Rudolph Steiner
Steiner's Life and Teachings
Rudolph Steiner (1861-1925) is an important occult philosopher. An
Austrian, he was greatly influenced by Goethe's works, and worked for a time
at the Goethe archives at Weimer. He later became involved in the
Theosophical Society, and founded a new German branch. But although
obviously influenced by the Theosophical World-view (the concept of seven
planes, cosmic cycles and sub-cycles, etc) Steiner's approach and teachings
differed markedly from those of the rest of Theosophists. Whereas the
Theosophists, under the inspiration of Blavatsky's orientation, looked to the
East - to India and Tibet, for inspiration - Steiner was preiminantly a
European mystic. He was interested in European occultism, European
mysticism, European Christianity. In 1907 he was initiated into the
Rosicrucians. By 1910 he was lecturing heavily on the Gospels, which gave
him a popular following among the Germans he associated with.
Annie Besant and C. W. Leadbeater's Star of the East project (in which they
claimed the new Messiah had incarnated in the person of Jiddu Krishnamurti,
then a young boy) was as much as Steiner and the Germans could bear. And the
last thing the German aristrocracy wanted to be associated with was the
British empire and all that Indian stuff. They craved instead the Nordic
mysteries.
Eventually, due to increasing tension with Annie Besant's brand of
Theosophy, things came to a head, and he broke away in 1913 to found his own
organisation, which he called Anthroposophy ("Wisdom of or about Man").
Steiner wrote only a few books, but during his period as a teacher he gave
thousands of lec-tures on all aspects of occultism and esotericism, as well
as education, music, agriculture, and economics. In this enormous corpus of
work he laid out his metaphysical system, a unique but limited structure,
based on elements of Theosophy, Rosicrucianism, Plato, Goethe, and
Christianity. Indian influence in his ideas was for all intents and purposes
nil, unlike the Theosophists, and the Theosophical Sanskrit terminology which
appears in his early lectures was soon replaced by Christian European terms,
such as spirit, soul, etc.
Steiner claimed to have clairvoyant or occult vision; to be able to directly
perceive occult realities, spiritual beings, and the Theosophists' Akashic
Record. It was on the basis of reading this akashic record that Steiner
developed his cosmology, theory of human evolution, Christology, etc. He
claimed to be able to actually see back in time to these ancient events
imprinted on the cosmic aether.
Unfortunately, this akashic record cannot have been the most reliable thing,
for Steiner made a few curious blunders. His account of the formation and
history of the Earth for example is not supported by any astrophysical,
geological, or paleontological evidence. He took the Gospels at face value,
whereas any modern religious historian could tell you they were not
eye-witness statements but theological accounts of how the early Church
perceived Christ, only written some decades after the latter's death, and
compiled from different sources. And his claim (on the basis of this same
akashic record) that the anonymous fifth/sixth century Christian Neoplatonist
who used as a psuedonym the name of a disciple of Paul's was actually the
original (1st century) Dionysius mentioned in the book of Acts, is disproved
by the striking similarity between "Psuedo"-Dionysius' writings and those of
the Neoplatonist Proclus (fifth century). Whole sections of Dionysius are in
fact plagiarised from Proclus.
Steiner's published lectures, despite being a mine of occult information, are
also tedious and repititious. His actual writings, especially his later and
more important ones, are even more so, and for the most part totally
unreadible.
Steiner's current legacy lies in education and agriculture. His education
philosophy made him a notable figure among progressive educators just after
the First World War, and his "Waldorf schools" are still known and respected
by many today (although quite understandably everyone tends to look down on
his associated cosmology in a rather dismissive way). In the 1940's and
'50's in Australia at least the Steiner people developed the Camp Hill
Communities (for example Warranala in Sydney), with curitative education of
other retarded children. In many ways these were the forerunners of the
modern communes, with aspects of closed monastic communities.
Steiner's extraordinary system of agriculture, called "bio-dynamics", rejects
chemical fertilisers, and is based on the subtle formative forces of plant
growth. With the help of his second wife, Marie von Sivers, he developed a
system of flowing movement, "eurythmy", which seems, especially in Curative
Erythmy to be at least superficially camparable to Chinese disciplines such
as Tai Chi, although totally independent of them (for Steiner the Greek
influence was always primary).
Around the turn of the century, Steiner returned to the mystical interests
which had formed part of his education at Vienna. Such occult interests
tended to be quite common among the idealistic and reforming circles in which
Steiner moved, and his conversion from Goethe-specialist to occult teacher
was complete by about 1906. This period was marked by the increasing
ascendancy of Marie von Sivers (1867-1948), a Baltic Russian actress and
originally a keen Theosophist.
In 1906 Steiner accepted a charter from the O.T.O. (this was still several
years before Crowley was to join and eventually take over the organisation),
which licensed him to work as head of a lodge called the Mysteria Mystica
Aeterna. It is very unlikely that Steiner adopted the sex-magical practices
of that organization. Rather, he was looking for an "apostolic succession"
to give authority to his own ideas and his own form of Rosicrucianism. But
Steiner's "Rosicrucianism", like his "theosophy", was a personal creation.
He mingled Theosophical ideas of karma and reincarnation with contemporary
European occultism, Goethe, and his own brand of Christianity.
http://www.kheper.auz.com/topics/Anthroposophy/Steiner.htm
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