A future occult faculty Steiner placed in the West: driving machines by spiritual vibration, one of three coming powers alongside eugenic and hygienic occultism.
Mechanical occultism is Rudolf Steiner's name for a coming human power to drive machinery through spiritual vibration rather than fuel or steam. Speaking at Dornach in November 1918, he set it as the West's portion of three future occult faculties. The East would gain eugenic occultism over birth, the Middle Lands hygienic occultism over healing, and the West this mastery of motors through the law of resonant vibrations.
In Steiner's Own Words
This will make it possible for nine-tenths of human labor to become unnecessary within the English-speaking world. But mechanical occultism not only makes it possible to dispense with nine-tenths of the work that is still done by human hands today, it also makes it possible to paralyze any rebellious movement of the then dissatisfied masses. The ability to set motors in motion according to the laws of harmonious vibrations will develop extensively among the English-speaking population. This is known in those secret circles. It is expected to give them supremacy over the rest of the world's population during the fifth post-Atlantean period.
What it Means Today
Steiner did not invent the image of a machine run on etheric vibration from nothing. His audiences in 1918 already knew the inventor John Worrell Keely, who from 1872 ran the Keely Motor Company out of his Philadelphia laboratory on North Twentieth Street. Keely claimed his engine drew an "etheric force" from water and air, releasing it through tuning forks tuned to resonate with the atoms themselves, a doctrine he called sympathetic vibratory physics. Investors poured in millions before the apparatus was exposed, after his death in 1898, as a hidden compressed-air rig. Steiner had been tracking this stream closely. He built the inventor Strader in his Mystery Dramas partly on Keely's pattern, the man who senses that motors can one day answer to a moral and spiritual will rather than to combustion. When Steiner names "the law of resonant vibrations" in GA 186, he is pointing at exactly Keely's premise, then setting it inside a far larger map of where such powers will and will not arise among the peoples of the earth.
Thalira synthesis: Read against Keely, mechanical occultism is less a prophecy of better engines than a warning that the West can perfect the machine while losing the soul, which is why Steiner bound it by necessity to the Eastern and Middle faculties it cannot grow on its own.
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