Steiner's view that true symbols are not invented pictures but exact readings of spiritual facts, which then work formatively on the soul that meditates them.
Occult Signs and Symbols in Anthroposophy is Rudolf Steiner's teaching, set out in the 1907 Stuttgart lectures published as Myths and Legends, Occult Signs and Symbols (GA 101), that genuine symbols such as the pentagram, the swastika, light as wisdom, and the seven seals are not invented allegories but exact renderings of astral and spiritual realities perceived by the clairvoyant seer. Each sign is read off the essence of the thing it points to, the pentagram from the fivefold current-pattern of the etheric body, light from the luminous astral wisdom of the Elohim. Steiner holds that such a symbol, held in meditation, works formatively and educatively on the soul that contemplates it, guiding the human being step by step toward direct knowledge of the spiritual world.
Occult signs and symbols, in Rudolf Steiner's account, are not arbitrary marks chosen for wit or convention. They are taken from the inner essence of the things they stand for, so that the pentagram traces the real currents of the etheric body and light denotes the wisdom that once shone from the Elohim. Read rightly, each sign opens a window into the spiritual worlds.
In Steiner's Own Words
If one gradually receives the right instructions to use the figures or signs, then they are a means by which man is gradually introduced to the knowledge of the spiritual world and can become clairvoyant. For those who immerse themselves in the pentagram in meditation, the path of these currents can be found in the etheric body. There is no point in thinking up arbitrary meanings for these signs. And so it is with all symbols and signs, including those that you can find in the various religious documents, because these symbols are deeply rooted in occultism.
What it Means Today
The claim that fascinated Steiner, that a symbol does work on the soul of the one who contemplates it, found an unexpected clinical witness in the depth psychology of Carl Gustav Jung. In his essay "Concerning Mandala Symbolism," written in 1950 and collected in Volume 9, Part 1 of the Bollingen Collected Works (The Archetypes and the Collective Unconscious, Princeton University Press), Jung documented patients who, without instruction, drew circular and fivefold figures during periods of psychic crisis. He observed that the act of forming and dwelling on these figures had an ordering, steadying effect, drawing scattered contents toward a center. Jung treated the mandala as a spontaneous self-portrait of the psyche rather than a borrowed decoration, which is structurally the same move Steiner makes: the genuine sign is read from an inner reality, not pasted on from outside.
Where the two part company is instructive. Jung stayed agnostic about whether the mandala pointed beyond the psyche, treating it as an image of inner wholeness. Steiner went further, holding that the pentagram and the symbol of light record currents and beings that exist in their own right in the etheric and astral worlds, so the practitioner who meditates them is not only ordering the soul but training an organ of perception toward those worlds. Thalira synthesis: read together, Jung gives the modern reader the verifiable half of Steiner's thesis, that contemplated symbols measurably reshape inner life, while Steiner supplies the cosmology Jung declined to name, turning the mandala from a mirror of the self into a doorway.
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