Eurythmy was given to humanity for our age, as an art form and a sacred movement that accesses the true archetypal forces of health and healing. It opens the door for a deeper understanding of the forces that have made the Earth and the Human Being. My purpose in creating this website was to make it possible for as many people as possible to access these forces, especially in this world when so much has turned away from true understanding of the spiritual world.
As part of this service, I want to bring you thoughts that will help you understand the spiritual world better. In that spirit, throughout the twelve months I will bring to you essays about the human being and the stars, and specifically the 12 signs of the zodiac.
This work has an especially deep connection to the core of Eurythmy, for in Eurythmy, we can enter deeply into an experiential understanding of the different sounds of the zodiac. For each sign of the zodiac, we create a particular gesture with our bodies to allow that sign to come to expression. Out of this gesture there then unfolds the movement that expresses the sound that is born out of that sign.
In the twelve essays I will write, I intend to give a picture about the spiritual beings who are the guardians of the zodiacal circle and the planets. I will write about how the world of Nature and the sacred human being were created from these beings. I will describe, month by month, the nature of the zodiacal sign ruling that month, and I will go into depth to explain the relationship of these signs to the consonants of language, for when we speak any sound we draw upon the forces of the zodiac. Eurythmy is the powerful doorway that allows us to understand these cosmic-earthly forces.
And as I write, I will unapologetically write about the spiritual nature of the world and the human being. I will write of our etheric, astral bodies and our divine self-consciousness, for these present our direct connection to the higher worlds. Before I write my first article, however, I would like to prepare the ground.
Allow me, then, to begin with some seed thoughts.
In our present time, the vast majority of human beings are enchanted by the power of the sense world. Our thoughts, our plans, our desires, our work are all driven by our unconscious assumption that the world operates like a huge, super-intelligent machine. From this perspective, we are merely insignificant beings struggling to survive on a small grain of sand in the universe.
We can, however, choose to look at things from a very different perspective. Then, our view of creation looks very different. In the process, I am by no means advocating that we deny science, but rather that we seek for understanding on multiple levels and not on the one-dimensional mechanistic level.
Before our dimension ever existed, the universe was already unfolding itself in other realms. As humans, we were once embedded in the hearts and minds of far greater beings, analogous to the way that we now are hosts to countless other life-forms that live within us.
Through long cycles of evolution, time and space came into being. The universe evolved from its condition of pure Being, and as Mind developed, so also did matter. It became ever cooler, ever denser, and at last solidified into a material world, operating according to mechanical laws.
At long last, in this present earth-time, humans have been “born” out of the womb of the spirits that birthed us. We have become individual beings, each of us experiencing our separateness and isolated existence. This feeling of separation is both reality and illusion, for we are evolving through our separateness towards far greater experiences of oneness.
In this existence, it will be our journey to resurrect the light of creation by becoming conscious. We, the youngest children of Creation, are the true stewards of this world we inhabit. And our challenge will be to do grow to our blessed future through loving this world of appearances, learning from it how it came into being, and treating it with devotion and care so that all of Creation takes a step forwards through our participation.
Our ability to take part in this resurrection can begin with realizing that the entire world of the senses is in fact a “frozen word.” This characterization stems from ancient mythologies and philosophies that spoke of the Creator Being as one who spoke, pouring out His/Her/Its inmost thoughts and dreams and will, and thereby creating time and space and everything that has ever become, everything that will ever be.
In this sense, we human beings could be described as being the final recipient of this Word, living in a world in which the speaking Creator is no longer experienced. It seems to the naïve modern mind that we can explain everything that we perceive through our normal senses through purely material thinking. We are dazzled, we are blinded, we are chained in this world.
There are, however, other ways to look, to think, to understand. And when we do that, we can perceive another dimension of reality “just on the other side of the physical world”. And yes, we have the capacity to experience this other dimension through becoming more sensitive for the dynamic behind the physical sense impressions.
It is this that has led modern science to begin talking about field theory, about systems, about interrelatedness. There we begin to perceive the realm of the etheric, the super-sensible life-body of the earth and of the human being. This is where we meet the ever-changing, sculpturally active forces of the word, even as we know them in eurythmy as the movements of the sounds of language.
As we begin to peel back the veil of appearances, we come to even higher realms, to the astral sphere, where we perceive the origin of the cosmic-creative thoughts that hold the archetypes, the why, what and how of all the shapes that have come into being. Finally, we enter the realm of pure being, in which he archetypes are recognized as the loftiness of spiritual beings. In eurythmy we know these archetypes as the actual beings of the different sounds, and the movements we make enable us to embody their higher will.
The number of stars appears to be infinite. The sun and the planets move, however, through a proscribed path in the starry sky. The stars that describe their circuit is known as the zodiac, and this zodiac is the external body of the archetypal forces that tell the entire story of our earth-life.
In the months to come, I will write twelve essays, one dedicated to each of the twelve signs, beginning with Aries, the Ram, the first-born of the signs.
These ideas are drawn from a lifetime of living with the study of Anthroposophy and Eurythmy, and draw extensively from the work of Rudolf Steiner.
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Aries, the Ram