What is Steiner Speech?

What is Steiner Speech?

The words of our languages are not mere haphazard groupings of sounds conveying abstract meanings, but are living creative forms whose colours, resonances, sound combinations, rhythms and gestures speak experientially of their content. Indeed within the spoken word “the living breath of creation” can be deeply experienced.

The creative singing dance of the “Verbum”, the Logos, the “Word” is at the source of the Creation Myths of many varied folk cultures, and resonates at the heart of all the worlds Spiritual/Religious Movements, not least in the Gospel according to St. John: “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. All things were made by Him, and without Him was not anything made that was made. In Genesis, too, the world was spoken into being— And God said, “Let there be light, and there was light”.

The creative power of the Logos was also at the heart of the ancient Greek Mystery Centre of Ephesus, where the mystery of human Speech was studied intimately. Upon entering the Mysteries the pupil was met with the words “Speak O Man, and thou revealest through thee, the coming into being (the evolution) of worlds. On leaving he again was exhorted with the words “The coming into being of worlds reveals itself through thee, O Man, when you speak. The pupil was thus led to experience how the very act of speaking echoed in its process the creation of the world and all that’s in it, and could truly feel the truth of the old adage “as above so below” experiencing the mighty presence of the Divine within the microcosm, the created world.

This power of the Word is still preserved, albeit somewhat dimly at times in our modern renditionings, in the Chant and Mantric traditions of for example India, Tibet, the Middle East, in Coptic, Byzantine and Russian Orthodox singing, as well as in the Western Gregorian Chant tradition. The poetic charge in the use of language by the great poets and writers also preserve the transformative power of the Word in the many, varied, rich and distinct languages of the world, each a unique window into the mystery of the Logos, the archetypal Speech of the Cosmos, from whence we all descend and ascend.

Ancient languages such as Sanskrit, Hebraic and Aramaic, old Greek and even to some extent Latin carry with them greater or lesser resonances of the primal tongue, a resonance which our materialistic, headbound age has all but squeezed out of our modern language consciousness, regardless of where we are born or into which culture. Nevertheless even though words of all languages, old and new, seem to have lost their power to heal as they once did in ancient India and even in Egypt, the genius of language can still be rediscovered, and words which have become a mere abstract means of intellectual, and often mundane, communication can rise again in full creative splendour and on the stage where in the main the shrunken word unhappily holds sway.