The prevailing colour of a room decides which elementary beings the etheric body relates to, so colour is chosen for the work the room does.
What is Room Colour and the Etheric Body?
Room Colour and the Etheric Body in Anthroposophy is Rudolf Steiner's teaching that the prevailing colour of an interior decides which class of spiritual beings the human etheric body enters into relation with, so that colour must be chosen for the work a room is meant to do. Steiner set this out in Stuttgart on 15 October 1911, in a lecture printed in Images of Occult Seals and Columns: Munich Congress 1907 (GA 284), speaking inside a hall he had covered in deep ultramarine. He contrasted that choice with the red used for the Munich Congress hall of 1907: red for a short festive occasion demanding a strong decision of will, ultramarine for a workroom given over to study repeated week after week. What a trained clairvoyant does knowingly by immersing himself in a colour, the untrained etheric body does unknowingly, so surroundings either assist its forces or leave it fighting them.
Room colour and the etheric body belong together in Steiner's account of interiors. He treats a painted wall as a threshold rather than as decoration: the colour we sit inside opens the etheric body toward one company of elementary beings and closes it against another. Opaque wall colour reaches beings spread out in space. Transparent window colour reaches beings at work in the mineral, plant, and animal kingdoms.
In Steiner's Own Words
In a red room, other beings become visible than is a blue room, when one penetrates to them by means of colour. We may ask: what happens if one is not clairvoyant? That which the clairvoyant does consciously is done unconsciously by the etheric body of a person if it is not clairvoyantly trained; it enters into a certain relation with the same beings. The consequence of this is nothing less than that, according to our surroundings, we come in touch with one or another kind of spiritual beings. Now, further, it is a case of being able to establish a favourable or unfavourable connection with the beings that surround us.
What it Means Today
The clearest working continuation of this 1911 indication is the wall treatment of Waldorf classrooms. The first Waldorf School opened in Stuttgart on 7 September 1919, founded by Emil Molt of the Waldorf-Astoria cigarette factory with Steiner as its pedagogical director, in the same city where the ultramarine lecture had been given eight years earlier. Its walls were not flat-painted. Waldorf schools took up lazure, the translucent wash technique developed for the interior of the first Goetheanum, in which thin veils of pigment are floated over a white ground so that light travels into the layers and comes back coloured instead of stopping at a coated surface. The sequence runs by developmental phase rather than by occasion: warm rose and peach in the youngest grades, moving through orange, yellow, and green, arriving at blue and violet in the upper school. That is a change of axis worth naming. Steiner in 1911 chose colour by the work a room does and how often that work repeats. Waldorf practice chose colour by the age of the person the room holds.
Thalira synthesis: lazure sits exactly in the gap the Stuttgart lecture left open, because it is neither the opaque wall that meets beings spread out in space nor the coloured window that meets beings shaping the kingdoms of nature, and the lecture does not settle what a wall behaving partly like a window does to the etheric body. The smaller claim needs no clairvoyance to test. Give a room used for one repeated task a calm deep colour and watch whether the work settles, and keep strong red for the room where something is decided once and then carried.
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