Steiner's name for an occult method, borne by the Jesuit Order, that works through regulated exercises and cult directly upon the human astral body and its will.
Jesuitism in Anthroposophy is the term Rudolf Steiner uses for an occult method, carried by the Jesuit Order, that works through regulated spiritual exercises and a saturating cult upon the human astral body rather than upon thinking or the ether body. Where most occult brotherhoods of the fifth post-Atlantean age reach only the ether body, and through it steer thought, Steiner holds in Building Stones for an Understanding of the Mystery of Golgotha (GA 167, 1916) that Jesuit training takes hold of the astral body and its will-impulses directly. His chief illustration is the Jesuit State in Paraguay, founded in 1610, where bell-regulated days and unbroken sacrament formed the Guarani into a single directed astral aura. Read today, the term marks the precise line Steiner draws between an esotericism that frees the I-being and one that organises the will of others from outside.
In Steiner's Own Words
The Jesuit Orders belong to such occult brotherhoods. Jesuitism absolutely rests upon occultism. I once told you about that in a lecture cycle in Karlsruhe, where I described the exercises which the students had to do in order to become Jesuits. These exercises rest upon the fact that the human being who takes part in the cult, instead of being affected in his ether body, these things take hold of his astral body. All Jesuit educational training goes toward giving the Jesuit forces which enable him to present his works or actions in such a way that he is able to steer himself, I might say, into the astral impulses of man.
What it Means Today
The method Steiner names did not end with the Paraguay reductions. Its engine survives intact in the Spiritual Exercises of Ignatius of Loyola, composed at Manresa between 1522 and 1524 and first printed in Rome in 1548, which Steiner treats as the regulating template for the whole order. The Exercises still run in their classical form as the eight-day and thirty-day retreats given at Jesuit houses such as Loyola Hall in Lancashire and the Eckerd retreat tradition in the United States: fixed daily rhythm, guided composition of place, and the felt rehearsal of scenes until they move the will rather than merely the intellect. Steiner's reading is that this regimen acts on the astral body, the seat of desire and impulse, which is exactly the member a retreatant is asked to engage when imagining a Gospel scene until it grips the affections.
Thalira synthesis: where Ignatian directors describe the Exercises as ordering the affections toward a chosen end, Steiner reframes the same discipline as astral-body formation, which lets a reader hold both descriptions at once without taking either as the whole. The historian Philip Caraman, in The Lost Paradise: The Jesuit Republic in South America (Sidgwick and Jackson, 1976), documents how the Paraguay reductions translated that interior method into an entire bell-governed society, the outward case Steiner uses. Read this way, Jesuitism is less a verdict on an order than a name for a question every spiritual practice must answer: does the work free the I-being, or does it shape the will of others from outside?
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