Emil Molt

And yet, for all this interconnection, the practical teaching on inner calm has a self-contained integrity that allows it to be engaged on its own terms.

From anthroposophy grew a range of practical movements, the most widely known among them Waldorf education, which Steiner founded in Stuttgart in nineteen nineteen at the request of Emil Molt, the owner of the Waldorf-Astoria Cigarette Factory, who wanted a school for the children of his factory workers.

Waldorf schools are now found in dozens of countries around the world—over a thousand of them by most counts—and they represent perhaps the most visible and enduring legacy of Steiner’s work.

There is also biodynamic agriculture, a system of farming that Steiner developed in a series of lectures in nineteen twenty-four, which treats the farm as a living organism and incorporates practices that range from the scientifically plausible—composting, crop rotation, attention to soil health—to the frankly mystical: planting according to cosmic rhythms, burying cow horns filled with manure There is anthroposophical medicine, which combines conventional medical practice with Steiner's spiritual insights into the nature of health and illness.