Grey Magic in Anthroposophy

Glossary✦ Anthroposophy✦ 3 min read
Grey Magic n.

Grey magic is Steiner's term for reaching the spiritual world with the will forces that beat the heart, because the Portal of Death was skipped.

Grey Magic in Anthroposophy is Rudolf Steiner's name for a misuse of will that occurs when a student reaches the second stage of esoteric training, the Portal of the Elements, without first having passed the Portal of Death. Steiner described the condition in Berlin on 2 March 1915, in the cycle published as The Destiny of Individuals and of Nations (GA 157). A student who has genuinely died to his ordinary concepts stands outside the body and works with will forces that belong to the cosmos. A student who arrives by whipping up feeling instead stays inside the body, and lays hold of the spiritual world with the organic forces that circulate his blood and beat his heart. Steiner called those forces forbidden, not because they are evil, but because they are borrowed from the etheric housekeeping of one's own life. The name places it between white and black magic: the harm is not intended, but the power is taken from the wrong source.

Grey magic is what Rudolf Steiner called the state of a person who lays hold of the spiritual world with forces he is not permitted to use there: the forces that move his blood and beat his heart. He has not left the body, so he wields inner organic power outward. The result is real perception, mixed with an egotism he can no longer detect.

In Steiner's Own Words

If, therefore, a man is taken possession of by the element of will without having gone through the prescribed esoteric path, without having passed through the Gate of Death, those forces seize him which otherwise circulate in his blood and beat in his heart; and then he does not use the forces that are outside his body but those that are within him. This would be “grey magic.” It would cause a man to seize the spiritual world with the forces with which one is not permitted to seize the spiritual world. What matters is that one sees the lion, that this monster is actually before one, and that one knows: This is what it looks like, this is how the forces of will desire to lay hold of one; they must be mastered from outside the body.

Rudolf Steiner, The Destiny of Individuals and of Nations (GA 157, lecture of 2 March 1915, Berlin)

What it Means Today

Steiner's warning has an unexpected counterpart in clinical contemplative research. In May 2017, PLOS ONE published "The Varieties of Contemplative Experience," a mixed-methods study by Jared Lindahl, Nathan Fisher, David Cooper, Rochelle Rosen, and Willoughby Britton of Brown University, built on long interviews with Western Buddhist meditators and their teachers. The authors catalogued dozens of meditation-related difficulties and sorted them into domains, one of which was frankly somatic: involuntary movement, disordered breathing, pressure and heat, and a bodily energy that would not settle. Britton went on to run Cheetah House in Providence, Rhode Island, a nonprofit that fields calls from practitioners derailed by retreat. The study ranked no practice as safe or unsafe. It reported that intensity, prior trauma, and the absence of a teacher who could name the experience shaped how badly an episode went.

Read next to GA 157, the overlap is exact in one respect: Steiner is not describing a bad mood at the Portal of the Elements but forces leaving their post, the blood and heart powers that keep a body alive, spent instead on perception. Thalira synthesis: grey magic is a bookkeeping fault before it is a moral one, and the bill is presented by the organism, which is why the reported symptoms run physiological rather than merely psychological. Steiner's correction was not less practice but a different order of operations, thinking disciplined first and feeling enthused afterwards, so that the will is met outside the body rather than drawn out of it.

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