A soul-mood, not a doctrine: the inner tone that holds the real being of the world as hidden behind appearance and reachable only by an inward path.
Occultism in Anthroposophy is one of the seven soul-moods Rudolf Steiner sets out in Human and Cosmic Thought (GA 151, Berlin, January 1914): the inner tone in which any of the twelve world-outlooks can be held, the mood that treats the real being of the world as hidden behind sense-appearance and reachable only by an inward path of cognition. Steiner does not mean a body of secret doctrine. He means a Seelenstimmung, a colouring of the soul. The Occultist says the essence of things never enters ordinary perception at all and must be sought by a way of its own. Among the seven moods Steiner aligns it with the Moon, which stays dark until inner light is brought to it. It is the mood standing nearest to spiritual science itself.
Steiner draws a careful line. The Transcendentalist grants that a thing's essence hides behind its red and blue, yet still believes the senses bring him to its threshold. The Occultist goes one step further: no degree of seeing or hearing ever touches the hidden being, so it must be sought another way entirely. That second way, by meditation, concentration and the schooled cognition of Knowledge of the Higher Worlds, is what places this mood closest to anthroposophy.
In Steiner's Own Words
But the mood I now have in mind will not accept Transcendentalism. On the contrary, it says: “One may experience red or blue, or this or that sound, ever so intensely; nothing of this expresses the hidden being of the thing. My perception never makes contact with this hidden being.” Anyone who speaks in this way speaks very much as we do when we take the standpoint that in external sense-appearance, in Maya, the essential nature of things does not find expression. We should be Transcendentalists if we said: “The world is spread out all around us, and this world everywhere proclaims its essential being.” This we do not say. We say: “This world is Maya, and one must seek the inner being of things by another way than through external sense-perception and the ordinary means of cognition.” Occultism! The psychic mood of Occultism!
What it Means Today
It helps to know what Steiner is not saying. Popular usage treats occultism as a shelf of hidden lore, tarot, sigils, secret orders. The January 1914 Berlin lectures put a different sense in front of us. Here occultism is the occult soul-mood: a way the soul can be tuned, the tone of seeking what stays veiled by super-sensible means. Because it is a mood and not a creed, Steiner makes the surprising point that a person can be an occultist of materialism. The physicist who speaks of the atom, while admitting that no method ever brings the atom itself into view, holds matter occultly without using the word. The mood can colour any of the twelve standpoints.
The two moods it stands between sharpen it best. Mysticism waits for the hidden essence to flow inward and fill the quiet soul; the Occultist, by contrast, never expects the world to pour itself in, only that an inner path can be cut toward what lies outside ordinary reach. Transcendentalism, its immediate neighbour, still trusts the senses to deliver him to the door of the essence; the Occultist denies even that. Steiner sets occultism beside the Moon, dark until borrowed light wakes it, an apt figure for knowledge that stays closed until concentration kindles it. This is why he names it the mood nearest his own spiritual science. The continuation is institutional, not only inward: the School of Spiritual Science at the Goetheanum in Dornach, founded by Steiner in 1923, carries the disciplined cognition this mood asks for, the schooling that turns a leaning toward the hidden into method.
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