Within Rudolf Steiner's collected works, volume 315, Eurythmy Therapy, preserves the course of eight lectures he gave at Dornach between the twelfth and the eighteenth of April 1921, addressed jointly to practising eurythmists and to physicians, together with a further lecture delivered at Stuttgart on the twenty-eighth of October 1922. Its subject is the therapeutic branch of eurythmy, often called curative eurythmy, the discipline in which the movements of the stage art are reshaped into a form of medical exercise. Where artistic eurythmy makes the silent gesture of speech visible for its own sake, the therapeutic form takes each vowel and consonant, slows it, repeats it, and directs it toward the restoration of a body that has fallen out of healthy balance. The lectures were spoken to a small working circle and demonstrated with a eurythmist present, so the text reads less as a treatise than as a spoken workshop in which idea and gesture unfold side by side.
Place in Steiner's Work
GA 315 belongs to the medical stream of Steiner's final years, the period in which spiritual science was reaching out of the lecture hall and into practical work with the sick. It stands close in time to the first medical course of 1920 and to Fundamentals of Therapy, the book Steiner wrote with the physician Ita Wegman, and it shares their governing picture of the human being as a fourfold organism of physical body, life body, soul, and individuality. Eurythmy itself had been born only in 1912, and its artistic form was still young when Steiner began to extend it toward healing. The 1921 course therefore marks a threshold, the moment at which a new art was asked to serve medicine directly.
The setting matters to the meaning. Steiner spoke these lectures at Dornach while the first Goetheanum still stood, to an audience that was itself divided between two callings, the eurythmists who knew the movements and the doctors who knew the patients, and the whole course is an attempt to build a working bridge between them. Neither group could carry the work alone. The physician had to learn to read a gesture, and the eurythmist had to learn to think about an organism, so that a therapeutic exercise could be prescribed and judged like any other treatment. This is why the volume presumes the reader already knows the ordinary eurythmy of the stage, for the healing exercises are described throughout as modifications of movements the eurythmist has learned elsewhere. Steiner is not teaching eurythmy from the beginning; he is turning a finished art on its axis toward medicine. The volume is best read alongside the artistic eurythmy lectures and the medical courses, each lighting the others, and its later reception owes much to Wegman and the clinicians who carried the indications into practice after Steiner's death.
Themes and Structure
The course opens from a single premise carried over from Steiner's view of language, that vowels express the inward life of feeling while consonants trace the outward form of things. In ordinary modern speech the bodily movement that once accompanied every sound has fallen silent and been drawn inward; therapeutic eurythmy gives that movement back to the body, and in doing so works upon the organism itself. Steiner treats the vowels first. Each is demonstrated as an armed gesture that is then lowered, repeated, and quickened, and each is bound to a definite physiological effect. The stretched I expresses the person as a whole and helps those whose gait is clumsy or whose circulation lags; the U serves those who tire in standing and have weak legs; the O, rounding the arms into a barrel, counters a tendency to grow heavy; the E, one arm laid across the other, strengthens the thin and inwardly weak; the A works against an overly appetitive, animal element in the constitution. Steiner sets these out plainly, as one exact fragment shows:
In the case of "I" we had those who cannot walk, with "U", we have those who cannot stand.
Steiner is careful about how each vowel is to be felt as well as performed. In the O the person is asked to sense not only the closing of a circle but the bending of it, as though a line were drawn along the breastbone to seal the form behind; in the E the covering of one arm by the other must be genuinely felt, not merely traced. He warns too about the temperament of the exercise. Children delight in the I and should be led to enjoy it, since it works upon the whole individuality, whereas the other vowel exercises may be met at first with the reluctance of a child taking medicine, and that reluctance does little harm. Feeling, in other words, is part of the prescription.
From the vowels the course turns to the consonants, which are approached not through inward feeling but through the beholding of form, since each consonant sculpts an outer shape. Steiner draws on his threefold picture of the human being, the nerve-sense pole in the head, the rhythmic middle of breath and heart, and the metabolic limb system below, and he insists that movements carried out for the lower man be done with only a third of the force used for the upper. He shows how vowel exercises may be extended from the arms into the legs and feet, how gestures can be placed in a deliberate sequence so that an arm movement, a foot movement, and an arm movement reinforce one another, and how each exercise must be measured against the constitution and even the mood of the person doing it. Practical indications recur throughout: irregular breathing, chronic headache and migraine, sluggish digestion, inattentiveness and drowsiness, difficulties in forming particular consonants, all are met with specific sequences. Woven through the technical detail is a constant note of caution, for Steiner regards these exercises as genuinely medical, to be prescribed with the same care as any remedy and never applied mechanically, and he stresses that those who most need a given exercise are often the very people least able to perform it, which is precisely why they must learn it. The later Stuttgart lecture rounds the course by setting therapeutic eurythmy within the wider hygienic and educational life it was meant to serve.
Glossary Terms from this Volume
The following entry in the Thalira glossary draws its primary source from GA 315. This study guide is its hub within the GA Work Library.
Where to Read It
You can read the full text of the course at the Rudolf Steiner Archive, where the English translation is available lecture by lecture. For the printed edition, whether new or secondhand, search the publisher's catalogue through SteinerBooks. We link to these sources rather than reproducing Steiner's words here, since this guide is our own account of the volume and is meant to send you to the original.
Continue Your Study
To follow the threads that run out from this volume, you might turn next to any of the following:
- Begin with the linked entry above, Eurythmy Therapy, then use the full Thalira glossary to trace related terms across Steiner's work.
- Return to the GA Work Library to place this course among the neighbouring volumes of Steiner's medical and artistic periods.
- Read the companion eurythmy volumes, especially the artistic addresses of GA 277, to see the stage art from which these healing exercises were drawn.
This study guide is an original work of exposition by Thalira Wisdom Temple. It describes and interprets GA 315; it does not reproduce Rudolf Steiner's text. Quoted material is cited to its source and kept to a minimum.