The esoteric society founded by Blavatsky in 1875, within which Steiner led the German Section from 1902 until the 1913 break that created the Anthroposophical Society.
The Theosophical Society in Anthroposophy is the worldwide esoteric organization, founded in New York on 17 November 1875 by Helena Petrovna Blavatsky and Colonel Henry Steel Olcott and later headquartered at Adyar near Madras, within which Rudolf Steiner worked from 1902 to 1913 before the independent Anthroposophical Society emerged. Steiner served as General Secretary of its German Section from October 1902, with Marie von Sievers as his closest co-worker, on the openly stated condition that he would teach only the results of his own spiritual research. In The Course of My Life (GA 28, written 1923 to 1925), he recalls the Society as the one institution of that era where a real spiritual life was cultivated, and the break of 1912 to 1913 over the Order of the Star of the East as unavoidable. Historians of Western esotericism read those German Section years as the seedbed of anthroposophy.
Rudolf Steiner treated the Theosophical Society as a vessel, never a source. Invited through Count and Countess Brockdorff's Berlin lodge in 1900, he accepted the German Section's leadership in 1902 yet lectured only from his own research. The arrangement held until Adyar proclaimed a young Jiddu Krishnamurti the vehicle of the returning Christ; the German Section refused, was expelled, and its members became the Anthroposophical Society.
In Steiner's Own Words
No one was left in uncertainty of the fact that I would bring forward in the Theosophical Society only the results of my own research through perception. For I stated this on all appropriate occasions. When, in the presence of Annie Besant, the German section of the Theosophical Society was founded in Berlin and I was chosen its General Secretary, I had to leave the foundation sessions because I had to give before a non-theosophical audience one of the lectures in which I dealt with the spiritual evolution of humanity, and to the title of which I expressly united the phrase “Eine Anthroposophie.”
What it Means Today
Historians of esoteric movements treat the Theosophical Society as the trunk from which most modern Western spiritual currents branched, and Steiner's German Section as its most consequential offshoot. The field that studies this lineage, anchored since 1999 at the University of Amsterdam's Center for History of Hermetic Philosophy under Wouter Hanegraaff, reads the 1902 to 1913 decade through the documents Steiner himself left: the monthly Luzifer (later Lucifer-Gnosis), founded with Marie von Sievers immediately after the German Section so that anthroposophy, in his words, “evolves out of its own germ,” and the autobiography he wrote in his final two years.
Two demarcation points organize that record. The first is the 1907 Munich Congress, where the German Section staged Schuré's reconstructed Eleusinian drama, with Marie von Sievers as Demeter, and gave the gathering an artistic form that left many older members from England, France, and Holland dissatisfied; Steiner notes that the anthroposophical movement “had a completely different inner attitude” from the older Society. The second is the Krishnamurti affair: when the Order of the Star of the East declared a Hindu boy the bodily vehicle of the returning Christ, Steiner named the claim an absurdity, Annie Besant revoked the German Section's charter, and through 1912 and 1913 the great majority of its members crossed into the newly founded Anthroposophical Society. Thalira synthesis: the Society gave Steiner a hall, never a script; what anthroposophy owes theosophy is an audience already prepared for the spirit, not one sentence of doctrine.
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