In Steiner's spiritual science, destiny (Schicksal) is the way a person meets the consequences of their own earlier earthly lives as the circumstances of the present one.
Destiny in Anthroposophy is the lawful shaping of a human life through the consequences of that same individuality's earlier earthly lives, the inner side of what Rudolf Steiner also calls karma. In Karmic Relationships, Volume I (GA 235, 1924) he separates inner destiny, the talents and constitution a person carries inward at birth, from outer destiny, the people, places, and vocations that approach from without. The German word is Schicksal, from schicken, to send: destiny is what is sent toward us. What meets a person as circumstance is the earthly reflection of deeds the spiritual Hierarchies balance during the time between death and a new birth. Destiny is therefore not blind fate imposed from outside but the present face of one's own past will, a biography that can be read and consciously taken up rather than only endured.
For Steiner this reframes the oldest question a person asks of their life. A destiny is not luck or punishment arriving from elsewhere. The circumstance that meets us, a marriage, an illness, a city, the work we are drawn into, is woven from our own earlier striving and returned to us so that the same will can act again, now in freedom.
In Steiner's Own Words
Whether I meet a person who has significance for me in earthly life, who determines my destiny: what happens with this meeting of the other person, the gods have exemplified it as the result of what we have had with this person in a previous earthly life. Whether during my life on earth I am transferred to a region that is important to me, to a profession that is important to me, everything that comes to me as external fate is the image of what the gods have experienced, gods of the first hierarchy, as the consequences of my previous life on earth during the time in which I myself stood between death and a new birth.
What it Means Today
The reader most likely to recognise Steiner's picture of destiny is one who has met it through C. G. Jung. Working in Zurich through the 1920s and 1930s, Jung came to read a biography not as a string of accidents but as a meaningful pattern, a life governed by an inner ordering he located in the Self. In his 1934 to 1939 seminars on Nietzsche's Zarathustra he returned often to the old Stoic phrase amor fati, the love of one's fate, and argued that the decisive turn in an analysis comes when a person stops resisting their circumstances and recognises in them the shape of their own deeper will. What looks like outer chance, the people who arrive, the place one is sent, the vocation that takes hold, reveals itself on reflection as continuous with who one already is.
The parallel with Steiner is close and worth naming precisely. Where Steiner speaks of deeds carried from a former earthly life and reflected back as outer fate, Jung speaks of the unconscious that one has not lived consciously returning as event. James Hillman, working from Jung, later sharpened this into his "acorn theory," the claim that each life carries an image it is here to grow into. Steiner's contribution within this family of thought is the moral one: destiny is not a sentence but an address. The circumstance that meets a person is the very situation in which their own past will becomes legible, and so the point at which freedom can begin again.
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