Initiation Science is Steiner's name for the exact, trained supersensible research method that reads karma, the planetary spheres and human biography as one reads a script.
What is Initiation Science?
Initiation Science in Anthroposophy is Rudolf Steiner's late technical name for a disciplined method of supersensible research, acquired by training rather than received as a gift, which proceeds through three ordered stages: Imagination, Inspiration and Intuition. Steiner set it out most fully in the Karmic Relationships lectures of 1924 (GA 239), given at Prague, Paris and Breslau in the last year of his teaching, and he grounded its exercises in the 1904 book Knowledge of the Higher Worlds. The researcher first surveys the life-tableau of his own biography, then extinguishes those pictures in the consciousness of Inspiration, and in the emptied space perceives the Moon, Mercury, Venus and Sun spheres through which a soul passes between death and rebirth. Steiner insisted that this is exact knowledge, comparable to reading a script, and not dim feeling or visionary mood. Its practical use is biographical: it reads a human destiny as an ordered text rather than an accident.
Initiation Science is the name Steiner gave, in the last years of his life, to the research capacity of spiritual science itself: not a state of exaltation but a faculty schooled step by step until supersensible facts can be checked, compared and reported. He treated its findings the way an astronomer treats an observation, naming the volume, the city and the lecture date on which each was made.
In Steiner's Own Words
In order that one set of facts may be supported by others, let me explain how such observations are made by one who is versed in modern Initiation Science. For some time now, even in public lectures, I have been describing how when a man develops the faculty of genuine super-sensible perception through the methods indicated in the book, Knowledge of the Higher Worlds, he looks back over his earthly life, seeing it as a kind of tableau. Everything is present simultaneously, in a mighty panorama of the whole of life since the birth of the ‘I’; but the several epochs are in a certain respect distinct from each other.
What it Means Today
The clearest modern bridge to Initiation Science is Owen Barfield, the English philosopher who joined the Anthroposophical Society in 1923 and then spent seven decades arguing Steiner's epistemology in ordinary academic English. Barfield's Saving the Appearances: A Study in Idolatry (1957) traces a history of consciousness in which human beings once stood inside the phenomena they perceived (he calls this original participation), then withdrew into the detached onlooker stance that produced modern physics, and may now move deliberately into what he named final participation, where the knower knows that his own activity helps constitute the phenomenon. Barfield's contribution is to show that this is an argument about cognition, not a request for belief. Read alongside him, Steiner's Initiation Science stops looking like a claim to visions and starts looking like a claim about method: the observing faculty can itself be trained, and the training has stages that can be described, taught and checked. Barfield's fellow Inklings, C. S. Lewis and J. R. R. Tolkien, took up his history of consciousness without accepting Steiner at all, which is fair evidence that the argument stands on its own feet.
Thalira synthesis: Initiation Science is better understood as literacy than as sight. Steiner's own image in the Breslau lecture is a page of thirty-four letters that an illiterate can count but cannot read; the training adds no new organ, it teaches the reading of what was already in front of the eyes.
Where to Read More
- Karmic Relationships: Esoteric Studies, Volume V, GA 239
- Find Karmic Relationships at SteinerBooks [THALIRA_BLOG_LINKS_PLACEHOLDER]