Rudolf Steiner's 1910 six-chapter cosmology, GA 13, mapping the seven planetary conditions from Old Saturn to Future Vulcan and the path of supersensible knowledge.
Occult Science (Book) in Anthroposophy is Rudolf Steiner's foundational 1910 cosmological text, Die Geheimwissenschaft im Umriss (An Outline of Occult Science), catalogued as GA 13. Across six chapters it sets out the seven planetary stages of cosmic evolution, the post-Atlantean cultural epochs, and the methodical path of cognition by which the supersensible worlds become accessible. Steiner revised it through 1925, the year of his death.
In Steiner's Own Words
It was intended that only the fundamental characteristics of the soul-world and the outstanding features of the life of the soul in this world should be described here. This applies also to the following descriptions of the Spiritland. It would exceed the prescribed limits of this book were further characteristics of these higher worlds to be described. For what can be compared with spatial relationships and the course of time (since conditions here are quite different from those obtaining in the physical world) can only be discussed intelligibly when one is prepared to deal with them in full detail. References of importance in this connection will be found in the book Occult Science, an Outline.
What it Means Today
Among contemporary anthroposophic training programmes, GA 13 functions as the cosmological anchor that GA 9 cannot carry alone. Theosophy describes the human being's threefold and sevenfold inner architecture; Occult Science places that architecture inside seven planetary conditions, the Lemurian and Atlantean earthly phases, and the post-Atlantean cultural epochs running from Ancient India through our own consciousness-soul age. The book is read end-to-end in the Goetheanum's School of Spiritual Science First Class, and the current English-language standard is Catherine Creeger's 1997 SteinerBooks translation, published as An Outline of Esoteric Science, which restored the more careful rendering of Geheimwissenschaft after a century of translations veering between "occult" and "esoteric".
What practitioners take from GA 13 is structural rather than literary. The seven planetary conditions are not metaphors for inner states but a developmental sequence the cosmos and the human being are inside together. Chapter V then describes how a reader can verify any of this from within, through the cognition stages of Imagination, Inspiration, and Intuition. Where Blavatsky's The Secret Doctrine (1888) drew on a Theosophical synthesis of Indian, Egyptian, and Kabbalistic sources, Steiner's book stakes a different claim: that the cosmological picture is reproducible in disciplined first-person research. Reading GA 13 today, in the chair or on the cushion, is less an act of belief than the entry-point to that research, which is why anthroposophic curricula since the 1920s have placed it on every foundational reading list alongside Theosophy and Knowledge of the Higher Worlds.
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