A Path to the Word: Rudolf Steiner and the Art of Eurythmy

by Clifford Venho

The lily-of-the-valley produces the seed and the seed again the lily-of-the-valley; in like manner the divine creative Word created the mute human seed—and when this primeval creative Word glided into the human seed, in order to spring up again within it, it sounded forth in words.

—Rudolf Steiner (lecture in Hamburg, May 18, 1908)

In her memoirs, published under the title “The Green Snake,” the artist Margarita Woloschin describes a remarkable encounter with Rudolf Steiner, which took place in May of 1908, when he was giving the lecture quoted above on the Gospel of St. John: On that first evening, he spoke about the Prologue to John’s Gospel.

After the lecture, he came over to me and asked, “Could you dance that?” I was not surprised by this question, for ever since childhood I had desired to dance every deep experience, and I was convinced that Rudolf Steiner “knew everything.” “I think one could dance everything that one feels,” I answered. “But today it really does depend on the feeling!” He repeated this sentence and stood a while before me as if expecting a question. But I did not ask him. 1

1 Steiner, Rudolf. Eurythmy: Its Birth and Development. Trans. Alan Stott, Anastasi Ltd., 2002, pg. 16.

Woloschin later realized that Rudolf Steiner had been waiting for her to ask him the question that would afford him the opportunity to inaugurate a new art of movement out of the Word—the art of eurythmy. It is not mere happenstance that this first inkling of the new art of eurythmy came after a lecture on the doctrine of the Logos, the Word, as it appears in the profound depths of St. John’s Gospel. Indeed, when Rudolf Steiner gave his lectures on speech eurythmy some sixteen years later, in June and July of 1924—lectures that were a kind of synthesis of everything that had been given since the inception of eurythmy in 1911—he again returned in his opening lecture to the theme of the Word. He pointed once more to the tradition that stands behind the Prologue to St. John’s Gospel, a tradition that understands the Word as a spiritual reality and not merely a symbol. In the lecture, he draws attention to the fact that we tend to treat the concept underlying a word as more important than the word itself. He suggests that we even feel a certain sense of superiority in being able to devalue the word compared to the thought it expresses. But this understanding of the word is far removed from the one that prevailed in ancient times. As Steiner explains, “To primeval human understanding, the idea, the conception ‘the Word,’ comprised the whole human being as an etheric creation.” 2

2 Steiner, Rudolf. Eurythmy as Visible Speech. Trans. Alan Stott, Coralee Schmandt, and Maren Stott, 3rd ed., Anastasi Ltd., 2015, pg. 29.

This understanding of the Word forms the basis for the development of speech eurythmy, which is, in essence, the making visible in artistic form of this etheric creation through gesture and movement.

In this first lecture of the speech eurythmy course, Steiner further characterizes the nature of the etheric body as an immensely complex organism that is constantly in movement. He describes how this activity of the etheric body goes over into the sounds of speech, so that when we speak, the forms and gestures of the etheric body are imprinted invisibly on the air. Each sound of the alphabet produces in the air its own particular form, which is in reality a picture of a movement in the human etheric body. Steiner explains that if one were to speak all of the sounds of the alphabet from “a” to “z” in succession, so that by the time “z” is reached “a” is still sounding, then one would have in the air a picture of the whole human etheric body. 3

3 Ibid., pg. 31.

Steiner then goes further by describing how the human being actually arises out of the eurythmy of the gods, out of the divine movements of the gods, which then come to rest in the human form:

In eurythmy we are really going back to primordial movement. What does my Creator, working out of primeval, cosmic being, do in me as a human being? If you would give an answer to this question you must make eurythmy movements. God eurythmises, and as the result of His eurythmy there arises the human form. 4

4 Ibid., pg. 37.

This is one of the central tasks of eurythmy: to bring the human being into a direct relationship on earth to the divine creative activity that fashions the human form and, indeed, all created forms. Rudolf Steiner lays out a path through which human beings can begin to experience themselves within the divine creative process—can begin to experience themselves as co-creators, as beings endowed with the Logos, the Word. In other places, he describes how in eurythmy the physical body is raised into the etheric realm, so that the body moves according to the flowing, weaving laws of the world of life. In eurythmy, we should feel as though we lift the body into the sphere of life, so that the body becomes an expression of these purely etheric laws.

Eurythmy “O” form & color indications by R. Steiner

In this first lecture, as mentioned above, Rudolf Steiner makes us conscious of the fact that we no longer have a feeling for the power of words—that we have become hardened, intellectual beings whose first impulse is to grasp the concept signified by a word, while disregarding the inner life of that word itself. In many ways, eurythmy seeks to awaken in the human soul a feeling for the life of the Word and for the inner qualities, moods, and gestures that live in words. When we begin to enter into these qualities, not only with the intellect, but through engaging our whole being—when we lift our hearts into our heads—we enter a world of creative activity, of movement and life.

This aspect of eurythmy’s task is described beautifully in an introductory lecture given in 1913 on the occasion of the first eurythmy performance. 5

5 Steiner, Rudolf. Eurythmy: Its Birth and Development, pg. 52.

It should be mentioned that the birth of eurythmy is intimately bound up with the development and staging of Rudolf Steiner’s Mystery Dramas. Some of the very first indications for eurythmy were made in connection with the work on the dramas, especially in relation to the portrayal of spiritual beings on stage, such as Luciferic and Ahrimanic thought beings, as well as elemental beings. In this introductory lecture, Steiner begins by recounting a conversation between Professor Capesius and Frau Balde (two characters from the dramas). Frau Balde is a simple woman from the country who has a talent for storytelling, while Capesius is a learned professor.

In this discussion, she tells him quite bluntly that he is a bad listener, and that this makes her work quite difficult. Capesius, believing himself to be an attentive listener, is somewhat taken aback, and asks, “What is missing in my listening?” At first, Frau Balde does not think he will understand what she has to say; but when Capesius persists in his question, she replies, “Well, you know, if you would listen properly, then your ether body would dance. But it doesn’t dance!” Capesius, in his typically intellectual fashion, retorts, “And why should my ether body dance? And how should I do this?” He wants to understand it through his head.

Frau Balde tells him that he first has to understand how she actually receives her fairytales, namely, from the spiritual world. Here Capesius balks and says, somewhat uncomfortably, that he does not see how these spiritual beings could speak to her in human language—that is, in German or English or French. Frau Balde replies, “That’s just it! On this point you have to become more intelligent. The beings do not relate in any language, but they move. And everything which with them is movement is what you have to understand.” Capesius asks how to do this, and Frau Balde replies:

Well, you see, you have to understand the art of letting the heart rise for a while into the head. Then one receives a remarkable feeling from all those movements which the elf-beings, fairytale princes and fairies carry out. And what one feels here, flows like streams into the larynx—and then one can tell the story. And if you would listen properly, then your ether body too would dance. But because you cannot do this, you can’t understand everything and much of what I tell is lost on you. 6

6 Ibid.

Rudolf Steiner uses this example from the Mystery Dramas in order to emphasize the possibilities for concrete experience of the spiritual realms opened up by eurythmy. We usually listen only with our heads; we extract the thought content from words without heeding their inner movement, their hidden qualities. But, as Frau Balde tells Capesius, we have to learn to dance with our ether bodies in order to truly hear. When we do this, we experience not abstract thoughts or dead pictures, but the living, weaving life of the spiritual world.

In another of Steiner’s early introductory eurythmy lectures, given on January 21, 1914, he describes the rigidity of modern thinking, and the potential source of renewal for thinking that can arise out of eurythmy. He describes a future where “our thoughts will also learn to move artistically,” and through this inner enlivening of the human thought world, “we shall see before us the redemption of humanity in this one realm.” 7

7 Ibid., pg. 56.

This redemption of thinking is also described in Steiner’s Letters to the Members, written at the end of his life for the members of the Anthroposophical Society. There he speaks about Michaelic thinking as one in which the heart feels the qualities of thoughts—their contours and shapes, their brightness or darkness. 8

8 See Steiner, Rudolf. Anthroposophical Leading Thoughts. Trans. George and Mary Adams, Rudolf Steiner Press, 2007, pg. 97, “The World Thoughts in the Working of Michael and in the Working of Ahriman.”

It is a thinking in which the heart rises up to meet the thought activity of the head in order to bring an artistic sensing and forming into the creative unfolding of the movements of thought. We are thereby able to wrest the power of intelligence from the clutches of Ahriman who wants to make our thinking into a tool for his aims of world-denial, of separation from the sphere of life and from the higher realms.

This artistic forming of thoughts is always the principle that underlies the composition of Rudolf Steiner’s written works. As he states in his preface to the revised English edition of Theosophy, “Inner truth, for descriptions of the spiritual world, can only be of that quality which is also expressed in mobile, flowing inner pictures.” 9

9 Steiner, Rudolf. Theosophy: An Introduction to the Suprasensory Knowledge of the World and the Vocation of Man. Revised Translation by David Ecklund, Thomas O’Keefe, and Clifford Venho. Chadwick Library Edition, vol. 7, Anthroposophic Press, 2019, pp. 17-18.

And the reader must likewise be engaged in this experiential form of thinking. As he explains in another preface to Theosophy, “Whoever merely reads through it [the book] will not have read it at all. Its truths must be experienced. Only in this sense does spiritual science have any worth.” 10

10 Ibid., pg. 12. 11 Ibid., pp. 173-187.

Eurythmy can be a guide toward experiencing the thoughts of anthroposophy in this way.

To take an example, also out of Theosophy, which illustrates how eurythmy can contribute to an enlivening of the thoughts of anthroposophy, we can consider the chapter on the human aura. 11

11 Ibid., pp. 173-187.

There he describes the human aura as an interweaving of color. But he makes sure to clarify that he is not speaking about color as a physical phenomenon, but rather of the inner soul experience that one has when immersing oneself in color. In other words, one has to strip away the physical color, and live purely within the inner experience that arises out of that color— for example, the inwardness experienced while living in blue, or the radiance experienced in yellow. When he gave the indications for color in eurythmy in 1915, he brought them in connection with stretching and contracting: “Try to experience every stretching as a brightness. Try to experience every contraction as a darkness.” 12

12 Steiner, Rudolf. Eurythmy: Its Birth and Development, pg. 81.

He then described how one can feel these qualities of brightness and darkness in the sounds of speech—for example, the vowel sound ee (as in “see”) should be felt as bright, while the sound oo (as in “you”) should be felt as dark. He then gave the indication for the colors themselves in the form of a stretching of the hand upward and a contracting of the hand downward, with a balance in the middle. Green, which is a balance of yellow and blue, is experienced with the hand held straight out. From there one can stretch the hand upwards, brightening to yellow and even farther to orange and finally, with the most tension, to red. Conversely, when one contracts the hand by closing it, one arrives at the experience of blue, indigo and violet. 13

12 Ibid, pg. 82.

In this way, one can begin to embody the inner qualities of color, which can be extremely helpful for entering into Steiner’s descriptions of the human aura as they appear in Theosophy—that is, not as outer phenomena, but as inner experience. One can likewise enter in a living way into the descriptions of the spiritland in Theosophy through the help of eurythmy. As Steiner describes, in this spiritland we encounter the “archetypes” of everything we have come to know in the lower worlds (soul and physical). These archetypes are described as creative beings that are constantly active, producing form after form in a mobile, living process of creating. He describes how one can also experience a form of spiritual hearing through which these beings of the spiritland also sound in tones, rhythms, and harmonies. Upon entering the higher regions of the spiritland, the observer can experience how this sounding transforms itself into a spiritual language:

He begins to perceive the ‘spiritual word’ so that the things and beings do not only make their nature known to him through music, but also express it in ‘words.’ They tell him, as one may put it in spiritual science, their ‘eternal names.’ 14

14 Steiner, Rudolf. Theosophy: An Introduction to the Suprasensory Knowledge of the World and the Vocation of Man, pg. 140.

Through such descriptions, one can begin to understand what Steiner means when he says, “God eurythmises, and as the result of His eurythmy there arises the human form.” 15

15 Steiner, Rudolf. Eurythmy as Visible Speech, pg. 37.

Eurythmy in its highest form is the spiritual language of the higher worlds, which human beings can begin to cultivate during earthly incarnation as a remedy for the experience of separation from the divine world, a separation that lives as a wound in every human soul.

The first word ever carried out in eurythmy was Halleluiah, which, according to Rudolf Steiner, means, “I purify myself from everything which hinders me from beholding the Highest.” 16

16 Steiner, Rudolf. Eurythmy: Its Birth and Development, pg. 41.

Through eurythmy we are able to sense a future in which humanity will one day speak and create out of the power of the Word, in which the flesh will become Word. For that reason, Rudolf Steiner planted the seeds of eurythmy into the hearts of human beings. It is our task to care for those seeds, so that what was sown a hundred years ago can bear ripe fruit for the future.

Clifford Venho is a member of the faculty and performing ensemble at Eurythmy Spring Valley [www.eurythmy.org]. He also serves as a translator for the Chadwick Library Edition of Selected Written Works of Rudolf Steiner.