The Rudolf Steiner Archive

In these afternoon hours I wish to present the first seeds of a curative eurythmy. Today we will have a sort of introduction, and what we gain from it we will develop into definite forms in the days following. First of all I want to draw attention to some basic matters. What has been practised up until now is eurythmy as art; and as such it should be concomitantly accepted as the eurythmy pedagogically and didactically suited for children, since what has been developed until now as eurythmy is in every way drawn out of the formation of the healthy human being. We will see that certain points of contact appear, by means of which it will be possible to distil a hygienic-therapeutic discipline from the eurythmic, and how certain artistic forms transform themselves in one direction or another to become what can be called a sort of curative eurythmy.

It will, of course, be essential to emphasize that artistic eurythmy—which is in essence the expression of that element inherent in the formation and in the tendencies to movement of the human body—is that which must be adjudged correct for the development of the human organism as soul, spirit and body, even as it is appropriate for visual presentation. However, one can also work towards a curative eurythmy which will be of extensive use in the treatment of various chronic and acute conditions, but which will prove to be especially important and to the point in those cases specifically where we attempt to treat impending sicknesses and tendencies to sickness, prophylactically through eurythmy. Here is the point at which the didactic-pedagogical element in eurythmy flows gradually over into the hygienic-therapeutic.

However, for those who wish to practise artistic eurythmy, I want to specifically emphasize that they will have to forget in the most thorough fashion what they have acquired in these hours when they do artistic eurythmy. Then precisely in this area one must maintain a strict separation between those goals which one pursues in hygiene and therapeutics and that artistic quality which one must strive to attain in eurythmy. And anyone who persists in mixing the two will first of all ruin his artistic ability in eurythmy and secondly find himself unable to achieve anything of importance in respect to its hygienic-therapeutic element. Apart from this it will be necessary to acquire certain physiological knowledge—which will transform itself into a sort of feeling for the processes forming the human organism—in order to apply the hygienic-therapeutic side of eurythmy practically, as we will see in the following lectures.

Now, having given this preface, I would like to speak more specifically about what may be considered the basis for human eurythmy itself since it appears to me to be pertinent to the goals we wish to attain. If one wishes to understand what eurythmy in its most varied aspects is, one must first of all gain a certain understanding of the human larynx. We will come to know the other vocal organs of man precisely through the course of our exercises relating to it. But the first thing which we must obtain will be a certain knowledge of the human larynx and its importance for the human organization in general. There is much too strong a tendency to regard each human organ as a thing unto itself. That isn't the case, however. That is not how a human organ is. Every human organ is a member of the organization as a whole and, at the same time, a metamorphic variation of certain other organs. Basically, every self-contained human organ is a metamorphosis of other self-contained human organs. Nevertheless, the case is that certain human organs and groups of organs prove to carry this metamorphic character more exactly within them, more precisely, I would like to say, and others less precisely.

An example of an organ where one can penetrate through that one organ into the essence of the human organism solely through a properly understood metamorphosis is the larynx. Recall from your anatomical and physiological knowledge how peculiarly the human larynx is formed.

What I wish to convey can be grasped only through Goetheanistic contemplation of the human larynx. However, if you will make the effort to attain to this Goetheanistic contemplation of the organs involved to which we will now direct our attention, you will see that it is possible. If you take the larynx first of all as an upwards directed extension of the windpipe, you will discover when you study its forms that it may be characterized as a reversed, a from front-to-back reversed piece of the human organism; from another place, another piece of the human organization turned around. Picture to yourself the back of the human head, including the auricular parts, and think of what you are picturing to yourself as the back of the human head, including the auricular parts—insofar as these are localized in this part of man—excluding the frontal lobe¹ for the moment, and extending downwards so that it becomes the human ribcage with its vertebrae, including the beginnings of the ribs which have the much softer breast bone to the front that falls away altogether lower down. Picture to yourself, then, this less clearly defined—system of organs that I have presented to you: the posterior part of the head including the auditory parts, broadening out into the ribcage below.

And now think of this part somewhat transformed; imagine the diameter of the ribs greatly reduced. Imagine that which is very wide in the ribs, in the ribcage, here transformed into a pipe, the bony material being replaced by cartilage. That part which I isolated as the head, imagine that to be filled out in such a way that the less well filled out parts of the head, were poured out, and then that what is now filled in with thicker tissue were left out; think of that which in the head is actually filled with a liquid solid mass replaced. When you imagine this transformation of these parts of the human organism, then you have the metamorphosis of the larynx: the posterior head with the attached ribcage, reversed. The upwards extension into the larynx is truly a sort of posterior head, transformed. It is actually so: the etheric formative forces of the larynx bring about an inversion when we compare them with the formative forces of the aforementioned part of the posterior head with the attached ribcage. Considering the matter etherically, we carry in our breast, in the larynx, a second man, in a manner of speaking, who is, to be certain, in a way rudimentary, but who is in his dispositions, in his beginnings nevertheless at a certain stage of development.

If that which I have just described to you were to be turned around again to its former position so as to appear as the posterior head, then it would, in accordance with the formative forces, of necessity add on those parts of the brain lying further forwards. The tendency to build something similar on is also present in the larynx. The larynx has for this reason the thyroid gland in its neighborhood. What appears in more recent physiology as the peculiar conditions of the thyroid can be understood metamorphically, if you can see a sort of decadent frontal lobe in the thyroid which to a certain extent performs functions taken over from the frontal lobe in the speaking man. The thyroid must co-operate with the frontal lobe. If the thyroid is in any way diseased, you can easily imagine what sort of conditions arise; simply because he has the thyroid, man is organized to use it as an additional organ of thought related more to his breast being.

That which I have designated as etheric formative forces which are at work to bring this second man, who takes up an appositive position in us, into being:—these etheric formative forces are in fact very differentiated. When we breathe and this breathing expresses itself in speaking or singing, when this modified breathing (for from a certain point of view one must call it that) lives as speech or song, then that whole system of organs in man, which I have already indicated as the posterior head continuing down into the breast, is in such inner movement, that this movement experiences its reflexes in the organization of the larynx. So we must picture to our-selves that this whole system—that together with the ear is nothing other than a larynx, only metamorphosed—there is a frontal lobe—calls forth certain effects which are reflected. Thus our larynx performs backwards, in eurythmy, in the form of forces, what we think, feel and so on. This eurythmy really goes on within us. Our larynx eurythmizes; and we have then the assignment to turn around again that which arises sensibly-supersensibly through the reflex-reaction of the larynx, and to make it visible, so that our arms bring to expression that which has already been relayed forth and back again. Thus we have to do here with something which is taken directly from the human organism.

One must make it clear to oneself that we are drawing attention to that organ which like an additional head with a downward extension has been set into the rhythmic system. Our ordinary head, the more or less thoughtful head, has the peculiarity of quieting down what pulses up rhythmically into it through the arachnoidal cavity, which is an extension of the respiratory system. It is by means of the transformation of the movement from below in the rhythmic system into quiet; and by virtue of the fact that a state of balance is reached and stasis is developed out of elements in movement, reciprocally conditioning each other in motion, that thinking is conditioned: through statics arising in the head out of the dynamics.

The reverse is also true: what we develop in the quiet, in the stasis of the head, influences the dynamic of the rhythmic man, to begin with in a retardative manner. The fact is that an unnatural exertion of the soul-spiritual in connection with the head tends to slow down the circulation. A further consequence is that chaotic or sloppy thinking transforms the rhythmic into the arhythmic, changes the natural rhythm which should play in the human rhythmic system into arhythm, even into an antirhythm when it comes to full expression. And if one wishes to understand man, one must observe the connection between the circulatory and respiratory system, and careless, chaotic thought, as well as logical thought, Logical thinking as such carries within it the tendency to slow down the rhythm. Logical thought has the peculiarity of falling out of rhythm. Therefore, the soul-life that wishes to fall into rhythm will try to supercede logic and attempt to frame sentences and verses that follow not syntax, but rhythm in their course. By striving to return to rhythm in poetry, by resisting the enemy of poetry, that is prose (with the exception of rhythmical prose, of course), one tries to become more human. I am not claiming that through logic one's development will tend more towards the animalic; when you wish, you can always imagine that one evolves towards the angelic. But when one strives to turn back from the logical towards the human, one must try to bring into the succession of the syllables and their movement, into the movement of the sounds and into the sentence structure, not that which is demanded by the syntax, but that which the rhythm requires. We must pay heed to the rhythmic man when we want to return to the realm of poetry; we should listen to the head-man when we wish to enter into prose.

This will serve as an indication of the connection which in fact exists between that manifest part of man which I have described and that part which, as a metamorphosis of it, is somewhat concealed. He is there within us, however, this eurythmist who performs as the etheric body of the larynx a distinct eurythmy intimately connected with the normal development of our respiratory system, with our whole circulatory system and, naturally, through the intermediary of the circulatory system even with the metabolic system, as you can surmise from all that I have presented to you.

Now all possible sorts of occasions arise for this very complicated arrangement, this dove-tailing of a forwards- and a backwards-orientated system, to become disjointed. It would be accurate to say that they are properly articulated in only very few people of today's culture. It will be necessary to develop a certain ability to observe this since when the head system, for example, has been so dealt with in childhood that the transgression against the rhythmic system is too great everything possible can develop in later years simply through an irregularity in what I have described. This is precisely because in the case of the human organism, as in an avalanche, small provocations may build up to great effects.

In observing children from this aspect one will find that it is extremely significant to what degree their unconscious living in rhythm predominates in their soul-life over the quieting element of the head organization; for example if this is the case, if the rhythmic system predominates, one must ask oneself if something should not be introduced into the education of the child. If in time the condition appears to he habitual, then something must be clone. When, as a result of the anomaly to which I have drawn attention, the child becomes increasingly excited, ever more and more fluttery and one can do nothing with him, one must attempt to bring an iambic element into his whole organization. This can be done by having the child move in such a manner that, in full consciousness—and for that he must have your guidance—he moves first the left arm and the left hand forwards, thereafter the right arm, so that this becomes the more conscious. The child must be aware: that is the first and was the first. Throughout the entire exercise the consciousness must prevail: that was the first and remains the first; it began with the left. One can reinforce the whole affair by having the child walk, stepping out with the left leg and bringing the right leg up to it, so that the leg and foot exercise is added to the hand and arm exercise, but only as a reinforcement, however. The arm exercise is really the essential. If one has the child practise in this iambic manner, as one may call it, one will see that the exercises will calm the fluttery child, the excited child and so on provided they are continued over a sufficiently long period of time.

Out of your knowledge of eurythmy you could describe it thus:² You have the child make half an “A” with the left arm and then complete this half “A” to a whole “A” with the right arm, and so on, so that the child remains in motion and the “A” does not come into being all at once, but as the result of successive movements.

If on the other hand one has a child who is phlegmatic, who doesn't want to take things in—our Waldorf teacher know these children well, they can at times bring one to mild despair; they actually hear nothing of what one says to them, everything passes them by—in this case one would do well to treat this child trochaically, that is to say, in just the opposite manner. Naturally one cannot begin with everything all at once; this is an element which has yet to he brought into Waldorf education. One forms the “A” so that the child knows: first the right arm, then the left arm, right arm, left arm and then further that first the right leg is placed in front and the left leg brought up to it; thus one has the arm movements forming the “A” (one after the other) reinforced by the leg and foot movement. One must pay particular attention that these things are done in such a way that they live in the child's consciousness; so that the child is really aware: on one occasion the left arm was the first, on the other the right arm was the first.

You will find that these things present difficulties for an inner understanding if someone is in every way a physiologist in the modern sense and believes that man's whole soul-life is mediated through the nervous system, that is, if you do not know that feeling is mediated by the rhythmic system and the will by the metabolic system, and that only thought formation is mediated by the nervous system. If you do not know these things you will have great difficulty in grasping the significance of what happens in any part of the body, both in respect to the soul-spiritual part and the bodily part of man's being.

The person who has developed an ability to observe knows that when a person has clumsy hand and finger movements and so on, he will exhibit a particular manner of thinking as well which one can compare with what happens in the fingers. It is really extremely interesting to study the connection between the manner in which a person controls the mechanics of the arm and the finger-physiognomy with the way in which he thinks. Then the soul-spiritual qualities which a person portrays proceed from the whole human being, not solely from the brain and nervous tissue. One must learn to understand that one thinks not only with the brain but also with the little finger and the big toe. There is a certain significance in achieving lightness—particularly in the limbs—as this will bring lightness into the soul-life as well. These ideas will only become applicable—as we shall see in the following lectures—when one has the possibility of providing a truly complete school hygiene to accompany the other instruction. It can happen, for example, that a child has the peculiarity of being unable to comprehend geometric figures. He cannot understand a geometric figure by looking at it. However difficult it may be you will do this child a great service when you have him take a small pencil between the big toe and the next toe, hold it and write really proper letters. That is something which carries a certain significance and which points in a fully justified manner to an inter-relationship in man.

Especially in the case of children, one may notice that the three members of the human organization do not snap properly into one another. A really large part of the anomalies of life are due to this improper articulation. To begin with, the children have headaches and at the same time one notices that the digestion is disturbed and so on. The most varied conditions may appear. We will give further indications in this regard in conjunction with other exercises which will be shown in the next days. However, when one is confronted with a situation such as I have described one can achieve a great deal with the child or children through having them do the following exercise: a eurythmic I—as you already know—a eurythmic A and a eurythmic O; but so that the children make the “I” with the whole upper body. For our physician friends I want to emphasize particularly, that what is essential in eurythmy, and that through which one achieves what is essential in artistic eurythmy as well, is not the mere form of the limb in position seen from without, but that which comes into being when the stretching or the bending within the positioned limb is felt. What is felt in the limb is what is important. Assume that you make an “I” with both arms; this “I” will not appear as it should when seen from without if you observe only its line, its content as a form. You must feel concurrently and you can tell by looking at the person—that he feels the stretching power in the I as he does it. Similarly when a person makes an “E”, for example, the important thing is not that he does this (crosses the arms), but that he feels: here one limb comes to rest on the other. In this feeling of one limb on the other lies the “E” in reality. And that which one sees in the expression for this sensing of one limb through the other. Then what you do here is no different from what you do when you look. You are continually carrying out an “E” by crossing the axis of the right eye with the axis of the left in order to find a point and so arrive at a crossed line. That is actually “the primeval E”. What has been demonstrated here is basically an imitation of it; however, everything in man is a metamorphosis, and this is a perfectly justifiable imitation, as in speaking “E” the larynx carries out exactly the same form to the rear in the etheric.

When you practise this exercise with a child it is necessary that the “I” be done with the upper body, that is to say, the child stretches out his upper body. He feels the whole body stretched. He makes the “A” with his legs and the “O” by moving his arms so. have the child do the following as quickly as possible in sequence: stretch the upper body vertically, separate the legs, and make the “O” movement with the arms; release and repeat, release and repeat and so on. One can practise such a thing with the children in chorus, of course. However, in principle such exercises should not be practised with the children as a class. Artistic eurythmy and the eurythmy for pedagogic and didactic reasons should be done by a class as a whole, for here children of the same age belong together. In order to make the transition from the usual class eurythmy to these matters related to hygienic-therapeutic eurythmy, one must take those children out of various classes who, due to the peculiarities which I have described—the disharmony of the three members of the human organism—have need of such an exercise, in order to practise with them. One can take them out of the most varied classes and then practise this exercise with those particularly suited for it. That really must be done if one truly wishes to pursue hygienic eurythmy, therapeutic eurythmy, in the school. Thus we are already on the path which as we follow it further will lead us to study certain movements that are actually only metamorphoses of the usual eurythmic movements and to trace their effect on the human organization. The fact is that we have organs in our interior and these organs have certain forms. These forms may he subject to anomalies. The form of each organ stands in a certain relationship to a possible form of movement of the outer man. Therefore the following may be said. Let us assume that some organ, let us say the gall, has the tendency to deformation, a tendency to assume an abnormal form. A form of movement exists which will counteract this tendency. And such is the case with every organ.

It is in this direction that we intend to develop what will follow. What I have given today was meant as an introduction to guide you to the path leading into this subject.

• 1. Vorderhirn; literally, the frontal lobe of the brain
• 2. The sounds are given throughout the English text as they are written in German: German “a”, “ah” as in English “father”, German “e”, “a” as in English “say”; German “i”, “ee” as in English “feet”; German “ei”, “i” as in English “light”; German “au”, “ow” as in English “how”; German “eu”, “oi” as in English “joy”.

Today I intend to discuss matters related to the vowel element in eurythmy. We need only to recall—as it is known to us through spiritual science—that vowels express more that which lives inwardly in man as feelings, emotions and so on. Consonants describe more that which is outwardly objective. When we remain within the realm of speech, these two statements are valid: vowels, more expression, revelation of the inwardness of feeling; we reveal ourselves to an extent in the vowel, that is to say, we reveal what we feel towards an object. Through the movements which the tongue, the lips and the palate perform, the consonants conform themselves more plastically to the outward forms of objects—as they are spiritually experienced, naturally—and attempt to reconstruct them. And so basically all consonants are more reproductions of the outward form-nature of things. However, one can actually only speak of vowels and consonants in this manner when one has an earlier stage of human evolution in mind in which in fact the evolution of speech was given and in which—since the individual sounds were always to a degree connected with movements of the body—the movement of the whole body and of the limbs as well was self-evident. This connection has been loosened, however, in the course of man's development. Speech was removed more to the interior and the possibilities of movement, of expression through movement, ceased. Today in normal life we speak largely without accompanying our speech with the corresponding movements. In eurythmy we bring back what attended the vowels and consonants as movements and thus bring the body into movement again. Now we must realize that when we pronounce vowels we omit the movement and make the vowel inward, that previously joined in the outward movement to an extent. We take something away from it on its path to the interior. We take the movement away. Thus we restore to the vowel in outer movement what we have taken away from it on its inward-going path. In the case of the vowel, matters are such that the outward movement is of exceptional importance in the search for the transferal of the effect of the vowel, eurythmically expressed, onto the whole man. That is what we must take into account here.

In speaking of vowels today, we will speak purely of the meaning of that which is eurythmically vocalized in movement. Here it is very important that one develops a feeling for what flows into the movement. That one develops a perceptive consciousness which tells one whether that which is happening in the respective human limb is a stretching, a rounding, or such. One must decidedly acquire a specific consciousness for this. In what pertains to vowels it is extremely important that one feels the movement made or the position taken up. That is what is important. Starting from here, we will transpose each of the vowels from the eurythmic into the therapeutic.

Practically demonstrated (Mrs. Baumann): a distinct “I” made by stretching both arms. This stretching should be carried out in such a way that one then returns (to the rest position; the ed.) and performs the same movement somewhat lower, returns again, and does it with both (arms) horizontal. Now we go back and, if you had the right forward at first, now, as you go lower, you must take the right to the back, and now to the front, now a bit back again, and then somewhat deeper. Now I don't want to trouble you further with that, but if one wanted to carry it out, one could make it more complicated by taking more positions; one would then start with the “I”, return, do it a little further on, go hack, a bit further on, and so forth, so that one has as many “I”-positions as possible, carried out from above to below, always returning (to the rest position; the ed.). When these movements are performed, they are an expression for the human being as a person. The entire individual person is thereby expressed.

Now we could notice for example that some child, for that matter a grown up person, cannot express himself properly as a person. He is somehow inhibited in the expression of himself as a complete individuality. He might be a dreamer in a certain sense or something similar. Or, if we think of a physical abnormality—in the case of a child, for example, that he doesn't learn to walk properly, he walks clumsily—or if in the case of an adult we notice that it would be desirable for hygienic or therapeutic reasons that the person learn to walk better, this particular exercise would be very good for this. When grown-ups step out too little in their stride, when they don't reach out properly with their steps, it always means that the circulation suffers under it. The circulation of the blood suffers under an insufficiently outreaching gait. So when people walk in this way (lightly tripping; the ed.), that has a consequence that the circulation becomes in some fashion slower than it should be in that person. Then one must attempt to have this person learn to step out again, and by having him do this exercise, one will be certain to attain one's goal. Then the person will have greater and more penetrating results in learning to walk properly. Thus one can say that in essence this modified “I”-exercise furthers those people who—I will express it somewhat radically—cannot walk properly. It can be summed up approximately so: for people who cannot walk properly.

You can extend the exercise further, and, with the addition of a sort of resumée of what Mrs. Baumann has done, it will be that much more effective Now try to do the whole exercise without bringing the arms back (to the rest position; the ed.) so that you reach the last position only by turning: turning in a plane, quick, quicker and quicker. The “I”-exercise as it was first demonstrated and described can be intensified in this way and will benefit those people who cannot walk properly. It will then be extraordinarily easy to bring them to walk properly. One can admonish them to walk properly and their efforts to walk in a different manner will bring suitable results as well.

Now Mrs. Baumann will demonstrate an “U”-exercise for us. The arms quite high up, and back to the starting position, now a bit lower, back again, a little lower, now horizontal, back again, now below, back again, and again below; that is the principle of it. And now do it straightaway so that you start above maintaining the “U” as you move downwards; and now do it increasingly quickly so that at last you reach quite a speed.

Please keep this in mind as the manner in which to execute the “U”-exercise. If I were to summarize again in the same fashion as earlier, I would call this the movement for children or adults who cannot stand. In the case of “I” we had those who cannot walk, with “U”, we have those who cannot stand.

Now not being able to stand is to have weak feet and to become very easily tired when standing. It would also mean, for example, that one could not stand long enough on tiptoe properly, or that one could not stand on one's heels long enough without immediately becoming clumsy. Standing on tiptoe or on the heels are no eurythmic exercises, but they should be practised by people who have weak legs, who tire easily while standing or who can't stand properly at all. To be unable to stand properly is to be easily tired in walking as well. That is a technical difference: to walk awkwardly and to tire in walking are two different things. When the person is tired by walking, one has to do with the “U”-exercise. When the person walks clumsily or when as a result of his whole constitution it would be desirable for him to learn to step out with his feet, that can be technically expressed as being unable to walk. However, to be tired by walking would be technically expressed as not being able to stand. And for such people the “U”-exercise is especially appropriate. This is interrelated with matters with which we must deal once we have come a bit further.

Now please do the “O”-movement: quite high up and back (to the rest position; the ed.) and now somewhat lower, back again, lower still, and so on. Now do it so that you make the “O”-movement above; feel distinctly the rounding of the arms within the movement as you glide down. When you glide down with the “O”-movement it must remain an “O”. Now increasingly faster.

You would see this exercise complete in its most brilliant application if you had here in front of you a really corpulent person. If a child or grown-up becomes unnaturally fat, then this is the exercise to be applied. By making the “O” so often and by extending it to this barrel-shaped body at the end—then it is really a barrel that one describes outside oneself—that which forms the opposite pole to those dynamic tendencies at work in making a person obese is in fact carried out. One can apply it very well hygienically and therapeutically, and you will be convinced that a tendency to become thinner actually appears when you have such people carry out this movement, especially when they practise other things as well which we have as yet to discuss. But at the same time it is of special significance in this exercise that you have the person practise only so long as he can without sweating heavily and becoming too warm. If one wishes to attain the desired effect, one must try to conduct the exercise so that the person can always rest in between.

Now Mrs. Baumann will make an “E”-movement, quite high above. It is a proper “E”-movement only when this hand lies on the other so that they touch. Now return (to the rest position; the ed.), then somewhat lower, the right hand over the left arm, and then, so that it is really effective, we will do it so that it lies increasingly further back and now again from above to below; then the “E” must be done so that it penetrates thoroughly. And now, in bringing it down, you must move (the crossing) further back, so far that you split the shoulder seam at the back. Now this is the exercise that will be especially advantageous for weaklings, that is to say, for thin people rather than fat people, for those people in whom the weakness comes distinctly from within, but is organically conditioned. It must be organically caused.

Another exercise which can be considered parallel to this should be applied with some caution as it affects the soul
more closely. It is the following: make an “E” to the rear as well as you can and as far up as you can. That really hurts. It is a movement that is in itself a bit painful and that is indeed the purpose. It should be practised with those children or adults in whom there are psychological grounds for becoming thin, such as being worn down and so on. Since one must in principle be careful in approaching from the outside with healing by such spiritual means, this too must of course be applied with caution. That means that one must inspire a child who has failed or who shows signs of depression so that he takes heart when one will have him do these exercises. If one concerns oneself with the child otherwise by comforting him and caring for his soul, then one can have him do these exercises as well.

You can see that in the case of all these things it is to a degree a matter of extending what comes to expression in artistic eurythmy in a certain manner. This is especially true in respect to the vowels.

Now it is very important that we make the following clear to ourselves. You know that the vowel element can be developed in this fashion, and that it is in essence the expression of the inward. One must only grasp through feeling and contemplation that which takes place. One must bear in mind that the person concerned, the person who carries out these things in order to be healed, must feel them; in “E” he feels that one arm covers the other. In the case of “O” however, something more comes into consideration. In “O” one should feel not only the closing of the circle, but the bending as well. One should feel that one is building a circle. One should feel the circle that runs through it. And in order to make the “O” particularly effective one should make the person doing it aware as well that he should feel as though he himself or someone else were to draw a line along his breastbone, thus by means of feeling, closing the whole to the rear in spirit; as if one were to experience something like having a line drawn on the breastbone by oneself or someone else.

Now we want to make an “A”: we return (to the rest position; the ed.), now we make an “A” somewhat lower, return again, make an “A” horizontally, back, make an “A” somewhat lowered, back, an “A” very deep, back, then to the rear; that you need to do only once, but return first (to the rest positon; the ed.). And now make the “A” above and without changing the angle bring it down, and, again without the feeling that you change the angle, to the back.

This exercise can he really effective only if one has it clone frequently. And when one has it repeated frequently, it is the exercise to be used with people who are greedy, in whom the animal nature comes particularly strongly to the fore. So if you have in school a child who is in every way a proper little animal, and in whom the condition has an organic cause, when you have him do this exercise, you will see that it has for him a very particular significance.

In the case of these exercises you can observe once again that if they are to be introduced into the school it will be necessary to organize the children into groups especially for them. You will soon become convinced that the children do these exercises much less gladly than the other eurythmic exercises. While they are eager to do the others, one will most likely have to persuade them to do these, as they will react at first as children often react to taking medicine: with resistance. They won't be particularly happy about it, but that is of no especial harm in the exercises having to do with “O”, “U”, “E”, and “A”; in the case of “I” it is somewhat harmful when the child doesn't enjoy it. One must try to reach the stage where the children delight in the “I”-exercise as we have clone it. In the case of the others, “U”, “O”, “E”, and “A”, it is not especially damaging if they carry out the exercise on authority, and knowing that it is their duty to do it. With “I” it is important that the children have pleasure in doing it as it affects the whole individual, as I have said
already.

You will profit further by coming to terms with the following: the “I” reveals man as a person, the “U” reveals man as man, the “O” reveals man as soul, the “E” fixes the ego in the etheric body, it permeates the etheric body, strongly with the ego. And the “A” counteracts the animal nature in man.

Now we will follow the various workings further. If you have a person with irregular breathing, who is in some fashion burdened clown by his breathing and such like, you will be able to bring this person to normal breathing by applying the vowels. You will be able to achieve in particular the distinct articulation of the consonants by means of these exercises, as that is greatly facilitated through the practice of the vowels. When you notice that certain children cannot manage to form certain consonants with the lips or the tongue—for the palatal sounds (Gaumenlaute) it is less applicable, although for the labial and lingual sounds exceptionally good—it will be of great help to the children with difficulties in this respect, when one tries to have them do such exercises as early as possible.

You will also notice that when people tend to chronic headaches, to migrane-like conditions, these can be appreciably alleviated through the practice of the vowels. So in the cases of chronic headaches and chronic migrane symptoms, as well as when people are foggy-headed, these things will be particularly applicable. Similarly, if you employ the exercises which we have done today for children who cannot pay attention, who are sleepy, you will awaken them in a certain sense to a state of awareness. That is a hygienic-didactic angle of a certain significance. It will be observed that sleepy-headed adults can definitely be awakened in this way as well. And then one will notice that when a person's digestion is too weak or too slow, that by means of these exercises this slow digestion and all that is known to be connected with it, can be changed for the better.

In certain forms of hygienic eurythmy it would be good to have the movements—which are carried out with the arms only in artistic eurythmy—done with the legs as well where possible, only somewhat less forcefully, as I am about to describe. Now you will ask how one can make an “I”, for example, with the legs? It's very easy. One must only stretch out the leg and feel the stretching in it. The “U” would be simply to stand with full awareness on both legs, so that one has a distinct stretching feeling in both. “O” with legs must be learned, however. One should really accustom the people with whom one finds it necessary to do the “O”-exercise ih the manner that I have described, to do the “O” with the legs as well. That consists in pointing the toes somewhat, but only very slightly, to the outside and then trying to stand in this manner and hold one's position. One must thereby stand on tiptoe, however, and bend outward, remain so standing a moment and then return to the normal position; then build it up again and so on.

It is necessary to take into account the relationship existing between the possibilities of organically determined inner movement in the middle man and the lower man. This is such that movement done for the lower man should be carried out at only one-third the strength. Thus when you have someone carry out the “O” movement as we have seen it, you must have the feeling that what is done later for the legs and feet requires only one-third of the time and thus only a third of the energy expended. It will be especially effective, however, when you place this in the middle, so that you have, let us say, A and then A again, with B, the foot movement, in the middle (see the table); it will be particularly effective to have them together.

 one-third one-third one-third A B A Arm Foot Arm 

It will also be especially effective to do the same in connection with the “E”-exercise for the feet, by really crossing the feet.

But one must stand on tiptoe and lay one leg over the other so that they touch. Again, one-third, and placed, if possible, in the middle. That is something which it would be particularly good to have done by children, and by adults as well, who are weaklings. They will naturally be hardly capable of doing it, but that is exactly why they must learn to do it. In precisely these matters one sees that that which it is most important for various people to learn is that which they are most incapable of doing. They must learn it because it is necessary to the recovery of their health.

“A” (with the legs; the ed.) is also necessary; I have already demonstrated it to you yesterday. It consists in assuming this spread position while standing insofar as it is possible on tiptoe. That should also be introduced into the A-movement and it will be particularly effective there.

Now one can also intensify all the exercises that we have just described by carrying them out in walking. And you will achieve a great deal for a weak child, for example, when you teach him to do the “E”-motion as we have just done it in walking; he should walk in such a manner that he always touches each leg alternately. In taking a step forward he crosses over first with one leg, then with the other, so that he always crosses one leg over the other, so that he places one leg at the hack and touches it with the other in front. Naturally he won't move ahead very well, but it is good to have this movement carried out while walking. You will say that complicated movements appear as a result; but it is good when complicated movements appear.

Now I want to bring it to your attention that what we have said about the vowel element should be sharply distinguished to begin with from what we will practice tomorrow in respect to the consonants. The consonantal element is such that it generally expresses the external, as we have already said. In speech as well the consonant is so formed that a reconstruction, an imitation of the outer form comes into being through the formative motions of lips and tongue. Now the consonants have, as we will see tomorrow, very special sorts of movements and it lies within these forms of movement to make the consonant inward again in a certain manner by giving it eurythmic form. It is internalized. That which it loses in the outward-going path of speech is restored to it. And, whether one is contemplating them in eurythmy as art or performing them for personal reasons, in the case of consonants it is particularly important to have, not a feeling in the way one does with a vowel, a feeling of stretching, of bending, or of widening and so on, but to imagine oneself simultaneously in the form that one carries out while making the consonants, as though one were to observe oneself.

Here you can see most clearly that one must admonish the artistic eurythmists not to mix the two things; the artistic eurythmists would not do well to observe themselves constantly as they would rob themselves of their ability to work unselfconsciously. On the contrary, when you have a child or a grown-up carry out something having to do with consonants, it is important that they photograph themselves inwardly in their thought as it were; then in this inward photographing of oneself lies that which is effective; the person must really see himself inwardly in the position that he is carrying out and it must be performed in such a manner that the person has an inner picture of what he does.

If you would be so good (Miss Wolfram) as to show us an “M” as a consonant, first with the right hand, now with the left, but taking it backwards, now taking the right hand back, and “M” with the left hand and now with both hands, that can be multiplied in various ways, of course. Now an “M”—we will start with this example; to begin with, what is it as speech? In speech “M” is an extraordinarily important sound. You will experience its importance in speech, and in speech physiology as well, if you contrast it with the “S”. Perhaps Mrs. Baumann will make a graceful “S” for us now, right, left, and now with both hands.

Now to begin with it appears that you have the feeling, or should have the feeling when the “S” is done that you encounter something within you—it is the etheric body namely (at this point Dr. Steiner made the corresponding movement; the ed.); so that you have a snake-like line. This serpentine may approach a straight line in the case of a particularly sharply pronounced “S” and can even be represented as a straight Iine. By contrast, when you look at the “M” that was just performed, you should have the feeling—even when the organic form is carried out inwardly—that it is really not the same thing. And so the “M” is that which counters the “S”-direction when laid against it and that is in essence the great polarity between an “S” and an “M”; they are two polar sounds. “S” is the truly Ahrimanic sound, if I may speak anthroposophically, and the “M” is that which mitigates the properties of the Ahrimanic, makes it mild; if I may express it so, it takes its Ahrimanic strength from it. So when we have a combination of sounds directly including “S” and “M”, for example “Samen” (seed) or “Summe” (sum), we have in this combination of sounds first the strong Ahrimanic being in “S”, whose sting is then taken from it by the “M”.

Perhaps you will make a “H” for us (Miss Wolfram). When you really look at the “H”, when you feel yourself really within this “H”, then, you will say to yourself: there is something in this “H” which reveals itself as unequivocally Luciferic. It is the Luciferic in the “H”, then, which comes to expression here. And now try to observe yourself—here the feeling is less important than the contemplation of it—try to observe yourself, when Mrs. Baumann does it for us now, how it is when one does the “H” and allows it to go over immediately into an “M”. Make the “H” first and let it carry over by and by into an “M”. Now take a look at it. In this movement you have the whole perception of the mitigation of the Luciferic, of its sting being taken from it, brought to expression. The movement is truly as if one would arrest Lucifer. And, one can also hear it if you simply think about it—today's civilized man can actually no longer reflect properly on these things. If someone wants to agree to something Luciferic, but immediately diminishes the actual Luciferic element, the eagerness of his assent, then he says, “Hm, hm”. There you have the “H” and the “M” placed really very close to one another and you have the whole charm of the diminished Luciferic directly within it.

From this you can see that as soon as one turns to the consonantal element, one must immediately turn to the observation of the form as well. That is the essential thing and tomorrow we will speak about it further.

In order to proceed in an appropriate manner, we will prepare the grounds today for certain matters to be deepened physiologically and psychologically tomorrow, considering the forms which consonants take in eurythmic movement. In what has been developed as the form involved in consonantal movement consideration has been truly given to everything which must be taken into account when man attempts to penetrate into the outer world through speech. The person who sets himself the task of observing speech will see that man's confrontation with the outer world must consist on the one hand of living into the world vigorously; of making himself selfless and living out into the world. In the vowels he comes to himself; in the vowels he goes within and unfolds his activity there. In the consonants he becomes in a way one with the outer world although to varying degrees. These varying degrees of unification with the world are manifest in certain practices within language as well. In the development of the consonantal element in eurythmy, particularly in reference to the sensible-super-sensible observation of which I so often speak in introducing eurythmy performances,—it is necessary to take into consideration whether the human being objectifies himself. To discover whether man extroverts himself completely in order to grasp the spiritual element in the things outside him in a spoken sound, or if, despite this objectification of himself, he remains more within and does not go completely out of himself but instead reproduces the external within himself. That is a major distinction, by reason of which I must ask Mrs. Baumann to be so good and show us first of all the movement for “H”. Now please disregard this H-movement altogether and Mrs. Baumann will demonstrate the F-movement. And now keep an eye on what you can observe here in these two different movements. You can observe what is present by virtue of the human instinct in the attempt to enunciate the sound in question. Consider the pronunciation of H: actually you say H-a, you follow up with a vowel. It is impossible to sound a consonant without it being tinged by a vowel, you follow it up with an “A”. The pure consonant is vocalized, combined with a vowel. If you consider the “F” you will find that man's linguistic instinct places an “E” in front of it: e-F. Here the opposite occurs: an E is set before it.

Through the foregoing you will perceive that when man utters an “H” he makes a greater effort to uncover through speech the spiritual in the external object; when he utters an “F” his effort is directed more towards reexperiencing the spiritual within himself. Therefore the manner in which the consonant arises is entirely different, according to whether the vowel tinges the consonant from the front or from the back, if I may use this manner of expression in respect to the nature of consonantal articulation. This you will find conveyed in the form you have observed.

Perhaps Miss Wolfram will do the “H” once again. H: here you have an energetic unfolding in the outer world, one doesn't wish to remain in oneself, one wants to go out and live in the external. F: you see the decided effort to avoid entering into the outer world too sharply, to remain in the inner.

Now when one takes this into consideration, one can carry on from here to form a mental picture of various matters which, although they must become part of eurythmy, were, to begin with, unnecessary as far as we have been concerned with eurythmy as art, but which will become necessary the more this art is extended to other languages. The moment one says not “ef” but “fi”, in that moment it is a different matter; in that moment one attempts to embrace the external with the sound as well. This is indicative of an important historical fact: In ancient Greece people attempted to grasp the external even in those things in respect to which modern man has become inward. You see how one can follow into the outermost fringes of man's experience what I have expressed for example, in The Riddles of Philosophy:¹ this going out and taking hold in the external world of what man today already experiences entirely inwardly in his ego. The reason why spiritual science is not accepted on the grounds of such things is solely that the people of our civilization are in general too lazy. They have to take too many things into account in order to come to the truth, and they want to make it easier for themselves. But that just won't do. They want to make everything easier for themselves; and that won't do.

That, for the present, in respect to one element which flowed into the formation of the consonants. If we want to understand the formation of consonants in the field of eurythmy, then we should consider a second element which I believe people pay less attention to nowadays in teaching, even in physiology, speech physiology, than the third element which we will come to in a moment. In order to form an impression, I will ask you to compare once again. Here it is important that one form a contemplative picture. Naturally, one cannot penetrate to the very end of that which one has in such a picture, to the concept.

Perhaps Mrs. Baumann will be so good and make the H again, and once the tone has faded away, Mrs. Baumann will make a D for us. One must pay attention in this case to the following: When you contemplate the H, you will find the movement for it deviates greatly to begin with from what takes place in speaking it; since—in respect to the characteristic of which I am thinking at the moment—the eurythmic element must be polar to the actual process in speech. You know that the speech process as I presented it the day before yesterday is a reflecting back from the larynx. The eurythmic process must express this outwardly. It expresses it in movement. In certain instances one must go over to the exactly opposite pole. This is particularly characteristic of H and D; in the case of other consonants this element must be toned down. Now, what sort of a sound is H? H is esentially a breath sound. The H is actually brought into being through blowing. In the case of H you have a decided shoving thrust² in eurythmy where you have to blow. When you utter “D” you have this thrusting effect in the pronunciation. We must polarize this by transforming it into the characteristic movement that was present in D. Thus the thrusting quality of speech is lamed when one conveys the sound through movement.

So you see that precisely this characteristic must be taken into particular account, when one has either a breath sound or a plosive sound. Now sounds are not only either breath or plosive sounds. But by what reason are they one or the other? You see, when one has a decided breath sound, one expresses by means of the blowing the fact that one really wants to go out of oneself; in the thrusting, that this going out of oneself is difficult, that one would like to remain within. For this reason the eurythmic transposition of the sound must take place in the manner you have seen.

Now one also has sounds that carefully connect the inward with the outward; sounds that are actually physiologically so constituted that with them one states that one is bringing to a standstill, arresting, that in which one would like to be active in such a manner that the inward would immediately become outward, where one would enter into the movement immediately with the whole human being. This is decidedly evident in only one sound in our language: the R, which is, however, for this reason the most inclusive sound; one would like to run after the speech organism with every limb, as I would like to express it, when one says R. Actually with R one strives to bring this pursuit to rest. The lips want to follow when they pronounce the labial R, and bring this running-after to a halt, the tongue wants to follow when it speaks the lingual R, and finally the palate wants to follow when the palatal R sounds. These three R's are distinctly different from one another, but are nevertheless one; in eurythmy they are expressed thus (Mrs. Baumann: R). The bringing-in-swing of what one usually brings to a standstill is expressed. Thus it is precisely the running after the movement of the sound that comes to expression in the R. And when one wants to bring the other element to expression, one can express the labial R by carrying the movement further downwards; the lingual R can be made more in the horizontal and the palatal R rather more upwards. By this means one can modify the R-sound in the eurythmic movement. But you see that the form is determined by leaving the vibrations of the R in the background and bringing the “running-after” to expression.

A similar sound where one has, not a vibrating, but a sort of wave in the movement is the L (Miss Wolfram: L). You sec that there is something of the same movement in it as in the R; but the running-after is mild and comes to rest. It is a wave rather than a vibration that comes to expression.

That is what is connected innerly, physiologically, with the shading through the vowel element of the consonantal sound, and with the shading through feeling, which already leads to a greater extent into the physical. One arrives at the outermost division of the sounds by considering the organs; if we compare once again the respective movements we will arrive at the most extreme, the most external principles of division through our contemplative picture. (Mrs. Baumann: B) That is a B, and now we will continue directly perhaps with a T. (Mrs. Baumann: I). Now you can see from the position—which as the third element must be taken into account and which makes itself quite apparent to the sensible-super-sensible contemplation—that in the case of B we have to do with a labial sound and in the case of T with a dental sound. (Miss Wolfram: K) K: here one starts with the position and the essential lies in the movement. Isere we have to do with a palatal sound which in its pronounciation, in the tone in which it is spoken is the quietest, but which is transformed in movement into its polar opposite when performed outwardly in eurythmy. The consonants overlap in respect to their characteristics; one division extends into another. The following may serve as an aid.

Take the labial sounds—I'll write out only the most distinctive of them: V, B, P, F, M. You can determine to what extent the vowel colouring is involved by pronouncing the sounds; I don't need to indicate that. Let us take the dental sounds D, T, S, Sh, L, the English Th, and N. And now the palatal sounds: G, K, Ch, and the French Ng, more or less. We will have to write the R in everywhere, since it has its nuances everywhere:

 Labial sounds: V, B, P, F, M R Dental sounds: D, T, S, Sh, L, (Th), N R Palatal sounds: G, K, Ch, Ng R 

Considering the process of division from the other point of view now, I will underline with white where we have to do with a definite breath sound: V, F, S, Sh and Ch as well, more or less. These would be the decided breath sounds. I will underline in red where we have to do with what are clearly plosive sounds: B, P, M, D, T, N, and then perhaps G and K. The vibratory sound is R. We have to do with a distinct undulent sound—which, because of the soft transformation in the movement, must be in a sense of an inward character—fundamentally only in the case of L.

These three organizational principles—the vowel colouring, the blowing, thrusting, vibrating and undulating, and all that which has to do with the external division (into dental labial and palatal sounds; the ed.)—all this comes to expression in the forms given for eurythmy. It must be clear to you, of course, to what degree these principles of division affect each other, however. When we have to do with L, for example, we have to do with a distinct dental sound which must have all the characteristics of a dental sound, and then we have to do with a gliding sound, with an undulant sound, which must have the characteristics of a wave. Apart from that, it has a strong connection to the inward. We have to do with a colouring from within outwards, at least in our language. We don't say “le”, but “el”; here we have the transition from older forms in which people reached yearningly into the exterior world and where as a result a word was used in order to express such an event, in order to bring this going over into the external to proper expression. Thus in each of the letters we have to do with a likeness of that which is taking place inwardly.

Before we consider the consonants individually, let us contemplate the following. Yesterday we were able to show that A—which we also studied in its metamorphosis—has to do with all those forces in man that make him greedy, which organize him according to animal nature: the A in fact lies nearest to the animal nature in man, and in a certain sense one can say that when the A is pronounced it sounds out of the animality of man. And certainly as spiritual investigation confirms A is the sound which was the very earliest to appear in the course of both the phylogenetic evolution as well as the ontogenetic evolution of man. In ontogenetic evolution it is somewhat hidden of course; there is a false evolution as well, as you know. The A was the first sound to appear in the evolution of mankind, however, resounding to begin with entirely out of the animal nature. And when we tend towards A with the consonants, we are still calling on what are animal forces in man. As you could see yesterday, the whole sound is actually formed accordingly. If we use the sound therapeutically in the manner in which it presented itself to our souls yesterday we can combat that which makes children, and grown-ups too, into smaller and larger animals. With such exercises we can have very respectable results in the de-animalization of man.

And now let us go on to the sound U, for example. We said yesterday that this is the sound we use therapeutically when a person cannot stand. You saw hat yesterday. It is the sound which in a certain respect expresses its physiologic-pathologic connection already in the manner in which it is formed in speech. The U is spoken with the mouth and the openings between the teeth constricted to the greatest degree and with the lips somewhat extended, in such a way, however, that the mouth opening is narrowed and the lips can vibrate. You can see that in speaking one seeks an essentially outward movement with the U. In the pronounciation of U the attempt to characterize something moving predominates. Thus with the eurythmic U the physiologic opposite occurs: the ability to hold one's stand is called forth. This is present in the U in artistic eurythmy as well, at least as a suggestion.

If you now take a look at the other vowels you will find a progressive internalization. In the case of the O you have the lips pushed together towards the front and the opening of the mouth reduced in size—there is at least an attempt to reduce the size. This is transformed into the polar opposite in the encompassing gesture of the 0-movement in eurythmy. Precisely in such things the natural connections are to be perceived. In the manner in which O is employed in speech certain forces are present. And in languages in which O predominates one will find that the people have the greatest propensity to become obese. That may really be taken as a guideline for the study of the physiologic processes connected with speech. If one were to develop a language consisting principally of modifications of O, where people had to carry out the characteristic mouth and lip formation of the O continuously, they would all become pot-bellied. If with the O, on the one hand, one has this propensity to become big-bellied, as I would like to call it, it is easy to understand why when reversed the O represents on the other hand that which combats this obesity when it is carried out eurythmically and in the metamorphosis demonstrated yesterday.

The state of affairs is different with E, for example. A language that is rich in E will engender skinny people, weaklings. And that is related to what I said yesterday about the treatment of thin people, and thus of weaklings, in relation to the significance of E. You will remember that I said that in the case of weaklings particularly the E-movement with its given modification is to be applied.

Now in respect to all these matters it is necessary to take one thing into account, however: if one considers the forms outwardly one does not come to the truth of the matter; one must grasp them inwardly in the process of their becoming. One must concentrate less on what comes to outward expression and more on the tendency involved. The tendency to become fat can be combated by means of the O and the tendency to remain thin by the E. Attention must be drawn to these matters because when eurythmy is used for therapeutic purposes, it is necessary to take the forces that are present in the upper man and tend to a widening, and the forces present in the lower man tending to the linear, more into consideration. Thus I must say that when man utters the O he actually broadens the living element.

You see, when I draw it roughly, the head of man is in a way a sphere and spiritual-scientifically it is a proper reproduction of the earth sphere. It is a copy of all those forces that are centralized in the sphere of the earth and it is developed by that which lies in the forces of the moon. This latter builds it up in such a manner that it becomes a sort of earth-sphere. Of course, this is all actually connected with cosmology, cosmogeny. As the earth-phase proceeded out of the moon-phase, so out of the forces that are so powerfully at work in building up the human head—which of itself, of course, intends to become a sphere and is modified only by the breast and the other part of the body being attached to it and altering the spherical form—so out of the moon-building forces the head is formed. If it were left to itself the head would become a proper sphere. That is not the case because the other two parts of the human organism are connected with the head and influence its shape.

When one pronounces the O one tries to bring that which finds its expression in the spherical form of the head to expression in the entire etheric head. One makes the effort to form a second head for oneself (see the violet in the drawing) and one can really say that in uttering the O man puffs himself up like his head—he puffs himself up, he blows himself out and awakens thereby the forces that give him at the other pole the tendency to become fat. These things can really be taken pictorially as well. His inflating of his own head gives him the tendency to become fat. When one wants to counteract this tendency to become, etherically speaking, a fat-head—not really a fat-head, but etherically a fat head—to become a big head, then one must attempt to round it off from the other side, to take it back into oneself. And that is the protest of the fathead. Therefore an O is fanned at the opposite pole. All the individual sounds have a nuance of feeling, namely, which is deeply established in the organism, because it lies in the unconscious; hence the import of the inner being of the sound. For the person who looks at the matter in a super-sensible manner the frog who would like to blow himself up into an ox, you see, is the one from whom a cannon-like O tone would continuously proceed if he were able to fulfill his intention. That is the peculiarity of it—one must explain by means of such things if one wishes to understand these matters inwardly.

With the E it is distinctly the reverse. In E one wants to take hold of oneself inwardly, wants to contract together inwardly. For that reason there is the touching of oneself in the eurythmy, this becoming aware of oneself: you become aware of yourself, simply, when you place the right arm upon the left, just as when you feel an object outside yourself, when you take a hold of it, you become aware of yourself. It would be even more clearly expressed if you simply grasped the right arm with the left hand—in art only an indication of all these things can be given—when you grasp the right arm with the left hand you are feeling yourself. This contacting oneself has come to expression especially in the eurythmic E. And this touching oneself is carried out throughout the whole human organism. You can study this touching of oneself simply by studying the relationship of the nerve Process in the human back, those that ordinary physiology mistakenly call the motory nerves and those that are called sensory.

Here where the motor nerve, which is basically a sensory nerve too, comes together with the sensory nerve, a similar sort of clasping occurs. The fact is that the nerve-strands on the human back continually form an E. In this forming of the E lies the way in which man's inward perception of himself which is factually differentiated, in the brain, comes into being. Yesterday we attempted to reproduce this E-building which actually takes place in a plane; you will find that what we attempted to reproduce shows through the outward movement and the position of the movement how this inward E-making in man sums itself up into the vertical. As the head puffs itself out and wants to become a horn-blowing cherub, this E-process, this pulling-oneselftogether-in-points, sums itself up in the vertical, in the upright line. It is a continuous and successive fastening together of E's which stand one above another; that expresses clearly what one observes taking place in weaklings. They have the tendency to continuously stretch their etheric bodies. They want to extend the etheric body rather than to pull it together into a point, which would be the real antithesis to the activity of the head. That is not the case however: they try to stretch the etheric body thereby making a repetition of the point. And this extension which makes its appearance in people who are becoming weak—not the extension in the physical, but in the etheric body—will be counteracted by shaping that E of which we spoke yesterday.

So I believe you will see now how there is an inward connection between the eurythmic element involved and the human formative tendencies, how what is present in him as formative tendencies has been drawn out of the human being. The fact is that these formative tendencies which express themselves first in growth, in the forming of man, in his configuration, become specialized and localized once again in the development of the speech organism, this special organism. There these formative tendencies—which are otherwise spread out over the entire person—are to an ex-tent accumulated. In developing eurythmy we turn and go back again. We proceed from the localized tendency to the whole man, thus placing in opposition to the specialization of the human organization in the speech organism another specialization, the specialization in the will-organism. The whole human being is indeed an expression of his volitional nature insofar as he is metabolic and limb organism throughout. One can move this or that part of the head too, and therefore the head is also in a certain sense limb-organism. That can be demonstrated by those people who are capable in this respect of a hit more than others. People who can wiggle their ears and so on, they can show very clearly how the principle of movement of the limbs, how the limb-nature extends into the organization of the head. The whole human being is in this respect an expression of the volitional. When we go on to eurythmy we express that once again. Before we proceed to working out the sounds particularly, to the special manner of forming them and further to the combinations of sounds tomorrow, I would like to speak in closing of something historical.

The movement of the will and the movement of the intellect, you see, constitute two sorts of evolution of power which proceed in man at different velocities. Man's intellect develops quickly in our age, volition slowly, so that as part of the whole evolution of mankind we have already surpassed our will with our intellect. In our civilization it is generally manifest that the evolution of the intellect has overtaken the evolution of the will. The people of today are intensely intellectual, which precisely does not imply that they can do much with their intellect; they are strongly intellectual, but they hardly know what to do with their intellect; for that reason they know so little intellectually. But what they do know intellectually they treat in such a manner as though within it they could function with a certain certainty. Will develops slowly. And to practise eurythmy is, apart from everything else, an attempt to bring the will back into the whole evolution of mankind again. If eurythmy is to appear as a therapy the following must be pointed out: It must be said that the over-development of the intellect expresses itself particularly in the organic side effects of the evolution of speech as well. Our speech development today in our modern civilization is actually already something which is becoming inhuman through its superhuman qualities insofar as we learn languages today in such a manner that we have so little living feeling left for what lies in the words. The words are actually only signs. What sort of feeling do people still have for that which lies in words? I would like to know how many people go through the world and become aware in the course of learning the German language for example, that the rounded form which I have just drawn is expressed in the word “Kopf” (Head), which has a connection with “Kohl” (cabbage), and for which reason one also says “Kohlkopf” (cabbagehead), which is actually only a repetition; the rounding is metamorphosed according to the situation. That is what is expressed here. In the Romance languages, “testa, testieren”, is expressed more what comes from within, the working of the soul through the head. People have no more feeling for the distinctions within language; language has become abstract. When you walk, you walk with you feet. Why do we say “Füsse” (feet)? You see, that is a metamorphosis of the word “Furche” (furrow) which came about because it was seen that one traces something like a furrow when one walks. The pictorial element in language has been completely lost; if one wishes to bring this pictorial element back into language, then one must turn to eurythmy.

Every word that is experienced unpictorially is actually an inward cause of illness; I am speaking in coarse words now—but then we have only coarse words—of something which expresses itself in the finer human organism. Civilized mankind suffers chronically today from the effects which learning to speak abstractly, which the failure to experience words pictorially, has upon it. The results are so far-reaching that the accompanying organic side effects express themselves as a very strong tendency towards irregularities in the rhythmic system and a refusal to function of the metabolic system in those people who have made their language abstract. However, we can actually do something about what is being spoilt in man today through language, which he acquires of course in early childhood, and which, if it is acquired in an unpictorial way, really produces conditions leading later on to all kinds of illnesses. We can actually do something about overcoming this with the help of therapeutic eurythmy. Thus curative eurythmy may be introduced in a thoroughly organic manner into the course of therapy as a whole.

It is truly so: the person who understands that developing oneself spiritually has always something to do with becoming ill—we must take becoming ill in the course of spiritual development into the bargain—must also taken into consideration that one can fight, not alone through outward physical studies, but also by outward means, this process of becoming ill which is due to our civilization. We put soul and spirit into the movements of eurythmy and combat thereby what, on the other side, soul and spirit do themselves, though often in earliest childhood, in such a manner that the effect of their activity when it develops in later life must be felt to be the cause of illness.

• 1. Published by the Anthroposophic Press, Inc., New York, 1973.
• 2. stossige wirkung

As we have seen the vowels in eurythmy always work more or less directly on the rhythmic organism. With the consonantal eurythmic movements the case is that, although the rhythmic organism is, of course, also affected, this is accomplished by way of the limb-metabolic system. Naturally the first thing we must do today is simply to take a look at the details; here one can only arrive at a contemplative picture of what is involved when one can enter into the details. We will now go through the most important consonantal movements in eurythmy. Perhaps you would make a B for us, Miss Wolfram; and now this B in walking as well. Try to walk in such a manner, however, that one leg imitates the motion of the arm while moving; but repeat the B. Now imagine that done more and more quickly and repeated to begin with, let us say for four to five minutes. Perhaps Mrs. Baumann will now do the P for us in the same manner. The difference is not very great. Now you must attempt to do this with the legs as well. That brings about a complicated leg movement which is very similar to the movements of tone eurythmy. That must now be repeated frequently and in series by the person with whom one hopes to accomplish something by means of the P.

Now all of the movements that are connected with the eurythmic consonants have to do with that in the process of digestion which lies on the far side of the activity of the stomach and intestine. We will now ignore the actual intestinal space through which the food passes. When we consider the outer wall of the intestine, however, where the chyme passes through the intestinal villi and so on and then into the blood and the lymph—thus from the other side of that comprised in the first digestive activity—movement such as we have just made work back on the inward digestion, on all that which is digestive activity in the blood vessels, and moreover on what is digestive activity in the kidneys. Thus if you should be concerned with regulating the activity of the kidneys, you should have such movements carried out. Precisely the movements which we have just done, B and P, are those which work pre-eminently in the regulation of renal activity, for example in regulating the elimination of urine. These connections are certainly extraordinarily interesting for someone who remembers how the whole circulatory being of man is related to language, and how a connection thus arises between that which pushes itself into the circulatory system from the metabolic system and this particular manner of making sounds, of making consonants.

Let us try to make a D. Now attempt to make the same movement with the legs: you hop, and while hopping you bend the legs somewhat at the knee. Here one must try to get the patients to bend at the knee and hop more and more powerfully and have them jump. Perhaps Mrs. Baumann will demonstrate the T for us; here the corresponding movement will be a hop forwards with an attempt at making knock-knees.¹ Thus while stepping forward you make the attempt to hop forwards and form knock-knees. That is what must be carried out. Our first concern is to demonstrate these things. So we have D and T. When one carries out the so-called soft sound one can remedy milder conditions, and with the so-called hard sound, the more severe conditions of this sort. Of course one must have the patients repeat them for several minutes until they are quite tired—in these things it is really a matter of carrying the exercise out until one is tired. And when one carries them out to fatigue, the D- and the T-sounds in particular are a force which works to strengthen the intestinal activity, particularly that activity which comes to expression in constipation. In this manner one can counteract constipation in many cases. Such a matter is unquestionably evident to the person who knows the physiological connections between the speech organism—which takes up the movement in the course of learning to speak—and the metabolic-limb system.

Now perhaps you will be so good, Miss Wolfram, and demonstrate the G-sound for us. Here is a matter of trying again to move forward in a similar manner while forming knock-knees. It would be the same thing with the K sound (Mrs. Baumann). And now you must try to hop forwards with the legs spread out sharply, with the Q as well; but that is the same thing again. Here in the case of G, as well as of K and of Q we have a movement which stimulates the forward motion, the inner mechanization of the intestine, which thus promotes the movement of the intestine itself. The difference in the physiological effect of D and T, G, K, and Q, is that in the case of D and T the processing of the food itself is more affected while with G, K, and Q the effect is more on the forward motion of the food in the intestine when the intestine itself lags.

Particularly important and therapeutically fruitful is the S. When you do the S-sound it is necessary to hop, to hop forwards keeping the legs continuously in the O-form, and to make the S-sound. Because one continually sets the legs down in this 0-shape, namely, this actually has a very inward connection with the human digestive activity, and that is with the metabolic activity as it works back upon the entire human organism. In this movement one has something which one can have those children do who show an insufficent digestive activity and, who therefore, have headaches, since this movement regulates in particular the formation of gas in the intestine. When this is not in order, when it is either insufficient or too strong, this movement in particular will have a most important effect.

Then we have the F-sound. (Mrs. Baumann). One has to do here with something psychic. One must try to perform the jump in the following manner: one begins and tries to go forward; in landing one must come down hard on the tips of the toes, however, and now bring the heels down—once again, a jump onto the tips of the toes, then down on to the heels again. In the case of the V,² it would be just the same. Here we have a movement which should be practised when one finds that urination is not in order. It has a stimulative effect on the passing of urine. When it is necessary to animate this—for whatever reason—here is the movement to be performed.

It is, of course, entirely possible to combine the movements in the most varied manners; one will find in giving treatment that one will have to combine the one with the other—depending on the direction to be taken.

If we make an R (Miss Wolfram) I must ask you to please make it in such a way that in stepping forwards you always stretch distinctly, then with the left foot thus (here Dr. Steiner demonstrated the bending and stretching movement himself; the ed.), put the weight on the foot, stretch and as you step forwards—continuing in this manner to put the weight on the foot with the legs bent—you must try to make the R. That would have to be developed in this manner. If one were to practise this R with a person for a few minutes—one would have to practise it frequently during the day, however—it would regulate the rhythm of evacuation were that not in order. That is something which works directly over onto the rhythm of evacuation and regulates it.

Apart from its being necessary to do these movements not in a dilettantic fashion, but in a manner suitable to the matter at hand, in accordance with the diagnosis, it will be important for the observation of the whole dynamics of the human being to keep the connections which come thus to light in view.

Now an L, (Mrs. Baumann) here again together with the effort to place the legs in the knock-kneed position and hop forwards—draw together—now once again. It should be an effort to hop forwards, too. The forwards motion is entirely necessary in such a case. This movement works especially strongly on the peristalsis, on the movement of the intestine itself. With this movement one can also have the patient move backwards in the same manner. He will have much more difficulty in learning to do it, but it will have a significant effect in regulating the movement of the intestine itself, the peristalsis, as all these movements in fact work in a regulative manner out of the limb-metabolic system into what is in this connection a dependency of the limb-metabolic system (or at least adjacent to it) that is, into the circulation and into the respiratory movement as well.

A very interesting letter is the H, which actually has the most vowel nature attached to it. One should accompany the H in walking as follows: one tries to stand with the legs together, to hop forwards, and in the course of this hop forwards, to spread the legs and strike the floor with the legs apart; one should always be moving forwards. That is a movement which, I beg you to take notice, must be carried out thoroughly slowly, however. In the case of the other movements it is important to carry them out quickly; this movement, however, must be carried out slowly and there must be pauses for rest between each of the jumps as well. This must be taken into account with this movement as it has a very strong effect on the regulation of intestinal activity in the area of transition from the stomach into the intestine. Therefore, when one notices that someone eannot get his food from the stomach into the intestine, it will be greatly to his advantage to perform this movement, but, as I said, tranquilly and standing still after each separate hop.

Now we have the M. (Mrs. Baumann) This M must be made with the “peewit step”. It is good to do one step with one leg and the next with the other leg—forth and back. One can also do the peewit step backwards and then with the other leg forwards again. This technique of doing the peewit step backwards is something which one should really master. It is in fact a movement which it is important to study, then when the M is carried out in this form in movement it acts to regulate the entire metabolic system and limb system and it is extraordinarily important to practise it with the children during puberty. When this exercise with M is practised at the time of sexual maturity it will prove a strong regulator of over assertive sexuality. It will regulate over assertive sexuality when practised during puberty. One must only have developed an eye for whether it should be practised in this manner. It is not without reason the M was regarded as an especially important sound in the time when people still understood something of the inner content of the sounds; it is the sound which closes the OM syllable of the Orient. The OM syllable of the Orient is closed by M because the whole human being is in fact regulated through the metabolic-limb system by exactly this sound. Thus this movement is particularly regulatory. In the ancient culture it was customary to have the younger people perform such movements in order to educate them to be corporally complete human beings and, at the same time, reserved persons.

Then we have the N sound. The N-sound is accompanied by a jump in which the knees are bent from the beginning. So, one keeps the legs, the knees, bent and then jumps. That is a movement which strengthens the intestinal activity greatly and in such a manner that it can be applied where there is a tendency to diarrhoea. That can serve as a substantiation or as an indication of how one can see the effect of the system of movement on the metabolic system. That is something which one really only notices when one considers the connections between the system of movement and the metabolic system in the light of one's knowledge of the threefold order of the human organism. This threefold order of the human organism sheds light in fact on many things; in our present time where knowledge of the soul consists almost solely of words, one can think out at length all sorts of exercises in which one believes one has taken the soul element into account—or one can develop gymnastics in which one takes only the bodily physiology into consideration. One can talk at length around and about these matters; without knowledge of the threefold order of the human organism one will not attain to any clarity in them. It was mteresting, in fact, to have a physiologist of the present day here who listened to one of the introductions which I usually give at eurythmy performances and then saw eurythmy as well. Now I normally say that in education one will have to replace the sort of gymnastics that proceeds solely from physiology with this soul-filled sort of gymnastics. Thereupon the physiologist, who is also known as a very great authority in nutritional matters, said that for him it wasn't enough to say that one shouldn't overrate gymnastics; for him gymnastics was no method of education at all, but a barbarism.

Now, you see, behind something like this is hidden a very important Symptom of the times. It is, on the one hand, just as correct to say that the gymnastics of today is usually one¬sidedly conceived—since it is taken out of the physiology and anatomy of the organism alone—as it is at least one-sided on the other hand to say that gymnastics is a barbarism. Why? Because when one develops gymnastics out of the physiology of the body alone it becomes a barbarism. It is our materialistic education and civilization that first made a barbarism out of gymnastics. In the manner in which gymnastics is practised today, it is a barbarism. And this conception of gymnastics is connected with some completely false notions, is it not? For example, people believe—although the experts don't believe it anymore, still many people believe that if one has a person exert himself mentally (geistig) and then allows him to recover, as they believe, corporally thereafter, that constitutes a proper recuperation. But that isn't true at all! If a person does arithmetic or gymnastics for an hour he will become equally tired in reality; it makes no difference. That is known today, but people cannot properly judge how soul and Spirit should be brought into gymnastic movements, how the movements carried out are to proceed from the human being as a whole. Now one will have to develop gymnastics gradually in such a way that what we are developing as artistic eurythmy can unite with what is thus developed as physiological gymnastics. And one can make the transition from the eurythmic to the gymnastic quite well. It will only be necessary to see that this sort of eurythmy which actually takes the part of a sort of soul-filled gymnastics in the course of instruction is done with humour; before everything else it must give the children delight. It must give the children joy; that is a part of it. To teach eurythmy like a grumpy, dried-out school-master would be something which could really not be done at all.

Now we still have the Sh. (Miss Wolfram) When it is accompanied by a small jump, then a larger jump, a small jump, then again a larger jump, a smaller jump, a larger jump, then one has a movement with a strong effect in the Sh as well; however, it too must be carried out slowly. It is not necessary to slow the N-movement down particularly, but with the H and Sh movement it is essential to do them slowly and in the case of the latter to take a short rest after every three jumps, at the transition to the next set; thus a rhythm is brought into it as well: short, long, short—and now one rests—long, short, long—and now a rest—short, long, short,—now a rest. Thus one has in this a movement which in the appropriate cases—one can combine movements, of course—affects the beginning portions of the intestinal tract, which pertains to the stomach. When someone has what is in itself such a weck digestion that the food remains lying in the stomach—I have drawn attention to similar matters on other occasions—that will also be particularly the case where the H-movement is involved. with the Sh movement, however, one must notice, for example, whether stomach acid is easily produced and so on; then the Shmovement should be carried out.

So you see the consonants as they are performed eurythmically are connected with the formation of man in a totally different manner from the eurythmic vowels. As we considered the making of vowels in eurythmy I had to draw your attention to the manner in which the inward, that which lies more to the interior, is related to movement. Here we have to do with the effect on the third member of the threefold organism.

Now when applying that which we discussed the day before yesterday in regard to the vowels, it would be good to have the patient sound the vowel of the exercise to be done, slowly, before the exercise as such is begun. So that without singing—singing would be of less help in this case—he very simply entones the sound at length, and when he has done this for a time, when he has sounded it out loud, one would have him carry out the movement for the vowel in question. When he has done that one should try to call forth in him the impression that he hears the sound that he has just carried out. You will find that in the present day only very few people have the impression that they hear the sounds inwardly in a soul-spiritual manner. Thus one must tell him to enter into a state of soul such as if he were to hear the “I”. It is particularly important to understand this matter. Then, you see, when you have the patient speak the vowel, entone it, the organism as such feels as if the sound were being induced. If he then carries out the movement it appears to be the result of the spoken sound. And then one listens. One entones the “I”, then does the movement, and then in one's fantasy imagines that one hears the “I” sounding. Then we have: the calling forth of the “I”, that which arises through the movement of the “I”, the hearing of that which has moved, the hearing of the sound once again. This is something which brings a great deal of life into this human etheric body; and in precisely those directions we have pointed out it brings real life into the etheric body. In these matters, in these exercises the intention is to bring movement into the human etheric body, to bring an inwardly regulated movement into the etheric activity of the human organism. It is particularly interesting to see how the movement, which as a movement of the intestine progresses from the front to the hack, releases a movement in the etheric body which proceeds from back to front and then breaks on the abdominal wall—it does not actually break, but disappears. This latter movement is in most cases where the intestinal activity is not in order, in gross disorder as well. This activity which counters the physical movement will be aroused particularly by the R-movement, for example. Here there is a very lively vibrating from back to front and that is the element in the R-movement which affects the rhythm of elimination in a very specific manner.

It can also be used pedagogically as the whole human organism is a unity and everything in it works in a unitary fashion. If you were to survey children in school, for example, you would find amongst them some who can hardly pronounce an R, who are quite shocking in their pronunciation of the R. Of course, the factors can be crossed and the matter may not be self-evident—nevertheless, such children are always simultaneously candidates for constipation: one does them a kindness, in fact, by doing something such as I showed you yesterday with them: the R-movement, which affects the rhythm of evacuation positively. It is indeed possible to make use of these things pedagogically. One must only always have the indications and one must not go too far. The physician, however, can go much further as he will find that specific symptoms naturally appear when the exercise is practised for days and weeks. But he is, of course, in the position to counter these symptoms, which quite justifiably appear, by other means. I want to point out that if the effect of the N-movement were to become too predominant, one would only have to counteract it with the D-movement and one would nevertheless have achieved that which was to be achieved. Thus one can balance one by means of the other.

The only other thing I wish to say today is that I really do not want artistic eurythmy to be influenced in any way whatsoever by the discussion which must of course arise when eurythmy is considered as a hygienic-therapeutic discipline. I beg the artistic eurythmists to forget these things thoroughly when they practise artistic eurythmy so that they are not confused by their thoughts on digestive activity when they are involved in artistic eurythmy. That would be most troubling. One must nevertheless be entirely clear, however, that human art does have to do with the whole human being and does not proceed from the head alone. And especially in the case of an art of movement that must naturally be kept in view.

That is what I had as yet to tell you. In the following days we will discuss more what has to do with the evolution of man, with reference to what comes to the fore after certain intervals of time, that is to say, what occurs at a later age, as the consequence of an exercise affecting the organism of the child.

• 1. X-beine; literally, X-legs.
• 2. V is pronounced in the same way as F in German.

Today we will go over to some of those eurythmic exercises more related to the activity proceeding from the soul. Before we begin, however, it will be necessary to take note that it is usually assumed when a person produces an expression of will or when he arrives at a judgment, that these expressions are connected with the human nervous system alone. This, however, is not at all the case; one must make it clear to oneself that the judgments which the human being passes, for example, are bound up with his entire constitution; that man pronounces a judgment out of the totality of his being. Thus when one makes the eurythmic movement corresponding to a judgment, here again, the whole human being is influenced in a certain manner; it is not only the head which will be subject to the influences of what arises through judging eurythmically. Mrs. Baumann will show us the movement which corresponds to confirmation, and then the one corresponding to negation. Naturally it should be carried out several times without interruption when used as therapeutic exercise. Now this confirmation and negation is precisely that which can be called a judgment; when one confirms or negates something one has to do with the nature of judgment in its essence. When you give such a confirmation or negation, the movement works, when it is repeated frequently, by way of a detour through the etheric body very strongly on the respiratory system. One can by this means counter a tendency to shortness of breath. You can for example repeat the confirmation ten times consecutively, then the negation, and follow this up with confirmation, negation, confirmation, negation—both ten times consecutively. Whatsoever illness this shortness of breath may be the symptom of, by this means one will be able to counteract it in such a way that the entire constitution is affected as the whole matter occurs by way of a detour through the etheric body. You must only keep in sight what is being done here. One could interpret what Mrs. Baumann has done touching upon what is essential in it as follows: what she projects thereby into the world is a thought that has become fleeting, a thought which has gained wings and gone over into movement. When a judgment is fixed eurythmically—as a confirmation or negation—then it is a thought which rides on the movement. And because the thought rides on the movement one projects in fact on the one hand, a part of this being outwards; on the other hand, because the thought rides on the movement one takes a part more thoroughly into oneself than otherwise. That is to say, one makes a movement through which one becomes more awake than one otherwise is. Such movements are actually movements that awaken. However, because one does not wake up with the ego at the same time in the same manner, the activity of the ego is in a certain way dampened. This dampening of the ego is not absolute, however, but in relation to the organism. In fighting shortness of breath by means of this detour through the etheric body this constitutes what would be the first symptom reached and what is introduced into the whole human constitution by means of the byway through the etheric body.

Now a disposition of the will:¹ sympathy and antipathy. Now imagine you make this movement repeatedly, one after another: sympathy, antipathy, sympathy, antipathy, or only one of these two. When one does this, in a certain sense one is setting out something which one carries within oneself; naturally this can only be confirmed through observation. It is a sort of falling asleep. The other movement (confirmation and negation; the ed.) must be carried out quickly, and this must be carried out slowly. It is indeed a movement which brings forth the imagination of sleep in the observer; imaginatively one falls asleep in a way with such a movement—not in reality, however, at least that shouldn't happen. But because one in reality doesn't go to sleep while making this movement, the “I” is more strongly active in relation to the body than it usually is. And by means of such a movement the circulation and the digestion as a whole are stimulated. The entire digestion is really stimulated in such a manner that through such a movement the tendency to belch, for example, can be counteracted.

Now we want to express that which one could call the feeling of love towards something (Mrs. Baumann). Take a good look at this, the feeling of love for something. Imagine it carried out ten times consecutively and accompanied by a powerful E between each of the movements. Thus, Love-E, Love-E, and so on, one after another. You accompany the movements which you have learned as expressing feeling in eurythmy—it could be another feeling as well—with the movement for E. Here we have a strong influence which proceeds from the human etheric to act on the astral nature and which has the effect of warming the circulation. It is something which really works on the circulatory system in a beneficial manner. One cannot say that it accelerates or retards the circulation; it affects it in a beneficially warming manner.

We also have something which could be called a wish: Hope. (Miss Wolfram) Look at this and picture to yourself that one carries out this movement for the wish repeatedly—always returning to the position of balance, then carrying out the movement for the wish again—and always alternating it with the movement for U. This means that the astral will act very strongly upon the etheric and it can be said that a beneficial warming effect on the breathing system will result. Naturally one must take into consideration that all these things of which we have spoken today occur by way of the etheric body and can, therefore, never show what effect they have on the following day. Some effects may appear after two to three days and are then, however, all the more certain.

Now imagine that we make a bending and stretching movement with the legs and at the same time a definite B-movement (Mrs. Baumann). That which I have just shown you simultaneous with a decided B movement, now rest, B while bending, ten times consecutively. That is something which people who very frequently have migraine or other headaches should do. The time for them to do it, however, is not when they have the headache, but rather when they do not.

A particularly effective movement is the following: bend and stretch the torso forwards and backwards accompanying this movement simultaneously with the movement for R. (Miss Wolfram) Bend forwards, bend backwards with the R; that consecutively and often. That affects the whole rhythmic system, the rhythm of breathing and of circulation, positively. When there are irregularities present there, this will work extraordinarily well under all conditions.

Now I will ask you to take a look at another most effective movement which consists in shaking the head to the right and left with the movement for M. The head should not be turned, in so far as possible, but only bent to the right and left, and that with the M-movement. That is something which when practised has a very strong quieting effect on all possible irregularities in the lower body, again by way of the etheric body. Irregularities in the lower system which express themselves through pains can be mitigated thereby. One must combat tendencies to such pains when the pains are not present. That is the crux of the matter. While the pains are present it cannot very well be carried out. The important thing is to carry it out so long as the pains are not present.

Please take note of the following: strike the knee with the foot, stemming the movement of the foot against the knee; picture this accompanied by an E movement with the arms. It is a very beautiful movement. It can and should be carried out as an exercise with children in school, as when it is done frequently it wages war against the most varied aspects of clumsiness. The children will at least he well cured of their clumsiness when they practise just this exercise. And when the children come and say that their shoulders hurt so and everything possible hurts, then you should reply: that is exactly what I wanted; you will be especially glad about it once it's better again! Every pain that is brought about in this manner combats clumsiness. Thus in respect to this one can deal quite energetically with the children.

Now we will take a look at another variety (of movement). Imagine every sort of E movement which can be carried out with the arms now projected onto the floor. This movement comes into existence when this line crosses the other at an angle. Now let us imagine it in this way: Mrs. Baumann places herself here, Miss Wolfram there. Now walk and accompany the whole thing with an E movement with the arms. Run so that you pass by one another, but pay attention that you don't run into each other. So you make an E on the floor and an E with the arms and you pay attention at the same time that you don't collide. It is this taking notice of the other person, this exerting of one's concentration on him combined with the E-gesture which works together with the movement here. This exercise can only be carried out with two people. It is—when carried out by two people—essentially what one would call a strengthening of the heart, all that which is connected with the phenomena which one generally terms the strengthening of the heart.

Question: Could one have this exercise carried out by one sick and one healthy person?

One can readily do that, but one would perhaps have to have the healthy person omit the E-movement with the arms. This movement is especially intended for the clinical situation where one will, of course, have two people in need of a strengthening of the heart; it really is better if one has two such people.

Now let us imagine the movement so: one of the ladies stands here, the other here, behind one another. When you arrive here, then Miss Wolfram carries out the path which you have begun, but in such a manner that she is always facing forwards. Then as the movement carries on, you take this part of the path and you the other. You initiate the continuation of your own movement in the other person and accompany it with the O position of the arms. Now one must see that the people who do this begin at a certain tempo; to begin with it must be slower, then become ever faster and faster. This rapid tempo should then ebb out into a slower one. That is then a movement which serves to strengthen the diaphragm significantly and thereby the whole breathing system. Here again, when one leaves out the O movement with the arms one can have a healthy person participate, but it is of course best to employ two people who are in need of healing.

Now I will ask you, Mrs. Baumann, to demonstrate the H movement for us once again. And now I will ask you to make this movement in such a way that you hold the arms still and imitate the movement with the shoulders alone as well as possible. In this case, however, one must accustom oneself to doing this movement with the shoulders and making an A with the arms at the same time, an A of any sort with the arms. That should be repeated frequently. You see, that is what could be designated as: “laughing eurythmically”. That is how one laughs eurythmically. And when one laughs thus eurythmically that which one has in the curative effect of laughing itself is really very greatly heightened. The curative effect of laughing is well known. But when one practises laughing eurythmically, this curative effect is proportionately greater. You could do it otherwise as well, however.

Miss Wolfram, please make an A movement of some sort. And now try to make the same movement I spoke of before, the shoulder movement of the H, but do it quite slowly as if you wished to do it thoughtfully. Thus into the A movement of the arms one makes the shoulder movement of the 11. One could designate that as follows: the whole organism is brought into accord with the feeling of veneration. It encompasses all that which the feeling of veneration actually effects in the organism. The effect on the human organism of the feeling of veneration, when it is habitual, is to make the organism as such actually more durable, more sturdy. It becomes capable of greater resistance. People who really have the capacity for veneration inherent in them become more capable of resistance within their organism. That is why everything which brings children to veneration, to the gift or capacity for reverence makes children more resistant. And one can come to the assistance of this capacity for resistance through this last eurythmic exercise.

One must keep in mind that what we have demonstrated today as decision, expression of will, hope, love, what we have shown in respect to certain organic pains, what we have demonstrated as a means of combating clumsiness and so on, all these things are related to man in such a way that the human being is gripped through them in the innermost part of his organic being and by way of a detour through the etheric body actually derives the possibility of making this etheric body into a workable instrument. The etheric body is a part of man which becomes stiff in most of those people who sit out their lives, spend their lives without interest for their surroundings. And it is not good when the human etheric body becomes stiff; nor for the organic functions is it good. When one has the exercises which we have described today carried out by children in moderation and by the appropriate patients very energetically (one can see by the indications given which patients have need of them), the etheric body will become supple and inwardly flexible. And by means of them one will do the children as well as the adults a good service.

These movements are indeed such that one can give them priority over the usual gymnastic movements; the usual gymnastic movements are taken in reality from the physiology, from the physis of the body alone and they tear the physical body continually out of the etheric body. Thus, the physical body then makes its own movements which do not pull the movements of the etheric body in the appropriate manner after them. For this reason the usual, merely physiologic, gymnastics is basically a school for materialism, since by means of it materialistic thought is transformed into feeling. Eurythmy makes man capable of recognising himself within increasingly and of gaining control over himself inwardly. Therefore such exercises have a pedagogic-didactic value as well as therapeutic and hygienic value. The attempt should be made to have these exercises—those described today, I mean—carried out by adults as well in moderation and to develop them in such a way that they could be carried out by the sick in a clinical situation.

A question has been put to me which could perhaps lead to something—and some other questions as well. Here is the question: “The Chinese cannot pronounce the letter R, they substitute L for it. Strawberries thus becomes stlawbellies, for example. Does that have to do with their race?”

It has to do with the organisation of the organism insofar as that is racially determined, of course. Through the particular gift of one part of mankind for one sound or another one can see what tendencies are inherent in certain people by virtue of their race. I brought such things to discussion just a few hours ago.

Other questions have been put about exercises which could be used in relation to conditions of indolence, insufficient reaction, lethargy and so on; conditions which frequently have to do with an insufficient thyroid activity. And here it has been brought to our attention that Fliess, in his well-known book about the course of life, has placed this complex of symptoms in the intermediate sexual category. How could a contemporary author not do so? Everything about which he knows very little he chalks up to the intennediate sexual category, or some other way. He puts the left-handed, for example, in the same category. I want to emphasize, expressly, however, that I have never recommended a eurythmic exercise with a special right-left emphasis to anyone.

(Attention was drawn to the exercises which one should begin either to the right or to the left: iambus, trochee.)

That is not in order to particularly accentuate an emphasis on the right or left, but rather in order to call forth the feeling of the iambus or trochee within the forward motion. That is thoroughly justified. The fact is that it has less to do with the long-short than it has to do with the particular movement. It is quite correct; it has to do with the fact that what lives in the breathing system is reversed when it is transferred into the system of movement. The upper man and the lower man are the reverse of one another. Thus every imaginable iambus in the breathing system, brought forth in speech, must of necessity become a trochee in the movement of legs and vice versa. Eurythmy in its entirety is based on this principle. You may test the whole of eurythmy in respect to it: eurythmy does not follow the principle of similarity in its execution, but the movement which is in keeping with the polar image. It is all entirely in accord with the image formed as the other polarity. This idea must be maintained throughout. But I have never recommended to anyone that he do something especially right or left; that should be left completely to the feeling. The question of whether a thing should be done with the right hand or the left hand should be determined only by those matters which would otherwise come into consideration. I do not want people to have the impression that I would have suggested an emphasis on the right in particular eurythmic exercises to any more left-sided person whosoever. That is not the case.

In addition I would like to emphasize the following. It is the case that when one has to do with insufficient reaction or with lethargy this more general indication will fall into some category which I have already given; lethargy is a general expression and can be relegated to something or other about which I have spoken. The appropriate movements should then be carried out.

On the whole one should see that with an exercise such as I have just given in connection with judgment and expression of will²—that the appearance of indolence, of lethargy and so on can be combatted very especially by that which I have given for the expression of will. And if one should notice that this is not particularly effective, one can alternate that exercise with the exercise that I have given for judgment, but in such a way that one attempts to discover—as it is here a question of trial—whether it is more effective when one varies the expression of will and the expression of judgment in a ratio of three to two or of two to three—one shorter, the other longer. And since these things work by way of a detour through the etheric body, one will find that one will first have to begin and carry on with these exercises for two to three days and according to the circumstances—when one sees that they are not having the proper effect—make a change on the third day. But in general one can say that the one exercise so well as the other will have an awakening effect on man in both directions. The will exercise and the judgment exercise are thus the ones that come into particular consideration.

In order that there be no misunderstanding, I emphasize that of course the opinion must not arise that these exercises would have a very significant effect after being carried out for two or three days. That would be an error. In order to produce an effect, these exercises should be carried out for at least seven weeks. Thus one can maintain—without necessarily being mystically inclined—that the space of time necessary for the beneficial effects just described to show themselves would be about seven weeks.

That is what I wanted to tell you today concerning these matters. I would like to request that the corresponding session tomorrow follow the other directly, after a short pause. Tomorrow will be the last eurythmy session then, as it will be necessary to have two purely medical sessions one after the other on Monday.

• 1. Willenszustinnung
• 2. Willensäusserung

There is so unendlessly much one could relate about the connection between the hygienic-therapeutic and eurythmy. Today we want to take into consideration that part of the physiological which we discover in the proximity of the spiritual when we contemplate a eurythmic exercise. Of course, all that which can he observed in this connection in artistic eurythmy will be encountered in an intensified form when one makes the transition from artistic eurythmy to the fortified eurythmy we have become acquainted with in these days. Nevertheless, the essence of that which concerns us can already be discovered purely artistically in a performance of eurythmy and the physiology corresponding to it then sought out. Let us try this by carrying out the following.

Perhaps Mrs. Baumann will be so good and perform the poem “Über allen Gipfeln ist Ruh” alternately in vowels and in consonants, while you (Frau Dr. Steiner) recite it.

Now let us make clear to ourselves what is taking place here, proceeding however very exactly. What is happening? A poem is recited. The person who does the eurythmy listens—he is the one who comes for us into consideration physiologically. That is the first matter of importance. He doesn't speak himself, he listens. That is essential. He listens to something which is in essence the meaningful word, a meaningful association of words. He listens to something in which the activity of thought and of mental representation are alive. What he perceives outwardly is the activity of mental representation clothed in an association of sounds. That is something which man in his waking, daytime existence often does, is it not? But what actually takes place when he does it? If you consider the process from a psychologic-physiologic point of view you will easily discover that a light, partial sleep overtakes the listener. The “I” and the astral body glide over what they are taking in, they live into it. In listening man steps out of himself slightly. He is overcome by a condition which is similar and then again dissimilar to sleep. It is similar to sleep in that the “I” and astral body are slightly disengaged, dissimilar in that they remain receptive, perceptive and self-aware. Thus the process is extraordinarily similar to imagination. It is a subtle, conscious imagining that is still strongly suppressed in the subconscious. Such is the process at hand.

To every such process is a reaction within the human being himself; we take this into account as well. Let us look at what takes place in the person who is not reciting. What does he do when he listens? He brings his etheric body into motion. The etheric body reacts. in fact the etheric body takes up those movements which it carries out—only much more weakly—when the person is asleep and has left his etheric body behind in the physical body. When the human being is asleep the etheric body is considerably more active than when he is awake. During this dampened sleep taking place in the listener the movements of the etheric body are awakened to a greater degree. These movements of the etheric body can be observed. Thus in the listener one has a person demonstrating in a heightened manner the movements which the human being carries out otherwise in a a weakened form in sleep. Thus you can study in the listener, who promptly performs them for you, ether movements of the human being in sleep. It isn't at all necessary to study the person while asleep; one can study the etheric movements of the human being when listening and has in fact here the heightened movements of the etheric body in sleep. One studies these movements and has them carried out by the physical body. That is to say one allows the physical body to glide into all those etheric movements which one has studied in the manner just described. Thus in eurythmy one does what the human being carries out with his etheric body constantly while listening. You can see what is actually taking place.

Now that we have observed what actually occurs, its effect will become apparent as well. The result is that by means of the physical movement one carries over into consciousness what otherwise occurs unconsciously. One stimulates the astral body and the ego by means of this detour through the physical body and strengthens them. But what happens as a result of this? When the astral body and the ego are strengthened in this manner their activity becomes similar to the activity in the child and still growing person as it occurs naturally. You are calling upon the forces of growth in the human being. You are working directly into the person's forces of growth. If the person is still a child and shows signs of being retarded in his growth, you can stimulate his growth in this way. If the person is no longer a child, and the forces of growth have already diminished, or if the person is actually in the second half of his life, one calls upon the youthful forces, the rejuvenating forces in him which, however, cannot contribute to his growth since the human organism is, of course, fully developed. We can expedite a child in his growth or combat his abnormal growth by having him do eurythmy. In the case of the fully-grown person the inner organism presents too great a resistance to the outer organism for us to be able to make him grow. Nevertheless, we can still introduce these forces of growth. The result is that they crash against the resistance of organism and metamorphose; that means that they activate in their metamorphosed state the plastic force of the inner organs. They stimulate the plastic force of the inner organs and these inner organs learn to breathe better and to better digest. They are encouraged to fulfil the necessary activity of the human organism in its entirety.

When artistic eurythmy is performed one should not think of it in the first instance as curative eurythmy; nevertheless, in the moment a person begins to be abnormal in any way it will have a curative effect. We have already seen the examples where when the usual eurythmy is reinforced, the reaction which follows is naturally also strengthened and we can form a mental picture of how this eurythmy affects the plastic qualities of the organization.

You can understand that the habitual practise of eurythmy activates the plasticity of the organs, their plastic force, and that as a result the human being becomes internally a better breather, a better person, if I may express myself so, in respect to his inwardly oriented digestion. He becomes a person who has his whole organism more within his own discretion. He becomes an inwardly more agile person. And to become a true artist is nothing other than to make the inner man more flexible, plastic, agile. That can be seen when one sculpts, for example. One cannot sculpt properly if in experience one cannot transpose oneself for example into the figure that one is developing plastically, if one cannot bring to life in oneself the forces that are building the figure, that express themselves in the figure. If, however, one sees the human organism itself as an implement and carries out what corresponds within, then what is the case in outward artistry is in a higher degree the case here as well for at this point one can do nothing other than to call forth internally what corresponds to the outward movement.

If you would be so good we will do the poem again now, this time with only the vowels. So that the emphasis is on the vowels alone. (Miss Wolfram and Frau. Dr. Steiner)

What I have just said about the physiology of eurythmy is specialized here. When only the vowels are carried out then that which I have characterized does not come to expression in its entirety. What I characterized is correct when someone speaks and the movements for consonants and vowels are made alternately. For what we have just done is that which I said not entirely correct: it will have to be specialized. Here very specific, differentiated movements have been performed all of which prove to be movements within the etheric body having primarily to do with what lies in the rhythmic system. Thus we must fasten our attention on that system which—as an etheric system—participates especially when vowels are spoken. When a person listens to vowels—which occurs of course in so specialized a manner only in eurythmy and to which for this reason attention must be drawn as it is here especially important therapeutically—when one recites a simple sequence of vowels for this person, or when one has him carry out such movements, in which case he would be listening to the movements which are the forms of expression for the vowel element while doing eurythmy—then, in the normal person listening to vowels those movements of the the etheric body corresponding to the rhythmic system become active in the way described earlier. And now you have the person doing eurythmy carry out in turn those movements through which he glides with his physical body into the movements which are otherwise manifest in the etheric body when vowels are heard. That is how the matter is specialized. In this way in particular those organs which belong to the rhythmic system are stimulated to respiration and inward digestion. These organs are strengthened; in them the appeal goes out to the forces of growth in the growing child or to the plastic forces which have their resistance within the organization of the fully grown adult.

This will serve as an introduction to the physiology of the vowels in eurythmy. Thus in applying to therapeutic ends everything derived from the vowel-element in eurythmy you will be able to affect the rhythmic organs in particular.

Now perhaps Mrs. Baumann will do the same poem once again consonantally. A mere glance will testify to the radical difference between the consonants and the vowels as they are carried out eurythmically. The difference is indeed thoroughly radical. If we wish to study what we have just seen we will have to make clear to ourselves how the matter would lie if in ordinary listening we were to hear only the consonants. For civilized man that is seldom so, but among less civilized peoples it is sometimes the case that they must listen to much of a consonantal nature. The consonantal world in speech is appreciably richer among less civilized peoples, and the transition from one consonant to another is stronger and unilluminated by a vowel lying between. You will find it possible to observe this up to and even within Europe. just look at words written in the Czech language and you will see just what combinations of consonants are present. To be sure when the words are spoken the vowel element sounds within these combinations of consonants, but it permeates them only as a continuous, hardly differentiated undercurrent. And if you listen to Czech you will say to yourself: to listen to this consonantal element is entirely different from listening to a language that is thoroughly permeated by vowels. Thus one has to do with quite another process here which can be characterized best in the following manner.

As an ordinary listening process this process calls forth strongly those movements of the etheric body which are otherwise actually carried out in the case of physical movements. They are retained and so, while listening to consonants, the human being lives in a certain tension. Unconsciously he would like to be imitating outwardly, physically, when he listens to consonants, but he holds back. The situation is alive with tension: a state of pacification prevails, but an artificially induced pacification, called forth by the power of one's own ego in opposition to those movements which demand to be carried out. Volition dammed up within itself is manifest when consonants are heard. Therefore you will find that listening to consonants is inwardly exceptionally invigorating. If one has an eye for it one can study how peoples such as the Czechs comport themselves inwardly—how, the human being deports himself in his interior in relation to these tensions, these aggressive forces once one knows that they are built up out of the consonantal element of the language. It is a continual curbing of what unceasingly strives to become physical movement.

Once again it is for the human being a stepping-out, a going over into the condition of sleep, and this going out, this transition into sleep is extraordinarily interesting. Consider the human being schematically: head, rhythmic system, limb-metabolic system. In listening to consonants it is primarily the limb-metabolic system that is engaged. The person wants to move his limbs, wants to break into movement, but the movement is converted into tension. He passes as it were into a state of sleep which actually does not take place in other respects, for the ego and the astral body—which go out in ordinary sleep—remain within the organism. One even tries to bring about a sort of artificial sleep for the limb-metabolic system in this case. But when one falls asleep in the limb-metabolic system to a degree, a strong reaction makes itself evident. This reaction consists of dreaming. However, at the moment one's consciousness is not so organized that one can dream. Dreams come into being that play about the human being. (orange). They affect the outer astrality and the outer ether. People who listen to consonants reinforce the aura in their proximity. This expresses itself in turn in its polarity: what remains here in the subconscious as polar content plays about the head as a volition-feeling factor and penetrates into the organism of the head. (violet). Therefore you may notice an intensification of wilfulness and caprice in people who are accustomed to living in the consonantal element. Dreams transformed into will play through the organism of the head.

What are dreams transformed into will from a physiological point of view? If one examines the etheric-physical correlative, it is essentially what is plastically at work in the organization of the head. The plastic effect on the organization of the head is pre-eminent and in this manner it will be possible to activate to a degree the organization of a head which is retarded. If one has to do with a feeble-minded person, or with someone where it can be demonstrated physically that his head organism is not in order, one should let him do consonants in eurythmy.

Then one engages oneself with those forces which otherwise work as dream-like will in the entire remaining limb-metabolic system, which stimulate there the organization and preserve its activity. One makes the heads of imbeciles and those who are otherwise retarded in their head-organization more active. Thus one can employ this sort of eurythmy to arouse curative forces for the organization of the head, particularly when one carries it out in the intensified form, with the strengthened form of the consonants of which we have heard in the last few days. It is natural that when one wishes to consider the physiology of eurythmy one should keep the active moving human being in view. In ordinary physiology one actually does not pursue physiology at all: even when an experiment is conducted on the living one proceeds from the mechanical; or one starts with the corpse and draws conclusions about physiology in actuality. One then arrives at something which one has inferred. If one wishes to attain to a physiology of these processes, what one otherwise infers must be read from inner activity of man. And it will be seen how this sort of study will quicken the whole of physiology. Consider alone the following: what is the process of digestion as observed in the living human being? It is metabolic activity which thrusts itself into the rhythmic activity, which unfolds in the direction of the rhythmic. Digestive activity is metabolic activity which is caught up to a degree by the rhythm of the circulatory organs. A continuing process, which is a combination of the metabolic activity and rhythmic activity (completed by the German editor) is taking place here. When the rhythm pulses up against it, what is metabolic activity in the lymph is caught up into the rhythm of the organs of circulation and pulled along with it. The more chaotic activity—the chaos astir in the movement of the lymph—is taken over into the rhythm of the circulatory system. Physically human volition lives there where the chaos of the lymph goes over into the regular rhythmic functioning of the circulatory system. One must distinguish this activity of will, which consists in the continual transition taking place between the chaotic vigour in the lymph and the rhythmically regular, harmonising activity present in the circulatory being, from the outer activity into which it however pours. It is, nevertheless, in this way that the inner world of man lying within the skin brings itself into harmony with the outer being of man. Through the subordination of his personal being man encorporates himself into the being of the outer world. Therefore, when one influences this activity through eurythmy—as we have seen with the consonants—one counters in fact the human being's tendency to become self-willed, to become egoistic, and his tendency to become organically egoistic as well. What does it actually mean when man becomes egoistic? Organically expressed it means that the force of plasticity in the organs is diminished and the rigidifying, crystallizing tendency takes the upper hand. The organs no longer want to be modellers, they want to become more crystalline. By means of consonantal eurythmy this tendency can be counteracted.

Here you have an insight deep into the human organism. Egoists are always people whose organs threaten to take on a proper wedge form. They want to become wedges, to become crystalline, where as in the case of people who are pathologically self-less, these organs expand. They have no crystallizing agency; they have plastic forces and become round. That is also a pathological condition. It is always the swing of the pendulum from one extreme to the other to which one must pay heed.

Consider what spiritual activity is: when man thinks and from out of his thinking feels—that is designated spiritual activity in normal life. It is carried out by the most physical part of the head organism and is for precisely this reason the sublimating spiritual activity, the individualizing on the one side, the abstractly felt on the other. When the human being carries out this activity, what happens then? He draws out of his organism the force that enables him to encorporate him-self into the outer world. He draws out of himself the force that, pathologically, entices him to expand. He makes a crystallizer of himself when he is spiritually active. Certain peoples, the more northern peoples in particular, have developed a strong instinctive consciousness of these matters. Today they have as yet no inclination to introduce eurythmy in accordance with this instinctive consciousness. They employ instead what is more outwardly physiologic, Swedish gymnastics and so on. Nevertheless they make decided use of the characteristic alternating effect, by alternating the activity which the children must carry out in scientific study in school—when they must think and so on—with what diverts them to movement. They expect every teacher to be a gymnastic teacher as well and require on the other hand that the gymnastic instructor stands at the spiritual level of the child. Such things should be taken into consideration in an advanced civilization. However if I may make a statement that may appear to be a bit nasty, but is really meant only to enlighten, one must have time if one wishes to take these matters into account instinctively. Such things must be carried out by those peoples who take less part in the process of civilization, who live a life apart, more for themselves, and who are thus able to gradually develop instinctively that which has to do with the rhythm of spiritual and physical activity. The Swedes and the Norwegians who lead a more isolated existence, for example, can put such ideas into practice instinctively particularly well. For others the practice of such matters must be more conscious since these peoples are more engaged in the world processes in general—people, for example, who must concern themselves—as was of late very much the case—with making war and so on. These peoples must see these matters much more consciously. And those nations that stand in the centre of the world's movement, who must take part in its affairs while the world turns around them so to speak, they will soon see what they will get themselves into if they do not turn to these things consciously, how they will gradually degenerate. That is something which Switzerland in particular should take to heart.

These things can be observed to play a part in the state of the world as a whole. The general conditions prevailing in the world are, of course, the result of human activity and even today they proceed more from unconscious human activity than from conscious activity. We are given the task, however, to gradually transmute the unconscious activity of man into conscious activity.

How does this spiritual activity work in man? It awakens the crystallizing forces. In people with weak egos it strengthens the “I”, it makes the ego more egoistic. In people who effuse organically because they are not sufficiently egoistic we will find it necessary to activate the forces of egoism not for the benefit of the soul, but for the body. We could stimulate them by outward means as well; it would be natural to advise people who effuse organically to consume substances containing sugar. However, they sometimes have an antipathy towards them—a fact which gives expression to the true state of affairs.

However, that is something of much less interest to us at the moment. What interests us just now is that through the vowel element in eurythmy one has the possibility of working most effectively in this direction; one can bring the human being organically to himself through the vowels. One can awaken the forces which bring him to himself organically. For certain people that will be most necessary, among them the sleepy headed people. One will find that the alternation between the two, between the vowels and the consonants in eurythmy, will work favourably as well as it enduces a living rhythm in the human being such as should exist between opening oneself to the world and retracting into oneself. That will be called forth by alternating consonantal and vowel elements in eurythmy.

It is, of course, particularly important, when one intends to apply eurythmy for therapeutic purposes, to make one's own what I would like to call this physiologic-psychologic perception of what actually takes place. One should understand that the person who does consonantal eurythmy tends to call forth around himself a sort of aura which works back on him and brings him out of an egoless mingling with the world; in the case of the person who does vowels in eurythmy, his aura is drawn together, densified in itself, which is, of course, always the case with spiritual activity as well, and that the inner organs are thus stimulated to bring the person to himself.

Pedagogically considered, alternating between the lessons one would place more in the morning hours where more mental work would be done and the lessons in which there would be more movement and where a great deal of eurythmy would be done calls forth rhythmic activity in the growing child that has an extraordinarily beneficial effect; all the detriments that are of necessity incurred through an improportionate mental exertion are balanced out again by doing eurythmy. For this reason eurythmy has an especially beneficial function within the curriculum as a whole.

That which I have to say about eurythmy particularly to the physicians I will convey in the course of my lectures to them. Thus we conclude our consideration of eurythmy as such here. Tomorrow there will be two consecutive medical lectures where the eurythmists are not present.

Held before physicians

In respect to particulars you will find it necessary to elucidate what I have to tell you today about eurythmy through your knowledge of physiology and so on. How that can he done will reveal itself to you as if of its own accord, if I may say so. When we look into a spiritual-corporeal process such as that which takes place in eurythmy, we may do no less than to indicate the deeper spiritual-physical connections as well. Thus I would like to draw your attention to the following.

First we must contemplate that extra-human world process which one usually traces only in its details and not in regard to what is actually inwardly active. Just consider what earth formation is, in reality: a formative tendency works from the planetary sphere inward. And furthermore, from what lies without the planetary sphere a formative working into the earth takes place: continuous, radiant cosmic forces revealing themselves in the individual potentialities (“Kraftentitäten”, entities of force) radiating towards the earth.

In this connection we may conceive of these cosmic powers as working centripetally and building up that which is on and in the Earth from without—although they encompass all that I have said about such rays previously as well. The fact is that the metals of the Earth as a whole, for example, are not in essence formed out of some force or another within the Earth, but are actually set into the Earth from the Cosmos. Now these forces that work through the ether can be called formative forces, formative forces working in from outside and not from the planets, for in that case they would work towards the centre; the planets are there for the specific purpose of modifying them, that is, the planetary sphere. Please take note of them in precisely this context: the formative forces. In opposition to them stand those forces in the human being and in the earth which take up those formative forces and make them fast, which assemble them around a point so that the earth can come into being. Those forces which make secure we may thus call the consolidating forces (“Kräfte des Befestigens”) (please see the following diagram, and the one shown on page 81.)

In the human being they are present as the forces that build up the organs plastically, whereas the other forces, the formative forces, have more to do with propelling the organs out of the spiritual-etheric world into the physical world. That is a process which becomes so tangible in the contrast between the propulsive powers of magnesium and the rounding-off forces of fluorine. It is a process active every-where: in the teeth from below upwards and rounding-off at the top, but from front to back as well and from the back forwards, from above to below, rounding-off at the bottom. This process will become directly tangible if you picture to yourself that, in association with the tendency to push something spherical forwards, from without inwards, some-thing is formed which is opposed by a process of spherical formation from below upwards (red, in the following illustration).

Between these two processes is that which mediates: processes of secretion and on the other hand, the absorption of what the other has secreted and so on, that which can be called processes of secretion in the widest sense; then in the final analysis absorption is dependent upon a secretion inwards which is in turn re-absorbed. In between lies thus what can be best called secretory processes.

Such a secretory process becomes tangible when you picture to yourself that on the one side lies what continually wants to secrete carbon (orange, in the illustration) and that which takes it up through respiration from the fore in the formation of carbon dioxide (white).

Behind this such a process of secretion is taking place. When you descend further into the metabolic-limb system, you have a proper process of consolidation. However, this process is present in the other direction as well. You will be able to follow it most tangibly by studying the eye, which is built inwards from without, as embryology demonstrates, but is consolidated from within. The formation is internalized. That is the manner in which the eye develops. It is internalized (see the following drawing: orange).

Thus, as we progress to that which is of soul-spiritual nature in man, to the organs of the soul-spiritual, to the sense-organs, we find that the process of consolidation has become spiritualized, truly ensouled and spiritualized in perception; that is, more or less, the descending process which leads to the formation of. the organs (please refer to the first illustration and to the chart which follows).

Thus we find at the lowermost end the process of sensory perception, objective perception. If this development continues, if it goes further in this direction, then the process of perception encounters the consolidating forces; should it become conscious in this encounter, it will become imagination. If imagination develops further and becomes conscious in encountering the process of secretion, it becomes inspiration. And when inspiration develops further in the direction of the formative forces, collides with them consciously and thus sees through these forces, it becomes intuition. Thus Dne can develop this progression in the life of the soul stage by stage from objective sensory perception to imagination, to inspiration and to intuition.

 Formative forces Intuition Secretory processes Inspiration Consolidation Imagination Perception 

This process which unfolds in the soul is based, however, on the process of coming-into-being. It is in fact, as you can see here, only the inverse of this genesis. One steps out to encounter what has already come into existence, rising into this becoming in the opposite direction. Formation takes place in the descending direction. The human being ascends in the opposite direction; he advances to meet what is coming into being. Thus, what one develops as powers of perception and cognition in imagination, inspiration and intuition always has its counter-activity in the creative powers which express themselves in the formative forces, in the processes of secretion and consolidation.

From all of this you will gather that what is active in the human organism in the opposite direction, in its coming into being, is that into which one ascends when rising in knowledge. You will perceive that in reality what we attain in imagination are the same powers which, without our being conscious of them, reveal themselves in the phenomena of growth, in the plastic phenomena of growth. If we ascend to inspiration, we come upon the forces which inspire man from without inwards in his breathing, which shape him through and through as he breathes, which shape themselves into the plastic forces as they work these forces through, to a degree. And if we ascend to intuition, we rise in reality to the primal mover (“Agens”) who enters into our plastic forms from the world without as substantial being.

You see, in this way we grasp the human being as he takes shape out of the Cosmos. If we now apply the knowledge which we have gained in one way or another through anatomy or physiology and illuminate it with what is given us here, then we begin to understand the organs and their functions. This is an indication of how to understand the organs and their functions. Thus what is always at work plastically in the human being, what permeates and shapes him, lives on the other hand in the movements for the consonants, the unconscious imaginative forces which call forth a permeation of the organism, as I said yesterday. Yesterday's lecture should be of help. Here you can perceive how consonantal eurythmy takes hold of deficient formative powers, deficient plastic forces in the human being and transforms them into something truly sculptural.¹

Let us assume we have a child before us and we see that he is insufficiently formed, that his growth is rampant. What does it mean, when we say that something of a plastic nature is growing uncontrolledly? It means that the plastic is working centrifugally, thus making the head large, and, in doing so, is no longer permitting the head to be permeated in the proper manner with imaginative forces. These must be supplied. Therefore one will let the child do consonantal eurythmy.

Here we have a question about “a two-year-old boy with a large head, who is nevertheless not hydrocephalic and is otherwise apparently healthy.”

Here you have the effective antidote, in properly applied consonantal eurythmy. Here we have arrived at the point at which a thorough observation of the morphology, of the more profound morphological facts, can provide a direct indication for the eurythmic treatment.

Another: “a twelve and three-quarter-year-old boy whose growth in height is distinctly retarded, with no organic findings other than worms; intelligent but intellectually quickly tired.” A most interesting complex of symptoms, all of which indicate that the imaginative forces are insufficent, that the plastic forces in the organs are running rampant because of a lack of inner fictile forces, of plastic soul forces. These plastic forces of the soul are those which destroy parasites. It is no wonder that when these forces are insufficient the child has worms. Thus one should have him do consonantal eurythmy; therein lies the antidote. These associations will provide you with concrete indications of where you can employ eurythmy. Although the phenomena are somewhat camouflaged here, eurythmy will have an extraordinarily positive effect even in such cases, particularly if one complements it medicinally.

Here I have an interesting question that has been presented to me. Naturally I must answer the questions in principle. If complications of any sort should appear, they can later be taken into special consideration as the case demands. However, although it may be necessary to combine something else along with it, the matter has nevertheless been thoroughly dealt with from the side characterized.

“I have as a patient a five-year-old child who lost a great deal of blood as the result of a bullet wound suffered in the outbreaks of violence; two years ago a deformation of the joints set in. These are things which could lead to anaemia and similar conditions in adults. How could one help this child therapeutically?”

Here you have a deformation of the joints. That is an outwardly-working tendency of plastic forces that are unable to remain within. Thus these forces ray outwards, leaving the human being instead of working within him as they should. They will be reflected in the most effective manner precisely through the practice of consonantal eurythmy. In doing consonantal eurythmy you will call forth the objectively effective imaginations which offset the deformations. As the manner in which the question is placed quite correctly indicates, people in the future will in general tend to deform in the most manifold ways, because they will no longer be able to build up the normalizing human form out of the involuntarily active forces. Man will become free; he will gradually become free even in respect to the building up of his own form. However, he must then be able to do something with this freedom. Ile must go on to engender imaginations which continuously counter the deformation.

Now as to the other; you see that we are here concerned with a dearth of objective imagination. We could have to do with a deficiency of objective inspiration as well, which would express itself in a deformation of the rhythmic system, if I may call it that. In the case of a deformation of the rhythmic system, the objective inspiration which goes inwards does not encounter the circulatory rhythm in the proper manner. One can work towards a normalization of the situation by practising vowels in eurythmy. In eurythmy the vowels affect internal irregularities which are precisely not accompanied by morphological changes, even as consonantal eurythmy affects deformations and the tendency to deformation.

As I said earlier, it may nevertheless be necessary to render aid when something appears in particularly radical form, as in the case of the deformations of the joints that we just discussed. There it would he necessary to come to the assistance of the consonantal eurythmic process therapeutically. This consonantal process works by stimulating through its imagination the inner breathing of the organs orientated from without inwards and lying on the far side, of the intestinal wall: the lungs, the kidneys, the liver, and so on. When a person does consonantal eurythmy, it is a fact that particularly the back of the head, the lungs, the liver and the kidneys begin to sparkle and flash; something is really there that indicates the reaction of the spirit and soul to what is _lone outside in the consonants. Man becomes a shining being in these organs, and the movements that are carried out are in continuous opposition to the luminous movements within. In particular, there appears an entire luminous reproduction of the excretory process of the kidneys, through certain consonantal movements. One has a picture of the excretory process of the kidneys in this luminous process which comes about as the result of consonantal eurythmy. And that works over into the unconscious imagination. The whole process in which this part begins to shine is the same process that I described as being especially under the influence of copper. It is the same process. Here one must draw the attention of the physicians to the fact that there are people with particular forms of illness. These forms of illness were brought to my attention again yesterday when I was shown some painted pictures that were very much admired in some quarters at least, and was asked whether they were particularly occult. In a certain sense, of course, they are occult, but it is extraordinarily difficult to speak to people about these things, for they are an objectively-fixed kidney-efflorescence; they are the objectively-fixed process of the excretion of urine. When in the case of persons predisposed to this illness the process of urinary excretion becomes an abnormal, luminous process, that is, when the process of excretion falters—a purely metabolic illness—the kidneys then begin to shine. When this inwardly directed clairvoyance then sets in, people begin to draw wildly. What they produce will be aesthetic, in an outer formal manner beautiful in every case. The colours applied will be beautiful. But, of course, people are not content when one says to them, “Yes, there you have painted something very beautiful; it is in fact your obstructed excretion of urine.” I can assure you that the obstructed urinary process and suppressed sexual desires—which lead as well in a certain manner to metabolic irregularities—are often presented by people of particularly mystical nature as mystically profound drawings and paintings. In much of what makes its appearance in the world in this manner one should recognize the symptoms of pathological abnormalities in the human being that are just bearable still.

As you see, anthroposophically oriented spiritual science is not mysticism as mysticism is commonly understood, since it fosters no illusions about matters such as we have just characterized. Quite the contrary: it investigates just such matters. People take exception to one for doing so, however. They resent my having gone so far in a public lecture as to indicate that the lovely poetry of Mechthild von Magdeburg, for example, or of Saint Theresa, are the inspirational reflexes of processes arising from repressed sexuality. Here, of course, the things are not drawn or painted, but poetically expressed. Naturally it is not pleasant for people to hear Mechthild von Magdeburg or Saint Theresa described as personalities with a strong sexuality which they restrained precisely because it was too strong for them, that certain metabolic-circulatory processes resulted from this retension, and that the reactions to this in turn appeared in such a form that they were fixed in very beautiful poetry. Indeed, this phenomenon leads extraordinarily deep into the mysteries of existence, when considered in a higher light. However, one must be able to rise to such an interpretation. And, therefore, one must have at least a notion of these peculiar processes which light up as inward processes when eurythmy is done outwardly. And in the moment when what is concealed within the poetry becomes eurythmy, as I showed you yesterday—when a beautiful poem is read and the eurythmy corresponding to it is done as we saw yesterday in vowels or consonants—then the one thing crosses the other; then an inward silent speaking joins what is carried out outwardly in movements in the person doing eurythmy as well. And when this process does not exude in sultry poetry but takes instead the course of accompanying beautiful poetry as eurythmy, then that which takes place in the human being does not become a recording of mysticism, but a definite process of healing for the human being. Thus one can say that when one lets the patients do eurythmy in such a manner that one continually brings to his attention: listen carefully, bring intensely into consciousness the sound that you hear, the relationships of the sentence you hear, to which you are doing eurythmy; then one will initiate his ascent to the outward formative forces, to the objectively intuiting powers. When one wants to affect all that has remained in the human being from what no longer took place between birth and death, but what materialism calls inheritance—the greater part of which, however, is carried over from the pre-existent spiritual soul-life—if one wants to affect what can be called congenital defects and so on, then one will do well to work—particularly during the course of youth—again and again through eurythmy by challenging the person doing it: make very clear to yourself what you hear outwardly! By this method one can drive out all the tendencies to fix inwardly what would like to arise and take form in something like mystical poetry or mystical drawing. Precisely that will be connected to the beautiful outer poem. It is the reverse process. A true mystic knows that that of an abnormal nature which is reflected by the human being as beauty always has a questionable side. By contrast, one cannot claim that, when what is beautiful in the outer world is experienced inwardly, it appears as a particularly magnificent and beautiful picture: on the contrary, it becomes schematic and thereby abstract; abstract as if it were sketched; abstract, as a drawing is abstract. That is precisely what is healthy, however, and what is desired. The beautiful historic process would not have taken place, but if for example Mechthild von Magdeburg had been instigated to do eurythmy to good poetry, her entire mystic fate would have been spared her. Naturally one can say here that a point has been reached where in a certain sense good and evil cease to exist; one enters into the amoral sphere of Nietzche, beyond good and evil. Of course, one cannot be so philistine as to claim that all the Mechthilds von Magdeburg should be eradicated. On the other hand you may be certain that from the super-sensible worlds care will be taken that the corresponding connections with these super-sensible worlds nevertheless remain, when man attempts to prevent this tendency from undue proliferation.

Although it is quite late, I would still like to go into a few matters in order to perhaps bring some clarification. I would like to start with the following question:

“Couldn't the therapeutic eurythmy exercises be reinforced by rational breathing exercises? It needn't necessarily be Hatha-Yoga.”

To this I would like to make the following remark. In our times, and within the direction that the continually progressing human nature has taken, rational breathing exercises, as a reinforcement of the eurythmic exercises, can in fact only be treated in the following manner. It will be observed that a tendency towards a modification in the rhythm of respiration arises of its own accord under the influence of the vowels in eurythmy. One will notice this quite clearly. Here one finds oneself in the uncomfortable situation that one should avoid stereotyping, avoid saying the one thing or another in general, but should first observe what is to be done. One should concern oneself in each individual case with the breathing of the person in whose healing one is attempting to be of assistance by means of eurythmic vowel exercises (in accordance with the diagnosis given, whatever it may be); one should observe the modification of the breathing and subsequently make the patient aware that he can consciously pursue this tendency himself. We are no longer human beings like the ancient orientals, who would go the reverse route and influence the entire human being by way of a prescribed method of breathing. This is something which today leads of necessity, in every case, to inner shocks, no matter how it is prescribed; it should really be avoided. We just have to learn to notice what kind of effect eurythmy itself, especially vocalic eurythmy, has on the breathing process. And then we can consciously continue the tendency which arises eurythmically, in the individual case. You will certainly observe that this respiratory process will be carried on individually, continued in varying manners in different people.

My esteemed friends, those are more or less the things that it is possible to answer at the moment. We have no real possibility of dealing with a number of matters that have got bogged down due to the shortness of time. In closing, my dear friends. I want to warn you that you must be prepared that your medical colleagues in the world will wage their wars no less intensely when they become aware of your bringing something of our sort to bear, and that you will have need of the penetrating power of conviction to weaken what will confront you. In no case, of course, may what you are confronted with lead you to neglect these matters; we may permit ourselves no illusions about those antagonistic forces we arouse.

At the end of this course I would as well like to state that, in order to make the movement possible, as it should now be inaugurated in the medical field, I will adhere everywhere to the policy of not involving myself directly with the patients in the therapeutic process, but will discuss and consult only with the physicians themselves. Thus you will always be in the position to refute any allegations that I myself interfere in any way in an unjustified manner in the therapy. I have already mentioned this at the end of the last course. This has been made extraordinarily difficult for me even from the anthroposophical side—this cannot he passed over in silence—as people naturally make all possible demands in this direction. It is also definitely the case that among anthroposophists the tendency exists, not only not to rise above egoism, but sometimes to become even more egoistic than normal people are. Then, when the occasion arises it is often a matter of complete indifference to the person, what the welfare of the movement may entail; that the welfare of the movement is dependent in each individual instance upon a rejection of the practice of what the world outside terms quackery; that a healing process should take place in the whole of medicine and should not be disturbed by the demands arising from an individual's personal aspirations. People will make it difficult, but it must be carried through in this direction, since we will only be able to succeed in this area when we can stand up to the outer world—as we are otherwise able to, in the anthroposophical movement, insofar as matters are conducted with understanding and not bowdlerized by people without understanding. Simply by virtue of knowing what is going on in the anthroposophical movement we must be in the position to say: what is being said there is certainly a lie, it is beyond doubt an invention. We must simply always be in the position to say that, in certain cases. And we come to be able to say that, when we are all inwardly initiated in the contents of matters such as those to which I have drawn attention here: that I myself do not intervene in the therapeutic process, but that within the anthroposophical movement the doctors are responsible for the therapy of the patients.

Having said what was necessary, I want to add nothing more than the wish that the stimuli—which, in this course in particular, have often remained mere indications—may work on in you and become active in the appropriate manner for the welfare of humanity. Hopefully we will have the opportunity to carry on in some manner what we have already twice begun; in any case we will make an effort to carry on with it. With this wish, my dear friends, I will close these contemplations, in the hope that our deeds in these directions may be in accord with our wishes. It was very satisfying to see you here. It will be a satisfying feeling to think back on these days here, which it was your desire to spend together towards the enrichment of medical science. The thoughts that hold us together will accompany you, my dear friends, on the paths that you will wander, to transform into deeds what we attempted to activate, to begin with here, as thoughts.

• 1. Rudolf Steiner uses in every case here the word “plastic”.

Translated by Steiner Online Library

My dear Friends,

We have, as you know, quite a number of children whose development has been arrested and whom we have now to educate—or again, to heal, in so far as this is possible. There are several of these children here in the Clinic at Arlesheim, and you have a number also at Lauenstein.¹ We shall in these lectures try to deal with our subject in such a way that wherever possible our study leads straight on to the practical application. Then, when Frau Dr. Wegman puts some of the children at our disposal for demonstration—for this is permissible among ourselves—we shall be able also to discuss certain cases with the child immediately in front of us. To begin with, however, I want to speak more in general about the nature of such children.

It is obvious, in the first place, that a thorough knowledge of education for healthy children should already be possessed by one who wants to educate incompletely developed children. For the very things we notice in incompletely developed children, in children who are suffering from some illness or abnormality, can also be discerned in the so-called normal life of soul; only, they show themselves there less plainly, and in order to recognize them we must be able to practise a more intimate and close observation. In some corner of the life of soul of every human being lurks a quality, or tendency, that would commonly be called abnormal. It may be no more than a slight tendency to flights of thought, or an incapacity to place the words at the right intervals in speaking, so that either the words fall over each other or else the listener could go for a walk between them.

Irregularities of this kind—and they are to be found also in the life of will and of feeling—can be noticed, at all events to some slight degree, in the majority of human beings. We shall have something to say about them later on, because for anyone who sets out to deal, educationally or medically, with serious irregularities, these slighter ones will be of importance as symptoms. And one must, you know, be able to make one's own careful study of symptoms, in the sense in which the doctor speaks of symptoms by which he recognises illnesses. He speaks indeed also of the complex of symptoms which enables him to take a survey of the disease-process; but he never confuses the complex of symptoms with what is really the essential nature and content of the disease itself. Similarly, in the case of an incompletely developed child, we must regard what can be observed in his life of soul simply as symptoms.

Psychography, as it is called—descriptive psychology—is really nothing but symptomatology, the study and knowledge of symptoms. When psychiatry today limits itself to describing abnormal phenomena of thinking, feeling and willing, this means no more than that it has made progress in accurate description of complexes of symptoms; and as long as it cannot get beyond this point, it is quite incapable of penetrating to the essential nature of the illness. It is, however, most important that we should be able to do this, to perceive what the “being ill” really means. And in this connection I want to ask your attention to the following. You will find it helpful. Try to grasp it and hold it clearly before your minds.

Suppose we have here² the physical body of the human being, as it confronts us while the little child is growing. Then we have the life of soul, rising up, as it were coming forth from this physical body. This life of soul, which can show itself in varied expressions and manifestations, may be normal or it may be abnormal. But now the only possible grounds we can have for speaking of the normality or abnormality of the child's life of soul, or indeed of the life of soul of any human being, is that we have in mind something that is normal in the sense of being average. There is no other criterion than the one that is customary among people who abide by ordinary conventions; such people have their ideas of what is to be considered reasonable or clever, and then everything that is not an expression of a “normal” life of soul (as they understand it) is for them an abnormality. At present there is really no other criterion. That is why the conclusions people come to are so very confused. When they have in this way ascertained the existence of “abnormality”, they begin to do—heaven knows what!—believing they are thereby helping to get rid of the abnormality, while all the time they are driving out a fragment of genius! We shall get nowhere at all by applying this kind of criterion, and the first thing the doctor and teacher have to do is to reject it and get beyond the stage of making pronouncements as to what is clever or reasonable, in accordance with the habits of thought that prevail today. Particularly in this domain we must refrain from jumping to conclusions, and simply look at things as they are. What have we actually before us in the human being?

Let us look right away from this life of soul, which emerges only by degrees and in which a part is often played by teachers—concerning whom perhaps the less said the better!—let us look away from this life of soul, and then we find, behind the bodily nature, another life of soul, a spirit soul, which makes its descent, between the time of conception and birth, from the spiritual worlds. For the first-mentioned life of soul is not that in man which descends from spiritual worlds. The life of soul which descends from the spiritual worlds is something quite different, and is not, in the ordinary way, perceptible to earthly consciousness. This whole life of soul that comes down from the spiritual worlds takes possession of the body which is being built up from the sequence of generations in accordance with heredity. And if this soul-life is of such a kind that it tends, when it lays hold of the liver-substance, to form a diseased liver, or if it finds in the physical and the etheric body some inherited tendency to disease, which gives rise to a feeling of illness, then disease will make its appearance. Similarly, any other organ or nexus of organs may be faultily inserted into what comes down from the world of soul-and-spirit. When the connection has been made, when the union has come about between what comes down and what is inherited, when this entity of soul-and-body has been formed, then there arises—but even then no more than as a reflection in a mirror—that which we know ordinarily as our life of soul, as it manifests in thinking, feeling and willing. This soul life that manifests in thinking, feeling and willing is, however, as we said, no more than a reflection, it is really just like a reflection in a mirror. It is all obliterated when we fall asleep. The really permanent soul-life is behind; it makes its descent and passes through repeated earth-lives. And if we ask where it is in man, the answer is: It has its seat in the organisation of the body. How is this to be understood?

Let us think first of the human being in his three systems: nervous system, rhythmical system and metabolism-limb system. You will understand me when I say that the nerves-and-senses system is localised principally in the head; we can therefore speak—although, of course, diagrammatically only—of the head system when we are referring to the nerves-and-senses system. This is more literally correct in the case of the very young child, where the upbuilding function of the nerves-and-senses system proceeds from the head and works thence into the whole organism. The nerves-and-senses system, then, is localised in the head. It is a synthetic system. What do I mean by that? It brings together all the activities of the organism. In the head is contained, in a sense, the whole human being. When we speak of hepatic activity—and we ought really to speak always of the activity of the liver, for what we see as liver is nothing but a liver process that has become fixed—this liver activity is, naturally, entirely in the lower body; but for each such nexus of functions there is a corresponding activity in the head. Here, shall we say, is the liver activity. And there is a correspondence to this liver activity in a particular activity in the human head or brain. Here in the lower body, the liver is relatively separated from the other organs, from kidneys, stomach and so on. But in the brain everything flows together, the hepatic activity flows together with the other activities; so that the head is the great synthesizer of everything that is going on in the organism. And the effect of all this synthesized activity is to set up a destructive process, a process of breaking down. Substance falls away.

Whilst we have thus in the head a synthesizing process, in the whole of the rest of the organism, and especially in the metabolism-and-limbs system, we have an analysing process; here, in contrast to the head, everything is kept separate. Whereas in the head, the renal activity takes place together with the intestinal activity, in the rest of the organism the several activities are held apart. In the head, however, everything flows together, it is all synthesized.

Now this flowing together—accompanied as it is by a continual falling away of substance, like rain—this synthetical activity of the head lies at the basis of all our thought activity. For what has to happen in order that man may be able to think? That which enters into man from out of the realm of soul and spirit, enabling him to come forth and be active in the world—this soul-and-spirit nature of his has to be endowed, in the region of the head, with the synthesizing function and so be capable of synthesizing in the right way the inherited substance; then this harmoniously synthesized hereditary substance can become a mirror. When, with the descent of soul and spirit, the synthesizing activity begins to take place in the head, the head becomes a mirror; the outer world is reflected in it, and this produces the thinking that we ordinarily observe. We must therefore distinguish between two functions or activities of thinking: there is first the one which takes its course behind the realm of the perceptible, and builds the brain—this one is the permanent element in human thinking; and then there is the thinking function that is not real in itself but only a reflection. This latter function is obliterated every time we fall asleep; it subsides as soon as we stop thinking.

Another part of what comes down from the realm of spirit and soul builds up the system of metabolism and limbs—analytically, building there organs which are separate one from another and have each their own clearly distinguishable outlines. If you set out to study the whole human body with its several clearly distinguishable outlines, then in this body you find liver, lungs, heart and so on. With all of these the metabolism-and-limbs system is connected. The rhythmic system we do not see; everything which is filled with physical substance belongs to the system of limbs and metabolism; even what we can see of the brain is metabolism. Now it is these single, analytically built-up organs that lie at the basis of the whole life of will in the human being, just as the synthesizing activity lies at the basis of thinking. Whatever we have in us in the way of organs is the foundation for our life of will.

And now let us think of a human being who has arrived at the stage of being “grown-up”. What has happened to him while he has been living his earthly life? He reached the age of seven and got his second teeth, he grew to be fourteen years old and attained puberty, finally he reached the age of twenty-one, when the consolidation of his soul-life took place. If we want to have any understanding at all of the development of the child, we must clearly distinguish between the body a human being has who has passed through the change of teeth, and the body of a very young child who has not yet experienced the change of teeth. As a matter of fact, what can be observed by comparing these two outstanding examples, is happening continuously. The body changes with each year that passes. We are perpetually thrusting something out from our body; a streaming outwards, a centrifugal impulse is at work all the time, pushing the body out. The consequence is that the body of man is completely renewed every seven or eight years. This renewal is, however, particularly significant about the time of the change of teeth, about the seventh year. For what reason?

The body which we have from birth till the change of teeth is, in a sense, nothing else than a model that we take over from our parents; it contains the forces of heredity, our forefathers have helped to build it. In the course of the first seven years we thrust off this body. And what have we then? A completely new body comes into being; the body that man has after the change of teeth is not built up by the forces of heredity, but entirely by the spirit-and-soul which has descended. The human being has his body of inherited substance until the change of teeth, and no longer; but while he is thrusting off this body, he builds up a new body, working from out of his own individuality. Thus only since the change of teeth have we had what we may call our own body. But the inherited body is used as a model; and according as the life of spirit-and-soul is strong or weak, will it either be in a position to proceed in a more individual direction when confronted with the inherited form, or be subject to the inherited form—in which case the soul will be compelled to shape the second body like the first, which was shaped by the parents. What is usually adduced in the theory of heredity is really nonsense. For it is assumed that the laws that underlie man's growth up to the change of teeth simply continue into later life; whereas the truth is, that the influence of heredity has to be reckoned with only until the change of teeth, and no further; the individuality then comes in and builds the second body.

We must therefore distinguish, when speaking of a child, between the body of heredity and the individual body which is its successor. The individual body—and this body alone can truthfully be called the personal body of the human being—develops by degrees. Between the seventh and fourteenth years the very strongest activity of which the individuality is capable goes forward. Either, the individuality conquers during this period the forces of heredity, and then it can be observed in the child that, after the change of teeth, he begins to work his way out of the forces of heredity—the fact will be clearly perceptible, and we teachers must take note of it—or, the individuality is completely subject to the forces of heredity, to what is contained in the model, with the result that the hereditary likeness to the parents simply continues beyond the seventh year. But it all depends, you see, upon the individuality, not upon the forces of heredity. Suppose I am an artist and you give me something to copy and I change it very considerably. Just as little as I can say that you are responsible for my picture, just so little can it be said that a person has acquired through heredity the body he bears from the seventh year onward. This truth we must master thoroughly, and then be able to know for ourselves in any particular case how strongly the individuality is working.

Between the seventh and fourteenth years every human being passes through a process of growth and development which expresses, as strongly as in his case is possible, the individuality he has brought down with him. In this period of his life the child is thus comparatively shut off from the external world; and we teachers have opportunity to watch during these years the wonderful unfolding of the forces of the individuality. But now, if this development were to continue after the fourteenth year, if the human being were to go on into later life with nothing further than this unfolding of individuality, he would become a person who was perpetually refusing and rejecting everything that approached him, a person utterly without interest in the world around him. That this does not happen is due to the fact that, during the aforesaid period, he is all the time building his third body, which manifests at puberty, and this third body is built up to accord with—to bear right relation to—the forces in the earthly environment. The relation of the sexes is not the whole thing; the exaggerated importance given to it is just a consequence of our materialistic turn of mind. In reality, all connections with the outer world which begin to make their appearance at puberty are fundamentally of the same nature. We should really speak, therefore, not of sexual, but of earthly maturity. And under earthly maturity we have to include the maturity of the senses, the maturity of the breathing—and another such sub-division will also be sexual maturity. This gives the true picture of the situation. The human being, then, reaches earthly maturity. He begins to take again into himself what is outside and foreign to him; he acquires the faculty of being sensitive and not indifferent to his environment. Before this time, he is not susceptible to the other sex, neither is he susceptible to his whole environment. Thus does the human being form and develop his third body, which is active in him until the beginning of the twenties.

What descended from the spiritual world reached a kind of end at the time of the change of teeth; but it has continued to work, right until the twentieth year. It has already taken form in the organs which are now there, and has given the human being individual maturity, and earthly maturity. Suppose that now some abnormality shows itself in the life of soul, which reflects—and is in conformity with—the structure of the organs, and is conditioned by the whole development of the human being. We shall then manifestly have an abnormality of soul, that has come about in this way. But if, after the human being has passed his twenty-first year, an abnormality appears in the liver or in some other organ, this organ is by then so much “on its own” and so detached, that the will—in its inner “soul” aspect—can keep itself independent of it. This is less and less possible the further one goes back into the years of childhood. But in a grown person the soul-life has become relatively independent; the organs already have a definite direction, and the oncoming of illness in an organ will not work so strongly upon the soul-life, and can therefore be treated simply as a disease in that organ. In the very young child, however, everything is still working together; a diseased organ still works into the life of soul—and very actively.

The diseases usually diagnosed by our modern pathology are the cruder illnesses; the subtler illnesses are not really accessible to histology. These lie in the fluids that permeate an organ, such as the liver, for instance; in the movement of the fluids—or even of the air—through that organ. The warmth permeating the organ is also of quite special significance for the life of soul. If therefore we are dealing with a child who shows evidence of a defect in the will, the first thing we must do is to ask ourselves: with what organ is the defect in the will connected? Is there some organ showing signs of degeneration or of illness, with which we can connect the defect in the will? That is the really important question.

A defect in the thinking is not of such tremendous importance. Most defects are really defects in the will; for even when you find a defect in the thinking, you must look carefully to see to what extent this defect in thinking is really a defect in will: When someone thinks too rapidly or too slowly, the thoughts themselves may be quite correct; the trouble is that the will which works in the dove-tailing of the thoughts into each other is faulty. We must be able to discover in all such cases how far the will is a factor. One can really only be sure that there is a defect in thinking when, independently of the will, deformations of thought, sense-delusions, make their appearance. These then arise quite unconsciously in the human being in the process of relating himself to the outer world. The mental picture itself becomes irregular, or we have something like “fixed ideas”, where the very fact that they are fixed ideas lifts them out of the sphere of the will. It is therefore most important we should take pains to discern whether in a particular case we have to do with a defect in the will or a defect in the thinking. Defects in thinking fall for the most part into the strictly medical domain. In the education of incompletely developed children, we have mainly to do with defects of the will.

And now look how the entire being of man plays into his development! You can appreciate this from the description we have been giving. Take the first seven years. There may be defects due to heredity. It is during this period that such defects come particularly into consideration. But now, a hereditary defect should not be regarded in the terribly mistaken way in which it is regarded by modern science; it does not fall to our lot by chance, but as a karmic necessity. Out of our own lack of knowledge—in the spiritual world, of course—we have chosen a defective body, one that is defective as the result of the generations. The existence of defective forces of heredity means that before conception there was a lack of knowledge of the human organisation. Before a human being comes down to Earth, he must have an exact knowledge of the human organism; otherwise he cannot enter into this organism in the right way during the first seven years, neither can he transform it rightly. The knowledge about the inner organisation of man which we acquire between death and a new birth is infinite in comparison with the scraps of knowledge that have been acquired by external observation and are to be found in the physiology or histology of today. (As for the latter, it really amounts to nothing at all!) The knowledge which we have between death and a new birth and which then sinks down into the body, and is forgotten because it sinks down, a knowledge that does not direct itself, with the help of the senses, to the outer world—this knowledge is immeasurably great; it is however impaired if, in an earlier life, we neglected to develop interest in our surroundings or were prevented from doing so.

Suppose one day a civilisation were to arise that confined human beings in rooms, keeping them there from morning till evening, so that they were debarred from taking any interest at all in the outer world. What would be the result? These human beings would of course by such a process be precluded from acquiring any knowledge of the outer world; and this would mean that when they passed afterwards through death and came into the spiritual world, they would be insufficiently equipped for getting to know the human organism in this spiritual world (where all is contained); with the result that when they descended again to Earth, they would come down with far less knowledge than one who had in his previous life acquired the faculty for looking out upon his surroundings with free, open perception.

There is another secret connected with this. You go through the world. You think perhaps, as you go through the world, that a single day is of little importance. And so it is for ordinary consciousness, but not for that which is building the unconscious within this ordinary consciousness. If for one single day, as you go through the world, you observe the world intently and carefully, then this gives you already the preliminary condition for knowledge of all that is contained in the body of man. For what is outer world in Earthly life is spiritual inner world in life beyond the Earth. And we shall have to speak further of the results that cannot but ensue from our present civilisation, and of how it comes about that children are born defective. Those human beings who live shut off from the world today will all of them at some time or other come down with a lack of knowledge of the human organism, and they will choose ancestors who would otherwise have remained barren. It will be precisely those parents who tend to beget sick or feeble bodies who will be chosen, while those who would be capable of producing good bodies will remain sterile. Yes, it is actually so: it depends upon the whole development of a particular epoch, how a generation, when it descends again to birth, will be formed and built.

When we look at a young child, we must see what it is in this child that has come from the previous earthly life. We must understand why he chooses organs that are diseased in consequence of the forces of heredity; and again, why he works himself into this body with an incompletely developed individuality. Think of the many possibilities that exist for a child, in this first period up to the change of teeth, owing to the fact that what has come down is not always quite able to cope with what it finds before it. There is the possibility, let us say, of the child having a good model that has been well developed in the liver; but because the individuality is incapable of understanding what is contained in the liver, the development of the same (upon the model provided) during the second life-period is incomplete, and we have, in consequence, a very significant defect of will. Precisely in a case where the development of the liver has not been complete in this second period, has not been in accordance with the good development of the model, we find a defect in the will. The child has will, but does not get to the point of carrying it out; the will remains in the thinking. As soon as ever the child has begun to do something, he immediately begins to will something else. The will gets “stuck”, it is transfixed. For you must know that the liver is not merely the organ modern physiology describes; it is pre-eminently the organ that gives the human being the courage to transform a deed which has been thought of into an accomplished deed.

Imagine a man who sees a tram about to start, and knows that he has to go to Basle, but at the last minute cannot get into the tram. There are people like this! Something holds him back, he does not reach the point of getting in. This kind of stoppage of the will may sometimes reveal itself in most curious ways. But wherever it occurs, there is invariably a subtle defect of the liver. The liver is the mediator which enables an idea that has been resolved upon, to be transformed into an action carried out by the limbs. In point of fact, every organ is there in the body for the purpose of acting as mediator for something to come about.

I was once told about a certain young man who had an illness of this kind. He would be waiting for a tram; but when the tram came, he would suddenly stop short and not get in. Nobody knew why, he did not know himself. He simply stood there, rooted to the spot. What was the cause of this condition? It was a very complicated affair. The young man's father was a philosopher. He had divided the faculties of the soul, in a rather singular manner, into ideas, judgments (or conclusions) and the forces of “sympathy” and “antipathy”. He did not reckon the will among the powers of the soul. The will was omitted in his enumeration—from sheer desire on his part, to be honest and not to put forward more than revealed itself clearly to his consciousness. He carried this to such a point that it became perfectly natural to him to have no mental concept of the will at all. Then, at a comparatively advanced age in life, he had a son. By perpetually ignoring the will he, the father, had implanted into the liver an inclination not to transform subjective intentions into deed. This came out in the son as an illness! And now you can see why the individuality of the son chose this man for his father. The individuality of the son had no understanding of how to cope with the inner organisation of the liver; so he chose a constitution in which he need not trouble himself about the liver, a constitution in which the liver was lacking in the very function he had himself failed to bring down. You have here a very striking instance of the need to look also into karma, if we want to understand the child.

This is what I wanted to say to begin with, and tomorrow at the same hour we will continue.

• 1. The first two anthroposophical homes for handicapped children.
• 2. A drawing was made.

My dear Friends,

It is, as you know, my dear friends, our intention to work things out here from their foundations, in order then to pass on afterwards to the practical side. I called your attention yesterday to the fact that the ordinary, superficial life of soul has to be regarded as a complex of symptoms, and no more. It follows from this that, if we want to get at the real state of affairs that lies behind a so-called mental illness or mental weakness in some child, modern methods of approach are quite inadequate, for they can only describe how things are in this superficial soul-life, without being able to lead on to what lies deeper—that is to say, to the region where, as we saw yesterday, the real life of soul is working. We cannot here enter into the question of how mental illnesses in grown-up people should be dealt with (there are indeed always, as you know, problems of many kinds connected with that), but we do want, in this course, to make a thorough study of what it is possible to do with children.

Before going further into the subject, I would like to read you an article from this newspaper that gives a crude example of how misleading an observation of the superficial life of soul can be. (I use the word “superficial” in the sense of locality, not in a derogatory sense.) It is an example that will have special significance for you, in view of the tasks that you are undertaking.

A man of the name of Wulffen,¹ who was once Public Prosecutor, has made a study, from the standpoint of criminal psychology, of all kinds of mental abnormalities, and has written big books on the subject. How does he reach his conclusions? For he obviously does not take his start from professional medicine. In his capacity as Public Prosecutor he naturally became familiar with a wide field of abnormalities in the life of soul, and afterwards at a more mature age, he set out to acquire a somewhat miscellaneous knowledge of medicine. He then combined his experience in his profession with his subsequent reading, and evolved a theory which is nothing else than the inevitable outcome of the so-called “scientific” hypotheses of today. For either we take this modern scientific point of view seriously, in which case we are bound eventually to come to the conclusions arrived at by Wulffen, or we do not take it seriously, and then nothing remains but to take our start from Anthroposophy. An intermediate way can never be anything but a questionable compromise.

Wulffen recently gave a lecture in Zürich dealing with the subject of criminal psychology, in which he spoke about abnormality in the life of the soul. It is important that we should pay attention to what is said in such a lecture, for we are in fact in these days continually coming up against the very same kind of thing. If you set out to think about any knowledge you have gained from looking into some modern scientific book, or into any book that is based on the scientific way of thinking, you will find it full of the forms and modes of thought which this man Wulffen voices in a particularly radical way. And you really ought to know whither modern science must inevitably lead when it begins to investigate the field of abnormal soul-life. Before I read the press notice let me tell you that Wulffen himself is a much more able man, and much more correct in his statements, than the journalist who is reporting his lecture. The journalist can only make fun of it, which he is free to do, since he has still the public behind him—thanks be!—in his prejudice against psychiatry and criminal psychology. The tone in which the report is written need not therefore concern you; the journalist, as I said, is not a man of much ability and can do no more than ridicule the whole thing. He has, however, no idea that his jests are a hit at modern science rather than at Wulffen! For if the science upon which Wulffen takes his stand were honestly adhered to, its representatives in other fields of knowledge would have to speak in the very same way as he does. And now let us read this press notice—for it really does concern us. It is entitled: “Schiller according to the Psycho-Analysis of the Public Prosecutor”. It should rather be called: “Friedrich Schiller, according to the Psycho-Analysis of present-day Psychology or Psycho-pedagogy”.

Last Friday, 29th February, I924, the Public Prosecutor Dr. E. W. Wulffen, a man known and respected far outside his immediate profession, took severely to task the penniless Swabian, Fritz Schiller (at one time Professor of History in Jena and the author of several revolutionary writings) in a brilliantly constructed lecture on “Criminal Psychology and Friedrich Schiller”. He achieved among the large number of listeners belonging to the Zürich Lawyers' Union a success all the more lasting because, on account of death, the accused was unable to be present at the meeting; the utmost he could do was perhaps to point with an invisible hand to what he had written during his lifetime.

Wullfen's arguments were most effective. The proofs adduced were irrefutable. The lecturer had even confiscated—I mean, had read—Schiller's private correspondence. And, lo and behold, thanks to Dr. Wulffen's help, scales fell from the eyes of the audience. Our people's love for Schiller, youth's adoration for him, were laid bare in all their ugly roots. Schiller is popular, it seems, on account of his innate cruelty which makes wallowing in the gloomy splendor of the horrible come natural to him, and causes him to write ballads like “Die Kindesmörderin”, etc., which are evidence enough of a cruelty that is continually intensified by Schiller's struggle with his own sick body. And then his tragedies, which stimulate fear and compassion in the spectators why are they so effective on the stage? Because they appeal to latent criminal qualities in the public and enable the audience to enjoy a safe outlet for dangerous propensities ...

It is true that in spite of this overwhelming load of proof Wulffen concedes to Schiller certain redeeming features. There is his feeling for freedom, which, nursed by the suppression he laboured under in earlier years (associated, as it was in him, with an inferiority complex) suddenly flares up in “The Robbers”, and is then gradually purified and ennobled, until finally in “Wilhelm Tell” we have the glorification of a revolution that is founded on order. For the rest, Schiller's attitude to good and evil is seen to be the outcome of aesthetic points of view.

Thus are the arteries which feed Schiller's poetry quickly detected by Dr. Wulffen and defined; they are—cruelty and the urge for freedom. The struggle with these impulses, which Schiller lived out in his poetry—this it was, so we are assured, that led him along the path to perfection.²

So there was, then, in Schiller an “inferiority complex”—in his childhood. It is quite important to realise what the outcome would be if modern science were to enter the realm of pedagogy, and teachers were then to give lessons in the manner of this science—let us say, in a school where some young Schiller was among the pupils. You must envisage quite exactly what this would mean.

If you think of what was said yesterday, you will see that, just as we have to take, in other illnesses, the symptoms, that help us to find the right orientation, and then lead back from these to the real facts of the illness, so we must start in our present investigation from the manifestations of the life of soul, from thinking, feeling and willing, and trace our way back until we can “behold” the real condition of the patient. We saw that the origin, for example, of an abnormality of soul, which showed itself in the patient's being unable to pass from intention to deed, had to be sought in some subtle abnormality of the liver, and that the knowledge of this connection must form the starting point for our treatment, both educational and therapeutic.

And now, before we can pass on to consider the practical side in detail, we must look back once again at the life of soul of the child. We have seen how during the first seven years the body presents a model, and the individuality works out in accordance with this model the second body, which functions between the change of teeth and puberty. If the individuality is stronger than the inherited qualities, the child will overcome these—more or less—in the course of changing his teeth; his individuality will then be apparent in his whole life of soul, and will manifest also externally in his bodily nature. If, however, the individuality of the child is weak, it will be overcome by the inherited characteristics; it will give, as it were, such close attention to the model that a slavish copy of the same will be visible in the body. And then one can rightly speak of inherited characteristics. For between the change of teeth and puberty everything is as it results from the individuality; the reason why it can happen that inherited characteristics show themselves at all during this period, is because the individuality has been to that extent too weak to overcome them and follow its own line of direction in accordance with karma. What works in the individuality as the real impulse of karma shows itself overpowered in such a case by the inherited characteristics.

Now at this point we must observe—and it will also provide us with what I may describe as a symptomatology of more general application—we must observe how thinking is related in its development to the development of will, in the child. We saw yesterday that there is a certain sense in which we have to look upon thinking, feeling and willing as no more than symptoms. We saw that thinking, as it expresses itself in the superficial soul-life, has behind it a synthesizing activity which operates in the construction and organisation of the brain; and then we saw how behind expressions of will is an analytical activity which underlies the organs—underlies indeed our whole metabolism-and-limbs man, keeping the organs separate and distinct one from another.

To begin with, let us consider thinking, with the synthesizing activity of the brain, that underlies it. We must understand clearly what thoughts really are. Thoughts, as we know, enter the organism of the child, as it were, in snatches, bit by bit. Even the grown person has around him only in scattered fragments, so to speak, all that man is capable of thinking. One person will have a great wealth of thoughts, another will have less. But now, what are thoughts?

The modern view, which tends to degenerate into the conclusions you find in people like Wulffen, imagines that thoughts come into existence gradually in the human being, as he progresses in his development, and that when he succeeds in having thoughts that “answer” in the world, that fit in all right with the world, then these thoughts he has evolved, of course, out of himself. But if we investigate, with anthroposophical understanding, the being of man, we shall never succeed in discovering in him anything from which thoughts can arise. All investigations which set out to discover where thoughts could originate in man are, in the eyes of Spiritual Science, no more sensible than if someone who had a jug of milk given him every morning were to begin one day to ponder, in his cleverness, how the china of which the jug is made produces the milk. It might conceivably happen that he had never observed how the milk does get into the jug; but if he could start wondering how the milk manages to ooze out of the china, we should take him for a simpleton indeed. To assume such a possibility in regard to a milk jug is obviously to adopt a hypothesis which leads to an absurdity. And yet, in regard to thinking, science makes this very hypothesis; science is just as stupid, every bit as stupid as the fellow we have imagined. For when we set out to investigate with all the means afforded by Spiritual Science (and we have been speaking of these now for more than twenty years), we find nothing at all in the human organisation that could possibly produce thoughts. There is simply nothing there capable of doing it. Just as the milk must be poured into the jug in order to be in the jug, so for thought to be in man, they must come into him. And whence do they come—for the life we are considering, between birth and death? Where are thoughts? We can investigate the question of where milk comes from; we ought also to be able to discover where thoughts are. Where then shall we look for these thoughts.

We are surrounded by the physical world. But we have around us also the etheric world, from which, as you know, our own etheric body is taken, immediately before we descend to physical incarnation. The etheric body of man comes from the cosmic ether, which is all around us in every direction. Now it is this cosmic ether, my dear friends, that is the bearer of the thoughts. The cosmic ether, which is common to all, carries within it the thoughts; there they are within it, those living thoughts of which I have repeatedly spoken in our anthroposophical lectures, telling you how the human being participates in them in pre-earthly life before he comes down to Earth. There, in the cosmic ether, are contained all the living thoughts there are; and never are they received from the cosmic ether during the life between birth and death. No; the whole store of living thought that man holds within him, he receives at the moment when he comes down from the spiritual world—when, that is, he leaves his own living element, his own element of living thought, and descends and forms his ether body. Within this ether body, within that which is the building and organising force in man, are the living thoughts; there they are, there they still are.

If we have here the symptomatic life of soul—thinking, feeling and willing—and here behind, the real life of soul, then the thoughts constitute a part of this real life of soul: and these thoughts which we take from the universal cosmic ether build up in us, first of all, our brain, and then in the wider sense, our whole nerves-and-senses system. For it is the living thinking that forms our brain—forming it into an organ of demolition, an organ that deals with matter in a way we might describe somewhat as follows.

When we look out upon our environment, we have around us the world of earthly substance, in all its various processes and ways of working. These processes, which in Nature are living processes, are gradually broken down by the activity of the living thinking, so that here—in the brain—a continual demolition is going on; the processes—which are, as I said, Nature processes—are arrested. Thus, in the brain, a beginning is actually made in the direction of a stoppage of Nature processes; matter is continually being secreted and then falling away. The matter that has fallen away, the matter that has been excreted and become useless, is the nerves. And the nerves, arising in this way as a product of living thinking but with the life in them being perpetually killed all the time, become in consequence endowed with a faculty that resembles the faculty possessed by a mirror. They acquire the faculty of enabling the thoughts of the surrounding ether to be reflected in them; and this is the origin of subjective thinking, the superficial thinking which consists in reflected pictures, the thinking we carry within us between birth and death. Through the fact, therefore, that living thinking is active within us, we are enabled to hold up our nerves-and-senses system to the world like a mirror, and can then produce there pictures of the impressions that are living in the surrounding ether, and throw them back into our consciousness. This means that the thinking, and the forming of mental pictures, which belongs to the superficial life of soul is nothing else than the reflection of the thoughts that live in the cosmic ether.

When you compare yourself with your reflection in a mirror, you realise at once that you are something altogether different from that reflected picture. Similarly, you can compare thoughts with their reflections, and you will find that the latter are “dead” thinking, just as the picture of you in the mirror is dead, whilst you yourself, standing in front of it, are alive. There cannot ever be in the cosmic ether a distorted, an illogical or a deranged thought. Yet the thoughts that are contained in the ordinary, superficial life of soul are, as we have seen, reflections of the thoughts in the cosmic ether; how, then, does a deranged or senseless thought come about? How can it ever arise? The answer is, through the mirror not being in order. The whole process that originated in the structure of the brain has not succeeded in producing a perfect mirror. In order, therefore, to explain the presence of distorted thoughts, we have to go back to what takes place in the brain and the nerves-and-senses system, which the human being constructed for himself from the real living life of thought. It is most important to be clear from the outset that it is not the thoughts themselves that we can in any way assail; for the thought-content as such, the thoughts themselves, are in the cosmic ether in their full validity and truth.

We must make every endeavour to enable the pupil with whom we are dealing, who has been given into our charge, to find his right relation to this cosmic ether. We shall never do so unless we, as teachers, are permeated through and through with the feeling that the thoughts in all their rightness and in all the power of their livingness are contained in the cosmic ether, are present all the time in the cosmic ether. Without having ourselves this religious feeling towards the cosmos, we cannot possibly develop a right attitude towards the child. And the attitude, the whole relation that we bear to him, is what matters most of all. Let me explain why this is so.

What is it that is influencing the child, and what is it that is living in the child, when he gets distorted thoughts? And what is able then to work from the teacher upon the child? What can the teacher do? From all that I have said, you will be able to see that in such a child the etheric body has not been formed in the right way. When the human being is descending from pre-earthly existence, there are of course, at that moment, as always, only right and true thoughts in the cosmic ether; but these right thoughts have to be received by the being who is providing himself, clothing himself, with an ether body. And now let us go back to our milk jug. We cannot accuse the milk of having a wrong form or shape: it is obliged to take on the form that the jug can give it. If we have a sensible vessel, then our milk will be properly and sensibly “housed” in it. But suppose it occurred to an eccentric person to make a milk jug like an hour glass with the waist stopped up. [A drawing was made.] He pours in the milk and it cannot get down to the bottom. And yet, in reckoning up the cubic content of the jug, he reckons in all this part down below! I have given you an extreme case. All sorts of mistakes are, in fact, possible. One could, for example, make a jug that very easily tips over, and more often than not, the milk is spilt. The point is, of course, that the way in which the milk will be in the jug, will depend upon what the jug is like. And the way in which the ether body with all its livingness will be in the human being, will depend upon how the human being—as he arrives from pre-earthly existence, bringing with him his karma—is able to receive into himself the ether body. It is important to recognise this and have it in our consciousness.

It can actually happen that a human being, owing to his karma, arrives from pre-earthly existence with something that is not at all unlike this very inadequate milk jug. For his karma may not enable him, for instance, to permeate the metabolism-and-limbs system properly. This system will then be poorly provided with etheric body. The child will have in the region of the head a properly developed etheric body, and in the region of the abdomen and limbs, a poorly developed etheric body. In these parts he will lack the formative thoughts. It is actually most important for you to know that in very many cases of backward children we have to do with an imperfectly developed etheric body. And we teachers must ask ourselves the question: What is it that can influence the etheric body of a growing child?

Here we encounter a law, of the working of which we have abundant evidence throughout all education. It is as follows. Any one member of the being of man is influenced by the next higher member (from whatever quarter it approaches) and only under such influence can that member develop satisfactorily. Thus, whatever is to be effective for the development of the physical body must be living in the etheric body—in an etheric body. Whatever is to be effective for the development of an etheric body must be living in an astral body. Whatever is to be effective for the development of an astral body must be living in an ego; and an ego can be influenced only by what is living in a spirit-self. I could continue, and go beyond the spirit-self, but there we should be entering the field of esoteric instruction.

What does this mean in practice? If you find that the etheric body of a child is in some way weakened or deficient, you must form, you must modify, your own astral body in such a way that it can work upon the etheric body of the child, correcting and amending it. We could, in fact, make a diagram to demonstrate how this principle works in education:

The teacher's etheric body (and this should follow quite naturally as a result of his training) must be able to influence the physical body of the child, and the teacher's astral body the etheric body of the child. The ego of the teacher must be able to influence the astral body of the child. And now you will be rather taken aback, for we come next to the spirit-self of the teacher, and you will be thinking that surely the spirit-self is not yet developed. Nevertheless, such is the law. The spirit-self of the teacher must work upon the ego of the child. And I will show you how, not only in the ideal teacher, but often in the very worst possible teacher, the teacher's spirit-self—of which he is himself not yet in the least conscious—influences the child's ego. Education is indeed veiled in many mysteries.

What concerns us at the moment is that the weakened etheric body of the child must receive the influence of the teacher's health-giving astral body. How is the astral body of the educator to be “educated” for this purpose? Self-educated too, as it needs must be today! For Anthroposophy can at present do no more than give suggestion and stimulus; we cannot right away establish colleges and arrange courses for all the necessary branches of training. The astral body of the teacher must be of such a character and quality that he is able to have an instinctive understanding for whatever debilities there may be in the child's etheric body. Say, the child's etheric body is weak and deficient in the region of the liver. As a result, we shall notice that the child stops short at intention, he cannot get beyond it; it constantly happens that he has an impulse of will, but the impulse comes to a standstill before the actual deed. If the teacher can feel his way right into this situation (where the child's will ought to push through to deed), if he is able himself to feel the stoppage that the child feels, and able at the same time out of his own energy to evoke in his soul a deep compassion with the child's experience, then he will develop in his own astral body an understanding for the situation the child is in, and will gradually succeed in eliminating in himself all subjective reaction of feeling when faced with this phenomenon in the child. By ridding himself of every trace of subjective reaction, the teacher educates his own astral body.

Let us say, the child wants to walk, has the will to walk, but cannot. This can become a pathological condition, can become quite conspicuous; it may even happen that at last the child comes to be described as “incapable of learning to walk”. But we will suppose that the condition shows itself in only a slight degree. So long as the teacher meets the situation with any kind of bias, so long as it can arouse in him irritation or excitement—so long will he remain incapable of making any real progress with the child. Not until the point has been reached where such a phenomenon becomes an objective picture and can be taken with a certain calm and composure as an objective picture for which nothing but compassion is felt—not until then is the necessary mood of soul present in the astral body of the teacher. Once this has come about, the teacher is there by the side of the child in a true relation and will do all else that is needful more or less rightly. For you have no idea how unimportant is all that the teacher says or does not say on the surface, and how important what he himself is, as teacher.

How may one set about acquiring this kind of understanding? By developing greater and greater interest in the mystery of the human organisation. All sense of its mystery—in fact, any real interest in the organisation of man—is completely lacking in present-day civilisation; consequently, one thing present-day civilisation does not know ...³

Suppose someone is suffering from severe mental disease. How is that regarded in our time? For obviously whatever is done in such a case has to be done within the civilisation of the present day; there is no alternative. This will mean that while we must do our best to come to an understanding of such illnesses, we cannot expect to be able at once in each single case to use methods and treatment that accord with the picture we have in our understanding. It is, on this account, very important that there shall be no fanatics among you. It will not do for you to set out on this work of Curative Education in a fanatical spirit, not knowing how to judge the scope and bearing of some truth, when it is a question of applying esoteric knowledge in practical life. For this reason the circles within which these truths are communicated cannot be too carefully restricted; for people of the present day have not the insight to see why, in very many cases, it is quite impossible to follow at once some particular guidance that has been given. We must know the truth, and then try to act wisely and sensibly, applying the guidance where it can be applied, as in the education of backward children, within the given limits. In dealing with adult mental patients you will not be able to apply the guidance in the same way; for something extraneous comes in there—namely, the law. And the moment you have to reckon with factors other than those that arise out of the nature of the case, the moment you have to do with hard and fast laws, the thing becomes unworkable. For what the law lays down is general; it cannot be individual in its application, it has to be general. So far as treatment of abnormal human beings is concerned, the law is a veritable poison. It is there in the world, however, and you have to reckon with it. The things of which we are speaking here cannot be applied fanatically; you have to let them percolate into life, in ways that are possible and practicable.

Let us suppose then that you have this person who is said to be suffering from grave mental illness. You can, as is generally done nowadays, describe the case psychographically—that is, describe the symptoms. According to the view of the case that is certain to be adopted in our present-day civilisation, the person does the maddest possible things. But people do not stop to consider what they may have before them in this mad person! As a matter of fact, it may quite well be that the person who is now passing his life in complete insanity has had in earlier ages a very significant incarnation, he may at one time have been a genius. But suppose this manifestation of genius came two incarnations ago and then, in the intermediate incarnation, the man was imprisoned when comparatively young, and had from that moment on no contact with the world. He passed then through the gate of death, and lived on further in the spiritual world. Then he appeared again on Earth—insane. Because what he took in during that incarnation remained completely outside the field of experience of the physical and the etheric body, he had not the opportunity of elaborating it, and therefore returns to incarnation in entire ignorance of the interior of the human body. He cannot get into the physical body and ether body, he remains outside them all the time; and so, being unable to make use of the physical body, he is, you see, insane. His manner of life is such that we shall not be able to see him as he really is, until we look right away from his physical and his etheric body and give our attention to his astral body and ego.

Let us now imagine, we have such a person before us in childhood. There will be a constant effort on the part of the child to come into the physical and into the etheric body, and then again, he will experience a resistance, he will be pushed back. It may very well be that owing to the predetermined conditions some of the organs are not in order. Imagine you have here physical body and etheric body.⁴ The astral body and ego want to come in. And they do come in, everywhere, but here they do not enter in a proper and orderly manner. They have to make a special effort. Every time, they want, let us say, to penetrate liver and stomach, the astral body and ego have to make an effort. And now this effort works itself out—regulates itself, as it were, in a curious way. A kind of rhythm is set up, an abnormal rhythm. At one moment the ego strengthens itself, then it become feeble again. So that we find in the child this alternation—first, a strong liver-stomach feeling, and then, before this has come to consciousness, a weakened liver-stomach feeling. The child oscillates continually between the two. And the consequence is, he has not, as it were, time to make use of his body in the so-called normal way. For he could make use of the body only if this rhythm were not present and astral body and ego were able to take possession of the several organs quietly.

How can we learn to recognise and understand such a condition? It will help us to do so, if we look at the whole process in somewhat the following way.

Imagine you have before you a clever man, an exceedingly clever man—but a man who is definitely not a watchmaker. It happens one day that he is in the predicament of having to mend his watch, which has stopped. Instead of mending it, he completely ruins it. That does not gainsay the fact that he is an exceedingly clever man. He fails, not from lack of cleverness, but because he has not sufficient mastery of the situation. Similarly genius may, under certain circumstances, fail and come to grief, when descending from pre-earthly to earthly existence. Only, in this case the failure is not so quickly finished with, but lasts for the whole of that earthly life.

There is a real call to us here to look with love upon the soul-and-spirit nature that descends from the spiritual world, to look with love upon it, even where it comes to expression in so-called insanity—yes, to look with love upon the very details of the insanity. And then we shall feel impelled to go beyond the symptomatology that can furnish a psychography of the case, and look rather at the karmic connections into which this insane human being comes. We shall have to observe his relation with the outer world, and note carefully the situations of life into which he comes, for these are incredibly interesting. And then, watching all this objectively, we shall find that insanity is really something that can arouse our deepest interest. We shall see in it a distorted image of the highest wisdom; it will be for us like the opening of a door from the direction of the spiritual world—though the spiritual world has then to come in through a rather twisted and contorted passage of entry! And as our interest in the whole process grows—without of course becoming sensational—the particular abnormalities will become deeply and inwardly interesting to us. Suppose an abnormality gets hold of the physical and the ether body and a rhythm such as I have described is set up: first, a powerful development of astral and ego activity, so that physical body and etheric body are taken hold of strongly; then, that is all reversed, and the activity of astral and ego becomes weak again. Suppose there is this rhythm, and we come to the point of being able to observe what happens, first in the moment when firm hold is taken of the physical and etheric bodies, and then again in the moment when this hold is weakened. If we are able also to enter into the experience the child goes through inwardly, entering into it with a great capacity of love, it can come about that, as time goes on, the rhythm is overcome, and that then as a result of it all, liver and stomach are gripped with quite unusual intensity—and behold, the child begins to do things that are a manifestation of genius! Otherwise the condition has to remain as it is until these things can be adjusted in the further life between death and a new birth. For it is indeed true, and we must be conscious of the fact: in educating backward children we are intervening in a process which in the normal course of development—were there no intervention, or were there misguided intervention—would find its fulfilment only when the child had passed through the gate of death and come to birth again in the next life. We are making, that is to say, a deep intervention in karma. Whenever we give treatment to a backward child, we are intervening in karma. And it goes without saying, we must intervene in karma in this way. For there is such a thing as right intervention. Certain prejudices in these matters need to be overcome. How necessary that is, let me demonstrate to you from another example.

In the Agricultural Course at Koberwitz,⁵ at which one or two of those here were also present, I indicated guiding lines for agriculture. An elderly farmer attended the course, who is also an old member of the Society. Throughout the whole of the course he could not rid himself of a feeling of misgiving; it kept coming out in the discussions. Again and again he would say: “But if we do that, we shall be using occult means for practical ends; won't that be steering too close to the sphere of ethics? Could not these truths be applied also in a wrong way?” He was never able to get rid of this scruple; he was always suspicious of black magic in the application. Needless to say, these things do become black magic when they are not handled as they ought to be handled. And it was for this reason that I said once on that occasion quite explicitly: “A high standard of morality is absolutely essential in dealing with these matters; therefore I assume at the outset that those who attend this course attend it on purely ethical grounds, desirous only to serve humanity and help agriculture. The Agricultural Experimental Circle has accordingly to be regarded also as an ethical circle, which definitely sets itself the task of seeing that the truths are applied in the right and proper way.” The Gods use magic, and the difference between white and black magic consists only in this: in white magic one intervenes in a moral, selfless way, and in black magic in an immoral, selfish way. There is no other difference. And so, in the nature of the case, since all talk about education of backward children is mere talk and leads to nothing, obviously this education can only be effective when it uses measures which are capable also of immoral application. And that brings us once again to the imperative need for a deep sense of responsibility.

If only one could count upon a more serious sense of responsibility, one could at this time do a great deal. I must, however, frankly admit that silence has to be maintained today about many things, just because conscientiousness is not sufficiently developed. When people hear that this can be done, and that can be done—they want to do it! An eagerness to be doing something—that they have. But that is not enough. As soon as it comes to the doing of a real deed, and no mere continuation of some old impulse, as soon as it is a question of bringing in new impulses from the spiritual world—and that is what is needed, new impulses from the spiritual world!—then it becomes imperative to demand a high standard of conscientiousness and responsibility. And there is only one way in which these can be awakened in us, namely, that we have knowledge of what is really involved. Thus, we must know that in the education of backward children it is a matter of deep intervention in karmic activities which would otherwise come to fulfilment between death and the next birth. It is actually so: what is done by us now, intervenes in the work of God which would otherwise be brought to fulfilment at a later time. If we are not satisfied for this to remain merely a piece of theoretical knowledge, if we are ready to let it work powerfully upon our minds and hearts, then we shall find ourselves continually faced with the alternative of doing what has to be done or of leaving it undone. Let us never forget that every step taken at the prompting of the spiritual world leads us into a situation where we have to look right and left, and make a new decision—and these decisions that are continually facing us have to be made with courage, with inner courage of life.

In ordinary life, man is protected from the necessity of this inner courage, for in ordinary life he can simply continue doing what he has been accustomed to do. He can jog on in conformity with the motives and standards that are so deeply rooted in him, taking for granted that these are correct, and feeling no necessity to adopt new ones. This answers quite well for the life that proceeds merely in the physical world. But when we come to working out of spiritual sources, we are inevitably confronted, daily and hourly, with decisions; in regard to each single action, we stand face to face with the possibility of either doing it or leaving it undone—or else maintaining an entirely neutral attitude. And the decisions require courage. This inner courage is the very first thing needed, if we want to accomplish anything in the domain of Curative Education. And it can be aroused in us if we hold continually before our minds the greatness of that which we have undertaken. We must be constantly thinking: “I am doing something which generally God does in the life between death and new birth.” The fact that you know this is of untold significance. Receive it as a meditation. To be able to think it, is most important. If we bring it before us every day in meditation—as one says a prayer every day—if we place it there before our soul day by day, it will endow our astral body with the character and tone that we need to give it if we are to deal in the right way with backward children.

It is really only possible for us to go on in these lectures and speak together of further things, if we are ready to acknowledge that we must in this way prepare ourselves for the task before us. Therefore, let us resolve to take what has been said as a necessary introduction, providing the groundwork for what follows; and let us ponder it with all earnestness. For in approaching tasks like those of which we are speaking here, it is indeed a matter of undergoing preparation of mind and heart.

• 1. Erich Wulffen, b. 1862, author and criminologist.
• 2. From Neue Züricher Zeitung, No. 342, 7th March, 1924.
• 3. A gap occurs here in the text.
• 4. A drawing was made.
• 5. A course held at the Estate of Count Carl Keyserlink near Breslau, 7th – 16th June, 1924.