The Anthroposophic Movement is the volume catalogued as GA 258 in the collected works of Rudolf Steiner. It gathers eight lectures given at Dornach, Switzerland, from 10 to 17 June 1923, in the months before the Christmas Foundation Meeting that would refound the Anthroposophical Society. The lectures are a work of history and self-examination rather than cosmology. Steiner set out to describe how the anthroposophic movement arose, how it became entangled with and then separated from the Theosophical Society, and what kind of people were first drawn to it. His name for those seekers gives the course its enduring keyword: the homeless souls.
The course carries a double character that makes it distinctive. On one level it is autobiography, since Steiner had stood at the centre of every episode he recounts and could speak from direct memory. On another level it is a diagnosis, an attempt to explain to the assembled members why the Society had reached the crisis it now faced and what it would have to become in order to survive. Because the lectures were spoken to insiders, they assume a good deal of shared knowledge, yet they remain readable today as one of the clearest windows Steiner ever opened onto the human story behind his ideas.
Place in Steiner's Work
GA 258 belongs to Steiner's late period, when he turned back to look honestly at the society he had helped to build. By 1923 the Anthroposophical Society was in difficulty. The first Goetheanum had burned on New Year's Eve of 1922, and the membership was divided over how the work should be led. Against that background Steiner asked his listeners to remember where they had come from. The lectures are unusual among his output because their subject is the movement itself: its origins, its personalities, its mistakes, and its unfinished task of becoming a true community.
The course sits directly alongside the reorganisation of the Society at Christmas 1923 and 1924. Where many of Steiner's cycles reach outward into medicine, education, or the spiritual worlds, this one turns inward. It reads best as a companion to the founding documents of the reconstituted Society, and as Steiner's own account of the difference between a spiritual movement, which lives through ideas, and a society, which must live through the people who carry it.
There is also a reason of feeling behind the lectures. The membership had grown quickly, drawing in newcomers who had never known the small circles of the early years, while some older adherents still measured everything against the Theosophy they had left behind. Steiner uses the history to bind these groups together, reminding the newer members that the movement had a hard-won past and reminding the older ones that anthroposophy had never simply been a branch of the Theosophical Society. For a reader coming to Steiner through his better-known work on child development or agriculture, GA 258 supplies the missing biography of the organisation that carried all of it, and it explains why he spent so much of his final year rebuilding the Society from its foundations rather than adding to his already vast body of teaching.
Themes and Structure
The first lecture introduces the homeless souls: people who, by their inner fate, could not settle into the ordinary paths of modern civilisation and went searching along the side-tracks of the age. Steiner counts among them the readers of popular mystics, the followers of Wagner at Bayreuth, and the seekers who drifted toward spiritualism at the close of the nineteenth century. He describes such a soul with a homely image:
are homeless souls, grow out of the snug nest rather than into it.
The second and third lectures turn to the Theosophical Society as Steiner found it. He gives a candid, sometimes wry portrait of a body that had acquired a strong corporate self, an "I" of its own, held together by shared theories about advanced and unadvanced souls, by borrowed Eastern vocabulary, and by loyalty that outlasted the failings of its leaders. He weighs the writings of H. P. Blavatsky, finding in them a chaotic mass alongside genuine tidings from a spiritual world, and asks how such reports could reach the modern age from so questionable a quarter.
The fourth and fifth lectures follow the anti-Christian orientation that Steiner saw in Blavatsky's work and in later Theosophy, and set against it his own conviction that knowledge and religion must meet without a gulf between them. Here he traces how modern science had emptied the natural world of living beings and made a bridge to the divine seem impossible, and why anthroposophy could not follow the Eastern turn away from the figure of Christ. He recalls the older religions, in which the study of nature flowed without a break into the knowledge of the divine, and argues that the human mind still longs to cross freely between the two. This, for Steiner, was the point at which his path had to diverge from the Theosophy of Annie Besant, whose books he treats with a mixture of respect for their sources and impatience with their method.
The sixth and seventh lectures lay out the inner history of the movement in three periods. Steiner recalls the years when he first connected his message to the only circles that would hear it, the middle period when the Gospels and Genesis opened new ground in lecture cycles, and the present day of 1923, with its particular life-conditions for a Society that had grown far beyond its beginnings. The eighth lecture draws conclusions and looks toward the future conduct of the Society. Steiner returns to his early writings on Goethe, recalling that he had to seek a point of connection for spiritual ideas in Goethe's world-conception because the philosophy of the day offered none.
A thread runs through all eight lectures: the tension between a movement and a society. A movement, in Steiner's telling, can live on ideas alone, carried forward by whoever happens to find them. A society is something harder, because it asks separate individuals to feel themselves parts of a single body without surrendering their freedom. He admired the way the Theosophical Society had achieved that corporate strength, even as he refused the means by which it had done so, and he confessed that the Anthroposophical Society had not yet learned to become a genuine community. That candid admission is one reason the course still repays study, since it names a difficulty that any group built around a teacher must eventually face.
Read together, the eight lectures move from the seeker to the society and back to the individual again. They are a summary in Steiner's own voice, and the reader should treat them as memory and interpretation, not as a neutral chronicle. What the study guide can offer is a map through that voice, so that a first-time reader knows why the account dwells so long on Blavatsky, why Christianity keeps returning as a theme, and how the three periods fit together into a single unfolding story.
Glossary Terms from this Volume
This volume is the primary source behind the following entry in the Thalira glossary. Follow the link to study the term in depth:
Where to Read It
You can read the full text of these lectures at the Rudolf Steiner Archive, which hosts the English translation used here under the title The Anthroposophic Movement. For print editions and related titles, search the publisher catalogue at SteinerBooks. When you read the lectures themselves, keep in mind that Steiner is speaking to members who lived through the events he describes, so a little background on the Theosophical Society of the period will make the account easier to follow.
Continue Your Study
- Browse the full Thalira glossary to see how the language of anthroposophy connects across Steiner's lifetime of lectures.
- Start with the entry for Homeless Souls, the seekers whose portrait opens this volume, to see how the idea is unpacked term by term.
- Return to the GA Work Library to place these 1923 lectures beside the other volumes of Steiner's collected works.