The Arts: Eurythmy, Music & Architecture

Steiner's claim that art is itself a way of knowing: the artist and the spiritual investigator draw from one and the same source.

Steiner's teaching that the arts are not human inventions but a sacred inheritance, each art preserving the memory of one cosmic Mystery-stage of evolution.

The form-creating power that rises unconsciously in the artist, which Steiner read as a dim first foretaste of Imagination, the opening stage of spiritual cognition.

Steiner's reading of Comenius, whose Temple of Pansophia carried the old mystery-wisdom into the modern age of the intellect as universal education.

Steiner's classic example of a genuine seer whose physical-world habits of mind falsified what he saw in the spiritual world.

Steiner's tone eurythmy: the art that makes the inner experience of music visible as movement of the whole human being.

Steiner's movement-art in which each sound of speech, every consonant and vowel, is shown as a precise gesture of the whole moving body.

In Steiner's spiritual science, genuine folk tales that rise from the soul's deepest supersensible experiences and feed a perpetual hunger of the human soul.

The Swiss physician-philosopher (1780 to 1866) whom Steiner names as a forgotten forerunner of spiritual science, and who himself reached for the word Anthroposophie.

Steiner's split of colour into four image colours that picture something (black, white, green, peach-blossom) and three lustre colours that shine from within (yellow, blue, red).

The Goerlitz shoemaker-mystic Steiner reads as a genuine spontaneous theosophist, whose vision of light, darkness, and seven source-spirits prefigures spiritual science.

The ninth-century Irish philosopher Steiner uses to show that the pre-modern soul thought with the etheric body, not the brain.

The two soul-moods music gained with the third: major as the soul turning outward in elation, minor as the soul turning inward toward sorrow.

The Egyptian preservation of the body, which Steiner read as an initiate-planned measure that bound souls to matter and seeded modern materialism.

The medieval cardinal Steiner names as the thinker who stood one step short of turning the learning of his age into knowledge of the spirit.

Steiner's building style in which a structure is shaped like a living organism, every form following inner necessity instead of the repeated right angle.

The Renaissance physician-initiate Steiner read as a bridge between folk-healing instinct and spiritual science, who looked for illness in the etheric body behind the organ.

The flesh-tone of living human skin, which Steiner named the living image of the soul, a colour found nowhere fixed in outer nature.

The anthroposophical study of sculpture and the plastic arts, where carved and modelled form reveals the spirit working in the human body rather than copying outward nature.

The Spanish Carmelite mystic Steiner reads as legitimate Catholic mysticism, and names Spiritual Science the rightful continuation of his path into the spiritual world.

The Corinthian ornament that Steiner read not as a copied plant but as the painted sun-earth palmette made plastic, a felt etheric gesture.

Painting worked out of colour itself, where the surface is treated as inwardly luminous rather than drawn and filled in.

Steiner's art of the word raised above prose, sounding the spirit through epic, lyric, and dramatic speech.

Steiner's teaching that the task of art is to build a bridge between the earthly world and the spiritual world.

Carved wooden figures Steiner designed to show each speech-sound as one threefold whole of movement, feeling, and character, each painted in three colours.

Steiner's account of how a single musical tone is felt not in the air but inwardly, in the ether, by the whole human being.

Rudolf Steiner's double-domed wooden building at Dornach (1913 to 1922), the first home of anthroposophy and the founding work of organic architecture, destroyed by fire on New Year's Eve 1922.

Goethe's 1795 fairy tale, which Steiner read as a picture of the threefold social organism and the seed of his first Mystery Drama.

Steiner's teaching that music originates in the spiritual world the soul knows in sleep, and that audible tone is a remembered copy of it.

The musical fifth Steiner read as an older, outward way of hearing, where the soul felt lifted past its own body into the divine world.

In Steiner's spiritual science, the instant of dying, seen from the far side, is the most luminous, sun-like point of existence, remembered through all the years between death and rebirth.

Steiner's teaching that the cosmic forces causing physical death exist to implant the faculty of the Consciousness Soul, not merely to end life.

In Steiner's aesthetics, beauty is spirit made visible in the senses: the dawn through which the soul passes from feeling into knowledge.

The one interval where the higher tone merges back into its own prime, which Steiner heard as the soul finding its self again, lifted a level.

Steiner's account that each art is born when a human sense is freed from the body and reunited with its spiritual archetype.

The carved Christ-figure of the First Goetheanum, holding the balance between Lucifer above and Ahriman below, conceived as the synthetic centre of the whole building.

The seven carved capitals of Steiner's first Goetheanum, named Saturn to Venus, each form unfolding out of the one before it as the nave runs West to East.

Steiner's idea that every sacred building, from pyramid to Gothic church, is a portrait of the soul, and that the temple of the future takes the spirit-filled human being as its model.

The soul's three rhythmic encounters with the divine: nightly with the Genius, yearly with Christ, and once in life with the Father-Principle.

Souls not yet descended to birth who, in genuine ceremonial Lodges, communicate spiritual nature-wisdom to the living through the Earth-Spirits.

The life-forces a person who dies young never spends, which Steiner taught the spiritual world keeps and streams as strength into the living.

The musical wing of eurythmy, where pitch, beat and interval are made visible as movements of the human body.