Skythianos, the Buddha and Zarathustra, the three reincarnated initiates Manes gathered around himself to guide the post-Atlantean epochs.
The Three Great Teachers in Anthroposophy are Skythianos, Gautama Buddha and Zarathustra, the three reincarnated initiates Rudolf Steiner describes Manes gathering around himself in a fourth-century spiritual council. In The East in the Light of the West (GA 113, 1909), Steiner names them as incarnations of Bodhisattvas, keepers of the wisdom carried over from Atlantis, who together planned how the spiritual streams of the post-Atlantean epochs should flow into the future. Skythianos guards the ancient bodily wisdom of the West, Buddha the teaching of compassion and reincarnation, Zarathustra the wisdom of the cosmic sun. Their combined teaching was carried into the European mysteries of the Rosy Cross, where all three were revered as the teachers preparing humanity to understand the Christ.
In Steiner's Own Words
He called together the personality in whom Skythianos lived at that time, and also the physical reflection of the Buddha who had then appeared again, and the erstwhile Zarathustra who was wearing a physical body at that time. Around Manes was this council, himself in the centre and around him Skythianos, Buddha and Zarathustra. And in that council a plan was agreed upon for causing all the wisdom of the Bodhisattvas of the post-Atlantean time to flow more and more strongly into the future of mankind
What it Means Today
Read as a group rather than as three separate biographies, the Three Great Teachers describe how Steiner thought a civilisation actually inherits its wisdom: not from one founder, but from a council whose members each guard a different stream. Skythianos keeps the West's knowledge of the physical body, Buddha the inward teaching of compassion and rebirth, Zarathustra the outward path toward the cosmic sun. Manes is the fourth presence who convenes them. The point Steiner makes is that no single one of these streams is sufficient on its own; the future needs all three woven together. That is why he places their combined work inside the schools of the Rosy Cross, where, he says, the three were revered together as one teaching body.
This is where the group differs from any of its members studied alone. A reader can meet Skythianos as the Atlantean guardian in his own right, but the Three Great Teachers are a deliberately plural image, a model of how distinct lineages cooperate without merging. The lineage Steiner is describing runs forward into his own work. When he founded the School of Spiritual Science at the Goetheanum in Dornach in 1923, he framed it as a continuation of exactly this Rosicrucian task, drawing the teaching of reincarnation from the Buddha-stream and the knowledge of cosmic powers from the Skythianos-stream into a modern, examinable form. The practical use today is comparative: the trio gives students a structure for holding several wisdom traditions side by side, each honoured for what only it carries, rather than collapsing them into a single creed.
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