Archetype of the Pentagram by Brigida Baldszun Eurythmy Therapist This is a shortened version of a research paper from 2015. People around the world draw stars, with any number of points. The transition from drawing a star to moving the figure of a star is immense. The rosacea of the plant world, the starfish of the animal world, and the human form share this star form. Children will run joyfully from the center of the star out into one direction, return to the center and ray out to another point! Adults, by contrast, find it satisfying to have a pattern in mind, walk through it, and finish in the center. Another stage of moving the star pattern is when a group of five people move star-ways together, each one contributing one path of the star and lifting the exercise to a social level. An orderly web of crossing lines will appear for the viewer. This choreography of the pentagram can be adapted to accommodate any number of people. The Esoteric Background of the Pentagram When did the five-pointed star first appear? What makes it such a popular symbol? The relation between the pentagram and the celebrated “Golden Ratio” has motivated a number of historians of mathematics to investigate the topic thoroughly. A pentagram appears on a jar dated to 3100 BCE, found north of Thebes in Egypt. As an Egyptian hieroglyph, a pentagram enclosed in a circle meant the netherworld, the underworld of the dead. Interestingly, pentagrams from the same period were found in Mesopotamia. In Sumerian and Akkadian cuneiform texts, the meaning of the five-pointed star was the “Regions of the inhabited world, which are not the regions warmed by the brightness of your light.” (1) At Tell Esdar, in the Israeli Negev desert, archaeologists found a flint scraper with a pentagram (Figure 1), dated to the Chalcolithic period (4500–3100 BCE).
The Pentagram in Eurythmy The pentagram is widely considered to be the Star of Man, as shown in the illustrations by Leonardo da Vinci and by Agrippa von Nettesheim. Rudolf Steiner used the pentagram for the first time in a eurythmy lesson in 1912. Lory Smits was given the first word “Hallelujah” in eurythmy, during which Rudolf Steiner said, “It will become a beautiful exercise if you place five people in a pentagram, letting them form this word at the same time, as one being. This would have a social effect in the highest sense of the word.” (2) Steiner made comments about the pentagram already in the years of 1906 and 1907. He emphasized that the pentagram can be a figure, a symbol, a decoration, but, in relationship to the human body, it is a picture of those etheric streams which penetrate the etheric body as well as the physical body. In his notes of an esoteric lesson from Nov. 14, 1906, he writes: “Streams of ether are always circulating out of the cosmos through the human body. One such stream enters through the head, passes from there into the right foot, then into the left hand, then into the right hand, then into the left foot, and from there back to the head. It would be bad for man if the stream did not enter into him through the head but through the feet. These streams circulate all the time in man and bring him into connection with the entire cosmos.” (3) Just as the anatomist sees the skeleton as being part of the physical body, the occultist sees the pentagram being part of the etheric body. What happens when a human being moves this ether stream as indicated? The Roman architect Vitruvius (80BC-15AD) first coined the word eurythmy to described a certain degree of harmonious relationship of measurements in space. And the German poet Goethe also (1749-1832) used the name eurythmy. Through Steiner’s work the harmonic relations were put into movement. People young and old love to move the pentagram in eurythmy. Lessons with Children In many decades of teaching eurythmy, I experienced the truth of a passage in a lecture by Steiner: “The teacher should really regard the child before him as something like a riddle that he has to solve. …He must never proceed in any dogmatic way, but all the time he has to consider the child itself as his teacher, and see how spring | summer 2024
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