Address on Eurythmy

But then, in addition to this movement, there is something else that lives in the same part of the human image-forming body, something that is held back, something that passes through our soul when we feel, when we experience impulses of will that can be translated into actions or simply felt. All this is not expressed in the same way in the image-forming body of the larynx as the word, the sound itself, but is expressed in a very formative way. We color, we permeate our speech and our singing with the tone of our will. But this does not translate into movement; it stalls the movement, so to speak. In the etheric body, a certain sound causes a swing, a movement of some kind to be performed. Feeling enters into the matter through the fact that this movement is dulled in a certain way and a form arises in the movement. While the movements of the etheric body are directly reflected in our eurythmy, what is contained in natural speech pours into the sounds, and eurythmy attempts to dissolve this, to bring it out. So, in eurythmy, we translate real movement into movements of the human limbs, or we dissolve movements that are latent while a person is speaking into real movements, into movements that the human organism then performs outside of its limbs by bending the head forward and backward, or by doing group dances. But you see that what we do is not something invented, but a reflection of what is present in the human organism. In this way, we really go back to the principles of ancient temple dance; for everything that was originally true temple art had as its principle the permeation of human life with the power of the word. But “word” was not understood in the way we understand it today, but rather the wisdom that resounds through the world in the sound of the spheres, which finds expression in the most diverse areas, which has a pure expression in human language, a somewhat more abstract expression in human song, which has a materialization in instrumental music, which can be redeemed when the whole human organism is brought into form and movement in the manner described. That is actually the principle at stake.