The Dionysian Course I

On that very first afternoon, Rudolf Steiner spoke last of three consonants — he had emphatically stressed: “One must sensitively experience the vowels in their movement tendencies: stretching, grasping, bending, crossing, striving.” In all this activity, the soul lives and expresses itself in ever-changing ways: “The whole soul is represented in its emotional life in the vowels.” This purely soul-based, weaving, living process was then contrasted with three specific consonants, namely the three consonants “b,” “s,” and “z,” which grasp a piece of the outside world, where we “have something in our hands” and now direct all our attention, all our experience, all our adaptability toward this “something,” this object. I will touch, hold, relate to, or even move or shape this piece of the outside world differently if it is a veil, a staff, a shield, a bud, or a flower. “Imagine how spiritual it can be when the boy in ‘Heidenröslein’ holds a stick in his hand and performs all his s-movements with the stick,” said Rudolf Steiner when, about six months later, he showed us a few more of the only stick exercises he had given us during these first lessons, some of which clearly had such an s-character.