Theosophy and Occultism is the English title carried by GA 90c, a sequence of fifteen lectures Rudolf Steiner gave in Berlin between 24 August and 4 December 1903 to members of the newly founded German Section of the Theosophical Society. The volume belongs to the group of note-based publications gathered in the Collected Works under the number 90, texts that survive not as Steiner's own manuscripts but as records taken down by listeners sitting in the room. Its subject is the architecture of spiritual evolution: how an individuality carries itself from one earthly life into the next, how consciousness came to rest on the physical plane at all, where evil originates, and what an esoteric movement may responsibly speak aloud in public. Because these are notes rather than a finished book, the prose is compressed and elliptical, and it moves faster than almost anything else Steiner left behind.
Place in Steiner's Work
1903 is very early. Steiner was forty-two, two years into his public esoteric teaching, and had not yet written the books that would define him. Theosophy appeared in 1904. The instructions later gathered as Knowledge of the Higher Worlds were still being serialised. The Anthroposophical Society, and with it the name anthroposophy, lay nearly a decade ahead. What a reader meets in GA 90c is a thinker working inside a borrowed vocabulary and already straining against it.
That borrowed vocabulary is the most striking feature of the volume. The lectures speak of devachan and its arupa heights, of kama-manas, upadhis, rounds, root races, elemental kingdoms, and the descent of the Manasaputras. These are Theosophical Society terms, largely inherited from Blavatsky's The Secret Doctrine, and Steiner uses them because they were the shared language of his audience. Within a few years he would recast nearly all of it: kama-manas becomes the sentient and intellectual soul, the planetary rounds become the Saturn, Sun, Moon and Earth conditions, and the racial framing drops away almost entirely. Reading GA 90c is therefore an unusual chance to watch a terminology being used and quietly outgrown in real time.
The volume also complicates a common assumption about the sequence of Steiner's interests. Readers often suppose that his Christian material arrived only after 1907, once he had separated himself from the Adyar leadership. The closing lecture of 4 December 1903 makes that difficult to hold. It treats the figure of Christ as the centre of a doctrine of initiation, and it does so while Steiner was still addressing a Theosophical branch under a Theosophical banner. GA 90c is small, but it is evidentially useful.
Themes and Structure
The fifteen lectures do not follow a single argument. They read as a weekly conversation with a small group, each session picking up a question the previous one raised. Four strands run through the whole.
Repeated earthly lives and the rhythm of individualities
The opening lecture takes Cardinal Nicholas of Cusa as its case study, arguing that a highly developed individuality does not merely return but returns on a pattern, preparing its own later conditions from the heights between lives. Steiner offers sequences of names as illustrations of what he calls regular development. The eighth lecture returns to the same ground with harder questions: how long the interval between lives typically runs, and what happens when a child dies early. A reader should notice that these succession claims are given as reports from spiritual observation, not as historical argument, and that Steiner never offered corroborating method for them.
Secrecy, disclosure, and the ethics of an esoteric movement
Lectures two and three are the most historically interesting in the set. Steiner discusses the Knights Templar as a society with a hidden aim, then turns to the question that clearly preoccupied his audience: by what right was the Theosophical Society printing material that had previously been passed from mouth to ear only after long testing. His answer is that the change was forced from two sides. Fragments had already leaked over centuries and had been recovered piecemeal by outside scholarship, and the drift of the age toward materialism made silence more dangerous than speech. He also frames the disclosure as an event with a date, tying it to changes he claims were readable in the astral world around the year 1900. Alongside this comes the idea of seven great secrets of existence released in succession, the fourth of which he presents as the one being prepared in his own time.
The scale of consciousness
The twelfth lecture is the structural spine of the volume. Steiner argues that every kingdom of nature possesses consciousness, and that what separates them is where that consciousness is seated: the human being on the physical plane, the animal on the astral, the plant in devachan, the mineral higher still. From this he builds a sevenfold ladder of consciousness states, from a deepest trance condition through today's ordinary object awareness up to a future condition in which the world is heard as sound rather than seen as image. Each state of consciousness is said to pass through seven states of life, and each of those through seven states of form, producing the figure 343 that occultism writes as a number to be read rather than counted. The three Logoi are then mapped onto those three levels. It is dense, schematic, and worth diagramming rather than paraphrasing.
Substance, body, and the origin of evil
The thirteenth lecture describes the Moon condition preceding the Earth: no mineral kingdom yet, a half living globe, gelatinous beings that later armoured themselves in bone. Steiner ties the chemistry of that epoch to nitrogen, treating today's nitrogen compounds as leftovers of a former norm, which is why he regards them as hostile to earthly life. The eleventh lecture supplies the moral counterpart. The preceding cosmos, he says, was a cosmos of wisdom, and ours is a cosmos of love, whose task is to turn inherited wisdom into freely given love. Evil enters because beings who completed their wisdom development in the earlier cosmos press human beings off their proper path. Christian esotericism gathers those beings under the name Lucifer. Practical lectures on suffering, hereditary illness, embryology, nutrition and temperament sit alongside this cosmology, and the closing lecture gathers everything into an account of three initiations, of wisdom, of heart, and of will, with a striking argument that the great teachers deliberately refuse to work on the sleeping human being because doing so would preserve the pupil's freedom at the cost of the will.
Theosophy is not a religion, but a tool for understanding religions.
A reading caution. These are listeners' notes, sometimes visibly abbreviated, with editorial brackets where the record breaks. Treat no single sentence as a settled doctrine. Where a passage matters to you, check it against the fuller cycles Steiner gave on the same subject after 1908.
Glossary Terms from this Volume
Nine entries in the Thalira glossary draw directly on GA 90c. Each one takes a single motif from these lectures and sets it in the wider context of Steiner's later work.
- The Cosmos of Wisdom and the Cosmos of Love, the two cosmic epochs whose relation defines the task of Earth.
- Hyperintelligences, the beings of surplus wisdom whom Steiner identifies with the Luciferic principle.
- Kama-Manas, the desire-bound thinking that Earth existence had to build into the nervous system.
- The Manasaputras, the sons of mind whose descent kindled self-conscious human thinking.
- Nitrogen as the Moon Substance, why Steiner reads cyanic compounds as survivals of an older world.
- The Threefold Fertilization, the physical, astral and egoic layers Steiner finds in human conception.
- Re-embodiment After Child Death, the shortened interval and the question that prompted it.
- The Seven Unspeakable Secrets, the sequence of mysteries released one to each epoch of humanity.
- The Initiation of Wisdom, Mind and Will, the three-stage path set out in the final lecture.
Where to Read It
You can read the full text at the Rudolf Steiner Archive, which hosts all fifteen lectures of GA 90c along with the companion volumes 90a and 90b. The English there is a recent working translation prepared for the Steiner Online Library rather than a long-established print edition, so the German remains the text of record for close study; the archive presents both side by side.
For print editions and related titles, search the publisher catalogue at SteinerBooks. Readers who want the same 1903 material in Steiner's own polished prose should pair these notes with Theosophy, written the following year, which reworks the same anthropology for a general audience.
Continue Your Study
- Browse the full Thalira glossary to see how the terms above connect to the rest of Steiner's vocabulary.
- Return to the GA Work Library for study guides to the other volumes of the Collected Works.
- Follow a structured route through the material with the Paths to Knowledge reading sequences.
- Read the glossary journal for longer treatments of single terms as they are published.