Gravity & Levity in Human Movement by Olive Whicher

GRAVITY & LEVITY IN HUMAN MOVEMENT

by Olive Whicher

From the 1960 Edition of the Golden Blade
An Anthroposophical Journal
https://www.waldorflibrary.org/images/stories/Journal_Articles/GoldenBlade_1960.pdf

On a quiet evening, many years ago. a child was walking along the main street of a small town in southern England—a girl about eleven or twelve years old. Stars were shining, and the fresh smelling air of the countryside blew through the deserted street. The child walked with even, swinging strides, listening to her foot steps on the smooth stone pavement. ” I am going my way.” she thought. “And under my feet I feel the ground.” Then suddenly the wonderful feeling dawned: “Yes. I am walking upright! I am walking the earth with powerful strides and my head is held beneath the stars. I am carrying myself along!” It was a happy, unforgettable experience.

It is in ways such as this that our children experience themselves in their bodies, provided that for them the heavens are not darkened;
and when in later life they meet ideas such as ‘ Threefold Man’ or ‘the up-bearing ether-forces’, they often take them quite for granted.

Many years after I had first met Anthroposophia. and when I was able to entertain exactly formed thoughts about physical and ethereal spaces and about the forces of gravity and levity. I came to learn the Bothmer gymnastic exercises. The teacher responsible for gymnastics at Michael Hall had been called to the war; I had long since been devoted to the geometrical and mathematical research inspired by Rudolf Steiner. but now. as it seemed, destiny intended that at least for a while I should turn my attention to school gymnastics. So I began to learn the Bothmer exercises.

Count Bothmer previously a cavalry officer in the German Army, was called by Rudolf Steiner to the Waldorf School in Stuttgart in 1922. and given the task of developing new methods in physical education to accord with the aims and ideals of this pioneer school of the Rudolf Steiner School Movement. Some sixteen years later the Waldorf School was closed by order of the Nazi Government, and when it was reopened after the war. Bothmer was no longer on earth to help rebuild it.

During those years which were given to him. however, first with Rudolf Steiner’s active encouragement and help and then in the early years after his death. Bothmer worked with tremendous vigour and devotion, aided by the love and enthusiasm of the boys and girls who were his pupils, to create a sequence of gymnastic exercises. and also a new approach to the problems of physical education as a whole, in which the human body as a threefold organism should find its true relationship with the three dimensions of space.

Learning these gymnastic exercises. I realised with astonishment, yet at the same time with a feeling of absolute certainty, that the power whereby a limb is moved comes not only from within the body. In previous gymnastic schooling, the emphasis had always been laid on physical strength, which one imagined to be stored up in the muscles and then released by them at will. We had practised hard to make the muscles strong, to jump, to throw—as high as possible, as far as possible. Perhaps we had tried to achieve power of movement through rhythm, but it had always been assumed that the centres of power were somewhere within the physical organism. In the muscles, in the sinews, at any rate within the body, was the force which brings the limbs into movement.

Here, however, was something quite different. Man reaches towards the stars; through bodily movement he can feel himself widened and expanded, as though his fingers could feel the distant horizon, as though as a physical-spiritual being he could permeate limitless space. But more—the most essential thing was this: the power for movement springs not only from within the body, frotn the world-circumference also comes the force whereby the body is held erect and enabled to move.

The Will is asleep in the human body, glowing like a smouldering fire in the darkness. Left to itself, it makes no movement, or at most only uncontrolled twitching of the limbs. Noble movement is called forth, through the light of consciousness, from the world surrounding man. It is well to reflect, for example, on how the small child is first called to his feet and, standing erect, makes his first steps into the beckoning world about him, where exciting shapes, colours, human faces all ask to be reached and touched by little outstretched hands.

Indeed, throughout conscious life we are continually being called to activity and movement by the tasks which lie within our destiny in the world and among the human beings around us. The Will, hidden and secret, is related to the centre of the Earth, while the world of Light—the world perceptible to the senses—is spread around man and comes to meet him from the wide horizons of space. The Thinking-Sensing human being can live in a world of wide horizons. And human movement—dynamic, purposeful movement, spiritual as well as physical—is brought about not one-sidedly by compulsion from either world, but through the balanced interplay of both.

Two kinds of forces, springing from two different worlds, give man the possibility to stand erect and rejoice in his freedom of movement. They are the centric, earthly forces on the one hand, and, on the other, forces of quite opposite kind and quality, which we may call peripheral forces. In the early chapters of their book Fundamentals of Therapy, Rudolf Steiner and Ita Wegman describe how these peripheral forces work inward from the wide distances of universal space towards the living entities on earth. In contrast to the gravitational forces of the Earth, which work between point-centres, we must learn to know and understand these other forces, carried plane upon plane, inward from world-horizons. Inasmuch as any earthly substance is endowed with life, these are the forces which raise it upward—plant substance, incarnate substance — overcoming gravity. These are cosmic, ethereal forces.

Thus man needs the power of the earthly, gravitational forces: the domain of Seraphim, Cherubim and Thrones. He needs also the cosmic, peripheral forces, which, from above, bear him upward, and here the Second Hierarchy work—Spirits of Form (Exusiai), Spirits of Movement (Dynameis), Spirits of Wisdom (Kyriotetes). Man lives and moves in the dynamic interplay of these great contrasting powers. The Will becomes formed—Light irradiates Warmth; the Thinking-Sensing man becomes active—Warmth glows through Light This is the Threefold Human Being, whose life takes its course in the realm of the Third Hierarchy—Angels, Archangels and Archai.¹

It is in the true balance of this his threefold being that Man is endowed with a freedom of movement not comparable with the movement of any other living creature. The movements of animals each a state of perfection sometimes unattainable by man; but the animal is not really free in its movement. An animal is for the most part bound to a particular set of movements, just as it is bound to the kind of feelings and instinctive urges which belong to its species. It is as though the muscular system of an animal were set like the strings of an Aeolian harp; the astral winds blow through it, and the sound, beautiful as it may be, is predetermined. Each animal will sound the chord to which it has been tuned. Only man, who is upright, can play upon his own harp. He alone has a true rhythmic system through which he experiences a whole
world of feelings and a great range of movements. Healthy feeling life and healthy movement belong together. Human movement is unique; there is nothing like it in the whole world. Brought about through the forces of will from the depths and through the forces of the thinking-sensing, cosmic man from the heights, it is itself a manifestation of the rhythmic man.

Two qualities of force, then, must be taken into account if we would really understand “dynamic” movement. The essence of such movement is that it will be harmonious; it will express the harmony of interplay between the two polarities. If the movement falls into one or other extreme, it becomes dead. One-sided, inharmonious movements may be heavy and slow, or reveal too strongly the push and pull and thrust, the physical aspect of the earth-forces; then the centric gravitational forces of mass, inertia and weight predominate. (These forces may well express them selves explosively.) On the other hand, a human movement may be too severely formed, too much controlled by thought. In both extremes, movement will become stiff and deadened and its effect will be tiring. A healthy movement always has something of both
worlds in it, perhaps striking a lower chord and revealing more the gesture of thrust or lunge; perhaps showing more plastic, planar quality of an upward-bearing, more winglike movement, but through the working together of gravity and levity. Suck movements bring about healing, physically as well as psychologically.

To-day we think a great deal about the forces of gravity and ethereal forces of levity—those which act contrary to gravity. We know that all heavy bodies are drawn towards the earth’s gravitational centre, and that a powerful concentration of the same, essentially physical type of force is expressed in the momentum of a body which is ejected outward into space.

This centric type of force operates both centrifugally and centripetally. The ethereal forces also have this twofold aspect, but they are of quite another nature. They work not with heavy downward pull or explosive outward thrust, from point to point, but gently, plastically, as though from plane to plane.²
A man standing upright is supported by his legs and by the wonderful structure of his skeleton, bone upon bone. Were this structure to give way, he would fall to the ground. But it is also by the light of his consciousness that a man holds himself erect and vertical amid his encircling horizon, and were his consciousness to be darkened, he would also fall. In this wide-awake pole of his being he is functioning in a world of forces which enable him to move against the force of gravity and to overcome it. The life sustaining ethereal forces flow inward, plane upon plane, bestowing life; they draw the heavy body upward, away from the earth’s centre of gravity.

It is in physical space that the physical forces work; but Rudolf Steiner was at pains to convey to his scientific audiences that the ethereal forces belong to what he called ” counterspace” (Gegenraum). Quite opposite in quality to the forces of the dead physical world are the forces of life which permeate it.³

Rudolf Steiner once spoke to teachers about physical training towards the end of a lecture otherwise devoted to the rhythmic system of man; he had been speaking at length about the worlds of speech and music. “Every child,” he said, “is a musical instrument and feels the pleasant quality of sound within him.” The rhythms of sound build a bridge between his own inner world and the great world around him. In gymnastics, said Rudolf Steiner, man places himself into space; he finds his bearings in it. He puts himself into the harmonious balance of space (Gleichgewicht des Raumes). It is a task of the greatest urgency to awaken to an understanding of what Rudolf Steiner really means when he speaks in such contexts about space, and insists that the body does not just move in ” abstract” space.

Often and again in his sequence of exercises, Bothmer starts from the movement-or position described by Rudolf Steiner in the lecture just referred to. The body is vertical; the eyes look forward; the arms are outstretched with palms downward, “laid” into the horizontal direction, usually sideways, though sometimes forward; the legs and feet are together, or nearly so.

It makes a great difference whether the arms are merely stretched out, or if they reach out livingly into the surrounding horizontal plane; that is to say, if they are not just stuck out, but spread horizontally, the palms of the hands coinciding with the horizontal plane which extends from the horizon and passes through each individual, upright human body. The great horizontal plane which reaches to the far horizon can then be actually experienced as a sustaining, upbearing plane. Though not there physically, ” the horizontal plane ” is an ideal reality which can be experienced in bodily movement Once awakened to perceive it, the eye sees it too, when watching others move. To watch a healthy, active child running along a Wall, jumping over a rope, or engaged in the many other happy, unconscious movements of play throughout the day, gives constant opportunity of recognising this ethereal plane and also the many others associated with it; they are revealed in the
gesture of movement.

Standing with his feet on the ground and arms outspread m the plane of the infinitely distant horizon, man can experience how he is firmly placed in the physical gravitational realm the dark earth, while at the same time he is upheld in the world of the planes of light. Truly, man sets himself in the focal balance of cosmic space! For Bothmer, this position is like a gateway through which, in many different exercises, the child or young human being may enter into the heights and depths of human movement. Though hardly itself a movement, this position, when rightly achieved ra the Bothmer exercises, is pregnant with the dynamic forces which flow into human movement when it is truly alive.

The exercises created by Bothmer come nearest to what in gymnastics we usually call still-standing exercises, which are carried out on the floor without apparatus. But especially in the later part of the sequence, stepping movements are introduced, where the exercise moves across the floor and is not held to one spot. Each exercise consists of a sequence of movements and is complete in itself; as Bothmer himself expressed it, “each is a whole, a movement-picture into which the child can grow.”⁵ The complete sequence of exercises covers a period of twelve school years; the child -advances in the sequence as he grows through the school.

Bothmer was right when he said that words could not adequately describe his exercises: they must be done to be experienced. If—and only—if—the planes of levity, which are all the time playing through the exercises with their cosmic, ethereal, upward-bearing power, are really experienced as they should be, then the new gymnastics will develop and grow into its Own. Then something entirely new enters info physical education and the children are happy with it. They remember unconsciously the starry world which permeates human beings and their movements, and they experience powers of resurrection.

REFERENCES
1 Mission of the Folk-Souls (Lecture 5). Lectures by Rudolf Steiner in Oslo, June, 1910.
2 Lecture by Rudolf Steiner at The Hague, April 9,1922.
3 .1 The Plant between Sun and Earth, by George Adams and Olive Whicher. (Published by the Goethean Science Foundation, Clent, Stourbndge, Worcs.) [CURRENTLY SCANNED AND REMAINING OF BOOK WILL BE PUBLSIHED ON AETHER FORCE SOON]
3.2 Also by George Adams: Physical and Ethereal Spaces, in the qawctaiXy, Anthroposophy, 1933, Nos. 3 and 4;
3.3 and The Threefold Structure of the World, in the Golden Blade, 1953.
3.4 See also the relevant chapters of Man or Matter, by Ernst Lehrs (revised edition, 1958) [WHOLE BOOK TO BE PUBLISHED ON AF]
4. Rudolf Steiner: Lectures to Teachers, Torquay, 1924; Lecture 6.
5. Gymnastisehe Erziehung, by Fritz Graf von Bothmer. (To be published shortly m German and English by the Philosophisch-Anthroposophischer Verlag, Dornach, Switzerland.)