The Asian murder-order Steiner cites as occult crime under expert direction: killings ordered by unknown superiors to send chosen souls early through death.
The Order of the Thugs in Anthroposophy is the Asian order of ritual murderers that Rudolf Steiner cites, in his Zurich lecture of 6 November 1917 (GA 178, Individual Spirit Beings and Their Influence on the Soul-Life of Man), as the one form of occult assassination carried out with expert knowledge rather than amateur zeal. Its members were charged by secret and unknown superiors with killing named individuals. The purpose lay past the killing: a soul torn from the body by violence keeps, for a time, forces that normally lapse at death, and can reach certain secrets earlier than human maturity allows. Those selected were the persons who would be equipped after death with that faculty, and what they learned was drawn back to earth through trained mediums. Steiner sets the Order against the anarchist Propaganda by Action of the 1890s, which struck at comparable targets out of fear and without knowledge.
The Order of the Thugs enters Steiner's work once, and not as history. He treats the nineteenth-century order as a working example of occult crime: killing committed neither for gain nor for protest, but to place a chosen soul in the spiritual world ahead of its time, where the knowledge it seized could be read back through a medium.
In Steiner's Own Words
It was an Order of murderers, so to speak, with the task of putting certain individuals to death. Evidence of its activity filtered through from time to time in news announcing the murder of such and such a person. The murder was committed on the orders of unknown superiors who had charged some member of this Order of the Thugs to carry it out. In the places where this was undertaken, the aim was well understood. By arranging circumstances of the physical plane in such a way that the establishment of this Order of the Thugs was possible, and then by directing its activities as required, the plan was to bring about the violent death of such persons as would be equipped after their death with the faculty for learning certain secrets.
What it Means Today
Steiner spoke in 1917 to listeners who knew the Thugs from one source, the British suppression campaign. William Henry Sleeman ran it from the 1830s, the Thuggee and Dacoity Department turned it into an administrative machine, and the Suppression Acts of 1836 to 1848 gave it law. That archive, built from the depositions of captured men who turned approver to save their lives, is where the familiar picture comes from: a hereditary fraternity of stranglers, directed from above, bound by cult. Kim A. Wagner reopened it in Thuggee: Banditry and the British in Early Nineteenth-Century India (Palgrave Macmillan, 2007), and his reading is that the evidence took the shape of the questions the Department asked. Robbery and strangling on the roads were real. The centrally commanded order behind them was largely produced by the machinery that recorded it.
Thalira synthesis: that finding is the reason to keep this entry rather than drop it. Steiner is not doing Indian criminology, and his claim rests on something the colonial archive was never equipped to settle. What he points at is a structure: a killing directed from outside the killer, the target chosen for what the target would be able to do after death. Read that way, the Order is a case study in the misuse of a real fact, that forces bound to the body in life do not switch off when the body is taken by force. The historical Thugs may have been far less organised than 1917 believed. The structure Steiner describes did not need them to be.
Where to Read More
- Individual Spirit Beings and Their Influence on the Soul-Life of Man, GA 178
- Find Individual Spirit Beings at SteinerBooks
- Thuggee, the historical order, on Wikidata (Q1139658)
- Rosicrucianism: The Order, the Manifestos, and the Legacy
- The Rosicrucian Order: History, Teachings and Modern Legacy
- The Five Platonic Solids: Geometry, Elements, and Cosmic Order