Steiner's name, given in 1917, for an intended use of the earth's north and south magnetic polarity to send spiritually guiding forces across the whole planet.
The Mystery of the Earth's Magnetism in Anthroposophy is the name Rudolf Steiner gave, in the third lecture of The Wrong and Right Use of Esoteric Knowledge (GA 178, Dornach, 25 November 1917), to something he called an American secret: the intention to work with the earth's magnetism in its doubleness, north and south, and by that means to send guiding forces of a spiritual kind across the whole earth. The bearer of the working is not one of the four human members but the Double, the Doppelgänger, the being that rises into a person out of the earth's own forces. Steiner tied the transmission to spiritual beings streaming in constantly from one definite direction of the heavens, and he told his listeners to take a magnetic chart of the earth and study where the needle swings east, where it swings west, and where it does not swing.
The Mystery of the Earth's Magnetism is Steiner's 1917 term for a planetary technique, not for a natural fact. The magnetism itself is ordinary geophysics. The mystery is what certain brotherhoods intended to do with its polarity: to make north and south a carrier, so that forces reaching the earth from the cosmos could be steered where a group wished.
In Steiner's Own Words
Those concerned to present an Anti-Christ as the real Christ will try also to make use of something that works through the most material forces, but in this very way can work spiritually. Above all they will strive to make use of electricity and earth-magnetism in order to produce effects all over the world. I have shown you how earth-forces rise up into what I have called the human Double, the Doppelgänger. This secret will be opened up. An American secret will be to make use of earth-magnetism, with its north-south duality, and by this means to send over the earth guiding forces which will have spiritual effects. Look at the magnetic chart of the earth and compare it with what I am now saying. Observe where the magnetic needle deviates to East and West and where it does not deviate.
What it Means Today
Steiner's instruction was unusually concrete: take a magnetic chart of the earth and read it. That chart now exists as a continuously maintained global product. The World Magnetic Model is the standard reference for navigation, attitude, and heading referencing systems that use the geomagnetic field. NOAA's National Centers for Environmental Information and the British Geological Survey developed it jointly, and it is produced with the United States National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency and the United Kingdom's Defence Geographic Centre. A new version is issued every five years to track the drifting field; WMM2025 was released on 17 December 2024 and stays valid until late 2029.
Thalira synthesis: what Steiner called a guarded secret is now an openly published coefficient file, and the weight of the question moved with it. He was not predicting that anyone would discover magnetism. He was noticing that a single planetary field, read the same way everywhere, becomes a channel through which very few institutions supply the orientation that billions of devices then act on. Every smartphone compass that corrects magnetic north to true north is reading Steiner's chart under another name, and the north magnetic pole keeps drifting out of Arctic Canada toward Siberia, so those deviation lines are redrawn on a schedule, for the whole earth at once.
Where to Read More
- Individual Spirit Beings and Their Influence on the Soul-Life of Man, GA 178
- Find Secret Brotherhoods and the Mystery of the Human Double at SteinerBooks
- The Chaldean Oracles: Ancient Theurgy and the Fire of the Gods
- Theseus: The Athenian Hero, the Labyrinth, and the Civilising of Chaos
- The Divine Aura: Unlocking the Science of the Halo