The right-angled body of the Egyptians
The point of departure for Ida's argument is a single observation any tourist can verify: the Egyptians, across thousands of years and tens of thousands of carved figures, depicted the seated human body the same way. Knees at ninety degrees. Pelvis level. Elbows squared. The pharaoh on his throne and the scribe at his work table both sit in the same right-angled posture, repeated until the posture becomes a cultural fact. In her 1975 Boulder advanced class, with senior practitioners gathered around her in the morning session, Ida laid out what she thought this repetition was for. It was not stylization, not a convention of low-relief carving. It was, in her reading, a deliberate pedagogical instrument — a way of teaching the body what an organized body looked like, without ever needing to write it down.
"All practically all of the Egyptian statues, statuary and drawings show you these right angle angles. Remember in your mind's eye? Now those guys couldn't get crooked legs such as we've seen by the dozen in here. Because if you're really going to sit square, your legs will be balanced."
Ida, opening her Boulder 1975 lecture on body images across history:
What makes the observation more than tourist anthropology is the inference she draws from it. The Egyptians did not write textbooks on body mechanics. They did not, as far as anyone knows, leave behind treatises on how the human frame should be carried. What they left behind was the statuary itself, in numbers that defy ordinary explanation. Ramesses II alone is reproduced in tens of thousands of intact figures still standing in Egypt today; the practitioner walking the Louvre's basement passes more right-angled bodies in a single afternoon than she will see in a lifetime of clinical practice. For Ida this volume was not redundancy — it was transmission. The same image, repeated until it entered the unconscious of every Egyptian who saw it.
"They drew by the thousand. They created statues by the tens of thousands, all with those right angled bodies. Every time you look at a right angled statue, your body tends to go right angled as far as it can. This is the effect of suggestion suggestion on your subconscious. And those old babies knew about it."
She continues, drawing the mechanism of transmission:
Transmission without textbooks
The reading Ida is offering here is not casual. She is making a structural claim about how earlier cultures transmitted knowledge of the body — through image, through suggestion, through repetition — and she is contrasting this with the modern situation in which that knowledge has to be written down, lectured about, and demonstrated by people like her in advanced classes in hotel ballrooms. The point is not that ancient pedagogy was better. The point is that ancient pedagogy worked on a different level of consciousness, and that the body it produced was reflected in its art with an accuracy modern viewers tend to dismiss as stylization. When she tells her students to remember Ramesses, she is asking them to credit the carvings as documentary.
"As far as one knows, in those old Egyptian times, they didn't write a book and tell you a textbook on how to do it, but they showed you in their statuary endless, endless statues of their their very powerful kings. Ramess the second, for instance. God alone knows how many tens of thousands of Ramess the second still sit in Egypt. And every one of them, this powerful king sits with right angled knees, right angled pelvis, right angled arms, This is what we're talking about."
Ida names the absence of textbooks and the presence, instead, of an iconographic curriculum:
The phrase carries weight: this is what we're talking about. The right-angled pharaoh is not an artifact to admire from across a museum rope; he is, in Ida's pedagogy, the picture of the body the practitioner is trying to recover in the room. The ten-session series, as she taught it, was an attempt to bring the random twentieth-century body back toward the carriage that the Egyptian sculptors took for granted in their subjects. That this organized carriage had once been so common as to be unremarkable — common enough that one could carve thousands of versions of it without consulting a model — was for her both a vindication of what was possible and an indictment of what had been lost.
From Egypt to Greece: when the right angles relaxed
The lecture does not stop with Egypt. Having established that the Egyptian body was right-angled and that this carriage was transmitted through statuary, Ida traces what happened next. The Greeks went to Egypt, studied the form, and copied it for a time — and then, as she puts it, got bored with copying. The early kouroi of archaic Greek sculpture stand in the Egyptian posture with the left foot forward, the arms at the sides, the gaze frontal. But by the classical period the Greeks had introduced curves: the contrapposto stance, the weight shifted to one leg, the shoulders rotating against the hips. To modern viewers this is the great achievement of Greek art, the birth of naturalism. For Ida, viewing the same statues with a structural integrator's eye, the curves were also the beginning of a loss.
"Now then came the Greeks, and the early Greeks went over to Egypt and learned their lesson and had their right angled joints. But then they got bored with copying, and they decided they were going out on their own trip. And they began to get the curves, the very beautiful curves that you see in the Greek classical statuette. But now you see, they had taken the attention, the subjective the suggested attention of people off the necessity for the right angle. And you look at those classical Greek statuary or pictures of them, and you see the beginning of the distortion of angles. Good with them. Fairly good. Not as good as the Egyptians, but better than the Greeks, really, than our terms."
Tracing the historical arc from Egypt to the Greeks and onward to the Romans:
The argument here is subtle and worth slowing down for. Ida is not saying the Greeks made worse bodies than the Egyptians. She is saying that the Greek sculptors, in their pursuit of naturalism, stopped showing the audience the structural ideal and started showing them the structural reality — and that the population, looking at curving bodies rather than right-angled ones, began to permit itself the same curves. The mechanism is the same as before: suggestion working on the subconscious. But the content of the suggestion has shifted. Where the Egyptian citizen unconsciously straightened toward Ramesses, the Greek citizen unconsciously curved toward the Apollo. The Romans, she observes drily, kept their bodies in better shape than the late Greeks not because they were better artists but because their empire required them to walk.
The disappearance of the body in Christian art
The historical arc that begins with Ramesses ends, in Ida's telling, with the medieval saints. Between the fall of Rome and the rebirth of figurative naturalism in the late Gothic, European representation effectively stopped depicting the body. The cathedral statues of the ninth through fourteenth centuries show, as she puts it in the same Boulder lecture, heads with folds running from the shoulders down — the body itself disappearing beneath the draperies of the saint's robe, surfacing only in the protruding feet at the bottom. This is not, in her reading, a failure of artistic skill. It is a culture that has decided the flesh is not worth representing. Spirit, she notes, was more important than flesh.
"And, really, they had to, you know, because those robbers used to have to march a few thousand miles a day, so to speak. And they had to at least a very large part of the population had to be in good enough shape to do all of this footwork and still run the empire. So the Romans made it, but then came the Christians. Spirit was more important than the flesh. And all through from the ninth century about to the thirteenth century, fourteenth century, you have these these cathedrals and so forth the pictures of the saints who have only heads and then some folds running from their shoulders down. The you you and down from the bottom come a couple of feet. There was nothing in between. Nothing in between."
Continuing the historical sweep from the Romans to the medieval cathedrals:
It would be easy to dismiss this as Ida's amateur art history, but the structural point she is making is precise. A culture that does not depict the body cannot transmit body carriage through depiction. The Christian millennium, in her reading, did not produce worse-organized bodies by depicting curving ones — it produced worse-organized bodies by depicting no bodies at all, by allowing the visual culture to lose its capacity to show what a balanced human frame looked like in space. By the time the Renaissance restored the body to the canvas, the original transmission was lost and could not simply be picked up where it had left off. The artists had to reinvent anatomy from cadavers, because the living models around them no longer carried the form.
Statuary as physiology, not idolatry
Ida returns to this argument across many advanced classes, and her colleagues take it up as well. In her sixth-side public-tape recording, working with senior practitioners on the question of how children lose the open carriage they were born with, she expands the claim: the Egyptians and the Greeks, she says, were talking through their sculpture. They were not making pictures of what they saw; they were making pictures of what they wanted seen, of principles of movement they recognized and wanted to install. The mechanism by which Catholic devotional images worked on the subconscious of the medieval worshipper, she argues, was the same mechanism by which Egyptian statues worked on the subconscious of the citizen of Thebes.
"See, I think there have been a great many people down through the years who understood this, And that this is the way they conveyed information because this was the way that earlier peoples conveyed information. The Egyptians and the Greeks were talking through their sculpture and through their pictorial representations. And they weren't so much trying to represent what they saw as they were trying to convey through suggestion principles that they recognized, principles of movement. I think I discussed this with you at the time we were talking about feet and how feet came up on the outside when you wanted good feet to walk with and how in all pictures of Hermes on Mercury, the wings are on the outside of the feet. What they're saying was if you want transportation, you must walk as though you have wings on the outside of your feet because they had no pollution problem. They just walked. And so the principle of walking was to walk as though you had to bring something outside of the teeth when you got there."
Ida, in an undated RolfA6 public lecture, generalizing the principle from Egypt to Greece to Catholic iconography:
She then offers a specific worked example, one she clearly takes pleasure in: the wings of Mercury are on the outside of his feet. Why? Because, in her reading, the ancients knew that good walking comes from the outside of the foot, that the propulsion of human transportation moves up the lateral line rather than rolling through the central toes. To convey this fact, they did not write a treatise; they put wings on Mercury's outside ankles. Anyone walking past the statue would, at some unconscious level, take instruction from the placement of the wings. This is the kind of close reading of artistic detail Ida did constantly in her advanced classes — turning small iconographic choices into evidence of structural knowledge that had once been common and was now lost.
"What they're saying was if you want transportation, you must walk as though you have wings on the outside of your feet because they had no pollution problem. They just walked. And so the principle of walking was to walk as though you had to bring something outside of the teeth when you got there. And I have many, many, many, many of these earlier peoples taught that way, and the Catholics still knew all of this business of so called idols of saints. Mhmm. Not idols at all. They are representing in a certain accepted way certain basic principles of character, and they put them here and here and here and here so that every every time some of these relatively unconscious people see them, it is calling to their mind certain principles of character. The Virgin or Saint Christopher or what have you. And the mere way in which these statues were represented, evoked in the mind of the hearer and at an unconscious level certain responses, physiological responses, emotional responses."
She develops the Mercury example into a general theory of how iconography conveys structural knowledge:
Manly Hall in the Louvre cellar
The voices around Ida sometimes pushed back against her admiration for Egyptian carriage, and one of them is worth hearing in full. In a 1974 Open Universe class, Manly Hall — the esoteric philosopher and frequent guest lecturer in her circles — offered a counter-reading of Egyptian sculpture that is more sober than Ida's. Where Ida saw the right-angled pharaoh as a triumph of cultural body-teaching, Hall saw in the same statues a kind of forest lawn, a funerary art whose dominant note was the awe of death rather than the celebration of life. The two readings are not actually incompatible — the Egyptian body could be both well-organized and grim — but Hall's testimony reminds the reader that the visual record of Egypt is more ambiguous than Ida's pedagogical use of it admits.
"I've never spent a more depressing afternoon trying to find our way out of the Louvre, which is like trying to get out of Pasadena during the Rose Bowl traffic. It works. The darkness and the awe of death and the feeling of the shadows of the dark wing of the crow of death are really in the lube in that cellar, and yet some of these things are quite magnificent. But it's not what I would call an image of man which has anywheres to go except to the tomb, except to the embalmer. Ancient Egypt was a kind of a sad forest lawn, and their art is a kind of a journalism which merely records the glories of the dead man, the number of people he has killed, the kinds of slaves he has had, and his relationship with his society is pretty grim."
Manly Hall, lecturing in Ida's 1974 Open Universe class, recalls a Louvre afternoon:
Hall's contrast with the Greeks is then more aesthetic than structural. Where the Egyptians produced an art of stoic finality, the Greeks produced what he called a glorification of the human body — the Apollos, the Venus de Milo, the chariot drivers in bronze. For Hall this was a hedonistic flowering, a culture that decided the body was worth depicting beautifully because the body was worth living in. Ida would not have disagreed with the diagnosis, but she would have pointed out that the Greeks' aesthetic embrace of the body was also the moment when the right angles relaxed and the population began to lose its carriage. The two lecturers were reading the same statues; they took different things from them.
The body-image as cultural inheritance
Underneath the historical argument is a psychological one, and it is most clearly stated by Valerie Hunt, Ida's longtime research collaborator at UCLA. In Hunt's 1974 lecture in the Open Universe series, she sets out the concept of the body image as the most crippled part of the personality — the place where what the person actually has and what the person believes they should have collide. The body image is not merely a private mental picture; it is shaped by what the surrounding culture shows the citizen of what a body should be. The Egyptian who looked at Ramesses ten thousand times in his life carried a body image with right-angled knees. The medieval Christian who looked at the saints in his cathedral carried a body image of disembodied piety. The modern American who looks at advertising carries — Hunt and Ida agreed — body images that are mostly incoherent.
"They are hyper fortifying their kinesthetic in order to keep a stimulus coming. Is this an immediate thing I need to read? Yes. Okay. Very good. Carl Meininger has said probably the most crippled part of a personality is the body image and we can say it's the self but it's the body image that ties the selves together. So we might even add, just to conclude this part, that without a strong and a secure body image and strong and secure I mean where the actual and the ideal somewhat approximate each other where what you want is not too far from what you've got. Either you have to change what you've got or you have to get rid of your ideal. You know, you have to change something. You either have to change what it is or you have to change your belief system so that your actual and your ideal are not too far away or you're in trouble. With an insecure or an incomplete body image perceptions are distorted, time and space and weight, and these are the most important ones that you first start with."
Valerie Hunt, lecturing in Ida's 1974 Open Universe series, names the body image as the central organ of self:
Hunt's contribution to the argument is essential. Without it, Ida's claim that Egyptian statuary shaped Egyptian bodies sounds like art-historical romanticism. With it, the claim becomes a specific psychological proposition: visual images of the body, repeated, install body images in the unconscious of the viewer; body images, once installed, organize the postural choices of the body; postural choices, repeated over a lifetime, produce the carriage one sees in the population. The Egyptians, on this reading, were running a society-wide body-image program through their public art. Whether they understood the mechanism in modern psychological language is beside the point — they understood it well enough to use it for thousands of years.
What the random twentieth-century body looks like
Against the right-angled Egyptian and the curving classical Greek, Ida set the body that walked into her room: the random body, as she called it, of the mid-twentieth-century American. In her 1973 Big Sur advanced class she gave one of her clearest descriptions of how this body comes to be — not through accident or trauma alone, but through the steady weakening of extensors by negative emotion, the steady tightening of flexors, the steady installation of hooks for gravity to catch and pull down. It is worth noticing that this is the same mechanism she ascribed to statuary, only reversed. Where the Egyptian image installed extensor tone through suggestion, the modern image — the slumped commuter, the depressed teenager, the figures in advertising — installs flexor dominance.
"Now, Feldenkrais, whom I wish were here today, and that reminds me, get Kathy to remind me to throw me in. Feldenkrais was the first man that I know of that called attention to the fact that all negative emotion, weakened extensors, strengthened, tightened flexors. And that under negative emotion, you've got this typical breakdown into the random body. And the random body is or it's a big word is always characterized by a flexor system that is too strong for the extensors. The flexors over balance the extensors. Now, as soon as you consistently carry your body in a fashion where the flexors over balance the extensors, that soon, you are putting a whole series of hooks in that body that gravity can get a hold of and pull him down. And so you see the old premise that gravity always broke the body down had that grain or that area of half truth in it. And this is what made it so dangerous. Because it was not apparent to any of those boys that were pitching around this half truth of gravity breaking the body down. It was not apparent to them that it was possible to so organize that body, to so develop that body, that gravity wouldn't break it down. And this is the new idea, that it is so possible to organize that body that gravity does not break it down, but can support it. Now, this is not an easy task."
Ida, in a soundbyte from the PigeonKey collection, naming what makes the random body random:
The pairing of Feldenkrais and statuary here is striking. Feldenkrais had given Ida the mechanism — negative emotion weakens extensors — and the statuary had given her the historical evidence that the mechanism could be reversed at the cultural scale. If a society organized its visual environment around upright, extended, right-angled images, the bodies of its citizens would be pulled toward that organization. If a society organized its visual environment around slumped or distorted or disembodied images, the bodies of its citizens would drift the other way. Her work in the room with individual clients was, by extension, an attempt to do for one body what the Egyptian sculptors had done for an entire civilization.
Standing as a measure: the verticality of the burrow
What the Egyptians depicted in their carved kings, Ida tried to articulate in modern mechanical terms. Standing vertical, balanced around a center line, with ears over shoulders over hips over knees over ankles — this is the template she repeated in lecture after lecture as the modern restatement of what the Egyptian statue had simply shown. She was aware that the template was not original to her. Bess Mensendieck had brought it from Germany to Harvard in the 1920s; the Harvard physical-education school taught the same alignment; every school of body mechanics in the twentieth century had a version of it. What Ida claimed for her own work was not the template but the means of getting there.
"This vertical line registers the alignment of the ankles, with the knees, with the hip joints, with the bodies of the lumbar vertebrae, with the shoulders, with the ears. This vertical line is reminiscent of the prickles on the chestnut burrow. All those prickles pointing straight toward the center of the earth. If the lines are substantially vertical. This is a static verticality, however. This is the verticality taught by every accepted school of body mechanics operating in this century, and the Harvard group heads the list. All schools of body mechanics teach this measuring stick and verticality, but no other school of body mechanics teaches how to achieve it. But because the body has an unforeseen, unexpected quality, it can be done. The body is a plastic medium. Now this is incredible, and twenty five years ago, no one would have believed this statement."
Ida, in her 1974 Healing Arts lecture, naming the modern verticality and locating it in a long history:
Notice the rhetorical move. Ida concedes that the Harvard school and the Mensendieck school had the picture right — the same picture, essentially, that the Egyptians had carved into their kings. What none of those schools had, she argued, was a method. Mensendieck told the girl with the curving back to stand straighter; when the girl came back the next week with the same curving back, Mensendieck told her to do the exercise twice as many times. The exercise approach assumed the body would conform to the image if asked nicely enough. Ida's approach assumed the body would conform to the image only if its connective tissue was reorganized to permit it — and that this reorganization required the hands of the practitioner on the tissue. The image, in other words, was necessary but not sufficient. The Egyptians had had the image; modern Americans had had the image, in their textbooks at least; what neither had had was the method.
"energy to go up to Yale University and to persuade those good old conservative New Englanders that they wanted to put this kind of a system into their physical education program. Now, Madame Mensindeep had a way of getting where she wanted to go. The thing is that she and I didn't see the same place as the same goal. I never knew. And when somebody came in with a curved curvature of the back, for example, Madame Mensenby thought that she could cure that curvature of the back by telling them to stand straight or to do such and such an exercise. The next week they came in and they looked just as bad, and she says, Well, go home and do it twice as many times every day."
Ida, in her 1976 advanced class, recalling her own encounter with Mensendieck's image-without-method approach:
Why a balanced body gives the viewer pleasure
If statuary works by suggestion, and if the body image is the most consequential single piece of the personality, then one question follows naturally: why does a balanced body give the viewer pleasure? Why does the Egyptian pharaoh, the classical Apollo, the well-organized human being walking down a street, evoke a relaxation in the observer that the random body does not? In a 1975 Boulder advanced class, Ida turned this question over and admitted she did not have a final answer. The fact that a balanced body gave pleasure was, for her, a data point — something the senior practitioners in her circle had noticed independently, and that she believed connected to depth psychology in ways that exceeded her competence to fully describe.
"The fact is that long before we were Rothes, it gave us a curious satisfaction to see bodies that had that type of order, that were approaching that type of order. I had a funny experience up in San Francisco the other day. A woman came in to interview me for an article, a newspaper article, '99, don't know why. And she sat, let's say, here, and I sat about where Rogers City. And across from her, there were five Roelfas. Penny was there. Andy was there. John was there. And a couple of the other rockers Michael Kilbro. Michael Kilbro was there and still another one. Anyway, they were all sitting there, and they were all sitting on chairs of the sort that you have. No. They were on the couch, etcetera, etcetera. And she suddenly looked up, and she said, you know, it's such a strange experience to look at five people sitting across from you and every one of them sitting straight. Now she was a random body. She didn't know anything about random bodies or about Roth bodies except that her job was to get an interview from a temporary celebrity up there. But somehow this appealed to her aesthetic sense. Now once again, we are getting into the kind of depth psychology where we don't really belong. Because by this time, we're getting so near the edge of metaphysics."
Ida, in her 1975 Boulder advanced class, on what a journalist saw when she walked into a room of five practitioners:
The story is illuminating because of what the journalist noticed without being told what to notice. She had no theory of right-angled bodies, no exposure to Ida's lectures on Egyptian statuary, no idea that the five people across from her were trained in any particular discipline. She simply registered, at an unconscious level, that something in their carriage was unusual enough to comment on. This is exactly the mechanism Ida ascribed to Egyptian sculpture: a balanced body in the visual field produces, in the observer, a recognition and a response that does not require the observer to know what they are seeing. The five practitioners in the San Francisco hotel room were, in a small way, doing what Ramesses had done at scale — broadcasting a structural ideal through the simple fact of their being seen.
The dancer who could not find her line
One last historical figure makes a frequent appearance in Ida's classes when she turns to the question of body images and lines. Ruth St. Denis, the American modern dancer who founded the Denishawn school with Ted Shawn in the early twentieth century, wrote in her diary on more than one occasion that she could not dance well that night because she could not find her line. Ida loved this quote and used it often. Here was a dancer who had no training in structural integration, no exposure to her template of verticality, no contact with the Egyptian statuary on which Ida built her arguments — and yet Ruth St. Denis had arrived through her practice at the same recognition. There was a center line in the body, and the dancer's whole art depended on finding it.
"This Anyway, she wrote in her diary on one occasion or a couple of several occasions perhaps, I shall not be able to dance well tonight. I cannot find my Santa Monica. In other words, here was a dancer and a teacher of dance who understood that her particular goal was to get her body working as though it were working around a vertical line. See, there are lots of ways in which people, cultures find things out. Sometimes they have have someone like me where you put a nickel in the sky and something comes out. Sometimes they have dances who illustrate the thing. What I'm trying to get you people all to understand is the variety of human experience and of the human experience which puts information into our our common reservoir. And here's this dancer who says, I cannot find my Lyme. Well, maybe if there'd been a bunch of Ralph's around, she would go into a Ralph and say, can you help me fill it right in there? And if he was good enough, he probably would. If he did enough, I don't Now know. Where can my common line go? Where can that center line go? Where will be the center for a center line in the body? Will it be on the outside of the body? I mean the lateral sides of the body? No, it's got to be the middle of the body, don't it? So you have to build up toward the middle and not detract from it by taking it apart."
Ida, in her 1976 advanced class, on Ruth St. Denis and the variety of ways cultures find their way to the same recognition:
The point Ida is making here is generous and important. Egypt is not, in her telling, the only culture to have known about body carriage. The Greeks knew, and lost it; the dancers know, and find it in private; the chiropractors and osteopaths have versions of it. What is unusual about her own time and place — twentieth-century industrial America — is not that the knowledge is absent but that it is unevenly distributed, held in small pockets by specialists rather than transmitted through the common visual culture. The Egyptian peasant had Ramesses in every public square; the modern American has advertising in every public square. The contrast was for her sufficient to explain a great deal about the bodies she saw.
Statuary as evidence: the architectural argument
Ida's interest in historical body carriage was not purely art-historical; it fed directly into her structural arguments. In her 1966 Esalen IPR lecture — one of the earliest recordings of her public teaching — she developed an analogy between the body and the tent that depended, indirectly, on her reading of historical architecture. The Egyptian pyramid, she noted, was a building wider at the bottom than at the top, with everything going down — a configuration of dead weight resting on broad foundation. The modern building, by contrast, can be wider at the top than at the bottom if its segments are properly balanced — a configuration that requires precise placement of weight in three dimensions. The human body, she argued, is the second kind of structure, not the first.
"And the answer to that has been solved within relatively recent years architecturally, for example, where the architect finds that he's going to build a wider top than he has a bottom, that he must so arrange his segments, that they are symmetrically balanced, and it is the symmetry of the balance which gives him any degree of stability. And of course, this is a much more light and a much more mobile and a much more effectual stability than this sort of thing, like the good old Egyptian pyramid, everything going down, whereas this other kind of configuration has a lightness and a going upness and a quality that is vital. Now, body also has another problem within it and that is that it is a very plastic medium. It is not solid medium. It is not fixed medium. It is a plastic medium. And so you have to begin to look at what happens, how you balance plastic medium. And you can look instead of looking at a house, instead of looking at a heavy building and so forth, you can begin looking at lighter structures, for example, a tent. Now, I was having a big argument not very long ago about with somebody whom I said, Well, how is a tent found? And he said, well, everybody knows that. It's about tentpole."
Ida, in her 1966 Esalen lecture, contrasting the Egyptian pyramid with the modern body:
The architectural argument is worth lingering on because it complicates the picture of Ida as a simple admirer of Egyptian form. When she praised the Egyptian seated pharaoh, she was praising the right-angled carriage of the figure; when she dismissed the Egyptian pyramid, she was dismissing the dead-weight stability of the architecture. The body, she insisted, was not a pyramid. It was a lighter, more dynamic structure that worked by balanced segments and would collapse under the kind of broad-base solution that kept the pyramids standing for four thousand years. Her quarrel here was with the structural logic of the building, not with the body it housed. The right-angled pharaoh sat inside a tomb whose architecture pointed the wrong way; the body inside was nonetheless one she wanted modern Americans to recover.
The template and the practitioner
By the time Ida had finished her historical sweep — Egyptians, Greeks, Romans, medieval Christians, Mercury, Ruth St. Denis, the Mensendieck school, the architectural pyramid — she had arrived at a single working concept for her students: the template. The template was what the practitioner held in their mind when looking at a body. It was what Ramesses showed in stone, what Apollo modified into curves, what the cathedral saints suppressed entirely, what Mensendieck drew on a chart, what the dancer felt as her line. It was the picture against which the body in front of the practitioner was measured. The practitioner's job was to bring the body closer to the template.
"Now, exactly what is Rolfing? How do you produce these changes? Well, what we teach to a prospective Rolfe is a a picture. What is the word that I've been using, Bob? A template. A template. Why don't you start your sentence again? Yes. What we teach to the prospective world for is a picture or, in other words, a template of what a body should look like, how it should look, what are the relations within the body, what sort of arms should a certain set of shoulders have, what sort of shoulders should a certain head have, etcetera. You very often find all kinds of disparities. This is something that we all know. Mubba knows, for instance, that when she wants to make a dress for Mary, she's got to get a size ten for the skirt and a size eight for the blouse, etcetera. We all have seen this sort of thing. Now this is this is not in accordance with the template, And our job is to bring a body toward that template and see that Mary, if"
Ida, in an interview from the 1971-72 mystery tapes, naming the central pedagogical concept she taught the practitioner:
It is striking, reading the interview now, how cleanly Ida moves between her historical arguments about statuary and her practical pedagogy of the template. The Egyptian sculptor and the modern practitioner are, in her telling, doing structurally the same work: both hold an image of the well-organized body, both apply that image to the material in front of them, both expect the material to come closer to the image as a result of the application. The differences are operational — the sculptor works on stone, the practitioner on connective tissue; the sculptor produces an image that will then work on viewers, the practitioner produces a body that will then walk around. But the underlying logic, the conviction that a held picture of the well-organized body is the necessary starting point for any actual body work, runs continuously from Ramesses to the Boulder advanced class.
The horizontal hinge and the lumbar lever
The statuary argument fed forward into the practical eye-training of Ida's senior students, and one of the clearest places to see this is in a 1971-72 mystery-tape recording in which George, Peter, and the other senior practitioners worked out with Ida what they were actually looking at when they read a body. The Egyptian image had shown a body of right angles — knees square to the floor, pelvis level, elbows squared out. The modern operational restatement of this, the practitioners agreed, was the horizontal hinge: a way of describing those right angles in terms of the planes of joint motion rather than the static stone-cut posture of the seated pharaoh.
"I know the world is full of osteopaths and I think every one of them would say that what they were doing was doing what you were describing. This is true. Also in the Cyclonic ideal, it was the sculpture of the years of time period. Defining an idea of another idea. We're defining another idea of balance. There's no question about that. And this is where we get into trouble because there are several ideas of balance around the world and we're defining one and it has not been one that has been brought forth over several centuries now. I think it was known in the days of the Egyptians. I think that's what the factions say. Now, our balance, our horizontal horizontal comes comes out out of of the interaction of preplane. Knees moving forward, the elbows moving outward and the hips moving upward. Now those three claims have to be related before I accept it as balance. And those three claims, me being people are not theoretical claims that practical claims are the practical movement in the body of certain significant specific forms. And this puts it in to a three-dimensional material world."
Peter offers a definition of balance in the dialogue of the 1971-72 mystery class; Ida names the cyclonic ideal of the Greek sculpture period:
What the dialogue makes visible is that Ida's reading of statuary was not a private hobby but a working part of how she trained her practitioners to see. When Peter described the head of the femur sitting in the acetabulum and the pelvis floating freely on the legs, Ida heard a description that any competent osteopath could have given. What turned this generic description into something specifically structural was the historical reference — the recognition that the Greek sculptors of the classical period had been depicting the same balance, and that the Egyptian sculptors before them had been depicting a more rigid version of it. The template the practitioner carries forward into the treatment room is, in this sense, the descendant of a long line of held pictures.
Reading the rib cage as a sculptor would
The eye-training that descended from Ida's habit of reading statues showed up most clearly in the 1976 Teachers' Class, where senior practitioners and trainees worked through how to read a standing body from a single view. The angle of the ribs, the position of the shoulders, the depth of the chest from front to back, the width from side to side — all of these were read in the way a sculptor reads a figure, by registering the proportions in a held mental image before doing anything with the hands. The right-angled Egyptian pharaoh was, in this sense, the founding case study of structural seeing.
"I had written down last night about the angle of the ribs determining the narrowness from right to left or the shallowness from front to back. So that as you look at a person standing there, you see by the degree of angle of their ribs whether they're too shallow front to back or if they are too narrow. Side to side. Side to side. With some people, you see very wide base down here in a very narrow upper part of their chest. Even though it's supposed to be narrower, some people, it's tremendously narrow. And it looks as though their shoulders then have no place to rest. They are close-up to their ears, and their neck disappears. Yeah. That pear shape. Right. Okay. Other people, you see that this is very shallow from here to here. It's almost as though and some people, extremely so that you get this scooping right in here where mean, this is characteristic of the spinal curvature. Right. Where there is so so much more posterior, where it looks as though this has been wrapped and folded in and that the chest is being held to the back of the pelvis. You don't often see a person way out here."
A senior practitioner in the 1976 Teachers' Class, reading the standing body by the angle of its ribs:
Notice what the practitioner is doing in this passage. She is not yet touching the body; she is reading it, from a distance, as a held proportion. The narrow upper chest with the shoulders crowded up against the ears, the shallow front-to-back depth, the scooping where the chest folds into the pelvis — these are the same kinds of observations a sculptor makes before lifting a chisel. Ida's pedagogy of the template, descended from her readings of Egyptian statuary, produced practitioners who looked at bodies the way curators look at figures, registering the proportions before considering what to do about them. The bridge between the carved pharaoh and the standing client is precisely this trained eye.
The lumbar lever and Mensendieck's failure
If statuary gave Ida the picture of the well-organized body, the work on individual bodies forced her to confront where the structural failures actually occurred. In a 1971-72 mystery-tape session on Frederick Fox's textbook discussion of posture, Ida laid out for her senior students why the lumbar curve, rather than the dorsal or the cervical, is the structural lever at which any body's distortion has to be addressed. The Egyptian pharaoh sat with a vertical lumbar because the rest of his carriage was already organized; the random twentieth-century body presents with a lumbar that has yielded in every conceivable direction, and the practitioner has to start there.
"you see how to what extent it changes. Pathology is not pathology. It's a provision of physiology. And you get the structure put where the physiology can function, you can change it very quickly by simply changing structure. At least that's where I stand. And inasmus and in emphacimus, you never get them, without you get a very distorted rib cage. You see, right from the beginning, you have to let's see how we can put it. The lumbar curve is the point which structurally can give and structurally it does give and structurally it has given. Mostly it goes forward, sometimes it goes back. Sometimes you get a posterior curve. Now, Fox is talking from the point of view of the spine. If we ever get to be great big boys and girls that sit in the Council of the Mighty's, it will be because we do not use that entry, but because we use an entry which is more acceptable to modern thinking."
Ida, in the 1971-72 mystery tapes, naming the structural significance of the lumbar lever:
The technical argument turns out to support the historical one. The Egyptian sculptor depicting Ramesses did not need to draw attention to the lumbar; he simply showed the king sitting square, and the lumbar position followed from the carriage. The modern practitioner cannot count on this — the body comes in with the lumbar already distorted, and the work has to address that distortion before any of the higher refinements of carriage become available. Ida's lecture on the lumbar lever is, in this sense, the technical complement to her lecture on Egyptian statuary. The pharaoh shows the practitioner what the finished body looks like; the lumbar work shows the practitioner where the unfinished body has to be addressed first.
Cervical and lumbar as the twin ends of the stick
The structural anatomy that supports the statuary argument extends upward as well. In a 1971-72 mystery-tape discussion of Fox's posture textbook, Ida and her senior students worked through the relationship between the lumbar and cervical curves — the twin ends, in her phrase, of a single stick. The Egyptian seated king carries both curves in a controlled, vertical relation; the random modern body shows the two curves out of conversation with each other, the cervical going forward when the lumbar goes back, or the cervical collapsing when the lumbar yields. Reading the historical statue with a structural eye, Ida saw the cervical–lumbar relation that the modern body has lost.
"In other words, although the manner of posture may be regarded as predisposed by the hereditary characteristic of the locomotor apparatus and the typical habits of a given group. The actual phenomenon of posture is not a traditional right but is and always has been governed entirely by the existing physical ability of each individual to react to the six laws of gravity. Some quote I think is quite strange. The other one is this one. In summation, the relation between the line of gravity the human spine be considered normal as far as posture is concerned. When the points of intersection of the two, that is between the line of gravity and the human spine. When the points of intersection occur approximately at the normal level, that is at the cervical dorsal and the dorsal lumbar junction and the iliopsoas muscles have adequately elongated to permit equilibration of the curve. That is that the, the line of gravity goes through the cervical dorsal and the lumbos dorsal junctions and that the ilioptores muscle has sufficiently elongated to permit equalization of these curves. It's a a balance. Essentially But the contribution, it doesn't say enough, No, but it says contribution, I should say, but you see, this is a very slidey sort of thing."
Ida, reading from Fox's textbook on posture in the 1971-72 mystery tapes, on the relation of line of gravity to spine:
The Fox passage matters because it gives Ida a piece of textbook authority for the structural relation she had been reading in the statues. The line of gravity passes through the cervical-dorsal junction and the dorsal-lumbar junction; the iliopsoas has elongated enough to permit the two curves to balance each other. This is, in technical language, what the Egyptian sculptor had depicted in the seated pharaoh — a body in which the curves were in conversation rather than at war. That the textbook anatomists of the twentieth century had only recently arrived at the formulation the Egyptian sculptors had used three thousand years earlier was, for Ida, simply one more piece of evidence that what is rediscovered in modern terms was once held intuitively in the visual culture.
The third hour and the integration of the side body
The integration the Egyptian sculptors depicted in their seated kings — the right-angled body in which knees, pelvis, and elbows all sit at ninety degrees — required, in modern operational terms, an integration that the ten-session series approaches across all of its hours. In her 1971-72 mystery-tape recording of a class on the relation of the pelvis to the shoulder girdle, Ida laid out the spanning work that produces the verticality the Egyptian statue simply displays. The girdles float; the spine extends through them; the elbows establish their horizontal plane, the knees establish theirs, and the vertical emerges from the relation of the two horizontals.
"Now how does it get away from floating around the horizontal plane? And God knows you all could not find out. I I don't bother you. On working on you're working on through your arm because you do not work. You are no longer working with your arm. They are working by the trunk muscles working through the arms. And those arms must be far enough away So there you get the actual index of the elbows going straight out and straight in on horizontal lines as being the index of the relation of the pectrogirdle to the trunk. And only when you're through with all of that can you properly get up into the neck Now when people have come in, will they feel that you will Now this is telling you why people stay with their flesh images even after you get them to the point where they can break loose from you. Because you see, for example, these junctions are held short and tight."
Ida, in a 1971-72 mystery class, on the movement of the girdles and the establishment of the vertical:
The link to the statuary argument is direct. The Egyptian pharaoh shows a body in which the elbows move out and in on a single horizontal plane and the knees move forward and back on another. The seated posture freezes this arrangement in stone, but the arrangement itself is not static — it is the resting position of a body whose girdles can float on those planes when moving. Modern practitioners arrive at the same arrangement through the spanning work of the ten-session series, addressing the strings that tie the girdles down and freeing them to find the horizontal. The end position is recognizably what the Egyptian sculptor depicted; the path to it is, of necessity, modern.
The asymmetry of the body and the limit of the right angle
However much Ida admired the Egyptian right angle, she did not believe true symmetry was achievable in a living body. The Egyptian sculptor could carve symmetrically because he was working in stone; the practitioner working on connective tissue has to contend with the asymmetry built into the body itself — a heart on one side, a liver on the other, asymmetric viscera under every layer of fascia. The right-angled pharaoh of the statues was a structural ideal that the living body could only approach asymptotically. In a 1975 Boulder class on the relation of the legs to the pelvis, Ida and her senior students worked through what the structural ideal actually looks like in living tissue, where bones rotate and asymmetry is the rule.
"One thing about the legs, like you said, to look in one year, the legs do not go straight. The gravity gravity line doesn't get through into the legs until it gets about two thirds of the way down I I realized after I spoke that I was yeah. Yeah. It's diagonals through this. Well, you get diagonals, and it goes through the through the abductors and all kinds of things. It starts to soften. Hold on. Realize that as these bones rotate in there, you're going to get a different picture. As it goes out through the These bones rotate through here. And the picture's going to change. And what I'm saying to you is that you don't know now. Here, you take, for instance, in this picture, which is a drawing, there is no horizontal pelvis. That's true. There. Not in our sense of horizontal pelvis. Mhmm. By the time you horizontalize that pelvis, you're going to twist the head of the femur in the acetabulum, And this is going to bring this whole thing around in here in a slightly different manner."
Ida, in her 1975 Boulder advanced class, on the limits of the right-angled ideal in the living leg:
The corrective is important. Ida is not asking the practitioner to produce, in living tissue, the literal symmetry of the carved pharaoh. She is asking the practitioner to use the statue as a held image while accepting that the body in front of them is a rotating, asymmetric, plastic structure that can only approach the held image in a relative sense. The horizontal pelvis of the Egyptian seated king is, in the living body, a pelvis that has come closer to horizontal than it was — closer enough that the rest of the carriage can organize around it. The structural ideal is, in this sense, a direction of work rather than a destination.
Coda: a body for the present
What does the practitioner take from Ida's historical sweep? Not a romance about ancient Egypt. Not a wish to restore the right-angled pharaoh as the modern American body. Not even, finally, a complete confidence that the Egyptians knew what they were doing when they carved their kings. What the practitioner takes is the recognition that body carriage is a cultural fact as well as an individual one, that the visual environment shapes the body image and through it the body, and that the work of organizing one body in a treatment room is the small-scale version of work that civilizations once did at scale through their public art. Ida did not believe the present could simply borrow the Egyptian answer. She believed the present had to make its own answer, equipped now with chemistry and physiology the Egyptians lacked, but informed by the evidence that an organized body had once been culturally possible.
"And, of course, thank God, they've not only been changing, they've been developing. Actually, you need to be more conscious. I hear a certain amount of complaints going on these days because some of you who are in those older earlier brackets of Rolfing are complaining because we have so many new classes and we keep telling everybody about the difference in the teaching nowadays from the old teaching and so forth. But actually you see if we weren't changing in this very rapidly changing world we also would be in the garbage pail, I fear. It is this capacity for change and the fact that from somewhere out of the blue we are given a vision of how we can change that keeps us as a valuable contributor to the culture of today."
Ida, in a 1971-72 IPR conference address, locating her own teaching in the larger history of ideas:
The Egyptians, in her telling, had a static template — a body image carved in granite and repeated for three thousand years without revision. This was, she suggested, both their strength and their limitation. They preserved a structural ideal across millennia, but they did not develop it; the pharaoh of the New Kingdom sits in essentially the same posture as the pharaoh of the Old Kingdom. Modern structural integration, by contrast, was for Ida explicitly a moving target. The template was the right-angled, the vertical, the balanced — but the methods, the depth of work, the understanding of the connective tissue web, all of these were under continuous revision in her classes. To ask the modern practitioner to revere the Egyptian answer would have been, for her, exactly the wrong lesson. The right lesson was that the Egyptians had taken the question seriously enough to spend three thousand years on it. The modern practitioner was being asked to do the same.
See also: See also: Ida's 1973 Big Sur lecture (SUR7301) where she develops the broader contrast between the older mechanical school of healing and the chemical school that displaced it in the late nineteenth century; the historical reading of Egyptian and Roman bodies appears as part of this longer arc. SUR7301 ▸
See also: See also: Ida's 1973 Big Sur class on the third hour (SUR7313) and her 1975 Boulder class on the fifth hour (T7SA), which together work out the practical methods by which a modern body can be brought toward the structural ideal her statuary discussions describe. SUR7313 ▸T7SA ▸
See also: See also: Ida's 1971-72 public-tape soundbyte (TOPAN) on bones as tent-pole spacers rather than weight-bearers — the architectural argument behind the contrast with the Egyptian pyramid. TOPAN ▸
See also: See also: the RolfA1 public tape, in which Ida describes the cultural practice of telling women to stand against a wall and tuck the tail in, as a modern iconographic instruction whose structural effect she considered the inverse of the Egyptian right-angled image. RolfA1Side1 ▸
See also: See also: the 1974 IPR lecture (74_8-05A) in which Ida lays out the progression from the random sloppy body to the vertical balanced body — her modern restatement of the developmental arc she saw documented in Egyptian and Greek statuary. 74_8-05A ▸
See also: See also: Ida's 1971-72 mystery-tape interview on the plasticity of the body (PSYTOD2), where she introduces the concept that allowed her to claim modern bodies could be moved toward the template — the methodological piece Mensendieck and the Egyptian sculptors both lacked. PSYTOD2 ▸