Modern Anthroposophical Path in Anthroposophy

What it Means Today

The path is trained today at the Goetheanum in Dornach through the First Class of the School of Spiritual Science, re-established by Steiner at the Christmas Conference of 1923-1924 and continued under the leadership of the Vorstand since. Class members work with the nineteen Class lessons as meditative texts, not as doctrine. Sergei Prokofieff, who served on the Vorstand from 2001 until his death in 2014, devoted his published Class-member writings to the path's inner structure, arguing in May Human Beings Hear It! (2004) that the Foundation Stone Meditation, given on 25 December 1923, is the central rhythmical exercise of the modern path. Outside the Goetheanum, the Anthroposophical Societies in Europe and North America run their own training programs, and Christian Community priests, ordained since 1922, carry the path's sacramental wing through the Act of Consecration.

What a practitioner actually does is unspectacular. Five quiet minutes each morning, a single thought held without drifting, the Six Subsidiary Exercises rotated across the week, a verse from the calendar of the soul read at dusk. Steiner's instruction in GA 10 is that the disciple gives birth to a higher human being within, then lets that inner figure govern outer life. The branded Thaliran reading is that this path resolves the Pilate Archetype, the modern soul's chronic question "what is truth?", not by answering it from outside but by training the questioner until thinking itself becomes the organ of answer. The Modern Anthroposophical Path finds artistic embodiment in the Mystery Dramas, the four esoteric plays Steiner wrote 1910-1913 and the Goetheanum Stage Group has performed continuously since 1928.