I. Eurythmy as Visible Speech

GA 279/1924-06-24/p031 ·1924-06-24 · English MediumMedium alignmentSome paragraph re-numbering between this translation and the German original — the locus may slip by a paragraph or two.
Record: stenogram (shorthand transcript). Shorthand transcript taken during the lecture — the strongest kind of lecture record in this corpus. Evidence: «Das Stenogramm wurde neu übertragen» (The shorthand transcript was transcribed anew). The publisher's description of the 2019 edition, as mirrored on AnthroWiki (GA 279). The translation is the maintainer's, not a published one.

We have therefore to do with a creative activity which, welling up from the depths of cosmic life, flows outwards through the medium of speech. We see revealed in a fluctuating, ever-changing form that which otherwise withdraws itself into the mysterious depths of the human organization at the moment of physical birth. Thus we gain something which is essential for us in our artistic creative activity. We gain respect, reverence, for that creative element into which we, as artists, are placed. Theoretical discussion is useless in the realm of art. We cannot do with it; it merely leads us into abstraction. In art we need something which places us with our whole human being into the cosmic being. And how could we penetrate more deeply into the cosmic being than by becoming conscious of the relation existing between speech and the genesis of man. Every time that a man speaks he produces out of himself some part of that which existed in primeval times, when the human being was created out of cosmic depths, out of the etheric forces, and received form as a being of air before he acquired fluidic form, and, later still, his solid physical form. Every time we speak we transpose ourselves into the cosmic evolution of man as it was in primeval ages.

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Cite: GA 279/1924-06-24/p031 · edition English