Currents · by Frater Custos · 15-minute read

Anthroposophy

A Goethe scholar who at forty begins to describe the spiritual worlds, a schism that carries off eighty per cent of German theosophy, and a movement that today runs a thousand schools, forty thousand farms and a pharmaceutical company. And inside it a question that the movement itself has measured, counted and published — and that almost nobody reports with the right figures.

On 28 December 1912, in Cologne, the Anthroposophical Society is founded. It is a date almost nobody cites, because the story is usually told starting from 1913, when Adyar revokes the charter of the German Section of the Theosophical Society. But the order of events is the reverse of what one reads: first Rudolf Steiner founds his own society, then Theosophy expels him.

This study attempts to set out what is documented about anthroposophy, what is controversial among scholars, and what is simply false — in both directions, because about this movement people lie in order to accuse it and lie in order to defend it, often with the same nonchalance.

Before: the Goethe scholar

Rudolf Steiner was born on 27 February 1861 at Kraljevec, then in the Kingdom of Hungary, today Croatia. He studies at the Technische Hochschule in Vienna. In 1882, on Karl Julius Schröer's recommendation, the publisher Joseph Kürschner entrusts him with the editing of Goethe's scientific writings for the Deutsche National-Litteratur: the volumes appear between 1883-84 and 1897. From 30 September 1890 he works at the Goethe-Schiller Archive in Weimar. He takes his degree at Rostock on 26 October 1891, with a dissertation on the theory of knowledge in Fichte — mark rite, the lowest on the scale. In November 1893 Die Philosophie der Freiheit appears, with 1894 on the title page.

Up to this point he is a second-rank academic intellectual, but a perfectly recognisable one. Then, around 1899-1902, he begins to speak of spiritual worlds directly perceived, of subtle bodies, of the Akashic Chronicle.

Break or continuity? This is the chief controversy internal to academic research, and it is to be kept distinct from the polemic for or against Steiner. The break thesis: for Helmut Zander and Peter Staudenmaier anthroposophy is in substance theosophy under another name, and Steiner is held to have backdated his own esotericism, presenting as always present what was innovation. The continuity thesis: for Christian Clement, editor of the critical edition, the late Steiner develops a philosophical mysticism already implicit in the youthful writings of idealist stamp. Staudenmaier objects that this reading flattens the real novelty of the esoteric Steiner. Anyone who presents the question as settled, in one direction or the other, is simplifying.

The schism, with the figures

Steiner joins the Theosophical Society in January 1902; on 19 October 1902 the German Section is founded and he is elected its Generalsekretär, with Annie Besant's explicit backing. Under his leadership the Section goes from 377 members in 1905 to 3,702 in 1913.

The break has a formal occasion and a deep cause, and they are to be kept separate. The occasion: in 1912 Steiner rules that no member of the Order of the Star in the East — the organisation built around the young Krishnamurti as «World Teacher» — may belong to the German Section. This is a breach of the statutes, which forbid discrimination between members. Adyar replies by revoking the charter on 7 March 1913.

The deep cause is doctrinal. Steiner had already reoriented his teaching around the Mystery of Golgotha: the Incarnation as a unique and unrepeatable event in the cosmic history of the Earth. This structure is logically incompatible with the idea of a master who periodically overshadows a human vehicle — an Indian boy in 1909 as Jesus in the year 30. It was not a matter of taste: it was an incompatibility.

Of the 69 lodges of the German Section, 55 follow Steiner — about 2,500 people — and 14 remain with Adyar. Almost the whole of German theosophy departs.

The Goetheanum, and a fire with no culprits

The foundation stone is laid at Dornach on 20 September 1913. The first Goetheanum is of wood on a concrete base, with a double dome; it opens officially on 26 September 1920. On the night between 31 December 1922 and 1 January 1923 it burns down.

Arson was suggested at once and has never been established: the standard literature says that arson is not proven. The version circulating online — the arsonist is said to have been a mentally unstable watchmaker who died in the blaze — is tradition internal to the movement, not an established fact: I have not been able to confirm it in any documented source.

The second Goetheanum, designed by Steiner in 1923-24 and built from 1924 to 1928 after his death, is entirely of exposed concrete: a significant precedent in the history of architecture in concrete, and today a Swiss national monument. Between 23 December 1923 and 1 January 1924, at the Christmas Conference, the Society is refounded as the Allgemeine Anthroposophische Gesellschaft and Steiner takes on its direct presidency for the first time. He dies on 30 March 1925.

What anthroposophy left along the way

It is the trait that distinguishes anthroposophy from almost every other current in this atlas: it has produced institutions that work, and that have largely ceased to depend on the doctrine that generated them.

The Waldorf school. The first opens at Stuttgart on 7 September 1919, on the initiative of Emil Molt, director of the Waldorf-Astoria cigarette factory, for the workers' children: 256 pupils in eight classes, of whom 191 were the children of employees. Today the Waldorf World List counts 1,092 schools in 64 countries and 1,857 kindergartens. In Italy the Federazione delle Scuole Steiner-Waldorf, founded in 1992, brings together 22 managing members for 61 schools, about 3,200 pupils and 450 teachers.

Biodynamic agriculture. It is born out of eight lectures given at Koberwitz, in Silesia, from 7 to 16 June 1924, before 111 participants — thirty women and eighty-one men, from six countries. Sixty of them at once found an experimental circle, with an obligation of confidentiality as to its contents. The Demeter trademark is registered in 1928. The Society's report for 2024-25 declares sixty-four countries and about forty thousand farms: it is a partisan figure and I report it as such.

Anthroposophical medicine. Ita Wegman founds the first anthroposophical clinic at Arlesheim in 1921, and in 1925 signs with Steiner the founding text, written while he was already terminally ill. Her subsequent history is less edifying and the movement long played it down: she entered the Vorstand in 1923 and was put at the head of the Medical Section, and in 1935 she was removed and her supporters expelled.

And then curative education (1924), eurythmy, and the Christengemeinschaft — founded on 16 September 1922 at the Goetheanum by forty-five priests and priestesses, legally autonomous from the Society, and banned by the Nazi regime in 1941.

The race question, with the figures nobody cites

Here the utmost precision is needed, because it is the point on which most lies are told.

What Steiner writes. The most contested passages come largely from the lectures given to the workers on the Goetheanum building site between 1922 and 1923, taken down in shorthand. In the lecture of 3 March 1923 (GA 349) one reads that «the white race is the race of the future, it is the race that creates with the spirit», and that the black race «does not belong to Europe» — its presence there is described as a disturbance. In GA 348 there appears the association between blond hair and intelligence. In GA 8, of 1902, the contrast between Goethe and the «Hottentot». The doctrine of root races is inherited from theosophy: Steiner abandons its cyclical structure while retaining its linear evolutionary thrust, with the «Aryans» as the most advanced present stage.

The apologetic argument that Steiner abandoned the concept of race in favour of «culture epochs» can be documented at the level of terminology, but according to Zander and Staudenmaier it does not remove the substantive hierarchy. That is where the positions diverge, and it is honest to say that they diverge.

The Dutch commission. In 1996 the Anthroposophical Society in the Netherlands sets up a commission chaired by the jurist Th. A. van Baarda. The report appears in April 2000. It examined the complete works — about 360 volumes, 89,000 pages — and drew from them 245 problematic quotations, classifying them in three categories:

16 category 1: statements which, uttered publicly in the Netherlands today, would fall under the anti-discrimination law.
66 category 2: ambiguous or mildly discriminatory.
162 category 3: not discriminatory.

The conclusions: there is no systematic racial doctrine and no denigratory intent, and the charge that racism is intrinsic to anthroposophy is rejected — but sixteen statements are today actionable at law, and the commission criticises its own movement for the way it handled the controversy.

The report's limitation must be stated, and it is not a detail: the commission was composed of anthroposophists. It is a documented self-investigation, not an independent expert report. Anyone who cites it as an independent acquittal is using it badly; anyone who ignores it because «they were an interested party» throws away the only systematic count in existence.

The institutional bodies. On 6 September 2007 the German Bundesprüfstelle for media harmful to minors judged that parts of GA 107 are apt to «incite racial hatred»; listing on the index was avoided because the publisher undertook to circulate the text only with a critical apparatus. In 2008 the Frankfurter Memorandum, edited by Ramon Brüll and Jens Heisterkamp, is the most honest apologia available, because it concedes the point of fact: it admits five categories of problematic statements, «in no way any longer tenable». The Goetheanum working document of 20 June 2021 acknowledges passages «today considered racist» and denies a systemic racism: it is a partial acknowledgement accompanied by a defence, and is to be read as such.

And Nazism — where the received account gets it wrong twice

Two stories are told about this chapter, one from each side, and both are false by omission. Both the persecution and the collaboration are documented.

The persecution. In November 1935 Reinhard Heydrich orders the dissolution of the German Anthroposophical Society, with a decree attacking the «individualistic» character of Steinerian pedagogy. In March 1936 the minister Rust blocks new enrolments at Waldorf schools: it is a financial strangulation. Hamburg-Altona and Essen close in 1936, Stuttgart, the mother school, in 1938, the last ones in 1940-41. In June 1941, after Hess's flight, the Aktion gegen Geheimlehren sweeps away what remains.

The collaboration. Rudolf Hess was sympathetic to biodynamics and to anthroposophical medicine and protected the sector until 1941. The biodynamic leadership integrated itself into the Nazi state as early as the summer of 1933 in order to avoid dissolution, and in 1934 the German Anthroposophical Society wrote to Hitler arguing its own compatibility with the regime's values. At Dachau Himmler set up an agricultural plantation run on biodynamic lines: the gardener Franz Lippert, formerly head gardener at Weleda, moved there in 1941 to direct it.

The decisive study is recent and is to be noted for the way it came about: Ebert, zur Nieden and Pieschel, Die biodynamische Bewegung und Demeter in der NS-Zeit, Metropol 2024, commissioned by Demeter itself — more than ten thousand pages of surveillance documents, over thirty archives. The result is twofold and uncomfortable for both camps: textual analysis of the biodynamic writings finds no adherence to the central ideological themes of Nazism, but the ingratiation with the regime and the exclusion of Jewish members are documented. Demeter has publicly distanced itself from its own past.

What the research says, and what the medicine says

Anthroposophy is today the object of serious academic study, within the field of Western esotericism opened up by Wouter Hanegraaff. The standard work in German is Helmut Zander, Anthroposophie in Deutschland, 2007; in English Peter Staudenmaier, Between Occultism and Nazism, Brill 2014.

On the medical side the data are less ambiguous than both parties maintain. The Cochrane review of 2008 on mistletoe in oncology — twenty-one randomised trials — concluded that the evidence is weak, and it has never been updated; a systematic review of 2025 finds the picture substantially unchanged after twenty years. On vaccination, a review published in BMC Public Health in 2023 documents eighteen measles outbreaks between 2000 and 2012, eight of them starting from Waldorf schools — but at the same time it contests the stereotype of the anthroposophist as automatically opposed to vaccines, which does not hold up against the data.

There remains the question this atlas cannot resolve and will not pretend to resolve: how much weight falls, upon a pedagogy that works and an agriculture that anticipated organic farming by fifty years, from the fact that their founder wrote sixteen sentences that a Dutch court would today judge discriminatory. Those who answer «none» and those who answer «all of it» are both avoiding the question.

The Italian affair — which has a chapter of its own, far harsher, and a protagonist who wrote some hundred racist articles between 1931 and 1943 without ever retracting them — is dealt with on a separate page.