Part 3 of 3
Despite his later assertions, it seems that he did not at the time rule out the possibility of a reformation of human nature in terms less occult, and more related to the social goals of the opponents of materialist society. He became involved in the Free Literary Society, taught at the Berlin Workers' School, and generally behaved himself as a member of the Progressive Underground -- more respectable, more established than most; but he undoubtedly belonged to this milieu. He formed a friendship with
John Henry Mackay, a half-Scot,
half-German anarchist of some fame who was the editor of Max Stirner and who had admired Steiner's book
The Philosophy of Freedom. At Steiner's marriage to the widow Anna Eunicke (on 31 October 1899), Mackay was the witness. [82]
This first marriage of Steiner has given rise to conflicting reports, and as Steiner himself always refused categorically to discuss his private life, it is difficuit to know just where to place the emphasis. Sources favorable to Steiner note only that after a separation of several years, Anna Steiner died in March 1911 after confessing her former happiness with Rudolf Steiner to her daughter Wilhelmine. [83] On the other hand, information from another daughter, Emmy, tells a different tale.
Steiner had first come to the Eunicke family as a lodger in his early days in Weimar, when Emmy Eunicke was a girl of sixteen. It is plain that she resented the intrusion of the young academic into a family consisting of her widowed mother and her sisters. Emmy considered that Steiner was excluding the Eunicke children from their rightful inheritance both in terms of affection and of material goods. Her dislike of the newcomer became increasingly acute after he became her stepfather and the family moved to Berlin. For Steiner returned to Theosophical company, and accumulated the gaggle of adoring women invariably attracted to "occult" masters. One of his new disciples -- she is not named in the published account for fear of a libel action -- became Steiner's inseparable companion. According to the jealous daughter, a door was knocked in the wall between the flat of the Steiners and the parts of the Theosophical headquarters inhabited by the lesser lights, so that Steiner could visit his paramour. One summer about the year 1904 Steiner took a furnished Schlachtensee cottage divided into two flats -- one for his wife and another for his lover. Eventually, Emmy Eunicke claimed to have found her stepfather and his disciple in bed together. At all events, Anna Steiner seems to have become tired of waiting on her husband and his disciples, and after the marriage of her daughter Emmy in 1906 she left Steiner to live near her. The sudden death of Steiner's wife in 1911 sent rumors fluttering around the occult press, that Steiner had "strangled her astrally." [84]It must immediately be said that the source of this story is a two-headed Gorgon: a jealous daughter and a highly eccentric Nazi polemicist. It was made great play with by Steiner's opponents, who grew in geometrical progression, and the details should not be insisted upon. The charge most often brought against Steiner -- excluding those of lunatics concerned with astral strangulation -- is of opportunism, and
the possibility of his having married a rich widow for her money cannot be ruled out. About the same time as his marriage to Anna Eunicke, Steiner turned from his unwontedly extroverted existence toward the Theosophical interests which had earlier concerned him and accepted an invitation from Count and Countess Brockdorff, the leaders of the Theosophical Society in Berlin, to lecture to their members. He lectured first on Nietzsche; then on the esoteric interpretation of Goethe's fairy tale, "The Green Snake and the Beautiful Lily." In the winter of 1900 he further committed himself to a mystical approach by lecturing to the Theosophists on "Christianity as Mystical Fact." In the audience was his future second wife -- who, if there is any truth in Emmy Eunicke's story, was almost certainly the woman whom Steiner introduced into the strange menage a trois at Schlachtensee. Marie von Sivers (1867-1948), a Baltic Russian and a frustrated actress, was a keen Theosophist. She married Steiner secretly in 1914. After her initial encounter with him in Berlin, she went to Bologna to organize a Theosophical group there but returned to Germany in time to travel with Steiner to the London conference of the Theosophical Society in July 1902. At this point, Steiner was induced by the Brockdorff group to apply to Colonel Olcott at Adyar for a charter inaugurating a new German section of Theosophists. [85]
This transition from liberal academic to mystical lecturer is at first sight baffling. Steiner was not as inconsistent as it might appear. Since Vienna he had carried with him a large body of Theosophical knowledge, and such a combination of interests was not unusual among the Progressive Underground.
Steiner's academic speciality was Goethe; and he had to digest Goethe's own interest in matters symbolic and esoteric in order to carry out his task of editing and criticizing. His meeting with
Haeckel (the popularizer of Darwinianism in Germany and the protagonist of the theory of philosophical monism) had also given direction to his thought. Haeckel's monism was very influential during the early part of this century -- and not only in Germany.
The scientist proposed to abolish the conventional distinction between matter and spirit and to return to the conception of a unified organism -- a proposition which he himself defined explicitly as religious, and which gave rise to innumerable theories of political organization disguised under the term "organic state." For the propagation of this viewpoint -- which carried overtones of reassurance, the restoration of order, and the feeling of "belonging" -- were formed a number of societies. [86] At one of these, the
Giordano Bruno Bund, Steiner delivered what he was later to regard as the basic lecture on his emerging "spiritual science,"
Anthroposophy. This lecture on "Monism and Theosophy" took place on 8 October 1902, around the time when the German section of the Theosophical Society was reorganized with Steiner as general secretary.
Steiner's own explanation of why he joined the society was that, at the time, "this was the sole institution worthy of serious consideration in which there was present a real spiritual life." [87] It is obvious that from the start Steiner carried into Theosophy a rigorous academic training and a philosophical inheritance completely different from the mixture of Eastern religion and 18th-century occultism which had gone into the making of Theosophy of the Blavatsky brand. If we allow Steiner a consistency of aim and purpose he cannot be acquitted of the charge of joining the Theosophists with the intention of taking them over. Perhaps he had mentally returned to the preoccupations of his Vienna days, and merely proposed rather indefinitely to apply to these the conclusions of later years.
There was, in any case, bound to be friction between Steiner and the old guard of the German Theosophists. Of this group Steiner had later little good to say. Even
Madame Blavatsky had found it difficult to stomach Franz Hartmann. "The magnetism of that man is sickening; his lying beastly; his slander of Hubbe-Schleiden, his intrigues unaccountable but on the ground that he is either a maniac -- utterly irresponsible for the most part, or allowed to be possessed by his own dugpa Spirit." Steiner claimed that Hartmann had once told a story of how William Quan Judge had complained to him that he never received any letters from the mysterious Himalayan masters. Judge refused Hartmann's suggestion that he write some to himself with the stricture that he must be able to say that his letters arrived out of the blue in the known fashion of Mahatma letters. Hartmann's solution was simple: he volunteered to climb on a chair and drop the letters on Judge's head. Hubbe-Schleiden's sincerity was never in doubt. The trouble was that he cultivated an illusion that could explain the
metaphysical universe on a chemical analogy. He kept his attic crammed with models of spiritual atoms and maintained that
reincarnations must be connected by a single "Permanent Atom" (according to Steiner, "an appalling thing"). [88]
An uneasy alliance persisted, however, until 1912, when two factors contributed to a split between Steiner's group and the Theosophists proper. The first was the expulsion by Steiner from the German Society of Hugo Vollrath, a disciple of Franz Hartmann and a known opportunist. The second was the growing power in Theosophical circles of Mrs. Besant's
Order of the Star in the East, the vehicle of
Krishnamurti and the coming World-Teacher. This Steiner could not stomach. Eventually in 1913 his followers -- most of the German Theosophists -- broke away and founded their rival Anthroposophical Society. Hubbe-Schleiden was left with orthodox Theosophists and the adherents of Krishnamurti. [89]
But between 1902 and 1913 much had happened in the development of Steiner's thought. He steadily built up a personal following, and first really established himself with a series of lectures that he was asked to give at the Theosophical conference in Paris in 1906. These attracted more attention than the official events.
His search led him and Marie von Sivers into strange adventures, the most unlikely of which was Steiner's installation at the head of a lodge of the O.T.O. called the Mysteria Mystica Aeterna. The most probable date for his entry is January 1906. Steiner later maintained that his official position with regard to the O.T.O. was like that of a candidate for apostolic succession. He wanted, he said, to take over the historical authority to perform the "ancient symbolic and cultural ceremonies that embody the ancient wisdom. I never thought in the remotest degree of working in the spirit of such a society." It seems, nonetheless, that he may at one time have had the idea of creating a large international occult federation based on the structure of the O.T.O., but that, whatever use he made of the ceremonies handed over to him by Theodore Reuss, it is unlikely that he used "sex-magic" in the sense in which it was meant by his opponents. [90] What is important to notice is that Steiner could find in such diverse quarters as Theosophy, philosophical idealism, and the possibly Tantric magic of the O.T.O., material for his hoped-for revolution in consciousness.
If his sources were varied, his applications were equally so. For he intended Anthroposophy to be an all-embracing science that would provide answers both spiritually and materially satisfying in every branch of life. Agriculture, architecture, education, or politics -- all were areas in which he felt qualified to operate. By the time of his death in 1925, his society had become astonishingly influential and had attracted great hostility. The reasons for this hostility were various. One of the most obvious is that
the Anthroposophical Society embodied so many different aspects of the Progressive Underground and represented in itself a collection of people who compounded the felonies of Marxists, Social Democrats, and other destroyers of the social order by deliberately advocating change. Nor was the sort of change which they advocated entirely understood.
I will try to re-state my point: I think very many anthroposophists, today as in the past, are profoundly confused about politics and routinely mix together left-wing and right-wing viewpoints, and when they get involved in progressive efforts they often end up representing the least emancipatory and most conservative elements within those milieus. I further argue that this pattern is not accidental but flows from Steiner's own reactionary political assumptions, outlined at some length in the present series of articles. Steiner himself is a classic example of the kind of left-right crossover in modern German culture that I study ...
In the words of the anthroposophist Jens Heisterkamp, “the anthroposophist movement did not produce any members of the Resistance.”
--
The Art of Avoiding History, by Peter Staudenmaier
This is unsurprising. Steiner's ideas form less a "system" than an accumulation of sometimes apparently disconnected items. Thus, from Theosophy he took the ideas of karma and reincarnation; from his mystical studies and possibly the O.T.O.,
a personal "Rosicrucianism." He discovered an entirely new idiosyncratic and poetic interpretation of Christianity, and somehow contrived a seeming coherence with these teachings for theories of the social and artistic life of man. The underlying unity which he and his followers found in these elements of Anthroposophy lies in their source in Steiner's "spiritual perception." This faculty of "clairvoyance" -- of insight into what might be called real reality -- Steiner claimed to have developed early in his Vienna period; but he later connected it with Goethe's technique for immersing himself in the essence of things.
He thought that "a deep chasm had opened between Reason and its allied Thought Method on the one hand, and supersensual Truth on the other." [91] In accordance with Theosophical theory, he maintained that "man is not obliged to remain stationary at the point of view he occupies today and it is possible for organs -- spiritual eyes -- to develop after a similar fashion to that in which those physical sense-organs of the body, the eyes and ears have been developed; and once these new organs are developed, higher faculties will make themselves apparent." [92] As man advanced in this development, the
beings of higher worlds would make themselves known to him and he would advance in knowledge.
Steiner does not seem to have been above using his clairvoyant faculties gratuitously in the manner of a medium. Thus he informed the Protestant clergyman Friedrich Rittelmeyer -- who afterward became one of his firmest supporters -- that he had seen "a beautiful ether-form" after one of his sermons and that "an individuality" whom he took to be Rittelmeyer's mother attended his lectures. [93]
The chief uses Steiner made of his faculty were enunciating moral doctrine, describing the structure of the universe, and elucidating the history of man. Human history could be surveyed as far distantly as the seer might wish -- because of its impress on the "
Akashic Record." This mysterious and convenient chronicle is a legacy from
Madame Blavatsky; and like her,
Steiner made great play with the doings of man on the lost continents of Atlantis and Lemuria. In Atlantis, for example, the inhabitants had thought in pictures, possessed extraordinary memories, and used the energy latent in plants to drive airships. The most evolved among them were gathered together by a great leader in Central Asia and subjected to a refining process with the object of making them understand the divine powers. From this group were descended the early priest-kings of the Aryans. [94]
The Original Semites were the fifth and most important of the seven Atlantean Races, because in them we find the first germ of the corrective quality of Thought. Therefore the Original Semitic Race become the "seed race" for the seven races of the present Aryan Epoch....
The Original Semites regulated their desires to some extent by the mind, and instead of mere desires, came cunning and craftiness -- the means by which those people sought to attain their selfish ends. Though they were a very turbulent people, they learned to curb their passions to a great extent and accomplish their purposes by the use of cunning, as being more subtle and potent than mere brute strength. They were the first to discover that "brain" is superior to "brawn."...
Under the guidance of a great Entity, the Original Semitic Race was led eastward from the continent of Atlantis, over Europe, to the great waste in Central Asia which is known as the Gobi Desert. There it prepared them to be the seed of the seven Races of the Aryan Epoch, imbuing them potentially with the qualities to be evolved by their descendants....now his thoughts were to be turned from the visible Leaders, the Lords from Venus, whom he worshiped as messengers from the gods -- to the idea of the true God, the invisible Creator of the System. Man was to learn to worship and obey the commands of a God he could not see.
--
The Rosicrucian Cosmo-Conception: An Elementary Treatise Upon Man's Past Evolution, Present Constitution and Future Development, by Max Heindel
The entire course of human development followed a scheme similar to that worked out by H. P. Blavatsky with the difference that man was seen as evolving back toward a lost divine condition. Man's effort toward a renewed perfection was impeded by two malevolent powers to which Steiner gave the names of
Ahriman and Lucifer. Ahriman represents materialism and the world of matter, in which he seeks to imprison man's spirit. Lucifer is the demon of pride and self-sufficiency. This conception of the universe probably stems from
Gnostic and
Zoroastrian sources, on which Steiner is said to have worked around the year 1906. [95]
His Rosicrucianism seems first to have blossomed in 1907 (the year after he accepted the charter from the O.T.O).
Steiner proclaimed the way of the Rosicrucians as an esoteric version of Christianity, and he decided that Christian Rosenkreuz, the great master of this concealed brotherhood, had sent his favorite pupil, Buddha, to Mars, where he had regenerated the planet as Christ had redeemed Earth. In the year before he died Steiner claimed to have been in contact with a small group of Rosicrucians in Central Europe -- but this happened in the early years of the 19th century before he had entered this current incarnation. Gradually the figure of Christ emerged as central to his vision of the cosmos.
He saw the coming of Christ as equivalent on a cosmic scale to the effect produced on the individual by initiation in the mystery-religions: to return man to a consciousness of his divine origins. A strange and complex process was then envisaged in the universe which Steiner termed "
the etherization of the blood." In the individual human being this affected the bloodstream around the region of the heart, turning it into "etherized blood." When a correct understanding of Christ had been obtained, the etherized blood of the individual mingled with the etherized blood of Christ, present in the cosmos. [96] Whether there is more meaning in this doctrine than a singular elaboration of the old idea of mystical participation in the body of Christ it is not the present task of this book to decide.
From Steiner's Christology sprang a subdivision of the Anthroposophical Society called the Christian Community. In 1921 several of Steiner's disciples approached him with a request that he construct for them a rite to be used in Christian worship for those who followed his teaching. Steiner produced such a service, "The Act of the Consecration of Man," and
the group was placed under the leadership of Friedrich Rittelmeyer, who had come to Anthroposophy via several years of allegiance to Johannes Muller. [97]
Steiner's writings are verbose, diffuse, and difficult to decode. In part this is because so many thousands of pages represent published expansions of lecture notes. But there is frequently an absence of basic content -- by which is meant no attempt to evaluate the material, only a statement of quantitative fact. They have been taken seriously by large numbers of people, and particularly in the period just after the Great War they represented a force to be reckoned with. Not least was this so because the founder of Anthroposophy extended his spiritual perceptions to cover the most diverse areas of human activity, and in the general reaction toward the idealistic approach his theories appeared to many of those who were in search of a secure ideological crutch to provide more of a system than in fact they did. We shall briefly return to Steiner's influence on education and the arts; and there is good reason to examine in their context his plans for political reconstruction. We can only note in passing that
Anthroposophical medicine seems to be based partly on magical theories of correspondence -- for example cholera is a punishment for insufficient self-confidence and the pox for lack of affection. Today the Anthroposophists run clinics, a mental hospital, and a factory for medicines which has marketed a cancer cure. [98] Anthroposophical farming is carried out on a "Bio-Dynamic" basis which forbids exhaustion of the soil through the abuse of chemical fertilizers and advocates planting of crops in accordance with the phases of the moon. [99] Some of these agricultural methods at least seem to have borne literal fruit.
You catch a fairly young field-vole and flay it... We take the skin, when Venus stands in the sign of the scorpion, and combust the skin... Now take the ash, which you got this way, and pepper it out on the fields.
-- Rudolf Steiner (En Lantbrukskurs, Stockholm, 1966)
The campaign against Steiner and his society grew with the anxiety of the post-war years.
As early as 1917 the magazine Psychische Studien had carried a series of articles denouncing Anthroposophy for causing mental and physical illness and in some cases suicide. Erich Bamler, a Munich artist, claimed that he had become dissociated through using exercises recommended by Steiner and was only prevented from suicide by his Christian convictions. A young schoolmistress became convinced that she had had an
astral child. Steiner's opponents made much of such reports; and it should be firmly insisted that, whatever the effects of Steiner's exercises, they are not alone in having such accusations made against them.
It is an unfortunate fact that every occult or esoteric group attracts its quota of just those people who seem to be worst affected by the practices they are supposed to carry out -- the hyper-suggestible, the sexually maladjusted, and those on the edge of desperation. The worst or oddest case connected with Anthroposophy concerned one Wilhelm Krieger, who claimed that he had been given occult exercises which involved the transferring of his ego outside his body. Krieger became convinced that he could not recover his "I," that it had been stolen from him, that he had been the victim of "occult vampirism." As his delusion progressed he began to issue a newsletter directed against the Anthroposophists, and eventually sued Steiner, his colleague Carl Unger, and another Anthroposophist for the return of his soul. The tragi-comedy did not end there. Denied legal redress, Krieger bided his time, and on 4 January 1929 murdered Dr. Unger at an Anthroposophical meeting in Stuttgart. [100]
Steiner and his followers were refused permission to build a center at Munich. After having naturally considered Ascona as a possible site,
they erected their headquarters at Dornach. The building was designed by Steiner according to his architectural principles and embodied the same combination of woods as is used in the making of a violin. It consisted of two domed structures of which the larger slightly exceeded the size of the dome of St. Peter's. This remarkable building was known as the Goetheanum, and it was highly flammable. On New Year's Eve 1922/3, as the Goetheanum was nearing completion, it was set on fire. It was rumored that the pastor of the neighboring village of Reinach had watched the blaze through binoculars exclaiming his approval. An outraged Anthroposophist sent him (and two other clergymen who had directed the local opposition against Steiner) a postcard bearing the words, "Where is the arsonist?" The clerics replied that their questioner should go to Dr. Steiner, who was after all the clairvoyant. They accused the Anthroposophists of burning down their own headquarters for the insurance money. They even found sinister proof of their allegations in the humdrum fact that Steiner attended the funeral of a clockmaker called Ott whose body was found in the ashes of the building. [101]
Such hostility goes far beyond the local opposition of a band of bigots.
There was extraordinary vehemence in the hate directed against Steiner, who was seen as part of the Jewish-Freemasonic conspiracy to subvert the world. It will soon be necessary to discuss the meaning of this aberration, and the specific causes which involved Steiner in the "plot." These were bound up with the peculiar character of German politics in the period after the defeat of 1918. The search for realities transcending those of the material world was not confined to those who hoped for Heaven after life on earth. Throughout this survey of the German Underground of irrationalist and occultist opinion, one thing stands out: that the illuminated approach very often entailed an application of the transcendental ethic to social problems. Steiner and the Progressive thinkers of Vienna and Ascona, in all their extravagance, are examples of this tendency.
_______________
Notes:* A similar progress can be seen in Hermann Bahr, whose initial rebellion against rationalism and realism in art turned increasingly to Roman Catholicism and at the same time, to the Christian Socialist revival of Carl Ritter von Schonerer and Carl Luger. Bahr met Johannes Muller for a two-day conference in Berchtesgaden and Salzburg in 1911 or 1912. It was considered surprising that the meeting had not occurred before. Bahr wrote of Muller: "He opened up my heart to me." [68]
1. Andreas Steiner, "Das Nervose Zeitalter" in Zurcher Medizingeschichtlicher Abhandlungen, Neue Reihe Nr 21 (Zurich, 1964), p. 116.
2. Soren Kierkegaard, "Equilibrium," in Either/Or, vol. II (tr. Walter Lawrie, London, 1944), pp. 159-60.
3. Steiner, p. 117. Cf. the remarks made in The Occult Underground (p. 23) about the possibility of seeing the outbreak of "spirit mediumship" in the mid-19th century as a psychologically classifiable illness.
4. Toffler, Future Shock, pp. 291-93. He cites Dr. Thomas H. Holmes's "Life Change Unit Scale," which seems to have established a correlation between great changes in living patterns and severe illness. The evidence is so strong that it is becoming possible to predict levels of illness in various populations.
5. G. K. Nelson, Spiritualism and Society (London, 1969), pp. 155-61.
6. On Oliver Lodge, see his Raymond, or Life and Death (London, 1916).
7. On Doyle, see John Dickson Carr, The Life of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle (London, 1949), who does not even mention the episode of the fairies; Arthur Conan Doyle, The History of Spiritualism, vol. II (London, 1926), p. 225; Doyle, The Coming of the Fairies (2nd ed., London, 1928), pp. 22, 90, 136 ff.; E. L. Gardner, Fairies (2nd ed., London, 1951), pp. 45-46; Joseph Jastrow, Wish and Wisdom (London, 1935), pp. 52 ff.
8. See Lilly Heber, Krishnamurti: The Man and His Message (London, 1931), p. 59. According to a Reuter telegram from Krishnamurti's Dutch center at Ommen, George Lansbury congratulated Krishnamurti on abandoning organizations for the claims of the individual conscience. He was at that time a member of Ramsay MacDonald's cabinet.
9. On MRA, see Tom Driberg, The Mystery of Moral Re-armament (London, 1964); Lynden Macassey, foreword to Dr. Frank N. D. Buchman: An Eightieth Birthday Tribute (undated); A. J. Russell, For Sinners Only (London, 1932), pp. 65-69; Marjorie Harrison, Saints Run Mad (London, 1934), p. 58; Ivor Thomas, The Buchman Groups (London, 1933), p. 5; Frank Buchman, Remaking the World (London, 1947), especially Buchman's speech of March 1935: "Norway Ablaze;" W. H. Auden, "The Group Movement and the Middle Classes," in R. H. S. Crossman (ed.), Oxford and the Groups (London, 1935), pp. 89, 94.
10. Herman Hesse, The Journey to the East (tr. Hilda Rosner, New York, 1969), p. 6.
11. Hesse, Journey, p. 10.
12. Eberhard Buchner, Sekten und Sektierer in Berlin (Berlin/Leipzig, 1904), pp. 19 ff; Paul Scheurlen, Die Sekten der Gegenwart (4th ed., Stuttgart, 1930), pp. 115-21.
13. Buchner, Sekten, p. 68. John Alexander Dowie (1847-1907) was born in Edinburgh, the illegitimate son of an illiterate mother. He began his career as a Congregationalist minister in Sydney, Australia, where he developed a theory of "divine healing by the laying on of hands." In 1888 he emigrated to America and was the moving spirit in setting up the town of Zion City, where alcohol, tobacco, and conventional medicine were banned and which held 5,400 people by 1904. In 1903 the famous "visitation" of New York with meetings in the Carnegie Hall and Madison Square took place. Dowie's delusions of grandeur grew with the disillusion of his supporters, and the year before his death his chief lieutenant led the revolt that deposed him. See Rolvix Harlan, John Alexander Dowie and the Catholic Apostolic Church (Evansville, Wisconsin, 1906) and Edna Sheldrake (ed.), The Personal Letters of John Alexander Dowie (Zion City, Illinois, 1912).
14. Buchner, Sekten, pp. 78-90, 53-55; Scheurlen, Sekten, pp. 305-7. See e.g., Jacob Lorber, Haushaltung Gottes (Bietigheim, 1851).
15. Hans Freimark, Moderne Geisterbeschworer und Wahrheitssucher (Berlin/Leipzig, n.d.), p. 18.
16. Ellic Howe, Urania's Children (London, 1967), pp. 78-79; see also Franz Hartmann, Denkwurdige Errinnerungen (Leipzig, 1898), note by Hugo Goering in Werner Friedrichsort, Dr. Hubbe-Schleidens Weltanschauung (Braunschweig, 1895), and Goering, Franz Hartmann (Braunschweig, 1895).
17. Scheurlen, Die Sekten, pp. 46-47 and passim, 193-96, 281 ff., 290-94. One Georg Schon, a wandering preacher of the Lorberian New Salem Church, had a close connection with the Tanatra Lodge. See pp. 305-7.
18. Rudolf Schott, Der Maler Bo Yin Ra (2nd ed., Zurich, 1960); Bo Yin Ra, Warum ich meine Name Fuhre (Basel, 1961); Baron R. Winspeare, Esquisse somaire de l'enseignement de Bo Yin Ra (Paris, 1929), pp. 9-10. The worst example is undoubtedly the sole English translation of Bi Yin Ra, The Book of Happiness, (tr. C. C. and H. B. Wood, London, 1931).
19. Ottoman Zar-Adusht Ha'nish, Mazdaznan Health and Breath Culture (London, 1913), orig. U. S. A. 1902), pp. 3, 78, 138; See also, The British Mazdaznan Magazine (vol. I, no. 1, Jan-March, 1914); Ha'nish, Inner Studies (Chicago, 1902), pp. 23-24; Ha'nish, Mazdaznan Dietics and Cookery Book (London, 1914). This book received the Medal of Progress at an International Cookery Exhibition of 1911 at Luxembourg.
20. Howe, Urania's Children, p. 85; Scheurlen, Sekten, pp. 419 ff.; British Mazdaznan Magazine (no. 5), pp. 189, 195.
21. Scheurlen, Sekten, pp. 258-62, 266, 290, 296-302.
22. Scheurlen, Sekten, pp. 269-70 and note 2. Cf. Weissenberger's vision of spiritual combat with the fantasies of Denis Wheatley.
23. Karel Weinfurter, Man's Highest Purpose (tr. Capleton and Unger, London, 1930), p. 43. The particular works were The Key to the Spiritual World and The Way to Immortality. See Gottfried Buchner, J. B. Kerning (Lorsch/Wurttemburg, 1902) and Franz Hartmann, Lichtstrahlen vom Orient (Leipzig, n.d.); Kerning, Geschichtlicher Oberblick fiber die Freimaurerei (Lorsch, 1902); Kerning, Maurerische Mitteilungen (ed. Gottfried Buchner), in Kerning's Leben und Schriften, Band I (Lorsch, 1902), p. 39.
24. Weinfurter, Man's Highest Purpose, pp. 45-46. I have not been able to identify the old magician or discover his Magic Mirror: he was probably connected with the group that published The Lamp of Thoth from Keightley in Yorkshire.
25. See The Vahan, vol. II, no. 6, 1 January 1893 (London), p. 7.
26. Eduard Frank, Gustav Meyrink (Budingen-Gottenbach, 1957), p. 15; Herbert Fritsche, August Strindberg, Gustav Meyrink, Kurt A ram (Prague, 1935), pp. 18-20.
27. Frank, Meyrink, pp. 23-26, 40, 63 ff.
28. Gustav Meyrink, foreword to R. H. Laars (i.e., Richard Hummel), Eliphas Levi (Berlin, Vienna, Munich, 1922), pp. 12-13. Meyrink, foreword to his translation of Abhandlungen uber der Stein der Weisen. attrib. Thomas Aquinas (Leipzig, Zurich, Vienna, 1925), pp. xxvi-xxxii; Frank, Meyrink, p. 15.
29. Meyrink, The Golem (tr. Madge Pemberton, London, 1928); Meyrink, Meister Leonhard (Munich, 1925), p. 121. For the "historical" Dr. Schrepfer, see Joseph Ennemoser, History of Magic.
30. Weinfurter, Man's Highest Purpose, pp. 47-50.
One Arthur Rimay de Gidofalvia, who in 1893 was elected President of the Blue Star, may have been "Mr. R" if the initial is anything to go by. See The Vahan, 1 January 1893.
31. Weinfurter, Man's Highest Purpose, pp. 53 ff., 152-54, 174,237. One of the translators of this book into English was the Anthroposophist Carl Unger, whose murder I deal with later in this chapter. There were probably connections between the Rosicrucian group and the O.T.O., with its by-this-time-attendant Gnostic Catholic Church -- for which see this chapter, below, and Chapter VII -- as there was much talk of Gnosticism, and the obscure Paul Sedir was studied. I have not been able to identify the weaver. Vater Hain of "Sheep and Shepherd" was a weaver, and according to Archduke Johann of Austria the 1880s had seen an epidemic of Spiritualism among the weavers of the district around Braunau. But this occult "Master" remains obscure.
32. Frank, Meyrink, p. 16.
33. See The Occult Underground, p. 34, and Hellenbach, Mr. Slade's Aufenhalt in Wien.
34. Oskar Simony, Uber spiritistische Manifestationen von naturwissenschaftlichen Standpunkt (Vienna, Pest, Leipzig, 1884).
35. Friedrich Eckstein, Alte unnennbare Tage (Vienna, Leipzig, Zurich, 1936), pp. 64-69.
36. Charles Blech, Contribution a l'histoire de la Societe Theosophique en France (Paris, 1933), p. 115; Eckstein, Alte unnennbare Tage, pp. 69-77, 260-61. By 1891, the Vienna branch was officially in existence. Eckstein was president, and the secretary, Carl, Graf zu Leininghen-Billigheim, for whom see this chapter below. See Lucifer (London), vol. VIII, no. 43, 15 March 1891. In 1897 the count's place was taken by a Herr Ludwig when Leininghen-Billigheim left for Munich. By then, the Vienna branch had a reading room and held weekly meetings. See The Vahan. 1 March 1897.
37. For an "esoteric" interpretation of Wagner, see Otto Julius Hartmann, Die Esoterik im Werk Richard Wagners (Freiburg, 1960).
38. Eckstein, Alte unnennbare Tage, pp. 110 ff.
39. Richard Wagner, "Religion und Kunst" in Gesammelte Schriften und Dichtungen. Band 10 (2nd ed., Leipzig, 1888), pp. 212, 239.
40. Frank Walker, Hugo Woif(2nd ed., London, 1968), p. 134.
41. Eckstein, Alte unnennbare Tage, pp. 105-13; Walker, Wolf, p. 129.
42. Eckstein, AIte unnennbare Tage, pp. 185-86.
43. Carl, Grafzu Leiningen-Billigheim, Was ist Mystik? (Leipzig, 1898), p. 91.
44. Walker, Wolf, pp. 134-35, 210; Eckstein, Alte unnennbare Tage. p. 133; Hermann Bahr, Selbstbildniss (Berlin, 1923), pp. 230-32.
45. See Robert Brau, "Mystik bei Rosa Mayreder," in Der Aufsteig der Frau (Jena, 1925), a Festschrift prepared by the Verlag Eugen Diederichs. The volume also contains a tribute by Eckstein.
46. Friedell, Cultural History, vol. III, pp. 273, 466.
47. Georg Fuchs, Sturm und Drang in Munchen um die Jahrhundertwende (Munich, 1936), pp. 79, 107.
48. Karl Wolfskehl, "Der Priester vom Geist" (orig. 1895) in G. P. Landmann (ed.), Der Georg Kreis (Cologne, Berlin, 1965), p. 23; Schuler, quoted in Friedrich Wolters, Stefan Georg und die Blatter fur die Kunst (Berlin, 1930), p. 268.
49. See Myth, Religion and Mother-Right: Selected Writings of J. J. Bachofen (tr. Ralph Manheim, London, 1967), and C. A. Bernouilli, Johan Jakob Bachofen und das Natursymbol (Basel, 1924).
50. Wolters, Stefan Georg, p. 243.
51. Hans Eggert Schroder, Ludwig Klages (Part I; Berlin, 1966), pp. 166-84; Wolters, Stefan Georg, pp. 246-47; Robert Boehringer, Mein Bild von Stefan Georg (Munich, 1951), p. 106.
52. Schroder, Klages, p. 360.
53. Wolters, Stefan Georg, pp. 269-70; Boehringer, Stefan Georg, p. 106. Wolfskehl was, in any case, the least flamboyant of the group, although as interested in the mystical as the others. Besides his mythological studies and translations, he was a poet. He tells in "Gustav Meyrink aus meiner Erinnerung" of how Meyrink would hold his circle spellbound with tales of the supernatural. See Wolfskehl, Briefe und Aufsatze (Hamburg, 1966), pp. 202-3.
54. Edgar Salin, Urn Stefan Georg (Munich, 2nd ed., 1954); and M. Nijlund-Verwey (ed.), Wolfskehl und Verwey (Heidelberg, 1968), quoting a letter of Hanna Wolfskehl of 4 April 1934; Wolters, Stefan Georg, p. 264.
55. Wolters, Stefan Georg, p. 249; Dominic lost, Ludwig Derleth (Stuttgart, 1965), p. 46. The copper was presumably "sympathetic" to Nietzsche's ailment; Schroder, Klages, pp. 198-99; for Dessoir, see Kurt Hildebrandt, Errinerungen an Stefan Georg und seinen Kreis (Bonn, 1965), p. 22 note 7. For Cyril Scott, his own autobiographies, My Years of Indiscretion (London, 1924) and Bone of Contention (London, 1969).
56. Ludwig Klages, Vom Kosmogonischen Eros (6th ed., Bonn, 1963), pp. 56, 183.
57. Alfred Schuler, "Vom Wesen der ewigen Stadt" in G. P. Landman, Georg Kreis, p. 51; and Wolters, Stefan Georg, pp. 247 ff.
58. Jost, Derleth, pp. 25-29, 35-36.
59. Thomas Mann, "Beim Propheten," in Novellen, Band I (Berlin, 1922), pp. 239-40.
60. Jost, Derleth, p. 54; "Warte Schwabing, Schwabing warte, Dich holt Jesus Bonaparte!"
61. Ludwig Derleth, "Das Buch vom Orden" in Ludwig Derleth Gedenkbuch (Amsterdam, 1958), p. 90; Jost, Derleth, p. 97; Derleth, Buch vom Orden, p. 74.
62. Freimark, Geisterbeschworer, p. 88.
63. Freimark, Geisterbeschworer, pp. 89-90. I have not been able to trace a copy of Braun's autobiography.
64. Bernhard Muller-Elmau, "Fuhrung und Fugung" in Marius Gerner Beule (ed.), Schopferische Leben (Munich, Basel, 1964), pp. 19-27. On Lhotsky see Gregor Schwartz-Bostunitsch, "Der letzte Theologe" in Ariosophie (6 Jahrgang, Heft 3, 1931), pp. 66 ff.
65. See the utterly meaningless passage quoted in Freimark, Geisterbeschworer, p. 91.
66. Muller-Elmau, "Fuhrung," pp. 30-52. For Johannes Muller's own views see his Jesus as I See Him (tf. Hilda Bell, London, 1928). Neue Wegweiser (Munich, 1920); and the study of Richard Grohrock Der Kampf der Wesenkultur gegen die Bewusstseinkultur bei Johannes Muller (thesis presented to University of Heidelberg, 1930).
67. Muller, Hidden Springs (tr. Hilda Bell, London, 1925), p. 5 and passim.
68. Robert Landmann, Monte Verita (3rd ed., Ascona, 1934). The author is in fact Robert Ackermann, who appears in the book. Pp. 32-50.
69. Robert Landmann, Monte Verita, pp. 50-108. Muhsam wrote an anthem for the colony with a chorus which begins:
Wir essen Salat, ja wir essen Salat,
Und essen Gemuse fruh und spat,
Auch Frucht gehoren zu unser Diat ....
70. Robert Landmann, Monte Verita, pp. 111-13.
71. Francis King, Sexuality, Magic and Perversion (London, 1971), pp. 96-97.
72. Robert Landmann, Monte Verita, pp. 41, 53; Freimark, Geisterbeschworer, p. 93.
73. Landmann, Monte Verita, p. 41; John Symonds, The Great Beast, and cf. Goering, Dr. Franz Hartmann.
74. Symonds, Beast, p. 99, and cf. Goering, Dr. Franz Hartmann.
75. King, Sexuality, pp. 99 ff.
76. M. Kully, Die Wahrheit uber die Theo-Anthroposophie als eine Kulturverfallserscheinungen (Basel, 1926), p. 261.
77. Symonds, Beast, pp. 99 ff.; King, Sexuality, pp. 106 ff.
78. Landmann, Monte Verita, pp. 140-49; Kully, Wahrheit, p. 38; Landmann, Monte Verita, pp. 150-53.
79. Johannes Hemleben, Rudolf Steiner (Hamburg, 1963) p. 134. The source of the "master" story is Edouard Schure, so it appears that Steiner may at one time actually have made this claim.
80. Eckstein, Alte unnennbare Tage, pp. 130-31; Eckstein, "Ein Gruss aus langst vergangenen Tagen" in Der Aufsteig der Frau, pp. 102-3; cf. Steiner, The Story of My Life (London, New York, 1928), pp. 110 ff., 281, and Steiner, The Anthroposophic Movement (London, 1933); Steiner, Occult Movements (lectures given Dornach, October 1915), Lecture 2, p. 15.
81. Steiner, The Story of My Life, pp. 48-140; Hemleben, Steiner, pp. 27-43; Steiner, The Story of My Life, p. 265.
82. Hemleben, Steiner, p. 73, and cf. Thomas A. Riley, L'Oeuvre litteraire de J. H. Mackay (Paris, 1950).
83. Hemleben, Steiner, p. 73.
84. Gregor Schwarz-Bostunitsch, Doktor Steiner, ein Schwindler wie keiner (Munich, 1930), pp. 15-16. For Bostunitch himself, see below, chapter IV.
85. Steiner, The Story of My Life, pp. 285 ff.; Marie Savitch, Marie Steiner-van Sivers (tr. J. Compton-Burnett, London, 1967), pp. 41-50. The lectures are translated into English as Mystics of the Renaissance (London, 1911).
86. See Daniel Gasman, The Scientific Origins of National Socialism (London, 1971).
87. Steiner, Story of My Life, p. 300.
88. A. T. Barker (ed.), The Letters of H. P. Blavatsky to A. P. Sinnet (London, 1925), p. 121; Steiner, The Anthroposophic Movement, pp. 136-37, 141; cf. Story of My Life, pp. 303-4.
89. Howe, Urania's Children, pp. 80 ff. for Vollrath; see W. Hubbe-Schleiden, Das Morgenrot der Zukunft (Leipzig, 1912) for the atmosphere of Star in the East propaganda.
90. Gunther Wachsmuth, The Life and Work of Rudolf Steiner (N.Y., 1955), p. 79; Kully, Wahrheit, p. 262. Crowley's Lodge was the Mysteria Mystica Maxima; Steiner, Story of My Life, p. 325; King, Ritual Magic, pp. 97 ff, 206-7.
91. Steiner, Story of My Life, p. 39; Steiner, The Gates of Knowledge (London, 1912), p. 148.
92. Steiner,
"Haeckel, the Riddle of the Universe and Theosophy" in Three Essays on Haeckel and Karma (London, 1914), pp. 201-2 and cf. p. 206. Cf. Steiner's Knowledge of the Higher Worlds and Its Attainment (London, N. Y., 1923), and The Spiritual Beings in the Heavenly Bodies and in the Kingdoms of Nature (London, 1951), in which a procedure similar to Edgar Dacque's "nature somnambulism" is described. Cf. also the "perfective work" of James Morgan Pryse and A.E. described in The Occult Underground, pp. 323-24.
93. Karl Rittelmeyer, Rudolf Steiner Enters My Life (tr. D. S. Osmond, London, 1929), pp. 77, 102.
94. Steiner, The Submerged Continents of A tlantis and Lemuria (London, 1911).
95. See the convincing arguments of J. W. Hauer. Werden und Wesen der Anrhroposophie (Stuttgart, 1922). For Hauer himself, see chapter VI below. Steiner's debt to H. P. Blavatsky is great. He thought that she had been put in "occult captivity" by sinister Brethren who had dealings with "really illicit arts" and prevented her from disclosing all the secrets that she possessed.
96. Steiner, Theosophy of the Rosicrucians (London, 1953; orig. 1907), The Mission of Christian Rosycross (London, 1950; orig. 1911-12) and -- in same volume -- "Rosicrucianism and Modern Initiation" (orig. 1924), p. 157; Steiner, Christianity as a Mystical Fact (London, N. Y., 1914); Steiner, The Etherisation of the Blood (London, N.Y., 1935).
97. Rittelmeyer, Steiner, passim, especially 117 ff. and cf. Peter Anson, Bishops at Large (London, 1964), p. 367 note 2.
98. Hemleben, Steiner, pp. 132-33.
99. See e.g., Landau, God is my Adventure (reprint London, 1964), pp. 187-91. Steiner anticipated the modern "ecologists" by nearly half a century.
100. Kully, Wahrheit, pp. 301 ff. and cf. Karl Heyer, Wie man gegen Rudolf Steiner kampft (2nd ed., Stuttgart, 1932). pp. 45-46 for Krieger. Krieger was probably encouraged in his delusions by Steiner's opponents.
101. Kully, Wahrheit, pp. 67-71.