Father Johan is a telegraph operator on the railway and his job brought him to the place where his son was born. Even the date of birth could not be without controversy. Rudolf Steiner himself once left a record that he was born two days before his baptism, i.e. on February 25, but scientists who had access to all available documents still believe that Steiner was mistaken - so in German sources, Steiner's date of birth is still the 27th. February - as it says on his baptismal certificate.
Rudolf Steiner later claimed that he had visions even in childhood. Allegedly, when he was seven years old, his aunt appeared to him and committed suicide at that moment, far from him. Even as a boy, he read Kant, then studied in Vienna. During his years in Vienna, he came into contact with the esotericist Friedrich Eckstein, became acquainted with the teachings of Jelena Blavatsky, who founded the Theosophical Society in New York in 1975.
He moved to Germany to study - he obtained a doctorate in philosophy in 1891 in Rostock.
For the next five years, he dealt with Goethe's naturalistic writings as an associate of the newly founded Goethe and Schiller archive in Weimar. Even with marriage, Steiner does not act according to the bourgeois cliché. When his former landlady from Weimar becomes a widow, he moves in with her, and they get married a little later. She is eight years older than him and has five children.
From skeptic to mystic
Steiner's starting point in philosophy was Goethe's thought that the mind perceives ideas as the eye perceives colors. The work "Philosophy of Freedom" followed. In it, Steiner followed in the footsteps of Friedrich Nietzsche and advocated extreme individualism, and understood the world as a whole that can either be experienced or thought about - he considered everything else to be an unfounded hypothesis. Therefore, an agnostic, not a mystic, speaks from this work. Steiner did not manage to occupy a significant place in the academic community.
He worked for a while for Nietzsche's archive, and even met Nietzsche who was already seriously mentally ill. He broke off cooperation with his sister and was the first to point out her manipulations of his brother's inheritance. The first is Nietzsche's biographer and popularizer. In public, he was an energetic opponent of anti-Semitism.
A bohemian who is ashamed
Steiner lived in poverty in Vienna, Weimar and Berlin. But it was recorded that he sometimes banked for days with his friends, poets and artists. Until the beginning of the 1904th century, he hung out in Berlin with anarchists, advocates of free love. As early as XNUMX, in a letter to his wife, he expressed regret for the bohemian time spent.
During those years, he became a sought-after lecturer on Nietzsche's philosophy and mysticism. Theosophists, whom Rudolf Steiner initially regarded with skepticism, became his most numerous audience. He perceives his spiritual evolution as continuity, while biographers see a break - the agnostic suddenly approaches Christian mysticism.
In 1902, the German branch of the Theosophical Society was founded. The members could not agree on a candidate for president. They remembered Steiner and - everyone accepted him.
Unlike other theosophists, Steiner emphasized the uniqueness of the human "I" as well as the uniqueness of Christ - according to the teachings of theosophists, he was a highly developed man, a "master", and for Steiner much more. This did not prevent him from soon accepting the teachings about reincarnation and karma.
Friends like Bruno Ville warned him that the concept of Theosophy was discredited by a mixture of Buddhist scholasticism, occult superstition and spiritualist delusions.
Some friends turn their backs on him. In his lectures, he talks more and more about "higher worlds" and "mysteries".
From theosophy to anthroposophy
The book "Theosophy" with the subtitle "Introduction to Extrasensory Knowledge of the World" was published in 1904. It takes over Fichte's concept of the "spiritual eye" which, according to Steiner, allows us direct insight into mental and spiritual reality.
Steiner, unlike other esoteric teachers, does not advocate the initiation of students and their introduction into mystical knowledge, but wants everyone to find their own individual path to the "higher worlds". Theosophy knows no mediator between man and God. Steiner's writings went through 16 editions during his lifetime.
According to the teachings of esotericists, the total fate of the planet is recorded in a document called the Chronicle of Akasha - akasha is ether, one of the five basic elements in Hinduism. According to them, access to that fateful chronicle is possible. Rudolf Steiner claimed to be able to read from that writing stored in another dimension. The goal of anthroposophy - that's how Steiner called his theosophy after the split with the Theosophical Society - is to be a path of knowledge, which leads from the spiritual in man to the spiritual in the universe. The three spiritual states that help this psychonautic process are imagination, inspiration and intuition.
Man is squeezed between the Luciferian principle of selfishness and the Ahrimanic principle of alienation from God. He believed that Ahriman, as one of the destructive principles of the world known in Zoroastrianism, would be realized in America.
The split between Steiner and the American leadership of the Theosophical Society led in 1912 to the founding of the Anthroposophical Society in Cologne - the largest number of former members of the German branch of the Theosophical Society joined the new organization, and Steiner became its honorary president.
Steiner as a star
Rudolf Steiner becomes a kind of traveling preacher. Branches of the society are springing up in Germany and Europe like mushrooms after the rain. In the first two decades of the 6.000th century, Steiner traveled constantly. It is calculated that he gave over 4.500 lectures. Stenographers took notes. XNUMX of them were counted. They form the basis of numerous published books, but Steiner never authorized them.
He filled concert halls. At the height of his popularity, in 1921 and 1922, his tours were organized by a well-known concert agency from Berlin, and the police struggled to regulate the rush of people at the entrance. A higher ticket was requested. It was recorded that delighted visitors gave Steiner a standing ovation, stamping their feet on the floor, applause that lasted for minutes.
Steiner was clearly a master of mass suggestion.
Journalists were often skeptical of him, some welcomed him with a knife, and some called him a charlatan. He was certainly a phenomenon to which no one remained indifferent.
Geteanum - temple of learning
In Dornach, Switzerland, near Basel, the Geteanum, the world center of the athroposophical movement, was created in 1913 according to Steiner's plans. In May 1922, the Nazis attempted to assassinate Steiner in Munich, in the Hotel "Four Seasons" (Vier Jahreszeiten), which until 1924 was the headquarters of the secret society Thule - whose symbols probably served as the basis of Nazi symbolism. "Keep your blood pure" and "Remember you are a German" were slogans believed by the forerunners of the Nazis.
Steiner with his universalist mysticism was their natural opponent. Its Geteanum center burned to the ground in December 1922 - it is believed that the Nazis were also behind the arson.
Rudolf Steiner drew up a new blueprint for the Getenaum, this time made of concrete rather than wood. That building was completed in 1928, and Steiner never saw it again. His posthumous influence was also evident in the field of "organic architecture", which inspired the greatest architects of the XNUMXth century.
To this day, Steiner's ideas are alive in many social segments from medicine to artistic dance. Waldorf high schools work according to his concept, his advocacy of biological-dynamic agriculture bore fruit after the establishment of ecologically clean agricultural enterprises,
A lonely walk in the crowd
Towards the end of his life, Steiner was engaged against attributing guilt to Germany for the outbreak of the First World War, even participating in publishing publications bordering on conspiracy theories. In Germany, even in the new millennium, there was a controversy about some of Steiner's views, which could be called racist from today's point of view. But the fact is that his total teaching is not like that. The Nazis, his bitter opponents, misused some of his statements.
Steiner denied Freud's libido - according to him, man is not guided by the unconscious but by a spiritual being. He claimed that man, with the help of the development of his inner spiritual being, has the ability to peer into otherworldly records from the cosmic collective memory.
Rudolf Steiner died in Dornach, Switzerland in 1925.
His contemporaries mostly did not understand him. Or they thought he was wrong.
Albert Einstein attended his lectures and eventually said that Steiner did not understand non-Euclidean geometry, and he labeled the experience of the supernatural as nonsense. Franz Kafka even asked Steiner for life advice in personal contact, but his expectation remained unfulfilled. Stefan Zweig met him in Berlin. Kurt Tuholski made fun of him in his satires. Hermann Hesse denied the almost obvious connection of his work with Steiner's teaching. Albert Schweitzer, the Nobel Peace Prize laureate, testified about the special feeling of togetherness with Rudolf Steiner from their first meeting. And the poet Christian Morgenstein, Steiner's friend, left verses in the collection "We found the path":
those who walk towards the truth
they walk alone
no one else can be
brother on that track
Bonus video:
