Katharsis is the purification of desire that Steiner made the precondition of initiation: wisdom poured into uncleansed passions turns fanatical rather than illuminating.
Katharsis in Anthroposophy is the purification of the passions that must precede the reception of spiritual wisdom. Rudolf Steiner set the rule out in two 1904 lectures on Goethe's fairy tale, The Story of the Green Serpent and the Beautiful Lily (GA 68c), in Berlin on 4 April and Cologne on 27 November. The member purified is the astral body, the bearer of desire, which Goethe pictured as a river of instincts and passions and which cannot receive the gold of wisdom while it remains uncleansed: wisdom entering unpurified desire produces fanaticism, and the man stays the slave of his lower ego. Steiner names the danger in Theosophical terms, the ascent from kama (desire) to manas (spirit-self) is unsafe unless the lower ego is sacrificed in the same movement. Katharsis is therefore not emotional release but preparation, and the word survives in modern psychology only in its inverted sense, as the cathartic method Breuer and Freud named in Vienna in 1895.
Katharsis is the first stage of the older initiation path, the cleansing of desire that makes a person able to hold knowledge without being deformed by it. Steiner took the Greek word from the Mystery schools and read it back into Goethe's fairy tale, where the Ferryman refuses payment in gold and asks instead for fruits of the earth.
In Steiner's Own Words
Gold always signifies wisdom. The Will of the Wisps are those who seek after wisdom, yet do not mingle it with their nature, but give it away again undigested. The River is the Soul-life; the totality of human instincts, desires and passions. When wisdom is introduced into that, the soul is thrown out into a state of disturbance. Goethe always pointed out that a man must first undergo Catharsis (purification) before he can take in wisdom. For if wisdom is brought into the uncleansed passions, they become fanatical; and a man then remains the slave of his lower ego. The ascent from Kama to Mana is dangerous, unless at the same time the lower ego is sacrificed.
What it Means Today
The word did not stay in the Mystery schools. In 1857 the classicist Jacob Bernays published Grundzüge der verlorenen Abhandlung des Aristoteles über Wirkung der Tragödie in Breslau, arguing that Aristotle's katharsis in the Poetics was a medical term, a purgation of pity and fear rather than a moral lesson. Bernays' reading travelled: his niece Martha married Sigmund Freud, and in Studien über Hysterie (Vienna, 1895) Freud and Josef Breuer named their treatment the cathartic method, the discharge of a strangulated affect through speech. Katharsis entered modern psychology as release.
Steiner, lecturing on Goethe nine years later, kept the older sense. His katharsis is not discharge but preparation, and the two readings disagree about direction. Breuer's patient is relieved by getting something out. Steiner's pupil is made able to take something in. Read the Cologne passage again and the difference is exact: the danger he names is not blocked feeling but wisdom arriving too early, into a soul that will make it fanatical.
Thalira synthesis: the therapeutic katharsis asks what the soul must be rid of, the initiatic katharsis asks what the soul must become worthy of, and a practitioner who has only the first will keep clearing the same ground without ever building on it. In practice this is why Steiner attached self-development exercises to every esoteric course he gave: control of thought, control of action, equanimity, positivity, and open-mindedness. They are not preliminaries to the real work. They are the katharsis, and the wisdom waits on them.
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