Rudolf Steiner and Anthroposophy: A Graphic Introduction

By Lía Tummer and Lato

Combining Lía Tummer's lucid text and Lato's creative and playful illustrations, Rudolf Steiner and Anthroposophy is a highly-engaging and unique 'graphic' introduction that is suitable for both the curious beginner and the dedicated student.
At the dawn of the twentieth century, Rudolf Steiner presented anthroposophy as a 'spiritual science' that expanded upon the restricted, scientific–materialist ideology of his time. Based on a profound knowledge of human beings and our relationship with nature and the universe, anthroposophy not only provides rejuvenating impulses for the most diverse spheres of human activity – such as medicine, education, agriculture, art and science – but also provides answers to the eternal questions posed by humankind, and on which contemporary science remains indifferent: What is life? Where do we come from when we are born? Where do we go when we die? What is the meaning of pain and illness? Why do people experience such differing challenges in their lives?
This charming book depicts the development of a universal genius, from his childhood in the untamed beauty of the Austrian Alps to the sublimities of human wisdom; from his work as a Goethe scholar to the building of the extraordinary Goetheanum in Dornach, Switzerland.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Clairview Books
• Release date: Apr 15, 2024
• ISBN: 9781912992638

Lía Tummer

LÍA TUMMER works as a German and English translator. Her first contact with anthroposophy came with studying in Waldorf schools. Through reading and translating anthroposophical texts, she has become knowledgeable in all its fields.

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Contents

Introdution

Born of the woods

Masters

Goethe

Nietzsche

Haeckel

Theosophy

Marie von Sivers

The birth of anthroposophy

The realms of nature

The image of man

The evolution of the individual

Reincarnation and karma

The human aura

The path of knowledge

The Akashic Record

Steiner’s cosmology

The birth of human individuality

Anthroposophy and Christianity

2nd phase of Anthroposophy: the artistic impulse (1910-1916)

The ‘drama mysteries’

The Goetheanum

Eurythmy

3rd phase of Anthroposophy: practical applications (1917-1925)

The threefold structuring of the Social Organism

The Waldorf schools

The Waldorf method

Therapeutic education

An anthroposophical approach to medicine

Bio-dynamic agriculture

The Community of Christians

The Goetheanum fire

1924 to 1925

Anthroposophical organisations

Bibliography

Index

The Authors

Introduction

1900... One hundred years ago, when Europe first began to live by electric light, to communicate via telephone and telegraph, to travel by car, electric tram, airplane, and to be dazzled by the ‘magic’ of cinema...

...when, exultant, Europe celebrated her technological achievements at the foot of the new tower...

...and anxiously buried itself in the existential vacuum of ‘the end of the century’, reading Zola, Tolstoy, Shaw, Ibsen, and discussing the theories of Darwin, Haeckel, Marx...

Rudolf Steiner began to expound his very personal ‘path of knowledge’: anthroposophy.

The explosion of human creativity at the end of the nineteenth century represented the climax of the materialist concept of the universe, inaugurated by the ‘scientific revolution’ of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.

So radical was the revolution produced by Galileo in the history of culture, that his era is seen as the end of the Middle Ages and the beginning of the Modern Age—the ‘day the universe changed’.

Science focussed its attention on matter and movement...

...and thus achieved a vertiginous and successful ‘conquest’ of substances and the forces of nature.

At the end of the nineteenth century Rudolf Steiner had a broad knowledge and a full understanding of the importance of scientific achievements.

Yet, on the other hand he sought to restore the spirit as part of human and cosmic reality.

The world, trained for centuries to completely separate science and religion, knowledge and faith, body and soul, matter and spirit, did not accept that integration.

In the seventeenth century Galileo had had to explain to humanity that there is an infinite universe beyond the firmament that, until then, was believed to be the limit of space. In the twentieth century Steiner tried to explain to humanity that there is also a reality beyond the ‘firmament’ that modern man sees as the limit of life.

Just as the Church felt threatened by the ‘revolutionary’ ideas of Galileo, fighting him in life, and ‘ignoring’ him for centuries, so the academic world has managed to virtually ignore Rudolf Steiner for the last hundred years.

One hundred years have passed...

...and effectively not only is Rudolf Steiner listened to with growing interest, but many of his proposals have been used to reform a number of areas of human endeavour: education, medicine, agriculture, architecture, art, religion, social organisation, etc. The success of diverse initiatives demonstrates that anthroposophy is not a mystical and abstract mental construction, but a cosmovision able to enrich human life, even in its most practical aspects.

Born of the woods

Towards the end of his life, although already ill, Rudolf Steiner began to write his autobiography:

As a young man, Rudolf Steiner’s father had travelled through the woods of his native land as a hunter in the service of a Count. On meeting Franziska Blie...

Over the years—during which time a daughter