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The Short Summary of the Course

A vowel, a gesture and a colour for every day of the week — and a journal to write down what happens. Take the colour of the day in through your eyes, then watch what rises from within to answer it. Four weeks of daily work, drawn from Goethe's colour observations and Rudolf Steiner's indications, with a living chart that shows where each planet stands tonight.

The world was built as music. This course teaches one way of hearing it.

You already know that Monday belongs to the Moon and that Saturday is Saturn's. Every language that named the days named them for the planets, and the names are still in your mouth. You have been saying them all your life without hearing them.

Here you begin to hear them.

What you will do.

Each day of the week carries a planet, a colour, a vowel, and a gesture. You will take the colour of the day in through the eyes — and then watch what rises from inside you to meet it, which is not the same colour and is not in the room. You will speak the vowel of the day and listen for it sounding on after you stop. You will draw, in a rounding movement of the hand, in the colour of the day. And you will write.

Then you will go outside. You will find where the planet actually stands, point at it, and feel where the connection is — which, you will discover, is not always where the planet appears to be.

What holds it together.

The Sun does not stand above the solar plane or below it. The Sun is the plane — the sea of light over the darkness. Every other body rises out of that sea and descends back into it, and this rising and descending is the first thing to know about a planet on any given day. You are given a living chart that shows you, for any date you choose, exactly where each body stands.

By the end you will not be reading about this. Your own body will have begun to take up the rhythm.

Where the material comes from.

The colours and their moods are Goethe's, from the Theory of Colour. The planetary assignments and the vowels are Rudolf Steiner's indications for eurythmy. The daily practices come from work carried out at Arlesheim and set down by Dr. Norbert Glas — translated into English for this course, in full, for the first time. The teaching of the solar plane, the two waves, and the cosmic keyboard is my own.

Who this is for

No prior study is needed. If you have never read Steiner, the course does not assume you have.

What it does ask is ten to twenty minutes a day for four weeks — and the willingness to write down what you actually noticed rather than what you expected to notice. Those are the whole entry requirement.

What you will need

• Something to write in, by hand
• Wax crayons or wax blocks — Stockmar are named in the source and still made
• Coloured cloth, silk or large sheets of coloured paper in the seven colours
• A view of the sky. Any sky. A window will do

Nothing here costs much. The method was developed for people who could not get out of bed.