Cultic
Studies Review, Vol. 8, No. 1,
2009, pp. 68-71
Rudolf Steiner: An
Introduction to His Life and Work
Gary Lachman
New York, NY: Jeremy P. Tarcher/Penguin.
2007. ISBN 10: 1585425435; ISBN 13:
978-1-58542-543-3 (paperback),
$16.95 ($11.53 Amazon.com). 278
pages.
Gary Lachman
has written many books, including
one about his life in rock-‘n-roll
(as Gary Valentine), and others
about his views on the evolution of
consciousness. As a young
poet/musician, he helped form the
punk rock band Blondie, as their
bass player. In the mid-1970s, prior
to its meteoric success, the band
let him go, not happy with his stage
antics. He later studied philosophy
and became a journalist. His
experience with mysticism and the
New Age included several years
pursuing the Fourth Way teachings of
Gurdjieff.
Rudolf
Steiner is Lachman’s latest in a
series of books about significant
occultists and gurus who influence
our modern era (two of them
biographies about P.D.Ouspensky and
Emmanuel Swedenborg). In this
volume, Lachman leans toward an
apologetic view of Rudolf Steiner
the man, if not of everything he
taught.
Born in the
region of the Austro-Hungarian
border (Kraljevic was part of
Hungary at the time), Steiner lived
from 1871 to 1925. From an early
age, he had an odd personality.
Lachman cites English psychiatrist
Anthony Storr, who called Steiner “schizotypal,”
or someone who has some
characteristics of schizophrenia yet
functions adequately in society.[1]
Steiner was preoccupied as a youth
with a vivid inner vision, a trait
he retained till he died. As a
youth, he reported seeing the
spirits of two dead family members.
Those transcendent events continued
to inform all his philosophy
regarding his awareness of
“supersensible beings” and the
occulted world. Steiner believed
that a science of spirituality
exists. His goal was to unveil the
hidden realms and to create a way
for his followers to commune within
them.
Steiner seemed
to have a reading disability until
the age of 10; but when he needed to
read in later life, he did rather
well and at times excelled with his
studies. Lachman calls Steiner a
genius. The second defining moment
in Steiner’s life (after that of
seeing dead people) occurred when he
discovered geometry. Through those
structural principles he saw
meaning, or a bridge between the
outer world and that which underlay
his psychic reality. Without
grasping geometry as his avenue to
“the world” at large, Steiner might
have led a far less remarkable life.
Nevertheless, his Platonic and
Gnostic leanings dominated his
life’s work and relationships.
Steiner married twice, had no
children, and, Lachman surmises, may
have remained virgin. There is no
evidence from Steiner or his female
partners that he ever engaged in
intercourse. And his writings have a
distinctive asexual quality.
This odd man
was attracted to the esoteric ideas
of Goethe, the theosophy of Jacob
Boehme, and to some extent the
occultism of Madame Blavatsky. A
major breakthrough in his mystical
career occurred when a Goethe center
hired him to edit Goethe’s obscure
and generally ignored scientific
speculations. Goethe was a hero for
Steiner. Lachman spends an entire
chapter telling the story of
Steiner’s alliance with Goethe’s
aesthetics and idealism. He writes
how Steiner strove to defeat the
rising materialism of the age and to
refute his “nemesis” Kant, who saw
limits to human perception and
knowledge. Steiner preferred the
idealism of Fichte and the
romanticism of Nietzsche. Steiner
believed there were no limits to
human cognition about the world,
hidden or not, and he came to
believe in himself as the prophet of
humanity’s psychic evolution.
Theosophy, for
all its vagaries, was the most
important spiritual movement among
the avant-garde of Steiner’s day. He
would become the head of the German
section of the Theosophical Society
for some years, until 1913. Before
that achievement, Steiner’s
formative period included
significant time spent in Vienna. I
enjoyed Chapter Three, “At the
Megalomania Café,” in Lachman’s
narrative because it captures the
brooding pessimism as well as the
grandiosity of ideas in ferment at
the time. Megalomania Café (Cafe
Groessenwahn) was the popular
nick-name for the Griensteidl café
because of its primarily artistic
clientele that for a time included
Steiner. At age 18, Steiner commuted
by train to study in Vienna before
he moved there. On that train,
Steiner befriended a middle-aged
herbalist that he revered as a kind
of seer like himself. This eccentric
man, Felix Koguzki, may have been
the inspiration for someone Steiner
would later allude to as “the Master
M,” who Steiner claimed guided him
to the herbalist. Hidden masters
were in the air, so to speak, since
Blavatsky’s revelations in the late
1800s, with her revalorization of
Rosicrucianism, an occult movement
purportedly founded by the hidden
master Christian Rosencreutz in the
1600s.
Steiner
retained a Christocentric form of
Theosophy that put him at odds with
the Orientalism of the
Blavatsky-Besant lodges. When the
latter chose the young Indian boy J.
Krishnamurti in 1913 as the
embodiment of a messiah called World
Teacher, Steiner objected. He
severed relations with Theosophy and
changed his German section to the
Anthroposophical Society.
Anthroposophy flourished under
Steiner’s management, eventually
attracting thousands of supportive
devotees worldwide. Through
Anthroposophy Steiner established
himself as a notable lecturer and
innovator in art (Eurythmy in dance
and poetry, Luminism in watercolor,
and Expressionist architecture),
education (Waldorf Schools),
biodynamic farming, and therapeutic
care for handicapped folks (Camphill
schools). Although all of his
innovations sustain a following to
this day, they also attract serious
criticism from scientists,
educators, and former followers.
If there is a
weakness in Lachman’s book, it is
its lack of evidence against
Steiner’s ideas. You will get the
impression from the final chapter
that Steiner is an overlooked
prophet whose relevance is yet to be
discovered. Lachman is impressed
with a core idea from Steiner’s book
Theosophy, that man is an “I”
with a universal consciousness that
has the potential to “see not only
what proceeds on his own planet, but
in the whole cosmos” (p.142).
Steiner believed that this would
happen through man’s use of a
supersensible intuition, or what
Goethe called “active imagination.”
Steiner’s intuition was not always
profound. As Lachman points out,
Steiner made many strange claims,
such as the Christ sent Buddha to
convert all beings on Mars. Despite
Steiner’s focus on occult sciences,
his private religion included
elements of Catholicism. For
example, every day at three o’clock
Steiner would recite the Lord’s
Prayer in Latin.
Anyone not
familiar with Steiner will get a
solid general view of this complex
man and his extraordinary life from
Lachman’s book. For that reason, I
recommend it as an informative and
entertaining introduction to
Steiner, despite a few reservations.
Beyond my concerns personally as
someone not sympathetic to Steiner’s
occultism are some subtle errors in
the book. For example, Lachman
writes on page 123 about an esoteric
group in Berlin, the Giordano Bruno
Bund, to which Steiner lectured
around 1900. Lachman states that the
Bund was “named after the
Renaissance mage burned at the stake
by the Church for his advocacy of
the Copernican model of the solar
system.” Tragically, Giordano Bruno
was burned at the stake for heresy,
divination, magic, and alleged
immoral behavior. Although Bruno’s
views on Copernicus were
controversial, there was no official
Church policy on Copernicus and his
revolutionary if flawed science at
the time. Also, Lachman fails to
suggest that Steiner’s insistence
that children not be taught to read
till age 7 or so is more projection
based on his own childhood
experience than good science.
The book,
however, has a good index and
informative notes, all well worth
reading. If nothing else, Lachman
truly did his homework on this man,
citing dozens of sources as well as
Steiner’s own writings.
Related
|
