The Planet Dance in Anthroposophy

Glossary✦ Anthroposophy✦ 3 min read
The Planet Dance n.

A twelve-stanza poem Steiner wrote in 1915 for eurythmy, danced as sun, planets, and moon, with each stanza's last line reflecting its first.

The Planet Dance in Anthroposophy is the cosmic poem Rudolf Steiner wrote in 1915 for the first eurythmists at Dornach, published in German as Planetentanz and printed alongside the Twelve Moods in Truth-Wrought Words (GA 40). It runs to twelve verses of four lines each. The first line of every verse carries a sun-like quality and the last line answers it as the moon answers sunlight, so that each stanza closes by reflecting its own opening. Steiner also gave the poem a stage form. At its first performance on 23 August 1915 in Dornach, a single figure carried the sun through the twelve signs of the zodiac on an outer circle, eurythmists in a middle circle carried the planetary element, and one figure standing at the centre carried the moon. The Planet Dance is therefore a text and a choreography at once, and it belongs to the group repertoire of eurythmy.

The Planet Dance is a short cycle of twelve verses that Steiner gave to the eurythmists working at Dornach during the building of the first Goetheanum. Its subject is the solar system read as a set of relationships rather than as a mechanism: sun, planets, and moon, each with a movement and a speaking part, and the human question set inside them.

In Steiner's Own Words

There you will have seen that, portrayed precisely in movement, one is dealing with verses of four lines each and that the sun makes its twelve movements along an outer circle. There are also twelve verses, but on the outer circle the sun is represented as moving through the Zodiac. The eurythmists who stood in the middle circle expressed the planetary element, and the one who stood in the center expressed the lunar element, the moon. Thus you had sun, planets, and moon. And there was also the inner connection of the lines of verse and always the relationship of the first to the last line: the first line is always of a sun-like quality, the last of a moon-like quality. Just as the sunlight is reflected by the moon, so the last line is always a reflection.

Rudolf Steiner, Truth-Wrought Words (GA 40, address at the first eurythmy performance of the Planet Dance, Dornach, 23 August 1915)

What it Means Today

The claim buried in the title can be checked with your own eyes, given a few years and a clear sky. In A Little Book of Coincidence in the Solar System (Wooden Books, 2001), John Martineau plots where Earth and Venus stand at each of their conjunctions and draws the line between them. Because eight Earth years run very close to thirteen Venus years, the successive conjunctions do not scatter around the sky: they step through five places and close a five-petalled figure. Other pairings trace their own closed rosettes on the same principle. Nothing poetic has been added. The figure is what the ratio does, and it appears only when you plot relationship instead of position.

That is the seeing the Planet Dance trains. Steiner did not ask the eurythmists to imitate orbits. He asked one figure to carry the sun's path, others to hold the planetary movement in a middle circle, and one to stand at the centre as the moon, so an audience watched relationships move rather than bodies travel. The same instruction governs the verse: read a stanza's fourth line back against its first, and the reflection is the content.

Thalira synthesis: a planetary ratio and a stanza that ends by reflecting its own opening are one gesture in two materials, geometry in the first case and speech in the second, which is why Steiner could hand the astronomers' pattern to a stage and lose nothing.

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