Anthroposophy

What it Means Today

Anthroposophy is not a closed philosophy. It is a living movement, and the movement has a body. That body is the General Anthroposophical Society, refounded on Christmas Eve 1923 in the carpentry workshop next to the burnt shell of the first Goetheanum, when Steiner laid the Foundation Stone Meditation as the spiritual cornerstone of a renewed esoteric school. The Christmas Conference is the hinge. Before it, the Anthroposophical Society (founded 1913) functioned alongside Steiner. After it, Steiner himself took on the chairmanship, and the Society became an esoteric school with the General Anthroposophical Section at its centre.

A century later that body is still in motion. The Goetheanum sits on its hill in Dornach, Switzerland, hosting roughly 1,000 weekly events and serving as the headquarters for some fifty national societies and around 42,000 members. The Anthroposophical Society in America, in the UK, in India, in South Africa, in Brazil, all convene under the same Foundation Stone the conference laid. To meet Anthroposophy now is to meet that organism. Read GA 234 alongside Steiner's Leading Thoughts (GA 26), attend a Branch meeting, visit the Goetheanum, or work with one of the daughter movements (Waldorf, biodynamic agriculture, anthroposophic medicine, eurythmy, the Christian Community). The path begins where Steiner placed it: in a society of people thinking together about the spirit. In the sixfold and sevenfold members of the human being that anthroposophy works with, Life-Spirit names the sixth member, the etheric body transformed by the I into a vessel for spiritual life. The earthly evolution that anthroposophy researches passes through specific epochs that Steiner reads from the Akashic Records, notably Lemuria and Atlantis, before reaching our present post-Atlantean age. The foundational anthropological text of anthroposophy is Theosophy (GA 9, 1904), Steiner's first systematic exposition of the fourfold human being, reincarnation, and the path of supersensible knowledge. The cosmological companion-text to *Theosophy* is Occult Science (GA 13, 1910), Steiner's systematic exposition of the seven planetary stages and the post-Atlantean cultural epochs. Anthroposophy itself belongs to the free spiritual-cultural life whose independence Steiner championed. Anthroposophy extends its method to the past in the symptomatology of history. Anthroposophy exists to rebuild what modern thought severed; see the bridge between spirit and matter. Steiner condensed the whole of it into numbered theses; see Anthroposophical Leading Thoughts.