Steiner's name for the pre-Christian faiths whose gods were fixed to an earthly place or ruler, which is why every locality produced its own religion.
Earth Religions in Anthroposophy is Rudolf Steiner's category for the pre-Christian cults whose object of worship was fastened to something terrestrial: first a sacred place, later a ruling person. In From Limestone to Lucifer (GA 349), answering workers at the Goetheanum on 9 May 1923, Steiner described how Egypt worshipped Ra as the god who dwells in Thebes, while the regions of Alsace and Münster honoured their own local deities. Because each cult fixed the divine to its own soil, every locality necessarily produced a separate religion. When migrating peoples could no longer bind a god to a place, they transferred the divine dignity to their leader, which is why Rome worshipped its emperor as a god. Against these splintering earth religions Steiner set the universal sun religion carried by Christ, a contrast that scholars of ancient religion still trace between local cult and universal faith.
Earth religions, Erdenreligionen in Steiner's German, are the faiths that bound the divine to a point on the earth: the god housed in a Theban temple sanctuary, the local deity of one valley, and at last the deified emperor of a wandering people. Steiner used the category to explain why humanity holds so many separate religions, and why the Pentecost thought of one religion for all people answers them.
In Steiner's Own Words
Yes, gentlemen, if someone lived where we live today, he probably did not say: the god is in Thebes; because that was something that not only could not be reached in ancient times, but of which nothing was known at all. They knew nothing of Thebes. So those who were down here, in Egypt, where the Nile flows, said: the god who lives in Thebes. And those who were here, in our area, they also had such local deities. For example, there was a local deity in what is now Alsace, or in Münster. So people worshiped God in a particular place. Yes, that is the reason why there are different religions: the Theban religion, the religion of Münster, the religion of Alsace. There the religions split.
What it Means Today
The scholarship that now maps this category most precisely came from the Heidelberg Egyptologist Jan Assmann. In Moses the Egyptian (Harvard University Press, 1997), Assmann showed that ancient peoples treated their local gods as translatable, matched across borders the way traders matched weights and coins, which is how a Roman could honour the deified emperor while an Egyptian honoured Ra, with neither denying the other's god. He called the break with that world the Mosaic distinction, the moment a founded, universal faith set itself against the grown cults of place and people. His earlier study Egyptian Solar Religion in the New Kingdom (1995) reconstructed the very cult Steiner pointed to from the workers' bench in Dornach: Amun-Re worshipped in his sanctuary at Thebes as the god of that city.
Thalira synthesis: what Assmann reads in the documents as a change in the grammar of religion, Steiner reads as a change in its object, the moment worship lifted its fixing point from soil and throne toward the sun, so the Egyptologist and the spiritual researcher describe one event from two sides. The category also gives a working test that costs nothing to apply: wherever a faith is claimed for one valley, one nation, or one ruler alone, an earth religion is speaking, and the Pentecost thought has not yet been heard.
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