The open, public membership body Rudolf Steiner refounded at Christmas 1923, seated at the Goetheanum, carrying the School of Spiritual Science and led by the Vorstand.
The General Anthroposophical Society in Anthroposophy is the open, public membership body that Rudolf Steiner refounded at the Christmas Conference of 24 to 28 December 1923, with its seat at the Goetheanum in Dornach, Switzerland. Its first statute defines it as an association of people whose will is to nurture the life of the soul, in the individual and in human society, on the basis of a true knowledge of the spiritual world. Anyone may join, regardless of nationality, religion, or conviction, and the Society rejects sectarian activity and party politics. It carries the School of Spiritual Science with its Sections, is led by an executive committee (the Vorstand), and from 1923 onward has served as the worldwide institutional home of anthroposophy.
The General Anthroposophical Society is the worldwide association of members through which anthroposophy lives as a public movement. Rudolf Steiner refounded it at the Goetheanum over Christmas 1923, giving it written statutes, a governing Vorstand, and the School of Spiritual Science. It is the exoteric body of the movement: open to anyone, sectarian in nothing, the institutional house in which the esoteric work can stand.
In Steiner's Own Words
Now, my dear friends, the purpose of this Paragraph is to enable the soul which naturally belongs to the Anthroposophical Society and which can be given to it in the Goetheanum at Dornach, to be given to it indeed in the near future. This Paragraph of the Statutes is intended to make members, or those who still want to become members, conscious of the fact that in the Goetheanum we are given the soul of the Anthroposophical Movement. This will make it possible for the esoteric impulses that ought to be given to the Anthroposophical Society to actually be given to it. We shall make progress if you endeavour to penetrate to the spirit of this fifth Paragraph.
What it Means Today
Read through the lens of modern social phenomenology, the General Anthroposophical Society is something unusual: a spiritual community deliberately constituted as an open, public association of free individuals. There is no creed to sign, no initiation required to belong. The first of the Statutes that Steiner drafted for the Christmas Conference of 1923 asks only a shared will, to nurture the life of the soul on the basis of a true knowledge of the spiritual world, and the fourth declares the body entirely public, no secret society, refusing sectarianism and party politics alike. What holds such an association together is not doctrine but form. Steiner built that form out of three visible structures. The Statutes give the Society its shared intention in writing. The Sections of the School of Spiritual Science, organised by field rather than by abstract scheme, give its inner work a living shape. The Vorstand, the executive seated at the Goetheanum in Dornach, carries initiative for the whole. A phenomenologist would notice the move: a meaning that could have stayed private, an esoteric impulse, is given a public, lawful, institutional house so that it can appear in the world without being either hidden or imposed. That is the quiet achievement of the 1923 refounding, and it is why the Society can still describe itself as open to anyone while remaining the bearer of a genuinely esoteric school.
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