Anthroposophical Society

Yeah.

So in 1912, he starts the Anthroposophical Society.

In 1913, he moves the headquarters to Dornach, the village in Switzerland.

And he dies in 1925.

I mean, I plan two episodes, but who knows? It might be like four.

Yeah.

But they were closely, I mean, they have this excuse, they were like persecuted, and they call it persecuted because the anthroposophical society was banned at some point.

I mean, same thing with Mazda's nun.

And then he began designing a second Goetheanum, this time in concrete so that fire could not destroy it again.

The second Goetheanum, massive and sculptural, with a presence that visitors describe as both imposing and strangely peaceful, still stands today as the headquarters of the General Anthroposophical Society.

From Dornach and from lecture halls across Europe, Steiner spoke and wrote prolifically on an astonishing range of subjects until his death in nineteen twenty-five, leaving behind a body of work that runs to hundreds of volumes and thousands of recorded lectures.

His output is so vast that no single person has read all of it, and its sheer volume is part of what makes Steiner such a difficult figure to assess.

Great job setting me up, guys.

His group at this point was kicked out of the Theosophical Society, and so he reformed it as a splinter movement, the Anthroposophical Society, because his deep knowledge of time allowed him to foresee that one day skeptics would have to repeatedly say the name of his movement in semi-humorous biographies of him.

Yeah, did you win by having the least Google-able name? What the fuck? And it's Steiner's new Anthroposophy that saw his pseudoscientific views really branch out.

So based on his principles, the group founded a school of farming, biodynamic agriculture.

generated that way that yeah there's absolutely something so refreshing and um so vivid about having about thinking in through magic about going going to enchanted places the the kind of you know the the emotional side of it that's the tactile side how beautiful it is yes absolutely that must be um you know a huge a huge element of the um the interesting magic comes from there i wondered how much of how much of it also is owed to the decline in some more conventional institutional religion as well i mean you know it's not even all over all over the world's more pronounced in some places and other you know it's very pronounced in uh northern europe say the decline of christianity something like that and you know the spiritual component of human life you know it's such a huge elemental part of of being alive and being a being a person that's uh you know there's almost a kind of a a kind of gap there if religion declines.

I also think that all the sort of spiritual sort of side quest institutions are also failing now, right? Like, you know, the Anthroposophical Society, for instance, is just kind of losing it.

The Freemasons, like spiritualist churches, Christian science, they're all kind of also undergoing this crisis, even though we would say or expect them to have a resurgence when we're Getting more and more kind of magic into our lives.

So I think that the erosion is signifying a democratization of what's been given to the world by all of that, right? That there's some sort of, you know, death process by which when those all die, we...

And after the First World War, his anthroposophy became increasingly important to her.

She joined the Anthroposophical Society in 1920 and studied at the Goetheanum in Switzerland.

Around 1927, she sent a version of her Tree of Knowledge there, hoping it would be displayed.

It was not.