Handwork and Handicrafts - Waldorf Research Institute

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The physical organs of the child create this contrary or complementary
color, and it is this which brings about the corresponding organic structures
which the child needs. If an excitable child has a red color around him, he will
inwardly create the opposite, the green. And this activity of creating green has
a calming effect. The organs assume a tendency to calmness. 10
(The above should also be considered in connection with handwork.)
There is no limit to what Steiner has revealed concerning the nature of color in his
writings and lectures. The human soul comes to a new relationship to nature and to art if
it so receives Steiner’s color teaching that it becomes a living experience. Then we can learn
to appreciate how the Old Masters, through the inner knowledge of color that they still
possessed, were able to bring the supersensible to expression in the sensible in such a way that
the spiritual reality of what was represented in their pictures can be experienced even today,
if we look at them in the right mood of reverence. 11 Spiritual beings visit us on the wings of
color and connect us with a divine world.
In the ritual forming part of the religious sacraments as restored through the insight
of Steiner, the color of the priests’ vestments and of the altar cloths changes according to
the seasons and the Christian festivals, thus bringing to outer expression the inner mood
prevailing at these times of the year. The language spoken by these colors could not be
plainer. There emanates from them a mood of consecration, of healing and of beauty. And in
beauty the human soul experiences spiritual reality in earthly form.
Steiner said of clothing in general: “The real purpose of clothing is to make the
human being beautiful.” 12 Thus it should also lead him to an experience of the fact that not
only his soul-spiritual members but also his physical body is of divine origin. The human
being should so choose his clothing that it is a worthy expression of his divine nature. Special
light is thrown on this by the following remark of Steiner: “Our connection with the spirit
is broken if it is not sustained through the medium of beauty. Beauty connects the ‘I’ to the
body.” 13
ENDNOTES
1. Color, Parts I, II, III.
2. “Speech and Drama,” lecture 14, Dornach, 1823.
3. Ibid.
4. Ibid.
5. Ibid., lecture 12.
6. Color, Part III, Dornach, July 26, 1914.
7. Color, Part I, lecture 2, Dornach, 1921.
8. Teachers’ Conference, Stuttgart, January 31, 1923.
9. The Spiritual Ground of Education, lecture 6, Oxford, August 1922.
10. The Education of the Child in the Light of Anthroposophy.
11. Color, Part I, end of lectures 2 and 3.
12. From a lecture in Dornach, August 27, 1915.
13. From a notebook of Rudolf Steiner, 1918 (Published in “Das Goetheanum,” Vol. XII, No. 14).