The bewildering wisdom of the Rosicrucians

Rudolf Steiner was the founder of Anthroposophy, one of the most peculiar spiritual systems I've encountered. This little book contains transcripts of 18 lectures by Steiner in Paris, given in 1906. Apparently, the text is based on notes taken by Edouard Schuré, a French esotericist. A nod to another reviewer for providing us with this information – the Kindle edition only contains the lectures, not the introductory material by Schuré and Garber. Schuré must have taken more copious notes of some lectures than others, since the quality of the text varies considerably. While “Esoteric Cosmology” contain many of Steiner's fundamental ideas, the material is eclectic and unwieldy, and will probably only confuse the beginner. But yes, if you are ready for a “deep immersion” into Steiner's highly exotic worldview, I suppose this book is as good as any.

In 1906, Steiner was nominally still a Theosophist, but most of the ideas in the lectures are clearly his own, or perhaps based on earlier non-Theosophical traditions in Germany (it's not clear which ideas are taken from older systems, and which were Steiner's own creative inventions). Since Anthroposophy didn't exist as an independent movement yet, Steiner uses the Rosicrucian moniker to present his ideas. The lectures deal with a wide variety of subjects: the role of Christianity and Manichaeism in human evolution, meditation and yoga, Christian mysticism, occult anatomy, the astral world, etc. The most bewildering sections deal with Steiner's speculations about human and planetary evolution (humans during the ancient Lemurian period looked like fish and had gills, future humans will grow wings, and so on). There is also a section on the interior of the Earth from an occult viewpoint. On some points, Steiner's spiritual explorations weren't finished. He never mentions Ahriman. Instead, Lucifer's opposite is Jehovah!

I admit that I find most of this very hard to believe, and I don't chime with Steiner's anthropocentrism and optimistic evolutionism either (although I would like to). Perhaps I'm simply evolving in a different direction, who knows…

As a I pointed out elsewhere, most Anthroposophists would probably regard “How to know higher worlds”, “An outline of esoteric science” and “The philosophy of freedom” as Steiner's basic writings, but personally I prefer “Rosicrucian Wisdom”, which feels like a more worked-out version of the material contained in “Esoteric Cosmology”. However, Dr Rudolf Steiner is difficult under any title, whether you agree with him or not!