Rudolf Steiner's term in GA 173 (Dornach, 1916) for closed occult societies he argued influenced public life through suggestion, a claim he presented as his own historical analysis.
Secret Brotherhoods in Anthroposophy is the collective term Rudolf Steiner used in his Dornach lectures of December 1916, published as The Karma of Untruthfulness, Volume One (GA 173), for closed occult societies that he argued exerted real influence on public life. Steiner claimed such groups, particularly in the West, preserved genuine knowledge of historical development and that some members consciously misused it in the service of group egoism, working on unobservant people through suggestion rather than open argument. He repeatedly stressed that he was reporting these doctrines, not endorsing the aims behind them, and he rejected any blame directed at whole nations. The concept belongs to his wartime symptomatology, in which outwardly puzzling events are traced to currents working beneath documented history. Readers today meet the theme chiefly through scholarly editions of GA 173 and through the academic study of Western esotericism, where Steiner's claims are treated as historical sources to be weighed.
In the winter of 1916, while the war pressed against neutral Switzerland, Rudolf Steiner told his Dornach audience that current events could not be explained from newspapers alone. He pointed to secret brotherhoods, closed societies he said schooled their members in the deeper laws of historical change, and he asked listeners to test such claims rather than accept or dismiss them on feeling.
In Steiner's Own Words
Or the opposite can happen; something that has been so important and significant in European life during recent decades: that there are individuals who, by some means or other, learn through the secret brotherhoods about the spiritual forces that exist and consciously misuse this knowledge for some other ends. Perhaps their goal is not even an end that deserves a morally damning judgement. Yet it is like playing with fire when people, who do not know how to treat spiritual impulses, work to turn these impulses in a particular direction. Such a situation arose in the second half of the nineteenth century, when various more or less secret brotherhoods, who were strongly influenced by the European periphery, formed themselves in Central Europe. They worked to a high degree with occult means.
What it Means Today
The delicate part of this entry is the part Steiner himself kept flagging. Again and again in GA 173 he paused to insist he was reporting doctrines, not pronouncing them true, and he warned his Dornach listeners away from the cheap satisfaction of blaming nations or hidden circles for the catastrophe around them. Read a century on, the lectures work as a primary source from December 1916: a record of what one observer believed organized occult societies were teaching while wartime propaganda ran at full volume. Historians of esotericism now approach such material exactly this way. Since 1999, the Center for History of Hermetic Philosophy and Related Currents at the University of Amsterdam has treated claims about occult orders as documents to be dated, sourced and compared, neither believed on trust nor dismissed unread.
Steiner asked something similar of his own audience. Trace the symptom, weigh the evidence, hold the verdict until the facts cohere. A reader who wants to work with this concept can imitate that discipline directly: take his concrete example, the Serbian society Omladina and the 'Brotherhood of Ten' he describes alongside it, set it beside the documented record of the period, and note carefully where his account matches the sources and where it remains his claim alone. That exercise, not any thrill of hidden knowledge, is what the lectures train.
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