.

But we can also form the following sequence:

“it flows” – I am one with what is happening

“it is flowing” – I distance myself, it becomes circumstance

“it is fluid” – now I am in the realm of property/quality

“it is a river” – here I have the object.i

We can say:

The noun is a former verb.

Or the verb is a future noun.

The phrase “it flows” becomes, if I fix it, “the river”. Once again we have a stream of time in which the word undergoes a metamorphosis. I have now not shown how one is distinguished from the other as noun, adjective and verb but have led one into the other. The transition is the interesting thing.

What occurs between “it flows” and “it is flowing”?

What lies between?

The intervening, transitional quality is the decisive thing that leads us further.

What is the nature of this development, which brings the whole thing into process and movement?

Now we have arrived back at the statement that: a being incarnates in space in temporal manifestation.

This also is an example which, with the necessary caution, we can apply to eurythmy movement.

dual strEam of timE in flourishing and dyingLet us come finally to the realm of meditation. In his book Knowledge of the Higher Worlds4, Rudolf Steiner describes a preparatory exercise for entering the imaginative realm. Here we must inwardly transform something which itself is at rest in external space, in

i Translator’s note: In German all variants relate to the one word “Fluss” (river) as forms of “fliessen” (to flow), whereas in English “flow” does not as such become a noun.

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space and time. We are guided to focus our awareness alternately on the phenomena of developing, growing and blossoming on the one hand, and of fading, wither-ing, dying on the other.

We can only understand growth by seeing it as a process. In spatio-temporal terms only, we see just an excerpt, the fixed condition of a particular moment. In reality we must always remember that the current state of being is the outcome of something from the past, which bears within it the seed of a future condition. We can even go a little further and say: in growing, fading is always also contained. In the future lies the past and in withering, as seed is formed, new growth is already present as potential. Here again we have the dual stream of time, but now in the meditative realm, through inner picturing activity rather than outward event – although we do still connect here with sensory perception, for instance in the “seed meditation”5 described below.

thE potEncy of maKing visiblEImagine what can emerge from the insignificant-seeming structure of a sunflower seed if the right conditions are present. It grows upward, forms a flower, which may weigh 300 grams: it grows up into a plant that develops and elaborates itself upward. All this is already contained in the seed. On this is based the meditation phrase: “What is visible comes forth from the invisible”.

“The invisible becomes visible” – a wonderful phrase, that can also be directly transferred to eurythmy. The invisible is made visible. The potency of making visible comes from an invisible world, that of the life forces. It is precisely this power that the audience can experience when they watch a eurythmy performance which invokes it.

upliftIn this meditation, too, we can see that the power of uplift is active in the living world, from below upward. This wonderful phenomenon is one we also see in eurythmy: a non-eurythmist cannot understand how a eurythmist can pass so lightly across the stage. People often speak of “floating”, but that is not right. Here gravity is overcome in a way different from how it is ordinarily. When one watches ninth-graders (age 15) doing eurythmy, one can see how difficult it is to enter into this uplift power of the etheric. And again, when watching a performance, the audience can themselves experience this uplift.

The principle of inversion - a dual sTream of timEA final example. There is a comment by Rudolf Steiner in the third lecture of the 1924 Speech and Drama Course6:

In writing with style one must, in beginning to write an essay, already have the last sentence contained in the first; and must even give more attention to the last sentence than the first. And when one writes the second sentence, one must have the penultimate sentence in mind. You may only have a single sentence in mind in the middle of the essay. In other words, when one has a sense of prose style, one must write an essay out of the whole.

Naturally this shouldn’t be taken literally, by counting the sentences, but the principle off “inversion“ is involved here: we have a first half in which something unfolds organically and comes to a conclusion in the middle, or fourth stage of seven. What was there as potential in the first half is now inverted and is taken up again at a higher standpoint, giving rise to a correspondence between the fifth and the third stage, the sixth and the second, and the seventh and the first. You can find this in the seven seals, where this principle is artistically embodied in a pure form. In an organism a part must always also be seen in relation to the whole. The decisive thing here is the transitional or interval quality. It is not a question of placing things in a logical sequence but of seeing how the future works already on the present and the present on the future. When I write the first sentence I must already be thinking of what I have not yet written. Here a dual stream of time exists, and an organism of diverse polarities.

The relationship between periphery and center, between future, present and past, is very well expressed in eurythmy in the verse upon which this conference is based7:

“I feel my destiny, my destiny finds me.” Center – periphery

“I feel my star, my star finds me.” Center – periphery

“I feel my goal, my goal finds me.” I find myself at the periphery and the periphery finds me at the center.

We see here this alternation between periphery and center. For the stage artist this is a fundamental shaping tool for replacing everyday subjectivity with the creation of a higher individual center.

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summary of thE qualitiEs of thE EthEricIf we now summarize the qualities of the etheric, which eurythmy configures and makes visible on stage, we have:

Raising of oneself: rising into a world which appears in space but is not spatial by nature. Uplift.

The eurythmist’s attention is not focused on a point or the goal he wishes to attain, but on the periphery from which he draws and enacts impulses. The periphery leads him. Not I out of my focused consciousness direct the movement, but as eurythmist I allow myself to be moved. Productiveness and receptivity are in mutual interplay.

The dual stream of time, which we can regard as the battle for presence of mind. Those schooled in watching eurythmy can see when someone is no longer fully in the movement with his awareness. For the watcher, being fully attentive is naturally also hard, but in contrast to the stage artist he has all the license he likes. But it is also true for the watcher that when he succeeds in shifting his attention from the head, from spatial awareness, to following the movements, he can sense how something in his own life sphere is moving in correspondence. Being conscious does not mean continually inhabiting the head and thinking, but rather directing attention to a particular place – in this case to movement – and allowing this movement to speak to one.

The rhythm between polarities. Everything consists of mutually interacting polarities that do not exclude each other but are interdependent and interrelated. Here it is a question of forming a center out of the polarities.

And finally, the organism as totality. The separate parts always have a relationship to the whole, represent the whole, so that the whole also itself appears in the parts. We cannot simply change the sequence. Manifestation of being in time.

thE tasK for EurythmyStage eurythmists face many challenges: amongst all the elements which one must practice one must, basically, be a music connoisseur who can analyze a piece of music, and a connoisseur of poetry, so as to ascertain the style. This involves several professions in one, because eurythmy encompasses the diverse arts in such a way that they appear as totality. One cannot say that one does only eurythmy, and not music or speech art. That would be nonsense. Everything is integrated – which also represents a challenge for the audience.

Educating the audience is therefore also an important task for eurythmy: audience members must learn to watch in the right way at the right place. We might also call eurythmy the art of rendering visible the transition space, what lies between.

A good pianist starts playing already before the first note, anticipating it; and he can also play pauses. On stage this becomes visibly embodied in the eurythmist, who is always anticipating, transforming into movement (“motivating impetus”) what we “only” hear in music, which is invisible.

This is a mighty, inspiring but also comprehensive task, which very particularly cultivates the social interplay of the arts, and finds its highest culmination in stage art.

artistic EngagEmEnt with rudolf stEinEr’s indicationsIn relation to the theme of “stage eurythmy after 100 years” I would like to consider something that confronts not only eurythmists but every anthroposophist. This is the question:

How do we engage with Rudolf Steiner’s indications?

If we limit ourselves to simply following these suggestions blindly, we are at risk of becoming merely their slaves rather than free artists.

On the other hand, some of his suggestions are characterized by the fact that they must first be grasped before one modifies them; and on the other, we always have to ask whether a particular suggestion actually derives from Rudolf Steiner. There are many supposed indications by Rudolf Steiner that have arisen from tradition (“This is how it was always done”). These are the “well-trodden paths” which block all new reflection and new realization. This too makes the artist unfree.

How can I, on the one hand, perceive the really unique, incomparable personality and individuality of Rudolf Steiner, who was capable of drawing down gestures from the highest spheres of the zodiac, the planetary spheres, as forms and movements, and was able to create the sequence of eurythmy sounds as valid, lawful forms of expression of speech, and also did the same thing for music?

How can I, on the other hand, also be an independent, free artist in respect of this mighty individuality?

One has to bring both these aspects together, otherwise one becomes a slave of Rudolf Steiner in the sense of

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unhealthy discipleship, which will strike an audience as merely sectarian and dogmatic.

How can I therefore work constructively with Rudolf Steiner’s indications?

acquiring an attitudE of rEsEarch and EnquiryBecause Rudolf Steiner often substantiates these indications, we have the possibility of testing them by trying to verify his statements through observation, enquiring practice and practical enquiry. We can ask:

What is the effect of following an indication?

To begin with I cited the example of the performance in Leipzig, at which the audience members could sense the effects of the gestures. We can now try to go more deeply into these aspects, just as one opens oneself to the feelings invoked by red and blue if one wishes to become a painter. One has to acquaint oneself with these color qualities in hundreds of exercises.

In this way one gradually acquires competency and the capacity to make decisions in relation to such indications. One can always ask:

How is a particular indication affecting me?

What kind of quality does it have?

Founded on anthroposophy we can acquire an enquiring, questioning stance before we bring something to the stage. A stance of enquiry must already be present during training.

It is pleasing to see that in this program many meetings are taking place where research results are being discussed. Research always means having questions, the answers to which one does not yet know.

In closing let us consider this: Rudolf Steiner calls anthroposophy a path of knowledge.

Why does he not also call it an artistic path?

This is because he sees art, knowledge, and religious and social life as a unity. It is devastating for both art and knowledge if one regards them as opposites.

If I regard the scientist as only a “head person” and the artist as only a “heart person” I get no further. Today, artists need to have awareness of what they are doing. And every scientist or academic as I tried to show in my examples, must embark on an artistic process in thinking and meditation, must do eurythmy in his thoughts; otherwise he is not an anthroposophist but instead only a recipient who may know a lot but can do little.

thE rEprEsEntativE of humanity and EurythmyAnthroposophy is always stimulus to one’s own activity, to the forming of capacities rather than theoretical teaching. In the seven years between 1910 and 1917, above all, Rudolf Steiner developed approaches to art: the art of the Goetheanum, the Mystery plays etc. In this context we must also see that eurythmy is closely connected with the building and design of the Goetheanum, but also with the development of the Representative of Humanity sculpture.

The Representative of Humanity embodies the center between Lucifer and Ahriman, the human being walking in balance between the earth-binding and earth-fleeing forces. He is depicted in movement in such a way – and this is how it was intended - that he approaches the viewer from the East. He is shaped so that any sex-specific characteristic is concealed, both in the head and throughout the body. This is a depiction of a living, reflecting figure with a particularly harmonious chest sphere: not portrayed naturalistically but as quality elaborated from the wood. The arms are in the diagonal plane between above and below, to mediate between opposites; and the head has a pondering, aware

“a stance of enquiry must already be present during training.”

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forehead. This is not someone who thinks in the usual way, but a “musing”, speaking, moving person who approaches us. For me there is no question that what stands as being behind the Representative of Humanity inspired eurythmy as the new art of the future.

Eurythmy is the art of the Representative of Humanity in a wonderful form which, as Rudolf Steiner already em-pha sized in his day, is only at its beginning but has endless developmental possibilities and therefore be longs to the most precious aspects of what anthroposophy makes avai lable to us.

As stage art it had the great responsibility from the beginning of being exemplary, as new art, for all eurythmy work. As mature art form it is capable not only of mediating artistic experience but also, with its reinvigorating effect in public and internal performances, of showing students the eventual outcome of what they are making first endeavors to achieve in school eurythmy, lay courses or living thought process in their studies. It needs warm understanding for this task as exemplar, and the necessary practical support so that it can properly exercise this responsibility.

1 Steiner first gave the Twelve Moods as text on August 24, 1915 in the Goetheanum’s White Room, as part of the Appollonian Course. The first performance took place on August 29, 1915

2 see GA 40, “Truth-Wrought Words”

3 “Eurythmy as Visible Speech“, lecture 10, GA 2794 GA 10, chapter “Preparation”5 GA 10, “Enlightenment”6 GA 2827 GA 40, “Truth-Wrought Words“

Heinz Zimmermann, born 1937 in Basel, studied German literature, history and philology of ancient languages, and took a masters degree in Linguistics. He is an assistant professor and reader at Basel University, and high school teacher at Rudolf Steiner School in Basel. From 1975 he worked as director of the teachers’ seminar in Dornach and in 1988 was appointed to the Goetheanum executive council (until 2008). From 1989 to 2001 he was leader of the Pedagogical Section and from 1992 to 1999 the leader of the Youth Section. He is responsible for the “Study and further training at the Goetheanum” department, and works extensively as lecturer and course leader. He is the author of numerous publications.

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stage eurythmy demonstration

and past came to choral expression. Here lies a seldom-used means of expression in eurythmy, which works to spiritualizing effect in the artistic process.

4. The middle of the verse, founded on “I and you are we”, was framed by the eurythmy zodiac: the artistic expression of a reality in which inward soul unites with “human universal being” and thus with the cosmos. Once again, this is a significant indication by Steiner, which seeks to form and configure the inaudible.

5. After this sequence of development, the poem was performed as a whole, incorporating the diverse levels of the inaudible. This was further intensified in the repeat of the complete, but now silent, eurythmy presentation.

Our concern here was to illustrate the conference theme in eurythmy in relation to stage eurythmy.How does the new artistic principle come to expression in stage eurythmy? What has to happen on stage for the artwork to arise in the spectator?Drawing on the verse “Es keimen der Seele Wünsche …” [“The soul’s wishes bud”], it was possible to give a tangible sense of several strata by means of which eurythmy appears in a new perspective, insofar as the spectator engages in an active process of perception with the aid of a few explanations that guide and focus attention. Making visible the inaudible here assumed prime importance. The eurythmy configuration was based on suggestions by Rudolf Steiner which enshrine the new principle of art in a special way.

Moderation and commentary:Volker Frankfurt

1. The “Peace Triangle” was demonstrated in two different forms, with the second, relatively unknown suggestion by Steiner representing a present and future change, whereas the first embodies or reproduces an ancient temple dance.

2. The eurythmy emancipated itself from the rhythm of syllables and words with the onward striving anapest. In the mutually independent configurations of “the word of the feet” and “the singing of the hands”, a musical polyvalence, as it were, comes into play, and can exert an awakening and activating effect on the observer.

3. As the next stratum, the sphere of speech sound was taken up. We started from the normal formation of speech sound, subsequently bringing into visibility the past and inaudibly present motif (line) through speech-sound formation in standing; thus present

Rapt attentiveness prevailed, in which the new artistic principle could be realized in initial, tentative form – as was confirmed by the many positive responses.

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bEComing SElf – ConnECting with thE woRld

Jost Schieren

The concept of art in education1

The poem can be seen as a fundamental motif of education, as what we strive for as educators: we want to lead children into the “miraculous glory of the world’s realms”, so that they attain active participation in the world, uniting with the surrounding world in an intact and immediate way. What kind of education can lead them to such engaged participation in and integration with the world?

rEcognizing rEalityGoethe already occupied himself with the question of engaged participation in the world. In his “Faust” he explored the fundamental question of how human beings can grasp hold of reality with their awareness. There he says:

… so I perceive, then, how the worldis held together, inwardly entwinedI’ll gaze upon all active power and seeds,No longer rummaging in empty words.

Up to that point, Faust has studied all the disciplines of his day, without being able to still his thirst for a profound and all-embracing capacity to penetrate reality. He continues:

I see that knowing nothing is our lot;and this is close to burning up my heart…To live like this – even a dog would not!

Faust comes up against the brick wall of contemporary science and knowledge, and so decides to pursue a

What living, sense-endowed being does not love, above all other miraculous phenomena of space outspread around him, the all-pleasing light – with its colors, its rays and waves; with its gentle, ubiquitous presence as awakening day. Like the inmost soul of life itself, the vast world of the ever-moving stars breathes it and dances swimming in its blue surge and flux – the sparkling, ever-resting stone breathes it, and likewise the sensate, sucking plant and the wild, burning, many-configured beast; above all these, though, the magnificent stranger with pondering eyes, hovering gait and delicately closed, tuneful lips. Like a king of earthly nature it invokes every power to countless transformations, joins and releases unending alliances, informs every earthly being with its heavenly image. Its presence alone reveals the miraculous glory of the world’s realms. Novalis

These lines from the poem ‘Hymns to the Night’ by Novalis testify to a state of consciousness that has poured itself out entirely into the world of earthly phenomena. One has the sense here that light embodies a power from which earthly things have arisen, and that human consciousness unites with this power of light. The poem passes through all realms of nature in the manifest world, that of the stars, the stones, plants, the ‘burning’ animal, and finally the kingdom of the human being who can gaze out (“pondering eyes”), can walk (“hovering gait”) and is capable of expression and language (“tuneful lips”).

1 This is - only very sightly edited – a transcript of a lecture given during the eurythmy conference at the Goetheanum (Dornach, Switzerland) on April 27 2011.

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different path – which seems to him the only remaining way out of his impasse:

This is why I’ve given myself to magic –so that through the power and mouth of spirit,may be shown to me all kinds of secret.

In the figure of the earth spirit, the inner coherence of the world that he seeks appears to him. The earth spirit says:

In the flux of life, in storm of deedsI flow up and downBack and forth weave!Birth and graveThe eternal seaA changing weftIncandescence of life;And so I work at the rushing loom of time To weave the living cloak of the divine.

The earth spirit is the power penetrating, permeating and animating the phenomena of the world. Faust believes himself close to attaining his heart’s desire. He says:

You who roam the whole world round aboutO noble spirit –How close to you I feel.

His thirst for knowledge has reached the goal he wished for. But now the earth spirit turns him back, repudiating him with these words:

The spirit you grasp, not me, is the one you resemble.

immanuel KanT’s “copernican revoluTion”With this comment by the earth spirit, Goethe invokes a fundamental philosophical mood that originated in

his time: for it was only a few years later that Immanuel Kant wrote his “Critique of Pure Reason”, making a similar statement to that of the earth spirit in “Faust”:

For laws exist as little in the phenomena but only relative to the subject in whom the phenomena are inherent - insofar as the subject has reason - as phenomena themselves do not exist but are only relative to the same entity inasmuch as it has senses. Phenomena are only mental pictures of things which exist unperceived and unknown as regards what they themselves may intrinsically be.

As mere mental pictures, however, they are not subject to any laws of relatedness other than those the relating capacity ascribes to them.

Kant establishes that no laws exist in the world but only in human reason. The human being has reason, which in turn has the predisposition to seek laws. We are satisfied when we discover laws; but whether they have anything to do with things themselves must remain open. According to Kant, we can only say that the laws discovered by reason have something to do with this reason. He goes one step further than this and says that this is true likewise of our senses. The phenomena of the world are also not intrinsically present but appear as they do in a form adapted to the senses. If we had other senses we would see different sensory phenomena.

The central statement here is that we stand in an entirely relative relationship with the world’s phenomena, one mediated by our reason and our sensory organization. Kant called these conclusions a “Copernican revolution” in philosophy. Copernicus transformed the geocentric world view into a heliocentric one. Kant effected a similar

J. W. Goethe, Oil painting by

Joseph Karl Stieler

Novalis, steel engraving by F. E. Eichens

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transformation in philosophy: before him, perception and knowledge were oriented to the things of the world, whereas after him, human knowledge and perception dictate the nature of these things.

The interconnections between things are solely a construct of human reason. Things manifest in the world as a mental picture which has no intrinsic connection with the things in themselves. Here Kant describes a consciousness that is completely self-enclosed, autistically self-referential. It is unable, on principle, to reach the things of the world.

boundary of KnowlEdgEIt is precisely with this issue that Goethe engages in “Faust”. This problem of a faculty of reason that is continually thrown back upon itself was described by Goethe in these words: “The spirit you grasp, not me, is the one you resemble.” Paraphrased, this means: Your perception and knowledge cannot grasp the reality of my being, but can only ever grasp itself, pursuing its own forms. It is like being in a hall of mirrors of knowledge. In “Faust”, we read:

Alas, cursed mouseholeWhere I am immured – a jailWhere even – as through darkened glass -The lovely light of heaven can hardly pass.

Faust is completely absorbed by this tragedy of knowledge. Knowledge finds no access to the things of the world. Yet the fundamental motif both of Goethe’s artistic work and his scientific endeavors was to open a path for human consciousness to reach the reality of the things of this world. His whole quest for knowledge aimed to penetrate into the sphere of lawfulness of things. In his late poem, Testament, he writes:

No being to nought can ever fall Eternity keeps rising in them all.Hold fast to being gladly, forBeing is eternal; lawsPreserve the living, rich arrayWith which the universe adorns itself each day.

These verses are reminiscent of the opening poem by Novalis; or rather, one should say that with those lines in “Hymns to the Night” Novalis is recalling Goethe. The first verse of “Hymns to the Night” is really a Goethean stanza, a turning to the phenomena of the world in accordance with Goethe: “Hold fast to being gladly …”

The laws immanent in all the world’s phenomena correspond to the light quality which Novalis describes.

rudolf stEinEr’s thEory of KnowlEdgELet us now turn to Rudolf Steiner. His whole early oeuvre engages with the question of human potential and capacities for knowledge, and with the problem of a thinking consciousness that is sundered from the world. According to Steiner, such mental picture consciousness is distanced, static and self-enclosed, allowing no genuine access to reality. Ultimately it does not lead to engaged participation in the world, or open our access to it, but leads instead to a loss of world. At the psychological level this leads to anxiety, despair and loneliness; and to their counter-images of power and violence. Because we cannot reach the things of the world with our consciousness, we try to take possession of them. Modern civilization bears the traits of this.

In contrast, Steiner sought to describe a productive consciousness, one capable of participating in and engaging with the world, and identifying with the things of the world. How can such consciousness be developed?

Goethe said that “by gazing upon ever-creative nature, human beings become worthy of spiritually participating in her productions”. “Ever-creative nature” is embodied in the image of the “earth spirit” in “Faust”. The aim of Goethean knowledge is not to be sundered from this power but to participate spiritually in its creative activity. This however requires the subject, the human being, to be worthy of such participation.

Rudolf Steiner also described how human consciousness can overcome the fixity of mental pictures. His theory of knowledge takes its starting point from two loci which I would now like to examine in more detail: from what he calls “perception” and “thinking” as the two points of departure of cognitive consciousness.

pErcEptionLet us first turn to perception: our mental picture consciousness continually misappropriates the perceptual qualities of our meeting with the world. We always “know” what things are like in advance, and therefore do not fully engage with the qualitative nature of a perception. For this, an artistically predisposed awareness is required, which does not rush past things with the rapidity of thinking but gives due and proper attention to the qualities of the sensory world of

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phenomena, for instance becoming aware of light and color qualities.

If for example we look at Monet’s painting “The Cathedrals of Rouen”, we can see that Monet was not in fact painting something representative that can quickly be grasped by our picturing mind, but was instead painting the manifestation of light and colors in objects. He was less interested in representing objects than in the opportunity objects afforded him for gaining sense impressions, perceptions. Monet did not paint what he saw, but seeing itself. This is why he continually painted the same theme, time and again. Artists sense that there is more to be found in the perceptible world, and that more can be drawn from it, than our picturing consciousness would have us believe. Cezanne, similarly, felt that the actual configuring powers of reality lie in colors. He called this “sur le motif” – a oneness through painting with the world’s configuring powers. Our picturing thinking suppresses this qualitative sphere of the perceived world. A conscious way of perceiving the world, as Goethe developed it, is however capable of approaching this qualitative sphere. Novalis said that to attain this we need to keep our ideational capacity “as though floating” over things. We must become somewhat more “fluid” in our concepts, and would then be able to observe the transformation that occurs in the concepts we produce. The subject then no longer superimposes concepts on perceptions, but the former are taken hold of by perceptions and, as it were, “concretized”. They are modeled by our perceptions. This is a sculptural process. In all his scientific works, Goethe focused on the way in which a mental or spiritual content is sculpted in this way through perception. He

was concerned with a beholding not of things as such but of how something spiritual manifests within them sculpturally. In relation to this sculpting process we can speak of a kind of incarnation process, which we only become attentive to when we raise what is perceptible through the senses somewhat higher into consciousness and slow down the rapidity of our capacity to form mental pictures. With Novalis we can say that in this way the illumining power of our thinking manifests in reality and incarnates in things. Goethe experienced this with every natural phenomenon.

consEquEncEs for EducationWhat consequences does this kind of reflection on the perceived world, this way of entering reality, have for education? Rudolf Steiner describes in great detail the advantage which the child’s consciousness has over adult consciousness. The child does not yet have such distance from things, is still in a more intimate relationship with them, and engages in a more spiritually active way with the world of phenomena. A good lesson should not interrupt this spiritual intimacy with the world through dead concepts or fixed pictures. The fact that school lessons often do this is the criticism leveled by Rudolf Steiner at the “head person” in education. He repeatedly points out that we must keep ourselves in living flux, must be very careful when relating to children that we do not prematurely impose our adult consciousness, which is a sundered one, on the sphere of child consciousness.

In this connection I would like to highlight three aspects which Steiner refers to as suitable for wakefully maintaining a living consciousness.

“for every capacity we form, we enter into harmony with a law of the world.”

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1. tEaching that taKEs account of tangiblE ExpEriEncEThe teacher should incorporate as many tangible experiences into lessons as possible. The “dignity of actual experience” must not be passed over. This takes time, but also practice at repeatedly engaging with the qualitative nature of an experience. It is important to prevent this process of practice from becoming boring. Children do not have meditative awareness, nor the strong will which an adult may be able to invoke to keep repeatedly engaging with a particular experience. As teachers we must meet the challenge in our method and practice of kindling joy in the encounter with the experiential world in lessons. The new and interesting, that is not yet understood, all that goes beyond the ideas which children have so far formed, must become part of the lessons they are given,

A further aspect relates to the will realm, which Steiner repeatedly mentions. He distinguishes between the “head” and “will” aspects of our being, pointing out that will forces are awoken in every perceptible, real encounter. The participation of the will when forming mental pictures is small; but qualitative, sensory experience challenges the will because we must become spiritually active in the encounter.

2. thE importancE of imaginationIn Steiner’s accounts, imagination is the ideally hovering, conceptual power which is capable of numerous, sculptural manifestations. In relation to the plant kingdom, and his idea of the archetypal plant, Goethe experienced how the plant is capable of endless metamorphoses, and that endless variations can arise from a single form. The world of mental pictures does not know this fluid, flexible sphere. But when it proves possible to maintain a hovering stance, acquiring not just a conceptual awareness of things but instead an awareness of concepts crystallizing in relation and response to perceptions, we can experience the hugely productive nature of a conceptual world, which connects with the world of experiential phenomena in ever new variations and metamorphoses. Then we can form living concepts and develop imagination.

3. thE forming of capacitiEsOf major importance for teaching is the forming of capacities. Capacities have something intrinsically mysterious about them. Here’s an example. Riding a bicycle can easily be described: one sits on the

saddle, places one’s feet on the pedals, holds onto the handlebars, starts pedaling and takes care not to tip too far to the left or right. A teacher could explain to children how to ride a bicycle in such terms. The following day he can ask them what they remember. There will certainly be children who can repeat what was said; but surely none of them will be able to ride a bike simply by being told what to do in this way. To ride a bicycle we have to practice, and learn at first hand about the laws of balance, so that we are in harmony with them. For every capacity we form, we enter into harmony with a law of the world that takes effect specifically in the realm of this capacity. If someone wishes to learn to play the violin, it is not really helpful to read various books about violin playing. Though this may tell us precisely what needs to be done, we are still unable to do it. This is the difference between a picturing awareness that knows everything, but is sundered from the world, and a real capacity. Every capacity is in complete identity with the law involved. In every such capacity the dualism of knowledge is overcome in real terms. Then it is no longer possible to say: “The spirit you grasp, not me, is the one you resemble.” Then the human subject is identical with the earth spirit. Every capacity we acquire is in harmonious accord with the things of the world. This is achieved through practice. As we practice, we adapt ourselves to the law involved, bring ourselves into complete identity with it. By developing capacities, we are as though re-formed, newly sculpted through and in correspondence with the things of the world. A capacity is, basically, a spiritual power of light that becomes capable of being performed in a particular realm of activity. Within the day aspect of our consciousness, we use our will to bring ourselves into accord with the laws at work in the world. The Novalis poem speaks of this; and this is also a vital, core aspect of education.

thE night sidE of consciousnEssIn the “Hymns to the Night”, Novalis speaks however of another side, the night aspect of consciousness. Immediately following the lines quoted above, he writes:

I turn downward toward the sacred, inexpressible, mysterious night. Faraway lies the world – plunged in a deep vault – lonely and desolate is its place. A deep melancholy strokes the chords of my breast. In dewdrops I wish to sink down and mingle with ashes. Far-distant memories, desires of youth, the dreams of childhood, the brief joys of a whole, long life, and vain hopes come crowding in grey garb, like evening mist after the sun

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has set. In quite other realms light has pitched its joyful tents. Is it never to return to its children, who wait for it with innocent faith?

What pours forth suddenly so sweetly foreboding under my heart, to swallow the gentle air of melancholy? Do you too, dark night, take pleasure in us? What is it you guard under your cloak that strikes upon my soul with invisible force? Precious balm drips from your hand, from the bunch of poppies. The mind’s heavy wings you raise upwards. Dark and inexpressibly we feel ourselves moved – in happy shock I see a grave countenance that bends toward me softly and devotedly, revealing the mother’s beloved youth under endlessly intricate locks.

There is something very moving about these lines. One wonders why Novalis turns downward, away from the light. Goethe considered it was necessary to engage with this sphere in the moral domain, and he embodied this artistically in the figure of Mephistopheles. Goethe did not, though, pursue this path in relation to cognition. Rudolf Steiner’s only criticism of Goethe was that he did not engage with the night aspect of our consciousness, with the power to turn downward.

In the sphere of this night side of our consciousness it is lonely, desolate and empty. This is a realm well known to teachers and educators: there is no biography which fails to approach this abyss of loneliness, this desolate emptiness. In terms of psychological development we speak of the “Rubicon” or of “puberty”: two develop-mental periods when the child and adolescent distance themselves from the world. We need educators who can accompany the child on this path with great care, inner concern and serious attention. For such a path – as Goethe recognized – is also one of moral danger. The capacities which we develop in the day side of our

consciousness are not intrinsically moral. They can be corrupted. The great capacities which we have by virtue of civilization can become immoral. So we have to ask where to find the source of ethics and morality. Society draws upon norms and laws to which one is meant to adhere. In his picture of the human being, Rudolf Steiner suggests that it is not part of human dignity to merely adhere to laws in matters of morality. He points out that human dignity lies solely in our freedom. In other words, we must find ethics and morality in ourselves. Freedom opens our gaze to the night side of consciousness, and underpins the independence of the human being. In relation to education, Rudolf Steiner says:

The greatest thing that one can prepare in the growing human being, the child, is that he comes to an experience of freedom at the right moment by understanding himself.

Education can only ever be preparation. Our education system is subject to the illusion of an ultimate pedagogy that leads to conclusive “qualifications”. We believe we have done our part once a child has passed his school-leaving exams, or gained a Bachelor or Masters degree or suchlike. This is the expression of a finalized sense of education. Real pedagogy, however, does not have the arrogance to consider it has ever come to a conclusion that can be certified as “finished”, but knows that it is always only preparatory activity.

What is it preparing?

Rudolf Steiner speaks of the child “understanding himself”. The child and adolescent should be able to enter into an understanding, intimate and intact relationship with himself. Instead of pursuing alien idols, ideals or norms, children should find a guiding thread to help them make decisions. We never know when such

“The greatest thing that one can prepare in the growing human being, the child, is that he comes to an experience of freedom at the right moment by understanding himself.”

r. st.

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an aid will become necessary in someone’s biography. The quote from Steiner speaks of the “right moment”. If education cannot wait for this right moment it propounds a world view instead – whether in Waldorf education or any other educational model. If we cannot wait for the moment when the child, adolescent or perhaps even the adult identifies with himself in response to an event, experience or a situation when a decision is needed, then we are intervening prematurely. It is here that the educator’s duty of care is needed in not corrupting the human being’s inner self, not overpowering it even with the best of intentions. Reticence is required in relation to this right moment. Only then is freedom possible.

thE riddlE of thE sElfJust as, in the day or light side of our consciousness, we gaze upon the riddles of the world before us, so we gaze upon the riddle of the self when we are in the night side of our consciousness. Waldorf education accomplishes something very special in relation to this riddle of the self. It has a particular view of the self that enables it to grasp that this self is entirely self-founded and not externally determined – whether through inheritance, genes, socialization, a divinity or any other agency. Every modern concept of the self tries to see the human self as causally determined rather than self-determining. With the concept of reincarnation Waldorf education has the capacity to view the self as founded upon itself. That is the distinctive and special thing. Thus it leads us into the night side of our consciousness – though it must do so with very great, individual care.

The child and adolescent who first become aware of this night region, lose all support: from their parental home and from their friendships with other children which they have hitherto relied on. The child at this stage loses the world, in a way similar to that described by Novalis. And Rudolf Steiner formulates this as follows in his fundamental question in the Philosophy of Freedom:

Is there a possibility of looking upon the human ente-lechy in a way that offers support for everything else that approaches us as experience and knowledge, but of which we have the sense that it cannot support itself?

This question is really already an exceptional condition. Normally we rely on our mental picture consciousness. As naïve realists we believe in our mental pictures. This belief in mental pictures is disoriented by Steiner’s epistemology. In puberty it is biographically disoriented; and in terms of our culture and civilization it has now

long since become inadequate. There is no support except where we find it in ourselves. In the Philosophy of Freedom, Steiner describes thinking as such a support: not the thinking described by Kant – a rational, concluded, finalized thinking – but intuitive thinking that is actively self-directing and thus able to connect with the world of spirit.

Rudolf Steiner highlighted the actively self-directing, intuitive aspect of thinking, which is always overlooked in conceptual thinking. We continually forget our thinking. Just as we forget our perceptions when we overlay them with mental pictures, so we forget that we are active in our thinking. In the Philosophy of Freedom it is stated that the first observation we can make of our thinking is that we forget our own thinking activity. If we observe this, we are gazing on the ceaselessly beating pulse of our own spiritual being. We are always active in thinking since we must continually produce concepts from the world of spirit to maintain our consciousness. What is the significance of this for educational practice?

forming judgmEntsThe Waldorf School does not propound a philosophy or deal in epistemology – something reserved for university study. Nevertheless, the concept of knowledge cited here affects Waldorf education. One way in which this becomes apparent is in the idea of judgment and its development, to which Steiner draws attention. Let us consider the following judgment: ‘The garden is big.’ What happens when we form this judgment? During my life I have gathered many experiences and connected them with each other. On this basis I come to the conclusion that the garden I see here is “big”. Then someone else comes along and says: “The garden is not cared for.” Who is right? Both of us, for both have gathered different experiences which underpin their judgment. One’s own judgment is always based on one’s own experience. Judgments are biographically determined. With every judgment one must find the strength to relate oneself to one’s biography. Each person does this in their own way – and this is the guideline for our existence. Rudolf Steiner now points out that in puberty the power of individual judgment arises. Adolescents at this age judge in a hugely experimental way. They form new social judgments, for instance seeking out new friendships and trying to socially understand the people they encounter. They enter into relationships and break up again. Childhood friendships fail because entirely new orientations are being sought. New esthetic

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judgments are also made: we can see this very well as illustrated by the music which adolescents listen to: they test what they like or dislike. This is also – though not always pleasantly - noticeable in their clothing, hairstyle and many other things. This seeking of judgments is inevitably experimental in nature.

Moral judgments are also very important: adolescents have a strong moral need for judgment which is frequently projected outward. They expect honesty, reliability and commitment from the adult. A teacher who is unjust toward his class, or does not keep to what he says, can no longer work with the class. Adolescents have a very fine organ for moral judgments.

The forming of judgments begins in puberty, but is prefigured already in the so-called second seven-year period. During this period, children gaze as though clairvoyantly on the power of judgment in the people around them.

A judgment is a confluence of two things: life experience and evidential insights. I have to reflect on what I have experienced, and have to correct myself where necessary. Above all, though, I have to gain certainty for a certain period from a judgment I have formed.

We cannot dispense with judgments, for without them we could not exist. At the same time we must be capable of continually grasping our own judging capacity anew, through our thinking. To do this we need a range of values, and this is a theme that plays a major role in Waldorf education. On the other hand, we also need educators and teachers who form carefully pondered, conscious and secure judgments, instead of swinging this way and that like journalists or politicians, whose judgments are not oriented to truth but to the broadest current agreement. Children in the second seven-year period must encounter people who have the power of forming individual judgments, so that in the third seven-

year period they can then experience this power within themselves.

The judgment that is formed autonomously in esthetic, social and moral realms, which grows out of free self-determination, and toward which one feels committed and responsible, is what Waldorf education wishes to help adolescents develop.

idEalismSomething else is also important for adolescent education: idealism. Idealism is more than having ideas. I can have the idea of world peace, but when I invest no energy in this idea it remains a mere idea. The ideal connects the idea with the core of our being. This occurs in each person in a unique and distinctive way. Teachers who wish to implant their ideals into children only do harm. As educators we must give children the freedom to develop their individual idealism so that they find in themselves the strength to nourish their ideals – otherwise their idealism easily turns into fanaticism or nihilism. Mostly we fluctuate between fanaticism and nihilism if we do not bear within us the core of our own value measure. We can glimpse this core in the eternal values of the spirit, which Plato called truth, beauty and goodness.

Truth is entire accord and identification with the laws of thinking, but out of one’s own activity.

Beauty is identification with what is individual. As Rudolf Steiner stressed, beauty is not the manifestation of truth, which would be too general or totalitarian. Beauty is always something individual, and thus also one-sided, a portion or detail. It is a kind of relinquishment of the whole for the sake of what is individual. If we study the biographies of artists, we can find phases of great renunciation and pain because each must wrestle his way through to an individual concept of beauty. And for us, who absorb artworks receptively, beauty is the

“during this period, children gaze as though clairvoyantly on the power of judgment in the people around them.”

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possibility of identifying with this individual quality.

Goodness or the good, is the power to identify with the necessity of development, a willingness to develop oneself further by one’s own will. This requires the I’s capacity for devotion.

Those who can glimpse these eternal values in the night side of consciousness notice that it starts to shine. Novalis, too, gazed upon this inner luminosity of the night. In the second part of his poem, he writes:

What pours forth suddenly so sweetly foreboding under my heart, to swallow the gentle air of melancholy? Do you too, dark night, take pleasure in us? What is it you guard under your cloak that strikes upon my soul with invisible force? Precious balm drips from your hand, from the bunch of poppies. The mind’s heavy wings you raise upwards. Dark and inexpressibly we feel ourselves moved – in happy shock I see a grave countenance that bends toward me softly and devotedly, revealing the mother’s beloved youth under endlessly intricate locks.

When we gaze upon the night side of our consciousness, we gaze on the riddle of the self that starts to shine and glimmer. In the eternal values of “truth”, “beauty” and “goodness” we gaze upon our originating mothering spirit. Out of this power, this gentle, inner luminosity, out of his idealism, the young person can enter into the world.

The mood of this is expressed very beautifully in Goethe’s poem “To the Moon”. One can sense here that the “moonlight” is really an inner light of consciousness that has found clarity within itself, has found ideals that do not ray out into the world in a solar fashion, do not overwhelm reality, but instead shine into the world of phenomena as gentle light.

To the Moon

Once again you’re filling trees and valleySilently with shimmering mist;Likewise one day my soul entirelyYou’ll finally release.

Soothingly your gazeAcross my fields you spreadLike a dear friend’s gentle eyesOver my destined fate.

Every echo my heart knowsOf times of gladness, loss:between my grief and joysI wander in loneliness.

summaryOn the one hand we have considered an incarnation process, which is in close connection with the day side of our consciousness. Here capacities are developed through engagement with the world’s phenomena.

The other side, which we can call the night side of consciousness, is not connected with incarnation but rather with excarnation, or we might more appropriately say, transubstantiation. Here the enacting power of thinking – the other zero point and riddle of our existence – raises itself from our normal mental picture consciousness and thereby enables us, as individual human being, to connect with the world of spirit in freedom.

One the one hand, therefore, we have more of an incarnating or also sculpting experience; and on the other, a dissolving or also musicalizing experience.

An educational process has to be aware of both aspects. The first step here is to overcome mental picture consciousness. I have to emerge from the “concretized” nature of mental picture consciousness. Rudolf Steiner repeatedly emphasized that we should not enter school with our head alone. As soon as we step back from “concretized” thinking, we can experience how we ourselves are “concretized” or sculpted through the world’s forces. And we find how, in relation to thinking, we enter the eternal reality of our own being.

In Theosophy these polarities of human existence are described in one plain sentence:

If we wish to understand a human spirit, we have to know two things about him: how many treasures of the past lie in him, and how much of the eternal has revealed itself to him.

The “treasures of the past” are the capacities which we take with us from our encounters with the world, which are sculpted in us as we engage with the world’s phenomena.

The “revelation of the eternal” is something that we ourselves must create out of the riddle of the self; something that each person must acquire by his own efforts. No school can dictate how this should happen, but can only accompany and support so that the individual can approach his own eternal being. Here, in my view, eurythmy bears a very particular responsibility for the practice of the art of education – because it works with the polar forces of sculpting and world-becoming on the one hand, and musicalizing, self-becoming on the other. There are many moral dangers on the night side

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of consciousness, and numerous problems of over-fixity on the day side – for instance, that we grasp ourselves in our capacities in far too narrow a way. In engaging on a daily basis with these streams of forces in eurythmy, children and adolescents can gain the security that, even when they lose the support of their mental picture consciousness, they can nevertheless still experience a consolidating power from the perceptual aspect, and a power of self-becoming from the thinking aspect: they find that they can move freely in sculptural and musical realms. The fundamental motif of Rudolf Steiner’s pedagogy is to gradually develop this inner freedom to an ever greater extent.

If, as goal or also as background to our pedagogical work, we have an understanding of the free human being, this means that we must be able to lead the child and adolescent into a certain intimacy with himself. If ethics and morals are not to be mere norms laid down by society, then their source must be found within us. It is a core concern of Waldorf education to access this realm of freedom in the human being. A pedagogy that is prepared to lead the child and adolescent into the night side of consciousness, to honor such freedom, has a special responsibility here. It must attentively accompany this process. Artistic work makes a vital con-

tri bution to preventing children and adolescents from succumbing to the dangers of this path and from feeling a sense of loss and desolation. It is necessary for the soul forces of thinking, feeling and will to be grasped and managed more consciously in the artistic process than our mental picture consciousness usually allows. In ordinary mental picture consciousness, thinking corresponds to wakeful consciousness which shows me the things of the world in their static appearance. Naïve realism, that takes things as “given”, simply accepting the world as it presents itself, is the mental stance that normally facilitates thinking. In the artistic process however, it is a matter of experiencing thinking as a confluence of individual enactment and universal content. In such thinking I enter into the realm of activity of my own being, but rather than “subjectivizing” myself I notice that I am entering into harmony with the laws of thinking; and I also do not “objectivize” myself but enter into direct dialog. In enacting my own thinking I can sustain myself.

Feeling is similarly transformed. Normally, feeling is a reflex response to the things of the world, in which enjoyment and dislike, pleasure and displeasure are expressed. It is a subjective comment on the encounter with the world. Now feeling becomes the power instead

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to enter into the qualitative realms of the world and sense them. It becomes an organ for actually experiencing the distinctive and unique nature of the things of the world.

The will, that otherwise intentionally transposes one’s own wishes into the world, that appropriates things as it sees fit, is now directed inward instead and becomes the power to form oneself.

Two will gestures are cultivated in Waldorf education: the will to connect with the world, which is sculptural; and the will to develop oneself, to become oneself, which

is musical. The three soul forces of thinking, feeling and will, are transformed as follows:

Thinking: free identification with one’s own ideals.

Feeling:compassionate devotion to the phenomena of the world.

Will: the power of ceaseless inner activity.

Prof. Dr. Jost Schieren, born 1963 in Duisburg. Studied philosophy, German literature and art history in Bochum and Essen. Exchange program student in Ann Arbor (Michigan, USA). 1997 PhD entitled: “Anschauende Urteilskraft. Methodische und philosophische Grundlagen von Goethes naturwissenschaftlichem Erkennen.” [“The power of intuitive observation. Methodological and philosophical foundations of Goethe’s scientific writings”] From 1996-2006 taught German at Dortmund Rudolf Steiner School. From 2004-2008 was an academic associate at Paderborn University. Since 2008 he has been professor of school pedagogy with an emphasis on Waldorf education, and director of the educational studies department at Alanus College in Alfter, near Bonn.

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Demonstration on the theme of eurythmy in education

Moderation and commentary:Stefan Hasler

dEmonstrationThe conditions of human existence as characterized in the above themes are powers which surface everywhere in diverse ways in the eurythmy elements we are familiar with. They reveal themselves not only in the great opposites of speech and tone eurythmy, vowel and consonant, Apollonian and Dionysian perspectives etc. but we can also engage with them in a playful and creative fashion within a single eurythmy element.

These two aspects of existence can also be perceived in teaching, determining the artistic process in each situation and can, according to need, configure the further course of a lesson. As educators, therefore, we can ask how, with a few correcting words, we can offer the right help for whatever goal we are seeking.

How can the art of education draw on eurythmy elements to unfold as tangibly as possible, in a living way?

four aspecTs of The five vowels (a, e, i, o, u) as ExamplE:See indications by Rudolf Steiner for Tatiana Kisseleff, given in Dornach 1914 / landscape format

“Pure geometry”

A [ah] = “Angle of arms, arms still with hands”, E [eh] = “Crossing”, I [ee] = “Every stretching”, O = “Every enclosing rounding of the limbs”, U [oo] “Express both hands parallel”.

The laws are there. They must be felt and configured (“day side”) as soul response to outward influences.

A [ah] = “Astonishment, defense”, E [eh] = Reverence,

fear, disgust”, I [ee] = “Intimation of experiencing oneself within oneself”, O = “Lovingly enclose, wonder”, U [oo] = “Amazement”;

Inner musical in- and out-streaming

(Tone Eurythmy Course, lecture 1)

E [eh] experience as minor experience, I [ee] as transposition from one to the other, and O and U [oo] experience as major experience

A further step inward, the concordance series

(Tone Eurythmy Course, lecture 3)

Melodic connection between: A [ah] = third, E [eh] = fifth, I [ee] = seventh, O = second and U [oo] = prime tone (inner world as “night side”)

Within the vowel exercises a path is sought in four steps, corresponding to the transition, described in the lecture, from an experience of the “day side” to that of the “night side”.

thrEE aspEcts rElating to thE consonant bB configured out of the experience of the color yellow in relation to the artistic eurythmy medium of “movement”

B formed out of the experience of the color blue through the artistic eurythmy medium of “feeling”

B grasped out of the power of the red color experience through the artistic eurythmy medium of “character”

As elaborated in the lecture, this leads to transformation of the developing soul forces of thinking, feeling and will in the child’s education.

intErwovEn with thE abovE lEcturE wErE thE following: • The first stanza of “Hymns to the Night“ by Novalis. A solo elaboration as mood illustration of the mode of action

of the “day side”

• The second stanza from “Hymns to the Night” by Novalis as mood illustration of the “night side”

• The first three verses of “To the Moon” by Goethe as mood illustration for connecting the “day” and “night” sides

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thE bEing of EuRythmy

Michael Debus

The concept of art of eurythmy in social domain

everything, beings are ultimately active. Thus certain beings stand behind the professions. Re newal of a profession as anthroposophy understands it is con-nected with the desire and capacity of its mem bers to establish a relationship with this being. Once, in a cer-tain situation, Rudolf Steiner said: ‘When this, your movement, revealed itself to me…’2 In other words, there was a time when this was not yet the case. And then came the moment of revelation, when the being stood before Rudolf Steiner’s vision. This is comparable to the moment when one looks directly into another person’s eyes: a specific moment, the first beginning – the initium – of a relationship.

thE origins of EurythmyWe can therefore now ask:

When did Rudolf Steiner for the first time “look into the eyes” of the being of eurythmy?

If we trace the gradual development of eurythmy, this moment can become more tangible. Involved in it, however, is a wider spiritual context which we will now examine.

thE sphErE of christ’s rEappEarancEThe day before yesterday Dr. Zimmermann said, in conclusion, that he was sure that eurythmy’s source lies in what is given with the Representative of Humanity. This means, however, that this source lies immediately in the sphere of His reappearance. From 1910 onwards, Rudolf Steiner began to speak of Christ’s second coming, which could be experienced as early as 1909 as a change in the etheric aura of the earth.3 But much earlier –

When eurythmy is being discussed, I sometimes hear the voice of Else Klink saying the word “eurythmy”. She had a bright, sometimes almost girlish voice. And when she said something like, “Yes, eurythmy …” – with a slight ly lengthened vowel at the end, one had a direct experience, could ‘hear’ that she was not speaking of a subject but of a being she held in great reverence, to whom she had a living, perhaps even religious relationship.

This is connected with the first question:

What does “renewal of the professions through anthro-po sophy” really mean?

towards a profEssional EsotEricismRenewal is not the same as “reform”. Waldorf education is not a revised form of education, in the same way that anthroposophic medicine is not just a medicine that uses herbs. New approaches are involved – or in other words a really new beginning, as expressed in the Latin word initium, from which initiative and initiation – that is, esotericism – are derived. Basically we can only speak of a renewal of the professions insofar as each individual “wills” this through his own initiative, and insofar as the profession becomes his inner path of schooling. Renewal of the professions means: moving toward a professional esotericism. Some professions were comprehensively renewed through Rudolf Steiner’s guidance, while in others only the beginnings of this occurred – but it was always a matter of connecting with the esoteric foundations.

“Esoteric” (literally: within, inward) points to the inner nature or “being” of a theme. Behind and within

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already from 1905 onward – he speaks of this as a future event intrinsically connected with the sixth cultural epoch: “It is then that Christianity will really blossom, and heathenism will be united with Christianity.”4 And from 1908 it becomes clear in his accounts that this future Christ event will involve certain changes in the etheric realm.

loosEning of thE EthEric body and pErcEption of christIn April 1908, Rudolf Steiner speaks for the first time of the fact, derived from insight into the human constitution, that the etheric bodies of human beings are starting to loosen: “In fact, today humanity is once again at the point where the etheric bodies of a great number of human individuals are starting to loosen once again … But through the fact that the etheric body is loosening once more, everything that was formerly physical reality will gradually but inevitably become spiritualized.”5 Two days later a quite different indication came: Christ would come again, no longer in the flesh but in the etheric realm: “The Christ was only physically incarnated once. He will come again, though no longer in the flesh, but only when humanity comes to perceive Him in the etheric corporeality.”6

On the one hand we have a loosening of the human etheric body, and on the other the perception of Christ “in the etheric corporeality”. A subjective aspect drawn from the human constitution, and an objective aspect, here come together. Six weeks later in Hamburg, in lectures on the Gospel of St. John, he elaborated on this further:

He is there and will come again, not in a physical form but in one enabling those who have by then developed through the power of the Gospel of St. John to see him, really to perceive him, so that they are no longer skeptical when they have the spiritual power to see him. This is the world-historical significance of anthroposophic spiritual science: to prepare humanity and keep its eyes open when the Christ reappears in the sixth cultural epoch, and is active amongst human beings, so that for a large proportion of humanity can be accomplished what is prefigured for us in the marriage at Cana.7

Later he no longer connected Christ’s reappearance with the marriage at Cana but with Paul’s Damascus experience.

quEstion without rEsponsEThe Russian painter Margarita Woloschin, who later collaborated on the artwork for the first Goetheanum, was also present at these lectures on the Gospel of St. John. Rudolf Steiner asked her after the first lecture (on May 18), in which he had spoken about the Logos Mystery:8 “Could you dance this?” His question moved her greatly. She reports that Rudolf Steiner “remained standing before me for a while, looking at me as if he was waiting for something. However, I did not ask him.”9 One can imagine that this was a moment when Rudolf Steiner saw the being of eurythmy – in direct connection with the theme of Christ’s reappearance that forms the background to these lectures, and about which he spoke so clearly in his last lecture (on May 31, see above). The form of the question was unusual, for he never put pressure on people and always waited until

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he was asked. Might one perhaps, in relation to this question (May 18, 1908), very tentatively have thought in 2008 of 100 years of eurythmy? But no response was forthcoming initially, and things took a different course. When the time came, eurythmy arose without Margarita Woloschin, who worked instead as painter for the Goetheanum and for anthroposophy.

thE rEappEarancE of christ and EurythmyWe can now trace the two themes further, keeping in mind that they merge into one: the being of eurythmy is connected with the reappearance of Christ. In the few years up to 1911 the theme of Christ’s reappearance is deepened and elaborated until finally the decisive conversation took place between Rudolf Steiner and Clara Smits.

What was Rudolf Steiner speaking of during these three years?

He looked back to the Mystery of Golgotha and its effect on human etheric bodies: “Since then, therefore, something exists in the human etheric body which does not go hand-in-hand with death … a kind of spirit sphere forms around the earth out of vivified etheric bodies; it is this that Christ calls the Holy Spirit.”10 How does this spirit sphere arise? Rudolf Steiner’s moving reply is as follows: Through the fact that the blood of the Redeemer “etherised” as it flowed into the earth: “The portion of the blood that flowed from Christ’s wounds at Golgotha etherised, and was really taken up by the ether forces of the earth, so that the blood flowing from the wounds became etheric substance.”11

Which etheric substance does this refer to?

What is the etheric realm altogether?

thE “fifth EthEr“ and moralityWe know of four types of ether: life ether, chemical or sound ether, light ether and warmth ether. They work within the world of the senses and belong to the realm of the (Father) Creation, as this arose through Saturn, Sun and Moon evolution, and the first half of Earth evolution. If we were to see the fact that eurythmy relates to the “etheric in the human being”12 only in terms of the four ethers, we would not be considering all dimensions of eurythmy. What flowed into the earth at Golgotha and immediately etherised – or in other words became etheric substance - does not simply belong to the realm of the four ether types but is an entirely new etheric substance, a kind of “fifth ether” of

quite different properties. However unbelievable it may initially seem, this etheric substance is moral in nature. The life forces of the future will always also at the same time be moral forces. Esotericists also foresaw this:

Oriental Mysticism has spoken for many millennia of this point in time … when the earth will be immersed in a moral ether atmosphere. These schools of mysticism already saw that this moral impulse, this moral earth atmosphere, would emanate from the being whom we call Christ.13

If we accept this idea, further questions will follow from it, such as:

What is “moral ether”?

Is a person’s recuperative capacity dependent on his morality?

Does morality have anything to do with life force?

We will indeed have to draw increasingly on the “fifth” ether for support when outward nature no longer has sufficient etheric forces for our regeneration. Perhaps someone will tell us of a place where one can recuperate well because strong etheric forces are still active there – and we will accept this news gratefully. But at some point this will certainly change because too many others will also have discovered this place.

What can we do when the etheric forces of nature, which help us recuperate, gradually fade?

We will have to learn to recover by different means. Rudolf Steiner, for instance, never took a holiday.14 So how did he recuperate? We can have a sense that things will be very different in future when the “moral” or freedom ether can become the prime life source for us, instead of the gradually vanishing natural life forces.

dirEct EffEct of thE EthEric upon thE physicalSubsequently – all within these three to four years – Rudolf Steiner describes the etheric body of the reappearing Christ in a very unusual way:

Human beings will know, if they do not study such things with clouded senses, that this involves the etheric body that will wander at large within the physical world; they will know, however, that this is the only etheric body that can be active in the physical world in the same way that a physical human body is active.15

Isn’t the etheric body always active in the physical world?

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Certainly the etheric body can work within the physical world but only when incarnated in a physical body. Then it can also move this body, and keep it alive. But it cannot directly work upon the physical world. For instance, it cannot directly grow a plant out of dead material but only work through incarnation in a seed. Direct activity would be magic, a “magic act”, would be direct, spiritual intervention in the physical realm. But this is precisely what Rudolf Steiner describes here in relation to the quality of future etheric forces – initially an unaccustomed and very unusual perspective for the etheric realm!

Two-and-a-half months after describing the new etheric quality in this way, in mid-December 1911 in Berlin, the decisive conversation took place between Clara Smits and Rudolf Steiner regarding her 19-year-old daughter Lory. This was three years after Rudolf Steiner had asked Margarita Woloschin whether she could dance what he had related about the Logos – and received no further question from her about this in response. Now a mother asked him this question in relation to her daughter, who wished to study some form of movement. This was the crucial question. He immediately responded, saying that he had long “been striving for an art of movement based on etheric movement impulses”.16

In the following months a further motif relating to the etheric realm came to the fore. After giving funda-mental lectures in Karlsruhe in October 1911 on the resurrection of the physical body, the “phantom”, scarcely a year later - in his September lectures in Basel on the Gospel of St. Mark - a quite different perspective on the resurrection was added, with a description of the

resurrection body as a concentrated etheric body. After death Christ reappears, “no longer in the physical body but in the concentrated etheric body; and concentrated or condensed in such a way that the disciples were able to perceive Him; so that the Christ could walk about and be visible even after the event of Golgotha.”17

What is meant by a concentrated etheric body?

Was the body of the resurrected Christ only a phy si- cal body (redeemed phantom) or a (concentrated) etheric body?

Parallel to his lectures in Basel, with the quite new idea he proposed there that the resurrection body is a concentrated etheric body, Rudolf Steiner gave to Lory Smits, in nearby Bottmingen, the first, fundamental instructions for the new art of movement.

BirTh and naming of The Being “euryThmy”Five days before Michaelmas, at the end of the Basel cycle and on the very first day of the lessons he gave in Bottmingen, the being was baptized who had just come to birth but was as yet nameless. To Rudolf Steiner’s question about a name, Marie von Sivers replied “without even a moment’s hesitation”: “Eurythmy”. And without hesitation, likewise, Rudolf Steiner agreed.18 With the arrival of the name, the being could also be “addressed”. And from then on he no longer spoke as previously about the etheric body but about eurythmy. Now one must trace further the sequence that begins with his elaborations on the etheric and the reappearance of Christ by pursuing his comments on eurythmy.

A little later he also assigns eurythmy its place in the sequence of the arts. In a description of the seven

Margarita Woloschin Lory Maier-Smits

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arts he names only six, assigning each of these, in an abstract sense, to a member of the human constitution. Starting from architecture (physical body) through music (assigned to the I), poetry (assigned to the spirit self) he arrives finally at eurythmy.

To which constitutive member could eurythmy be assigned other than to the spiritualised etheric, the life spirit?

Because in our surroundings, within our spiritual surroundings, the life spirit is included in what we will later absorb, this life spirit could also be implanted at some point in the spirit self. But naturally that must at first be something, still, that can only attain a certain degree of perfection in a very distant future. In seeking to implant the life spirit in the spirit self, you see, the human being must live entirely in an element that is still wholly alien to us today. So in this realm we can at most speak as we speak of the babbling of an infant compared with the later perfection of speech development. We can have an inkling that one day an art in a state of great perfection will arise which in a certain sense extends beyond poetry in the same way that poetry – though of course no superior status is intended here, merely a classification – extends beyond music, and music beyond painting, painting beyond sculpture, sculpture beyond architecture. Of course you sense that I am pointing here to something that we know only today in its very, very first beginnings, which as yet can only be present in its very first, tender shoots: to eurythmy.19

Eurythmy incarnated in this process from May 1908 to the moment in September 1912 when it received its name; and then, in December 14, acquired its place amongst the arts. It now had to grow, “go to school” and gradually develop.

euryThmy and The moral-eTheric realmWe have seen that eurythmy is not simply concerned with the “etheric” in general, which is far too vague, but with a very specific etheric quality which – to summarize – is connected with the fifth ether, the Christ ether, with the very special quality of this ether substance which is today interwoven with the earth’s aura. The eurythmist draws on this ether aura when he really does eurythmy. Eurythmy is an art of movement, but not every art of movement is eurythmy. This leads to the following, very subtle question:

Where does eurythmy begin and where does it end?

The answer is connected with morality and freedom, that is, with the quality of these special ether forces that relate to the human being as a whole. We cannot separate the human being from the artist (eurythmist): they are one. And if anthroposophy has the task of preparing humanity for the reappearance of Christ, eurythmy as art has the same task. And when we speak of an etheric body that “can be active in the physical world in the same way that a physical human body is active”, or in other words can be “magically” active, this points at the same time to eurythmy as a “moral art”. Morality exerts a directly transformative effect on the physical body.20 One might in fact say that the reappearing Christ does eurythmy. And if we speak of His “concentrated etheric body”, this is also a description of the reality of eurythmy.

ahriman and EurythmyNow I’d like to turn to something that Herr Schieren referred to yesterday as the “side of darkness”. The dark side of eurythmy is Ahriman. Let me quote a few sentences here by Steiner:

Through the movements of eurythmy we try as it were to draw out what the I can engender as movements within the etheric body – as far as this is already possible today. If you imagine a poem or a piece of music performed in eurythmy, and could abstract from it or think away the physical body, and just look on what the etheric body is doing, then you would have the I in movement within the etheric body.21

The I engenders movements in the etheric body, an occult occurrence. Eurythmy “draws it out”, makes it visible: the esoteric thus becomes exoteric. In this sense eurythmy is also an externalizing or manifesting art.

Just ponder the idea for a moment that every eurythmy movement draws out what the I engenders as move-ments in the etheric body.

Who is active here?

Does eurythmy engender or manifest something which – in occult terms – is already present?

Is eurythmy a speaking or a listening art?

There are many further questions that might follow here. Rudolf Steiner continues:

We seek to wrest this eurythmy free of Ahriman; for the fact that Ahriman entered the world led to the etheric

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body becoming so hardened that human beings could not develop eurythmy as a natural gift. People would quite naturally do eurythmy if Ahriman had not hardened the human etheric body to such a degree that the nature of eurythmy cannot come to expression.22

Eurythmy must be wrested from Ahriman, otherwise he takes it over, occupies it – and then Ahriman does “eurythmy”. This is a very sensitive point.

Ahriman’s activity in the world leads to a hardening of the human etheric body – and here we must distinguish clearly between “concentration of the etheric body” and “hardening of the etheric body”. When one really does eurythmy, one is working with the concentrated or densified etheric body. But when Ahriman collaborates in “eurythmy”, one is working instead with the hardened etheric body. The human etheric body has already become so hardened through Ahriman’s activity in the world that we can no longer develop eurythmy as a natural gesture.

naturE and naturalnEss in EurythmyWhat is a “natural” gesture? If you know Steiner’s Mystery plays you may immediately recall Maria, whose naturalness is characterized by Benedictus as something sublime. This is not however the naturalness of nature, with which we are endowed at the beginning of life, but an acquired naturalness: “As the ripe fruit of many lives, the soul who shows such harmony embarks on earth existence. And her childlikeness is blossom, and not the root of her essential being.”23 Only the mature and experienced person can in this way regain “naturalness”.

Eurythmy thus aims to be something natural without being drawn directly from nature. If what we do is solely “natural”, Ahriman is involved in it too. In acquired naturalness, however, he is overcome. Eurythmy is the acquired naturalness of movement.

There is only one place in us where in a certain sense the etheric body can still naturally perform eurythmy: the larynx and lungs. There the etheric body is not yet

hardened and still also does eurythmy today. Everything has to pass through this “needle’s eye”:

The etheric body which is really prompted to live in eurythmy movements when we sing and also speak, is prevented by the body’s heaviness – that is, by Ahriman – from actually carrying out these movements, and can only bring them to expression through one part of the body alone: it can only place them into lung and larynx by pressing the air through them. And thus speech and singing come about.24

The eurythmist, however, also draws what is “natural” out of the rest of his being. The wonderful thing is that the whole human being can then do eurythmy, not just the etheric body of larynx and lung. This is connected with the capacity of the new etheric to work directly on the physical as concentrated etheric body “that can be active in the physical world in the same way that a physical human body is active.”25 The eurythmist works with this etheric body that is not merely incarnated as a natural given, but instead seeks to be “drawn out”.26

The fact that human etheric bodies are loosening today also plays a role here – for if these loosened etheric bodies do not find orientation, this leads to chaos.

“remedy” To counTer The seducTion of advErsary powErsRudolf Steiner very pointedly characterizes the effects of Lucifer and Ahriman on us as our standing at the verge of an abyss: “The first abyss is the lie, the degeneration of humanity through Ahriman. The second is self-seeking or selfishness, the degeneration of humanity through Lucifer.”27 That humanity has not - so far - been swallowed up by this abyss is connected with the fact that “the spirits who help humanity progress have taken counteracting remedies.”28 In relation to Lucifer this remedy is pain and suffering, in relation to Ahriman, it is living through and experiencing our karma:

What remedies have the spiritual beings who wish to sustain the human being in his progressive evolution

“eurythmy is connected with the fifth ether, the christ ether.”

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undertaken to counter this seduction, to counter error and illusion [lie] arising from the sensory realm? They have taken steps to ensure that the human being … is placed in the position of gaining the possibility – once more out of the sensory world – to rise above error and sin; in other words, they have given human beings the capacity to bear their karma, to unfold and enact it. On the one hand the beings who sought to redeem the temptation of luciferic beings brought pain and suffering into the world, and also what is connected with it, death; and on the other, those who sought to repair what flows through the sensory world from error have given the human being the possibility through his karma of resolving all error again, of erasing all evil he has brought about in the world.29

The fundamental lie of Ahriman lies in the idea that the material world is the whole of reality. It is not easy to escape this lie. Whenever we are uncertain we seek a solid hold in the physical, material world. This alone is experienced, initially, as reality, where we stand with “both feet on the ground”. Yes – but this “reality” can also be an ahrimanic illusion. “Standing with your feet on the ground” can mean very different things.

The “remedy” against Ahriman is called karma. Because we have karma, we continually come up against the fact that the material world is not the only reality, and not even the decisive one. This experience can occur whenever, as Rudolf Steiner so often reiterates, a “karmic” roof-tile falls on our heads: we suffer the consequences and may think of asking: What is this trying to tell me? What significance does this have in my current biographical circumstances? But if the roof-tile is trying to tell us something and even – but originating where? – has a “meaning”, this can no longer be a purely material event. Then the real cause of its falling lies beyond the material realm subject to laws of natural causation. We have to acknowledge that either the tile fell on my head due to natural laws, and then it was not karma; or that it fell on my head for karmic reasons, that could not have been caused solely by natural laws.

But how does karma work without overriding or annulling natural laws?

Taking the idea of karma seriously therefore has repercussions for our worldview. It opposes ahrimanic inspirations as a “remedy”, for karmic laws derive from the moral world order to which Ahriman has no access. He knows only the physical world order. That is the

thrust of the “cardinal question” as Rudolf Steiner puts it (see note 19 above):

For what has so far led human beings to their present condition has specifically created a situation in which people today cannot understand how moral world order and physical world order are interdependent. Today they cannot properly interpenetrate because the human being is to become a free being. But we must look upon the world’s points of intersection in such a way that we find natural order and moral order at one there.30

ahriman’s intEntion: anonymityAhriman is aware of the remedy to his power of temptation, and is battling against it. He is battling primarily against the idea of reincarnation and karma.31 Over and above this however he is trying to sunder the human being from his karma altogether, by leading him on paths whereby he loses his karma. In today’s civilization we can see everywhere how people are being almost systematically sundered from their karma by “anonymization”. The anonymous – meaning “nameless” – is always opposed to karma which always only proceeds from tangible connections between one person and another.

One need only mention the phrase “facebook” to point to a very efficient system of human relations whose power of attraction rests substantially on “anonymous intimacy”. The contradictory nature of this corresponds also to many people’s response: the more anonymous “closeness” is, the more intimately yet entirely publicly they may express themselves. Indeed, the term “anonymous intimacy” is a very telling description of Ahriman’s realm. Today such phenomena run through all areas of our civilization: Ahriman is trying to sunder the human being from his karma.

Opposed to this is what is increasingly becoming reality since the 20th century out of the sphere of the new ether forces, and which Rudolf Steiner describes so succinctly: “Christ becomes the Lord of Karma for human beings. This means that the ordering of karmic matters will in future occur through Christ.”32 This brings with it a profound transformation of karmic order, which we can only briefly indicate here.

christ and ahriman in thE EthEric sphErE“But Christ will be there; through His great sacrifice He will live in the same sphere in which Ahriman also lives.”33 This will primarily be the sphere of the etheric, where Christ and Ahriman directly encounter each other. The

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reappearance of Christ in the etheric opposes Ahriman,34 whose prime realm of activity lies in the etheric body.35 And this realm in which Christ and Ahriman encounter each other, is at the same time the realm of eurythmy. The battle of Ahriman against Christ who reappears in the etheric will of course be reflected also in the battle for eurythmy. The prime question today is how this encounter will play out.

In pre-Christian times, humanity was dominated by Lucifer: people increasingly became individual beings, separated out, each a being for himself. In the pre-Christian period this must be balanced by people finding their way to each other again. Thus the decisive task of the post-Christian era can be called “brotherliness”. Christ brings brotherliness.36

Ahriman also appropriates this. He likewise wishes to bring people together, and as such stands in a polar relationship to Lucifer. But he wishes to bring them together in a way that “functions well”. This is why ahrimanic social impulses always give rise to organizations that run smoothly. The aim of his activity is really to create a “social machine” in which each person is just a cog with a specific function. If everything is properly thought through, and contracts are precisely formulated, without loopholes, the whole thing will work. This gives rise to a kind of movement that is really not movement at all, since the machine always remains the same. Paradoxically, one can speak here of “static movement”. Ahriman creates the illusion that everything is running with increasing speed: surfing the internet, data transfer, real-time communication, flights to other continents. But in reality everything is static.

tasKs for EurythmyWhat has been said here about Ahriman leads us directly to the task of eurythmy in our time. In karma, the “spirits who help humanity progress” have given “counteracting remedies” against Ahriman. In eurythmy, a remedy is

offered that people today must themselves introduce into humanity’s evolution. This involves a path

from Ahriman’s “static movement” into real movement,

from the hardened etheric body into work within the concentrated etheric body,

from the “magic” of technology into the etheric body’s direct influence on the physical.

This can give us a picture of the being of “Eurythmy”.

Imagine a group of people who are doing eurythmy together – “really” doing so in the sense indicated here. This is a process in which each personally and individually meets every other. Doing eurythmy means keeping an etheric (not external) “eye-contact” with the other person. One cannot move eurythmically without always keeping the other etherically “in view”. This is the opposite of “anonymous”. Eurythmy is one of the most important antidotes to anonymity. Just imagine that airports not only had chapels where, thank God, one can find some calm, but also eurythmy rooms where passengers could do eurythmy for ten minutes to once again liberate themselves from anonymity. “Airport eurythmy” – a great future task of social eurythmy.

Then the “moving relationship”: people in a group of people doing eurythmy have a tangible relationship with one another and are at the same time in continual movement. Experiencing oneself in such a group one can feel this organism to be the opposite of the “functioning” social machine. In eurythmy nothing must ever only function, but must pass through living movement. Nevertheless, movement also needs form. How does this arise? Ideally, the form would arise entirely out of the movement itself, just as the vortex does in moving, flowing water. As those involved moved, form would become apparent to them. But because we are initially so intellectually oriented, we start with form (drawn on the board) and find our way from there

“the realm in which christ and ahriman encounter each other is at the same time

the realm of eurythmy.”

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into movement. For modern people this is a necessary compromise. But the path, really, is ultimately to just configure movement. Only configured movement is meaningful, and every eurythmy movement finds its meaning in a eurythmy form.

Karma and Eurythmy formSo we can regard people as moving eurythmically. It is then not hard to perceive that we are gazing into the workshop of karma. Karma is really nothing other than the “eurythmy form” of destiny. From supersensible worlds the gaze falls upon people who are moving karmically, who have relationships, who meet and part again – moving in “eurythmy forms”. The picture can arise that eurythmy forms are created by those “threads” which “karma spins in world becoming”.37

And the reverse is also true. Every eurythmy form creates karma - not externally, by changing karma, but in a very different way: by bringing karma into movement. People who have grown karmically “rigidified”, without a “way out”, who can no longer either move forward or backward, gradually come back into movement. Karma is not “difficult” or “easy” – those are just conventional terms. Karma is actually movement, and everything is good as long as we are in motion. Here there is no other “good” or “evil”.

Eurythmy is visible speech and music. And I’d like to add that eurythmy is visible karma. This is not far-fetched, for Rudolf Steiner said the same thing about the forms of the first Goetheanum: “And amongst everything else that has already been accentuated, was the fact that this Goetheanum, this Goetheanum building and the way in which more and more anthroposophy would have been practiced within it, was an education in karmic vision.”38 And we hear from Tatiana Kisseleff that the eurythmy forms have the same spiritual origins as the forms of the Goetheanum building39:

Rudolf Steiner points to the fact that the eurythmy forms arose parallel to what he experienced in creating the forms of the Goetheanum building – and thus there was complete harmony between them. He said that they both arose through the same type of artistic impulse. It is probable that eurythmy could not have been discovered without the work on the building. Prior to the idea for

the Goetheanum, it was only present in its tentative beginnings.40

Thus we are here fully concerned with overcoming ahrimanic intentions:

Ahriman wishes to sunder people from their karma; the eurythmist elaborates karma anew with human beings in the forms of eurythmic movement.

Ahriman wishes to make people anonymous; the eurythmist speaks the “name”, allows the individuality to manifest through interpersonal relationships and the way in which people stay in “etheric view” of each other while doing eurythmy together.

summaryEurythmy movements work directly out of the etheric on the physical body. Not all movements here derive from the incarnated etheric body. As well as the natural movements which the eurythmist performs, additional etheric forces come from the etheric body that works directly upon the physical, as Rudolf Steiner described this in his accounts of the reappearance of Christ41.

The fact that the movements of the loosened etheric body are led into purposeful movement means that we are preserved from the chaos that is surfacing everywhere today.

The resulting influx of forces helps us not to lose our karma to Ahriman, but to gain access to new, karma-forming forces. Eurythmy is visible karma.

Eurythmy means a stimulus and strengthening of forces which Rudolf Steiner calls “future forces in the etheric body”. The human being is thereby connected with his future, with all the forces from which Jupiter will one day arise.

And finally, the last and perhaps most decisive point: eurythmy is a moral art, for it draws on moral etheric forces, the fifth ether. And this addresses and challenges the whole character and disposition of the eurythmist. The eurythmist can only be a eurythmist with his whole being. Either he is a eurythmist or he lives in the illusion of being able to practice eurythmy, possibly “partially” amongst other things. Real eurythmy is a moral art and a bastion against Ahriman in our time.

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Michael Debus, born 1943, studied mathematics, physics and philosophy; subsequently he undertook theological training at The Christian Community’s Priests’ Seminar. Since 1969 he has been a Christian Community priest, directing the School of the Christian Community (Priests’ Seminar) in Stuttgart between 1978 and 2007. He lectures in Europe and abroad, and has published books and journal articles on theological, anthroposophic and contemporary issues. He is an office holder in the Stuttgart Anthroposophical Society.

Drawing by Urs Schwendener of the figure of Ahriman, as lower part of Rudolf Steiner‘s wood sculpture „The Representative of Humanity between Lucifer and Ahriman“

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1 This essay is based on a lecture, “The Concept of Art of Eurythmy in Social Domain”, given on April 28, 2011 during the professional conference for eurythmy at the Goetheanum.

2 GA 344, September 6,19223 GA 175, February 6, 19174 GA 92, December 3,19055 GA 102, April 13, 19086 GA 265, April 15, 1908, p. 4057 GA 103, May 31, 19088 GA 103, May 18,19089 Margarita Woloschin, Die grüne Schlange, Stuttgart

1954, p. 200010 GA 112, July 6, 190911 GA 148, February 10, 191412 “Because this art of eurythmy relates to the etheric

in the human being, it had to arise at a time when today’s spiritual science is being sought.” (GA 277, December 26, 1923, address at a eurythmy performance)

13 GA 130, October 1, 191114 With one possible exception, in the early summer

of 1911, when he stayed for some time in Portorose (now Slovenia); but there too he was working, for example on his idea for the “1912/1913 Calendar” (with “Soul Calendar”).

15 GA 130, October 1, 191116 GA 277a, p. 817 GA 139, September 21, 191218 As reported by Lory Maier-Smits in GA 277a, p. 4419 GA 275, 29.12.191420 In this lies the core truth of the honoring of religious

relics. Rudolf Steiner referred to understanding of this fact as the cardinal question for modern human beings: “The cardinal question for the human being’s world view [is] initially: How is morality, the moral world order, connected with the physical world order?” (GA 202, December 18, 1920)

21 GA 161, January 9, 191522 Ibid23 The Portal of Initiation, Scene Three

24 GA 161, January 9 191525 GA 130, October 1, 191126 “We try as it were to draw out what the I can

engender as movements within the etheric body – as far as this is already possible today.” (GA 161, January 9, 1915).

27 GA 194, December 15, 191928 GA 197, March 22, 190929 Ibid30 GA 198, March 28, 192031 One example is the discussion between Ahriman

and Maria in the second Mystery play, The Soul’s Probation, scene 11.

32 GA 131, October 14, 191133 GA 26, October 26, 192434 “Ahriman, on the other hand, influences our etheric

body and everything connected with disruption of our judgment can be traced back to him: both the involuntary nature of making a wrong judgment, and also the intentional telling of a lie. If we succumb to falsehood, Ahriman is at work in our etheric body.” (GA 125, November 26, 1910).

35 The realm of activity of Lucifer lies more in the astral.

36 “He is a follower of Christ who loves what is around him in brotherliness. If therefore we refer to the children of Lucifer in older times, the Christ principle is what can now cause us to say that Christ is the first-born amongst many brothers. And the brotherly relationship to Christ, the sense of being drawn not to a father but to a brother, whom we love as the first among brothers yet still as a brother, is the primary relationship to Christ.” (GA 113, August 31, 1909)

37 The Portal of Initiation, Scene 338 GA 236, April 27, 192439 see drawing by J. Starke p. 8240 Report by Tatiana Kisseleff in GA 277a, p. 10841 see “Direct effect of the etheric upon the physical”

(p. 44)

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Eurythmy to start the day: “Eurythmy in social domain”

The wave arises.

5. Now I’d like everyone in the room to hold this moving W [V] in a B, to form it.

This is successfully done.

6. Thus we configure the wave, hold it firm, then make a shared O in order to lovingly and empathically perceive what has newly arisen, and connect ourselves with it inwardly. Then we take hold of the whole surrounding space and lead it toward us in a T. The spiritual streams into each person.

7. Now the whole thing once again, as I speak the following sentence with it:

“Das Wort wallt durch die Welt und die Weltenbildung hält das Wort fest.”

[“The Word flows through the world and world formation holds the word firm.”]

Demonstration of a thematic eurythmy intervention for all conference participants at the start of the fourth day.

intEntion• To arrive fully in day 4, in oneself, in the shared space, in one’s inner hearing and perceiving.

• To move with attentiveness focused on an outward, encompassing sphere, before sedentary calm is required, and wakeful focused listening to a speaker.

• To open a qualitative space for spiritual content; to connect with the power of Michael through the W [V] and the spoken sentence.

procEssWelcome to participants with a few general statements on the theme and the course of the day. Overview in a few stages of the shared work with me. I ask whether there are non-eurythmists in the room, so as to modify my explanations accordingly if needed.

Moderation and commentary:Andrea Heidekorn

1. Perceive one’s own sitting, now, directly after arriving. Sit down upright and awake, with feet firmly on the ground; seek the center in sitting.

2. Lean back a little, opening the front space, feeling ready to absorb, then lean forward beyond the center, attentively perceiving – then find the center again anew.

3. Now, under the aspect of W [V] delicately feel and move over the body’s surface, encompassing one’s own form in a W [V]-like way.

4. Now inwardly perceive the other people in the whole hall. Move the W [V] together over our heads. Give the W [V] a direction from below right in the hall to upper left – this is the best way for all to perceive each other mutually as they move. A wave should arise, without prior agreement, without anyone directing/conducting.

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tRAnSfoRmAtion And nEw bEginning– the therapeutic impulse

Peter Selg

The concept of art in eurythmy therapy

with great engagement – both joy and concern – from the very beginning. Difficulties and problems were rife – difficulties which most of you are familiar with, and with which we will be indirectly concerned in the course of this talk as we search for the “concept of art in euryth-my therapy” in the interplay between renunciation and benefit.

I myself cannot speak to you from decades of experience as a physician who has engaged with eurythmy therapy. I speak as the director of an institute for fundamental anthroposophic research; and in what follows I would like to consider which principle comments by Rudolf Steiner relating to eurythmy therapy’s original development, may be of interest and further significance for our theme. We know that diverse publications of secondary anthroposophic literature – such as the well-known work by Margarete Kirchner-Bockholt – relate to the basic elements of eurythmy therapy. In that volume she starts directly with the speech sounds. However, I believe that it is now time to step back a little – not from eurythmy, not from the speech sounds, nor from the task itself – but from our own activity and view of ourselves. In a certain sense we need to climb a mountain and ask ourselves what actually constitutes the special nature of eurythmy therapy, and what, in particular, the artistic element in it is.

Let us first cast our gaze toward this from the distance, but then come increasingly closer to it; and, at the end, through the demonstration of eurythmy therapy, its healing nature will hopefully become more clearly apparent and tangible.

Our theme today is “The concept of art in eurythmy therapy”. In deriving eurythmy therapy from artistic eurythmy, an art of healing must be developed. The artistic element as such should not be lost, though it must undergo a metamorphosis, a transformation which we should not regard as too minor in nature. Ita Wegman coined the phrase “sacrificed art” for the artistic therapies. In the idea of sacrifice lives the fact that something in existence gives itself up, does so entirely – although only in order to be able to arise again at a new level as another kind of existence. Eurythmy therapy is without doubt something very different from eurythmy – and the path to achieve it leads eurythmy through a crisis, an existential crisis. Transfor-mation and new beginning in service to therapy, to the physical body.

We should note however that insofar as this transformation is unsuccessful, eurythmy loses much of its artistic character, becoming instead an applied technique that is not an art of healing. We know that eurythmy itself caused Rudolf Steiner some concern, as is clear from what he said to Tatjana Kisseleff in 1914 when he passed responsibility for eurythmy to her in Dornach – at a time when there was as yet no stage here:

If you take over leadership of eurythmy here, I am certain that eurythmy will be protected from soullessness. It does in fact face great dangers, above all that of superficiality. You, Frau Kisseleff, will be able to give and preserve its cosmic and sacred context.1

As far as I am aware, there are no such comments by Rudolf Steiner in relation to the field of eurythmy therapy. Nevertheless, he likewise accompanied its development

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thE thErapEutic aspEct of EurythmyAfter initiating eurythmy, Dr. Steiner repeatedly also used the term “therapeutic eurythmy”. And it seems important to me to note that from the very beginning a question arose as to the healing potency of eurythmy as such – one might even say before eurythmy began.

The legendary first discussion – which should not be misunderstood as mere anecdote – that Rudolf Steiner had with Clara Smits about the new art of movement, pointed in that direction.2 You very probably recall the situation: an esoteric pupil, whose husband had unexpectedly died, came to Rudolf Steiner in the search for a professional career for her gifted daughter. The centenary of this meeting is celebrated this year, for it occurred in November 1911 in Motzstrasse, Berlin, and ultimately led to Rudolf Steiner’s eurythmy work with Lori Smits. In this first conversation, Clara Smits asked, among other things, whether the new art of movement which she began to discuss with Rudolf Steiner, as a possibility for her daughter, might not also have a therapeutic emphasis. Could one not, she asked, used rhythmic movements that stimulate and strengthen the human etheric to invoke recuperative and healing effects? This question or impulse was therefore present from the very beginning, posed by someone in dialog with Rudolf Steiner. Clara Smits herself was healthy, but was still affected by recent events during which she had witnessed illness and death. She had not only lost her husband so far in her life, but also, before this, her first child – and this was what had led her to Rudolf Steiner and anthroposophic spiritual science. In other words, questions about illness and death as aspects of life -

and also therapeutic elements of anthroposophy – had accompanied this woman for some time, and therefore, we can suspect, motivated her question about the therapeutic potential of eurythmy from the outset. Here, and frequently on subsequent occasions, Rudolf Steiner pointed out that the eurythmy he envisaged would exert a healing effect, and could bring about an inner harmonization of the human organism, its functions and systems, “insofar as these form a totality in the human organism”.3

These things are well known and have been in the public domain for many years. I mention them however, and recall them here, since the Goetheanum is a place (or the place) where what people individually experience, study and know within the anthroposophic movement can be present between them as real being – that substance which we can re-encounter here in a shared space. It is therefore advantageous, in my view, if here and in what follows I also speak of contexts which most of you are already familiar with, that you have heard, read about, thought about and considered.

To return to the theme, according to Rudolf Steiner eurythmy is something which the etheric body as it were asks to be given by the human being. Already at

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the first eurythmy performance on August 28, 1913, Goethe’s birthday, in Munich, Dr. Steiner spoke of how the new art of movement can work in a healthy way on the organism and the soul:

By adapting the human body to the world of movements, and pouring the certainly healthy mobility of the human being into an instructed form, it will also be possible to work with healing effect on the human organism and the human soul constitution. Much that is unhealthy in the outer world is due to the fact that there is so little harmony between what the physical body does in adapting to the external world and what the etheric body really requires of the physical body through its inner mobility. This lack of accord is something we wish to remedy through a movement capacity of the physical body which corresponds to the etheric body.4

Without doubt, this is one of the core issues in modern civilization: whether the etheric, the life body can find a continuing dwelling in the human being and in all living beings on earth, or whether humanity will carry on driving it away, the etheric body, the body of formative forces, so that its capacity for life and existence is permanently destroyed. Without doubt, the most profound problems of humanity and all life on earth are connected with this question and task – through to its Christological dimension. This is surely clear to all who have gathered here. That is why the question of healing is such a serious one – and is integral to eurythmy from the very beginning.

During this conference the talk by Herr Schieren, and also the performance by the children, have clearly highlighted the dimension of “pedagogical eurythmy”, also in its health-bringing aspect. Rudolf Steiner once said to teachers in Stuttgart in relation to eurythmy that it could “give rise to very surprising healing processes.”5

thE bEginning of Eurythmy thErapyThe generally therapeutic dimension of eurythmy, however, does not yet give rise, as Rudolf Steiner sees it, to eurythmy therapy, which is a very specific art – and signifies something quite new and different. We must therefore ask when, why and under what circumstances, as well as how and with what consequences, what we usually call eurythmy therapy arose in addition to general eurythmy. As early as July 1920, during a faculty meeting at the Stuttgart Waldorf School, Rudolf Steiner said: “I have been asked whether something couldn’t be done in the way of eurythmy therapy. I will try to do

this.”6 In this context, Steiner did not say that eurythmy itself was already healing – but spoke rather of the task of a specific new “attempt”.

We do not know who had previously asked Rudolf Steiner about a distinct eurythmy therapy, for the traditional account, which is no doubt partly true – I am referring primarily to the well-known reminiscences by Erna Wolfram van Deventer – date the whole thing to November 1920.7 It seems conceivable that someone like Karl Schubert, who was in charge of the remedial class at the Waldorf school, and collaborated with Elisabeth Baumann, may have approached Steiner with the request of which the latter spoke to the teachers in July 1920. Eugen Kolisko, too – in his function as school doctor – and Ita Wegman as director of the Clinical-Therapeutic Institute in Arlesheim, may have wondered whether, if ordinary eurythmy already has such healing and recuperative capacities, this could be enhanced as a specialized therapeutic approach, a distinct form of therapy. “It would be a fine task,” said Rudolf Steiner in Dornach at the opening of the Goetheanum in September 1920, soon after his comment to the Stuttgart faculty, “to develop a kind of eurythmy therapy, if only there was a little leisure to do so.”8 “Leisure” - Rudolf Steiner needed time, a certain free space in the midst of his numerous obligations, the rapidity of the life he was living and the countless projects and concerns of these years. He spoke of a “fine task”… He had likewise originally put off Lori Smits in the summer of 1912 in Munich when postponing the eurythmy instruction she had been hoping for, with these words: “I cannot yet tell you. During these few weeks in Munich I cannot take the time that I need for this.”9 Soon after this she did after all receive her lessons in Basel.

The further development of eurythmy into eurythmy therapy was doubtless a great and intrinsically complex task. Eurythmy has to be “modified” in order to be able to exert a healing effect on the sick organism.10 According to Rudolf Steiner, it would involve similar but “reconfigured” movements which basically would be “after all of a different nature”.11 Steiner spoke of an emphatic modification which would at the same time signify an intensification, indeed an “accentuation” of eurythmy – and would require “great care and attention”.12 The eurythmy therapy that was to be created would no longer involve a general harmonizing of functional systems but very specialized, specifically elaborated exercises and procedures, capable of

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effectively counteracting processes of illness in the body. But, as Rudolf Steiner suggested, a great responsibility was associated with this – and this emphasis ought not to be forgotten. Rudolf Steiner knew that what he was prepared to develop in detail and to pass on also had the potential of causing harm if it was wrongly used or abused: that it could intervene profoundly in the human organism, in the physical body. One can get the sense that Rudolf Steiner hesitated, and that all this was not merely a problem of lack of time or “leisure”. Irrespective of this however, the aspect of time pressure was doubtless also a root cause of the delayed beginning. In 1921, during a faculty meeting in Stuttgart, at which Eugen Kolisko (again?) requested eurythmy therapy exercises for difficult children – actually very sick children who were however attending the school – Steiner said that he had long considered elaborating the system of eurythmy therapy. Nevertheless, “It has become difficult for me recently to still undertake this. One would have to develop and elaborate eurythmy therapy.”13

It does not seem unimportant to me to mention all this, for, as stated already, it was not so straightforward as the literature suggests: that Erna Wolfram (later van Deventer-Wolfram) and Elisabeth Baumann came to Rudolf Steiner and asked him, at which he gave the eurythmy therapy course (after discussion with Henk van Deventer). This is not wrong – but one should know that this theme had been living in Rudolf Steiner for some time, entirely based on existing needs: as task, spiritual intention and aim. Changing “etheric” eurythmy to a stronger focus on physical corporeality was in accord with the trajectory of anthroposophy, its incarnation and healing tasks. The fact that both eurythmists – supported by medical student Henk van Deventer – eventually approached Rudolf Steiner with determination, was however essential and decisive: they were people who stood within practical work, and were in addition willing to share responsibility for the

whole venture, that is, to make eurythmy therapy their personal concern. In relation to the Mystery plays and the fact that they were written down at a late stage – during the nights prior to rehearsals – Rudolf Steiner once said, simultaneously cheerfully and seriously, that it would be senseless to write a play before an actual performance was in sight … In a certain sense it was the same here. The “elaboration” of eurythmy therapy, of which Rudolf Steiner spoke at the faculty meeting in Stuttgart, was not a theoretical or cognitive problem, but a task of living and lived life. As a social initiative began to form which desired to take up eurythmy therapy, Rudolf Steiner was able to take a further step. One of Rudolf Steiner’s first questions to medical student Henk van Deventer was whether he had people to hand who could really put into practice, and take responsibility for, what was given. This was ultimately a question directed to him, Erna Wolfram and Elisabeth Baumann themselves, their own resolve: whether they were willing to commit themselves fully to the further work.

The risKy venTure of “euryThmy” and “euryThmy Therapy”Rudolf Steiner did not invent eurythmy therapy; at most he discovered it. One might say that the being of “eurythmy therapy” is a real individuality made possible by world evolution, in the shape of a new form of therapy. The question, though, was into which hands it would come, and into what kind of time.

This question was already pertinent for eurythmy. When Rudolf Steiner proposed the first public eurythmy performances, he told the eurythmists in so many words, “Bring eurythmy onto the stage. And if people don’t like it, just carry on! And if they do like it, ask yourselves what is wrong with this eurythmy.” Eurythmy could not be to the public taste in the age of dance expressionism and exhibitionism, during the passionate, hectic and tense years immediately after the end of the war: at a time

“The prerequisite for practicing the profession of eurythmy therapy is knowing and mastering all the possibilities of artistic eurythmy.”

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when all anthroposophy was severely criticized in public and a bone of contention. Rudolf Steiner, however, impressed on the eurythmists that a new culture was involved here, one needing to be prepared, and that at present it would inevitably meet with resistance and repudiation – and yet, in a dialectical way, was needed by this very time and culture.

Thus the artists around Tatjana Kisseleff and Marie Steiner began to perform publicly in the theatres of big cities. Alongside meeting with approval they also had to suffer boos and catcalls; but they carried on in the knowledge that eurythmy was bringing people something at odds with contemporary life because it bore elements of the future in it. Stage eurythmy was already a risky venture, and for Rudolf Steiner no compromises were possible here – nor for the whole of anthroposophy. It was a matter of presenting it in a pure, unadulterated form, trusting in its unique nature, its power and efficacy. This was – and continues to be – a question both of ability and courage.

As an art of healing, eurythmy therapy was in some respects still more at risk. Nevertheless, Rudolf Steiner ultimately decided – despite some reservations – to act and step forward into the future, trusting in human capacities. He did not just give Erna van Deventer and Elisabeth Baumann a few exercises, but in April 1921 gave a whole, fundamental course – as part of a medical course, with full participation of the physicians. The two ladies were amazed at what they – according to van Deventer - had “set in motion” with their request. In fact they had not set eurythmy therapy in motion at all, but rather, in the way already briefly outlined, had provided the social opportunity which enabled Rudolf Steiner to take such a step. It was clearly during the period of the course that he said to Erna van Deventer that the prerequisite for practicing the profession of eurythmy therapy was knowing and mastering all the possibilities of artistic eurythmy. Furthermore he said:

Find it in the cosmos as the powers of the planets and fixed stars, as reflections of human language and music, then through movements of the human body itself, finding the human being, and coming to know yourself as the being who reflects macrocosm and microcosm in his own body! Only when you have grasped this stance and task will you be able to move on from the periphery of eurythmy to the center of the healing aspect of eurythmy.14

An important insight: point and periphery, as in the meditation for curative educators. How should we under stand this?

hEaling as cEntral christian tasKAccording to van Deventer, Rudolf Steiner spoke of the healing aspect of eurythmy as its real center. This may seem astonishing from an artistic perspective – especially if eurythmy therapy is seen and (mis)understood as a small and less illustrious appendage of real art. In my view however we should acknowledge that according to Rudolf Steiner healing is the central task of the Christ impulse in the present age and the near future – in a world that is progressively falling sick at all levels. Anthroposophy as such serves this Christ impulse. And we can be certain that everything which Rudolf Steiner gave through anthroposophy in the 20th century involved a great healing endeavor both in relation to and for the human being. What could be more important in an era of euthanasia, assisted suicide, racism, social Darwinism, anti-Semitism, collective fascism and world wars than giving a real answer to the question, “What is a human being?” Everything one thinks about the human being, his existence, his “value” or the “sum of his life” has repercussions. As you know, these questions and problems are not outdated, yet the great majority of what today, for example, is argued in favour of the ending of life in the euthanasia or assisted suicide debate originated in the 19th century. The human capacity to forget, not just spiritually but historically, is great, inconceivably great – even for the human tragedies of the 20th century along with their conceptual foundations and implications. What is at stake here is the image of the human being, with all aspects of its consequences for medicine and society. At the core of anthroposophy stands the redress of the “idea of the human being”15 and the healing impulse connected with this idea; and thus also a concern for and attentiveness to the bearer of incarnation – to the physical body as the “end of God’s work” as Oetinger said. Human corporeality as the crowning of the work of God!

Periphery and center – which also simply means that eurythmy works outward and eurythmy therapy inward. Rudolf Steiner’s differentiated account goes like this:

Whenever artistic eurythmy is performed, human attention – and thus all processes in the human physical, etheric and astral organism which bear and sustain attention – turns to the corresponding speech sound or word configuration or artistic phrasing, or metric and

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poetic form etc. The human being is entirely given up to what is possible in the way of artistic configuration of speech sounds when he engages in artistic eurythmy – since, quite naturally in artistic eurythmy, we adhere to the same form and configuration that speech itself has. Thus, in actively performing artistic eurythmy, we are given up to the outer world.16

Then he adds, in relation to eurythmy therapy:

In a certain sense therefore, what lives in artistic eurythmy as dedication to the configurations of speech sound, word and phrasing, is reflected inward.17

Turning toward the world thus becomes turning toward the body. “Periphery” becomes “center”. This human body is itself created out of the great macrocosm; from cosmic breadths is formed the “spirit seed” in order that it may become the human being’s physical body on earth.18 Eurythmy therapy addresses this body.

Eurythmy thErapists as sKillEd connoissEurs and artistsBecause it leads inward, an extraordinary responsibility is associated with eurythmy therapy, which also became indirectly apparent in the eurythmy therapy course. Rudolf Steiner expected (or required) of eurythmy therapists – not just the physicians – that they should acquire a “fine insight into the human organism” and acquaint themselves with the whole range of the human being’s “inner, organic movement potentials”, developing “a kind of feeling for the way the human organism is formed”, for its formative tendencies.19 Not only the physicians – without whom there can be no eurythmy therapy, and of whom Rudolf Steiner hoped that they would also themselves carry it out with their patients – but eurythmy therapists too should become skilled connoisseurs of human corporeality. And at the same time they should be artists – for, according to Rudolf Steiner, to accomplish eurythmy therapy one needs an “artistic grasp of the human organism”, and a feeling for the “artistic dynamic at work in the whole human being”.20 He said in the course that eurythmy therapists needed to acquire an intuitive, artistic insight into the body, along with its functions and morphological gestures, in order to penetrate ever deeper into the whole process that becomes visible in every movement form, but which also manifests through many other human forms of expression: to penetrate into its developmental and formative processes.21 In eurythmy therapy – unlike eurythmy – it is by no means a matter

of the general harmonizing of function systems, but of giving help in an individual, pathophysiological situation: of finding and practicing what the individual needs in order to be able to re-establish his specific equilibrium. This involves very specialized and effective exercises that must be developed out of the particular pathology. In their fundamental medical textbook, Rudolf Steiner and Ita Wegman wrote:

Where the movement gestures of artistic and pedagogical eurythmy are modified in a way that enables them to flow out of the human being’s sick aspect in the same way as they otherwise flow out of his healthy aspect, then eurythmy therapy arises.22

This is also very probably why Rudolf Steiner hesitated to embark on the course. He needed people who really could or wished to do this – in other words who, in this regard and orientation, were willing to embark on a committed, demanding and tough path of schooling;

Notebook entry by Rudolf Steiner for the eurythmy therapy course:

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and he needed the active interest and responsible collaboration of the anthroposophic physicians – which came toward him then in the person of the young Henk van Deventer. Here we should recall that we now live in a time when the human body has become a plaything not only of passions but of technologies that manipulate the body. We know the extent to which human corporeality can be manipulated today.23 Here, however, in the sphere of eurythmy therapy developed and illumined by Rudolf Steiner, we find the very opposite – a knowledge of human corporeality that makes it possible to individually support and nurture it in accordance with its own potential, movement directions and processes. It was and is a matter of precisely adapting the moved gesture to a given organ disorder, thus working in upon the “inner nature of the sick person”.24 Rudolf Steiner also told the young anthroposophic curative educators on the course that they should be aware of the dimensions and responsibility of their task, since working in the field of anthroposophic curative education involves exerting a preparatory influence on the formative principles of a future corporeality – a task that is really reserved for the gods after death. (“But when we come to working out of the spirit, we must daily and hourly feel we are facing decisions in relation to every action we undertake as to whether we can do it or should leave it undone, or should remain entirely neutral. And such decisions require courage, you see, inner courage. That is the very first condition when one wishes to accomplish something in a field such as this. And this courage only awakens if we repeatedly become aware of the greatness of such things: that we are doing something that otherwise is done by the gods in the life between death and a new birth. To know this is of very great significance. Absorb this meditatively. It is very important to be able to think this.”25). Something similar – although certainly not identical – is also true of eurythmy therapy. It is a knowing and intervening art – and depends on trust that as human beings we have the capacity not only to form and shape our own body but also that of the other, of the patient. This theme is a thread running throughout the eurythmy therapy course. One should not overlook it because of the many exercises that call upon our prime interest. In this course, whose full, cognitive penetration is something we must still await in the future, Rudolf Steiner developed a meticulous procedural methodology for engaging with physical-etheric corporeality, which we would really need to discuss in detail – something there is no space and time for here.

At this point, however, I would like to point out that a particular morality or ethics is connected with eurythmy therapy, which is distinct from artistic eurythmy, and belongs intrinsically to the field of medicine. This is an ethics and spirituality from which arises creative work on the other and with the other – the real nature of the “creativity” in this domain. Rudolf Steiner said to Erna Wolfram:

Allow the patient, the child or adult, to practice threefold walking for seven minutes, forward, backward and sideways; then you will see what he or she lacks. You will see the outward, visible reflection of the etheric body, and can ask yourself what there is too much of, and too little of. You have to learn to see this.26

It was and remains necessary to develop a real, tangible awareness of what occurs in the body; to acquire what Steiner calls the “sense, the feeling grasp of what is going on there” 27 – in the pathophysiological process and in the influence of a specific exercise on this patho physio-logical process. Eurythmy therapy can only succeed, according to Rudolf Steiner, if eurythmy therapists themselves penetrate the mystery of the body, and the mystery of speech sounds: “You must go through the whole alphabet – perform speech sound movements 20 times, 30 times, but with love for these sounds – and then their being will reveal itself to you!” said Rudolf Steiner, once again to Erna Wolfram.28

living onE’s way into thE patiEntOne may perhaps say that eurythmy therapy is “sacrificed art” inasmuch as it does not live and fulfill itself in artistic movements but rather – in great humility and even selflessness – in the being of the other as a patient. Like every great art, eurythmy also works with powers of devotion. Artistic eurythmy is concerned with the artistic work and performance, and like every great art, too, it flourishes from humility. Anyone who has witnessed really important artists can see that they are never vain, self-regarding people. At least while practicing their art they serve the work, its presentation or manifestation. They do not place themselves above it and merely deliver it, but make its appearance possible. Great art makes one humble, and at the same time lives from the forces of community, is usually a social edifice built by many. In eurythmy therapy however, the work that is performed – without audience or applause, in quiet enclosure – is the process of healing, the “healing work” on and within the other’s body. Here too community is central – between the therapist

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and patient, physician and therapist, but also in the whole, wider context of therapy. We owe so much to the nurses and other therapists in relation to a deeper understanding of the human being’s corporeality and capacity for movement! Only if one has worked in a real team does one know what a healing community is. The “artwork” involved here is the individual patient, the sick body, and the language and movement – we could also say, the cosmos – that express themselves in it.

At the hospital of St. John of Jerusalem, at the beginning of this order – which had a pronounced spirituality, as Schiller later elaborated – the knights were required to address patients as “My Lord Patient”.29 This related to perceiving Christ in the sick person who, in the view of the therapeutic order of St. John, was closer, as sufferer, to the Christ being. This reversal of traditional medical culture arose with the St. John’s Order: no longer did people repudiate the patient as someone who had fallen and should be excluded from society, but instead they inwardly elevated themselves to him. The patient was regarded as the core focus of this Jerusalem hospital – where the knights of the order also lived initially. Transposed to the present and our theme of eurythmy therapy, this means that the art of eurythmy therapy is expressed in devotion to each respective individual, to the unique other in his present situation, out of which therapy must be developed in “perceiving selflessness”. On one occasion Rudolf Steiner encouraged curative educators who were overtaxed or felt themselves to be so, with the following words:

Someone who wishes to become an educator of abnormal children will never be done: every child will be another, new problem for him, a new riddle. But he will

only discover how to work in each specific case by taking his guideline from each child’s being. This is tough work, but the only real way to work.30

This means that one can have trust in our encounter with the child, the other – with his form and being into which we try to enter – in the fact that something will manifest that he lacks, and that is therapeutically needed. Therapy thus arises as idea, though only after methodological preparation and schooling. The vernacular expression “What’s wrong with you?” here becomes a question as to the other’s need of healing. What is lacking, and is needed, is the specific therapy! This can be a stance or gesture to be practiced in eurythmy therapy, an internalized medicament, a biographical renewal, relationship or new configuration. As therapist one must find one’s way into the kind of support the other needs, which can only be developed together with him and from him, out of his biographical (or pathophysiological) situation. But this means we have to share to a certain extent in the life – and also the suffering – of the other, learning to understand it profoundly.

suffEring thE movEmEnt form of thE othErThis seems to me an important aspect of approaching the being and distinctive nature of eurythmy therapy – and thus also the concept of art in therapeutic eurythmy: the movement form of the other, of the patient, his individual situation, his individual physiology, must be recognized and this means also, to a certain degree, suffered. In the field of eurythmy therapy it is not at all adequate or helpful to describe this movement form only from a distanced perspective. Rather, the lack in the movement capacity of the other must become our inner experience by us deepening our gaze; through, as

“eurythmy works outward while eurythmy therapy works inward.”

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Goethe said, “the higher experience within experience”. In one passage of the Curative Education Course, Rudolf Steiner very carefully describes the situation of a curative educator with a child before him who cannot activate his will because his bodily members are not coming into the right physiological connection with an organ – in this case, the liver. Steiner describes how it is not a matter here, in a curative education approach, of getting annoyed at the child’s difficulty with accomplishing actions, but instead of experiencing and sharing in the suffering of this difficulty, right into bodily member processes: to experience and suffer with the child the place where the obstruction originates, and in the encounter with the child to sense how he wishes to do something, tries to, but is unable to do so physically. Then, Steiner elaborates further, the curative educator can find his way into the forces at work in the child, and can experience in himself, like an answer, how the right remedy “awakens”. He finds his way to what is helpful, that leads him further therapeutically. According to Rudolf Steiner it is not possible to find access to healing ideas and forces without at the same time experiencing oneself what the patient is suffering from. In a mantric verse which Rudolf Steiner gave during a first aid course here at the Goetheanum, shortly after the first world war, it says:

As long as you feel the painThat I am sparedChrist working in universal beingIs unperceived.And weak the spirit remainsWhen it alone in its own bodyIs capable of suffering.------Solange du den Schmerz erfühlest Der mich meidet Ist Christus unerkannt Im Weltenwesen wirkend Und schwach nur bleibet der GeistWenn er allein im eignen Leibe Des Leidesfühlens mächtig ist. 31

What is involved, therefore, is to live one’s way into the other’s situation, gaining understanding of it and becoming creative out of this knowledge – founded on what has previously been developed and brought to the encounter as methodological tools and capacities. It is here, that is, in passing through this process, that the use of particular forms of movement becomes a

healing art – and it is important to note that no models, prescriptions and instructions exist for this process that can claim greater validity than the demands of each given situation. Eurythmy therapy has its techniques, it is true, its insightful skill – and the fundamental exercises developed by Rudolf Steiner are the prerequisite for everything else and in future should in fact attract greater rather than less perceptive attention and understanding. In a certain respect, though, all this is still preparatory rather than being the process itself of eurythmy therapy treatment – its healing art. The important thing is the creativity or what is specifically done in a given situation, what is to be configured through eurythmy therapy. Here we need, at least tentatively, to penetrate that cosmic divine work of language and movement which a person needs in individualized form so as to emerge from the constrictions into which he has entered: to change, reverse and possibly even redress what has become cramped, distorted, delayed or compacted; to resolve it or bring it closer to resolution. “One must stand fully within eurythmy; but on the other hand one must also really see into the physical organization. Both these things can be learned … .”32

crEating thE conditions for hEalingAnd of course it is not the case that the eurythmy therapist heals by his or her own means. Not even eurythmy therapy heals – just as no physician or medicine, as such, has ever healed. Rudolf Steiner said that the organism or human organization wishes to be “stimulated” to healing. It does not wish to and cannot be healed from without, but instead can receive an inwardly consistent, valid impetus that helps it to regroup and reconfigure itself and rearrange its force relationships. If this process is successful, a new center arises, into which a curative I-element can incarnate with future potential. The really healing aspect is not within human control: we are the servants of the healing process, accomplishing nothing more and nothing less than – as Rudolf Steiner once said – “constellating” the conditions for healing. In relation to our theme, this means that, through his own movement potential, the eurythmy therapist stimulates something in the other that he demonstrates to him and accomplishes with him. He needs a subtle sense for the other’s individuality, for the patient. He not only discovers which exercises are needed, and with which intensity, but also which preparatory exercises may perhaps be required, and what kind of breaks and pauses are necessary. He has to discover what is already possible

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or also what is not yet possible: what must be held back therapeutically or reintegrated into the process; or also, which difficulties can be overcome despite remaining hindrances (and disinclinations) in order to facilitate the new configuration of the physiological process and the situation of the bodily members. (“And precisely in these things one can see that for various people the most important thing for them to learn is what they are least able to do. They must learn whatever this is, because it is necessary for their recovery.”33). This overall interplay of forces is a creative composition, in certain respects a therapeutic artwork. Its success however is not always assured: for all that the therapist can accomplish is to create the preconditions for a healing process to unfold, preparing and helping facilitate a new constellation of forces and processes. Whether these constellations and these forces can ultimately be taken up by the other’s individuality in a way that works further, belongs to the sphere of freedom of his individuality. Medicine never directly affects the human I – which cannot and should not be “treated” by it without intervening in this ultimate sanctum that it must absolutely respect. But medicine – and eurythmy therapy – can facilitate new force activities and constellations in the body; it prepares these – as a question and appeal to the human being, to the individual core of his being.

These forces include – among others – the “centrifugal” and “centripetal” forces which Rudolf Steiner elaborated on in the course. In every organ, forces work from its periphery into its center, and from its center to its periphery, as concentrating and releasing forces. Eurythmy therapy can be regarded as a means to work helpfully upon this interplay of forces that has fallen out of equilibrium. Rudolf Steiner’s actual words are:

These two dynamics must be mutually regulated. One can hope that eurythmy therapists are trained to have a fine sense for this – for what should happen in each individual case. Here, naturally, an artistic sensibility will be of extraordinary importance.34

At another place in the course, Rudolf Steiner no longer spoke of “regulating” but of “conducting” the relevant dynamic. The conductor intervenes in the musical process to order and direct it, without playing an instrument himself: he has a facilitating, serving and intrinsically selfless task. In eurythmy therapy, according to Rudolf Steiner, the therapist needs to “gain hold of bodily function” – but ultimately make it possible for the other, the patient, to become a creative artist again himself to a greater degree within his own bodily organization. He, the patient, is not really “conducted” and directed so much as helped to experience and shape his bodily composition anew. Rudolf Steiner said of eurythmy in general that it makes one a more skillful and artistic person. Everything of an artistic nature really involves making ourselves inwardly more flexible, vividly contoured and skillful. In relation to eurythmy therapy, however, this means that the patient should be helped to acquire a new adroitness that goes right into his physical body – so that he learns to, and is rendered capable of, actively helping to configure his life melody and life story, and continue composing it.

The eurythmy therapist Aglaja Graf once wrote down the following sentence for me: that the art of eurythmy therapy for the patient involves “becoming someone who practices, a person who moves himself toward health, a star in the swell of wandering words.” Here we can gain an inkling of the greatness of the future task with which eurythmy therapy is connected, as a progression of the

“in eurythmy therapy one needs an artistic grasp of the human organism, and a feeling for the artistic dynamic at work in the

whole human being.” r. st.

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Logos Creation in the domain of each individual. “For the healing nature of eurythmy therapy is, basically, as I would put it, what very particularly relies upon cosmic forces in healing.”35 Ita Wegman used to end her daily morning study with the nurses at her clinic with this verse by Rudolf Steiner:

Find yourself in the lightWith the soul’s own tone;And tone pulverizedBecomes color formin the light –Divine beings of light

Vanished toneTone resurrected in itSpeaks from it:You are

Soul’s own tone in universal lightResound luminouslyShine as you resound.

------

Finde dich im LichteMit der Seele Eigenton;Und Ton zerstäubt,Wird Farbgebildim Lichte –Licht – Götter - Wesen

Verschwundner TonIn ihm wiederstandener TonSpricht aus ihm:Du bist

Eigenton im WeltenlichtTöne leuchtendleuchte tönend.36

a child in need of special care - sandroE staughtonI too will conclude and lead us on by speaking of a child whose eurythmy therapy exercises, proposed by Rudolf Steiner, will then be demonstrated to you on the stage here. Sandroe Staughton was the first child in need of special care whom Ita Wegman admitted to her clinic in the fall of 1923.37 Many decades later, when the eurythmist Alois Winter visited the curative educational

institute La Motta, where Sandroe was now living as an old man, the latter introduced himself to him with the words: “I am the first curative educator.” Earlier I quoted Rudolf Steiner’s statement that the child’s being leads the curative educator to what he (the child) needs therapeutically – insofar as the educator really enters into the relationship and internalizes the other’s situation. Thus Sandroe was not only the first child in need of special care, supported in 1923/24 on an anthroposophic foundation, but also “the first curative educator”… I would like to say a few words about him now.

Sandroe was passed to Rudolf Steiner for further therapeutic supervision in the late summer of 1923 in Ilkley, England, during a lecture tour. Rudolf Steiner was very busy, but the child’s parents from America had approached him to ask whether Sandroe could come with him to Arlesheim for treatment. Guenther Wachsmuth, who also had a fair amount on his hands as Rudolf Steiner’s secretary, was given the fine task of looking after Sandroe while in England. This was a new challenge for Wachsmuth, since a wild, restless, scarcely tamable nine-year-old boy was a novelty in the context of anthroposophic conferences …

A short time later, after Rudolf Steiner and Ita Wegman had returned to Dornach and Arlesheim, Sandroe was admitted to the Clinical-Therapeutic Institute. The boy was already extremely conspicuous in figure, with a very unusual facial physiognomy and very big hands and feet that he could only move very awkwardly – like a great, burdensome weight at the outer pole of the limbs. He created mayhem in the clinic by throwing everything on the floor at lunchtime, eating almost nothing himself apart from some lettuce, accompanied by water. This was a child who did not form a relationship with anyone but who spoke only to his own index finger, which he called “Bebe assay”, and treated like a live being. In addition, Sandroe felt that he was accompanied by a lion with whom he spoke in American slang. He was hard to govern. On his first walk through Arlesheim he threw himself on the road, but fortunately no car was passing. He roared like a lion, his movements were hampered as if by leaden weight, and he could scarcely be induced to do anything. The problems had started when Sandroe was two. I cannot go into them in detailed anamnesis here, but they are well documented in the literature and can be studied.

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Rudolf Steiner presented Sandroe Staughton in the Curative Education Course. He described how the forces working in from the nerve-sense system, which primarily permeate and organize the body in the first seven years, were only able to take hold here to a very imperfect extent, and in particular not at the limb pole; and that consequently heteronomous forces from without had taken possession of the limbs right through into the development of the child’s form. Rudolf Steiner continued by describing how this had also led the respiratory system to become unstable, so that the child lived too much in inhalation – a physiological or pathophysiological condition, which Rudolf Steiner suggested in the course could be empirically demonstrated by suitable methods of investigation. Interestingly, after the second world war, during a holiday, Sandroe’s parents – who had no idea that Steiner had said this – had him examined at a NASA laboratory, and what Dr. Steiner had stated many decades before was confirmed: the excessive influx of oxygen, Steiner said in the Curative Education Course, had led to far too much synthesis and too little development of consciousness. In consequence, Sandroe’s whole, distinctive morphology formed, with narrow forehead that drew very little nourishment from the body since the forehead and frontal part of the head are sustained by earthly nourishment. This is why the boy did not eat. When he woke up in the morning and tried to bring his I and astral body into his physical organism, he experienced this, according to Steiner, as being as hard as rock: “And thus he looks upon the world through difficult physical conditions … .”38

In the course, Rudolf Steiner showed what curative measures were needed – one can read up on all this. In addition he described which eurythmy therapy and medicinal procedures were needed. Sandroe was given arsenic – for the “arsenicizing” process, especially in the form of the external Levico Bath application, can

stimulate the nerve-sense system’s astralization forces to penetrate the body more intensively. Along with administration of Hypophysis 6x – a substance that supports formative bodily processes – Rudolf Steiner said that the physiological processes could regain orientation that would give Sandroe access to greater capacities. He also said that if the child had been prescribed eurythmy therapy at an earlier stage, the deformations could have been entirely remedied.

But intensive eurythmy therapy was also given – “R”, “L”, “M”, “N”. I hope that the demonstration which follows will give a tangible experience of the physiological tendencies that Steiner was pursuing here – through the revolving and movement impetus of the astral, that lives in the “R” and works upon the rhythmic system, activating the gaseous organization right through into the fingertips, and at the same time helping regulate the process of falling asleep and awakening, and stimulating the exhalation process “sympathetically” (Steiner); through the supple-making and light-penetrating process that lives in the “L”, and helps to overcome the heaviness of matter through formative processes which unfold in the fluid-etheric sphere; through all that is connected with “M” as mediating center, that promotes connection with the earthly world (as “earth readiness” at puberty); and through the “N”, finally, helping to lead the way into the head organization and into the intellectual domain. “One must stand fully within eurythmy; but on the other hand one must also really see into the physical organization. Both these things can be learned … .”

In brief summary, the physician and eurythmy therapist Julia Bort wrote as follows about the prescribed and implemented sequence of speech sounds:

Through the R, the movement impetus of the rolling wheel was activated within the patient’s organization. Through the L, compactions were softened, through the

“The healing nature of eurythmy therapy is … what very particularly

relies upon cosmic forces.” r. st.

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M, the upper and lower were interwoven, and the soul was able to feel and extend its way into the limbs that had been rendered fluid and flexible. Through the N, the soul that was entirely poured out into its surroundings was able to create some distance, come to itself, and raised what it experienced into intellectual awareness.39

Margarete Kirchner-Bockholt who, like Julia Bort, also treated Sandroe, recorded the following in relation to the eurythmy therapy work:

The speech sounds worked directly in his case. Whenever the boy came to eurythmy therapy in the mornings, he stood there, unmoving, with melancholic eyes. One saw that he was completely unable to bring his heavy, burdensome limbs into motion. Then it required the greatest effort to induce him to enter into the rolling R even to a small extent. One had, at least, to say <Rosse rasend rennen und ein großes Rad von Riesen den Berg hinaufrollen lassen>i in order to awaken his urge for movement. If one managed this, one had achieved a good deal; and could pass on to the L. In the L we have the sound in which the physical realm is lifted out of its weight; and once the boy had done a series of Ls, his whole temperament underwent a visible change. Previously so melancholic, he became ever more cheerful and his face brightened. He clearly found it liberating to be able to overcome his heaviness by his own strength, and enter more into the activity of the etheric body in which, after all, a child of his age naturally lives, giving him his sanguine temperament. Now these speech sounds had activated his metabolic forces, providing him with a sulphuric element. One could see this visibly: he was almost exuberant, leaping and rushing about, so that it was difficult to calm him. One had the clear sense that one could not leave him like that, that the work was only half done. Now these awakened forces had to be given a direction. This occurs through the M – which enables us to grasp the outer world in a loving, measured gesture; or, seen physiologically, leads blocked metabolic forces correctly through the exhalation stream into the outer world. The climax of the exercise, and also of our pleasure in it, was the N. At this, the boy, who otherwise preferred to sit or stand, hopped about lightly, while his big, clumsy hands made the greatest

i A speech exercise using many R sounds. A rough equivalent: Rushing racing reins and a great revolving reel rolled up the hill by rascals.

efforts to accomplish <neckisch nichtsnutzige Nixen zu necken>.ii Through this sound, the will forces that had been activated in the metabolism, were led upward as far as the head’s forces of consciousness. He always left the session cheerful and happy, and his memory of this experience repeatedly caused the boy himself to ask for eurythmy therapy – the start of which each time, however, was always once again an arduous effort.40

Sandroe loved the Goetheanum, and although in his own way – according to today’s standards and in our modern terminology – he was and remained a severely disabled person, his development was nurtured to an extraordinary extent through anthroposophic curative education and medicine, including eurythmy therapy, as Wilhelm Uhlenhoff has documented in detail. Whenever this was at all feasible, Sandroe came from La Motta, accompanied by his carer, to performances of the Mystery plays at the Goetheanum. He used to say, “Here sufferings become easier.” Sandroe knew a great deal about La Motta and his fellow human beings there. He lived with the elements and when, on one occasion, someone fell into a ravine, Sandroe knew where he would be found. “The wind over Motta told it to me.” Sandroe was a very special person, and died, also, in a quite special way. In death his face bore the expression of a wise, highly evolved and special individuality.

Rudolf Steiner said that there had been karmic difficulties in his choice of parents – and that really the boy was a genius. Not least humanity’s drama of materialism colored and informed Sandroe’s life on earth. In his book on the children in the Curative Education Course, Wilhelm Uhlenhoff states that Sandroe’s father, a professor of metallurgy, was involved in America in building the capsule for the first atom bomb, and was amongst the US president’s closest advisers, the “seven worldly wise men” in the era of materialism. As Rudolf Steiner stated in the course, materialism is a drama also because it will increasingly make it difficult or even impossible for people to take hold of and permeate their body at all. In the context of his account of Sandroe, Steiner described how the astral body and I would become less able to find “refuge” in the muscular system, and that this was connected with the lack of real religiosity in our culture. Without genuine religiosity and great examples, he said,

ii Roughly: Nimble to knock at the nick-knacking knocker

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the human being would be ever less capable of living in his body:

The development of muscles attached to bones depends on there being great examples present in the world. Even if the human being can only look to exemplars in thought, a meshing system of muscles and bones develops.41

Sandroe received help and was able to configure in a somewhat more bearable way the difficult bodily

circumstances through which he had to look upon the world – thanks to his therapists, and Rudolf Steiner, whom he loved more than anyone. Eurythmy therapy was an especially decisive help to him here.

I would like to end with a phrase by Ita Wegman – as transition to the demonstration which will now follow: “The gods descend to us in our actions.” “One simply has to start,” said Rudolf Steiner, even when the tasks seem daunting.

Prof. Dr. med. Peter Selg, born 1963, is director of the Ita Wegman Institute for fundamental anthroposophic research in Arlesheim (www.wegmaninstitut.ch) and Professor of Medical Anthropology and Ethics at Alanus College for Art and Society in Alfter.

Sandroe Staughton

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1 Brigitte Schreckenbach (ed.).: Tatjana Kisseleff. Ein Leben für die Eurythmie. Borchen 2005, p. 114

2 Magdalene Siegloch: Lory Maier-Smits. Dornach 1993, p. 24.

3 GA 315, p. 112.4 GA 147, p. 1575 GA 303, p. 350. 6 GA 300a, p. 190. 7 Vgl. GA 313, p. 124f.8 GA 73a, p. 469. 9 Magdalene Siegloch: Lory Maier-Smits, p. 43. 10 GA 277, p. 244.11 GA 279, 40.12 GA 303, p. 349.13 GA 300a, p. 269.14 Quoted from Sigrid Stutz Gerbaldo: Erna van

Deventer-Wolfram (31.3.1894-31.1.1976). Report by its author of a talk given on the occasion of the memorial commemoration at the annual conference of the German eurythmy therapy professional association. Leipzig, May 29, 2009. Typescript, p. 5.

15 Cf. Peter Selg: Die Grundstein-Meditation Rudolf Steiners und die Zerstörungen des 20. Jahrhunderts. Arlesheim 2011.

16 GA 315, p. 112f.17 GA 315, p. 113.18 Cf. Peter Selg: Vom Logos menschlicher Physis.

Die Entfaltung einer anthroposophischen Humanphysiologie im Werk Rudolf Steiners. Volume 2. Dornach 2006, p. 681ff.

19 Cf. GA 315, for instance p. 10/53/103.20 Ibid., p. 105/106.21 Ibid., p. 106.22 GA 27, p. 96.

23 Cf. Peter Selg: ‘Die geistige Dimension des Menschen? Zur Entwicklung der medizinischen Anthropologie im 20. Jahrhundert.’ In: Peter Heusser/Peter Selg: Das Leib-Seele-Problem. Zur Entwicklung eines geistgemäßen Menschenbildes in der Medizin des 20. Jahrhunderts. Arlesheim 2011.

24 GA 27, p. 97.25 GA 317, p. 41.26 Quoted from Sigrid Stutz Gerbaldo: Erna van

Deventer-Wolfram (31.3.1894-31.1.1976), p. 5.27 GA 315, p. 3328 Ibid., S. 6.29 Cf. Peter Selg: Die Reinheit des Ordens und das

Opfer. Friedrich Schillers Johanniter-Fragment „Die Malteser“. Dornach 2010.

30 GA 317, p. 74f.31 Beiträge zur Rudolf Steiner Gesamtausgabe. No.

108, 1992, p. 46. Rendering according to manuscript by Rudolf Steiner.

32 GA 317, p. 101.33 GA 315, p. 30f.34 Ibid., p. 119.35 GA 316, p. 13336 GA 268, p. 115.37 For more on Sandroe Staughton cf. GA 317

and Wilhelm Uhlenhoff: Die Kinder des heilpädagogischen Kurses. Krankheitsbilder und Lebenswege. Stuttgart 1994.

38 GA 317, p. 96.39 In: Wilhelm Uhlenhoff: Die Kinder des

heilpädagogischen Kurses. Krankheitsbilder und Lebenswege. Stuttgart 1994, p. 52.

40 Ibid., p. 53f.41 Ibid., p. 97.

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IAO larynx metamorphosis blackboard drawing from the eurythmy therapy course, April 12, 1921

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Eurythmy therapy demonstration

Moderation and commentary:Angelika Jaschke

The task of eurythmy therapy is to connect directly through the sounds of human speech with the forces of cosmic movement and configuration which have built up the human body.

Health is the fluctuating state of balance between rigidification and dissolution. Between these poles we work with the eurythmy therapy vowels and consonants when healthy equilibrium is disrupted during illness.

We do this by “in-corporating” the corresponding etheric speech sounds. Thus the effect of eurythmy therapy is directed toward the body – rather than the world or our surroundings.

We would like to demonstrate a few characteristic aspects of eurythmy therapy at four different levels, before subsequently bringing these together again to form a “therapeutic word” in the eurythmy therapy sound sequence RLMN, which Rudolf Steiner gave for Sandroe.

vowEls and consonants: Vowels are uttered by the patient himself in a resonant way – the vowel is formed in the self-created space and made to “ring” (right through to sensing the bones in stretching and bending). Then an inner space is created, in which what is spoken and moved becomes “audible” experience via inspiration.

We tried to do this with all the participants in the hall, with the speech sound A [ah].

In the consonant the pre- or after-tinged speech sound resounds as though from without. The movement is carried out alongside speaking: as one moves, an

imaginative picture of one’s own movement should be engendered (R. Steiner calls this “taking a photograph”).

We demonstrated this with the speech sound M.

The activities of after-listening / picture-creating are polar opposite in vowel and consonant and require the highest degree of I presence to learn to perceive oneself in what is really one’s own sleeping and unconscious will activity, in doing. Here we are active beyond the threshold of earthly laws.

“Movement – feeling – character” are described by R. Steiner as the medium of all eurythmy.

How are these aspects applied in eurythmy therapy?

We demonstrated this with the speech sound N:

Movement as “the body being in tune” can be expe-rienced through the physical senses as “weight” and “lightness” (or “levity”) or can be described in synesthetic terms as “bright” and “dark”.

Feeling, by means of which we configure our relationship to our surroundings in eurythmy (“the singing of the hands”) can be described in sensory terms as “sucking” or “concentrating”; or synesthetically as color (a yellow-green color experience in the case of N).

In eurythmy therapy, our own body becomes periphery. It is decisive how the movement of the speech sound is sensed in the moving body through sucking pull and pressure. The blue-purple speech sound color of N senses and leads the movement of the arms / legs.

Character gives the speech sound the capacity to become form configured through the body. Through

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the intentional use of muscle tensing and relaxing, the speech sound’s etheric movement consolidates in the body and grasps hold of it. Thus the speech sound can act within the body.

In impact sounds, the character tension ends the movement.

The blowing speech sound starts with the character tension and releases the sound into movement.

repeTiTion – faTigue – resT The speech sound formed through movement-feeling-character is “impressed” into the etheric body in eurythmy therapy through repetition, aided by increasing tempo and rhythmic patterning, in a way that extends as far as physical fatigue. Thus physiological processes gain from the etheric form of a certain speech sound the impress necessary for the illness. The element of “character” undergoes considerable strengthening through this type of repetition. Physical waning, expressed in weariness, is the precondition for a sound-specific strengthening in the absolutely essential rest phase. This alone is what makes physiological changes (healing) possible.

We demonstrated this with the speech sound R.

thE wholE human bEing participatEs in spEEch sound configuration In eurythmy therapy the sounds are not only formed with the arms but the leg-limbs are also involved. This can be done by forming the speech sound with the leg, or through X-positions of the legs in varying, sound-specific ways, or through differentiated leaps.

This means that the whole body becomes a speech sound form. Leaping frees us for a moment from physical gravity, giving rise to levity.

We demonstrated this with the sound L.

For a complete configuration of eurythmy therapy, all four aspects must be merged together in one sound, and the elements for each speech sound achieved through practice.

We demonstrated this with the sound sequence (“therapeutic word”) which R. Steiner gave for Sandroe, as follows:

Metabolism-er, el with X-leg and leap

em with kibitz or ‘peewit’ step and leap

en with leap

The speech sounds are our teachers, and working with the eurythmy forms is a great help toward allowing the single speech sound to become, through our selfless activity, a healing being full of life.

For the demonstration on-stage at the Goetheanum, the four speech sound forms were depicted on large A0 posters. Many thanks for this!

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pRESEnting RESEARCh StudiESTuesday to Friday April 26-29 2011, between 2.30 and 3.30 p.m

Göran Krantz (Järna, Norway)

The connection between the experience of intervals and bodily movement

The experience of the intervals was examined in a series of studies based on participants’ verbal accounts. In this practical project we studied whether there is a connection between interval experience and bodily movement. 28 non-eurythmists were asked to express their experiences through movements or gestures. The results show a range of movements or gestures relating to the eight intervals in the C major scale. These movement tendencies are in accord with one another.

goran.krantz@minpost.nu Tel +46734170948

Tanja Masukowitz (Alfter, Germany)

Bodily member diagnosis as movement analysis in eurythmy

The following issues will be discussed:

What is bodily member diagnosis and where does it originate?

How is it used in the Master’s thesis on which this research report is based?

What are the results of this research so far?

Olga Gerasimova (St. Petersburg, Russia)

Russian eurythmy: what’s distinctive and what’s difficult

In our research work on Russian eurythmy, and our daily work as artists and eurythmy teachers, we repeatedly ask ourselves the following:

How can we today understand and realize Rudolf Steiner’s suggestions for Russian eurythmy?

How can we manage the discrepancy between the spoken language and the visual expression of Russian eurythmy?

Why do we do German eurythmy in Russian schools?

Various eurythmy exercises are gladly used by non-anthroposophists in Russia, e.g. in psychology training courses.

Should we regard this trend as an opportunity for the spread and official recognition of eurythmy in Russia?

Demonstration: S. Artamoschina, E. Tscherepanova. Translation: M. Grankova.

guerassimova@mail.ru, Freies Ensemble, “Theater-Studio Eurythmie St. Petersburg”, “Zentrum für Erziehungskunst” School Prospekt Weteranov 122-74 198205 St. Petersburg Tel +7 812 572 90 48

Brief presentations during lunch breaks, a forum of short reports and talks, were a pleasure for the conference participants. They extended from the formulation of issues through to fully developed research work. The short presentations offered stimulus for one’s own research ideas. Throughout the week, the written documentation relating to these talks was on view.

Between introductions held in parallel, there was enough time to take part in further exposition. During the breaks, speakers were available for more extensive discussion.

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Anna de Millas (Dornach, Switzerland)

The future of eurythmy – further study of the dual stream of time

The dual stream of time as the basis for observing developmental processes and as a possibility for evolving deeper understanding of the relationship between originating impulse and future perspectives of a theme or subject.

Where do we stand today in relation to the future perspectives for eurythmy present as potential in eurythmy’s originating impulse?

What enables us today to perceive past and future aspects simultaneously, and to work in a way that allows us to approach originally prefigured ideals in a contemporary way, and realize them in relation to available possibilities and current impulses for the future?

The approach to this work is founded on the dual stream of time itself: in active engagement with eurythmy’s past lies an opportunity for perceiving that creates our capacity to master the future out of the present.

annami@web.de

Silke Sponheuer (Cape Town, South Africa)

Simultaneity of time qualities in tone eurythmy elements

This research deals with different types of time awareness and how these are inherent in tone-eurythmy elements. A short overview of concepts of time through the ages introduces time qualities besides the chronological aspect. These notions can build incentives for diverse ways of working with time in eurythmy. Specifically, the qualities of the god of time ‘Kairos’, from Greek mythology, can stimulate insights and inspiration for eurythmy concepts and movement impulses.

silke@cfce.org.za Kairos Eurythmy Training 4 Victoria Rd SA- 7800 Plumstead

Tel +27 21 797 68 02

Tania Mierau (Stuttgart, Germany)

What makes tone eurythmy into visible song?

Taking Steiner’s characterization of tone eurythmy as “visible song” as my point of departure, in my Master’s thesis (University of Plymouth/Järna) I studied tone eurythmy training. The special focus of this research was on how the resonant quality of song can be achieved or supported in movement. Drawing on the literature relating to classical singing and eurythmy, and using interviews with singers and eurythmists, criteria and aspects of classical song and tone eurythmy were elaborated, examined in relation to their congruence and equivalence, and perspectives established for the training of tone eurythmy movement. In classes with eurythmy trainees these were applied in practice, and examined as to their effectiveness.

tania.mierau@gmx.de Eurythmeum Stuttgart Zur Uhlandshöhe 8 D-70188 Stuttgart

Göran Krantz (Järna, Norway)

Interval and heart

In this study we examined whether two intervals – major third and major seventh – affect the heart. Heart Rate Variability (HRV) was measured: on the one hand when participants stand still and listen to the interval, and on the other, when they listen and express their impressions through movement. There were 20 test subjects. The results showed wide variations between third and seventh; and also showed that a ‘harmonization’ of heart activity arises if the participants move in response to the interval.

goran.krantz@minpost.nu Tel +46734170948

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Herbert Langmair (Wetzikon, Switzerland)

Eurythmy therapy and squinting (Strabismus divergens)

Report and video on a course of eurythmy therapy which, over a five-year period, led to a pupil being able to do without surgery.

bewegungspraxis@web.de, Buechweid 14, CH-8332 Russikon www.bewegungspraxis.ch For this single case study, see: www.grin.com/e-book/131942/

Ingrid Everwijn (Dornach, Switzerland)

Process-oriented learning

Report on an attempt to identify the main elements of a process in the musical realm, and assign to three methodological stages (doing – experiencing – knowing) the positive effect which has been ascribed to music for millennia.

ingrid.everwijn@eurythmeum.ch

Tille Barkhoff (Hamburg, Germany)

Comparison between learning speech eurythmy during eurythmy training and language acquisition during childhood

In its initial stages, language development in childhood has clear analogies with the learning of speech eurythmy, for instance in the way in which the child absorbs language immediately from birth, how he distinguishes the first sounds, learns to speak his first syllables, first grasps concepts and then passes to two- and three-word sentences.

The comparison of both modes of learning also however reveals many differences. The child passes from unified verbalizations of sound into differentiation. The adult eurythmy student, by contrast, can already speak in a differentiated way. In eurythmy he consciously “goes back” to a non-intellectual, “more universal” mode of expression and understanding of speech. A child’s

speech development is based, as part of his overall development, on gross motor movements and leads to differentiated, internalized gestures of conceptual thinking. Speech eurythmy students, on the other hand, connect speech with movements of the whole body.

Thus this comparison shows that one can also see eurythmy as a path back to the roots of speech development.

This study also involves the intriguing question about the relationship between the view of speech and speech sound in eurythmy, and academic linguistic concepts.

tille.ba@web.de Eppendorferweg 205a 20253 Hamburg wwww.4d-eurythmie.de

Myrtha Faltin (Munich, Germany)

Eurythmy as trauma therapy in crisis and war zones

As part of an educational emergency aid project, which “stART international e.V.” carried out together with the “Elisabeth Gast Foundation” in Georgia following the war with Russia in August 2008, I was able to undertake a scientifically-supported study on this theme. At the village school of Samtavisi, on the border with areas now occupied by the Russian army, a group of pupils regarded by their own teachers as having been particularly traumatized by the events of the war were offered eurythmy therapy in February 2009. The therapy for this group was carried out and documented on a scientific basis.

In my Master’s thesis, this therapeutic process is described in differentiated detail,with scientific presentation of the findings. The trauma symptoms which still existed seven months after the war. improved markedly through eurythmy therapy. According to the pupils themselves, there were significant improvements in sleeping patterns, anxiety levels, concentration abilities and irritability. The study can be ordered from: m.faltin@start-international.org

Wacholderweg 2 82194 Gröbenzell Tel 0049-(0)8142-4659107 www-start international.org

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Stefan Hasler (Alfter, Germany), Margrethe Solstad (Dornach, Switzerland), Felix Lindenmaier (Dornach)

Rudolf Steiner’s tone eurythmy forms

Reports from joint research work were given in re lation to:

The hearing process and the origins of Rudolf Steiner’s eurythmy forms, comparison of forms and musical elements and the relation between musical movement and eurythmy movement in Rudolf Steiner’s language of forms.

felixlindenmaier@bluewin.ch margrethe.solstad@goetheanum.ch stefan.hasler@alanus.edu

Claudia von Knorr (Stuttgart, Germany)

Inbetween – reading the gesture of the human body and shape

The starting point for this Master’s thesis are the six outlines of the human form by Agrippa von Nettesheim, and Rudolf Steiner’s exercise, “I think speech”.

The study arose as practice-related research in the field of social sculpture.

Report on the research and questions. (Final thesis for an MA course 2008/09 in Social Sculpture at Oxford Brookes University, GB)

clauknorr@t-online.de, www.imzwischenraum.com

Tone eurythmy form by R. St. to the Prelude by Chopin

Anne-Marie Somero (Helsinki, Finland)

Eurythmy therapy for asthma

This study inquired into the effects of eurythmy therapy on a single patient suffering from asthma. The prime question is:

From what diverse perspectives can one consider the eurythmy therapy exercises in order to understand their effect?

The LAOUM exercise is central here, and is examined from seven different aspects.

anne-marie.somero@welho.com Haapalahdenkatu 15 A 4 FI-00300 Helsinki

Kjell Häggmark (Elmshorn/Hamburg, Germany)

A project to promote independent reflective capacity in eurythmy as curriculum subject for high school pupils at a Waldorf school.

In this study, in relation to pupil-centered impulses for educational practice, I will report both on the interdisciplinary preparation of pupils for an invited stage production and follow-up of this using questionnaire evaluation methods, the teaching diary and group discussion. Since the study arose from a desire to improve my own educational practice, I will also discuss its influence on my daily work in teaching pupils.

haeggmark-eurythmie@t-online.de Buschweg 9 25358 Horst +49-4121-923 76 +49-151-110 423 81

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Outi Rousu (Helsinki, Finland)

Factors influencing Waldorf students’ attitudes towards eurythmy

When no prior studies about an aspect of eurythmy exist, it might be worthwhile checking whether the phenomenon has been studied or described in the field of dance, for example the status of dance as subject in school or other pedagogical situations. A study using a range of methods shows that many Finnish Waldorf students report finding eurythmy easy. This applies to both finding eurythmy itself easy and finding performing eurythmy easy, the latter especially in a context where eurythmy is already known. Their perception as to whether this easiness is preferred or not varies. Phenomenographic interviews show some variation in Waldorf students’ ways of describing eurythmy. Most of the interview data consists of positive stories about eurythmy experiences. Some interviewees mention changing their views towards eurythmy in the last five years, and say that negative attitudes around the time of puberty progressed later into a more favorable attitude. Ideas for improving eurythmy pedagogy are brought up for discussion.

outi.rousu@vantaansteinerkoulu.fi

Werner Barfod (Dornach, Switzerland)

The challenge of eurythmy in the 21st century in training and dramatic configuration

This title heads a series of current eurythmy themes as contributions to contemporary issues. Findings from eurythmy research are to be presented in the following context:

How has the human constitution changed in the past 100 years, and what does this mean for eurythmy training today?

What is the 21st century asking of an art at the threshold?

As synesthetic form of expression, the art of eurythmy needs an esthetic foundation.

For the dramatic configuration of eurythmy and for the presentation of spiritual beings, it needs a situation-oriented grasp of gestures from the future.

(A related book under the same title (see above) was published at Easter 2011 by Verlag am Goetheanum.)

werner.barfod@goetheanum.ch Efringerweg 1 CH-4143 Dornach

Cristi Heisterkamp (Frankfurt, Germany)

Research on eurythmy before the age of 3: approaches to evaluation

The study offers scientific foundations for inquiring into the usefulness of eurythmy with children under the age of 3 in crèches and “parent-and-child” groups. It encompasses the fields of: anthroposophic views of the human being (analysis of the 7 lecture passages where Steiner speaks of the young child), infant neurology (in relation to making music, self-directed movement and the connection between language and gesture), and sociological developments (social changes which are what first give rise, at all, to considering eurythmy at this age). The study also reports on this work. A documentary film illustrates the findings.

cristi.heisterkamp@googlemail.com

Elisabeth Holling (Berlin, Germany)

Fundamental issues relating to applied eurythmy for screen work

The screen is the external face and projection surface for the computerized world. Specific behavior characteristics and phenomena become apparent when using and working interactively on the screen. These have been studied in connection with the above theme. Spiritual-scientific research by Rudolf Steiner on relevant matters has been studied in detail and cited here. Possible effects were treated during a workplace pilot project using eurythmy therapy. Electronic media and technical developments in general have led to global cultural changes which must also be seen as a challenge to health. This is motivating development of the specialist field of ‘media eurythmy’. Currently work in this area is being undertaken with a larger group of test subjects.

Elis.Holling@web.de

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Brigitte von Roeder (Dornach, Switzerland)

Hygienic eurythmy

Are the 12 so-called “soul exercises” in the Eurythmy Therapy Course (GA 315) suited as hygienic exercises in the workplace for people in sedentary occupations?

Could it be helpful for an institution or a business to allocate a short period during working hours for such activities?

Rudolf Steiner describes these exercises as enlivening, and as making the etheric body supple. He does not only recommend them for sick people:

“Basically people should really also try to get adults to always carry out such exercises, to a moderate ex- tent … .”

I have attempted this and have gathered experiences in courses but also, quite specifically, with groups in the workplace, with whom I first built up these exercises and then successively practiced them: for 10 minutes a day, over 7 weeks. Using questionnaires and also verbal evaluation I tried to gain an overview of the effect of these exercises; and I would like to report on this as encouraging stimulus.

b.v.roeder@gmx.ch

Herzentalstr. 22CH-4143 Dornach

Hans Wagenmann (Hannover, Germany)

The nature of encounter

Whom do I encounter?

What comes toward me?

How do I fully meet these encounters?

Am I at a threshold when I do so?

A research report devoted to processes of attentive-ness and participation during eurythmy movement, and asking what esthetic and social challenges and con sequen ces arise from this for a eurythmy that is appropriate for today.

The theme of this research finds its point of departure in the Master’s thesis written in 2009, entitled, “The participating person as focal point. The social efficacy of eurythmy movement and method.”

hans.tanz@t-online.de, Freiligrathstr 7, D-30171 Hannover

Manuela Schröder (Stuttgart, Germany)

Eurythmy therapy case study on ADHD – the restless child

The latest scientific research results on ADHD are explained and compared/extended with insights from Rudolf Steiner’s spiritual science. In addition, practical examples from eurythmy therapy illustrate the course of therapy. The whole sequence is visually clarified through six, large-format posters.

Anja Meierhans (Basel/Bern, Switzerland)

The activity of perception in eurythmy therapy

Brief presentation of research results from my Master’s thesis on “The activity of perception in eurythmy therapy”. I engaged with the issue of how one can perceive and identify the specific nature of eurythmy therapy movement, and what conclusions can be drawn from this for documentation work.

anjam@sunrise.ch

Walter Appl (Salzburg, Austria)

Eurythmy training from the point of view of personal development

The aim of my research is to discover how eurythmy movement activity affects personal development in the adult:

What is distinctive about eurythmy movement, and what criteria can be used to observe and describe this?

What cognitive, emotional and will-related capacities are trained through eurythmy?

This study aims to contribute to the current development of ‘social eurythmy’.

w.appl@gmx.net

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Tanja Baumgartner (Bartenheim, France)

Eurythmy and its effects on plants and substances

Starting from the question, “To what extent can the effect of eurythmy movements on substances be rendered actually visible”, research began in 2000 in collaboration with, among others, Bern University and the Hiscia Institute. In 2007 we founded the ArteNova Institute in order to provide a home for the research. The effects of eurythmy were studied from many diverse aspects: constellations, length of treatment, distance of the eurythmist from the test object, different packaging materials, varying persons etc. etc. The focus was on the eurythmy gestures of B, L, K and S and the evolutionary series as a whole. Seeds, water and plant extracts such as Iscador were the prime subjects of study. The aim of the research was to demonstrate eurythmy’s potential action. In the meantime, treatment with eurythmy gestures has come to be used in many agricultural applications (plant breeding, taste enhancement) with further possible applications in pharmacy and water enlivening.

tanjabaumgartner@mac.com 2, rue de Bâle F – 68870 Bartenheim – la Chaussée

www.unternehmen-eurythmie.ch

Frøydis Lutnæs-Mast (Berlin, Germany)

Eurythmy therapy for hypertonia

In a pilot study (Master’s thesis) the therapeutic effect of eurythmy therapy is validated by means of 24-hour blood pressure measurements, questionnaires and patient documentations. The findings confirm the conclusions of the 3-types concept. Through differentiated eurythmy therapy, pathogenetically varying forms of hypertonia as in the 3-types concept can be treated in a more targeted and efficient way.

froeydis.lutnaes-mast@web.de, Deisterpfad 16, 14163 Berlin

Annette Weisskircher (Alfter, Germany) Albrecht Warning (Alfter)

Pilot project to research the effect of eurythmy therapy on hayfever (allergic rhinopathy)

This project took place in the context of a study by the Institute for Eurythmy Therapy at Alanus College. A group of eight test subjects were instructed to carry out the eurythmy therapy series TSRMA independently for seven weeks, twice weekly. Here we will report on the experiences, research parameters and positive evaluations in this project. Subsequently a research model will be presented (multi-center study) for studying pollen allergy, in collaboration with a research group around Professor Erich Baars at Leiden University, Holland. Eurythmy therapy colleagues present will be told about participation in a research project Related documents can be handed out.

For personal reasons this study could not be presented by those involved.

Manja Wodowoz de Boon, Holland, stepped in to present the multi-center study on pollen allergy for the Bolk Institut, Hogeschool Leiden in Holland.

annette.weisskircher@alanus.edu

Simone Wantz (Tönsberg, Norway)

Epilepsy and eurythmy therapy (waking process) – a case study

In this study, based on treatment of a single case, research was undertaken to investigate the effect of eurythmy therapy on epilepsy. This case involved, among other things, epilepsy on awakening, and petit mal. The waking-related problems were clear.

To what extent can eurythmy therapy intervene in an epileptic constitution and support the waking process?

simonewantz@gmail.com Hougensgate 24 3111 Tonsberg Norway

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SCiEntifiC And SpiRituAl SCiEntifiC

The ground plan of the first Goetheanum was drawn, starting from the five-pointed star as the human measure. We observed the geometrical positions of the pillars in the auditorium; and, on the stage, as centralizing point, the lectern, and the place intended for the Representative of Humanity and the Foundation Stone.

From this we sought and found the harmony between the vowel forms and this ground plan. We saw that someone doing eurythmy – when he allows this to shine up within his awareness – is always “standing in the first Goetheanum”, and can work toward bringing to experiential, fluid visibility the forms that awaken karma vision.

A visit to the unfinished model of the first Goetheanum by Rudolf Feuerstack in the vestibule of the “Group room” rounded off this work for the time being.

Johannes Starke (CH)

Participant‘s report

Drawing-based and eurythmically moved connection between the eurythmy figures and the first Goetheanum. At the beginning of the course stood the question: What happens when there are twins of whom one leaves the earth? The other must then take over the other’s tasks. We gained a sense of the means by which Sabine Sebastian is, in the broadest sense, researching

Dr. Sabine Sebastian

“And the edifice becomes human“

This phrase relating to the pink South window – before the windowless alcoves that follow the Mercury pillar – was our guiding star when asking:

“How do the geometrical forms of the eurythmy figures harmonize with the geometry, i.e. the ground plan, of the first Goetheanum?”

The Goetheanum – the House of the Word – which has the task of making visible forms that awaken karma vision, arose during the first years of eurythmy’s path into incarnation. After the Goetheanum fire on December 31, 1922, eurythmy had to share in the task that this building had for humanity. The following themes were pursued as a path in this workshop:

Origin of the eurythmy figures together with their tasks, which Rudolf Steiner valued highly. This newly created artistic medium was to help elevate a person’s sense of themselves and enhance eurythmy capacities without leading to vanity or coquettishness (GA 295, August 29, 1919). Teachers were to engage with them in pursuing a psychological physiology (GA 300b, March 1, 1923). Eurythmy students were to learn to imitate them so as to develop skilled movements (GA 277a, March 30, 1924). We examined the figures as manifestation of the fourth, fifth and sixth dimension (GA 324a, especially p. 88 [German edition]).

Afternoon groups of further study

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SCiEntifiC And SpiRituAl SCiEntifiC

this connection between the first Goetheanum and eurythmy.

In practical terms we started by drawing. A freehand five-pointed star became a little imprecise, as we discovered by rotating its points. Drawn freehand into a circle, the pentangle became more regular. Then, using a compass and ruler we rediscovered the forgotten golden section, which is a possible basis for constructing the ground plan of the great hall of the first Goetheanum. At the base points of the five-pointed star within it, the circles of the great and small cupolas intersect. Ever new dimensional relationships came into play until the 2x7 planetary pillars found their positions in the hall, and from these the 2x6 could be determined on the stage as twelvefoldness. (In a painting relating to Goethe’s fairy-tale, Hermann Linde depicted the zodiac images on the architrave so that Sagittarius and Capricorn - between whom the Christ birth has been accomplished - visibly encompass the central figure. Rudolf Steiner no doubt perceived this but did not comment on it.) In activity and observation, intensive engagement with the artistry of the Goetheanum building took place, so that we gained a multi-layered impression of its very complex proportions.

why euryThmy figures are Two-dimensionalAs second question we asked why the eurythmy figures were (only) given as two-dimensional forms, represented by lines.

What happens when, starting from the point, the three

dimensions of “straight line”, “surface” and “solid” (cube) are transformed into each respective higher dimension?

Rudolf Steiner stated that the fourth dimension extinguishes the third, the fifth the second, and the sixth the first. In other words, first depth “disappears” so that only the two others are perceptible as height and breadth, and can be extended through to the “sixth-dimensional” point. The fourth, fifth and sixth dimension have their life at higher levels, not on the earth; but their projections, as it were the shadows they cast, fall upon the earth. Thus the projection of the fourth dimension is time, of the fifth is feeling, and of the sixth is self-awareness.1

The wood figures are surfaces in space, and can be seen as such projections: plane in the overall image, line in the structuring or as boundary, point ideally determined. One finds the latter by transforming the head geometrically into the rest of the form, which is different in each figure. The crossing point of these “transformation” or transposition lines lies at the place one indicates in regard to oneself when saying “I”.

1 Sabine Sebastian summarized these and further thoughts in her article “Eurythmy as instrument for consciously crossing the threshold” which was published in the newsletter of the Section for the Art of Eurythmy, Speech, Drama and Music at Easter 2003, with reference to GA 324a, 276, 184

foundAtionS of EuRythmy

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mighty bacKgroundThe next task was to draw a eurythmy figure from memory, then copy one from a model. Finally, in a rapid process, we constructed the ground plan of the first Goetheanum. Then a new, third circle was drawn, to pass through the two intersections of the large and small circles as well as their center points, or in other words connecting them specifically so that they can, as it were, be seen as its poles. Into this imaginary round, which does not appear physically in the building but forms the inner cohesion as so-called primal circle, the figure of a vowel was drawn in such a way that it points with the feet, the bearers of its future, to the figure of the Representative of Humanity. And where do the arms point in this position?

The A [ah] points to Venus on both sides, the E [eh] to the Mars pillars, O and U [oo] with the shoulders or inside of the arms to Jupiter and Saturn; distinctively, the I [ee], the I figure, points to the sun, reflecting it or as it were casting its shadow.

The aim of the course was to show the mighty background against which a real connection can be seen between the eurythmy figures for the vowels which Rudolf Steiner sketched so freely, and the precise geometrical relationships in the first Goetheanum. How the consonants relate to this context will be the subject of further research. A visit to the 1:20 Goetheanum model made by Rudolf Feuerstack concluded in a very tangible way the four so intensive and valuable course afternoons, with their wealth of “aha” experiences.

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Dr. med. Wilburg Keller Roth

The roots of eurythmy art in a poet’s scientific explorations

Discussion group drawing on selected passages from:

R. Steiner, Goethe as the father of a New EstheticsJ.W. v. Goethe, Metamorphosis of PlantsR. Steiner, Introduction to Goethe’s Scientific Writings, Part III (color theory) J.W. v. Goethe, Theory of ColorsR. Steiner, Eurythmy Therapy Course

day of Eurythmy as stagE art:Goethe’s view of esthetics states that the creative source of art lies in a perception of the spirit that reveals itself as lawfulness (ideal form) in natural phenomena.

day of Eurythmy in Education:Goethe’s theory of metamorphosis as basis for deriving eurythmy gestures from the human speech organism; its significance for healthy human development.

day of Eurythmy in thE social domain:Goethe’s view of space and the overcoming of physical space in eurythmy.

day of Eurythmy thErapy:Goethe’s theory of colors, the eurythmy figures, and selected speech sound indications in eurythmy therapy (I [ee], U [oo], A [ah]).

Gunna Gusewski

Participant‘s report

This account outlines some of my findings from the lovely sessions of living thinking with Frau Dr. Keller Roth. She helped us to experience how Rudolf Steiner led his spiritual perceptions into science, enabling us to gain insight into this process through thinking.

day of Eurythmy as stagE art:Goethe is concerned with a reconfiguring of sensory reality. Like the archetypal plant that does not actually manifest, no natural substance can bring its inherent idea to realization. This idea, whose reality is distorted as it freely develops, is something the artist needs to take

hold of and bring to unfolding. Beauty can be regarded as the manifestation of secret natural laws. Thus art is sensory reality in divine clothing.

day of Eurythmy in Education:In discussions about eurythmy in education we found that eurythmy instigates a sense of the ideal human form in children and adolescents, as well as in lay courses for adults.

It was surprising to see the theory of metamorphosis applied to social contexts: the parts of simple organisms are similar to each other. The more highly developed an organism, the more dissimilar its parts. The law of subordination states that all parts are of equal value, but interrelate in an ordered way. All parts (e.g. of a faculty or business) are equal to each other and necessarily enhance and augment each other to form the whole. All work together toward the archetypal image, the idea.

day of Eurythmy in thE social domain:Drawing on Goethe’s theory of space, Rudolf Steiner declared space to be a mutual relationship between things. This mutual relationship is a tangible idea which is perceived by the eye of spirit. The pedagogical exercise “I and you … are we” served as an example: space is the grasp of the world as unity – is an idea and not, as Kant believed, a viewpoint or perception.

day of Eurythmy thErapy:Goethe relates his theory of colors to the polarity between light and darkness. He saw each color as light modified by darkness. We looked at light through a clouded, undulated opal glass, and saw a red spectrum – light shining through cloudiness. Darkness appears as blue. Goethe calls this an “archetypal phenomenon”. We considered the figures of I [ee] and U [oo] as archetypal phenomena: a primal or archetypal phenomenon appears when I create the conditions for it.

We concerned ourselves with the following questions:

How can we pursue research on our eurythmy figures with highly differentiated color indications, also including in this study Rudolf Steiner’s Easter picture, and the colors in the standing human figure as given by Ilona Schubert?

Which colors express the being of A [ah]?

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fEEdbACkfrom 152 returns

3. wErE you satisfiEd with thE organization, both bEforE and during thE confErEncE? Positive: The food was superb!; the many breaks were very good; great deal of flexibility in response to unexpected developments.

Negative: Registration on arrival was chaotic; one should be able to get a conference ticket without meals; a plenum should be incorporated into the conference; registration confirmation took too long, which meant increased prices for intercontinental flights.

4. what was particularly stimulating or plEasing to you in rElation to thE contEnt of quEstions rEgarding thE 4 domains of Eurythmy? Positive: Research contributions from all domains were gripping – courageous people; one could experience the spiritual depth of eurythmy; eurythmy is one being; the “simpler” the exercises were, the clearer one could discern the different approaches; new access to eurythmy therapy; course leaders’ closeness to actual practice; the Christ impulse present in all eurythmy domains; gratitude for the courage to risk such a thing.

Negative: Too little on education / high school themes; better to elaborate one issue practically in every professional domain – more careful/discerning foundation work; to make things more tangible it would have been enough for two specialist domains to meet; in some courses, all 4 domains stood separately alongside each other; less teaching from the front and more independent work in small groups.

1. how did you ExpEriEncE thE confErEncE?Positive: Inner balance of activity – listening – encounters; building bridges; alternation between morning and afternoon groups; the 4 course leaders were always an active presence; vibrant, multi-layered conference form; wonderful performances; inspiring; rich in content; serious; giving food for thought; beautiful and profound experiences; Debus lecture as absolute highlight

Negative: Too little English-language information for an internationally-subscribed conference; poor or no amplification – many people failed to understand much; too little reflection/discussion after the morning courses; too many themes – 3 or 4 basic themes would have been sufficient; inscribing for a course at initial registration could have reduced the chaos of registration on arrival.

2. what was your pErcEption of thE dEcEntralizEd contEnt prEparation by around 100 collEaguEs? Positive: Diversity of eurythmy approaches; required much effort, but was rewarding; one could feel the sustaining energy; brilliant logistical achievement; could experience this as the future for conference organization; deeply effective working atmosphere; social artwork.

Negative: The conference theme “The concept of art …” did not come alive; the connecting thread between the four course leaders was frequently not assured; let course leader teams find themselves, and design each day together.

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5. what will you taKE away with you from this confErEncE as impulsE for thE futurE?Keeping faith with eurythmy; the intense, nourishing, cheerful, rich, worldwide, diverse power of eurythmy; experienced battle and jeopardy; medical courses on the spiritual science and science of eurythmy should certainly not have been lacking; responsibility of each individual for eurythmy; much stimulus for one’s own work; practice – practice – practice; seek dialog with other colleagues on returning home; go back to work on the basics; more intensive engagement with anthroposophy; more courage for critical and objective discussion between colleagues; strength, because one could experience how many – throughout the world – are working toward the same end; art and healing permeate all eurythmy.

6. pErsonal notEs / rEmarKsA conference where people meet together like this should be regularly repeated; women / female eurythmists should also be invited to give lectures; hygienic eurythmy should be properly developed and elaborated (e.g. between education and therapy); eurythmy training

courses should be stricter; discussions on the theme: What are the challenges of our time?; Why do no course participants wear eurythmy clothes nowadays?; Where is the young eurythmy generation?; the wonderful idea of the conference was not clearly delineated enough in advance; lectures and demonstrations could be better coordinated with each other.

rEgarding thE thursday EvEning:It was a test that was passed; the response of the preparation group was adequate; awakening element – despite all hurt; all realms of eurythmy are social-artistic;

How does one heal such wounds?; the audience’s social competency was unsatisfactory; one cannot delegate responsibility; trust is good – checks are better; following training introduce an obligatory practical year with mentorship; range in one day from Debus to the performance – a picture of our time.

The preparation group has in the meantime held relevant clarification discussions with each other and with all participants.

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Income number income (CHF) expenditure (CHF)

Conference tickets 514 59‘060,00Evening performances 21‘703,00Donations 69‘554,80total income 150‘317,80

ExpenditureFood / refreshments 11‘275,00Donation payments from Med. Section / ET forum to participants 15‘850,00Essen -Freikarten 13‘778,00

40‘903,00Travel costs for course leaders 12‘018,30Accommodation for course leaders 10‘426,00

22‘444, 30Fees for five lectures 2‘013,95Room rentals 2‘126,10Kotura, Lord of the Winds (Goetheanum stage and children‘s performance)

9‘210,00

Goetheanum stage, Lamentate, Apocalypse 36‘707,00Amusements from divierse countries 2‘168,00Musician and translation fees 3‘862,00Organization and management fees 5‘599,44Folder / program booklet / poster / mailing 2‘450,00Div. payments, cost reimbursements, insurance

1‘935,54

66‘.072,03129‘419,33

Infrastructure / Goetheanum 20‘898, 47 20‘898,47

Total expenditure 150‘317, 80

Sum total 150‘317, 80 150‘317, 80

finAnCE ovERviEw

Thankfully, due to enormous efforts and helpful donors and foundations, we were able to conclude the conference without a deficit. Very warm thanks to all who gave financial support!

EDITORIAL 4PEOPLE AND PICTURES 6

The Spirit flowing in Substance 8by Roland Halfen

day of Eurythmy as stagE artFrom Sensory to Supersensible Realms 20by Heinz Zimmermann

Moderation and Commentary 29by Volker Frankfurt

day of Eurythmy in EducationBecoming Self – Connecting with the World 30by Jost Schieren

Moderation and Commentary 41by Stefan Hasler

day of Eurythmy in thE social domainThe Being of Eurythmy 42by Michael Debus

Moderation and Commentary 53by Andrea Heidekorn

day of Eurythmy thErapyTransformation and New Beginning 54by Peter Selg

Moderation and Commentary 70by Angelika Jaschke

PRESENTING RESEARCH STUDIES 72

SCIENTIFIC AND SPIRITUAL SCIENTIFIC FOUNDATIONS OF EURYTHMY

“And the edifice becomes human“ 80by Sabine Sebastian

The roots of eurythmy art in a poet’s scientificexplorations 83by Wilburg Keller Roth

FEEDBACK 84

FINANCE OVERVIEW 86

publishErAngelika Jaschke

translationMatthew Barton

proofingIrmgard SodenkampRegina Delattre

layout and covEr dEsignPhillipp SchoppmannKatharina Offenborn

printEd byEitzenberger, deVega Medien GmbH, Anwaltinger Straße 10 86165 Augsburg

distributionSektion für Redende und Musizierende Künste:srmk@goetheanum.ch

Medizinische Sektion:sekretariat@medsektion-goetheanum.ch

list of illustrationsCover: Gabriela de Carvalho

Front cover flap, p. 9, 45:© Forschungsstelle Kulturimpuls, Dornach

p. 15, 19, 51, 69: © Rudolf Steiner Nachlassverwaltung, Dornach

p. 59, 67: © Ita Wegman Institut, Arlesheim

“Angel“ p. 3: Charlotte Fischer

p. 4, 5 bottom, 6, 7, 39, 79, 70, 85:Irmgard Sodenkamp

p. 31 left: http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Goethe_%28Stieler_1828%29.jpg

p. 31 right: http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Novalis2.jpg

p. 51: http://wiki.anthroposophie.net/Datei:Menschheitsrepraesentant_Ahriman.gifOriginal source: Urs Schwendener (Hrsg.): Anthroposophie - eine Enzyklopädie in 14 Bänden, Band 1, p. 154

All other pictures by kind permission of the copyright holder.

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