Cataloged in Rudolf Steiner's collected works as GA 210 and published in English under the title Old and New Methods of Initiation, this volume gathers fourteen lectures delivered between January and March of 1922. Most were given at the Goetheanum in Dornach, Switzerland, with two carried to wider audiences in Mannheim and Breslau. Steiner had titled the JSON shorthand of this set "Cyprianus" after one of its most vivid case studies, yet the governing question across all fourteen talks is broader: how does the modern human being recover a living relationship with the spiritual world after centuries in which natural science has claimed the whole of reality for itself. Steiner frames this as the difference between the initiation practices of earlier ages and the new path suited to the age of intellect.
Place in Steiner's Work
By 1922 Steiner had spent two decades building anthroposophy into a comprehensive spiritual science, and these lectures belong to his late Dornach period, when he was speaking to members already versed in his teaching. The setting matters. The first Goetheanum still stood, and Steiner was addressing an audience that had followed his descriptions of the human being as spirit, soul, and body over many years. Against that background, GA 210 does not lay foundations so much as apply them. Steiner takes the historical drift he had traced elsewhere, the long passage from an age of instinctive clairvoyance into the age of abstract thinking, and asks what initiation must now become if it is to meet people whose consciousness has been shaped by the natural sciences.
The volume sits close in theme to the lectures Steiner gave around the same period on the decline of ancient wisdom and the birth of the modern intellect. What distinguishes GA 210 is its method: rather than argue in the abstract, Steiner reads the great poetic works of European culture as records of a consciousness in transition. The literature becomes his evidence.
This literary turn is worth pausing over, because it tells us something about how Steiner understood the history of the human soul. He held that great poets often perceive, half consciously, the deeper currents of their age, and that a drama such as Hamlet or a play by Calderon can therefore preserve a truer record of a spiritual crisis than any philosophical treatise. In GA 210 Steiner treats the poet almost as a witness whose testimony has to be interpreted rather than a mere maker of entertainments. For the student of anthroposophy, this offers a working example of how spiritual science reads culture: not by imposing doctrine on a text, but by listening for the state of consciousness out of which the text was written.
Themes and Structure
The opening lectures set the diagnosis. Steiner observes that modern people live divided between two worlds they can no longer join: the material world of natural law, which is indifferent to moral values, and the moral world of ideals, which seems to have no footing in nature. He describes the aim of a renewed initiation science in a single sentence:
It is the task of initiation science to take away from natural existence the absolute reality it assumes for itself and to give reality back once more to the world of moral values.
From this diagnosis the lectures move outward. Steiner distinguishes the older initiation, which worked through the transformation of the physical and etheric constitution, from a newer path that must begin in clear waking thought and carry that clarity, rather than dimming it, into spiritual perception. He treats sleeping and waking, memory and forgetting, and the daily rhythm of consciousness as gateways where the spiritual quietly enters ordinary life.
The most memorable stretch of the volume turns to dramatic poetry. In the seventh lecture Steiner reads Pedro Calderon de la Barca's play about the magician Cyprianus as a portrait of a soul poised between two ages. Cyprianus seeks the spirit inside natural things and processes, taking its presence for granted the way a medieval mind still could. When the figure of Justina enters, Steiner invites the reader to hear in her name the living justice that once pervaded the world, before law hardened into the abstract volumes of the modern lawyer. Cyprianus cannot reach her through the rigid necessities of nature, and the tragedy that follows becomes, in Steiner's reading, an image of what nature wisdom has become in the scientific age: a bringer of phantoms rather than life.
In the ninth lecture Steiner turns to Shakespeare's Hamlet and reads the prince as a genuine pupil of Faust. Hamlet has studied at Wittenberg, where he learned to treat his own brain as a book, yet he still stands inside a spiritual reality when his father's ghost appears to him. Both impulses war in his soul, the sharp intellect of the new age and the older openness to spirit, and Steiner argues that the famous ambiguity of the play, the endless scholarly quarrel over whether the ghost is real, is precisely the mark of a consciousness caught between two epochs. Where Calderon still portrayed spiritual beings as concrete as tables and chairs, Shakespeare holds them in living suspension, neither wholly objective nor merely subjective. Steiner extends the reading to Macbeth, King Lear, and Goethe's Götz von Berlichingen, using each as a further sounding of the same historical shift.
Running beneath the literary readings is a claim about the shape of history itself. Steiner describes a long passage from what he calls the fourth cultural epoch, in which spiritual beings were felt to be as real as any physical object, into the fifth, our own, in which sharp intellectual thought has driven that older perception into the shadows. Calderon still belongs, in soul, to the older world, while Shakespeare stands squarely on the threshold, and Goethe writes from a moment when the intellect has all but won. Reading these authors in sequence lets Steiner map the retreat of spiritual vision as a lived experience rather than a dry chronology, and it lets him show his audience where they themselves stand in that long movement.
The closing lectures gather these threads back toward the practical question of initiation, showing how the modern seeker must consciously and deliberately reunite what history has torn apart. Steiner is careful to insist that the answer is not a return to the old clairvoyance, which cannot be recovered and should not be mourned, but a new discipline that keeps the clarity won by the intellect while opening it, by inner training, onto the spiritual world once more. The structure of the volume thus moves from diagnosis, through cultural evidence drawn from poetry, to a description of the inner work by which the two worlds can be joined again.
Glossary Terms from this Volume
The Thalira glossary draws on GA 210 for entries that trace its literary and initiatory motifs. Each term below links to its full study entry, where this volume is cited as a primary source:
Where to Read It
You can read the full text of these lectures at the Rudolf Steiner Archive, a free and searchable repository of his collected works, at rsarchive.org. For the printed English edition under the title Old and New Methods of Initiation, or for related volumes, search the publisher's catalog at SteinerBooks. Reading the lectures in Steiner's own words is the surest way to test the summary offered here against the source.
Continue Your Study
To follow the ideas in GA 210 further, several paths open from here:
- Browse the full Thalira glossary to see how the motifs of initiation, consciousness, and dramatic imagination connect across Steiner's work.
- Read the linked entries on Calderon's Cyprianus Drama and Hamlet and the Consciousness Soul to see these lectures examined term by term.
- Return to the GA Work Library to place this volume among the other collected-works study guides.