Steiner's image for spiritual perception: seven planetary soul-moods are the vowels, and the twelvefold zodiac is the consonants, of one cosmic speech.
The Vowels and Consonants of the Cosmos is Rudolf Steiner's name, given in Helsinki in April 1912, for how the trained seer reads the spiritual world. Seven inner soul-moods, reflected by the etheric body, sound as the cosmic vowels. The twelvefold form of the physical body, spread into a living Zodiac, stands as the cosmic consonants. Where the two meet, a being such as one of the dead can speak.
In Steiner's Own Words
This cosmic sphere contains within itself, like seven planets, the vowels through which the dead can speak to us when we ourselves form the consonants through the twelve-foldness of our being. We can only come into connection with a being of the spiritual world by enfolding him, embracing him in such a way that this very act of enfolding forms the cosmic consonants; the being can then announce himself to us in the cosmic vowels. The cosmic vowels can then act together with the cosmic consonants which we ourselves have fashioned. Then reading and hearing work together. Thus, do we penetrate into a particular sphere in the spiritual world.
What it Means Today
The clearest living continuation of this teaching is eurythmy, the movement art Steiner began developing in 1912, the same year as the Helsinki lectures, and elaborated in his Dornach course of 24 June to 12 July 1924, published as Eurythmy as Visible Speech (GA 279). In eurythmy, every vowel and every consonant of human speech is given a precise bodily gesture: the vowels (A, E, I, O, U) carry the soul's inner moods, while the consonants imitate the forms of the outer world. A performer on the stage at the Goetheanum in Dornach, Switzerland, does in the body exactly what Steiner described the seer doing in the cosmos. The vowel reveals what lives within; the consonant sculpts the surrounding form.
The correspondence is not loose. Anthroposophical eurythmists map the seven principal vowels to the seven planets and the twelve consonant-gestures to the twelve zodiacal signs, the same planetary-vowel and zodiacal-consonant scheme GA 156 lays out. Eurythmy therapists, working since Ita Wegman's clinic in Arlesheim, use these sounded gestures as remedies, treating the moving body as an instrument tuned to the cosmic script. Thalira synthesis: read this way, eurythmy is not choreography set to poetry but a deliberate rehearsal of the very act of spiritual reading Steiner named in 1912, the human form learning, gesture by gesture, to spell the vowels and consonants of the cosmos.
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