Steiner's cosmic poem of twelve seven-line strophes, choreographed in eurythmy so twelve performers form the zodiac and seven move within it as the planets.
The Twelve Moods in Anthroposophy is a cosmic poem Rudolf Steiner gave to his first eurythmists in 1915, twelve strophes of seven lines each that he called the poem of the world. Set out in the working English translation of Eurythmy: The Revelation of the Speaking Soul (GA 277, lectures of 1915 onward), the cycle is choreographed so that twelve performers form the zodiac while seven represent the planets moving within it. Each constellation eurythmises its strophe; the Sun describes its whole circle at every strophe, carrying the planets onward, and Steiner tied the Sun's circuit to the course of the day, with Aries at sunrise, Cancer at midday, Leo at three in the afternoon. It belongs to the crown sphere of the I-Being, where the human listens for the speech of the cosmos itself.
In Steiner's Own Words
Then each constellation eurythmises its strophe. Aries begins; the planets, in the following sequence: Sun, Venus, Mercury, Mars, Jupiter, Saturn, Moon, each eurythmise one verse-line. The planets, and if possible the zodiacal images as well, hold their concluding gesture. The sun describes its whole circle at each of the twelve strophes, holding its concluding gesture and, at the end of each strophe, taking all the planets along into the next constellation. Let it further be pointed out that in 1915 Rudolf Steiner gave no other indications for the presentation of the "Twelve Moods"; yet he emphasised that the circuit of the sun has to do with the course of the day: Aries = sunrise, Cancer = midday, Leo = three o'clock in the afternoon.
What it Means Today
The clearest living account of how the Twelve Moods actually move sits in Werner Barfod's The Zodiac Gestures in Eurythmy (Floris Books, 2019, translated by Sally Lake-Edwards, with a foreword by Virginia Sease of the Goetheanum). Barfod studied eurythmy at the Goetheanum under Lea van der Pals, then directed the Eurythmy Academy in The Hague from 1969 to 2000, and he devotes a full chapter to Steiner's poem. He reads each of the twelve strophes as the gesture-language of one zodiacal sign, with the seven planetary performers carrying the vowels through the consonantal ring of the constellations. What in 1915 was a set of terse rehearsal notes becomes, in his hands, a practicable score that contemporary eurythmists can stand up and rehearse.
That recovery matters because the Twelve Moods is not a poem to be read so much as a poem to be inhabited. A reader meets twelve stanzas; a performer meets a turning cosmos, the Sun tracing its circle twelve times while the zodiac speaks and the planets answer.
Thalira synthesis: the Twelve Moods is best understood not as Steiner describing the heavens but as Steiner scoring them, so that a circle of human beings, by moving exactly, lets the zodiac and the planets speak through the body the sentence the cosmos is always saying.
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