Two rival French journeymen's brotherhoods Steiner reads as communities bound through the ego (Gavots) and the astral body (Dévorants).
The Gavots and Dévorants in Anthroposophy is Rudolf Steiner's reading of two rival French craft brotherhoods, the compagnonnage of travelling journeymen, set out in his lecture of 6 July 1923 at Dornach (GA 225, Three Perspectives of Anthroposophy). Steiner takes the historical fact, dramatised in George Sand's 1840 novel Le Compagnon du Tour de France, that journeymen carried secret identifying signs and traced their guilds to King Solomon or to the builder Hieram Abiff, and reads it spiritually. The Dévorants (the "devouring wolves," Loups garous) he sees as a community held together through the human astral body, loud, passionate, drawn toward the north. The Gavots, named for small Pyrenean spirits of the Grail stream, he sees as held together through the ego, quiet, ceremonial, drawn toward the south. The pair illustrates how, before the 15th-century turn to individuality completed itself, Western European souls still sought spiritual bonds through the members of the human being.
The Gavots and Dévorants were two rival brotherhoods of French journeymen craftsmen whose secret signs, legends, and funeral rites Rudolf Steiner interpreted in 1923 as evidence of spiritual community-building in the West. The Dévorants bound their members through the astral body, the Gavots through the ego, a contrast Steiner set against Central Europe's path of individual cosmic seership, figured in Goethe's Makarie.
In Steiner's Own Words
So while the one party, the Dévorants, wanted to emphasize more what lives in human astrality, the Gavots wanted to emphasize more what, according to the then prevailing view, lay in the ego. Thus, the antagonism between these two parties is really based on the antagonism between human astrality, the astral body and the human ego. And that is the striking, the tremendously interesting thing, that even in the first half of the 19th century we have associations that exert a tremendous influence and power within the class and profession, where it is customary to join them, and that are firmly rooted in such spiritual foundations.
What it Means Today
Steiner's spiritual reading rests on a real social world that historians have since mapped in detail. The standard study is William H. Sewell Jr.'s Work and Revolution in France: The Language of Labor from the Old Regime to 1848, published by Cambridge University Press in 1980. Sewell traces how the compagnonnages, the travelling journeymen's brotherhoods Steiner names, carried an older "corporate idiom" of rites, devoirs, and mutual recognition into the industrial 19th century, long after the guilds were legally abolished in 1791. Where Sewell reads the secret signs, the founding myths of Solomon and Master Jacques, and the violent rivalries as a language of work and dignity, Steiner reads the same signs as the outer trace of inner spiritual differentiation: one brotherhood living from the astral body, the other from the ego.
The two readings sit side by side rather than against each other. Sewell shows that the brotherhoods were genuine moral communities, not mere unions, which is exactly the point Steiner presses when he insists they were professional associations outwardly and soul-spiritual fellowships inwardly. Thalira synthesis: read together, Sewell's social history and Steiner's spiritual science suggest that the compagnonnage rituals were a Western answer to the same isolation that Goethe met inwardly through Makarie's cosmic seership, the West binding souls through shared craft and sign where Central Europe sought the cosmos in the single individual. The Gavots and Dévorants thus become a case study in how community itself can be organised through different members of the human being.
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