The souls belonging to Michael's stream, whose karmic impulse drives them toward anthroposophy and a culmination prophesied for the close of the 20th century.
The Michaelites in Anthroposophy are the community of souls who, before their present birth, gathered around the Archangel Michael in the supersensible School of Michael, and who therefore carry into earthly life a karmic impulse that draws them toward spiritual science. Rudolf Steiner names them in Karmic Relationships, Volume III (GA 237, lectures of 1924, Dornach), where he describes the Michaelites as those whose souls are taken hold of by a power working from the Spiritual down into the Physical, setting aside the element of race. They enter the body with a certain reserve, leaving the astral body and Ego-organisation more loosely bound. Steiner foretold that the stream of Michael and a second stream would incarnate together at the end of the 20th century, a destiny culmination he placed before the Christmas Conference community. Today the term names the inner sense of belonging anthroposophists feel toward a shared spiritual task.
The Michaelites are the souls of Michael's stream, the company Steiner described as bearing a karmic impulse toward anthroposophy from their time in the heavenly School of Michael before birth. They come to spiritual science not by chance but by destiny, and Steiner linked their gathering to a prophesied culmination at the close of the 20th century, when the souls of Michael's stream would meet again on earth.
In Steiner's Own Words
For if we sum up all that I have said of Michaelism, (if I may now so call it) then we shall find: the Michaelites are indeed taken hold of in their souls by a power that is seeking to work from the Spiritual into the full human being, even down into the Physical. I described it yesterday as follows. I said: these human beings will put aside the element of race, the element which, from natural foundations of existence, gives the human being such or such a stamp. If a man is taken hold of by the Spirit in this earthly incarnation inasmuch as he now becomes an anthroposophist he is thereby prepared in future to become a man no longer distinguished by such external features but distinguished rather by what he was in the present incarnation.
What it Means Today
Steiner placed the Michaelites within a vast arc of destiny. In the lectures of August 1924 at Dornach, given to the community that had just been founded at the Christmas Conference, he traced two streams of souls who had stood with the Archangel Michael in the supersensible School of Michael during the centuries before birth. Those souls, he said, carry a karmic impulse that drives them toward anthroposophy in this life, a hunger for the Spiritual that other people, firmly settled in the physical body, do not feel. The Michaelites enter the body with a reserve, which is why life often sits less easily on them: they have more possibilities, and Steiner counselled them to find their own inner initiative rather than wait for the world to decide for them.
The destiny he set before this community was a future meeting. Steiner foretold that toward the end of the 20th century the souls of Michael's stream would incarnate together again, and that a second stream, the souls schooled at Chartres, would join them, so that both could work for the spiritual renewal of the age. This is the prophesied culmination that gives the Michaelites their forward orientation: they are not a finished group but a community oriented toward a task still unfolding. As a Thalira reading, the Michaelite impulse is best understood as a felt sense of recognition rather than a doctrine, the quiet conviction that one's turn toward spiritual science answers a question already asked before this life began.
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