The Origin and Development of Eurythmy 1912–1918

GA 277a — 18 May 1908, Hamburg

Notes on the Origin of Eurythmy

In both her diary entries and her autobiography, Die grüne Schlange (The Green Snake), Margarita Woloschin describes her brief conversation with Rudolf Steiner after the first lecture in the series Das Johannes-Evangelium (The Gospel of St. John) (May 18-31, 1908) in Hamburg. In this lecture, Rudolf Steiner had spoken about the Logos doctrine based on the prologue to the Gospel of John and pointed to the origin of human beings in the divine creative word.

Margarita Woloschin, from: “Diary Entries”

In the evening we went to the lecture. A blue hall. The windows covered the entire wall and were covered with a curtain of delicate yellow silk. He stood in front of it when he spoke. He was illuminated by a white gas chandelier, very pale, completely surrounded by golden light, with superhuman eyes, superhuman love, and superhuman power. He spoke very differently than in Berlin, and I had never seen him look the way he did yesterday. A bouquet of lilies of the valley stood in front of him. He spoke of the beginning of the Gospel of John, of the mute creature and the Word, and of the lilies of the valley, which he held in his hand—as it seemed to me, the whole time. His voice faded, undecided whether it should return to the earthly realm, died away, only to rise again—again and again. A magnificent victory. Who can comprehend this eternity that has taken human form? At times, one cannot bear to look at him. But he, sparing us, takes on a simple human appearance. So, when I left the hall after yesterday's lecture and he asked me in the foyer: “Could you perhaps express what I have been talking about through dance?” “A perfect feeling, how else could it be embodied?” “Yes, today was also about feeling.”

Margarita Woloschin, from: “The Green Snake”

The lectures took place in the small white hall of a bourgeois house. Rudolf Steiner stood in front of a yellow silk curtain at a small table. On this first evening, he spoke about the prologue to the Gospel of John, “In the beginning was the Word”; and as he did so, he took a lily of the valley from the bouquet standing in front of him: Just as the lily of the valley grew from the seed, but the seed is hidden in the flower, so the world and human beings arose from the Word; it was a silent world, for human beings were silent in the beginning; but the Word was hidden within them, just as the seed is hidden in the flower. And the Word began to sound from man: “I am.”

After the lecture, he came up to me and asked, “Could you dance that?” I was not surprised by this question, because ever since my childhood I had felt the need to dance every profound experience; and I was convinced that Rudolf Steiner “knows everything.” I replied, “I believe you can dance anything you feel.” — “But today it was all about feeling!” He repeated this sentence and stood in front of me for a while, looking at me as if he were waiting for something. But I didn't ask him. — In the fall of that same year, after a lecture on the correspondences of rhythms in the cosmos and in human beings, he came up to me and said: “Dance is an independent rhythm, a movement whose center is outside of human beings. The rhythm of dance leads to the primordial times of the world. The dances of our time are a degeneration of the ancient temple dances through which the deepest secrets of the world were revealed.” And again he stood waiting in front of me, and again I asked nothing. I did not know then that the words of a teacher always want to be a hint, without infringing on the freedom of the student. I only understood what he was waiting for four years later, when he explained the basis of a new art of movement in response to a student's question. The question had to be asked by a human being, only then did he answer.