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EURYTHMY
A SUPPORT IN MOVEMENT TO THEAPPRENTICESHIP OF FREEDOM IN WALDORF HIGH
SCHOOL EDUCATION
A Resume of the Master’s Thesis Work Presented to the Graduate Faculty of the
Freie Hochschule Stuttgart and Eurythmeum Stuttgart
In Partial Fulfillment of the RequirementsOf a Master of Arts in Eurythmy Pedagogy
BY GABRIELLE ARMENIER
ABSTRACT
A free human being is a conscious human being, whose actions stream from an artistic understanding and artistic experience of life. To set the human being on his individual path to freedom, Waldorf education aims at providing the environment that enables the student to grasp his own freedom, by harmonizing his thought life and his actions. This harmonization is the ultimate and archetypal artistic experience, the experience of imparting meaning to one’s life.
Eurythmy is a complete embodiment by the human being of moving, living freedom. As the artist mediates his art from a source outside of himself, through his soul, back out into the world, eurythmy transforms the etheric laws of life which enables conscious thinking,through the heart-space, by movements of the will-imbued limbs of thehuman body.
If the human being is fully human, that is to say, free, when he transforms an outer given, through his soul faculties, back out into a social, meaning-filled action, eurythmy is the most conscious artistic rendition of this process. As the consciousness enabling power of thought begins to develop itself in each human being after puberty, what role does eurythmy play in the freedom-orientated Waldorf High School education?
Note to the Reader
This thesis takes as pre-requisite an acquaintance with the
spiritual-scientific work of Rudolf Steiner. The content dealt
with here is intended to take its basis from such work, as well
as from completely relevant and actual scientific research.
While eurythmy is an artistic expression of the understanding of
the human being as fostered in anthroposophy, I have chosen not
to focus on a justification of this statement, nor on a
justification of the laws of both eurythmy and anthroposophy: a
very rich and vast study would be needed to give justice to this
task and is be found in the vast literature available today in
German, English and French publications.
I have rather chosen to take my point of departure from the
lawfulness which has blossomed in both anthroposophy and eurythmy
in a hundred years worth of work, lawfulness which belongs to
years of research in a variety of fields, and which can be found
in the anthroposophically based literature, as well as in
forefront scientific publications, testimony to the nonsectarian
scientific studies it promotes. Based on this literature, my
present aim is to promote a furthering of the understanding of
the place eurythmy holds in Waldorf education.
This thesis is written as a continuation of the studies I
received at the Freie Hochschule Stuttgart during the academic
year of 2013-2014. As such, I assume the same understanding and
subject knowledge on the part of the reader as is expected of the
students in the Pedagogical Eurythmy Masters Course.
CONTENTS CHAPTER ONE Introduction
Page 5 - The Subject
Page 7 - The Question
Page 8 - The Structure
CHAPTER TWO
The Teenage Years as a Preparation towards Seizing Freedom
Page 9 - Waldorf Education
Page 11 - The Four High School Years
Page 14 - The Graduating Student
Page 16 - The Parzival Path
Page 20 - Thinking as the Goal
Page 26 - Harmonizing Thought and Will to Seize Freedom
CHAPTER THREE
Eurythmy as an Experience of Freedom
Page 32 - Eurythmy as an Art of Movement
Page 37 - Eurythmy as a Support for Freedom
Page 44 - The Pedagogical Pursuit: Eurythmy in High School
Page 53 - The Teenager and his Experience of Eurythmy
CHAPTER FOUR Conclusion
Page 59 - Conclusion and Future Development
Page 62 - Endnotes
Page 63 - References
CHAPTER ONE Introduction
THE SUBJECT Our role as educators of the 21st century in general, in Waldorf schools particularly and as eurythmy teachers most importantly tends towards enabling the students to seize their life destiny in their ownhands, that is to say, to acquire the ability to impart meaning to their life. To become a conscious Co-Creator of the manner in which the events of one’s life are lived through.
This consciousness is the stage upon which freedom plays its part.
A state of freedom is by its very definition a state that cannot be imparted in any way: it must arise out of the individual as a self-originated, self-cultivated experience.
The experience of freedom is not meant here as the liberty of the what,but as the freedom of the how, as the solely human capacity of accompanying an outer given in a way that a human individual has inwardly, individually and ethically decided upon; human freedom as the consciousness we bring to how we act, feel or think in a particular manner, in a particular given situation.
After puberty, a chord is “sounded” in the human being, which results in the awareness of one’s self. The feeling for freedom which awakens at that time in the holiest of shrines, in the human soul, should be left to develop itself: though its environment should be tended to with the outmost care, the young sapling itself is not to be directly tutored. It may root itself in the will-orientated education received in Waldorf kindergarten in its early years and unfold its stem and leaves in the artistic education of lower and Middle School. In High
School, it prepares its flower: the capacity and ability to think is slowly nurtured.
For education to one day bear fruit in the healthy individuality of a human being, the respect of the laws of development and growth must beobserved. An overly stimulated intellectualism has no place in such aneducation, but the apprenticeship of thinking must take place when thetime is right, that is to say, during the High School years.
The content must then not only be demanding, but must most importantlybe structured in such a way as to forward the practice of developed thought. The students demand of their teachers absolute truth in the subjects, and ask of the teachers a scientific attitude.
The educational material is therefore present, but is taught in such away as to leave the human Ego1 untouched. The unfolding individuality is not violated by dry intellectualism and the respect shown to him leaves the future vehicle of his freedom untouched.
The education of the High School years is thus one tending towards self assumed responsibility, desire and respect for truth, crowned by the first blossoms of self originated, living thought.
Living thought. That is to say, thought in movement.
Eurythmy, the art of conscious, living movement, is more than a part of Waldorf education; it is its foundation stone.
1
Ego: I will refer in my paper from time to time to a human being’s Individuality as their Ego. Capitalized, the term is not to be confused with the psychological ‘little ego’ one talks about when one uses the phrase “he has an overstuffed ego”. It is rather to be understood as that which, beyond heredity and outer life circumstances, makes a person truly unique, humanly unique. Every human being is bearer of an Ego and is, through this ownership, one evolutionary step above the animal kingdom.
Highly structured, according to the laws of the living -the laws of the etheric1 - and to the laws of movement -the laws of the astral2- eurythmy surrounds the activity of the Ego in a twofold manner, acting‘all the way down into’ the physical body on the one hand, and ‘all the way out’, in the space that surrounds the human body on the other.
THE QUESTION
If the High School years are the years of the apprenticeship of self induced, conscious and moving thinking, and eurythmy the moving enactment of living thought, in what way does eurythmy support the students’ development during High School?
I will argue this question in a threefold manner, contending that
1 Etheric, or etheric body: is used here as a summary of all the forces that enable and support life. As opposed to the force of gravity, they are subjected to the force of levity, force which pulls plant growth upward, away from the downward pull of gravity. As falling bodies are taken over by gravity, growing bodies are taken over by the force of levity. This subject was at the basis of Goethe’s scientific work, and is at the basis of the eurythmical gestures.
2 Astral, or astral body: compendium of the soul’s activity, its upheavals, urges, strivings, desires, it is a body of soul movements. The impulse for movement takes its point of departure in this body, as can be seen when animals jump, run, spring, leap, fly, undulate as a response to it, contrary to the un-ensouled stationary existence of plants.
1) The experience of a lawful gesture strengthens in a non-aggressive manner the feeling for one’s self;
2) The expressive gestures of this stage art enrich the soul life of the student, offering it manifold expressions;
3) The movement of one’s body in space demands not only a mastering of one’s own instrument, that is to say, one’s movement, but alsoa high attention to others, to their path and movement, dynamic and intention.
It is thus a schooling in:
1) The character of one’s Individuality2) The wealth of the soul life and the feeling for what is true,
beautiful and good3) The social implications of one’s part in society and in the laws
of interactions in-between individuals.
THE STRUCTURE
I will begin with a panorama of Waldorf Education, developing its atmosphere, ideals, goals, and methods.
From this plateau, I will spiral downwards and inwards towards my subject, encircling it in an ever tighter perspective: the viewpoint will shift from the general education principles of Waldorf education to those of High School, and then to the four questions that hold these four years together and weave the inward structure of the curriculum.
This will lead to the archetype of the High School student as seen in the figure of Parzival, archetype of a human being, self responsible in his actions and conscious in his thoughts.
The inward spiraling path of questioning that is at the base of an actof thought will be taken and will lead us to the conclusion of ChapterTwo. This chapter will end with the core of this paper, a reflection of the experience of freedom.
Chapter Three will be based on eurythmy and will spiral us back outwards from the individual teenager to the fully grown human being he will one day become.
Chapter Four will re-synthesize the elements I argue, and bring to a Conclusion the Question underlining this work.
CHAPTER TWO
The Teenage Years as a Preparation Toward Seizing Freedom
WALDORF EDUCATION
Waldorf Education is first and foremost a feeling of reverence for thehuman being as a whole, and for the developing Individuality of a student at a particular moment in his life. It is a feeling that is carried by every teacher, no matter what the subject. This feeling asks of every single teacher, before entering the school institution, to cultivate a certain relationship to the human being, a relationshipto the image of the human being as a being one evolutionary step aheadof the animal. The ultimate goal of Waldorf education is first and foremost to provide an environment, to provide as healthy, rich, and nurturing an environment as possible for the student’s self education. This self education is enabled by developing in the child the capacities for imagination, inspiration and intuition and is the base upon which ethical individualism may be freely built.
The Waldorf school motto “Receive the Child in Reverence, Educate it in Love, Let it Go Forth in Freedom” points to the threefoldness of the human being as a being capable of actions, feelings and thoughts.
Thus are the three components of body, soul and spirit accounted for and nourished first of all by the reverence such a being gently imposes, by the love and creativity needed to form the joyfully serious life of a child, and the discipline the teacher must demand ofhimself to present his students with worthwhile lessons. To accompany the students rightfully, the teacher assumes over the years three roles: he is for the young child as a priest, for the middle school child an artist and ends his own roles of accompanying transformation as a scientist.
The teacher is thus no unmoving entity, fixed in his part of knowledgeimparter, but rather accompanies the students in their development, byteaching from different standpoints. By adopting these three roles, the teacher respects the three learning stages the students go throughbetween kindergarten and graduation.
As such, the Waldorf school curriculum is formed as en living entity in which subjects are studied throughout the years from ever changing perspectives, based on the student’s consciousness (D’Aleo, 2002; Russell, 2009) and is based on three great leaning periods:
- The education of the Will:
A first experience is offered the students of kindergarten and
the lower grades through the will (Steiner, 1919, GA 297): the
senses are encouraged by tactile experiences of natural
materials (Graves, 2005), by painting, sculpting, wax
modeling; fingers games refine fine motor skills (Hauck,
1937), eurythmy and gymnastics classes support the body’s
spacial orientation.
- The artistic education of the lower and middle grades
This education of the will is taken one step further into an
artistic education (Steiner, 1923, GA 276). The forces that
were used by the body in building up the organism (Bockemuehl,
1977) are freed up around the age of seven (Steiner, 1915, GA
159). The inner life of the child is less body bound and it
becomes interested in the subjects that enrich his soul life.
- The education of the thought life in High School
When students enter High School around the age of fourteen,
the artistic phase of schooling ends; as puberty has just
been gone through, the method shifts once more anew:
subjects that were artistically studied in middle school are
once more taken up, but are now confronted by the intellect.
The point is no longer to be imbued by a subject, but to
apply one’s intellect to comprehending it (Steiner, GA 34).
The Waldorf pedagogical methodology is one of repetition, but
from standpoints and in manners that evolve with the abilities of
the student. This same methodology, namely the methodology of
repetition, cultivates the will and feeling (Steiner, 1919, GA
293: #4) and is at the base of mastering an artistic discipline.
In education, the question of learning being then not only one of
content, but equally of method (Schieren, 2012).
The main lessons are there throughout the years as the most
direct support of the stance the student must now take
(Guttenhoefer, 2004). In 9th grade, the main lesson on the Age of
Enlightenment sets off High School and helps ground the newly
appearing intellectual consciousness (Hoinaes). Human Sciences
that begin in 9th grade and go on to 10th grade aim at framing the
new position of the adolescent in life (Kennish, 2007) and the
phenomenology of the natural sciences taken as an exercise in
observation (Ogaard) and the training of the thought life
(Hardorp, 2011) begin slowly, tentatively, but in earnest, to
allow the thought-life to come to birth.
THE FOUR HIGH SCHOOL YEARS
The High School years can be looked at as an entity, developed
from and yet separate from, the 8 years of lower and middle
school. In America, a student will change building, campus, if
not school entirely for those last four years.
For the graduating student to face adult life confidently and
ably, he spends the last years of his school life developing this
aptitude by facing four questions. WHAT? HOW? WHY? WHO?
These four questions stand at the doorway of all that is taught
in Waldorf Schools in the Upper Grades. They are the structure
not only to the very curriculum itself, but to how it is
approached. By facing these four questions as a trial into
adulthood, the student comes to face himself, re-discovering and
re-studying in a conceptual manner the subjects he was taught
artistically and imaginatively in the first eight grades. But if
those subjects were then brought to him as soul pictures, he now
has to confront them as an Individuality in an abstract and
thought through manner.
And thus in 9th grade are geology, organic compounds,
thermodynamics and comparative anatomy some of the most important
main lessons. Black and white drawings as well as algebra come
back into the curriculum. The question of the WHAT is studied by
working the subjects as polarities; though the student’s thinking
is still infused with feeling, it is given a new basis that
transforms the artistic wealth of his previous education into a
solid scientific mode of perception. The phenomenological
scientific studies of 6th, 7th and 8th grade (D’Aleo: 2002) are
thus brought to a further stage.
In 10th grade this rational thinking approach to phenomena is
transformed and brought further: comparative anatomy becomes
embryology, thermodynamic in physics becomes mechanics, in
chemistry the study of organic compounds becomes that of acids,
salts and bases, and so forth.
The counting theory of 9th grade mathematics turns to sacred
geometry. Time and again, the developmental HOW is explored.
HOW? then turns to WHY? Invisibility is a key question in the
11th grade sciences: not only are electricity and magnetism
approached, but by digging into the heart of atomic structure,
the students are encouraged to look at what happens
phenomenologically when one rips the heart out of materialism
(D’Aleo: 2002). In studying Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle,
one comes to realize that matter is a mystery and that the answer
you get depends of the question you ask (Wulsin: 2006). We will
come to see how the parallel with the Parzival Legend will not be
difficult to draw.
The beautiful “at-rest” laws of 10th grade Sacred Geometry are
put into movement as Projective Geometry, asking of a student’s
thinking to encompass the notion of infinity, and to think
through an untouchable reality. Working to anchor not only the
visible, but also the invisible gives the student confidence in
the world and in his ability to face whatever comes towards him;
it is an antidote to the notion of fear that can be experienced
at that age.
In 11th grade, the students also study through embryology the
many stages of an evolving human form, the same principles of
metamorphosis being then taking up in botany with the higher
plants; in this way can this subject be rounded off in 12th grade
in a main lesson entitled “Evolution”, which is then connected to
the Faust story.
All the subject matters are brought around full circle in 12th
grade, resounding as the octave of their twelve years in school.
Main lessons on Light, Bio-chemistry, the Transcendentalists in
Humanities, Goethe’s Faust.... all these subjects help the 12th
grader transform Confidence into Responsibility towards the
surrounding world.
This he is more capable of doing when he has been given a chance
to explore his personal style, his personal approach to a
particular subject, as asked of him in 11th grade.
This art of teaching, which seeks to incorporate a transformative
principle from one subject to the next according to the
developmental stage of the High schoolers, embedded in the
rhythms of life (Glasby) can be recapitalized in the following
manner:
9th Grade: harmonizing Opposites fosters the powers of
Observation
10th Grade: studying Processes brings about Comparison
11th Grade: the deconstruction of matter to reach to reach its
‘inside’, its innermost element, demands Analysis
12th Grade: the ‘Making Sense of the Journey’ is supported as a
consciousness through Synthesis
Yet another way of stating these four questions is to approach
subjects through the methodologies of
Polarities in 9th grade
Synthesis in 10th grade
Metamorphosis in 11th grade
Integration in 12th grade
Applied to subjects, this brings about as an example these frames
of study:
9th grade History is explored through Art
In 10th grade, through Poetry
In 11th grade, through Music
In the 12th grade though Architecture.
THE GRADUATING STUDENT
The ultimate reward for a teacher is to hear the student he has
accompanied over so many years emit the wish to leave him. The
wish to leave the school. The wish to go on to greener pastures…
for that would entail the success of his education. The act of
rebellion that should accompany graduation is the gateway to
adulthood. It is the gateway from being a ‘student’ to being a
‘self learner’. Education need not stop at 18 years old, but the
person that steps out into the world through graduation is best
armed when he has acquired a confidence in his own ability to
assume himself.
Acts of rebellion can have varied outcomes, positive ones and
destructive ones, and not all rebellions are outwardly visible
(Pickhardt, 2013; Sulloway, 1996). The majority of rebellions are
inward attitudes, which may or may not be spoken out, towards
one’s surrounding world, or one’s inadequacies. Destructive
rebellion comes when the student is no longer able to master the
inner life that wells up in him and is referred to and looked
upon by the parents in dread or dismay. But in the best of cases,
rebellion leads to a constructive inner assuming of oneself and
is come to at different ages. It becomes the energy that drives a
change forward, and can be a most beneficial stage to go through.
For this to emerge in a proper way, what soul landscapes must be
crossed, what soul regions traversed? What questions asked? This
is naturally assumed by every student in a different manner, but
as a soul journey, great similarities of soul states can be
observed in the four High School years.
In twelfth grade, the 12th grader stands finally at the summit of
the school world and harbors a well earned feeling of “knowing it
all” as he begins to distance himself from the school life,
preparing himself to “reject” it at graduation. The Rose
Ceremony, during which the student comes around full circle, and
presents the first graders with a rose, opens the year. Twelve
grade, year in which the student presents a personal project
whose only demand is the total accordance of the student with his
subject, is one in which the zodiac as a experienceable entity
finds its place. The class usually goes through a more or less
complete dislocation in its inner structure, the group-feeling
falling apart as individuals start looking ahead. Graduation
allows one last celebration, and the group bonds once more in the
last few weeks of school, but the separation that has underlined
the year bears its fruits as the school year dissolves.
The 11th grader is, on the contrary, still fully engaged in the
school as an Institution, fully engaged in the classes and full
of an avid questioning. He is still here to learn, to be taught,
open to the impulses and directions of his teachers, sufficiently
independent in his feeling life to demand answers from them,
though not yet enough not be taken up more or less entirely by
the wonderful, exhilarating and craved for social life of his
class.
Ninth grade is the year of inner uncertainty, anxiety or self-
doubt. Kings of the playground in 8th grade, ninth graders enter
a new building and suddenly are the ‘little ones’; they see the
world with new eyes, and try to comprehend it for the first time.
The adult world, which still seemed so far away in eighth grade,
suddenly looms near and becomes the next big step they will take;
yet they feel as yet unable to face it, lacking the right tools
to face it, and anxieties can quickly develop (Vogt) as a student
suddenly feels pressed into new confines (Archiati).
The very strong emotional life which takes hold of the student
during the teenage years is supported by different cultures in a
more or less conscious manner. In America, the first three years
of this tetralogy are a rite of passage into the last year,
Senior Year. This last year tends to be seen as a “Golden Age”
and is often looked back upon with tender, longing regret.
American movies of those years abound, re-living and re-telling
what is felt to be a strongly life forming period.
In public schools especially, this last year is crowned by
‘Prom’, an event that stands as the culmination of twelve years
of school life and for the incarnation of the romantic values of
that age. Ideology is strong, and the approaching passage into
the responsibilities of adulthood emphasizes the contrast between
the end of high school and the new college/first job life that
lies ahead. The gaze back is often a sentimental one.
But this can also be a very rocky time (Staley, 2002). The
feeling of having to pass through the eye of needle that can be
felt by teenagers in High School is very real, and arises from
the opening of the soul life into the depths of the psyche. At
the extreme, suicides take place (suicides being the second cause
of death for youths between 10 and 24, 2010 CDC WISQARS) and car
crashes are not uncommon. But most of the death forms happen on
subtler levels. To accompany these soul-tempests, the curriculum
frames these inner turmoils by addressing them in the main
lessons. One example of this can be seen in the English main
lesson on Dante. There, the writer leads the students ‘into the
mouth of Hell’. With a taste of Hell and Purgatory, of how the
soul can be purified and acquire a taste of Paradise, the
students “emerge with a vaster knowledge of all the possibilities
of human sin than most of our comparable teenagers, without
having had to become victims, through the artfully conscious work
in the curriculum” (Wulsin, 2010). By addressing the inward state
of being of the adolescent through the incredible mastery of form
needed in the classical arts, whatever their form, the curriculum
aims at providing the tools for the students to become masters of
their own feeling-life. An example of a written assignment given
in this class could be the composition of twenty lines of poetry
in the style of Dante about a shadowy or soul-creeping moment;
that is to say, the dark areas of the soul brought forth and
submitted to the poetical laws, therefore objectified.
The main lesson on Dante usually gives way to that of Parzival.
The teenager is then completely addressed not only in his present
state of soul, but is shown a path to pure thinking that can lead
him on his entire life.
2 - 4 THE PARZIVAL PATH
The Parzival Legend holds a unique place in the Waldorf
Curriculum, as it is not only a main lesson in 11th grade, but
stands in a certain manner as the entire background to, as the
entire web of the Waldorf curriculum. The reason for such a
significance is to be found in this quote from Steiner: “In the
whole picture drawn of Parsifal, if rightly understood, we can
find all the different methods of training the consciousness Soul
which are necessary to evoke from it the right effects, so that
the person can gain control of the forces which whirl in
confusion and strive against one another in the Intellectual or
Mind soul” (Steiner, 2010). In Wolfram von Eschenbach’s own
words, we read that his book is not to be approached as a book as
such (verse 115, 25 – 11, 4) but as a journey to an inner
experience, where the structure of the text itself is a
development of the Grail Legend (Lampe, 1990). The grail legend
is approached by transforming words into sensibilities (Steiner,
1914, GA 149), by exercising consciousness in the three soul
realms.
The Legend of Parzival is thus the Legend of the human being in
the fifth Post Atlantean Epoch. It is the striving of the human
soul as it becomes conscious of itself in the full uprightness of
its human responsibility. Parzival is the human being as it
strives towards an individual taking-hold of itself.
The fact that this legend is considered by many teachers as the
vault stone of Waldorf Education as a whole can therefore come as
no surprise.
In a lecture entitled “Parzival – A Journey through Adolescence”,
John Wulsin develops this theme over the educational curriculum
of the four years of High School. Though the Legend lies
specifically at the heart of the 11th grade curriculum, it can
also be unfolded over the third developmental seven-year period
of 14 to 21 years of age, prepared in a concentrated form between
the ages of 14 to 18, but part of a development that spans an
entire life-time.
These considerations lead us to recognize that the Parsifal
Legend, in the greater context of the Holy Grail Legend, is a
description of a modern man’s soul path, that indeed “the history
of the Holy Grail (is) the soul’s history, moving through a
profound symbolism of inward being” (Waite; 1909, 494).
How does this Legend fit in the context of the Arthurian legends?
One could say that it is actually the last volume to the trilogy
of the soul’s development, as the subjects of the Arthurian
Legends are heroes of the three soul realms active in men:
“All the legends connected with King Arthur and the Round Table represent the repetition of the experiences or earlier ages in the Sentient Soul; all the legends and narratives which are directly connected with the Holy Grail, apart from Parsifal, represent what the Intellectual Soul had to go through; and all that finds expression in the figure of Parsifal, this ideal of the later Initiation in so far as this later Initiation is dependent on the Consciousness Soul, represents the forces which must especially be made our own through the Consciousness Soul.” (Steiner, 1913, GA 144: # 4).
This is recognized by Waite, the great Arthurian scholar: “We
have (with Parsifal) (…) a spiritual romance, setting forth under
this guise a mystery of the souls in its progress” (Waite; 1909,
59).
The fifth Post Atlantean Epoch has as its goal the development by
the human being of interiorized Christianity, of humanized
Individuality. This individuality will only be free if it is born
out of the feeling of love, of compassion. Inner freedom comes
about in the heart’s hollow space that is described by Rudolf
Steiner in his book “A Philosophy of Freedom”, where he states
that true freedom only comes about as an inner attitude towards
an outward, given circumstance. Only in the way I, as my own
master, chose to approach a given fact or event can my individual
true freedom be found. Parzival, still following the outward
advice of Gurnemanz, fails to accomplish what is expected of him.
The lonely path of solitude Parsifal sets on to acquire his
freedom is completed when the octave to that freedom resounds in
his heart as compassion, as selfless love: it is only when he
acts out of compassion, having come to himself and inwardly felt
Amfortas’ wound, that he is able to speak.
If “that which has to be enacted in the consciousness soul is
crystallized in the figure of Parsifal” (Steiner, 1913, GA 144:
#4) the castle of Montsalvat can be seen as a region in which the
human soul may learn to infuse the old intellectual
consciousness, inherited from the fourth Post Atlantean Epoch,
with a new consciousness. A new consciousness, that is to say, a
consciousness of love: for the carrying out of a deed out of free
will, is the carrying out of a deed out of love (Steiner, 1911,
GA 131). Love and freedom belong together (Steiner, 1912, GA 143;
2006). The apprenticeship of freedom comes about through the
apprenticeship of love, and it is another of the main themes
woven into the Parsifal Legend.
This point generally strikes the teenagers strongly, as it
addresses a question they hold dear. In the Parsifal Legend, the
transformation of blood related love, best expressed in sexual
love, is worked through to a new stage of love. This transformed
coming together of a man and a woman was at the root on Wagner’s
work: as History in 11th grade is looked at through music, the
study of Wagner’s operas allows the students another perspective
from which to view this Legend, and the underlying transformative
principles it is woven from.
In Wagner’s work, the transformation of sensual love is first
sketched in Tannhauser. But it is not enacted by the hero
directly and though Tannhauser is redeemed at the end of the
third act by the blossoming of the Bishop’s staff, he himself is
not able to live through the transformation. The transition of
tribe, family or blood-related love inherited from the time
before the mystery of Golgotha to individual love takes a further
step in Wagner’s rendition of ‘Tristan and Isolde’. There, the
heroes themselves arrive at the desired goal, but do not live.
Wagner himself in a letter to Mathilde Wesendonck called Parsifal
‘my third act Tristan inconceivably intensified” and voiced the
difference between the two heroes, namely, that the Christ Event
stood between them.
“We owe the fact that we can be free beings to a divine deed of
love. As human entities, we may thus feel ourselves to be free
beings, but we must never forget that we owe this freedom to the
God’s act of love. Human beings should not be able to grasp the
thought of freedom without grasping the thought of the Mystery of
Golgotha” (Steiner, 1911, GA 131: #10).
Parsifal will historically be the first human being to fully
embody the overcoming of sensory-based love (Steiner, 1905, GA
92). As ever in anthroposophy, the acclaimed aim is not to
renounce in a falsely pure manner something that can be
transformed; rather, the consciousness demanded to understand
that a transformation could take place is the first step in
placing human acts and events in their right place. For love
“mediated by the senses engenders creative powers; it is the
wellspring of that which comes into being. Without sense-born
love, nothing material would exist in the world; without
spiritual love, nothing spiritual can arise in evolution
(Steiner, 1912: GA 143). But when the feelings engendered by
Kundry are overcome, “the human being awakens within him a soul
which purifies everything transmitted by the senses (Steiner,
1905, GA 92: #4). Emancipation from a love dependent on the
senses: this is the mystery which Wagner has woven into his
Parsifal” (S.). “I acknowledge no external principle for my
action, because I have found in myself the basis for my action,
namely my love of the action” is the definition of freedom as
given by Steiner in his Philosophy of Freedom (Steiner, 1894, GA 4)
and could be applied word for word to the redeeming act performed
by Parsifal at the end of the Legend. “To live in love towards
our actions, and to let live in the understanding of the other
person’s will, that is the maxim of free men” (Steiner, 1894, GA
4, Chapter 9).
The last point that is crucial in the context of this Legend is
that Wagner never intended his Parsifal to be taken as an image
of Christ (Wesendonck Briefe). Instead, we are to recognize
ourselves in this figure. It is not a messiah to be adored, but a
mirror for our own path. This view is also to be found in
Steiner’s approach to the Christ being, which differs strongly
from the Church’s; that is to say, the Christ is not looked upon
as an outward judge, but is to be found by ourselves at the core
of ourselves. “The Christ on Michelangelo's painting in the
Sistine Chapel still has Luciferic and Ahrimanic traits, for he
sends the sinners to hell in wrath and leads the righteous to
heaven, so that his passions are active. But in our sculpture of
the representative of Humanity, Christ is mute, impersonal, and
the Beings that approach Him must judge themselves” (Steiner;
1915, GA 159). This approach of the Christ Being is the approach
artists have to their art form and to their own renditions of an
artistic truth. The knowledge of the human being as self judge
and self responsible agent is the knowledge of the human being as
an artist.
THINKING AS THE GOAL
To tie the legend to the activity of thinking, we can use the words ofSergei Prokofieff (2006): “Sense-free thinking is at the same time thepath to the supersensible Grail Temple, and the subsequently followingdeeds of love lead to the realization of the Grail impulse on earth. For only a person with pure thinking, who at the same time acts out ofunselfish love which fills his heart, can become a true knight of the Grail – however not in the ancient sense but solely in the way it corresponds to the consciousness soul, meaning out of fully experienced freedom. This is why the actualization of the content of A Philosophy of Freedom flows directly into the science of the Grail” (Prokofieff, 2006: 171).
We can turn here to Karl Koenig’s verse which is then worked on in eurythmy as an artistic piece:
There is a Knighthood of the 21st Century,Whose riders do not ride through the darkness of physical forests, as of old, but through the forest of darkened minds.
They are armed with a spiritual armor,And an inner sun makes them radiant.
Out of them shines healing,Healing that flows from the knowledge of the human being as a Spiritual being.
They must create inner order, inner justice,Peace and conviction in the darkness of our time.
They must learn to work side by side with angels.
Karl Koenig
The knight of the twenty-first century as a human being who wages his battle in the field of conscious thought is a very powerful picture for the teenage students. While absolutely no set of particular world views are taught in Waldorf schools, schools which flourish in all
religious cultures1, the pure, sense-free thought-ideal that is at its foundation serves as a guiding light to the curriculum.
“The epistemology on which Steiner pedagogy is based observes that theclarity associated with rational thinking is dependent on the thinker adopting the position of an onlooker or observer in relation to the outer world. This stance involves an inevitable existential distancingand separation of the self from outside reality. The process whereby the self establishes a relationship with the outside world unfolds slowly and is associated with the capacity for intellectual thinking which reaches its first stage of maturity when students reach adolescence” (Australian Steiner Curriculum Framework 2011).
The human being at the center of himself and of his activity: this is indeed our theme, theme of freedom, and as we will see later, theme ofthe art of eurythmy.
But to dive properly into the chapter of thought, let us first look atthe support of thinking as possessed by the students at their age.
The teenage brain has only recently been the center of the beginnings of scientific experimentation it deserves. Though it was conventionally thought off by the scientific community to be a youngerversion of an adult brain, the use of the relatively new technology called functional magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) has enabled un-thought of insights to appear. The teenage brain is in fact biologically quite different from both the child’s brain and the adultbrain. The development and completion of mature brain connections happens during the teenage years and is generally completed for girls around about 18 years of age, and for boys about two years later. The process of connecting the different parts of the brain together,
1 Precisely for the fact that Waldorf schools do not teach and are not bound to a specific religion, the movement of these schools (around xxx in the world) is the largest non-governmental school system, coming ahead of the Montessori system. Waldorf schools are to be found in China (), in India (), in Europe (), in Africa (), in Israel (), in North America (), in South America () and so on… - Numbers from the Waldorf School Association, 2014-
myelination, follows a back to front path in its connectivity development, the frontal cortex being the last to do so. Significant changes in anatomy, neurochemistry and in the brain’s activity are therefore taking place. Risk taking behavior, judgment and long term insight are overseen by this part of the brain and must be grown into (Jensen, 2015).
Frances Jensen, professor at Harvard Medical School states (TEDMED Conference, 2010) that recent studies have shown that addiction uses some of the same molecular biology and physiology as learning. As teenare still on the shoulder of rapid learning, and still have excellent synaptic plasticity, their brains get addicted faster and stronger than adult brains.
The works of Thomas Suedhof, 2006 Nobel Prize winner in Physiology or Medicine (and graduate of a Waldorf school) on the brain are fascinating to read, the intricacy of processes a marvel to study. While the synthesizing capacities of the brain are impressive, highly differing from the capacities of animal brains, due to the nerve-feeding capacity of the human brain mantel (Berns, 2010; Steiner, 1919, GA 293, #2) and for the entire marvel our brain is (Berns, 2010), it is not the brain that thinks. The brain is there only as a support to the thinking activity. Our thinking activity does not arisefrom the brain; it bounces off of it to allow itself the luxury of coming into being. “The thought-forces penetrate first through the etheric body, and the etheric body, permeated in this way by the thought-forces, works in a very special manner on the physical body. Thereupon a complete transformation sets in of that material existencewhich is within the physical body of man” (Steiner, 1921, GA 207). Thoughts have a life of their own, and unite with the brain to be thought out by a human being. Of the four bodies, only the etheric is truly active in the head (Steiner, 1921, GA 302a: #2) but it is because of its role in thought processing that the thinking activity arises.
Now, if the etheric body is the one most active in the activity of thought, the cultivation of true thought must obey the laws of the
etheric (Bott, Coroze, Marti, 1981; Bockemuehl, 1977), that is to say,of the living, of the artistic. Concretely speaking, these forces of thought are the formative, modeling, plastic growth forces. By coming to know these formative principles working in ourselves and in our thinking, we become able to structure our own thought activity. With children, this is practiced through art (Nobel, 1991). The artistic education that is Waldorf education can be understood when one realizes that art structures thinking, not sense-world inclined thinking, but self-modeled thinking, sense-free thinking through artistic practice. As an artistic process is not one solely of construction, but also of deconstruction, singing consisting of breathing in and breathing out, violin playing of down-bows and up-bows, the origin of thought within the etheric body does not rest solely upon formative, constructive forces. One receives access to conscious thinking when destruction strikes, through the nerves pathways, and destroys the etheric substance that built a thought up. Thought is thus a process that feeds upon the etheric, but must digestit, destroy it for nutrition to happen, that is, for conscious thinking to appear. Conscious thought is fed by the etheric, and nourished by the destruction of the etheric, by the astrality of the nerves. The nerve pathways of the brain are a consciousness supportingsystem (Rohen, 2000) and their dead matter the physiological conditionfor consciousness. The cadaver state of the nerves allows thought to glide upon the pathways of the nerves without entering into the bodilyorganism. The entering of the bodily organism does happen under the specific circumstances which lead to hallucinations, to visions which surge from the depths of the organ processes: induced by drugs or extreme states of heat, tiredness, etc, these processes are not generally regarded as conducive to clear and objective thinking! The destruction of the etheric in thought allows for a purity of ideal representation to arise. The Ego, consciousness mediating agent, acts in the human organism in the same way, by destroying that which is itsphysiological basis. The Ego builds a so called ‘ego-organism’ which is destroyed when will becomes active in self-consciousness.The thinking activity, processed by the etheric and mediated by the Ego, can bear the impulse for freedom:
“We can speak of human freedom when we speak of human actions shaped by man's own free thinking, when he reaches the point, through a moralself-training, of not allowing his actions to be influenced by instincts, passions, emotions or by his temperament, but only by the devoted love for an action. In this devoted love for an action can develop something which proceeds from the ideal strength of pure ethical thinking. This is a really free action” (Steiner, 1921, GA 79:#2).
Knowledge of the etheric is therefore the first step toward knowledge of the spiritual (Bott, Coroze, Marti, 1981) attained in a human way, through art on the one hand, and self-developed freedom, through thought, on the other. Thought, etheric, Ego through art: is that not the art eurythmy that is announcing itself? We shall see how this is taken up in eurythmy in Chapter Three.
Our thinking activity is a buttress to our relationship to the world of mental pictures and a potential for sense-free thinking, for thinking as the highest spiritual activity we have in our possession at the present time. The Ego’s role in thinking is addressed in the following quotation from The Philosophy of Freedom and can serve us in our understanding of the need to develop thinking at the age when the Ego forces are beginning to awaken:“If we observe the essence of thinking without prejudice, we will not attribute any part of this essence to traces in the bodily organism that arise because thinking prepares its appearance by means of the body. Here a significant question emerges. If the human organization plays no part in the essence of thinking, what significance does this organization play in the totality of the human being? The answer is that what happens in human organization as a result of thinking has nothing to do with the essence of thinking, but it does have somethingto do with the origin of I-consciousness out of thinking. The real “I”certainly lies in thinking’s own essence, but I-consciousness does not. Anyone who observes thinking without prejudice sees this is the case. The “I” is to be found in thinking; but “I consciousness” appears because the traces of thinking activity are engraved in general consciousness, as characterized above. “I-consciousness” is
based on the human organization, from which our acts of will flow.” (Steiner, 1894, GA 4: 138)
Thought as an activity, trained by the laws of metamorphosis, becomes a process, and through this process which he himself directs through and through, the human being endeavors to direct that which wells up in him and that which surrounds him, in the only manner that is human,by directing himself, and himself only. Imaginative thinking allows the Ego to ‘step out’ of the organism and the process is no longer a result-delivering apparatus seated in the brain, but an activity that penetrates the entire human being, all the way into the will. Therapeutic effects on the whole human organism as it may have (Buehler) it primarily assists the appearance of imagination, inspirations and intuitions (van Alphen, 2011). The very necessity of creativity, “doorway to our evolving human possibility” (Montuori, Combs, Richards, 2004) and its relevancy in the 21st Century, as it shifts from the practice of generating one single ‘object’ to a state of “phenomenon that permeates every dimension of life” (Montuori, Donnelly 2013) demands the same shift demanded of students in Waldorf education, that is to say, the shift from a noun-based thinking to a verb-based thinking, to a movement-filled thinking. In speech eurythmy, the gestures arising from a moving human being embody the verbs; the qualitative polarity of an action-filled verb is found in the passively descriptive adjective, done in standing.
The bringing into movement of a thought into a thinking process requires a change not only in the students, but also in the teachers: “in order for creative thinking to be understood and articulated, it requires the very kind of creative thinking that it seeks to understand” (Montuori, Combs, Richards, 2004: 226). And so does the Waldorf Schooltend towards being an institution where the knowledge is not imparted in an empirical manner, but where the lawful social dynamics between students and teachers breathe in a healthy social way. As a proof acquired only through thought is never a criterion for reality, but must unite with life, education must stream from the living relationship of the teacher to his students. By paying attention to the age groups of the teachers in relationship to the age group of the
students, one finds that certain dynamics are particularly well mirrored between certain phases of life, the archetypal age in which to teach teenagers being between twenty eight and thirty five years old, as what plays on in the physiological build up of the student plays itself out psychologically in the teacher’s soul around those years of one’s life.
HARMONIZING THOUGHT AND WILL TO SEIZE FREEDOM
“No, the freedom of your mind shall, I can promise you,remain inviolable. Your own feeling will provide me with the materialon which to build, your own free powers of thought dictate the laws
according to which we are to proceed” (Schiller)
That a twelve grader may leave the school institution uttering these words, as Schiller before him, is the only goal of Waldorf Education: “You have made it possible for me to grant myself my own freedom at the right moment in life. You have done something that enables me to stand before you now, shaping myself as a human being from my own individuality, which you left reverently untouched” (Steiner, 1924, GA308: #4).
“The most important thing for which we can prepare a child is the experience of freedom at the right moment in life” (S.). The birth of the Ego in a state of freedom is the sole aim of this education: it did not bring radically new methods of teaching, the pedagogical methods of education having been so thoroughly examined at the end of the 19th Century and at the beginning of the 20th; rather, it brought forth a radically new understanding of and outmost respect for the growing human being. By taking its point of departure from the
knowledge of the human being, it allowed freedom to be aimed for, not as a state to be attained (which would then imply freedom as a thing, qualitatively speaking, as an object) but as a path, as a quality, as a how.
Freedom as a quality of soul is rendered possible when the hindrances that stand between the body and the spirit have been ‘removed’. Our task as educators is the removal of hindrances between body and spirit. Physical hindrances in the first place, by providing an education that is supportive of the healthy development of the body (Glockler, Langhammer, Wiechert, 2006), and soul hindrances in the second place, so that the individuality may be free to develop in contact with life.
Some hindrances are personal, as illnesses and the like. But some hindrances are shared by all growing human beings, and are a natural part of the growth of all human beings. These hindrances could be seenin the binding together of the threes soul forces of thinking, feelingand willing with the physical organism of man. At the age of seven years old, the first chord is broken, and the ability to think is released from the bodily organism with the change of teeth (one example of how widely this is unconsciously known and worked with can be seen in the fact that children first learn grammar, first begin math and so forth upon entering grade one at age six or seven). At fourteen, the second bond is unfastened, so to say, when puberty releases the soul from the organism: the astrality of the functioning reproductive organs was held back within the organism to build up saidreproductive organs. When the soul is released out from the body, the result of its activity in the body becomes visible, revealed in the reproductive system. The last ‘untying’ happens around 21 years of age, when the will is released from the building up of the organism. Thinking, feeling and lastly willing have emancipated from the organism one after the other. They must now learn to work with each other as separated entities. This is what confers an adult the self-responsibility a child still lacks: the interplay of his thoughts, feelings and actions together in a way that is not subjected to the needs of his organism.
“Modern education has slept away its insight into the fact that education must consist in bringing the will, which appears in full freedom as a quality of soul at 21 years of age, into union with the thinking that was freed at seven years of age” (Steiner, 1923, GA 307 #5). The question which lies at the source of education, which lies atthe core of the need to educate, is the harmonization of the will to the thinking. By harmonizing his Will and his Thinking, the human being establishes the envelop that holds his Ego awake. “Man says “I” to himself only because he is a being endowed with will. If he merely had the power of thinking, his life would only be like a dream” (Steiner, 1915, GA 157).
For thinking, feeling and willing to always be properly intertwined, the development of one of these three faculties requires the development of the others. There is danger the over-empowerment of oneof the soul faculties, for example in thinking cut off from the realities of life, cut off from feeling and willing (Vogel). Examples of this abound in history, in the social monsters of Communism, for example. Therefore, an education that tends to the balance of the soulforces harmonized together is an education that tends towards the healthy development of social life. As each soul force ‘comes to birth’ in three manners, this education watches over the development of the Ego in three stages.
The caring of the activity of the will in the young child strengthens the cranial connections and allows the thinking to be set free at seven years old. The artistic education given between seven and fourteen years old frees the feeling from its bodily sheath. After puberty, the thinking capacities are trained, and the will can thus later be set free.
The Ego of the individuality may then adjust itself into the worked through will, feeling and thinking and penetrate the organism of man. At twenty one years of age, roughly speaking, (and let us remember this used to be the age of majority) the soul forces have been released from the bodily organism, and the Ego as director can now fully assume its role. The entire life of the human being after twenty-one years of age will consist in uniting his higher Ego with
his body. If “human beings will understand the world only when spiritdescends into the will” (Steiner, 1924, GA 308: #5), the uniting of the spiritual down into the will is then a consciousness enabling process. We are as far awayas possible from the schools of thought that believe that ‘the world is maya’, for the spiritual is on the contrary brought down into the physical, and imbues matter with spiritual consciousness. The human action is then an action that is filled with meaning, it is a ‘needed’action: thought is a meaning-filled activity that has its place in thedevelopment of mankind. The passage of the spirit through matter is mediated by the human being, and the condensation of the spiritual through matter required in this process allows consciousness to arise.With consciousness comes freedom, freedom in accompanying a process that must take place, but that is dependent on the goodwill of the human being. In his thinking, the human being is offered the possibility of experiencing freedom as the very center of his earthly experience.
Now eurythmy is precisely this: a bringing down of the spiritual into the will (Steiner, 1923, GA 279) consciously seized by the human beingin the meaning-filled gestures of the limbs.
The forces that flow in from the cosmos into our being are
transformed into our will (McKenna, 2010). The spiritual
streaming down of cosmic forces into our organism gives rise to
our power of will and forms in us the entity of the will element.
In eurythmy, it is this will element, this transformed cosmic
force, which is grasped and revealed in the activity of the limbs
(Steiner, 1920, GA312, #17). But while ‘every impulse of the will
can be manifested in movements of the body’ (S.), a conscious
manifestation of the will is not just any limb movement. Eurythmy
is the meaningful direction of the will into the limbs (Steiner,
1919, GA 293, #13) when the soul forces in man are brought into
unity. Eurythmy is the expression of the inner cosmic force we
have received in us as our will, into outward manifestation. When
meaning is brought into our movements, we draw the spiritual from
the cosmos, through our soul force of will, to outward
expression. A gesture filled with meaning is a gesture imbued
with the spiritual: soul and spirit flow through the will as
meaningful gestures and eurythmy, ‘external activity permeated
with purpose, comes about as a spiritualization of bodily
activity” (S.).
If education is the task of harmonizing the thinking activity
with the will element in man, so that the spiritual may freely
flow down and, mediated by the Ego, move into and through matter,
eurythmy is the streaming down of the spiritual into the will
element of the human being, so that this human Ego may express
outwardly though his limbs a meaning-filled gesture, that is to
say, a spiritual gesture.
In both cases, the Ego is there as conscious mediator between
downward streaming spirit and will embedded in the physical
matter of the limbs. As will is present in every act of thought
(Steiner, 1921/2, GA 315) thought is present in every eurythmy
gesture.
The perhaps enigmatic statements made by Steiner in his
educational courses, of the interrelationships between thinking
and eurythmy, can now be looked upon in a fresh context. Steiner
will often prescribe eurythmy lessons for children with
intellectual problems, difficulties in math or spelling, or with
poor memory (Steiner, 1921, 302a #4; 1923, GA 307: #11), that is
to say, when the faculties of thought have trouble uniting with
the individual’s will, memory being thoughts that have dived down
into the body (Steiner, 1921, GA 79: #1). As the development of
the mental organs and the development of the movement organs are
to be seen as conjunct phenomena, (Husemann, 1986: 45), movement
and consciousness are to be understood as two aspects of the same
fundamental process. Moral concepts are not instilled into the
child by appealing to logical reasoning and preaching moralistic
sermons (Steiner, 1919, GA 294: #7), but by appealing to the
feeling and will of the child, by artistic movement.
It is from the movement that lies in the organism of man that
speech develops (Steiner, 1924, GA 310, #3). From this speech,
thought may appear. As movement in the organism is that which
gives rise to words, words which then enable thoughts to form,
movements done to the spoken word, movements derived from the
spoken word as those of speech eurythmy, have a healing and
strengthening ability on the thinking activities.
Thoughts are movements embodied through words. Eurythmy gestures
are thoughts embodied through will. An effort to bring will into
the word, to make the word once more a principle of movement, so
that the thought which derives from this word is a living
thought, this is what eurythmy supports in Waldorf education.
While eurythmy harmonizes the will with the thinking element in
man (Steiner, 1923, GA 307), in its endeavor to bring will into
the word, thought, living thought, approaches the human being
through art (Steiner, 1923, GA 307: #4).
The reversal of the famous “I think, therefore I am” (Descartes)
into the reality based “I am, therefore I have the ability to
think” developed by Steiner in his Philosophy of Freedom, is at the
base of Waldorf education. It places the human individuality at
the center of his own being. The individuality becomes the
mediator, the middle man, the artist uniting spirit and matter.
The essence of anthroposophy, the science that honors the human
being as artist (Steiner, 1922, GA 305: #9) performs its
spiritual knowledge in the physical world through the will
endowed movements of eurythmy. The individuality eurythmising is
thus the consciousness-endowed mediating artist between spirit
and matter, between cosmic forces and human gestures.
And precisely because of the fact that “for the first time in
human history, we are becoming conscious of our own evolution”
(Gidley, 2013), that is to say, we develop a capacity of thought
far superior to any we possessed up to this point, the need
arises to develop in equal measure those capacities of soul and
will that will on the one hand, support our thought life, and on
the other hand, balance it out.
“For the time in human history, we are becoming conscious of our own evolution. We begin to realize our responsibility in co-creating our evolution. Co-evolution is at the same time conscious and collaborative. This has far-reaching implications in the fields of science and education” (S.).
Such a statement hits right at the heart of our purpose as human
beings on earth as seen by the Spiritual Science that underlines
Waldorf education, and right at the heart of the role of eurythmy
in education, both generally and most specifically in High
school.
CHAPTER THREEEurythmy as an Experience of Freedom
Our argument tending towards the experience of freedom as
experienced by the Teenager when doing eurythmy, we must
establish this in three ways: What is eurythmy? Does eurythmy
itself support freedom? How does the teenager experience it?
Three sections will thus form this chapter, and move from the art
of eurythmy back outwards towards the student.
We have also seen how thinking (thinking as an activity), the
etheric ( the forces of life and of growth) and the activity of
the Ego have a particular relationship to each other in the
development of human consciousness, in the development of
freedom. As these subjects are central to the art of eurythmy, we
shall come back to them, not in a block, but referenced to from
time to time, from various points of view.
3 – 1 EURYTHMY AS AN ART OF MOVEMENT
If one could perhaps call Parzival the ‘founding myth’ of Waldorf
education, eurythmy is as an activity the ‘method’ of Waldorf
education. These two pillars are the vault beams of this pedagogy
and freedom is its keystone.
Eurythmy is granted such a place for its embodiment, in movement,
of a view of the human being which recognizes the human being as
a spiritual being; as a spiritual being clothed in the four
bodies of the Ego, astral, etheric and physical. Eurythmy is a
complete embodiment by the human being of moving, that is to say
‘living’, inner freedom, and should perhaps as such be placed at
the very center of teenage education. Though its value is more or
less recognized by a large number of teachers, it is nevertheless
more than under-represented when viewed in this context.
Eurythmy is first of all an art form. It is speech and music
rendered visible through movement. It is the expression in
outward movements of the air movements when sound is sculpted
into speech by the human voice. It is the sculpting of space in
time by human movement and the rendering visible of the
connections that live in the social realm. When eurythmists move
together, they create a space in-between them that speaks the
poetry of human relationships.
Eurythmy is freedom in movement. It is the visible rendition of
the laws of life in their true form, in movement. In eurythmy,
the Human Being stands upright in his conscious humanity and must
courageously assume the ‘god-like’ nature he is the bearer of.
The marvel of uprightness in motion that is the human body is
rendered possible by the unique combination of etheric levity
forces allied to the uprightness of the Ego (Long-Breipohl,
2008). The structure of the human body is from the point of view
of physics an impossibility: the ratio of our weight balanced on
our two thin ankles is impossible to replicate mechanically. Add
to that the incredible range of motion of that structure as it
moves and balances itself on one foot, for example, and you see
before you the most genius-filled existing structure you could
ever dream of beholding. A standing human being is a marvel. A
moving human being is a miracle.
This is the ‘instrument’ of the eurythmist. Or so we often hear.
Yet a more accurate definition of the body’s role in eurythmy
would be to say that it is there as a reflection of our
consciousness, that it is there to fill the gaps of everything
that is not eurythmy. Eurythmy lies in the human being, and
around the human being, but where the matter is, it is not to
found. Our body is not our instrument: it is the negative space
that is not eurythmy. It is there to show where eurythmy is not.
It is there to render visible what is invisible.
Our instrument as eurythmists is our movement. The dynamic of a
musical phrase; the pitch and the rhythm of a melody; the colours
of a sound… The air is our medium, and we shape it, sculpt it,
and mould it with our movement, but not with our body. The
uprightness of the human form is always respected. We lend our
body to the gesture, but as an individual, do not personally
become what we are doing: when I move my arm downwards, I lend
myself to the depths, but do not become the depths. Freedom is
therefore respected in two ways: I retain in my gestures my own
individuality while expressing at the same time an ensouled
gesture the observer may not only relates to, but be a part of.
Observing me, the audience member has been left a space into
which he may enter; he is ‘accounted for’ in my space. I am not
expressing myself as person p, whose personality is subjected on
this particular day to mood m, personality which awakens more or
less interest in the viewer, in the most common of cases, no
interest what-so-ever. Rather, I have perfected and tuned my body
so as to hide it as much as possible from view. The better the
technique, the less we see it, the better we see what really
matters, the movement. By working through the personally towards
the individuality, I am working through my body towards my
movement. It is by no means a renouncement of myself. On the
contrary, it is a finding of myself on a higher level. No
musician will ever say that the immense technique of another
musician takes away from his uniqueness; on the contrary, it
allows what truly makes him a great musician to come out as an
unmistakable sound, a particular colour of tone, richness or a
purity of sound. We are as artists at the service of an art that
is to be performed and shown as such.
That eurythmy holds a unique place in the arts can be seen when
we observe how “everything artistic that come towards mankind is
divided into two streams: the sculptural, pictorial stream and
the musical stream” (Steiner 1919, GA 294: #3). They are polar
opposites, capable of a higher synthesis, of a higher union in
the art of eurythmy: “they may only be entirely united in
eurythmy when it if fully developed, so that the musical and the
visible can become one” (S.). That eurythmy is at the very
beginning of what it will later develop into, and has as yet not
a quarter of a tenth of the expressive ability, the light-filled
strength or the warmth-filled wisdom it will one day possess, is
for me no question.
Eurythmy expresses itself in Apollonian or Dionysian dynamics of
tone and speech eurythmy, but in a special way: for these two
streams of movement originate from a single source, from the
unification of the pictorial, sculptural arts on the one hand and
of the musical arts on the other. In this way they bring to
expression in two different manners the wedding of the arts as
they unfold here on earth.
Movement in eurythmy has two possible points of departure: it is
either a surging outward from the eurythmist’s inner soul world
towards the world that lies outside of him. From the INNER,
OUTWARD
It can also come from the so called outer world, from the very
periphery of this outside world and pick up the eurythmist like a
wave, carrying him along in its path, until the eurythmist is
completely moved. From the OUTER, INWARDS
Speech eurythmy obeys the first principle: it surges from the
inner nature of the human soul and directs itself outward.
Tone eurythmy obeys the second principle: it streams in from the
periphery of the cosmos inwards.
As such, tone eurythmy is apollonian and speech eurythmy is
dionysian.
The apollonian principle (Steiner, 1924, GA 279: #7) is the
principle of form, of structure (Steiner, 1908, GA 56), illumined
by beams of light (Steiner, 1914, GA 152), it streams downwards
from the spiritual worlds towards earth. It is the incarnating
principle; the coming down of the spiritual into the earthly. It
leads to death. It is the ability to think.
The dionysian principle is the ability to will. It is the
principle of life (Steiner, 1908, GA 56). It rises up out of the
physical into the spiritual worlds. It is the excarnating
principle, the principle of resurrection, of life tended to in
warmth (Steiner, 1919, GA 294: #3).
When we become sensitive to these two qualitative principles
working on in eurythmy, in the two disciplines of this art, we
become touched by the care that has been given to offer human
beings an art in which they can consciously work with the forming
principles of thought and will, death and life, structure, form
and chaos, light and warmth, in a unique way: experienced in
time, through the heart space. The cosmic thoughts that stream
towards the human beings in the gestures of tone eurythmy land in
the heart. These are made human, felt, experienced by the soul
(developed further in the section ‘the teenager’ s experience of
eurythmy’) before streaming outwards once more as speech eurythmy
gestures from the heart.
Before presenting eurythmy as a pedagogical practice, it must be fullyalive as an artistic practice. Artistic eurythmy should always be present in the life of the school, for educational eurythmy is secondary to artistic eurythmy (Steiner, 1923, GA 307: #12) in the sense that pedagogical eurythmy springs out directly from artistic eurythmy, is fed and nourished by artistic eurythmy. It streams from it, streams down from the life of artistic eurythmy into lessons for children. It should in no way be an abstract educational practice thatis not rooted in an artistic life. That is, in the best of cases. ForWaldorf education means teaching that out of life (Steiner, 1920, 302a: #1; 1923, GA 307: #12), out of everything that proceeds from life. It is a life education and shies away from ideals that are not anchored in life itself. And life truly observed is a revelation of the spiritual structure that weaves it, as is the human body, a revelation of the spiritual laws of creation that built it up (Steiner, 1911, GA 286). To do eurythmy as part of their education is
to allow children another gateway into the recognition of their spiritual origin. From this experience, the children in the younger years feel incredible joy. To see a class coming out of a eurythmy lesson where they have truly worked is quite a sight: the children arenot only smiling, an inner joy lights up their features. They have been given the possibility to express themselves in both dionysian andapollonian movements, and the gestures they have just done have given them a well-being in their body (Steiner, 1923, GA 307: #12) that nothing else offers in quite that way. The child feels no separation, or should feel no separation in the best of cases, between his body and the spirit. We will look at more closely at how this is lived in High School in the next section (The Pedagogical Pursuit).
And so do apollonian tone eurythmy and dionysian speech eurythmy
provide through their opposition an experience of the full
spectrum of space, and an un-exhaustive movement spectrum. The
space is vivified both from the human being and from the
periphery of the cosmos, from the will and from the cosmic forces
that stream in from the periphery of the cosmos, and the
interaction of these two origins of movement in the human heart
allows the human being to hold the center between himself and the
world. “A living being belongs to the whole universe” (Steiner,
1923, GA 307: #12) and the artistic enactment of eurythmy in its
relationship to space is one manifestation of such a principle.
By belonging neither solely to his inner world, nor solely to the
outer world, but instead by weaving a balance between his
experiences of both, the human being has there also a doorway
into the experience of freedom.
Both tone and speech eurythmy are taught in all twelve school
years, as well as in kindergarten. Expressions of the poles, of
the cosmos coming to the physical, incarnating, and of the
physical redeemed, excarnating, it comes then as no surprise that
tone eurythmy is to be emphasized in the education of the earlier
years while speech eurythmy is to take over in the teenage years.
The incarnating principles of tone eurythmy support the
liberation of the three soul forces, and the dynamising
principles of speech eurythmy support the harmonization of
movement and word through the harmonization of will and thought.
1 -2 EURYTHMY AS A SUPPORT TO FREEDOM
“Man was not originally a personal being and he became so because the forces building
his body were pressed together and in this way he obtained freedom” (Steiner, 1905, GA
Unknown).
Two points are at the center of this paper:
- The art of eurythmy, as the bringing down of cosmic forces,
through the body, into the space that surrounds it
- Freedom, as a qualitative and transitional how experienced
in full consciousness
In this section, I will argue that the principle of freedom, as
experienced in eurythmy, is to be found in the qualitative how
transitional passage of cosmic forces through the body,
transition in which the human individuality plays an active and
individual part.
Looking at the body, we therefore look at the medium through
which freedom can be incarnated. By becoming conscious of the
qualities inherent in our body, we can become conscious of the
quality of our accompaniment, that is to say, free in our
consciousness of the medium we move with, free in our movement.
I will focus on three points:
The UPRIGHTNESS of the body
The HORIZONTALITY of the arms and hands
The POLARITY between the ROUND head and the STRAIGHT limbs
These qualities of the body will then be united with the eurythmy
principles that transmute them into movement. If eurythmy is
indeed a spiritual activity performed by the human being as a
freedom-developing being, than as with any true revelation of the
spiritual in earthly life, the principles we raise to
consciousness in a willed, artistic or thought-through activity
can also be found already working in us in a physiological
manner. Just as the Christ being “fully rooted spiritual worlds
in earthly reality” (Barton, 2010: 28) one can also find rooted
in the marvelous human body the principles of the evolutional.
THE UPRIGHTNESS OF THE BODY
The upright pillar a man is, as he stands upright, is one of the
physiological foundations of freedom (Rohen, 2000; Husemann,
1986). Through the uprightness of a human being, the Ego may
incarnate properly (Verhulst, 1999). This verticality is
characterized in two ways which are only possible in a state of
awakeness, when the Ego is fully present, either as moral
uprightness or physiologically in the unique bony structure of
the body (Husemann, 1986: 158), that is to say, in the hardest,
densest part of the organism.
The physical support developed over long periods of time and was
rendered possible through many sacrifices on the part of
spiritual beings (Steiner, 1914, GA 152). A commonly held view
states that “today, the question of Freedom has shifted from one
of a philosophical nature to one of a physiological nature”
(Husemann, 1986: 255). The biological processes of the brain have
overcome the philosophical debates on Freedom, and the fact that
love can be regarded as a series of chemical processes in the
brain speaks for itself the change that has been gone through.
Yet this is not the case: the physical body is there only as a
support to an activity that is not body-based, but that could not
come into being without the support the physical body and the
physical world offer it.
THE HORIZONTALITY OF THE ARMS AND HANDS
This freedom we find in eurythmy is also be experienced in the
fact that we use our arms and our hands in a very important
manner (Steiner, 1919, GA 294: #7). I have often heard of how the
arms and hands are the lungs and the heart ‘pulled out’,
‘stretched out’ of the chest. It is with them that we touch other
human beings. I would want to add to this image of the arms as
unfolded lungs, the image of the hands as open hearts. The arms
have, compared to the hands, a slumbering aspect, a deeper, more
unconscious autonomy to them. The hands are the dramatic element,
the temperamental element, and the quick 1:4 rhythm of the breath
to the pulse could be seen as another expression of this, as the
ratio of the arm to the hand is also 1:4 ratio. It is with the
arms that we embrace, but with the hands that we slap, caress or
shake hands.
The unfolding out into space of the rhythmic system is perfectly
suited to the singing out of the soul into gestures. The
principle of freedom is to be found here also in the right/left
dynamics of our arms. The affirmative, expressionist, major right
side (Steiner, 1924, GA 278: #1) must ‘go through’ the heart
space to unite with the left receiving, impressionistic, minor
side. Balance as an earthly, human quality is not be found in
symmetry, but in a lawful conversation between Two. The heart is
to be found on the left yet leaning towards the right. The
gestures of tone eurythmy which originate at the periphery of the
cosmos stream into the human heart, drawn to their center, while
the speech eurythmy gestures which stream out from the heart
through the outstretched arms, seek their center in the
surrounding space.
This heart-space should be called both center and periphery of the gravity of
eurythmical movements.
By stretching the heart outwards, through the arms into the
hands, we are enlarging it significantly. But most importantly,
we are opening it lawfully, as far removed from sugary
sentimentality as possible, to encompass and touch others. But as
a worked through act of love (such as the one undertaken in
Parsifal as the task of the fifth post Atlantean Epoch) is an act
of love that has worked through physical touch to etheric touch,
so in eurythmy we do not physically touch each other as
eurythmists with our limbs, but rather touch each other
etherically though our gestures. The eurythmical gestures touch,
through the moving, sculptured air, fellow eurythmists and
audience members.
In this manner is the heart opened, unfolded from an inner,
personal organ, into an organ that surrounds others. By unfolding
the heart organ into the arms, the eurythmist turns the heart
inside out: the heart space that was the center of gravity of our
eurythmical gestures turns into a peripheral organ that
encompasses those that are around the eurythmist. Through this
reversal, the heart turns into a Sun (see Endnote 1). While the
physical sun (Blattmann, Schmidt, 1972) shines light onto the
earth, the human sun-heart shines warmth of soul into space.
Warmth of soul; love. Love, twin sister of freedom (Nesfield-
Cookson, 1983), is to be found in the eurythmical use of the arms
and hands. Using our arms and hands in eurythmy means to embrace
the audience in an act of love.
When an audience member watches a eurythmy performance, he is
embraced. He is encompassed in a warmth of soul, he is loved. By
awakening love in his heart, the eurythmist enlivens the twin
feeling of freedom, by leaves it as such, reverently untouched.
The POLARITY between the ROUND Head and the STRAIGHT Limbs
The polarity which finds expression in the round structure of the
head, and in the straight nature of the limbs, was uttered by two
men with regards to the entire nature of the body in relation to
its place in the universe. Two polar statements, the first
uttered by Novalis more than two hundred years ago, the second
uttered by Rudolf Steiner a hundred years later, state this
clearly:
“There is only one Temple in the World, and that is the
Human Body. Nothing is more sacred than this highly
developed Gestalt” (Novalis, Aphorisms).
This Body, our human body, may only be regarded as a Temple if
the office that is to be held within is a human mass, the mass of
light-filled love and warmth-imbued freedom.
“Man as he stands before us in the physical world represents
– within this physical world – a true image of the
Supersensible. This supersensible is filled with physical,
sense-perceptible material, and so becomes a physical seed,
perceptible within the world of sense, of the spiritual”
(Steiner, 1922, GA 218).
In these two statements, the human body is understood either as
periphery of a circle, whose center is of a spiritual essence
(Novalis); or as center of a spiritual reality (Steiner), reality
that finds its center in the physicality of the body. In both
cases, the body is a complement of the spiritual.
This reversal of the inner and of the outer from the outermost
periphery to the inner most center point, is best understood
through projective geometry. In projective geometry, the notion
of infinity is dealt with as a part of accountable reality: at
infinity, a principle is transformed into its reversal. By moving
the center of a circle to the plane at infinity, the periphery of
the circle becomes a straight line. On the other hand, a point is
a circle whose periphery is entirely observable.
If we turn to the human being, we see the head as a sphere,
sphere entirely visible to our field of observation, and limbs
which are completely straight members. The bone structure is
either a sphere in the skull, bone structure that holds the ‘soft
matter’ of the brain within itself; in the limbs, the straight
bones are on the contrary held at the center of the soft tissues
of the muscles.
If we apply the laws of projective geometry concerning the
qualitative reality of the sphere and the line, we can say that
the head is a sphere perceptible in its totality, while the limbs
are the periphery of a circle whose center lies on the plane at
infinity. To the laws of comparative anatomy, the corporeality of
the head is to be found fully ‘present’ in the three-dimensional
man as he stands before us, while the corporeality of the limbs
is to be seen only partially present, the ‘entirety’ of the
limbs’ corporeality stretching to the plane at infinity.
In eurythmy, this has incredible meaning! For while we hardly
move our heads (Steiner, 1922, GA 305: #8), our limbs are
incredibly active! That is to say, we are moving with a part of
us that is ‘hardly there’, ‘hardly present’, whose center is to
be found at infinity. While our head stays still, picture of the
entire cosmos, and rests upon the verticality of the back bone,
the limbs move around us and enliven the entire space that
surrounds us. What we then move in eurythmy, that is to say, when
we move our limbs, we are not moving with short members that end
at our hands and feet, but rather with members that set the
entire space to infinity in movement.
One might here object that all limb movements have this envergure,
be it in eurythmy or in gymnastics for example. While that is
true of the limb usage in any willed activity, a difference is to
be taken into account when dealing with eurythmical movement.
This difference is that the eurythmist works with a consciousness
of the space that is unique. As we have seen, tone eurythmy and
speech eurythmy gestures have the point of origin of their
movements either at the periphery of the cosmos, in geometrical
terms, at the plane at infinity (tone eurythmy) or in the human
heart (speech eurythmy). In both cases, the movement streams
through the limbs of the human being.
To qualitative formative principles are thus active in the human
organism, as head organism and as limb organism, two formative
principles that support the two disciplines of tone eurythmy and
of speech eurythmy:
In tone eurythmy, the gestures stream from the periphery of the
cosmos into the human heart. They are spiritual movements that
condense in the physical organ of the heart. The apollonian
Temple of the human head, Temple whose skull architecture holds
the power of thought, is fully present to our eyes in its
physicality. But its activity, it encompasses the entire cosmos.
In speech eurythmy, the gestures stream from the human heart
outward, into the cosmos. They are human soul movements that
express themselves outwardly. The Dionysian seed that is our
physical body holds in a condensed form the entire cosmos, as our
limbs, members only partially visibly incarnated, hold the entire
cosmos in their ‘physically’. But their activity is fully present
in the surrounding of the physical three dimensional organism,
restrained to the visible of their concrete actions.
The limbs and the head always being the two poles between which
weaves the movement, the body as a whole is not to be found at
the ‘same place’ in speech eurythmy and tone eurythmy. Tone
eurythmy is an apollonian discipline; the movement comes from the
periphery inward, down into the incarnated gesture. Tones come to
us from the far periphery of the cosmos. The head, present
physically in its totality, has a field of action that is as vast
as the cosmos. Speech eurythmy is a dionysian discipline; the
movement originates from inside us, and moves outward. The limbs
size, barely hinted at in the straight physical members we
possess, have a field of action that is limited. I can instantly
think myself into the farthest regions of the cosmos, but will
need a while to walk to the bakery at the end of the street. As
we are not performing in eurythmy the physical laws of the
living, but the spiritual laws impregnating them, my ‘inside’ is
to be found in Speech eurythmy within my corporeality, the air
around me being my ‘outside’. In Tone eurythmy, my ‘inside’ is to
be found everywhere my corporeality is not, my ‘outside’
encompassed within the body. In eurythmy, it is the rendering
visible of the spiritual in man that is striven towards.
When the circle has traversed infinity and comes back towards the
finite, it has turned inside out: what was the inside is now the
outside, what was the outside is now the inside. When I use my
limbs in eurythmy, I am moving with a part of myself whose center
is to be found at infinity. That is why the space is ‘sculpted’,
for I am not moving ‘in nothing’, I am moving in a space who
center is at infinity. How does this polarity between the cosmos
and the human organism, between infinity and the human heart,
between the head and the limbs, between tone eurythmy and speech
eurythmy enable eurythmy to come about?
Our subject being one of freedom, we need to look at the
relationship between the two elements that make our human
experience a unique experience in the realm of nature: the
relationship between the Ego and the Physical Body.
When I speak a verb, my Ego does what I am speaking; when I
listen to someone, I participate with my Ego to their activity.
Concretely speaking, this Ego activity is either suppressed, and
sense processes arise. Or it is not suppressed, and eurythmy
arises. In the sense process of listening, “the Ego always does
eurythmy in participation and what eurythmy puts before us
through the physical body is nothing other than a making visible
of listening” (Steiner, 1919: GA 294, #4). Manifested outwardly,
our listening activity is eurythmy, but it is only because the
Ego activity is not suppressed into the unconscious, but brought
one step out of the unconscious, that I am able to do eurythmy.
Suppressed Ego activity: sense process of Hearing
Unsuppressed Ego activity: eurythmy gestures arise
The relationship between Body and the Ego thus expresses itself
in two ways: either as a sense process (see Endnote 2), or as
eurythmy.
As the space and the body are prepared to complement each in
opposite forms for eurythmy to arise as a single art, so do the
Ego and the body act out a relationship that enables eurythmy to
come about. One can then say that eurythmy comes about as the
total incarnation of the pedagogical goal of Waldorf education:
The harmonizing of thinking and will, of limb activity and
thought.
2- 3 THE PEDAGOGICAL PURSUIT: EURYTHMY
IN HIGH SCHOOL
The will initiative that is needed in present times- this is cultivated especially by means of eurythmy as
an educational tool in schools
This section will be composed of four parts
- A first short introduction of pedagogical eurythmy
- A comparison of Eurythmy and Gymnastics
- The Four Questions of High School as worked with in Eurythmy
- The Teenage Soul structured through the Geometry of
eurythmical Forms
A SHORT INTRODUCTION
Eurythmy is a mandatory subject in Waldorf schools from
kindergarten to twelfth grade. The purpose of the school years
not being one of forming students into future specialized
craftsmen (no matter what the subject), but of providing through
the curriculum lessons as rich and as healthy an upbringing as
possible, eurythmy is therefore not approached as an artistic
discipline to be mastered, but as a health giving and growth
supporting pedagogical practice in the first years, and as a
consciousness-strengthening one in High School. It awakens in
young children an interest for the living, and fosters above all
things a deep joy for life (von Baditz, 2011; Bardt, 1998,
Steiner, 1919, GA 293: #4). “
Goethe’s epistemology of the living provided the basis for the
development of eurythmy (Steiner; 1920, GA 277). The forces used
in eurythmy, and from which the movements originate, are
encountered by the human being at an early age when toddlers
learn to walk. This set of forces is very strongly present in the
plant kingdom (Bockemuehl, 1985) as the forces of levity, the
etheric forces (Steiner, 1921, 205). These upward striving forces
counter the forces of gravity to which the mineral world is
subjected to and allow the plants to grow towards the sunlight.
These same forces give the young child the strength to stand
upright and learn to walk. “They act internally, in order to
teach us those spacial directions through which, in the true
sense of the word, we really become earthly human beings
(Steiner; 1914, GA 153). The spacial directions of the three
planes one works with in eurythmy are drawn from the laws of the
etheric. The up/down, right/left, front/back planes of movements
are the spheres of movements into which the student flows into.
The etheric forces are always present in us, always active (Bott,
Coroze, Marti, 1981). They are active in the activity of thought,
but not in the activity of speech (Steiner, 1923, GA 279), for
when speech occurs, these forces are given over into the air
(Steiner, 1924, GA 317: #8). Speech comes about when thought and
will unite, when the nerve-sensory system transforms into the
respiratory system, and when the metabolic system transforms into
the circulatory system, respiratory and circulatory system
allowing speech to appear as they unite (S.). The convergence of
the respiratory system and of the circulatory system produces
movements in the organism that, given over to the air, shape the
air into sounds and words, or directed inward into the organism,
are known as the therapeutic eurythmy gestures.
From the first indications as a stage art, eurythmy has indeed
blossomed into three disciplines, that is to say, into a stage
art, a pedagogical practice and a therapeutic application. Though
“a pedagogical, an artistic and a hygienic principle are
expressed simultaneously in eurythmy” (Steiner 1914, GA 156),
they nevertheless do not aim towards quite the same goal, or use
the body in quite the same way. A note from Steiner’s notebooks
(15.05.1920) differentiates them thus: ‘artistic eurythmy- the
human being himself is the instrument; pedagogical eurythmy-
ensouled gymnastics; hygienic/therapeutic eurythmy- harmony with
cosmic laws.’
EURYTHMY AND GYMNASTICS
Comparing gymnastics and eurythmy highlights especially well the
reason that stands behind the teaching of the subject of eurythmy
and the differentiations between the two disciplines, as well as
their respective strengths and purposes. In relation to the
student’s experience of the body, the physiological aspect of
gymnastics gives them a perception of the heaviness or lightness
of their limbs, strengthening the connection between the blood
and the muscles. In eurythmy, it is the psychological relation to
the body that is strengthened: the muscles learn to feel
themselves in their movement. In a well developed eurythmy
lesson, the students come to feel the strength of their muscles
in the character aspect (Steiner, 1924, GA 279: 161) of the
movement (Steiner, 1919, GA 300a, 300b). This character aspect of
a movement is another way of stating the connection between
eurythmy and the inner breathing process, process of transition
from the air to the blood (Steiner, 1919-1924, GA300a, 330b). The
pedagogical goals of eurythmy are directed in the lower grades
toward a hygienic effect, harmonizing the breathing and
circulatory systems for example (Bardt, 1998; Steiner, 1924, GA
317). The movements of the physical and etheric bodies press on
the astral body and on the Ego (Steiner, 1921, GA 302a: #3). The
struggle that ensues between the physical/etheric couple and the
astral/Ego couple strengthens the Ego forces of the child by
confronting the Ego with the frame of the physical body: the
reality of the physical gestures works as a mirror activity of
the Ego. This can be looked at and taken up in the Higher grades
by asking the students what effects they feel when doing
particular gestures, in particular ways; by asking them what
effect a straight arm has as opposed to a bent arm, a rounded
gesture as opposed to a direct gesture, what effect a movement of
the arms, above the head as opposed to a movement in legs has.
Another definition of the essence of gymnastics and of eurythmy
stands thus (Usher, 2006: 144):
Gymnastics: to fill the outer with the human being, so that the
human being unites himself with the outer world.
Eurythmy: to allow what is inner to express itself outwards into
movement.
“Feelings by no means remain the same during man’s earth
existence. The child’s feeling of freedom which has arisen out of
healthy, sensible, bodily movements, changes its course of
development into a consciousness of freedom” (Aeppli, 1955). How
does this change come about in High School?
THE FOUR QUESTIONS OF HIGH SCHOOL IN EURYTHMY
Eurythmy: the inner soul of the human being reveals itself in
movement (Steiner, 1924, GA 311: #6). As such, the four questions
that build the inner framework of the developmentally-based
curriculum (see pages 11 and 12) in High school are also central
to the eurythmy curriculum.
As overriding themes, they may be stated thus:
- 9th grade: WHAT - Harmonizing Opposites - Objectifying the
Body
- 10th grade: HOW - Studying Processes - Objectifying Thinking
- 11th grade: WHY – Looking Within - Objectifying Feeling
- 12th grade: WHO - Making sense of the Journey - Objectifying
the Will
- Ninth Grade
The first point to make when introducing ninth grade, is that
students at that age are meeting their body anew. Puberty has
been gone through, and an entirely different feeling for one’s
own body arises. Boys may have a tendency to jump one onto the
other, carry each other on their backs, wrestle, hit each other,
kick the doors open, simply to feel their bodies. They are often
amazed and the first to be surprised at their own strength. The
other general tendency is also felt by many boys and by most of
the girls, in the avoidance of all forms of contact: hugs become
air-hugs, group massages are no longer a thing and the easy and
innocent physical complicity girls felt when sitting beside each
other, braiding each other’s hair or holding hands disappears for
a while. To help this, rod exercises are re-introduced in a very
predominant manner (Russell, 2006). Rod exercises delineate the
body in a very precise manner and confront the reality of the
physical gestures of the students with the geometrical line of a
copper rod. Movements that involve the limbs strongly work on the
astral, giving it shape and strength (Steiner, 1924, GA 317: #7).
To answer the question of the WHAT, all the elements that have
been learned up to this point are revised. They are all gone
through: vowels, consonants, major, minor, tones, intervals, soul
gestures, colors and so on… Yet as a simple repetition of is
already integrated is of the most boring, the pedagogical method
is one of opposing one gesture to another, of harmonizing
antagonistic expressions. Opposing elements are worked in
synchronicity one to the other: consonants/vowels,
vowels/intervals, intervals/tones, tones/consonants…
The polarities of light and darkness, lightness and weight,
heights and depths underlie the choice of pieces the class will
practice. The dramatical element of the poem by Ingeborg Bachmann
“Ich” (see Endnote 3) is a good example of the feelings of the
ninth grader, newly found Egohood swept up in the highs and lows
of the soul life.
It is very important for the eurythmy teacher to now take a step
back, and to assume a new role in the group, a role tending more
towards the artistic director of a group, than one of joyful
participant. While the teacher was fully involved in the eurythmy
movements and gestures in Kindergarten, a little less so in the
lower grades, and distancing himself more and more from active
participation in the middle grades, he must now in high school
step back almost entirely during the lessons. What he
relinquishes in the action, he turns to explanation: forms and
gestures, qualities sought for, etc, are outwardly spoken by the
teacher. The students must think the explanations through, visual
the forms as directed by the teacher. The method of ‘point-to-
point’ thinking used in addressing ninth graders develops a
security in the action to come: before moving, we have planned
out our course of action, we know the route to take, have thought
the pitfalls through.
Eurythmy forms in ninth grade are mainly point to point forms,
where the entire piece is not yet taking in as such, but where
the elements of the phrase, the bar-line, elements of short
duration, are stressed.
- Tenth Grade
Ninth graders entered high school and were given a year to find
their marks, and re-gain a security in their bodily presence,
eurythmical gestures and space relationships. In tenth grade may
one begin to work in earnest as a high schooler. Tenth grade is
usually a grade in which much is achieved in terms of work. The
curriculum elements are taken up easily and seriously, the
students are focused, the working dynamics are full of
liveliness. Tenth grade has the tendency to be a ‘golden year’
for teachers, as the students’ work ethics are sound, and the
atmosphere not one wrought with tensions.
Thoughts are taken up easily: what the teacher has to offer is
taken up as a basis, team work in-between students then carrying
the exercise further. Forms are to be created in small groups of
students, and performed.
The four elements, which were reviewed in 9th grade, are
transposed to the soul, and become the four temperaments. Poems
that highlight these four moods are taken up, manners of walking
are worked upon. The HOW aspect is thus approached through their
own temperaments: not only do they get to exaggerate their own,
they may (finally!) spoof each other and their teachers. A
humoresque rounds off the year.
- Eleventh Grade
WHY? Why do we do eurythmy is a question that suddenly pops back
up after years of silence. The students suddenly feel the urge
once more to re-understand this subject, to re-question the
necessity and the place of this subject in their education.
Eleventh grade is the soul year of the High School years. Looking
into the dynamics of the soul life, torn between sympathies and
antipathies, the curriculum introduces the apollonian and
dionysian principles of movement. These can be taken up at the
same time as the art lessons of impressionism and expressionism
take place and lead the explorations of colours anew, colours as
soul moods and atmospheres. From the colours, the students look
at the eurythmy figures, and learn to move according to the
dynamics of colours. The interplay of colours is thus the guiding
thread towards soul gestures, and then towards the gestures for
the planets.
- Twelfth Grade
WHO? A fairytale rounds up twelve years of eurythmy, and a
performance aimed at the lowest grade is prepared for the first
grade. Though the entire school comes to watch, one of the aims
of this last group piece is asking the students to turn
themselves towards others, in this case, the youngest, and to
prepare a performance of eurythmy for them. That is, to prepare a
piece that is not aimed directly at their own age group
consciousness, but on the contrary, to perform something they
have at last mastered as their own in such a way, that they can
distance themselves from in enough to include another age in
their consciousness.
Offering such a fairytale performance signifies for the student,
in the particular apprenticeship of character-eurythmy, ‘I am
finally a person standing on his own two feet’. The exercise ‘I
Think Speech’ is appears as a reflection of this experience.
The zodiac is introduced, and is central to the practiced
elements: it is the last ‘new’ thing they will learn in eurythmy,
the last big set of gestures they never got to explore before; it
is usually eagerly awaited, as the ultimate carrot of the
curriculum: you will learn this in twelfth grade!
‘Making sense of the Journey’. ‘Where did we come from?’ ‘Where
did we start?’ ‘What has been enabled in me as a whole through
eurythmy?’ is brought to a celebration in the 12th grade eurythmy
performance. This performance is the main project of twelfth
grade in eurythmy class, for which lights and costumes must be
prepared. This allows much work on stage eurythmy to take place,
so that the last impression the graduating student has of
eurythmy is an artistic one: we have come full circle, and find
eurythmy finally grasped as an art in twelfth grade!
TEENAGE SOUL STRUCTURED THROUGH EURYTHMY
In High School, the discovery and exploration of their inner
world is at the same time the students’ dearest wish and outmost
difficulty. It is not lived in the same way in girls as in boys:
in girls, the astral body absorbs the developing Ego. Their life
of thought and feeling are enveloped by their astral bodies, and
can be expressed much more confidently; in boys, the astral
keeps its distance from the Ego, which results in a feeling of
unease and uncomfort in speaking out their thoughts and feelings
(Steiner, 1921, GA 302a: #5). The great life of feeling that
crashes upon them is addressed by art in such a manner as to
frame their feeling life from the outlandish bursts of fantasy
and/or despair that can overcome it, into a gesture that, while
expressive, confines the inner life to a physical expression
through repetitive practice. Repetition strengthens the memory
(de Forest, 2009).
Repetition is a learning tool throughout the grades: in the lower
grades, it forms the etheric body; in the upper grades, it tames
the astral world. Unconscious repetition cultivates feeling, and
conscious repetition cultivates the will impulse (Steiner, 1919,
GA 293: #4). Therefore, artistic practice trains the physical to
offer the soul a cultivated, an ordered inner world.
This is achieved through the mastering of geometrical forms
(Russell, 2009) from middle school to 9th of 10th grade, where
eurythmy forms as one single thread are properly worked on.
This is especially felt in the use of the body, with the need to
face the given reality of a gesture. Is my arm properly
stretched? Are my legs moving gracefully or slumping across the
floor? Am I bumping, crashing into others, or are we moving side
by side? When all the ‘technical’ questions have been somewhat
addressed, and that is already a huge field of work, the soul
aspect is still to be explored. Are my arms revealing the
dynamics of the music, is my feeling life flowing with every
nuance, every dynamic, colour, intonation? While the technical
questions of space usage may be worked outwardly directed by the
teacher, the last set of questions must be taking up by the
student himself. The teacher may help to unfold what is felt,
give directions as to how this could be expressed, and should,
but the will to go into the dangerous realm of expressing an
artistic feeling must be taken up by the student alone. There
also lies a freedom; an acceptance or not to go inwardly with the
music or the poem. The outward is a given: all must move the
form, or else chaos sets in. But the way a student in High School
delves into the experience of the piece is for him alone to
decide. It is a field that is not easy to approach: the physical
requirements are in and of themselves demanding. The soul and
spiritual aspects underlie the bodily gestures: I cannot go into
the feeling of a major tone as opposed to a minor tone if the
correct physical gestures do not present me with the correct
pallet of colours. But the inner life is trained, either from the
outside inward, by the ordering of the physical into the lawful
gestures of eurythmy; or by the soul that asserts itself so
strongly over the body, that it shapes it into the gesture.
This mutually supporting opposition of learning points of origin,
that is to say, the training of the body from the inner soul
life, or the taming of the soul life by means of lawful gestures,
can be understood by referring to Goethe’s statement that the
pinnacle of nature, her work of art, is the human body; this
human body, nature’s work of art, has in itself the potential to
metamorphose into the support for human art. The human art by
excellence, eurythmy, the art which contains a seed of all the
other arts (Steiner, 1923, GA 279) is human precisely in the fact
that all arts are contained in it, though in seed form, in un-
developed form. They are present, but not brought to the utter
refinements and un-equaled heights music, poetry, sculpture,
architecture and painting have attained. But so is the human
being: a being that contains within him all tendencies, but who
does not develop them to their extreme (Steiner, 1919, GA 293:
#9). Equilibrium is kept and this very equilibrium may speak to a
student from different perspectives. By being bound to the laws
of time and space and to the movement in time and space of his
fellow classmates, the High School student may learn to shape the
expression that lives within him in accord to the social demands
that surround him. Bound in laws, the real freedom of the inner
life may appear, freedom of the qualitative approach to a
gesture, to a coloration of expression. Freedom of the how.
Wer Großes will, muß sich zusammenraffen;In der Beschränkung zeigt sich erst der Meister,Und das Gesetz nur kann uns Freiheit geben.
Extract from ‘Natur und Kunst, sie scheinen sich zu fliehen’
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
3-4 THE TEENAGER AND HIS EXPERIENCE OF
EURYTHMY
As human beings, we never develop a fully conscious knowledge of
each other; yet we do carry an unconscious knowledge of the other
in our feelings regarding the other, in our unconscious
perceptions, in all the impulses of will we are led to accomplish
in his presence (Steiner, 1924, GA 308: #1). The soul always
weaves from one human being to the next and this soul aspect lies
at the basis of teaching (S; Steiner, 1919, GA 293). What happens
unconsciously in-between adults should happen consciously for the
teacher when relating to his student. When we understand things
from the perspective of the child, before understanding them from
our own adult standpoint, then and only then are we fit to teach
so that the soul of the child can receive what we say to it with
a feeling of comprehension and joy (Steiner, GA 34). The
Pedagogical Law (Aldinger, 2005) is one that takes this point
into account. While the child’s body, more concretely speaking,
his blood circulation, breathing activity and nutritional
processes, are surrendered to the environment, his soul-life is
not. But an adult does not relate to the environment he is in, in
the same way: what rises to the universe are his soul and spirit
(Steiner, 1924, GA 308: #2). Teaching eurythmy, the surrendering
of the soul to movement, cannot therefore be approached in the
same way when we teach a child or when we teach an adult. But
teenagers… are no longer children, nor do they possess the Ego
presence adults have developed. How are we then to approach them
as teachers?
This is the ‘tricky part’. We must address them as adults, as
they are on their way towards adulthood, yet without expecting of
them what would be expected of an adult. We must not teach them
according to where they are at, which is a period of transition
from one state of being to another, a period filled with
questioning and groping about (Gabert, 1964) but teach them for
the future (Steiner, 1923, GA 307). Teaching for the future is
teaching out of the will (Steiner, 1919, 293: #3, 4, 5). We must
teach for what they will one day become, so that they may look
back upon their education in High School, and find there gems to
unravel as the years go by. So that the nobility of the being
they will grow into is addressed, yet without the expectancy of
the results of a fully present Ego. In that way, we are teaching
for life. The truth and high demand of honesty that teenagers
demand of their teachers can only be addressed when the teacher
then sets himself on his own path to freedom, and teaches not
from what he knows, but from what he wishes to become (Gabert,
1964; Steiner, 1924, GA 317: #12).
Not only does the teacher then seize his own freedom, and by so
doing, teaches freedom in a freedom-respecting way, but he can
then plant inspiration in the heart of his students (Steiner,
1924, GA 308: #4). This inspiration is the life blood that High
Schoolers demand of those (Steiner, 1924, GA 317: #2) who teach
them. Academic competencies are a must on the part of the
teacher, but these will only be grasped if the teacher is himself
a being worth respecting. If the teacher, as a human being,
cautions the state of adulthood. High idealism lives in the
teenager, and a part of the soul suffering and distress of that
age lies in the inability to find a model towards which to tend
to. Literature has always abounded which describes the idealism
of that age. Admiration of, elation towards one being, whether in
a romantic sense or in an intellectual sense, towards an adult
one wishes to resemble. No teacher needs be the hero of his
students, but the self-engagement, as an individual being, he
infuses his work with, works on in the teenage students as an
ideal, as a security in the plight of adulthood. The teacher then
becomes an artist of the soul, and his education is something
that is lived, not learned. Only in this way does his education
have any real meaning.
And meaning is what is sought for at all costs. Not the outer
meanings offered by rational thinking, but the inner meanings of
the world; of life; of creation, death and the purpose of
existence. Wrapped in the masquerades of teenage rebellion, the
question of the purpose of life lies in every heart. If this
question can be approached in any means, the education of those
years will have achieved its goal.
I remember how at 16 years old eurythmy felt like the most real,
purposeful and sense-filled activity I had ever done. Not only
did I learn more about myself during a week-long summer eurythmy
course than in anything I had done that year, but the wealth I
discovered in that art was an absolute revelation of the wealth
of life in general. An education for adolescents anchored in
eurythmy could confront the students with a dynamic of
questioning to answer to the meaning-asking, meaning-demanding
world of the 21st century.
For by doing eurythmy, we enliven, regulate and enrich the soul’s
activity (Steiner, 1920: GA 312, #9) in a lawful way. That does
not mean that feelings are repressed, on the contrary: they are
cultivated away from raw and instinctual emotions and take on an
undreamed-of life. By doing eurythmy, we bring the soul to its
grazing pasture, and allow it to feed on the wealth of life. Such
a sentence could be secretly uttered by a teenager and comfort
him in his meaning-seeking enquiry into life, answer to the angst
of those years.
The feeling life appealed to in eurythmy may then be taken hold
of, and travel on the path that leads to the birth of the Ego,
around twenty-one years of age. For in feeling, the Ego enters
into the body. Not in a conscious way, for it would burn up the
soul, so to speak, and would be a humanly unbearable experience,
but as in a dream (Steiner, 1924, GA 308: #4). But this is
precisely what is dealt with in eurythmy: the taking hold of the
body by the Ego. By doing eurythmy in High School, we help the
Ego unite with the body. What one calls wisdom in old people is
precisely the fact that thoughts have sunk into the body: they
have become lived through in such a way that they are now woven
into the body (reference). Eurythmy thus helps a human being to
embody his thoughts, through the heart sphere, into wisdom. The
soul-spiritual nature he is a bearer of is permeated with ego
consciousness.
If nothing else, this paper will have striven to argue that
freedom is a path one sets on. The slow descent of the Ego into
the body is rendered conscious when doing eurythmy. This Ego is
to the soul life as a guide. This soul life, that lives in the
three states of consciousness of wakefulness, dreaminess and
sleep and expresses itself in the three activities of thinking,
feeling and willing, refers itself the Ego. This Ego, center of
our movement as it weaves between body and space, is a center
that is in its constitution on earth, as a non-space. It is as
the bar-line in music, an instant griping together of
consciousness in the midst of musical life. In eurythmy, the bar-
line is done by an imperceptible gripping of the muscles
together. This ‘kills’ the movement for an instant, but allows
consciousness to appear. In such a way does the Ego work in life;
that is, not as a continual state, but as moments of
consciousness. The activity of the Ego is one that acts in
‘jumps’, which are at once unheard and perceptible –as a bar-
line- and unseen, as in the darkness of night, and yet
perceptible in the leap of thoughts:
“The times you spent asleep appear as darkness in the midst of life, and in reality it is to these darknesses of life that you say ‘I.’ If you did not see the darknesses you would have no consciousness of ‘I.’ You owe the ability to say ‘I’ to yourself,not to the fact that you were active every day from morning untilnight, but to the fact that you were also sleeping. The Ego as weknow it in this earthly life is, to begin with, darkness of life,emptiness, even non-existence. If we consider our life truly, we shall not say that we owe our consciousness of self to the day but rather that we owe it to the night. This is the truth. It is the night which makes us real human being and no mere automata” (Steiner, 1923, GA 228)).
But "what happens in eurythmy is the opposite of what happens
when we fall asleep: we become more awake than in everyday
consciousness. The hypertrophy of the imagination that occurs in
dreams is removed; instead a healthy development of the will is
directed into the limbs. The will in its organisation is driven
into the limbs (Steiner, 1920, GA312, #17). By consciously
directing the will into the limbs, we work towards a taking hold
of the matter of our bodies, and of training the given to flow
with our intended activity.
Eurythmy as an art of the soul is thus the development of what is
not a death-like experience of the Ego, a coming to yourself in
the darkness and contraction of the bar-line. Eurythmy as an art
of the soul is the unfolding of the melodic element; the
unfolding of one gesture into the next. It is the developmental how
you go from one gesture to the next. One could almost say that
eurythmy dies when we have reached the gesture we were setting
forth to make. It is alive as long as it is being formed, but
dies the moment it has arrived. As a plant under a microscope,
cut off from its unfolding in time, eurythmy as a position in
space is no longer eurythmy. It becomes a picture of the Ego that
moves the eurythmy piece. As a bar-line, finished gestures and
positions in eurythmy are more than lawful, they are an absolute
necessity. Without them, the un-ending stream of movement would
be devoid of freedom, an un-bearable mess of glue and sentiment,
ever in motion, yet never moving. What is visible in eurythmy is
the Ego in a heightened, more illumined image then is usually
seen and possible in life. The enlivening of the movement of the
physical, etheric and astral bodies of a human being set off the
shining Ego more brightly.
But what is the light that illumines the Ego in such a way? One
could answer that it is the light of thinking, or the warmth of
the will that are embodied in the movements. Yet one would
perhaps then not be recognizing the true purpose of the art of
eurythmy, the core at which lies in the human heart, in the form
of love. This love, we saw earlier, is the human principle of
freedom. The human being is only truly human when he attains a
union of love and freedom. He only attains the striven goal of
eurythmy when he shines forth, radiating with love. The
incredible lawfulness of the eurythmy gestures, as they are
embedded between the earthly and the spiritual, gives rise in the
eurythmist’s soul to an incredibly gentle feeling of love. From
this love felt in eurythmy may rise a human freedom. And if love
is gentle, freedom is simple.
We are here very far from the shining and active battlefields of
old, where freedom was sought for, fought for and won sword in
hand. And we are also far from the stone walls of an enclosed
Cistercian cloister, where the kneeling monk turned to a higher
power to purify his life. We are at the age where priest and
warrior unite to form the artist. And this artist walks in
humility, doubled with seriousness, and his art, art of the human
being, art of life, gives birth within him to inner joy. A truly
human meaning of life appears in the warm cloister of the heart
and shines forth as a beam of inner light through the uprightness
of his human body.
Moving eurythmy with teenagers is hoping to let them come to an
experience, of themselves, of the meaningfulness of their
presence on earth. Then no matter what the outer circumstances of
life demand of them, what career they chose, whether or not they
even liked eurythmy in school and whether or not they will ever
do some again. What truly matters in the education of a human
being, the ability to impart meaning to his own life, has been
tended to through the practice of eurythmy.
CHAPTER FOURConclusion
It is only when the human being places himself “at the center of
himself”, so to say, that he has the rightful tools to study
himself. By being an active part of his human abilities, by
uniting his thoughts and his actions into a feeling-developing
life, into an artistic life of the soul, the artist human being
sets himself on his own oath to freedom. He discards the passive
role of enduring his condition and becomes a co-creator of his
reality.
If education is more than brain-stuffing, then the development of
the student’s soul life truly is the central key to what the
meaning of a student’s education is. The soul life that must
first and foremost be educated during the formative school years
unfolds itself through art. There, the principles of the true, of
the beautiful and of the good are embodied by the students in the
artistic disciplines and are received as seeds to be grown over
the entire span of one’s life. The tricks a teacher might use to
make a student memorize a certain amount of knowledge have no
lasting effects and are for all formative purposes of a human
being quite useless in the future adult’s life. But if a teacher
can engage his student’s feeling life, he will then have achieved
something that can bear fruits for a lifetime.
The spiritual nature of the human being is addressed in eurythmy
through the singing of the soul when it becomes self responsible
for the outward given of the human body. Eurythmy harmonizes as
an art form the densest element we possess, our physical bodies,
with the least dense element, air, moving to the ungraspable
reality of sound, be it voice or music. Through the unmoving
head, visible cosmos and the moving limbs, barely seen cosmos,
the inner and outer principles are brought into harmony. The
human being eurythmising stands at the center of two worlds and
is the conscious transformer of the inner world and of the outer
world. He is neither subjective nor objective, as both stream
through him. The movement, that either streams from the periphery
of the cosmos inward into the heart, is visible music, or outward
from the human heart into the social realm, visible speech. The
two streams ‘turning around’ in the human heart or at the plane
at infinity, balance the eurythmist between two fields of forces,
two realities, united in him as the evolutionary free principle.
The human being than stands as the greatest creature on earth,
through his unique capacity to unite the spiritual and the
physical, the outermost and the innermost, to impart meaning to
the physical stage we now live in; and at the same time, as the
most humble ‘in-between’, whose coming into being is a gift given
him by the marriage of spirit and matter, as a heart space
himself to the organism of the earth and cosmos. The human being
is thus point and periphery of today’s evolution, meaning-
endowering principle of the present age evolution. As eurythmy
imparts meaning to the human being through the High school years
to the entire life-time of a human being, so do the eurythmical
principles of speech and tone eurythmy reveal the meaningful
presence of the human being on earth, as an individual heart of
love and freedom.
The teenager who has experienced eurythmy in High School has been
given an experience of freedom, an education in freedom, in the
embodiment of moving thought activity. What he acted out in
eurythmy in High School in his body can serve as the first stage
of human self-understanding, to be consciously understood as an
adult.
FUTURE DEVELOPMENT
As a thesis ends when a subject has been brought a step further
in comprehension, therefore allowing a new question to arise, I
will end this work by turning to the future of eurythmical
education in High School and address it with a question.
Would an education fully anchored in its epoch recognize the need
to separate boys and girls from ninth grade to eleventh grade
into two groups in the eurythmy lessons?
The astral of a boy or of a girl not being united in the same way
to the soul and Ego organisation of a student, could the training
of the body be taken up in such a way as to respond directly, for
the first three years of high school in which this is especially
the case, to the harmonizing of the astral and the Ego? By
assuming and working with the different attachment of the Ego to
the astral organization in boys and girls, could a curriculum
come about that trains, through a three-year fast, the astral
social life of the class, and allows the two sexes to enter their
bodies in a way that is directly related to their feeling of it?
Boys, wearing eurythmical tunics and pants, could assume the
strength of their bodies through a rod-based curriculum, girls,
wearing eurythmy dress and veils, the expression of their soul
life in artistic gestures. The states of the development would be
addressed in this ‘fast experience’. Fast, the training of the
astral body (Bamford, 1999) would be lived by the class for a
period of three years, before the reunification of boys and girls
in twelfth grade bring a new joy and awareness to the opposite
sex in its artistical abilities. The Grail Temple experience of
twelfth grade, the re-finding anew of what had been lost, is the
experience of the Parsifal hero, who, having lost all hope,
spends years in the desolation and solitude of the wilderness. To
consciously find his way back, he inwardly sets himself upon the
path of love and compassion and transforms meaningless thoughts
into free, meaning-endowed speech thus redeeming, as a
transformed, self-responsible, conscious human being, the Grail
Castle.
----------------------------------
ENDNOTES
Endnote 1 – from page 38
For the concept of the Sun as Reversal Principle, see the excellent book The Sun Ancient Mysteries and a New Physics by Georg Blattmann and Gerhardt Schmidt, in which projective geometry and a phenomenological approach are united to offer a compelling view of the Sun.
Endnote 2 – From page 42
Dr. Hermann Poppelbaum: “Let us begin by stating anew that it is not the organitself that perceives, but the human being who ‘has’ the organ” (Poppelbaum: 1938). The reality of the human being as an Individuality as the Center of his sensory activity allows the set-up of a scientific experiential framework as opposed to a hypothetical conceptual framework to the study of the senses.We know that the processes of perception and recollection can not only to be compared, but are to be seen in a certain respect as one and the same (a very clear account of this can be found in Buehler: 1962); what the nerves destruct, the blood builds back up. The soul activity, continually living through death and resurrection experiences, either turns outward, and
perceives, or turns inward, and recollects. It is one process, either directedtowards the outer world or the inner world. All that is taken in during childhood and the school years has of course a very strong formative effect onthe student, this needs hardly be mentioned; but the fact that the continuing effects of mental images and ideas which later emerge through memory actually take place in the life of feeling (Steiner: 1921, Education For Adolescents, lecture 1), in the soul’s attractions and repulsions, sympathies and antipathies, actual vehicle of our memories, places a particular significance on the way one deals with perceptions during the teenage years. From 14 to 21 years of age, the development of the third soul force of thinking is empathized in Waldorf Education. Yet the process of incarnation of the astral body in the physical body during that time places the apprenticeship of thought on a rocky boat.
Endnote 3 – From page 46
ICH
Ingeborg Bachman
Sklaverei ertrag ich nichtIch bin immer ichWill mich irgendetwas beugenLieber breche ich.
Kommt das Schicksals HaerteOder MenschenmachtHier, so bin ich and so bleib ichUnd so bleib ich bis zur letzten Kraft.
Darum bin ich stets nur einesIch bin immer ichSteige ich, so steige ich hochFalle ich, so fall ich ganz.
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D’Aleo, Michael, (2003) What is Phenomenology? Waldorf Science Newsletter, Volume 10, #19 Fall (2003)
De Forest, Louise (2009) First Grade Readiness: The Development of Memory and the Transformation of PlayJournals, Gateways, Spring/Summer 2009, Issue #56
Gabert, Erich (1964) L’adolescence devant l’Autorite et la Liberte Supplement #18 de la Revue Triades, Published by Triades, Paris (1964)
Gidley, Jennifer M. (2007) Educational Imperatives of the Evolution of Consciousness: the Integral Visions of Rudolf Steiner and Ken Wilber International Journal of Children’s Spirituality – Volume 12, #2, pages 117-135, (2007)
Gidley, Jennifer M (2007) The Evolution of Consciousness as a Planetary Imperative: an Integration of Integral Views Integral Review 5, 2007
Gidley, Jennifer M. (2013) L’évolution de la conscience et le changement de paradigme – In La nouvelle Avant-garde, vers un changement de culture, sous la direction de Carine Dartiguepeyrou, L’Harmattan Collection Avant-garde (2013)
Glasby, Peter Adolescents - Their Relationship to the Night and the Senses in Connection With Their own Development Waldorf Journal Project 9 – The Online Waldorf Library
Glockler, M, Langhammer, S, Wiechert, C (2006) Education – Health for Life Published by the Medical Section at the Goetheanum, Dornach, (2006)
Graves, Bernard (2005) The Relevance of Handwork and Craft Kindling - the Journal of the EarlyChildhood Assn. (UK), issue #8 (2005)
Guttenhoefer, Peter Aesthetic Knowledge as a Source for the Main Lesson Waldorf Journal Project 9 –The Online Waldorf Library
Guttenhöfer, Peter (2004) The Division of the Main Lesson and the Role of the Conclusion Journal for Waldorf School Teachers 2004
Hardorp, Detlef (2011) Thinking and the Sense of Thinking: How We Perceive Thoughts Waldorf Library Journals, Spring 2011, Vol.16 #1
Hauck, Hedwig (1937) Handarbeit und Kunstgewerbe- Angaben von Rudolf Steiner Verlag Freies Geistesleben, Stuttgart (1981)
Hoinaes, Hans-Jorgen The Ninth Grade and the Industrial Revolution Waldorf Journal Project 8 – TheOnline Waldorf Library
Husemann, F., Wolff, O. (1986) La Medecine a l’image de l’homme - Premier Volume Translation (1993) by Triades S.A. – Paris from the tenth edition by Verlag Freies Geistesleben: Stuttgart (1991)
Jensen, Frances, M.D. (2013) The Teenager Brain ISBN: 9780007448326; ISBN10: 0007448325; Format: E-Book; Trimsize ; Pages: 384 Harper Collins Publishers, Australia
Kennish, Graham (2007) Teaching Biology in a Human Context Steiner Education Vol.22, No.1, England
König, Karl (1969) Embryology and World Evolution Electronically printed by AWSNA (2009) with permission from the Karl König archives, Scotland from The British Homeopathic Journal, Vol. LVII, No. 1,January 1969
Lampe, Bernard (1990) Gralssuche und Schicksalserkenntnis, Anfortas Band Drei - 3, Auflage (1994) Verlag der Kooperative Duernau, Duernau
Long-Breipohl, Renate (2008) Supporting the Development of Movement in Children Under ThreeJournals, Gateways, Fall/Winter 2008, Issue #55
McKenna, Marguerite (2010) Eurythmy and the Cultivation of Living Thinking Master’s Thesis in Humanities, Prescott College, Arizona, presented in May 2010
Montuori, A, Combs, A, and Richards, R. (2004). Creativity, consciousness, and the direction forhuman development. In D. Loye (Ed.) The great adventure: Toward a fully human theory of evolution (pp. 197-236). Albany: SUNY Press.
Montuori, Alfonso, PhD and Donnelly, Gabrielle, MA (2013) Creativity at the Opening of the21st Century – Springer Publishing Company – Creative Nursing, Volume 19, Issue 2 (2013)
Nesfield-Cookson, Bernard (1983) Rudolf Steiner’s Vision of Love – Spiritual Science and the Logic of the Heart The Aquarian Press, Wellingborough, Northamptonshire (1983)
Nobel, Agnes (1991) Educating Through Art – The Steiner School Approach Floris Books, Edinburgh (1996)
Ogaard, Arne About seeing the Heart Waldorf Journal Project 7 – The Online Waldorf Library
Pickhardt, Carl PhD (2013) Surviving Your Child's Adolescence: How to Understand, and Even Enjoy, the Rocky Road to Independence Published by Jossey-Bass – A Wiley Imprint, San Francisco, California (2013)
Prokofieff, Sergei P (2006) Anthroposophy and the Philosophy of Freedom Temple Lodge Publishing, Forest Row, England (2009)
Rohen, Johannes W. (2000) Functional Morphology – The Dynamic Wholeness of the Human Organism Hillsdale, New York: Adonis Press (2007)
Russell, Leonore (2009) Kinesthetic Learning for Adolescents – Learning through Movement and Eurythmy AWSNA Publications, Ghent, NY (2009)
Schieren, Jost (2012) The Concept of Learning in Waldorf Education Journals, Research Bulletin, Autumn/Winter 2012, Volume 17 #2
Staley, Betty (2002) What are the Physiological, Soul and Spiritual Changes in Youth Today? Published onthe Online Waldorf Library Lectures website from a lecture given at the AWSNA Teachers’ Conference, Kimberton, on 24.06.2002
Sulloway, Frank J (1996) Born to Rebel - Birth Order, Family Dynamics and Creative Lives Pantheon Books, New York (1996)
Tautz, Johannes (2011) The Meditative Life of the Teacher Published by the Pedagogical Section Council, USA (2011)
Van Alphen, Peter (2011) Imagination as a Transformative Tool in Primary School Education Research on Waldorf Education, Volume 2, #2 (2011)
Verhulst, Jos (1999) Developmental Dynamics in Humans and Other Primates – Discovering Evolutionary Principles through Comparative Morphology Adonis Press, Ghent, NY (2003)
Vogel, Anne-Marie (2007) Therapeutic Eurythmy for Children: From Early Childhood to Adolescence SteinerBooks, Great Barrington, Massachusetts (2007) Original German Heileurythmie fur Kinder im ersten und zweiten Jahrsiebt
Vogt, Felicitas Transforming Consciousness through Anxiety - Anxiety Phenomena in Daily Life and Its Opportunities Waldorf Journal Project 3 - Life’s Anxieties, Life’s Opportunities Anxiety and Its Importance to Inner Development – The Online Waldorf Library
Waite, Arthur Edward (1909) The Hidden Church of the Holy Graal Rebman Limited, London (2006)
Woloschina, Margarita (1952) Eurythmy as the mystery Art of Our Time
Wulsin, John (2010) Navigating Through Adolescence
Wulsin, John (2006) Parzival, the Journey of Adolescence Renewal Spring/summer 2006 Volume 15 #1
Rudolf Steiner
(1894) Intuitive Thinking As a Spiritual Path - A Philosophy of Freedom (GA 4) Anthroposophic Press, Hudson, NY (1995)
(1904/1905) Knowledge of the Higher Worlds and Its Attainment (GA 10) Anthroposophic Press, Inc, Spring Valley, NY, Third Edition (1947)
(1905) Evolution of Human Freedom and Personal Consciousness (GA unknown) Dusseldorf 19.01.1905
(1905) Richard Wagner in the Light of Anthroposophy (GA 92) A series of four lectures given between 28.03.1905 and 19.05.1905
(1908) Man and Woman in light of Spiritual Science (GA 56) Munich, 18.03.1908, from Perception ofthe Soul and of the Spirit - Published in German as Die Erkenntnis der Seele und des Geistes, authorized translation by permission of Rudolf Steiner Nachlassverwaltung, Dornach, Published in The Anthroposophical Review, Vol. 2 No. 1 (1980)
(1909/1910) The Ego (GA 117 and GA 124) Three lectures given between 04.12.1909 and 12.12.1910
(1911) Physiologie Occulte (GA 128) A series of eight lectures, given in Prague between 20.03.1911 and 28.03.1911 Edition Anthroposophiques Romandes, Genève, Suisse (1987)
(1911) From Jesus to Christ (GA 131) A series of ten lectures given in Karlsruhe from 05.10.1911 to 14.10.1911
(1911/1912) Esoteric Christianity and the Mission of Christian Rosencreuz – Twenty three lectures givenbetween 17.09.1911 and 19.12.1912 Rudolf Steiner Press (2000)
(1911/1912) The World of the Senses and the World of the Spirit (GA 134) A series of six lectures given in Hannover between 27.12.1911 and 01.01.1912
(1912) Love and Its Meaning in the World (GA 143) Zurich, 17.12.1912
(1913) The mysteries of the East and of Christianity (GA 144) A series of four lectures given from 03.02.1913 to 07.02.1913
(1913) Anthroposophy as a Substance of Life and Feeling - Veneration and Reverence for the Occult and Hidden Facts (GA 140) Tubingen, 16.02.1913
(1914) Christus und die geistige Welt, seventh lecture (GA 149) Dornach, 02.01.1914
(1914) The Four Sacrifices of Christ (GA 152) Basel, 01.06.1914, original German: Vorstufen zum Mysterium von Golgotha
(1914) (GA 153) Vienna 06.04.1914
(1914) (GA 156) Dornach 07.10.1914
(1915) The Etheric Being in the Physical Being (GA 157) Berlin, 20.04.1915
(1915) The Etheric Body as a Reflection of the Universe (GA159) Elberfeld 13.06.1915
(1916) Necessity and Freedom (GA 166) A series of five lectures given in Berlin in Januaryand February 1916
(1917) The Human Soul and the Universe (GA 175) Berlin, 20.02.1917
(1918) Anthroposophical Life Gifts (GA 181) A series of seven lectures given in Berlin between 30.03.1918 and 21.05.1918
(1919) The Foundations of Human Experience (GA 293) Anthroposophic Press – Translation of Allgemeine Menschenkunde als Grundlage der Paedagogik Dornach: Rudolf Steiner Nachlassverwaltung(1992)
(1919) Practical Advice to Teachers (GA 294) A series of fourteen lectures given from 21.08.1919 to 06.09.1919
(1919) The Spirit of the Waldorf School (GA 297) Anthroposophic Press, Hudson, NY (1995) quote!
(1919-1924) Faculty Meetings with Rudolf Steiner (GA 300a, 300b) Anthroposophic Press, Hudson, NY (1998)
(1920) Balance in Teaching (GA 302a) Anthroposophic Press, Steiner Books, Great Barrington, MA (2007)
(1920) Spiritual Science and Medicine (GA 312) A series of twenty lectures given in Dornach, Switzerland between 21.03.1920 and 09.04.1920
(1920) Physiology and Therapeutics (GA 314) A series of four lectures, given in Dornach between 07.10.1920 and 09.10.1920
(1920) (GA 277) Introductory words to a eurythmy performance given at Dornach 12.12.1920
(1921) Les Forces Formatrices et Leur Metamorphose (GA205) A series of thirteen lectures given between 16.06.1921 and 17.07.1921EditionAnthroposophiques Romandes, Genève, Suisse (1989)
(1921) Evil and the Power of Thought (GA 207) Dornach, 23.09.1921
(1921) Education for Adolescents (GA 302a) A series of eight lectures given in Stuttgart between 12.06.1921 and 19.06.1921 – Anthroposophic Press, Hudson, NY (1996)
(1921/1922) Curative Eurythmy (GA 315) A series of eight lectures given from 12.04.1921 to28.10.1922
(1921) Foundations of Anthroposophy (GA 79) A series of three lectures given between 28.11.1921 and 01.12.1921
(1922) Philosophy, Cosmology, Religion (GA 25) Rudolf Steiner Publishing Company (1943)
(1922) The Ear (GA 218) Stuttgart, 09.12.1922
(1922) The Spiritual Ground Of Education (GA 305) Anthroposophic Press, Great Barrington, MA (2004)
(1922) Fundamentals of Anthroposophic Medicine (GA 314) Eight lectures given between 26.10.1922 and 28.10.1922
(1923) Truth, Beauty and Goodness (GA 220) Dornach, 19.01.1923
(1923) The Evolution of Consciousness (GA 227) A series of thirteen lectures given in Penmaenmawr between 19.08.1923 and 31.08.1923
(1923) Man as a Picture of the Living Spirit (GA 228) London, 02.09.1923
(1923) The Anthroposophic Movement (GA 258) A series of eight lectures given between 10.06.1923 and 17.06.1923
(1923) The Arts and Their Mission (GA 276) A series of seven lectures given between 18.05.1923 and 09.06.1923
(1923) A Lecture on Eurythmy (GA 279) Penmaenmawr, 26.08.1923
(1923) (GA 306)
(1923) Education and Modern Spiritual Science (GA 307) A series of twelve lectures given between 05.08.1923 and 17.08.1923 - Steiner Books, Blauvelt, NY (1989)
(1924)The Essentials of Education (GA 308) A series of five lectures given in Stuttgart from 08.04.1924 and 11.04.1924 Anthroposophic Press, Hudson, NY (1997)
(1924) Human Values in Education (GA 310) A series of ten lectures given in Arnheim, from 17.07.1924 to 24.07.1924
(1924) The Kingdom of Childhood (GA 311) A series of eight lectures given in Torquay from 12.08.1924 to 20.08.1924
(1924) Curative Education (GA 317) A series of twelve lectures given between 25.06.1924 and 07.07.1924
(1924a) Eurythmy as Visible Singing (GA 278) – Translated by Alan Stott – The Anderida Music Trust, Stourbridge, England
(1924b) Eurythmy as Visible Speech (GA 279) – Translated by Alan Stott, Coralee Schmandt andMaren Stott - Anastasi Ltd, Weobley, Herefordshire (2005)
Barton, Matthew, (Compiled and Edited by) (2010) The Mysteries of the Holy Grail – From Arthur and Parzival to Modern Initiation - Rudolf Steiner Press, Forest Row, England
The Education of the Child in the Light of Anthroposophy (GA 34) An essay of 1909
Bamford, Christopher (Compiled by) First steps in Inner Development Anthroposophic Press, Hudson, NY (1999)
Steiner, Rudolf, Wegman, Ita Fundamentals of Therapy (GA 27) Kessinger Publishing, LLC (2003)
Usher, Beth (Compiled by) Eurythmy, An Introductory Reader Sophia Books, Rudolf Steiner Press,Forest Row, England (2006)
