Steiner's name in GA 197 for three living bodies of initiation knowledge contending to shape the modern world, only one of them standing below human evolution.
The Three Contemporary Initiation Streams in Anthroposophy is Rudolf Steiner's designation, given in the lecture of 13 June 1920 at Stuttgart (GA 197, Polarities in the Evolution of Mankind), for three organised bodies of initiation knowledge he saw contending to shape the post-war world. The first works quietly among the English-speaking peoples, holding genuine initiation knowledge but withholding it from general benefit. The second flows from the most energetic representatives of the confessions, and Steiner names Jesuitism as its fountainhead. The third is Leninism, which he calls an ahrimanic initiation: the cleverness latent in animal nature raised into human heads, with Lenin and Trotsky as its instruments. Two of the three stand on the plane of human evolution; the third stands below it, carrying an almost unlimited will. Steiner set genuine spiritual science against all three, not as a fourth faction but as knowledge held openly.
The three contemporary initiation streams are the Anglo-American occult circles, the confessional stream whose fountainhead Steiner identifies as Jesuitism, and Leninism. Each holds real initiation knowledge, and none of the three, in his account, uses it for humanity as a whole. Steiner drew the picture in a lecture at Stuttgart in June 1920 and treated it as a description of forces already at work, not a forecast.
In Steiner's Own Words
We are therefore dealing with three schools of initiation. Two are on the plane of human evolution and one is below that plane, though it is an initiation of tremendous will power, almost unlimited will power. The only thing that can bring order into all these developments, setting a goal that is worthy to be called human, is contained within genuine spiritual knowledge. A true goal and genuine sincerity will however only come from this spiritual science if it is made into something that involves the whole of our life, taking note how much empty chatter, how much conceit and inner egotism comes to expression in so much of what is usually said in its name.
What it Means Today
Steiner's claim was structural rather than partisan: initiation knowledge, once held by a group with a political programme, becomes a force in history whether or not the public can name it. Comparative esotericism has since produced a documented test case. Mark Sedgwick, professor at Aarhus University, traced one such stream in Against the Modern World: Traditionalism and the Secret Intellectual History of the Twentieth Century (Oxford University Press, 2004). The book follows the Traditionalist current founded by René Guénon (1886 to 1951) out of small initiatic circles in Paris and Cairo and into the political life of three continents, through Julius Evola in Fascist Italy, through Sufi orders in Europe, and through Aleksandr Dugin in post-Soviet Russia. Sedgwick's method is archival rather than sympathetic, and that is what makes it useful here: a historian working from correspondence and membership records arrives at the same shape Steiner sketched from the lecture platform in 1920, an initiatic teaching moving through political bodies that never announce it.
Thalira synthesis: the three streams read not as a roster of enemies but as a diagnosis of what happens when will, cleverness, and obedience each receive initiation separately from the other two, which is why Steiner's remedy was never a fourth faction but a knowledge that publishes its own method. When a movement claims esoteric authority, ask which of the three faculties it is training and which two it is leaving in the dark.
Where to Read More
- Polarities in the Evolution of Mankind, GA 197
- Find at SteinerBooks [THALIRA_BLOG_LINKS_PLACEHOLDER]