Synopsis "Eurythmy: Its Birth and Development "

“This gave my mother the opportunity of mentioning to Dr. Steiner an idea.... Could one affect the physical body in a healing, strengthening, and regulating way through certain rhythmic movements of the etheric body―which, after all, was the center of all that was rhythmic―as well as of health and illness? Dr. Steiner not only enthusiastically affirmed this possibility, but also spontaneously declared himself ready to give the necessary directions, which I could then work out with my mother’s help.” ―Lory Maier-Smits Alongside original material by Rudolf and Marie Steiner, this volume features unique first-hand accounts of the birth of the art of eurythmy by a number of its early students and practitioners. The practical and artistic stages of its development are chronicled in detail, alongside reports from the first public performance onwards. Rudolf Steiner offers inspiration to the original eurythmists to make their own discoveries―to perceive and fashion in movement their creative “inner voice.” The artistic principles are established for later development and elaboration, to reveal and foster human creativity in many poetic and musical contexts. Through the texts, links gradually emerge between eurythmy and temple-dances that accompanied ancient initiations. The impulse to dance is rediscovered as inherent in the “lost Word,” or the primordial root language still available in “genetic etymology”―the sounds of speech used in all languages. Music eurythmy, we learn, did not start from dancing, but from the archetypal structure of the musical system. Consequently, we can witness directly how an eloquent performing art can properly develop when technique and inspiration meet. The text is supported by extensive supplementary material, including eurythmy forms, a chronological survey, notes, and indexes.

Rudolf Steiner

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Rudolf Steiner (Donji Kraljevec, Austro-Hungarian Empire, now Croatia, February 25 or 27, 1861-Dornach, Switzerland, March 30, 1925) was an Austrian philosopher, literary scholar, educator, artist, playwright, social thinker, and occultist. He was the founder of anthroposophy, Waldorf education, biodynamic agriculture, anthroposophic medicine, and the new artistic form of eurythmy.

He described anthroposophy as follows: Anthroposophy is a path of knowledge that would like to lead the spiritual in man to the spiritual in the universe. Those who feel certain questions about the essence of man and the world as a vital necessity as the one felt when we are hungry and thirsty can be anthroposophists.

Steiner proposed a form of ethical individualism, to which he later added a more explicitly spiritual component. He derived his epistemology from the worldview of Johann Wolfgang Goethe, according to which thought is an organ of perception just like the eye or the ear. Just as the eye perceives colors and the ear sounds, so thought perceives ideas.

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