Steiner's description of eurythmy as the temple-dance art of the ancient Mysteries renewed for the present age in fully modern form.
The Renewal of the Ancient Temple Dance in Anthroposophy is Rudolf Steiner's account of eurythmy as a modern, spiritual-scientific renewal of the temple-dance art of the ancient Mysteries. In the old temple dance, priests read the round-dance of stars, planets, and the zodiac out of the heavens and imitated it in sacred human movement, bringing to revelation what the gods spoke down from above. Steiner first inaugurated eurythmy publicly at Dornach and set the idea down in GA 277, Eurythmy: The Revelation of the Speaking Soul (lecture of 25 August 1918). Where the older art read cosmic movement from the sky, eurythmy renews the same impulse for the present age, drawing the lawful gesture out of the invisible larynx and the etheric forces active in human speech and song. Talia Grose frames it as the temple dance turned inward: the heavens no longer copied from outside, but spoken from the human being.
The Renewal of the Ancient Temple Dance is the phrase Rudolf Steiner used to place eurythmy within the long history of sacred movement. He understood the new art as a renewal, in thoroughly modern form, of the temple-dance practiced in the older Mysteries, where human gesture imitated the round-dance of the stars and made visible what the gods spoke from heaven.
In Steiner's Own Words
With this we have the possibility of imagining that in eurythmy we renew that which in the most ancient Mysteries was temple dance: the imitation of the round-dance of the stars, the imitation of that which was spoken down from heaven to the human being through the gods. It was only necessary that, once again out of the element of spiritual knowledge, the possibility should be found in our time really to seek the inner sense of the corresponding gestures.
What it Means Today
The renewal Steiner spoke of in 1918 did not stay a theory. It became a working stage art, and the clearest line of descent runs through the Eurythmeum Stuttgart, the first eurythmy training centre, founded by Marie Steiner in 1923. From 1935 to 1991 it was directed by Else Klink (1907 to 1994), who in 1945 formed its resident stage ensemble and spent nearly six decades shaping eurythmy into a performing art that toured Europe and beyond. Klink's company, renamed the Else Klink Ensemble in 1992, is the institutional proof that the temple-dance idea is reproducible: gestures lawful enough to be taught, rehearsed, and performed before a public audience, not improvised mood.
For a contemporary onlooker, the bridge is easiest to grasp by what eurythmy refuses to be. It is not pantomime, not interpretive dance, not stylised acting. Each vowel and consonant has its own gesture, derived from the movement the invisible larynx already makes in speech, so a performed poem becomes visible speech rather than illustration. Thalira synthesis: where the ancient temple dancer faced outward and copied the heavens, the eurythmist faces inward and lets the cosmos speak through a body trained as a living larynx, which is why Steiner called the renewal modern rather than a revival. The old dance read the sky; the new one reads the human being, and finds the same starry order written there in the etheric forces of language.
Where to Read More