Language is Magic

From out of past cultural epochs up through to the present day, the evolution of human language is truly a wonder to behold. The ‘I’ became flesh, granting the potential to know the spirit itself. The new Tower of Babel can now be built.

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Language is magic. It never ceases to amaze me how a cat intones one single syllable, “meow” but can express such a range of feelings and intentions. The archetypal principle of language is the syllable: a being expresses inner experience through intoning a single sound. This is the principle of the primal syllable. It harkens back to the archetypal principle of primal sound (“Ur-Sound”) itself and to the primal emergence of speech and language, which began an entirely new stage in the evolution of humanity. “The Atlantean epoch is also the epoch when language developed.”¹ The first language, a speech of pure, primal sounds, so to speak, can be thought of as a magical language: the “speaker” still lived within the sounds themselves and expressed the sound directly in speech. These pure, primal sounds also awakened the speaker through the speaker’s experience of living within the primal sounds and the primal sounds passing through them. It’s as if the whole soul were a complex of innumerable vibrating strings played upon by a variety of other beings. This is how speech was able to heal illness—but also conjure up curses. The human being spoke as though other beings spoke through his vibrating larynx, and he merely listened and experienced their working through him. At this stage, the consciousness of the ‘I’ was still asleep.²

This basic characteristic of the original, primal language is still present in a certain sense in modern-day Chinese. “I’d say that a grandiose monument has been left behind from the middle of Atlantean culture, and that is the Chinese language,” said Rudolf Steiner.³ In Chinese, each word is connected with a “primal sound.” The Chinese word is an interwoven and inseparable unity of primal syllable-melody or a melody-syllable, a formation of unified, “pre-separated” speech sound and tone.⁴ Each primal sound has come to be expressed in a group of different words, that is, in a group of different pictograms with a variety of meanings, but they still all have something in common that relates to the essence (or being) of their primal sound.⁵ The Chinese script was originally created directly from the world of pictures rather than from the world of primal sounds⁶ and then became a complex combination of both worlds. Primal sound did not become fragmented into speech sounds and tones, as in later languages. It remained a whole, a living organism.

Since primal sound is supra-earthly and “ungraspable,” the Chinese cannot and do not want to develop pure concepts and do not (yet) know the pure world of concepts, e.g., in the sense of Plato. They do not “grasp” the essences of things, but rather live with them and enliven them through sound and image. They and the essence of things are still one. “What is peculiar about the Chinese is that they cannot think in concepts at all, but instead only in images; but when they do, they place themselves within the objects.”⁷ Their culture is still close to its source and therefore maintains its freshness and vitality, but this also entails a dormant ‘I’-consciousness.⁸

Independent Inwardness

The great Atlantean catastrophe, the Flood—a common legend in many different cultures—moved humanity more deeply into the inner world. Those living in Ancient India were able to develop an independent inner life for the first time in human evolution. They closed off their senses, the gates of the soul, and thus lost access to the outer world, the earthly realm. Through lifelong meditation, the ancient Indians lived, or rather “floated,” in the internal etheric realm and were unable to fully incarnate into the earthly realm. They lived so deeply in the world of primal sound that they believed the universe was born from this “Ur-Sound.” Primal sound then underwent a metamorphosis. It was ignited by the inner self and the temporal-spatial consciousness unfolding in the etheric realm within the inner world of the ancient Indians, thereby transforming from whole, pure sounds into a great multiplicity, crystallized in the Sanskrit grammar. But, due to a lack of earthly forces and direct relationship to the Earth, these ancient Indians could not or did not want to go further and invent writing.

Cuneiform Writing

The first attempt to transform the world of sound into the world of writing is found in the Ancient Persian culture. The ancient Persians experienced a powerful re-opening of the senses, and the invention of cuneiform writing was related to this soul development. Cuneiform script is earthly, both in terms of quality and substance; it was literally written on earthen tablets! In the epic of Gilgamesh, the great king is two-thirds divine and one-third earthly and therefore mortal. Writing is also a kind of dying. Yes, the pure, primal heavenly sound is broken apart into earthly sounds and tones in order to incarnate upon the Earth in a body. The primal beings lived in pure sound, whereas now the ‘I’ was coming to live in the separated speech sounds and tones. But the ancient Persians were not yet capable of a fully developed sense of space, and this prevented them from creating an effective and economical image of individual syllables or speech sounds.

This challenge was first mastered by the ancient Egyptians, who lived deeply in sacred geometry. In the myth of Osiris, the “killing” and “dismemberment” of primal sound is symbolically preserved. The principle of hieroglyphics is that every primal sound, then every speech syllable, then every vowel and consonant is “nailed” to a specific image and later to a pictogram. And the inverse is also true: a pictogram, and later a letter, is exclusively linked to a primal sound. This marks a decisive step in the entire development of language: the speaking ‘I’ incarnates into the organ of speech just as the formative, picture-making power is sealed in the engraved image. The power of image formation itself is further strengthened by being implanted in the material world. Now, pyramids are built of stone instead of clay bricks. The newly born world of picture writing is a symbolization of the world of speech sounds. On a higher plane, picture writing is a materializing fusion between the world of primal images and the world of primal sounds. This was a necessary preparation for the development of thinking. The ancient Egyptians did not go further. They lived in a sacred mist, so to speak, of feelings and sensations, incapable of purified thought. “The Egyptian and Chaldean people in the third post-Atlantean cultural epoch felt themselves to be sentient souls. . . they did not attach importance to having thoughts . . . .”⁹

The Word Became Flesh

In geometry, the Greeks (Euclid is a prime example) brought the Egyptians’ sacred sense of space into the world of abstract thought. They also transposed the “sacred script of hieroglyphics” into the Greek alphabet, demystifying and intellectualizing it in the process. The pre-Socratics were the first to begin to truly think. They raised themselves out of the world of the elemental nature beings and immersed themselves in matter in search of the origin of all things. From then on, language served as a means of thought and carried the substance of thought.

The Baptism through John and the Mystery of Golgotha revealed the essence of language in its entirety—the “Word” became flesh, became human, became I(esus) Ch(ristus).¹⁰ The ‘I’ (Ich) now stood at the center of cosmic evolution. Today, each culture and every individual is called to take up the Christ impulse. This means that the folk soul and the individual soul are given the opportunity to gain a spiritual center. Language (speech) is the means of individualization as well as the means of knowing the spirit itself. It becomes the place where cosmic evolution continues. “Four letters signify God to me; a few strokes signify a million things. How easy it is to make use of the universe, how vivid the concentricity of the spirit world!”¹¹ The 26 letters of the Latin alphabet, the basic elements of spoken language, are a necessary foundation of the modern age, where many languages of Western Europe find their starting point.

And today, what does the future of speech look like against the backdrop of artificial intelligence (AI)? Is speech and language still capable of carrying, embodying, expressing, and developing the spirit? These are some of the burning and most relevant questions of our time. In my opinion, eurythmy, first born in the German language, can serve as an essential research tool for studying the further evolution of language. But how can this spirit of eurythmy be freed, in the way that color is freed from painting?¹²

It is the time for the individual ‘I’, born in its mother tongue and recognizing the spirit of its mother tongue, to now collaborate on a higher level with a variety of language spirits. This will enable the ‘I’ to open up a relational (in-between) space, the relational phase of the evolution of language, in which the language spirits will refresh, renew, and re-inspire each other, and new language spirits may even be born. Having then overcome the confusion of languages, we humans will be prepared to build a new Tower of Babel.

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Translation Joshua Kelberman
Image The evolution of writing in Chinese (top) and in post-Atlantean languages (bottom) using the example of the word “fish,” illustrated by Hao Bu.

1. Rudolf Steiner, Cosmic Memory: The Story of Atlantis, Lemuria, and the Division of the Sexes, CW 11 (Great Barrington, MA: SteinerBooks, 1987), ch. “Our Atlantean Ancestors.”
2. Hao Bu, “Das chinesische und deutsche Ich” [The Chinese and the German ‘I’], Das Goetheanum 44 (Nov. 1, 2024), p. 13.
3. Rudolf Steiner, From Sunspots to Strawberries. Answers to Questions, CW 354 (Forest Row, East Sussex: Rudolf Steiner Press, 2002), lecture in Dornach on July 12, 1924.
4. Hao Bu, “Linguistic resurrection,” Anthroposophy Worldwide no. 3 (March 3, 2023), p. 2.
5. See footnote 2.
6. Hao Bu, “VIII, 8, und 八,” Die Drei, no. 1 (January/February 2025), pp. 118–19.
7. See footnote 3.
8. See footnote 2.
9. Rudolf Steiner, Dying Earth and Living Cosmos. The Living Gifts of Anthroposophy: The Need for New Forms of Consciousness, CW 181 (Forest Row, East Sussex: Rudolf Steiner Press, 2015), lecture in Berlin on July 9, 1918.
10. Ich is German for English ‘I’. Jesus was spelled with an “I” (Iesus) before the Latin letters “J” and “I” were fully separated in the Renaissance—Trans. note.
11. Novalis, Philosophical Writings (Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 1997), p. 23; first published as Novalis, “Blüthenstaub” [Pollen], Athenäum 1, no. 1 (1798): 71–106.
12. See footnote 4.