Secret Brotherhoods and the Mystery of the Human Double gathers nine lectures Rudolf Steiner gave in November 1917, in the closing years of the First World War, across Zurich, St. Gallen, and Dornach. The volume brings together several lecture threads that Steiner deliberately interwove: a pair of St. Gallen talks on geographic medicine and the human double, four Dornach lectures on individual spirit beings and the misuse of esoteric knowledge, and a paired study of psychoanalysis viewed from anthroposophy. It is not a single continuous course but a constellation of related meditations, and its unifying subject is the hidden second nature that Steiner calls the double, the Ahrimanic being that accompanies each person from shortly before birth.
Place in Steiner's Work
By late 1917 Steiner had been lecturing for more than fifteen years, and the tone of these talks reflects a man speaking into catastrophe. Europe was three years into a war he read as a symptom of spiritual blindness, and he returns again and again to the idea that the concepts of natural science, however brilliant in their own field, cannot reach the forces actually shaping human events. The lectures belong to a phase of his teaching preoccupied with the boundary between the sensory world and the spiritual world, and with the beings who work in the gap between them. They also mark one of his frankest treatments of occult secrecy. Steiner argues that knowledge once guarded inside closed brotherhoods must now become open, precisely because certain groups, which he calls brotherhoods of the left, had been retaining that knowledge to hold power over those who lacked it.
The volume sits close in time and theme to Steiner's lectures on the karma of untruthfulness and to his wider 1917 work on the threefold human being of thinking, feeling, and willing. Readers who know his earlier writings, such as Knowledge of the Higher Worlds and An Outline of Occult Science, will recognize the same disciplined method here, now turned toward a subject Steiner treats with unusual caution: the being he says had been kept out of human awareness for centuries, and is only now permitted to return to view. He frames the whole inquiry with a methodological reversal that runs through his mature teaching. Where natural science begins from birth, growth, and the constructive forces of life, Steiner begins from death and the forces of dissolution, arguing that only by facing what breaks down within us can we grasp the eternal part of the soul that passes through repeated lives on earth.
Themes and Structure
The heart of the volume is the St. Gallen lecture on the mystery of the double. Steiner describes a being that permeates each person shortly before birth, one he characterizes as highly intelligent and strong of will yet wholly without warmth of soul. This double, he says, is bound up with the forces that stream out of the earth itself, and it is the origin of organic illness that arises from within rather than from outward injury. He pairs it with a second being of Luciferic rather than Ahrimanic character, which he links to the nervous and hysterical conditions that are not true organic illness. From this claim he develops what he calls geographic medicine, the older discipline of reading how the forces of different regions of the earth act on the human being through the double. He treats the earth as a living organism rather than the dead mineral body of geology, comparing the geologist's picture of it to knowing a person only by their skeleton. He then offers a striking historical thread: that early European contact with the Americas was gradually suppressed because of the peculiar relationship between that continent, terrestrial magnetism, and the double.
Steiner presses this geographic argument into cultural observation. Different regions of the earth, he says, favor the double in different ways, so that the peoples formed under them face the same hidden nature under different conditions. He is careful to insist that these are geographic forces rather than qualities of any nation or race, and he cites figures of European culture to make the point that character is not fixed by birthplace. The claim he wants to leave with his listeners is practical rather than fatalistic: a person who knows the double is within them, and knows where its forces act most strongly, is no longer moved blindly by it. Self-knowledge of this hidden companion is, for Steiner, the beginning of freedom from it.
A second thread turns to individual spirit beings and the undivided foundation of the world. Here Steiner insists there is no such thing as an unconscious spirit. When a person crosses the threshold of ordinary consciousness, whether through spiritual training or through illness, they do not enter a void but a populated spiritual world whose beings are themselves fully conscious, often far shrewder than the human soul they act upon. This becomes his key criticism of psychoanalysis. The analysts, he grants, have noticed genuine phenomena of the soul that academic science ignores, but by naming what they find the unconscious they mistake a whole order of conscious spiritual beings for a mere blank region below awareness. To illustrate, Steiner retells the case of a woman driven from a social gathering by an impulse she could not explain, and argues that the force acting on her was not a dim unconscious urge but a conscious being, more clear-sighted in its aim than she was in her confusion.
The Dornach lectures on the wrong and right use of esoteric knowledge sharpen the volume's warning. Steiner dates a decisive shift to the year 1879, when, in his account, spirits of darkness were cast from the spiritual world into the human sphere. He argues that closed groups holding onto old mysteries could use them to manipulate events, and that the honest response is not more secrecy but disclosure, so that ordinary people may learn to recognize the double and the beings that work through it. Throughout, his method stays consistent: he takes death rather than birth as the starting point for knowledge of the eternal in the soul, and he asks his listeners to make their concepts living rather than fixed images, so that thought itself can meet a reality that ordinary ideas only skim.
Glossary Terms from this Volume
This volume is a primary source for the Thalira glossary entry below. Follow the link to study the term in depth, with its cross-references and related ideas:
Steiner's own words give the clearest sense of why he raised the subject when he did:
The human being in the coming centuries will have to know more and more that he bears such a double within him, such an Ahrimanic-Mephistophelian double.
Where to Read It
You can read the full text at the Rudolf Steiner Archive, which hosts the English translations of these 1917 lectures. For a bound print edition, search the publisher catalog at SteinerBooks. Because the volume assembles lectures from more than one setting, editions vary in how the talks are grouped, so it helps to read the whole sequence rather than a single lecture in isolation.
Continue Your Study
To go further with the ideas in GA 178:
- Browse the full Thalira Glossary to see how the double connects to Steiner's wider vocabulary of Ahrimanic and Luciferic beings.
- Return to the GA Work Library to find neighboring lecture cycles from the same period of Steiner's teaching.
- Study the entry on The Double alongside this guide to hold Steiner's clinical and spiritual claims together in one view.