Steiner's name for the intention he attributed to living Oriental initiates in 1920: to let earthly civilization end so souls need not incarnate again.
The Eastern Initiates' Renunciation of the Earth in Anthroposophy is Rudolf Steiner's characterisation of what the living initiates of the Orient actually intend, given in the first lecture of Spiritual and Social Changes in the Development of Humanity (GA 196, Dornach, 9 January 1920) and resumed in the eleventh lecture of 7 February 1920. Following the old custom of the East, these initiates do not speak publicly at all; they work through other channels. They are indifferent to the prospect that Asian humanity may fall to European conquerors, because they hold that any remaining earthly dominion could only be an English-American one, and they refuse it. Their aim is that earthly civilization should disappear and that souls should withdraw from the incarnations still to come. Steiner set this Eastern renunciation against the Western initiates' will to rule, and pointed instead to a renewed science of initiation able to serve social life.
The Eastern Initiates' Renunciation of the Earth names a claim Steiner made twice in the winter of 1920: that the initiated schools of Asia had given up on the earth. Their silence was not modesty but method, and their indifference to conquest followed from a decision that human evolution should continue elsewhere.
In Steiner's Own Words
Therefore, they actually want to make civilization disappear from the earth. They are, after all, very familiar with the spiritual world and are convinced that humanity will be better off if it withdraws from subsequent earthly incarnations. They therefore want to work to ensure that people avoid the following incarnations. For these initiates of the Orient, the results of Leninism will have nothing frightening about them, because these initiates of the Orient say to themselves: If these institutions of Leninism spread more and more over the earth, it is the surest way to destroy earthly civilization. But this will be to the advantage of precisely those people who, through their previous incarnation, have provided themselves with the opportunity to continue living without the earth.
What it Means Today
Steiner delivered this lecture on 9 January 1920. Five months later, on 14 June 1920, Max Weber died in Munich, leaving behind the essays on Hinduism and Buddhism he had published in the Archiv für Sozialwissenschaft und Sozialpolitik between 1916 and 1917, collected in 1921 in the second volume of his Gesammelte Aufsätze zur Religionssoziologie and translated by Hans H. Gerth and Don Martindale as The Religion of India for The Free Press in 1958. Weber was describing, in the vocabulary of comparative sociology, the same orientation Steiner was describing in the vocabulary of initiation. For Weber, Indian salvation religiosity aimed at release from the wheel of rebirth, which made the ordering of worldly institutions a matter of relative indifference; he called this world-rejecting asceticism and set it against the inner-worldly asceticism he had traced through Protestant Europe. Two men in two disciplines, four years apart, reached the same structural observation: one civilisation had organised itself around leaving the earth, the other around mastering it.
Thalira synthesis: what Weber recorded as a sociological type, Steiner treated as a living intention held by particular people choosing it in 1920, which is why he thought it could be answered rather than merely classified. GA 196 and The Religion of India touch one fact from opposite sides.
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