Who was Rudolf Steiner? what ideas, movements, and historical conditions shaped his visionary philosophy? From his early influences to the pivotal moments of his life, we investigate the evolution of Steiner’s groundbreaking ideas. Discover the origins of anthroposophy, biodynamic agriculture, Waldorf education, and his profound vision of human and planetary evolution, continuing in our time.

Steiner was born in Croatia, on the Austrian border. According to his autobiography, he possessed visionary perception, second sight, from early childhood, and could see the spirits of the dead, nature spirits, and so on. Finding that very few people still possessed this capacity, he didn’t speak openly about his esoteric investigations until he was 40 years old, with a Doctorate of Philosophy. We will explore influences on Steiner’s “spiritual science,” including Madame Blavatsky, Nietzsche, Goethe, Swedenborg, the Rosicrucian movement, and Jakob Böhme.

For a time, Steiner was head of the Theosophy Society in Germany, founded by Blavatsky. He later distanced himself from Theosophy to start his own occult school, Anthroposophy. In the first decades of the Twentieth Century, Steiner was a famous figure with a large following. He feared the development of a “black occult” movement — realized by the Thule Society and the Nazis — and consciously sought to create a “white occult” movement as an antidote. An artist and architect as well as a thinker, Steiner built the Goetheaneum in Dornach, Switzerland, which became a center for Anthroposophic thought. Steiner was a product of his time, and some of his ideas unfortunately suggest an inherent racism, an Aryan chauvinism, that may have contributed to the racist ideology of the Third Reich. We will explore these contradictions instead of minimizing them.