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Eurythmy as a New Mystery Art
by Clifford Venho
In my previous article, I discussed how the art of eurythmy emanates out of the Mystery stream of the Logos, the Word.
[“A Path to the Word,” being human fall 2019; www.issuu.com/anthrousa]
In the present article, I would like to look more closely at the connection between eurythmy and the Mysteries of antiquity.
We hear in the Prologue to the Gospel of John, “In the beginning was the Word.” But, as Rudolf Steiner points out, in writing his Prologue, St. John sought to forge a connection with a form of Mystery wisdom whose spiritual threads can be traced back to the Temple of Artemis at Ephesus. As Steiner describes,
CW 232. Mystery Centres. Trans. H. Collison. New York: Anthroposophic Press, 1943, p. 55
These Ephesian Mysteries played an important role in Steiner’s own spiritual research and in the development of the art of eurythmy, which from its inception in 1911 was intended to be “a matter of the word.” Eurythmy is an art that seeks to uncover and enliven the soulspiritual experience of the creative Word as it reveals itself microcosmically within the human organism.
Cf. CW 233 World History in the Light of Anthroposophy; CW 235 Karmic Relationships.
CW 277 Eurythmy: Its Birth and Development. Trans. Alan Stott, Anastasi Ltd., 2002, p. 15.
In a lecture in 1923 about the Mysteries of Ephesus, Steiner describes how in the Temple of Artemis, the pupils came to experience the spoken word as a microcosmic reflection of a macrocosmic evolutionary process. Our present earth has been formed out of the working of the Word within the substances of an earlier earthly condition. This activity of the Logos, which was at work in the atmosphere of the earth, is mirrored in the process of human speech. The Ephesian pupil came to experience how what we speak into the air is transformed, on the one hand, into the element of warmth, which ascends toward the head and takes up the content of our thought, and is transformed, on the other hand, into the water element, which descends downward to become inwardly perceptible to our feeling. This twofold rising and falling process was a picture of a macrocosmic process that had taken place in the evolution of the earth. Thus, upon entering the Temple of Artemis, the pupil of the Mysteries was greeted with the words: “Speak, O Man! and thou revealest through thyself the evolution of the world.”
CW 232. Mystery Centres, p. 52.
At the beginning of their training, the pupils of Ephesus were instructed to speak words and to “notice what you feel when the word sounds forth from the mouth.”6 They would speak short phrases that led them into the feeling of what lived in the activity of speech. If we compare this with the instruction given to Lory Smits by Rudolf Steiner at the beginning of her work with eurythmy, we find a striking similarity. He instructed Lory to speak a sentence containing only one vowel sound and to try to experience the dynamic that lives in the speaking of the sentence: “Barbara sass stracks am Abhang” (all ‘a’ sounds are pronounced “ah” as in “father”).7 She was to feel where the dynamic rose and fell, where it undulated, and so forth—in essence, the inner rhythm of the sentence—and then she was to dance it. This was a first step toward revealing how not only the spoken word but the whole human being is a microcosmic Logos. The activity which would otherwise take place through the larynx and neighboring speech organs is now extended, according to Goethe’s law of metamorphosis, to include the whole body. In eurythmy, the human being becomes all larynx. In addition, what is otherwise suppressed and hidden in the experience of the human ‘I’ during speech can be made visible—thus realizing Goethe’s statement that art is “the revelation of the hidden laws of nature.” As Steiner explained in a lecture to teachers in 1919,
Ibid., p. 51.
CW 277 Eurythmy: Its Birth and Development, p. 19.
CW 294 Practical Advice to Teachers, Lecture 4. Trans. Johanna Collis. Great Barrington, MA: Anthroposophic Press, 2000, p. 56
Thus, eurythmy takes an inner spiritual process, which would usually remain unconscious, and makes it visible through movement. The vocabulary, so to speak, of this movement arises in the first place out of the sounds of language, out of the alphabet.
In the Speech Eurythmy Course of 1924, Steiner describes how in the Mysteries, the alphabet was experienced as an expression of the human etheric body. He describes throughout the lectures how the sounds can be experienced in their inner quality and dynamic, and how these, in turn, are connected with what was taught in the ancient Mysteries. For example, the sound ‘f’ he describes in connection with the breathing exercises of the ancient eastern Mysteries and early Egyptian Mysteries. ‘F’ was felt as an expression of the wisdom of Isis, which permeated the whole structure of the human organism and could be experienced through the yogic breathing exercises. With the in-breath, one felt permeated by this wisdom, and with the out-breath in the sound ‘f’, one felt this wisdom sounding forth as knowledge. Thus, with ‘f’, we wish to say, “Know that I know.”
The etheric is a dynamic body of formative life forces which organize an organism’s mineral substance and support thought and memory. –Editor
CW 279 Eurythmy as Visible Speech. 3rd Edition. Trans. Alan Stott, et al., Anastasi Ltd., 2015, p. 44. 11 Ibid., p. 57. 12 Ibid., p. 49
Steiner also speaks about the sound ‘l’ in the context of the Mysteries as having a formative, magical power, a power to overcome matter and shape it to one’s will.11 This is brought beautifully to expression through the eurythmy gesture for ‘l’, which seeks to transform substance into spirit, laying hold of the earth and making it permeable to spiritual light. Similarly, the sound ‘s’ was felt in the Mysteries as having a magic power that could penetrate into the essence of things. It is a sound that brings calm through mastery.12 Think of how you would feel if, in a public space, someone began speaking the sound “sss” until the room fell totally silent. Indeed, something like this is required in the crowded hall of the Sistine Chapel, where the guards are often forced to shout, “silencio!” Steiner also connects the sound ‘s’ with the Staff of Mercury and the form of the serpent. Indeed, when we draw this form with its double curve, we can feel how it requires a certain inner mastery—as opposed to a straight line, for example, which can be drawn without much thought.
Steiner also speaks of the sound ‘m’ in connection with the sacred Indian word “aum.” It is that which penetrates the world with understanding. Steiner uses an example from everyday life, pointing out that when someone says something to us and we want to express our understanding, we naturally respond with the sound, “mmm.” Thus, with ‘m’ we penetrate into matter with insight and even take on the form of Steiner’s drawing of eurythmy form M. the thing we understand—we “mold” ourselves to the world in understanding, in sympathy for what is there.
Ibid., p. 57. 14 Ibid.
Steiner’s drawing of eurythmy form M.
All of these examples belong to the development of an inner experience of the qualities living in sounds. Steiner remarks that if we spoke only out of an inner experience of the sounds and not with words, “we would indeed possess a simpler and more primitive language, yet it would combine with this simplicity a much deeper intimacy and understanding.” Interjections are the most immediate expression of our inner experience, unadorned by any conventional or intellectual content. When we see a flower in the meadow or a starlit sky, we cannot help but express our wonder in the sound “ah.” When curiosity overtakes us, or also when we experience fear, we utter the sound, “oo.” When an infant lies resting in its mother’s arms, and we experience a loving connection with this infant, we say, “ohhh.” Indeed, the primeval, original language consisted of such expressions of pure inner experience through sound, especially through the sound of the vowels, which radiate from our inner life.
A (ah) / Alpha
This relationship to a living experience of language once belonged to humanity but was gradually lost in the course of history. The transition from the Greek to the Roman epoch marks the loss of the ancient wisdom and with it the ancient feeling for the sounds. We could say that this transition really began with the burning of the Temple of Ephesus, the house of the Word. The Greeks still called the sounds of their alphabet by name: Alpha, Beta, etc. They thereby expressed their experience of the beingness of sounds. It was the Romans who abstracted this beingness of the sounds into the abstract letters of the alphabet: a, b, c, etc. With the Greeks, we feel how the alphabet was a living expression of the whole human being. We can feel the vowel A (as in “father”) as containing the whole potential of the human being, the primeval sound that expresses his creation out of “two different directions of cosmic space.” We can also think of Christ’s statement, “I am the Alpha and the Omega,” the beginning and the end. Sensing in the Alpha this creative power of the human being in his full potentiality, we can then add the Beta. We can feel the enveloping quality of the Beta, again a formative creative power, but now coming out of the realm of the Zodiac, enshrining the human being in an outer form, in a body. Thus, with the Alpha and Beta, we have, as Steiner puts it, “Man in his house.”
Ibid., p. 51.
The Alphabet. Trans. V. E. Watkin. Mercury Press, 2013, p. 2.
B / Beta
One of the tasks of eurythmy is to enliven the experience of the beingness of the sounds of language, of the living alphabet. But this can no longer be done out of a dependence on the divine spiritual world, as it was in the past, but only out of human freedom. It is individuals who, out of their own initiative, must find their way from the barren desert of abstraction, having attained day-waking consciousness, back to the spiritual fields of life. Eurythmy takes its starting point from this waking consciousness that we have acquired through our separation from the divine world, our expulsion from Paradise, and seeks to expand it to encompass a living experience of the etheric, soul, and spiritual members of the human being and of cosmic being. Before eurythmy had yet appeared in Steiner’s work, he had already given exercises in his esoteric lessons in which he describes how one can work with the qualities of the sounds of speech in a way that awakens deeper and higher consciousness. In fact, it is a necessity for any path of meditation. For example, he gave various forms of meditation that work with the sounds IAO (as in “eagle, father, oval”). In one of the esoteric exercises, which bears a close resemblance to IAO in eurythmy, the pervading mood is described: “IAO is the name of Christ. This is connected to the secret of how Christ works in the human being.” We can sense how this threefold utterance, which gives expression to the human being balancing ( I ) between two polarities (A and O), can tell us how Christ, the Word, is active as a harmonizing force in the human being.
CW 264 From the History and Contents of the First Section of the Esoteric School 1904-1914. Trans. Hella Wiesberger. SteinerBooks, 2010.
The first real exercise for eurythmy given to Lory Smits was IAO. Here Steiner told Lory to experience herself as a column, whose base was her feet and whose capital was her head. He told her to experience this upright column, in which the weight rests on the balls of the feet, as the vowel sound I. She was then told to move the head of the column so that it was behind the base, with the weight on the heels, and to learn to experience this as A. Finally, she was told to shift her weight so that the head of the column was in front of the base, with weight on the toes, and was told to experience this as O. Thus, the threefold gestalt meditation was given to Lory as a seed from which all eurythmy would arise. She was told to learn to experience each position as a sound, to allow the microcosmic Word to sound forth not only from the larynx and mouth but from the whole human being.
CW 277 Eurythmy: Its Birth and Development, p. 23.
Steiner also speaks of the significance of IAO in many of his lectures, notably in his Easter lectures of 1924 in connection with the Mysteries of Ephesus. There he describes how the pupils of Ephesus could experience themselves in the sphere of the moon, in the condition of the human being prior to incarnation. There, as the pupil built himself up out of the sunlight transformed by the moon, there sounded forth the sounds I, O, A, as if raying from the sun itself. He felt the sound I as enlivening his ‘I’, while O enlivened his astral body. With A, he felt the approach of his radiant etheric body. Then, rising from the earth toward him, came the sounds eh-v. As Steiner describes, “In this word, IehOvA [Jehovah], the Mystery student experienced himself as a complete human being. Through the consonants, he felt a premonition of his earthly physical body.” The Mystery student could experience himself through the creative sounding of these cosmic vowels as a threefold being, ‘I’, astral, and etheric, within the sphere of the moon—the consonantal element then approaching from the earth in preparation for incarnation. Today, we stand firmly on the earth and have developed the physical body, the consonantal element, but we must reach back up out of our ‘I’-nature to what we are as spiritual beings. Thus, we have the sounding from earth: I, A, O. We are no longer looking down to the earth but rather reaching up to the heavens.
The Easter Festival in the Evolution of the Mysteries. Trans. Brian Kelly. Hudson, NY: Anthroposophic Press, 1988, p. 54.
In Atlantean times, when human beings needed no help in experiencing the cosmic aspect of their being but simply lived in the creative working and weaving of the spirit, they experienced the Divine speaking from all of creation. Rudolf Steiner describes how the atmosphere at that time was permeated with the water element, with thick veils of mists. But these mists had a special connection to the human being of that time. Through them, the soul was made receptive to the mysterious language of God. It could be heard in all of nature—in the rushing waves and the rustling leaves. It sounded forth to them as the sacred sound of TAO. Here, the spirit streams into the human being from out of the whole circumference of the cosmos through the sound ‘T’. This spiritual in-streaming was a preparation for the IAO, which can be experienced as welling forth from the inner being of the ‘I’. In ancient Atlantis, the word of the gods spoke to us from the whole cosmos; now the word of the human ‘I’ on earth must speak to the cosmos. The IAO has developed as “the name of Christ”, the ‘I am’, at work within the human being.
CW 266/1 From the Esoteric School. Esoteric Lessons 1904-1909. Trans. James Hindes. Great Barrington, MA: SteinerBooks, 2007, p. 179.
That is not to say the TAO does not have a place anymore in the spiritual life of humanity. In fact, Rudolf Steiner later developed an exercise in eurythmy, which he called a “eurythmy meditation,” based on this mystery of the TAO. He developed it for eurythmists in order to help them enliven their instruments, to bring divine spiritual forces into their hardened bodies, making them supple and permeable again. This permeability and flexibility, not only of the physical body but most importantly of the soul, has always been an aim in the development of eurythmy. Thus, we can see how eurythmy is an art that is permeated with the wisdom of the ancient Mysteries and, at the same time, that seeks to offer itself as a building stone in the temple of the new Mysteries.
CW 278 Eurythmy as Visible Singing. 3rd Edition. Trans. Alan Stott. Anastasi Ltd., 2013, p. 88.
Clifford Venho is a eurythmist, poet, translator, and a visiting faculty member at Eurythmy Spring Valley, where he also teaches poetics. He is as a translator and editor for Chadwick Library Press and SteinerBooks. His poetry is forthcoming in the anthology "“Without a Doubt: poems illuminating faith” and has appeared in various literary journals. He lives with his wife in Harlemville, NY.
