Timesuck with Dan Cummins - 499 - The Cosmic Teacher: Rudolf Steiner and the Occult Roots of Waldorf Schools

Episode Date: March 23, 2026

Rudolf Steiner founded the Waldorf education movement more than a century ago, inspiring thousands of schools around the world with a philosophy centered on creativity, imagination, and holistic learning! But... behind that influential educational system was a man who also claimed clairvoyant insight into Atlantis, reincarnation, and unseen cosmic beings guiding human evolution. Today we dive into the strange life, ambitious ideas, and enduring legacy of the mystic philosopher who blended occult spirituality with classrooms—and left a surprisingly large mark on the modern world. Merch and more: www.badmagicproductions.com  Timesuck Discord! https://discord.gg/tqzH89v Want to join the Cult of the Curious PrivateFacebook Group? Go directly to Facebook and search for "Cult of the Curious" to locate whatever happens to be our most current page :) For all merch-related questions/problems: [e-mail] (copy and paste) Please rate and subscribe on Apple Podcasts and elsewhere and follow the suck on social media!! @timesuckpodcast on IG and http://www.facebook.com/timesuckpodcast Wanna become a Space Lizard? Click here: https://www.patreon.com/timesuckpodcast. Sign up through Patreon, and for $5 a month, you get access to the entire Secret Suck catalog (295 episodes) PLUS the entire catalog of Timesuck, AD FREE. You'll also get 20% off of all regular Timesuck merch PLUS access to exclusive Space Lizard merch. Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

Do you sometimes wish that your school taught you something more practical? It's a common refrain in the U.S. That despite decades of reforms and mandates and political battles, something about much of what we learn in school, still feels impractical to many. After all, when was the last time you used trigonometry in your daily life? A lot of us have probably wondered why school didn't cover the basics, how to file taxes, manage debt, fix a leaky pipe,

grow vegetables in a garden, or negotiate a raise or a salary. And even if schools won't make that jump into the practical, why not at least make learning feel more alive and relevant, more hands-on, more creative? Fewer rows of desks, standardized tests, and long, boring lectures, and more curiosity, more hands-on education that gets us excited to learn more instead of apprehensive of failure. Well, what if I told you, there was an educational movement that tried to solve those exact problems beginning over 100 years ago. The Waldorf School philosophy was designed in 1919 in Germany to nurture kids' imaginations instead of making them comply with rigid structured learning. Instead of drilling the letters of the alphabet at age five, Waldorf kindergarten emphasizes outdoor play, storytelling, drawing, music, cooking, cleaning, gardening.

Though it may sound crazy to those of us used to constant benchmarking, at Waldorf schools, reading, writing, and formal math instruction are often delayed until around the age is seven, and even then they're framed as tools for creative expression, not boxes, to check on a standardized timeline. The hope is, by the time kids are in high school, they're capable, independent thinkers, kids who can use their brains to be innovative and question the status quoes of the world, not just be passive recipients of existing information. And a lot of parents still think this is the right system. Today, there are over 1,200 Waldorf schools and nearly 2,000 kindergartens operating in more than 60 countries, educating a significant

and growing number of students worldwide. There are over 300 Waldorf schools in the U.S. alone, attended by families happy to have found an alternative to what they view as the sometimes sole crushing demands of conventional education. I imagine only a very, very small number of these families know anything about the man, though, who founded this educational system. and that if they found out who he was and what he was about, they'd probably be shocked. I was. His entire educational system is rooted in the teachings of an occult philosopher

who claimed clairvoyant insight into the lost civilization of Atlantis, reincarnation, and invisible cosmic beings amongst many, many other things. His name is Rudolf Steiner, aka the most successful and influential occultist you've probably never heard of. Born in the Austro-Hungarian Empire in 1861, Steiner quickly became dissatisfied with materialism, the idea popular in philosophy and science at the time that the world was just made up of the physical things

we could interact with. Pushing back against this belief led him towards more and more fringe ideas until eventually he linked up with the Theosophical Society, which had been founded by Madame Helena Blavatsky, sometimes pronounced as Helena, a person widely considered the god. mother or the founder of the New Age movement decades earlier. A woman whose teachings we have touched on in so many episodes here over the years,

it feels like we have done an episode specifically on her even though we haven't. At the time, Steiner became involved with the theosophists. The German branch of the Theosophical Society wasn't much of a branch at all, more like a little twig. With Steiner, with his inexhaustible stamina for lecturing and touring soon became its most prominent figure. He also started teaching things that broke from officials. theological guidelines, like the idea that Jesus was not just one of many masters, but was one that was central to human spiritual evolution. And a lot of other theosophists didn't like that. And they warned Steiner to fall in line, but he wouldn't. His star was rising quickly, and he had the

ambition to want to keep pushing it even higher, while most other theosophists can find themselves to the spiritual realm. It was nothing that Steiner wouldn't take on and give his opinion about. art, education, farming, medicine, even a plan for a new world order. So who exactly was this man, a philosopher, a teacher, a clairvoyant, a visionary, a guru, as he has often been called? Or, as some would allege, was he mostly a quack and a fraud? The strange life and even stranger ideas of Rudolph Steiner, right now on a very weird, often whack-a-doodle, but also sometimes highly informative, educational, and inspiring in moments,

while also entertainingly esoteric and occult edition of TimeSuck. This is Michael McDonald, and you're listening to TimeSuck. You're listening to TimeSuck. Well, happy Monday, and welcome or welcome back to the cult of the curious. I'm Dan Kulmits, the Suckmaster, Suck Dungeon, Groundskeeper, curator of the Dark and the Weird. And you are listening to TimeSuck. Hail Nimrod, Hail Lucifina, praise beat, a good boy, Bojangles, Glory B to Triple M.

Feeling pretty good. I just got some new blood work back, and I'm going to brag about myself. I cut 90% of the carbs and sugar from my diet back in mid-January after my triglycerides were over twice the high level for a normal human being at 318. Now they're 126.

Down two belt loops, feeling better overall than I have in quite some time. So that's pretty fun. On my way to being a health nut, maybe. Even ordered the Hume Health Biometric scale. Pretty soon I'll be doing late-night organic juice infomercials. if those are still a thing.

Drink my celery protein, isolate, magnesium, mango smoothie. Live forever! If you're not driving a diet, hopefully I won't take a death far. Also, this is the first episode I've recorded since the U.S. and Israel launched their attacks on Iran.

I won't say much. I know most of you come here for escapism, but after just doing an episode on Lawrence of Arabia, set in that part of the world, you know, pretty close. I feel like I should say a few words at least. My heart goes out to the U.S. servicemen

and the U.S. service woman who have already died so far as I record this, a mother and numerous fathers. Hart also goes out to the 168 civilians, mostly children who died when the U.S. bombed a girls' school. Heart goes out to all the civilians who have died and will die by the time I hear this. I've long believed that the Iranian regime is terrible. At least 3,000, maybe over 30,000 protesters killed by the Iranian government in recent months alone. It's fucking, you know, atrocious.

There is no denying that it would be. great if this regime were to be destroyed, if a better, more humane leadership was able to take their place. Will that happen? Will the U.S. and Israeli strike as, you know, make life better for Iranians in the long run? I hope so. Truly do, but recent history doesn't make me feel optimistic. 2023 analysis found that 36% of Iraqis felt better off under Saddam Hussein. 33% felt just as bad. 59% believe the current situation was worse.

Also, the U.S. has never fully recovered from the first two Gulf wars in terms of national deficit. And because of that deficit, money that could go to social programs to make life better for working-class Americans instead goes towards interest payments. Today's military actions will definitely add to that debt. And towards those payments at an estimated cost of over a billion dollars a day. I hope there's a silver lining to all of this that I am just not seen. And that's all I got. Now let's move away from the current dystopian malaise. we're all living in and get lost in some strange escapist entertainment.

Such a strange topic today that does not relate to any current events, thankfully. And then next week for the 500th episode, going to get even weirder. In keeping with the tradition of every 100th episode, telling a story in an altered state, you know, I will continue that. I've been drunk. I've been stoned. I've been on magic mushrooms. I've been on Molly.

I've been on acid. Now I'm going to be on a horse tranquilizer. I'm going to be on ketamine. and it'll be the first time I've been high in ketamine for an episode I'm calling mushroom murders and special K. I'm going to head back to Australia's state of Victoria where I will try and narrate the story of a woman killing several people with mushrooms

while also taking too much ketamine. Will I be able to make it through the entire episode? Will I get lost in a K-hole? I need assistance. Could be a total train wreck. Hopefully that train wreck will be entertaining. A huge thank you to everybody who has been along for this entire ride.

500 straight weeks of new sucks. fucking crazy. A crazy ride it's been. And that's enough about this week. Enough about next week. There we go. That's why I went to say. I flipped that around.

Nothing about next week. Let's talk about this week. Time to get weird right now. I have to push this button. Helena Blavatsky. Alistair. Anton LeVay. Now, these are probably occultists you've heard of,

especially if you've listened to this show. As I mentioned, we've touched on Helena Blavatsky so many times here on TimeSuck. The Russian occultist, writer, co-founder, of the Theosophical Society, really like the main founder. Born in 1831, she traveled widely, claimed to have studied esoteric traditions in places like Tibet and India, where she said she spoke to mysterious figures.

She called the hidden masters. She claimed to speak the all kinds of non-human entities. Might have been mostly talking to her ass and then pulling conversations out of her ass. So much talk of vibrations and frequencies and planes of existence and invisible beings. Crowley we covered directly the self-proclaimed great beast ceremonial magician right the practitioner of sex magic the founder of thlema and anton LeVay founded the church of Satan in san francisco in 1966 a church we did an episode about he was about as occulty as an occultist can get but as infamous as these figures are it's hard to argue that any of them still meaningfully shaped the daily lives of a bunch of ordinary people who do not consider themselves a cultists in a direct mainstream way. Levatsky's ideas have been filtered into New Age spirituality. Crowley's influence echoes through certain corners of modern mysticism and pop culture.

LeVay's church still exists, though it was dramatically reshaped after a schism in 1975. Even so, you would be hard-pressed to find your average non-crystal clutching horoscope-reading person structuring their life around the secret doctrine, the book of the law, or the Satanic Bible. But there is another occultist, another multicultural. mystic whose ideas have seaped deeply into modern mainstream life, that millions of people interact with every single day without realizing it. And that occultist is, of course, Rudolf Steiner. Many people have described Steiner as the El Ron Hubbard of European occultists. And this is because

like Hubbard, he built a complete spiritual system one full of cosmology, karma, reincarnation, hidden planes of reality, spiritual hierarchies, and then turned it into an actual brick and mortar institution, many of them. Despite lecturing extensively about way out their shit, like Atlantis, root races, clairvoyant insight, two Jesuses, and humanity's spiritual evolution being filtered through different types of beings, as well as claiming direct knowledge of higher worlds on the knowledge he gathered on the astral plane. Steiner somehow also found a way to translate a lot of that into things people interact with every day. Schools, cultural centers, medical clinics, even farms.

And he did this by packaging all of his various ideas into one movement. Anthroposophy, made up of the Greek words for human and wisdom. Anthroposophy is based on the idea that there is a spiritual world that is definitely accessible to human insight, and that we human beings can develop the faculties needed to perceive this hidden spiritual world through disciplined inner development and or boofing. And booffing, of course, is the practice of taking heart.

drugs rectally, typically using tools like a needleless syringe, an enema bulb, turkey-based, or soaked tampon. Sometimes referred to as butt chugging when the drug is alcohol. Meth, cocaine, heroin, popular boofing options. When it's coke, boofing is sometimes called doing a booty bump. And if you boof enough, especially cocaine, if you do enough booty bumping, Steiner's ideas will start to make so much sense. Kidding about the boofing part.

That's not what Steiner preach. However, I did lay out the proper definition of boofing for you sweet little boofers before moving forward. I'm picturing somebody who just happened to have boofed. That's a fun word to say, by the way. I just love saying boofed right before playing this episode. And now they're high as fuck. And they think I can see what they're doing. And then I'm talking directly to them, which I am enough with the boofing, Liz.

Your mom is quite worried about you. We all are. Refocusing. In today's episode, we will cover how Steiner came to create this all-encompassing philosophy. how he was an intellectually highly advanced kid, but one with little access to the kind of education that would have made him a prominent academic, which was what he wanted to be at first.

How his convictions about the spiritual world led him down a path or grew more and more esoteric, and yet somehow also appealed to thousands of people. What's important to know right now is that Anthroposophy combines elements of Western philosophy, Christianity, and various esoteric traditions, including concepts like reincorrect, incarnation, karma, a hierarchical cosmos populated by spiritual beings.

Also important to understand that Steiner didn't see his spiritual insights as some sort of abstract theology to speculate about over glasses of wine with fellow intellectuals. He thought of them as fundamentally practical that they could guide education, agriculture, medicine, the arts, even politics, forming a complete holistic system for human development. And in some ways, that combination of the spiritual and the practical, while maybe seeming pretty fucking weird to many members of conventional society has led to positive results. Waldorf schools are broadly recognized for offering a solid alternative to a more rigid achievement-based education. A report from frontiers in education, which shares peer-reviewed

research on education policy and practice, studied Waldorf schools in California from 2015 to 2019. And they found that through third through sixth grade, Waldof students consistently lagged behind traditional students in both English language arts and math. By the seventh grade, Waldorf students achieved substantial gains in both subjects, edging out the non-Woldorf comparison group. And that advantage grew to nearly five percentage points

by the eighth grade, driven by continued improvement among Waldorf students, and a decline in proficiency amongst non-Waldorf students. The study suggests that while students may not hit society's expected academic benchmarks in the earliest years, their growth appears steadier over time, which could indicate that they actually are enjoying to learn instead of starting to resent school. Rather than experiencing the typical middle or high school slump, they seem to maintain momentum and avoid the loss of interest in learning that often seems to emerge during adolescence.

Meanwhile, applied to other areas, Anthroposophy seems to have led to some important and positive results as well. 1924, Steiner delivered a series of lectures to farmers, now known as the Agriculture Course, in response to concerns about declining soil, fertility, and food quality. Biodynamic agriculture, one of the earliest forms of what we now call organic farming, emerged directly from these lectures. Steiner proposed that a farm should be understood as a living self-contained organism, with soil, plants, animals, and farmers all working together in a balanced ecosystem. As a result, his approach emphasizes composting.

crop rotation, biodiversity, and integrating livestock into the farm system to build long-term soil vitality, all things that do objectively help the long-term health of a farm and the land that makes a farm work. But as these deep thinkers so often seem to do, Steiner just couldn't call it a day and enjoy his wins, enjoy his breakthroughs. He had to keep digging deeper, pushing things further and further and further until shit went off the rails. In doing so, he advocated using nine specific preparations for soil health, numbered 500 through 508. These included field sprays such as preparation 500.

Cow manure fermented in a buried cow horn over winter. Okay. 501. Finely ground quartz similarly prepared, as well as compost preparations made from yaro, camomile, stinging nettle, oak bark. Dandelion and Valerian. Also advocated using astronomical calendars to guide planting, cultivating, and harvesting according to lunar and planetary rhythms.

Now, does that should work? Long-term comparative trials, most notably the DOK trial in Switzerland, which has compared biodynamic, organic, and conventional systems since 1978, have found that biodynamic and organic systems can improve soil structure, micro-bile biomass, biodiversity relative to conventional farming through yields, or excuse me, though yields are often somewhat lower, but there has been zero strong empirical evidence that planting by lunar or planetary calendars meaningfully increases crop yields. But like Waldorf schools, perhaps the overall vibe matters as much as the literal mechanics behind it. A system that prioritizes creativity,

developmental timing, and whole child growth, or one that insist on soil health, biodiversity, to an ecological balance may generate real benefits, even if some of its theoretical foundations remain scientifically contested. So, all of this is a net positive, right? Rudolph Steiner was a great guy. He had some good thoughts about how to do things, even if some of those things were a little bit weird. Case closed. No. Now, the problem is that anthroposophy was designed as a total system, not just one where you're supposed to take piecemeal, what worked for you. And that total system definitely arose directly from his personal biases. In farming, one should be able to adopt composting and biodiversity without embracing cosmic metaphysics. And either way, the results aren't life or death,

either you get a good harvest of turn-ups or you get a smaller one. But in other fields, particularly when ideas are embedded in institutions, the line between practical method and spiritual doctrine is not always clear. And the motivations of the person who is preaching that doctrine are all the more complicated, like in medicine. According to Steiner, Bad health reflects the working out of the body's, quote, carmic destiny, as in if you committed sins or errors in your previous life, disease will enter your body in this life to purge the evils from your system. Steiner formulated, like many new age theorists do,

that medical intervention was often a bad idea. A doctor who cures a patient with drugs or surgeries might be blocking that patient's carmic self-healing process. Holy shit. This is bringing up memories of me talking to people, a variety of people, over the course of my life, who overall, you know, seem incredibly intelligent, educated and totally sane, but then in like one fucking arena, or all of a sudden, if you get them talking long enough, there will be this moment in the conversation, uh, where it takes in a rough left

turn into, what the fuck did you say, Bill? I'll share a notable example. Years ago, I worked with this one lady who knew so much legitimately about fitness and nutrition. She was an incredible shape. She understood how to adjust her macronutrients, her micronutrients to achieve various muscle fucking gain, weight loss, visceral fat reduction goals, whatever. New which vitamins and minerals were related to various bodily functions, what you should take more of if you're having problems with fatigue, how you should use, you know, less of this if you're having trouble sleeping. She understood what dietary changes to make based on a changing lifestyle, age, gender, workout variances, fucking blood type, on and on and on. On top of working it, and on, on top of working

and entertainment, she worked part-time as a personal trainer, and she was excellent at it. She had a lot of clients, a lot of phenomenal results. Also very well-read, well-spoken, intelligent, in a whole bunch of other areas. But every once in a while, she would say some shit like, well, it's by design. And I'd be like, what was that? What did you mean? And then within a minute, she'd be talking about the fucking wildest conspiratorial shit. You know, they're poisonous through chemtrails, they're sterilized, through this, you know, our food.

that's been fucking intentionally poisoned by the New World Order. She's explaining to me how U.S. slavery never happened, that the photos and text referencing it are all just lies by the New World Order to saddle people with guilt and shame and keep us from questioning the real truth, which keeps us trapped inside the Moon Matrix. You know, there's active military bases on Mars. Our one world government has made alliances with powerful extraterrestrial races years ago.

We've all been manipulated ever since via some David Ike fucking thought matrix bullshit. And she'd say all of this with the same tone and confidence, whether it was like real stuff or fucking looney-tune stuff. The same brain that could absolutely understand and interpret and regurgitate science-based nutritional information also had no problem believing in root races. You can't see because they vibrate at a different frequency, even though they exist on the same material plane. And reality is an illusion to keep us distracted from having our adrenochrome harvested.

The same curiosity and willingness to strength from established methods and thought patterns that made her very good at being an innovative personal training. sometimes led her to being a conspiratorial maniac. And her career seemed to unravel after 2020 when lockdowns led to her not being able to train and use all her energy, you know, to focus on fucking the powers that be. She couldn't seem to keep her curiosity in check,

couldn't stop digging. And that led her from, you know, going to be innovative overall to being pretty fucking bonkers overall. And Steiner, to me, same kind of person, just more successful, you know. once he started moving in a certain direction, he just couldn't stop when he made, you know, genuinely impressive and important breakthroughs.

He just had to keep going and going and going. It's like he wanted to know literally everything. You know, he finally just ended up with his place of, you know, maybe we don't need to use harmful chemicals, or he couldn't stop, excuse me, at a place like maybe we don't need to use harmful chemicals to keep farms producing quality crops. And then he'd go to ancient masters, you know, we should tap into them while our souls are gallivanting about on the astral plane.

take their eternal wisdom and apply it towards farming techniques. Now, to be fair to Steiner, when he was talking about shit like a patient's carmic self-healing process, he was riding before modern antibiotics, before advanced surgical techniques, before much of what we consider basic medical knowledge today. Even his contemporary, Sigmund Freud,

now hailed as the father of psychiatry, produced theories that we would consider wildly misguided now. But Freud didn't really have a personal stake in advocating his theories about women, wanting penises or whatever, for example. Or at least, you know, didn't have a personal stake other than a garden variety 19th century misogyny.

Steiner, on the other hand, did have a personal stake in advocating his theories. Many people seek spiritual help, right? When they're facing like a problem, a health problem, which means they're getting sick. And that can be good for a certain type of business. And people trying to recover from certain types of serious illnesses,

given the wrong advice, sold the wrong shit, can die because of that grift. Die because of that advice. Steiner once claimed that black magicians and other evildoers would create medicines that would deaden people to things spiritual. He said, quote, endeavors to achieve this will be made by bringing out remedies to be administered by inoculation. Only these inoculations will influence the human body in a way that will make it refused to give a home to the spiritual inclinations of the soul. Inoculations are, of course, vaccines. So how many people have not gotten vaccines that could have saved their lives because, you know, they didn't want to fuck up the

inclinations of their soul. This kind of dangerously bad advice doesn't have to be enshrined in any particular institution to be harmful. It's directly influenced to how people who were raised under Anthroposophy got access to medicine. On Waldorfcritics.org, Robert Smith Howled describes how he suffered while being raised by anthroposophists. They believe that sickness is the soul incarnating, and also that it has to do with karma. They don't believe in inoculations. so I had all the child diseases going around some twice.

Smith Hald reports that he was constantly ill throughout his childhood and that the primary treatment, quote unquote, that his anthroposophical doctors prescribed was, quote, little white sugar pills called in fluto, and buckets and buckets a horsetail tea and also camibil tea, shit that is not as good as antibiotics, vaccines, and other forms of modern medicine. Certain foods made Smith held sick, so he was required to eat great quantities of the same foods by his anthroposophical doctors until years later a regular doctor correctly diagnosed him with a gluten intolerance.

Now he avoids gluten and feels fucking great. Imagine that. So he was sick for no reason. He was made sick for no reason, just because of this diner's quackery. The institutional effects of what could be considered absolute quackery are real as well. Dr. Edzert earned. reported that between 1999 and 2010, there were at least 10 outbreaks of measles in the United Kingdom, the Netherlands, Austria, and Hungary. Excuse me, in Germany. All centered around Waldorf schools whose children had emusation rates below 10%. To be clear, Waldorf schools themselves don't uniformly reject vaccination and policies vary widely by country and school, but Anthroposophy's spiritual framing of illnesses has undeniably influenced segments of the community to be against not just vaccines, but modern medicine in general, which is fucking dangerous, sometimes lethal.

And all this forces to take a step back and use our critical thinking skills, or at least it should. Even if some of Steiner's specific insights prove beneficial in practice is the framework that produced them fundamentally untrustworthy. Perhaps more importantly, can you effectively challenge the untrustworthy elements in a system designed around one man's thinking? Did the institutions that Steiner created become cults were questioning Steiner's more extreme beliefs is tantamount to heresy. Some would argue yes. In 1979, the New York Times ran an article about a New York Waldorf School with a jarring headline. Psychic ex-students influence shakes Waldorf School. Apparently, a former Waldorf student had started claiming that he had paranormal powers and could converse with spirits. And instead of referring his kid to a good psychiatrist, several teachers, including

the headmaster, the former headmaster, and high school principal, all accepted his story and began using him as a clairvoyant sage for the school. He's the school's official wizard now. 1979, not 1799. Apparently even ceded some control of the school to the young man and his spiritual contacts, turning to them for supernatural decisions in matters large and small, ranging from curricular decisions to the selection of records played at school dances. What the fuck? What do our spirit guides want to hear next young wizard? Well, all right. Parliament's flashlight it is.

Great job spirits. Oh, solid dance groove. Way to keep up with the current trends and the coolest music. Thank you, agents. News of this, when it became public, led to an avalanche of resignations, a bunch of parents yanked her kids out, but the school did survive.

Indeed, some people who went to Waldorf schools would later reflect on how even when there wasn't a school-appointed wizard, the emphasis on spirituality wormed its way into their heads and made seeing the world for what it is actually impossible. As Roger Raleigh would write in February of 2007, the effects of Waldorf's educational program gradually accumulated in our heads and hearts after I'd been at the school for only a few years, the notion of trying to see the world clearly had lost almost all meaning for me.

Everything seemed symbolic rather than concrete, although what the symbol stood for was vague. Everything had its hidden deeps. Did a bunch of today's conspiracy theorists, wackadoodle social media influencers and YouTubers go to Waldorf schools? Rowling would also describe a 12th grade biology class in which his teacher, Mr. Gardner, said some troubling shit. Quote, he explained that the various races

stood at different levels of moral development. Each was forging its own destiny. The oriental races, he said, are ancient, wise, but vitiated. The African races are youthful, unformed, child. like, he said. Standing near the center of humanity's family are the currently most advanced races, the whites, he said. Uh, uh-oh. Occasionally Rawlings teachers would refer to angels or other supernatural beings as if they were objective, verifiable phenomena, just as real as trees or plants or electrons. And all this paints a disturbing picture, to me at least, a sort of cultist institution

presenting scientific study and empirical data alongside spiritual and paranormal notion. as if they possess equal verifiable weight, a cultist institution masquerading as an educational utopia, where kids are free to learn at their own pace. Let's now look at how this place, as educational style came to exist. It took the dedicated work of one man, one very strange man,

whose inexhaustible appetite for telling people that he knew fucking everything there was to know about human existence. Let's really get to know Steiner now, a very, very smart guy, but maybe also a guy who wasn't quite as smart as he thought, he was, a guy who shared a lot of important, innovative, truly helpful ideas with the world. But a guy who also shared a bunch of nonsensical and harmful bullshit that he had to have been just pulling out of his fucking ass to make himself appear a lot more important and wise than he

actually was in today's time suck timeline. Right after today's first of two mid-show sponsor breaks. If you don't want to hear these ads ever again, please sign up to be a space user on Patreon. Help us make monthly charitable contributions. get the catalog, ad free, the entire secret catalog, secret suck catalog, get episodes three days early and more.

Thanks for listening to our sponsors, and now let's get that timeline. Shrap on those boots, soldier. We're marching down a time-suck timeline. Rudolph Steiner was born on February 27, 1861, and Donnie Kahliavettes, a village that at the time was in the kingdom of Hungary, though today is in part of Croatia. Steiner later felt it was of symbolic significance that he grew up along the edge of the East and the West

between enlightenment, rationalism, and Far East mysticism. At least that's how he perceived the quote, Far East to be, to be mystical. Rudolph's parents probably didn't see it that way, though. They were just trying to make a living anywhere they could. Steiner's father, Johann Steiner, had left a position as a gamekeeper in the service of the house of Hoyos in Geras, Austria, to marry one of the Hoyos family's housemaids, Frantiska Bly. He actually asked the count if he could marry Francesca, and the count had said no, so Johan decided to take matters into his own hands. If he didn't work for the count anymore, he reasoned, the count didn't have any leverage over him, couldn't punish him. So when the count

said no, he just up and quit. Then he married Francesca without her father's blessing, and they would go on to have three kids. Rudolph, a girl named Leopoldin, and a boy named Gustav. To support his family, Johann became a telegraph operator for the Southern Austrian Railway, which meant they moved around a lot, first to Myrdling near Vienna, then to Potschak and the foothills of the eastern Austrian Alps. This might sound pretty exciting to us, but it was actually a pretty boring life since they were put in places that weren't all that developed beyond a railroad station. But young Rudolph was not confined to the humdrum life of a country bumpkin. No, sir, his physical location was irrelevant, for he was a psychic able to travel around the world using only

his mind in the astral plane. Apparently when Rudolph was a young boy, eight, eight or nine, he was sitting on the station waiting room when the door had opened and a strange woman came in. She sort of looked to Rudolph like a relative of his, though he could not tell which one specifically. the woman stood in the middle of the room and said to the small boy, try and help me as much as you can, now as well as later in life. Then she walked into the stove and vanished. And this definitely wasn't a fucking weird daydream. Nope, uh-uh.

100%. No, this was psychic sight. Steiner decided not to tell his parents. He was afraid of being scolded for being superstitious. But he noticed that his father was sad the very next day, and he discovered the reason a female relative had committed suicide, not far away. She had supposedly died at the exact. exact time Steiner had seen the woman in the waiting room. But did she step inside a stove?

That part's not clear. Around this time, he entered the village school, but following a disagreement between his father and the schoolmaster over something not specified, he was briefly educated at home. Maybe they disagreed over his psychic abilities. When Steiner was eight years old, his family moved once again, this time to the small village of Neudorfel near the border of Lower Austria. landscape there different from pottschats the dramatic elves were no longer towering overhead sheer and intimidating instead the area surrounded by beautiful woods those forests became a part of young steiner's daily life in the summer young steiner and his siblings would head out on long walks returning with his arms full of wild strawberries aw delicious raspberries blackberries yes he'd also regularly make a half-hour trek to a nearby mineral spring carrying a large clay jar walked back with a gallon of sparkling water to drink at lunches sounds delightful. Indeed, life was so quiet for the villagers that they would all assemble at the depot. Whenever a train pulled in, no matter who was on it, it was just something to do. It's just hilarious to me. What do you want to do today? I don't know, let's just go see what kind of people step off the train.

And then what? Well, then we talk about what they look like, you know, silly. We make up stories about who they might be, what they might be doing, obviously. Actually, that does sound legit like some fun. however soon it became apparent that Steiner needed more stimulation, which would show up in the form of a textbook on geometry. It was lent to him by the assistant teacher at the school, despite sounding catastrophically dull to many of us, Steiner was quite intrigued. Later he would write,

that one can work out forms which are seen purely inwardly, independent of the outer senses, gave me a feeling of deep contentment. I found consolation for the loneliness caused by the many unanswered questions to be able to grasp something purely spiritual, brought me an inner joy. I know that through geometry I first experienced happiness. Okay. In other words, I discovered that I could work out shapes and forms just in my mind without

needing to see or touch anything in the outside world. That realization made me deeply happy. It helped ease the loneliness I felt from having so many big questions that no one seemed able to answer. Young Rudolph had just taken his first step towards becoming a philosopher. As a result of this, he wondered about what was inside of us, you know, what it was in of us that enabled us to even have these kinds of thoughts. You know, that is a fascinating question. The conventional wisdom at the time said that thoughts were merely mental images of physical things.

But Steiner didn't agree. Just as there was a space outside the human being, what we might call the real world, he believed there was a space inside us, meets acts, and that thoughts were messages from inside this place. Geometry in particular seemed to illustrate this. At first glance, geometry was something that appeared to be created by human beings. beings through their own thinking, but how did you square that with the fact that geometric principles exist independently of any individual, that the universe seemed to literally be built out of the same

shapes and geometric patterns, but of different sizes, repeating all across the cosmos? Maybe because they are inside of us and inside of everything else, building blocks of the universe, the Lego blocks that we use to construct everything. To him, it was the same for the spirit world. It looked like something derived from human thought, but it also must have an independent reality. and you know this is intriguing i agree with a lot of what young steiner was contemplating i'll put another way steiner saw consciousness as a kind of train ride when he sat down to read a book for example he felt he had entered the mental world but only its outer edge like he was just a little bit outside of the railway station if the book truly captivated him and stirred him deeply he felt himself moving

beyond that outer space going further into the inner landscape of the mind but still on the train tracks. As this happened, he experienced a strange sensation, something like gliding, felt as though his mind had risen above the noisy turbulence of everyday concerns into a peaceful, cloudless realm. There, it could move silently and freely, like a train lifting off its tracks, gently rising and falling like something carried on soft air currents. Anyone who had felt this, he believed, would never forget the breathtaking sense of freedom, one that seemed to promise an entirely different kind of life. Based on this, you can probably guess that Steiner loved learning. His teacher at the local school then introduced him to music. He would learn how to play both

the piano and the violin and teach him how to draw as well. From the village priest, he learned about the politics of the Austro-Hungarian Empire and the passionate desire of Hungarians to be allowed to speak their own language and develop their own culture. Steiner was profoundly moved by church rituals. Despite being Catholic, Daddy Johan was a free thinker to the point that Rudolph's father spent many nights sitting under a grove of Lindy in trees with the assistant station master of a nearby town arguing incessantly about politics

and religion. Rudolph listened with fascination, as he also did when a local doctor told him about the literature of Gerta, Schiller, and Lessing. He was absorbing all kinds of stuff. Then at the age of 11, it was time for him to go to a secondary school. Faced with the choice of the gymnasium,

with its classical university prep-focused education, or the real school with its emphasis on science and technical training, his parents decided on the technical school. They hoped that Rudolph would become a railway engineer. Rudolph's new school meant he had to undertake daily journeys now to Wiena Noistadt, by train in the morning and back to Noydorfel on foot in the evening when the trains were not running. This was Rudolph's first time in the city, and he hated it. Failed most of his classes. Luckily, after taking some time to adjust, he turned things around. Second year went way better.

We discovered his appetite for learning, particularly for philosophy, which he had a sort of fanboy-like relationship with. When he heard the name of Emmanuel Kant, Steiner saved up and bought a copy of the critique of pure reason and totally unprepared by any philosophical training spent his days trying to master its obtuse arguments. Because he found history classes so boring, he separated the critique into sections, hid them inside his history book, and then would secretly read them during his history lessons. He made up for not paying attention to those lessons in history class by reading his history directly from the textbooks and received a mark of excellent for that class. Again, he was a smart kid.

He was also studying other extracurricular subjects at the time. By the time he was 15, he would later write that he had gained a complete understanding of the concept of time, which he considered to be a precondition for spiritual clairvoyance. Imagine hearing your 15-year-old announce that. Mom, dad, great news. I've mastered time. I've completely mastered time. I understand all there is to know about it. So now I am free to master's spiritual clairvoyance.

Yippee! This notion made him distrust an academic area that was making powerful advances at the time. Science. Based on the works of people like Charles Darwin, German zoologist, Ernst Heckel, science taught that man was an animal, made up of a biological system that existed primarily to keep itself alive. Similarly, leading philosophers of the era, of the area, not area, including Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, I mean, I guess they didn't live too far away, argued that human behavior resembled the operational machines. Use applied an input and output inevitably followed.

This hadn't been such a popular position just a few decades before. In previous centuries, while universities had been at the cutting edge of knowledge, their understanding of life was pretty limited. Science could describe only fragments of nature, leaving more questions and answers. And in that context, education was less about producing predictable results, more about just curiosity, exploring the unknown, right, putting out theories. So much of the world was unknown back then. By Steiner's time, however, the goal of academia had shifted from questioning and discovery to shaping human behavior according to what, you know, previous people's curiosity had found, according to predictable laws,

and didn't ascribe any particular moral purpose to these laws. Of course, some of this was right. Evolution, for instance, doesn't happen with a deeper meaning or purpose. It happens because organisms want to survive and reproduce. Now, you can speculate, of course, that a mistake, mysterious creative force, a god, if you will, set the processes or proceeds of evolution in motion, I choose to believe that, while simultaneously recognizing that I can offer you zero proof that that is the case. I have no dogma, only belief, belief that does not contradict with any proven scientific facts that I am aware of.

I also realize that evolutionary processes do follow predictable patterns regardless of a deity or deities pushing the first evolutionary domino or not. For example, in general, the faster, stronger, more adaptable organisms survive more often than slower, weaker, less adaptable organisms do. And they therefore breed more often and therefore pass along their superior traits to offspring that have a better chance to survival. That's a scientifically documented repeating occurrence. And sometimes when that doesn't occur, when, say, a new predator enters an ecosystem or there are suddenly more predators in an ecosystem than there were before, the slower, weaker, and or less adaptive organism goes extinct. What doesn't happen, though, is for a slow, weak, poorly adaptable creature to survive simply because a celestial bean suddenly imbued them with magical powers, or smited their enemies, or appeared before all and was like, enough!

newly introduced dogs, cats, and hogs. Leave these dodoes alone. That or any equivalent of that, not been documented scientifically ever. Some people might have faith that something like that has happened. Some people might believe that something like that has happened. But what they don't have is tangible, empirical, verifiable proof. Yet to Steiner, something essential was lost when one looked at the world in this coldly scientific way. And at the age of 18, with these kinds of ideas swirling around in his head, he began,

began to attend the Institute of Technology in Vienna. The railway company seems to have been extremely obliging and agreed to transfer his father to a station, one called in Intesthorf, sufficiently close to Vienna for Steiner to make the daily journey so he could still live with his parents. There he was allowed to attend the lectures of Professor Franz Bertano,

who taught at the University of Vienna, and these lectures would have a huge influence on him. Like Steiner, Brantano was troubled, by the way, materialism had taken over academia, specifically in how it thought about the human, mind. According to the materialist view of psychology, everything boils down to a physical reaction in the brain. Even our ideas of good and evil, just a result of mental processes, the same way sensations of hot and cold are the result of physical processes. If that was true, then it wouldn't

really make sense to talk about a mental act. All acts would ultimately be physical acts. Rentano disagreed. He drew a strong line between mental and physical acts, arguing that if you slip up on ice and fall, that is a physical act. And it can happen without any intention. But there's no such thing as an unintentional mental act. Whenever you think, you're always thinking about something. Your mind is directed towards an object of your choosing. God, I hope that's not true.

Guessing he didn't know about intrusive thoughts. If all my thoughts are intentional of my own making, I should probably just drive myself to prison right now. Because I still think about murdering people, fucking way more often than I would like to. hopefully I'm not interpreting this right but I think I am. Brentano compared mental activity thinking, choosing, loving, remembering

to a beam of light cut into darkness. In his view, there would always be an element of focus, intention, or will. In other words, the mind doesn't just drift aimlessly like leaves floating on a stream and it is not just a chemical reaction.

Again, this makes me nervous. I've always felt that my mind does definitely drift off aimlessly towards weird places. Places I consciously, as far as I'm aware, I have fucking zero interest in traveling to. But this was exactly what Young Steiner wanted to hear.

This whole life so far had been a struggle for freedom, a fight to escape, his working class existence, which all the conventional wisdom of the day was telling him was a useless fight since people were not in charge of themselves. And so the reasonable thing to do was to apply yourself towards a good, hands-on career like becoming a railway engineer.

But now Brantano is saying the opposite. Mental activity is by its very nature purposeful. If you're thinking you're doing something, this confidence boost would allow Rudolph Steiner to start forming his own philosophy, one that saw no conflict between science, nature, and the spiritual world. But at that moment, Steiner was still at university, a place where spiritualism was not discussed, very often, much less taught. So who would help him understand the spiritual world? In 1879, when he was 18 years old, Steiner made the acquaintance of a man to whom he could speak openly about his spiritual insights, who was able to reply with insights

of its own. This person was not a professor or a student. He was a random guy who made wooden fins for wounded goldfish who had lost to real ones so they could still swim and enjoy themselves. No, he was a factory worker. Not sure what he made, but I doubt it was wooden fins. I don't think there's ever been much of a market for that. During his daily commute from Inzastorf to Vienna by train, Steiner met this middle-aged factory worker, this guy named Felix Kosciazko, who spent his spare time gathering herbs. which he would sell in Vienna. Kaskosko was uneducated but obviously very intelligent.

He often expressed his deep religious convictions in thoroughly obscure language. Steiner found him interesting, and he deliberately cultivated his acquaintance. He would later write. He gave the impression of being simply the mouthpiece for spiritual content seeking utterance from hidden worlds. Gradually, it seemed to me as if I were in the company of a soul from bygone ages, who untouched by civilization, science, and modern views, brought me. an instinctive knowledge of the past. Steiner would add the interesting comment

that nothing could be learned from Casciosco in the usual sense, but that quote, because he had a firm footing in the spiritual world, it was possible to obtain through him important glimpses of that world. He often visited Casciosco,

his small and simple home in the village of Trumo, and felt completely comfortable in its atmosphere of simple piety. And this was where Steiner would speak freely for the first time about his own experiences of spirituality. When he wasn't visiting his buddy's humble abode, he was also making the most of his time in college. He joined the German reading room of the technical high school, was later elected

its librarian, then as chairman. As librarian, he wrote letters to authors asking for copies of their works. Through the library and the university, he made the acquaintance of many established writers and thinkers. You know, an important thing for a station master's kid who had zero connections to a world he wanted to be a part of. Indeed, his mind had turned from what he liked to do to how he was going to do what he liked to do now. His parents still wanted him to become an engineer, but he never put much faith in that idea. He wanted to do something for work that would give him lots and lots of time to think. One option was to become a school teacher, maybe eventually a university lecturer, but Steiner didn't really have the temperate for academia, or at least he thought

he didn't, didn't want to deal with students, or at least he thought he didn't. He wanted to learn from people already at his own level or above it intellectually. He leaned towards wanting to become an author. So he seized every opportunity to meet writers, artists, philosophers, or any professor who happened to have written a book. He became a regular visitor at the home of Austrian linguist and literature scholar Carl Schroer, who introduced him more fully to the literary works of Johann Gerta. A man who had died in 1832, a man still regarded today as the most influential writer ever in the German language. His play Faust widely considered the greatest work of German literature. American writer Ralph Waldo Emerson,

who considered Shakespeare, the greatest poet in human history, considered Gerta to be humanity's greatest ever writer. Steiner later said that when he sat alone with Schorer, he always felt there was another presence in the room, the spirits of Gerta. Also made the acquaintance of the brilliant physicist, Edmund Ritlinger, who was dying of tuberculosis. In his free time, he went to Vienna's famous coffee houses

where he met various poets and composers. Not all of the people in these circles, of course, agreed with Steiner's views about the world, and he liked that. He wanted to be challenged. He greatly admired the people who could argue intelligently against him. But as intellectually stimulating as all of this was, none of it got him a job, let alone a career. Fortunately for Steiner, fate aided by Carl Schroer, his Gertapal, would intervene. Schroer recommended him for work as a tutor to the family of Ladislaus and Pauline Specht, and Steiner was hired. And he entered their home in July of 1884 when he was.

was 23. He hadn't wanted to become a teacher, but he will soon find out that he was excellent at teaching. The couple had four kids, the youngest of whom, age 10, had hydrocephalus, water on the brain, as it was known then, which had left him with cognitive delays. Steiner soon formed the conviction that the problem with such children was basically a physical one. The body, not the soul, was undeveloped. This meant that to fix or cure it was a question of trying to draw out the child's mental faculties by slow and patient effort, and that meant the first task. was to gain his trust and his love. In other words,

Steiner saw education, particularly for non-typical kids, as basically a question of giving the child confidence, what modern psychology calls motivation. It meant considerable effort on Steiner's part, and he worked hard, and he was spectacularly successful.

Within two years, Autospect had caught up with the primary school curriculum and passed the entrance examination for the gymnasium. Moreover, his hydracephalic condition was steadily improving, supporting Steiner's conviction that the health of the mind depends on the health of the body or I guess maybe vice versa.

Steiner remained the boy's tutor for six years. Otto later became a doctor, though he would sadly end up dying while serving in World War I. A teaching Otto was a fascinating and life-affirming experience for Steiner. For Steiner, teaching would come to mean the development of a child's personality, not just overloading them with facts and information.

Combined with his previous thinking, this would manifest to what Steiner called the four-fold being. A person has a physical body, and an etheric body, also known as the aura or life field, aura being a concept, as we know it now, initially promoted by a theosophist C.W. Ledbeater, who we will meet later.

There was also the astral body, which can leave the physical body under certain conditions in what had come to be known as astral projection, a term very likely coined by theosophist, Helena Blavatsky, and finally the ego, a concept taken from Sigmund Freud,

which orders and coordinates the other three. In education, as in health, these four elements had to be brought into harmony, especially developing the ego in order for it to do its proper work as the person's conductor. And now shit starts to get weird and new agey, oras and astral projection. And shit will get so much weir in a little bit. In 1883, Carl Schroer would perform another important service for Steiner. Carl Urgen editor named Joseph Kursner to allow Steiner to edit Gertes' scientific writings,

and Kershner agreed. Probably wasn't because he was dazzled by, by Steiner, however, presenting Gertz's scientific writings was a task that few people would have wanted to undertake. There was a general consensus that they were the absurd aberration of a poet of genius. In effect, Steiner was being tossed to scrap that nobody else wanted. But Steiner wanted it, and that made all the difference. Like Gerta, he felt that nature is God's living garment and was profoundly opposed to the current tendency to treat it as a world of static matter. Working on Gerta's works led him to the belief that science needed to be redeemed first.

its materialism. Could he do that? He could. The main thrust of the research had to do with Gertes' theory of color, which grew out of 20 years of experimentation and aimed to disprove Newton's ideas about light, observing that white light through a prism remained largely white, with colors only at the edges, Gertes had concluded that color originates in the eye, not in light itself. He emphasized phenomena like complementary colors, staring at yellow, produces a blue afterimage, red produces green, and developed a theory in which colors are essentially variations of light and darkness. But he was wrong, at least partially. Gertes' mistake was partially misunderstanding of Newton.

He could not imagine white light seen as particles containing all the colors of the rainbow. In fact, a scientist named Thomas Young had already shown that light behaves as a wave, but since Newton was so famous, nobody paid attention to Young at the time. 32 years after Gertes' death, in 1864, James Clerk Maxwell, finally put forward a theory that would have provided Gerta with the solution he needed, that light is simply one of the many forms of electromagnetic vibration, and the eye distinguishes between these tiny wavelengths by seeing them as colors. In the end, Gertrta was right in that the eye creates color perception,

but Newton was right that white light is composed of the spectrum's colors. And when Steiner had completed the editorial work, he went on to write his first book, Theory and Knowledge in the Light of Gerta's World View, published in 1886. This combined with his influence in literary and scientific circles, allowed Steiner to make a decent living, writing books and articles, and to maintain a thriving social life. So he's doing it, right? He's living the kind of life he had dreamt of. He's truly making some interesting breakthroughs while also cultivating some very strange thoughts and beliefs in the background.

Steiner's circle widened further when in January of 1888, he became the editor of a newspaper, the German Weekly Review. But it was mostly a newspaper about politics. Stannard didn't care much about that. And he wasn't starry when he lost that job six months later. In 1889, Steinner was asked to present himself at the Gerta Schiller Archive at Weimar, to be considered for the task of editing Gerta's scientific manuscripts for the archive's complete edition. Steiner had little difficulty in convincing the director, Bernhardt, Supan, that he was the right man for the job,

it was arranged that he was going to start in a year's time, so now what's he going to do while he waits? Well, he'll get into Germany's growing spiritualism movement. And you'll hear all about that right after today's second and two mid-show sponsor breaks. Thanks for listening to those sponsors. Hope you heard some deals that you liked. And now let's hear about Steiner's introduction to a strange and growing form of spiritualism.

Back in Munich for the winter, Steiner became increasingly interested in a phenomenon that had become the latest intellectual fashion, Theosophy, the system of esoteric wisdom propagated by Madam Helena Blavatsky and her followers. The Theosophical Society had been founded in New York in 1875, 10 years later, following investigation

by the Society for Psychical Research Madame Lavatsky was denounced as a fraud. They had thoroughly investigated her claims of contacting the spiritual world and found it was a bunch of smoke and mirrors. They recovered letters written by Blavatsky, instructing peers on how to help her with various frauds. They found evidence of secret doors, tricks to produce her Mahatma letters. These were a collection of communications allegedly written between 1880 and 1884

by spiritual masters or mahottmas, specifically Kuthumi and Moria, to some followers, these letters often called precipitated, detailed the foundational philosophy, cosmology, and spiritual scientific and ethical teachings of theosophy, and handwriting analysis experts were positive. Blavatsky had written that shit herself. She was also found to have plagiarized a great deal of the spiritual wisdom

she supposedly received directly from beings known as ascended masters on the astral plane. So, in short, she was completely full of shit. charismatic and mystical con artist But her followers, by and large, they didn't care about these findings. They wanted to keep believing her, so they did. So frustrated that humanity never seems to learn our collective lesson

in that regard, right? So many con artists out there today just keep getting caught red-handed for all kinds of shit. And their followers just employ more cognitive dissonance or further denial, whatever is necessary, to keep seeing what they want to see instead of what clearly is. Anyway, Blaski's followers,

largely remained convinced that she had been framed by her enemies instead of exposed for being a fraud. That was the narrative she pushed. And in Vienna, one of her most ardent followers was a wealthy guy about town named Friedrich Eckstein, who had met Madame Lavaski in London in 1884. After that meeting, old Freddie, had returned to Vienna with the newly published book,

Esoteric Buddhism by AP Senate, another theosophist. And he started to form his own little club. Two other important figures in this emerging soul, scene with the feminist Marie Lang and her husband, Dr. Edmund Lang, during the winter of 1889, Steiner began to visit their home and learn more of the interesting doctrines of theosophy. There was a great deal in it that appealed to him, for example, its belief that the human soul evolves through many incarnations, and that salvation is actually a process of self-realization. This aligned with Steiner's existing belief in reincarnation.

He'd explained in his autobiography that it was obvious to him, that some people couldn't be explained by their genetics or life experiences they'd had thus far, right? Not those alone. For example, he felt that there were qualities in the 19th century German poet. Further, Ferker von Steinvant, holy fuck, that is the most German name ever, that could have only developed at a remote epic when Greek paganism coexisted with Christianity, centuries before this cow was born. But more than anything, theosophy aligned with his belief that there was no need to keep

science and religion in separate categories. But for now he didn't have time, the time he wanted, to thoroughly deep dive into all of this and to write about it. He had to go work on Gerta. In the fall of 1890, about six months before Theosophy's creator, Madam Blavatsky, died. It was off to Weimar, known then as the Athens of the North for its emphasis on scholarly and philosophical pursuits. Soon after arriving in Weimar, Steiner gave a lecture entitled Imagination as a Creator of Culture, in which he argued that what man creates in real imagination, is in fact a product of the spiritual world. But his thriving intellectual circle was back in Vienna,

and there nobody paid much attention to him. He still had no real intellectual clout. He was in the circle, but not seen as an important part of the circle. He decided to make the most of his isolation and focus on getting a degree, which was difficult because he had not attended gymnasium, the most academically rigorous type of secondary school, intended to prepare youth for a university degree.

He had gone to a technical high school, and so he would focus on something else. A woman. During his first two years at Weimar, or in Weimar, Steiner was not particularly happy with his lodgings. Looking for a better situation, he came across the recently widowed Anna Oynica, who, according to one biographer,

asked him to supervise the education of her five children. Steiner moved into her home and became her close friend. And soon their friendship grew closer still. Eventually became so close. His P found itself, fully lodged, inside her V. When he moved to Berlin in 1899, the Oynica family soon followed

and Steiner lived with him again. Then shortly thereafter, he will marry Onika Oynica, who was eight years his senior. Very interestingly, his real reason for marrying her might not have been proximity or even physical attraction. In his autobiography, Stiner will claim that he

was in contact with Mr. Oynica after the man's death. He'd explained that when he moved into the Oynica household, he became interested in who Mr. Oynica was based on the books in his study. Weirdly enough, something almost identical had occurred eight years previously in Vienna when Steiner had been introduced to the family of a fellow student. The father spent most of his time locked up in his study. Steiner never even caught a glimpse of him. Yet when he died, Steiner felt he knew him so intimately. He was asked by the family to deliver the funeral oration. He claimed that he literally met both these dudes, his friend's dad, and his wife's dead husband.

on the astral plane. Steiner would write later. The powers of spiritual sight, which I then possessed, enabled me to enter into a close relationship with these two souls after their earthly death. All of this and his early experience with his deceased relative would lead him to believe

that death was not so permanent after all. And Steiner's view, if you want to talk to the dead, you should just go to sleep with a question. As soon as you wake up, you'll feel like you've gotten an answer. Huh. Did you know,

was that easy? I didn't know it was that easy. I'll try to remember before I fall asleep tonight to have some questions. Hey, Jeffrey Epstein, please, can you get me a list? Could you give me a list of who exactly did the worst shit with you and tell me how to find irrefutable evidence of that shit without the help of the Department of Justice? Could you do that? Maybe that wasn't exactly what he meant. Also, Steiner believed that people communicate with the dead all the time via astral projection

in their sleep and just don't remember or realize that they have done it. As Steiner said, a great deal of what we undertake in life is really inspired by the dead. Well, isn't that spooky? Now back to the timeline. Moving into Anna's house, interacting in some way with her dead husband, Martin Nufais and Steiner's life. He didn't feel like he had to be constrained by academia anymore.

He had experiences, thoughts, a philosophical background. Now he wanted to write it all down and blow people's motherfucking minds and be a guru. And he would blow some minds. In 1894, he published the philosophy of freedom, as he would later write, during the first chapter of my life, I was destined to experience the riddle of the universe as it faced modern science. In my philosophy of freedom,

I formulated the ideas demanded of me by this experience. Now I face the task of formulating ideas that would present the human soul's experience of the spiritual world itself. Yeah, totally, totally sounds good. But how did he go about gaining access to the spiritual world? Seemingly just by looking, he would describe it this way.

when with spiritual perception, I observed the sole activity of man, thinking, feeling, and willing, a picture of a spiritual man became clearly perceptible to me. I saw these inner manifestations of life as creative forces, and they revealed to me man as spirit within the spirit. If I then looked at the physical appearances of man, I saw it supplemented through the structure of spiritual forces active within the physically perceptible. Uh, sure. Yeah, yeah, yeah. No, totally. I'm going to file all that right. under a fuck off. This guy had a lot of good ideas, also fucking diluted in a lot of ways. Acted like he's one of the X-Men. Some kind of superhero who possessed soul sight or some shit.

What did it even mean when he talked about seeing spiritual man? They could see their aura. They could tell them what religion they described to, how devoted they were, how faithful. Or was it super vague? Like he thought he could tell if you were truly a good person or a bad person overall by assessing your spiritual forces structure. This is the same kind of word salad bullshit I've listened to from dozens and dozens of self-described new age gurus and grifters over the years.

And I'm always like, I'll shut the fuck up. Apparently, I looked and saw something neat, wasn't exactly the hard-hitting work that people paid attention to. So his sole site claims did not get him closer to achieving his dream of becoming a professor. In 1897, Steiner left the Weimar Archives, moved to Berlin. There he became part-owner of, chief editor of, and an active contributor to the literary journal The Review of Literature, or he hoped to find a readership sympathetic to his philosophy.

But he didn't. For one thing, despite his track record with publications, Steiner's credentials simply didn't put him on par with university-level scholarship. Reviews of his books called him an autodidact, a poor teacher, and a gypsy intellectual. I feel like the last one was a slur that equated to pretentious fraud. Around this time, he also became depressed regarding his romantic life. He wasn't exactly a looker, as they say.

He was a small, short, thin man. with untidy long hair, poor eyesight, and he was odd with the propensity to make social full pause. He wrote about his utter misery of living alone. This improved when his old fuck buddy, Anna Oynica, moved from Vimar to Berlin in 1898. She took a house in the suburb of Friedenau and invited Steiner to become a lodger. But her daughters were now grown up in the presence of this still, a fairly young man in a house full of women probably gave rise to gossip. Not sure if that's what led to this or not, but Steiner and Anna were married October

31st, 1899. As I mentioned earlier, I'm going to jump around timeline wise a little bit. You know, married because, you know, he was so close to her dead husband, who obviously gave him permission. Interesting choice to get married on Halloween. Feels right for him, though. Soon afterward, he decided to give

academia one last shot by becoming a history professor at the College of the Workers' Educational Association. Not an esteemed institution of higher learning, but the only institution of higher learning interested in giving him a job. On January 13th, 1899, Steiner arrived for his first lecture at two minutes to eight. It was due to begin at eight, once more accompanied by Anna, one of her daughters. The room was small. History lectures in that day and age, maybe still, were often so boring that most of the class

usually dropped out within the first few weeks. But Rudolph Steiner was there to give it his best shot. The little man with the friendly face and Austrian accent launched himself into the lecture speaking without notes, and the crowded audience was wrapped, deeply impressed. Some of them even said afterwards that he ought to be a member of parliament. And contrary to the precedent, his lectures were packed for the rest of the semester. Based on this, he achieved his first version of commercial success at the age of 38. Trade unions soon asked him to lecture on science, and for the Gutenberg anniversary, he was asked to address an audience of 7,000 in the Berlin circus.

and in this context circus means large venue not you know traveling company of clowns acrobats other entertainers and an assortment of animals but I do like that it made me picture him delivering a science lecture while dressed up as a clown

in an actual circus welcome to my science lecture children now enough about science how's your aura doing today don't lie to me I notice my soul sight if you're telling the truth or not Would you like to go for a ride on the astral plane?

Hop on my back. Away we go. We fly towards the Akashik record so everyone knows what the future holds for them. Yay! Okay. So how did the writer, who nobody took seriously, suddenly becomes such a sensation. What excited Steiner's listeners so much was that they were asked to participate in the lecture. In Steiner's time, the classical general.

German method of teaching was very strict, right? You showed up, you listened, you went home. But Steiner encouraged people to ask questions to give their commentary, to challenge their peers. He turned a lecture into a show. He was like a comic doing crowdwork, you know, minus the jokes, but just as captivating. Nowadays, while this might seem commonplace for a university environment in Steiner's day, it was a radical departure from how teaching was done. His popularity opened other doors, as popularity often does, and now he became involved with the Giordano Bruno Union, a group of monistic idealists, i.e. people who believe that only basic reality is spirit, that the only basic reality is spirit. That same year, Steiner published an article titled Gertes' Secret Revelation about a story of Johann Gertrta called the Fairy Tale of the Green Snake and the Beautiful Lily, published in 1775.

The story revolves around the crossing and bridging of a river, which represents the divide between the outer life and the senses and the ideal aspirations of the human being. Gerta wrote it as a response to a work titled Letters on the Aesthetic Education of Man. The writer of those letters, Friedrich Schiller, thought that there was an ideal human being within everyone, and the challenge was to bring a person's outer life experiences into harmony with the inner ideal. That way a person would lead a truly worthy and harmonious existence. Gerta liked this idea. Both men were writing during the French Revolution at a time when France was experimenting with a imposing a harsh and blood-soaked new social climate in order to liberate people,

but Gerta and Schiller thought that freedom had to come from within an individual, that you could not force anyone to become free. So Gerta wrote a little story to illustrate that. At least that's what most scholars believed, but Steiner saw it differently. He viewed the story as an allegory of initiation, representing the transformation of the human soul and the bridging of the sensory and spiritual worlds. Instead of it being about an individual becoming the best version of themselves,

he thought it was about attaining the highest level of spiritual existence. He was, it seems to me, projecting his own beliefs into Gertes' work in order to feel validated by them. Regardless of why he was doing it. Word of Steiner's take on Gertes spread and drew a lot of curiosity and interest back in the days when a lot of people were interested in such discussions and interpretations as opposed to being interested in finding funny TikTok prank videos. In 1900, a young member of the Berlin Lodge of the Theosophical Society,

approached two of it, leading members, Count and Countess Brockdorf, and suggested that Rudolf Steiner would be a suitable person to deliver a lecture on the philosophy of Nietzsche. And this will push Steiner back towards theosophy.

Good timing, since Blavatsky had been dead for almost a decade, and the religion was, you know, in need of some new gurus. He soon noticed that some people in the audience were, quote, people who had great interest in the world of spirit,

according to his own writings. So he returned to the world of the mystical, and that would bring him back in touch with the the theosophists. He gave the lecture, was asked to return on September 29th, 1900.

He adapted his article on Gertes' fairy tale for his speech. It was a big hit. Over the following months, Steiner would give more talks on two mystics, Meister Eckhartz

and Jacob Beema, and followed him up with another 23 lectures on various aspects of mysticism in the inner life. A quick note about the mystic Meister Eckhart. In the early 14th century,

Eckhart preached and wrote a lot about the presence of God, in the individual soul. He once said, when I preach, I usually speak of detachment and say that a man should be empty of self and all things, and secondly, that he should be reconstructed in the simple good that God is. And thirdly, that he should consider the great aristocracy which God has set up in his soul, such that by means of it, man may wonderfully attain to God, and fourthly, of the purity of the divine nature. Catholic Church didn't like that message, because it made their priesthood,

an entire organizational structure, you know, a lot less relevant. Why go to do that? to a priest to commune with God if God already lives inside of you. They branded him as a heretic. When he died, he was on trial. Yet he not died of natural causes, the church would have almost certainly burned him alive or otherwise had him executed. So often, right, those who are the kindest,

the most humanist are punished by lesser men with lesser morals. Historically, trying to set people souls free has been a great way to end up ostracized and or dead. But don't dwell on that. Uh-uh. No, forget, forget, forget I said that. back to Steiner, reconnecting with the theosophist now. Because Steiner had been thinking about the spiritual world for so long,

he didn't feel like he had to agree with everything the theosophist said, while others seeking to break into the theosophist scene towed the line of praising other theosophists and offering their own interpretations. Steiner just went ahead and said whatever he wanted, which was, you know, more compelling to his audience, and that was what he cared about. One member of his audience told him one day

that his ideas were not in accordance with those of Annie Besant, leader of the English branch of the theosophical, God that word, Theosophical society. Steiner replied mildly, Oh, is that so?

And then just continue with his lecture, not caring. Another person who was intrigued with Steiner was an attractive young woman who had started to show up at his lectures.

Her name was Marie von Sievers. And she had been brought up in Russia, studied drama, Paris, only recently decided against making a career

as an actress. And yes, she was born into a lot of money. her parents were imperial Russian aristocrats had a lot of time on her hands to spend waxing philosophic about theosophy. She approached Steiner,

asked him whether it was time to launch a new spiritual movement in Europe. Steiner agreed that it was, and sensing correctly that she was asking whether he was willing to lead such a movement, replied that he would only be available to call into life a movement linked to Western occultism. What he meant by this was that he was not interested in developing Madame Blavatsky's eastern former theosophy.

What does this is the same? also meant for him was the end of his marriage. Apparently, Anna didn't like that her younger husband was starting to make waves in a cultist circles, and they soon divorced over the matter, although they continued to live together until 1903. Interesting relationship, those two had. Meanwhile, Steiner was on to another project. His newfound popularity and Marie's endorsement made him think that he really could be the face of a new spiritualist movement, the basis of which have been brewing inside of him for about two decades now. Or he sends a business opportunity in this gullible group of wealthy new age weirdos

who have plenty of time to study and talk about shit since they were never burdened with the trappings of regular employment or even child rearing. Depends on how you look at it. Depends on who you ask. In the, this was all a huge con camp, Steiner's critics pointed to the fact that Steiner did not have a coherent philosophy to become the leader of he dabbled in a lot of shit, wrote arguments for various things. then later sometimes wrote arguments against those same things.

For example, around the turn of the century, he made many hostile comments about Christianity. Yet by the fall of 1901, he was lecturing to theosophists on Christianity as mystical fact. As time went by, Steiner expanded his view of Christianity until it became the central event in human history. In this view, a divine being, who had been preparing for incarnation since the beginning of human evolution, descended into the earth in the last three years of the life of historical Jesus. and just kind of took over his body. So, you know, Jesus was possessed. Not demonically, he was heavenly possessed.

Until he was crucified, of course. Then the dude who had his body, you know, taken over was, I guess, you know, just fucking dead. According to Steiner, Christ's purpose was to turn the tide of battle against the forces of materialism, forces aided by evil powers called Lucifer, aka Satan, and Arriman, the Zoroastrian deity of darkness,

chaos and evil. which would otherwise have been, which would otherwise have overwhelmed humankind. Also, according to Steiner, there were actually two historical Jesuses, one, a descendant of kings and a reincarnation of the Persian prophet, Zarathustra,

the 7th century BC founder of Zoroastrianism, and the other Jesus, a quote, simpleton, who had never before been reincarnated as a human being. Apparently these two Jesuses lived together in Nazareth at the same time, two different kids, and were friendly with one another.

They saw each other, according to Siner. But then the Zarathrustra Jesus died at the age of 12. And when that happened, his consciousness stuck around and slid into the still living 12-year-old Jesus. And then that Jesus' mother took over the upbringing of this other Jesus, a Jesus who had like two different Jesus' consciousnesses now fused into one. And where was this other Jesus' mother? No fucking clue. Are you falling all this? I'm not.

Not really. I'm just curious if you are. All this, according to Steiner, explain why there is such a discrepancy between the early chapters of the Gospels of Matthew and Luke. It's because they're talking about two different Jesuses. So there's two Jesus now.

Fuck. There was super enlightened, reincarnated prophet Jesus. And then there was simpleton Jesus. You know, there was dumb Jesus. There was Jesus. Sweet, simple Jesus. And then when infused Jesus,

when double Jesus, who had powered up thanks to some thrive DFT's soul power patches. If you're not thriving, you die in! When he turned 30, he suddenly became a different person

again when God Jesus, or really a third Jesus, came and took over double Jesus' single body. Pretty straightforward, really. Also according to Steiner, after all this, convoluted two Jesus

merged into one Jesus who gets taken over by third Jesus, Christ will then never again have a physical body. When it came to the second coming, he suggested, that it would not be a physical reappearance that the Christ being would become a

manifest in non-physical form in the etheric realm. That is visible to spiritual vision and apparent in community life for increasing numbers of people. And that would start about 1933. And how did he know all that? Don't fucking worry about it.

He has soul sight, okay? And sometimes on the astral plane, when you're fully tapped into your soul site, your divine imagination, is fucking going gangbusters. You figure shit out. It just appears in front of your third eye And then you write it all down

And then boom, you're a guru, praise Jesus, double Jesus. Steiner emphasized that the future would require humanity To recognize this spirit of love, This second coming, ethoric Jesus energy And all this genuine forms. Now this might all sound highly confusing. Like a bunch of nonsensical fucking crazy gibberish Two fucking moron who doesn't have soul sight

but it actually acquired him a large following of Protestant clergymen. Towards the end of his life, Steiner would even create his own branch of the Protestant church, the so-called Christian community, which is still around, by the way. According to their website, they have about 200 locations, including over a dozen in the U.S. At quick glance, their congregations seem pretty small,

a little bit sad, and batch it crazy. But anyway, so did Steiner really come to change his opinion of Christianity that much, or did he realize that if his philosophy embraced Christianity, even if it was a super fucking weird, what are you actually talking about, form of it, that he would have many more followers. There's a bit of evidence

for that second interpretation. In his autobiography, Steiner stated that a conscious knowledge of true Christianity began to dawn in him in his Berlin period, and that it grew deeper towards the turn of the century, culminating in a revelation when he stood in the spiritual presence

of the mystery of Golgatha, or Golgatha, in a most profound and solemn festival of knowledge. Uh-huh. None of that, however, was found in a series of lectures. Steiner delivered to the theosophists, or to theosophists, in the winter of 1901 to 1902. Supposedly, right as his faith was really deepening. Instead, Christianity's mystical fact, which would in true Steiner fashion become yet another book,

would be devoted to an exposition of the ancient mystery, secret rights, and doctrines that contain the essence of the old religions. Those who were admitted to these secrets were the initiates. The initiates knew that God slumbers in nature. but the initiate also knew that God could also be found in his own soul and that quote, the soul is a sacred place where the spellbound God may wake to liberty. The father is a spell. This is all clear.

The father is a spellbound God asleep in nature and the son is the awakened God born out of the human soul. The problem with this was that Steiner was stealing somebody else's ideas. In fact, what Steiner had to say in Christianity as mystical fact bears a remarkable resemblance to a work that had been published back. in 1889, the great initiates by esoteric philosopher Edward Choray. And that book, Shirey, who later became actually incredibly close with Steiner, argued that all great religions have an exterior and an interior history, one open to all,

the other secret. The secret religion, once seen, shines out luminous and organic, always in harmony with itself. It might also be called the history of eternal, of universal religion. He then set out to show that various religious figures of the past, Rama, Krishna, Hermes, Moses, Orpheus, Pythagoras, Plato, Jesus were all, quote, great initiates of the one universal religion, right? Sounds pretty familiar. Marie von Sivers had been deeply influenced by Shire, and even had become his translator, meaning that this was almost certainly how Steiner came across his work. In his autobiography, Steiner would defend himself against his claims, though. He insisted that when a man has developed the power to withdraw inside himself,

through imagination, inspiration, and intuition, all capitalized, he becomes aware of spiritual realities and that these include the life history of the human race alongside these spiritual realities. He develops the power to read the Akashik, or Akashik record, or records. He's pronounced both ways almost equally. The imperishable record of the past, present, and future

of every soul in the universe. And that is imprinted on the psychic ether. Quick side quest. Whenever you come across somebody talking about the Akashic records, grab fucking popcorn, sit down, enjoy the show. Get ready for some talk of Atlanteans and Lemurians and root races and ancient Tibetan masters and shit. We can again thank theosophist C.W. Leadbeater for this term. In the religion of theosophy and the spiritual movement of anthroposophy, the Akashic records are believed to be a compendium of all universal events, thoughts, words, emotions, intent ever to

have occurred in the past, present, or future. Regarding not just humans, actually, but all entities and life forms. So you know what fucking dogs, a thousand years from now, like why they're going to lick their butth holes. Okay, do you got that? All right? It's the eighth dimension.

The matrix. It's everything. Don't understand still? Okay. All right. How about I let you hear these dudes from Gaia, from the Gaia YouTube channel. Tell you all about it real quick.

The eighth dimension is the one that connects the whole thinking of the universe in different levels of consciousness. not only mind as in the first dimension, but also emotional and physical. That's why we call the eight-dimension the Akashic Records. And also we call the eighth dimension, the matrix in which we are all in.

A collection of all human events, thoughts, words, emotions, and intent to have ever occurred in the past, present, or future. Yes. The concept of the Akashic Records finds its origins in ancient Sanskrit texts. Hell yeah.

But what knowledge lies within these treasured records, and how does one uncover their eternal truths? I'll fucking know. Cool music. Does it actually exist in ancient Sanskrit texts, the Akashic records? It does not. This is more religious interpretation here.

Or I don't even want to say interpretation. This is just making shit up. The word Akasha is Sanskrit. it means sky, space, or ether. But that's it. Everything else about this celestial book of everything. That was just made up by these motherfuckers. Same technique used here that I've talked about so many times over the years.

Do you want to invent a new religion or start a cult? The best tried and true way to develop your new scripture is to pretend it is based in old scripture or ancient text to give it that feeling of legitimacy, right? This like ancient aliens kind of vibes. Also, before moving on, let's look at some of the comments. under that video I just played you a snippet from, a video titled, What Knowledge Lies Within the Akashik Records,

in today's Idiots of the Internet? It's all the Internet. At Edward Tang, 1977, commented, Everything is there, except a lottery numbers. Otherwise, everyone who claimed to be able to access it would be rich. Oh, thank you, Edward. Incredible point.

The Akashic Records have everything. right you can fucking find out why you know how loud a dog farted uh 600 years ago or why a cat keeps looking at his paws too much 200 years from now but you can't find a lot of lot of numbers following that logic they would also have to not have stock market reports or property appreciation values over time and a whole bunch of other wealth building info uh at brenda weiss 1444 commented this is exactly what i experience and a life-changing experience with DMT. No, you didn't, Brenda. DMT is a hell of a drug, but you didn't access

the Akashic records. I've seen a bunch of shit, too. You know, if you saw the Akashic records, you'd be smoking DMT every day and, you know, and then writing down when you can remember or having somebody translate all your findings, you'd be a true guru of enlightenment and not just some random person posts on YouTube. At Anthony 452 posted, really wish I knew what this was when I regularly

astral projected Yeah man I used to astral project Like all the time I could have easily Visit the Akashik records But you know I I um

I hurt my I hurt my soul ACL I tore my spiritual ACL So I can't astral project You know anymore So you get it At Meredith And Hansen wrote

I've seen the Akashic records Mind blowing Now all devices have shut down Wish I had help Oh fuck Meredith You had it you're there. But then your spiritual internet stop working.

And no one will help you reset your internal modem. Oh, what a bummer, dude. At Venusian music posted, I accessed the Akashic records for my students using astro numerics to read their soul contracts. No, you don't. What music school does Venusian teach at? I want to find it.

No interest in taking lessons, but I would like to buy some psychedelics from him. At Jeff Million 5351 posted. been there dot dot dot oh that's classic you can't impress jeff like whatever you've done whatever you share he's fucking been there done that shit whatever dude i don't fucking freak out you know when i talk about this shit i didn't freak out like when i first slipped into my parallel universe bro easy dude act like you time travel before sheesh hey chill brother so you've been abducted by aliens who fucking hasn't all i do

Let's get abducted, okay? Finally, at their 1, 2, 3, 4, 5 posted. Interesting video. However, it did not address one important question. How do we know that these records exist? I'm open to it.

Someone please help. Not a single like a response to that comment. Why would you take a logic shit on their dream parade, Thayer? Why don't you shut the fuck up and let them have some fun? Let's get out of here. It's of the Internet.

Still speaking about the Akashic record, Madame Blavatsky, Steiner argued, also had the power to access it, but she only achieved that access in a state of trance when hidden masters spoke through her. But Steiner, on the other hand, he leveled up. He was able to perceive the spirit world in full consciousness. He insisted that his own revelations about the remote past

were highly accurate. He was a true Jedi master. Basically, he got every single one of his ideas directly from the spirit world on the astral plane, so it was impossible for him to plagiarize or be wrong, thank you very much. But if you think it's possible, it's Tyner, maybe plagiarized. Maybe just maybe he lifted some stuff here and there. There was nobody he lifted more from than Helena Blavatsky.

Blavatsky's interesting history of the human race is set out in her seminal grift, I mean work, the secret doctrine, which is largely a commentary on a supposedly ancient work that is definitely 1,000% for sure a hoax. something she called the book of Jian written in Senzar, which is, of course, the ancient tongue of the initiates. Oh my gosh. Okay, all right.

She had a very powerful imagination. No ancient copy of this book has ever been found, to be clear. The oldest copies in existence are the ones Blavatsky had printed. According to the book of Gian, though, there was originally a great nothingness, the Knight of Brom, which ended when the vibrations of eternity announced the cosmic dawn, And where did those vibrations come from? Who or what started vibrating shit?

Don't worry about it. These vibrations split into seven rays who became intelligent beings called Daihan Shohans, who proceeded to create the universe from electricity. You still following? Are you wondering where electricity came from? Don't worry about it. This process of creation began with diffuse cosmic matter, then a fiery whirlwind, which led to the creation of a vast nebula or a cloud of cosmic gas.

Where did that fiery whirlwind come from? Don't worry about it. The earth, which condensed out of this gas, was destined to pass through seven periods or rounds. We are now in the fourth round. During the first three rounds, the earth was non-material. It hardened into matter only in the fourth round. Similarly, the human race originated on earth hundreds of millions of years ago

and will go through seven cycles or root races. We are now in the fifth of these. The first race was purically spiritual in form and inhabited an imperishable sacred land at some unstated location. Don't worry about that location. The second race were the Hyperboreans who lived at the North Pole

when there was a tropical region, but they were bodiless, so temperature didn't really matter. Procreation slowly developed towards the end of the second race and continued into the third. How exactly did bodyless beings procreate? Don't fucking worry about it.

It was in the midst of this third race period about 18 million years ago that certain spirits spiritual beings felt a longing to experience earthly existence and descended to the physical plane. This is known as the fall. They possessed only three senses, hearing, touch, and sight. This race lived in a vast continent called Lemuria. In the Pacific Ocean, today's Australia, a fragment of Lemuria, obviously, along with Easter Island, of course, unfortunately, Lemuria was destroyed by fire and vanished into the ocean. How could a fire be

that destructive? Like, how is that even remotely fucking possible? Don't worry about it. The fourth race with the Atlanteans, who lived on a continent in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean. In some respects, they were more highly developed than we are now. They understood how to use electricity. They also invented powered flight. The early Atlanteans were giants and were responsible for building the pyramids and structures like Stonehenge. But they misused their power and became black magicians and their continent was finally destroyed in a watery cataclysm after a whole bunch of flying wizard battles. Facts! Our own root race is the fifth, and it began in northern Asia. like all the other root races

it is divided into seven sub-races we are in the fifth of these our current race is the most solid so far this means that we are more entrapped in the physical realm than any of the previous races but don't be sad because at the same time we have more possibilities of creative action than any previous race

just as a sculptor can work better in clay than in soft mud and better in marble than in sandstone in due course we shall be replaced by a more ethereal sixth root race and then by an almost as purely spiritual seventh, started as spiritual, then became physical, working our way back to spiritual, and why are we doing that?

Don't worry about it. Steiner agreed with or heavily plagiarized, Madam Blavatsky, on the point that the earth had three previous incarnations. He calls these old Saturn, old sun, and old moon. He said that old Saturn was made of chaotic, undifferentiated substance and was inhabited by creatures who were delicate, tenuous, and ethereal, and who would later become human beings. Cool, cool, cool. This all literally sounds like some shit. I would talk about while an acid,

talking to a friend who's also an acid. And while we're both really high, we will think we've made some real breakthroughs and have unlocked the secrets of the universe. But then later, when we're sober again, and sober people tell us what we were talking about, we will laugh our asses off about how preposterous and fucking ludicrous we're being.

Anyway, an old Saturn Earth, good old old Saturn Earth, you remember, higher beings than man, whom Steiner calls hierarchies, were in charge of this evolutionary process that was through their interaction with the natural forces of old Saturn and physical organs like hearts and lungs

began to emerge, so that's pretty fucking cool. Then came a gap in time when the seed of man lay fallow, so the spiritual hierarchies had to get involved to keep man's evolution going. That was how next earth, old son, came into being, if you're wondering. An old son, do you remember old son?

There was a still further heart of matter. This led man to acquire his second body, the etheric body, although physically man had only reached the plant stage of evolution. Okay. On the next earth, old moon, man was endowed with the astral body, the part of us that leaves the physical body while we sleep. But all of us must have sent, uh, all of this must have sent us back evolution-wise, because when man was finally reborn on our present earth, uh, his body was little more than a cloud of vapor. Fuck. Do you remember when we we had cloud vapor bodies, it sucked. It was so hard to enjoy like a nice craft cocktail or delicious steak with no hardened form to grab or digest stuff with. During its first two epics on Old Moon, the human race remained ethereal. By the way, as confusing all of this is, I spent a lot of time more than I enjoyed, reading their text directly.

The way they write it is infinitely more confusing. Like, if you think, if you're like, this is just, gibberish. Oh, it's even more gibberish when you dig into their actual text. Anyway, the third epic was the age of Lemurians. These creatures, communicated with telepathy, of course, and had an intuitive understanding of plant and mineral life. And how exactly did they show up? How were there different Earths sharing the exact same space in the universe? Don't fucking worry about it. No religion is meant to make total sense. If it did, you wouldn't have all that nonsensical mystery to endlessly ponder and argue over and try and unravel. Don't even stress it.

trust about it. Fun Lemurian fact, did you know that Lemurians can increase the strength of their arms at will to lift enormous loads? They could because Blavatsky and Steiner said they could. Meanwhile, Lemurian women began to develop amazing powers of imagination and because of that, that led them to enjoy certain things and just like others and the first ideas of good and evil arose. It was during the Lemurian epic

that the moon split off from the earth in order to give man a better chance to evolve, obviously, and how did the moon being part of it? of the earth, fuck with our evolution. Glad you asked. Because the moon forces were causing man to condense too quickly. And what exactly are moon forces? Don't worry about it. As he continued to harden, man became subject to certain evil or hostile forces, known as the luciferic hierarchies. According to Steiner, it was divine intention that man should have free will. So for some unexplained reason, don't worry about it. The hierarchies were first of all given a chance to exercise free will

and thus to rebel against God. Two different types of spiritual beings took advantage of their freedom to rebel against the divine will. These Steiner refers to as the luciferic and aramanic beans. Lucifer attempted man to pride, while Ereman tried to push him to advance much faster than he should, for example, by scientific invention. Man would be continually surrounded by these bad angels

who sees every opportunity to influence him. As a result of luciferic shenanigans, fear, illness, and death entered human history during the Lemurian period. Even worse, man also developed a taste for rebellion through their influence. I don't know if that's worse. Actually, I don't know if that's worse, but that's what they say. The result was an upsurge of egoism that led to a tremendous catastrophe, which put an end to Lemuria.

Basically, this was another one of Lavaski's ideas, just a little more fleshed out. According to Steiner, in the next epic, Atlantis, man became even more solid. These descendants of the Lemurians were unable to reason, but they possessed an abnormally powerful memory. could control life forces and plants and use this fucking life force, kind of like modern man uses coal or some shit. But anyway, Ehrman pushed them into scientific achievement, just for the sake of being faster, smarter, cooler, more productive. Even the initiates, among them, gradually became corrupt.

Various subraces then hardened into egoism and power-seeking, evil began to spread, end quote, since the forces of growth and generation, if torn from their original sphere and used independently, have a mysterious connection with certain forces working in air and water. There were thus unchained through human action, mighty destructive natural forces, which led to the gradual ruin of Atlantean territory. Okay, according to Stiner, Atlanta's vanished about 10,000 years ago.

Not that long ago because of all their pride and bad science stuff. And why haven't we found archaeological evidence of this incredibly advanced society that existed just 10,000 years ago? Don't fucking worry about it. The new age, the fifth age, that we're currently in. is the post-Atlantean era. And we're in the fifth sub-race of this era now. The first sub-race was Hindu, and their era began in 7,227 BCE, shortly after the fall of Atlantis.

They regarded the material world as an illusion and turned their backs on it. The second sub-race, the Persians, began in 5,067 BCE, and ended in 2,907 BCE. They regarded life as a crude battle between the forces of evil and good, what Steiner terms Ehramon and Ahura Mazda. Aura Mazda is a supreme creator and benevolent deity in Zoroastrianism

representing truth, light, and cosmic order. Next, when the Egypto-Caldeans, who discovered astrology and became closer to accepting matter, their age ended in 747 B.C.E. Then it was the Romans. No love for the Greeks in the system.

Romans went further than any human being so far in accepting the material world as the only reality as evidence of this Steiner cites that they even worship their emperors as gods and because of that at this point in his evolution man came close to being overwhelmed and permanently defeated by evil forces so the hierarchies called up christ who descended into the body of jesus of nazareth but only in the last three years of his life of course and turned the tide of battle christ not dezus but jesus deities deity christ has been around since the beginning. Sort of keeping tabs on how humanity's evolution is going. Why?

Don't worry about it. By the time the earth was created, he had become the highest of sun spirits and the chief opponent of Lucifer. Okay? But keeping tabs wasn't doing enough for humanity's future, so he realized that he would have to enter the body of a human in order to launch a new stage of evolution

and which man fully established a conscious ego, an eye, that could make its own choices. Seems a little fucked up, that he had to take over somebody's body, and you know, get that poor bastard crucified. Why couldn't he just appear as a spiritual form and started a new religion that way? I think you know the answer. Don't worry about it. By taking a human form and fully establishing that conscious ego, Steiner said Jesus created something he called the

eye in the intellectual soul. The age of the intellectual soul came to an end in 1413 C.E. and was replaced by the age of the consciousness soul. We're still in that era now. What created that change? I don't think I have to say it, do I? The age of the consciousness soul is also the age of the or the outsider, okay, that's because in the previous age, human beings were far more concerned with being members of a group than being individuals. Being loners eventually led us to fields like alchemy and later science, which gradually led to what Steiner terms are God a strange civilization. And the whole vibe of our current era is also somehow a real entity. According to Steiner, the zeitgeist, German word for spirit of the age, is an actual

conscious entity, a guiding spirit, whose purpose is to guide evolution in a particular epic. Mind blown, Steiner, mind blown. Also, fuck our current zeitgeist. What a piece of shit. During the Rosicrucian epic, the Middle Ages roughly, this spirit of the age was the archangel Gabriel, whose business was to lead the human spirit in materialism to foster a healthy spirit of skepticism and experimentalism. Jesus Christ. In 1879, the year Steiner went to Vienna, Gabriel gave way to the archangel Michael Picture two giant angels working as his fucking tag team wrestlers apparently Gabriel tagged out, Michael tagged in

whose evolutionary task, according to Steiner's followers Stedward Easton or Stuart Easton was to bring men together as individuals so they recognize their common humanity in Christ who lives within each human being. But not to be outdone by his own world building, Steiner saw his own task as the inauguration of this new age. In other words, he's an archangel. He's part of the tag team.

If Archangels Gabriel and Michael were like Scott Hall and Kevin Nash of the New World Order, wrestling team, Steiner was fucking Hollywood Hulk Hoken. As part of his new angelic duties, Steiner promised to recover what was lost to materialism and popularize the knowledge of mysteries. So what in the fucking fuck does that mean? Does all of this mean? Don't worry about it. For real, though.

One way to look at it is this way. While Blavatsky wanted to synthesize Eastern religions, Western occultism and esoteric Christianity, making Christ into basically one master amongst many, Steiner made things simpler. Still convoluted as ever-loving. Fuck, obviously, but somehow simpler than her teachings. Steiner saw Christ as the unique central event of cosmic evolution,

giving Christianity, which of course, many of the people in his audience were innately familiar with, a central role in human spiritual history. Along with that, he added in what he called spiritual science, basically clairvoyance, but unlike Blavatsky, who maintained that only the super, super enlightened could reach these truths, maybe not even them if the master did not choose them,

Steiner's approach said that if you combined a little bit of the scientific method, a little bit of self-improvement, and some spiritual seeking, you too could receive these truths. Tell them what they've won, Johnny. Much better message for marketing and growing followers. To make sure that he was seen as a spiritual scientist

and not just as an occult storyteller, He would also make sure to adapt his reading, i.e. what he was seen supernaturally in the world's memory, aka the Akashik records with his sole site, to the current state of technology. When, for example, the Wright brothers began flying with gliders and eventually with motorized aircraft in 1903, Steiner transformed the gondola-like airships of his Atlanta's story into airplanes in 1904. It's almost like he was definitely making this show up. But perhaps his biggest rhetorical achievement was that he, freely acknowledged that most people were really just accessing universal human memories when they

thought they were talking to the spirit realm. So you didn't have to believe everybody who claimed to be a clairvoyant. You only had to believe him because he was accessing objective truth. He knew how to do it correctly, just like you could if you listened to him, if you bought his books. All of this made him a lot more accessible than Blavatsky, despite both of them claiming nearly the same nonsensical bullshit. And it made him super popular with a lot of theosophists of his day. Okay, and now finally, after what probably felt like me trying to share what I remembered from an especially intense fever dream, we can return to our timeline. In July of 1902, Steiner traveled to London with Marie von Sievers to attend a Congress of the Theosophical Society. He would write, at this Congress, it was already taken for granted that a German section of the society should be established with me as the General Secretary.

So far, there had only been a Theosophical gathering place in Berlin, Marie von Sievers, has a German section. have been working in Bologna, Italy, helping a Russian theosophist to establish an Italian lodge of the society, but nothing in Germany. Not yet at least. Steiner would not only be the first head of the German branch, but also of the movement more broadly

in Switzerland and Austro-Hungary. By the time Steiner got back to Berlin, he was also looking at the part of a figurehead. He had shaved his moustache, and he wore a nice new bowler hat. Well, howdy-do? Our little theosophical weirdo is growing up. his teaching would change as well.

On October 8th, 1902, Steiner gave a lecture at the Giordano Bruno Bund, but instead of looking at his audience, engaging with them and asking them questions, he just stared over their heads and preached. He launched into convoluted attacks on spiritualism, claiming that any serious philosophy of life

must be based on scientific method, once again trying to differentiate himself from Blavatsky and the other spiritualists. But he said, you couldn't go too far in the scientific direction either, the trouble with modern science, he said, was that it was too narrow, and this resulted in materialism. But the real task of philosophy was to rise above materialism,

to transform itself into theosophy by introducing the idea of God. And when he was done with his presentation, not one person clapped. They fucking hated it. And Steiner's academic career was now over. But he didn't care. From now on, he would be a lecturing theosophist and a fringe celebrity. In 1904, he would launch a magazine called Lucifer, guessing that raise some eyebrows.

same year. He also saw that same year also saw the publication of the first of Steiner's major occult works, Theosophy, in introduction to the super sensible knowledge of the world and the destination of man. But is it super sensible? Or the exact opposite of that? In the opening chapter, he explained that man is a threefold being, consisting of body, soul, and spirit. Not a twofold being, consistent of body and soul is Christianity taught. According to Steiner, the body is holy material. The spirit, is wholly immaterial, the soul, the bridge between them. Okay. The book continued with a brief account of reincarnation and karma,

the threat of acquired destiny that runs from life to life as man is reborn. Then there was an account of the three worlds, physical soul world and spirit world, including the section on what happens to man after death. According to Steiner, the light field or etheric body dissolves in about three days following death, during which time the ego and astral body see the whole of their past life unfold before them, Pretty fucking cool. Then the ego and astral body enter purgatory,

aka Kamaloka, as he termed it, for a period lasting, for about a third of the lifetime he's just completed, during which the life is relived and re-evaluated. In Kamaloka, humans also experience everything we have ever done during our lives from the point of view of those to whom we did those things. So, for example, a murderer would experience that crime

from the point of view of the person he had murdered. I like that. That's my favorite of his time. teaching so far. Since the astral body would still be capable of feelings, this would create suffering from all the unsatisfied desires and lusts that were never sated during the physical body's lifetime, finally purified by this suffering, the astral body would dissolve after Kamaloka, and the disillusion of the astral body, the ego then rises to the spirit world and can now choose its next life and how to make restitution for wrongs committed in previous ones.

Apparently we choose a destiny we will live through the body we will inhabit as well as our parents and the people we will know in the next life on earth. We often choose to associate with people we have known in previous lives. And all of that means that it is pointless to feel like life is unfair. Because you fucking chose this shit, motherfucker. But if that were true, why wouldn't everyone just choose to be attractive, rich, and successful? Don't worry about it. Actually, he had an explanation for that.

Apparently, the spirit's aim is its own evolution, not just being some rich hot dude or rich hot woman. In fact, being a rich hot person can actually slow your karmic development. And you don't really learn anything. You just hang out and have fun. Which is why most spirits don't choose that. So if you are rich and fucking attractive, right? Like if you're young and wealthy and super hot, you're a piece of shit. Okay? You're a fucking vapid piece of shit. That said, I still wouldn't mind being rich hot in about 23, I don't know, 23, 24, 25, you know, Seems like a great time. The same year that Steiner was coming up with all of this divine wisdom.

Steiner stayed in Lugano, Switzerland, as a guest of the industrialist, Guntar Wagner, and began to spread theosophy there. The easiest thing he found was to get college students on board. And that's who he would focus on, right? Makes sense. For a lot of people, your adult mind, still not fully formed, is the most open to new ideas that will ever be in your life during your college age years. You're the most receptive to new ideas, both good and bad.

it's the first time in your life you're able to really choose and act on and pursue these new ideas as an adult for many people. After meeting with Steiner, one student named Ludwig Kleberg went back to Germany to start a the philosophical group at the University of Munich. Next year, the movement would spread to the University of Marburg. 1905, Steiner lectured extensively on Richard Wagner, the celebrated and highly anti-Semitic composer. The year 1906 took Steiner to the Theosophical Congress in Paris, where he set up a kind of rival, Congress in the suburb of Pasi filling the house with distinguished Russian intellectuals. The next year. Oh my gosh, these people.

The next year, 1907 Steiner lectured in Germany, Czechoslovakia, in Switzerland. But more importantly, he got to host the Theosophical Congress in Munich. Oh, whatever. What an honor. Annie Besant, the stately silver-haired president of the Theosophical Society, was impressed by how Steiner brought a crowd out, but also thought he took you too far. She knew that Steiner's philosophy was, you know, getting further and further from what Belatsky taught. And she told Steiner to either go start his own movement or start teaching the regular stuff.

Stick to the script, buddy. Steiner would do neither. He would continue to teach his own version of theosophy and not present it as a variant. Throughout 1908, Steiner continued to travel and lecture throughout Europe. By October, the number of Steiner groups had increased from 28 that previous spring to 37. the next year Steiner published a cult science and outline, which mostly detailed his beliefs about old Saturn, old sun, old moon, and their revolutions. Also took the time to take a shot at the criticism he was getting from the wider

theosophical society, mentioning that he had studied physics and chemistry, thank you very much, and the philosophy of Kant, that he had written books on Gerta, and that anyone acquainted with super-sensual research would recognize that he has tried to communicate only what is permitted, although he added that maybe in the future he would be allowed by the ancients to say more. Jesus Christ. He definitely did have more to say. For Steiner 1909 was a crucial year in the history of the German theosophical movement, being the beginning of a now seven-year cycle.

Oh, so many sevens with the theosophists. He would declare that 1909 marked a very special time in which those who wished to be close to Christ could achieve it in a quite different way than that of previous times. This was because there was a new action of Christ in the etheric world. And what exactly does that mean? Everybody say it with me. Don't even worry about it.

In Steiner's life, the year 1910 was as hectic as previous years, beginning with lectures in Scandinavia, then Berlin, then in Cologne, Stuttgart, Munich, finally in Vienna. After that, he traveled to Sicily, lectured in Rome on the intervention of great personalities who share in our Earth evolution. There he met a British painter named Harry Collison. who became an anthroposophist and went off to found societies in America, Australia, and New Zealand. Back in Berlin, Steiner spent a few weeks dashing off a play called the Portal of Initiation, a mystery drama, that's capital M mystery, which was presented in August at the Munich Theosophy Congress. All the actors were amateurs trained by Marie Fonsevers. The play was performed before an audience of 2,000 people.

Drama critics, not invited. This was because the play to anyone who was not sued. super into theosophy would be very fucking confusing and boring and terrible. Steiner would write for mystery plays. In all, uh, dry affairs where characters stood around and argued at enormous length about reason and spoke sentences like, with your last words, I am in full agreement, or the weight of this objection I can feel. Sounds painful.

Uh, the presentation and design of the mystery dramas led Steiner to think more deeply about the problem of art in general, or at least what he perceived to be a problem. in his ever-expanding worldview, art, science, and spirituality were all the same thing, and someone had to put that into practice. He was very inspired by a Russian composer named Alexander Scribun, who was attempting to create a new art form that would involve music, drama, dance, even colors blending on a screen, produced by a machine of his own invention called a color organ. When Scriban died of blood poison in 1915, he was working on his greatest project,

a mystery, capital M, that would take place in a temple, and involve hundreds of virgins dressed in white robes. What the fuck is even happening right now? In 1911, Scriban was regarded as one of the most significant artistic figures of his time. Steiner wanted to do his own version of this concept, supposedly prompted by a woman named Clara Meyer, who asked Rudolph about her daughter, her daughter, Lori, pursuing a career in dance or gymnastics.

Clara wanted to know if one could, by means of rhythmic movements, stimulate and strengthen the naturally occurring life forces in human beings. Who are these people? Excuse me, sir. Would you happen to know if one could by means of rhythmic movements stimulate and strengthen the naturally occurring life forces and human beings? Funny you should ask.

I was just thinking about this very important pressing matter. Dear God. Steiner, of course, answered yes. He would call his new style of movement, Eurythmi. Its aim was to, quote, cause a person or group of persons to carry out movements which bring to expression the element of music

in language in visible form, just as the organs of language and song do it in audible form. All right. This is still taught in Waldorf schools today and various Steiner-inspired institutions. According to the Watcombe Hills Waldorf School, urethmi help students to develop concentration, self-discipline, and a sense of beauty,

strengthening a healthy foundation for bodily movement, special relationships, and social development. One woman described her experience learning, Eurythmi on a message board in a different way. Apparently in 2014, she was flying twice a month to a Waldorf school in Madrid for national training. Days spent wearing silk robe sewn according to the instructions of Rudolf Steiner, moving between chanting, meditation, anthroposophical anatomy, and the study of esoteric symbols. Oh, for fuck's sake.

The movements themselves were exactly what Steiner had laid out over a century before and treated not simply, excuse me, as exercises, but as a form of communication with the concept of. kind of entity. Eurythmi, she was told, is a spiritual being. But she came to see it differently. Less pedagogy or therapy, more esoteric discipline. She recalls a heavy atmosphere where adults were treated like children and nobody really got to point of the exercise.

Of course they didn't. This is craziness. When she eventually left, questioning the cost and the purpose, she was told she had failed initiation and had left behind an etheric void in the group. There are some very fucking weird eurythmi videos you can find on YouTube, like this one, called Walking O Health Exercise, Instructional series for Eurythmi. It features a single camera view of two women. I would guess they're probably in their late 30s, 40s. They're wearing long white angelic dresses on a bare stage in front of a stone wall.

They don't ever smile. And performing while someone narrates their movements. Rudolf Steiner describes the O as every rounding of the limbs joining together, combined with the feeling of a loving embrace. The O already brings us into a more intimate relationship with that which we take in. So that the O becomes essentially gestural when not only does the person feel himself, but starting from himself, also feels another thing, or feels another being that he wants to embrace.

The words aren't that dramatic, I know, but the video has the vibe of people kicking off a cult ritual that ends with a virgin being sacrificed, maybe like thrown into a volcano or something, to keep God from smiting a village or to fucking conjure a demon. Back to 1911 now, Steiner had other things to worry about besides dancing.

During this period, relations with the London-based theosophical society were becoming quite strained. What? two different religious institutions not able to agree on how to interpret their made-up insanity, that has to be the first time this has ever happened. Their attention was due largely to Steiner's increasing emphasis on the importance of Christ in theosophic spiritual history. But what ultimately severed Steiner and the theosophical society was something nobody could have

expected, a random Indian child. In 1909, an English theosophist named Charles Webster Ledbeater, known as C.W., the dude who came up with the current understanding of oras and coined the term Akashik record, he was on a beach near Ajar India, when he saw an exceptionally beautiful Indian child. And yes, this occurrence was probably exactly as creepy as it sounds. Led Beater claimed that he was instantly impressed by the boy's remarkable aura, but there may have been something else going on, like pedophilia. Back in 1906, the 14-year-old son of the corresponding secretary of the esoteric section in Chicago,

whom Ledbetter had taken with him to San Francisco on his first lecture tour confessed to his parents that Ledbeater had encouraged him to masturbate in front of him. Almost simultaneously, he had another son of another theosophical official in Chicago accused Ledbetter of the same damn thing.

And apparently while traveling in Toronto, Ledbetter had written a letter to one of these kids in code that when decoded said Glad sensation is so pleasant. Thousand kisses, darling. Ledbeter would claim that he didn't see anything wrong with this. He defended himself to the Theosophical Society President Annie Bessent, writing, So when boys came under my care, I mentioned this matter to them, masturbation,

among other things, always trying to avoid all sorts of false shame and to make the whole appear as natural as simply as possible. Or natural and simple as possible. Oh, yeah, totally. He was just, you know, trying to be sex positive. He was just a good dude, trying to help kids, you know, with sexy oras, not feel sexual shame. Uh-huh. If that were true, a little fully clothed talk about sex, including masturbation, a talk not conducted in some closed bedroom, but ideally around another adult, like one of the kid's parents, with the parent's blessing, a sort of sex education chat, that probably would be the way to do that. But no kid needs to be encouraged to jerk off in front of an adult in private.

That's not sex ed. That's molestation. This guy's a fucking creep. Another accusation came later from Hubert von Hook in Chicago. who as an 11-year-old was proclaimed by Led Beater as a future world teacher. Hubert would say that Led Beater had misused him, meaning he had sexually abused him. Yet another witness would say that it was common knowledge that Led Beater's favorite. An Australian 15-year-old named Theodore St. John slept in his room sharing his bit.

But in the days before social media, in a 24-7 news cycle, the scandal did not last that long. Actually, what am I talking about? These scandals seem to not be taken seriously now, which is fucking insane to me. In 1908, the society voted for Leadbeater's readmission. You know, just fucking bring a Pito back into the fold, sure. And next year, he was off to India, where he met yet another child he found to be beautiful. Okay, that's kind of how it works. They just keep being creepy.

Led Beater persuaded the boy's father, a minor civil servant who held a post in the Theosophical Society in Madras to allow him to take Judu and his younger brother, Nitya into his house. Within a few months, President Annie Besant met Jadu, and was convinced that he was the latest incarnation of the master of Metrea, the prophesied future Buddha and Buddhist thought. Think the second coming to Christ, but Buddha style, and that he would be the savior of the 20th century.

Ledbetter, who, like Steiner, claimed to be able to see people's past lives, wrote an account of the boy's previous 30 lives now, started in 22,662BZE. Uh-huh. When Ledbeter did this, he pissed the German theosophist off. In their view, they'd been the most successful. by far at getting converts. And because the main branch of theosophy was threatened by their success,

they had made up this story to go along with this kid and take like a new direction with new leadership. After listening to his complaints, Basant offered Steiner a deal. If he would accept Krishna-Merti, as a child was now known to the theosophist, as the new Christ, new Buddha and New Christ, uh-huh. Steiner could therefore be, uh, John the Baptist. Uh, what? so many fucking clowns in this fucking tail. So many people born with too much money

who had too much fucking time in their hands who had a deep need to be seen as gurus, people who were just smart enough to convince themselves of so much weird bullshit. Steiner turned her down and that would lead to a theosophical schism. The split was finalized in 1911 when the main branch of the Theosophical Society

founded the Order of the Star of the East, a worship cult, with Krishna-Merti at its center. Cool, cool, cool. Steiner declared that no one who joined the new order could remain a member of his Theosophical Society, and Annie Bessent retaliated by having the Charter of the German Society revoked by the General Counsel. Quick side note on New Buddha, New Christ.

He would live until the age of 90. He would die in 1986. He would also break away from the Order of the Star of the East, the cult that worshipped him in 1929, effectively ending that organization. Krishna Merti then denounced all organized religion. worldwide. He had denounced the notion of gurus in general and denounced the entire, the whole teacher-f follower relationship, vowing instead to work on setting people, quote, absolutely unconditionally free. He wrote numerous books, founded some schools, gave lectures for

most of his life, centered around the philosophical concepts that he had developed. Too much to get into here. We already are talking about enough weird shit. But he does seem to have been a very special person. Gained a lot of admirers. Became very good friends with Aldous Huxley, Irish playwright, George Bernard Shaw called him the most beautiful human being I've ever met. People like martial arts master Bruce Lee, playwright Henry Miller, even a guitarist, current guitarist I love, Derek Trucks, have claimed to be influenced by his teachings. So the Pito C.W. Leadbeater may have seen more in him than just inappropriate attractiveness after all. Returning to Steiner now, in February of 1913, after his split with a theosophis,

he founded a new movement. and it would be called Anthroposophy. Right? We've talked about us already, the Greek words, human and wisdom. At its core is the idea that Steiner had advocated for years now that there was an objective spiritual world that human beings could come to know

through disciplined, inner development, and explore in a systematic, precise way with science, or like with science. To promote this new movement, Steiner undertook nine foreign lecture tours, wrote a new mystery drama, The Souls Awakening, supervised the first person,

presentation of Eurythmi in public and started condemning the consumption of both meat and alcohol. Dude had no shortage of opinions about no shortage of things. His biggest project was a physical one, though, the new headquarters for the new anthroposophical society. The obvious choice for location was Munich, Germany's artistic capital, but Stuttgart, which had a large Steiner society, was a strong rival. Then, to everyone's surprise, the Munich authorities turned down the plan to build an anthroposophical society headquarters in theater.

Fortunately, an alternative had already presented itself. A Swiss anthroposophist, Dr. Emil Grosheins, had purchased a hill at Dornak in Switzerland, and he volunteered this place to be the spot for the new headquarters. Steiner's first creation would be the theater. Here, too, Steiner's ideas about nature got involved. The idea was to create a building, indeed a temple, that looked as if it might have grown from the ground like a tree. It's actually going to end up looking kind of like a helmet, though.

the building will be called the Gertianum It's just a made-up word The Oh my God Gertainum The Gertadum Like from Gerta

And the foundation stone was laid September 20th, 1913 It's a very fucking weird building Like weird looking Architects created a large Very unusual double dome wooden structure over a curving concrete base Stain glass windows

We're added for color Inside painters would decorate the ceiling with murals depicting the history of human evolution and sculptors carved large columns with images of human transformation. Steiner was hoping to complete

the Strange Temple by August of 1914 so it could be used to present his fifth mystery drama which he still had yet to write. Unfortunately, his young society was running out of money, so Steiner quickly organized

a series of lectures emphasizing the importance of the new headquarters for the future salvation of humanity. And that crazy claim worked. People gave their money. Right?

Oh man, people love to get grifted. Some of them also literally gave up their jobs, moving to Dornack to help build the temporal slash theater. And by April of 1914, the wooden framework was in place. Everyone figured that it would be ready by the big celebration in August. But then history would intervene. When the Archduke Franz Ferdinand was assassinated at Sarajevo, June 28th, 1914,

a chain reaction of alliances began declaring war across Europe. And it became increasingly clear that the August festival would not take place. Right? Bummer. Humanity is doomed. The new headquarters for the future salvation of humanity will sit empty. We're all very lucky to be alive right now. When the war broke out, Steiner was on his way to Beiroit. He rushed back to Dornack, found an area in chaos, guards on every bridge, soldiers

marching, railway stations, jam with people. With the aid of an anthroposophist, who was also a railway official, Steiner and Marie von Sievers, whom he would marry later that year, were hastily pushed into a compartment of a train in Stutt, Gart. Hours later, they were back across the Swiss border. And all of this was bad news for Steiner. Not only did the war postpone the completion of the theater, but also people were way less likely to care about all this weird shit when there was an actual crisis taking place. And as the war went on, he would soon have other concerns. Germany had long wanted to go to war with Russia, believing that Russian industrial development was a menace to Germany's interests. but now that Germany and Russia were actually at war,

as Russia had entered on Serbia's side, along with France and Britain, the Kaiser started to have second thoughts. Was it really a good idea to go to war with Russia? Generals were convinced that Germany couldn't lose, including General Alfred von von Schlefen, who created a plan that involved hurling all the German forces against the French, then smashing them in one tremendous blow,

then turning that army against the Russians and smashing those motherfuckers next. Commander-in-chief Helmuth, von Moltka, who was actually the husband of one of Steiner's disciples, this guy was actually really influential, was someone who could have made this plan happen easily. But von Moltka, like the Kaiser, had lost his mojo. He couldn't decide whether to take the von Schlefen plan, which was a gamble, or play it safe by dividing the two armies. So, von Moltka asked to see Steiner. Yes, he wanted the advice of a supposed guru with zero military training,

someone who could consult the Akashik records. But by the time Steiner arrived at Koblenz on August 27th, 1914, the other generals had decided that they had done enough waffling and they'd go ahead with the von Schlefenstein plan, which promptly failed at capturing France and instead put Germany in a failing two-front war of attrition. And people actually blame Steiner for this. Retreating from the public eye now,

Steiner spent the fall and winter of 1914, producing a fully staged version of Gertes Faust. For the winter season, of the following year, 1915, he'd moved on to traditional Austrian Christmas plays, random. Apparently during rehearsals, he told his actors that he thought he'd have been a commercially successful director under different circumstances.

So he's having second thoughts about all this spiritual dabbling as if he hadn't done it to share genuine spiritual truths with the world, but instead was just trying to get rich and famous the entire time. Now on to 1916, according to Steiner's theory of seven-year cycles, 1916 marked a new beginning for him. He had devoted the last seven years to blending art and anthroposophy. Now in a world divided by war, he felt it was time to turn his thoughts to social questions. Early in 1917, as it became clear that Russia was drifting towards social revolution with the Bolsheviks,

a distinguished anthroposophist, Count Otto Lerkenfeldt, asked Steiner for his views on social reconstruction after the war. The two sat together for three-fold days, discussed the idea of the three-fold Commonwealth. basically expanding Steiner's ideas about the collaboration between mind, body, spirit, to society at large. Then with the aid of another anthroposophist, Count Ludwig Polstah Hoytitz, the three drew up a memorandum of their vision for society that they planned to send to all of Europe's prominent statesmen, including the Allies. They actually got this shit into the hands of Polster Hoytits' brother, who was the chief counter for the emperor of Austria, who had inherited the throne after Franz Ferdin's assassination, but nothing more would become of it.

Guessing the chief councilor just crumpled it up and threw it in the trash. This was probably the case, because what Steiner was recommending was basically anarchism. In his plan, the state would have less authority, and his only obligation would be to ensure that all citizens had equal rights. It wouldn't play any role in regulating the economy or in education. Oh, and businesses wouldn't make any profits. They would just supply people with what they needed.

most importantly to Steiner the new state's cultural leaders would fertilize economic life with new ideas in exchange for being taken care of by the state so Steiner wanted a handout for wax and philosophic he wanted to be able to focus on his bullshit

without the hassle of need to monetize it I didn't bother him that European leaders didn't go for it though he still prophesied that the threefold Commonwealth would exist within 40 years to that end he published the threefold commonwealth and undertook yet another massive lecture tour.

But this time, nobody wanted to listen to him. He lectured mostly in Germany, whereby the end of World War I, nearly half the population was starving. The German currency, the mark had collapsed into worthlessness thanks to interwar hyperinflation. In other words, people were focused on survival, not on adopting fringe political theories

or musing about fucking root races. Intellectuals, they didn't want anything to do with him either. After the Russian Revolution, the German communists, who once might have felt some sympathy for Steiner's idealism, felt that their moment had come, and they were intolerant of half-baked anarchists who thought we could all just be buddies if we tried really hard.

Also, both the German communists and Steiner now had a new enemy rising German nationalist star Adolf Hitler. The Austro-Hungarian monarchy of Steiner's youth and middle age had governed a vast ethnically and culturally diverse empire. National socialism, by contrast, would treat any mode of thought outside the world. the narrow boundaries of a German identity as a threat. And Steiner, with his mushy, gushy, convoluted, fever, dreamish, everyone is part of the same

spiritual energy based on different epics and races and types of spiritual and material bodies, astral vibrations, crystal frequencies. Remember when the Atlanteans died in that fucking wizard war, blah, blah, blah, was a persona non-Grada. Then in 1919, a political theorist of national socialism, Dietrich Eckart, attacked Steiner in writing and suggested that he was Jewish. Two years later, Adolf Hitler himself attacked Steiner on multiple fronts, including again that he was Jewish or at least a tool for the Jewish people. This was weird because back in 1919,

Steiner had financed the publication of and wrote a foreword for the book, The Entente, Freemasonry, and the World War, which has been called a now classic work of anti-Masonry and anti-Judaism. Guessing he wasn't anti-Semitic enough, though. The publication advanced a conspiracy theory that claimed that World War I was the result of Freemason and Jewish masterminds who had colluded to destroy Germany. That same old fucking trope. Publication that was actually later received enthusiastically by the Nazis.

So was Steiner a white supremacist? Yeah, actually. Even today, Steiner's racial theories are a source of ongoing controversy between anthroposophists and outside scholars and critics, with Steiner's defenders typically denying that his voluminous published works contain any racist elements. The controversy exists mostly because of how theosophistic, be in general thinks about race. Helena Blavatsky believed that, quote,

the inferior races represented the lowest specimens of humanity with brains devoid of intellect, according to her own writings, writings that he based, Steiner based his shit on. She held that the lowest races of men were the senile representatives of lost archaic nations, whose extinction is a carmic necessity. The Aryans, on the other hand,

represented the final adjustment of the human organism, which became perfect and simple. symmetrical only in the fifth race. Easy to understand right now how many of the Nazis or why many of the Nazis, you know, like we're occultists with all this shit floating around. Following Blavatsky, Steiner held that a succession

of five root races had arisen in the distant past, Polarians, Hyperboreans, Limerians, Atlantians, and Aryans. He'd present the story of human evolution as the progression of a small, racially advanced group, progressing into the next era while the great mass of backward

races declined in their population. populations. In Steiner's words, ever since the Atlantean race began slowly to disappear, the great Aryan race has been the dominant one on Earth. You know, so pretty blatantly racist. According to theosophical teachings, the Aryan root race was to give way to a sixth race in the distant future when physical distinctions will play a less prominent role, so not as racist later, I guess. So the, theosophy is racist now, but like, but it won't be later. Okay. The ideological legacy that Steiner inherited from classical theosophy not great when it came to race, and he'd carry their thoughts into his own teachings. For example, in a lecture from 1905,

he began talking about interracial unity, but then immediately shifted to an emphasis on racial difference, stressing how different the natural abilities, how different the talents of the individual races are. Steiner went on to elaborate the profound differences among, quote, the Negro race, the Mongol race, and the Caucasian race. The last of which Steiner identified as, quote, the truly civilized race. And that sounds like white supremacy. His way of reconciling this message of division with one spiritual unity was to imply that the spirit wanted to become better and better as it progressed through different lives, and so it would eventually become white. Uh-huh.

But he also did say in a very cringy way that since a white person's soul was once a not, non-Ary in person, we should all aspire to universal brotherhood regardless of race. And this at least was not Nazi approved. In 1922, a lecture Steiner was given in Munich suddenly turned to chaos when a series of stink bombs went off and the lights cut out. In the confusion, a mob of people rushed to the stage, apparently trying to attack Steiner, and he barely managed to slip away through a back door. Shit was getting intense. Unable to guarantee his safety, Steiner's agents had to cancel the rest of his lecture tour. The 1923

Bircholpuch, Hitler's failed attempt to seize power, convinced Steiner that getting out of Germany was the right idea. But the whole thing had taken a toll on the 62-year-old. Increasingly frail and ill, he still continued to lecture, sometimes giving two, three, even four speeches daily for different courses he was leading. Many of those would be collected into the 1924 book, Carmic Relationships. In that book, he argued, amongst other things that in an earlier existence, Karl Marx was a warlike Frenchman, who often went off plundering his neighbors. Totally. One day, previous life, Marx, came back and found that his own house and lands had been seized by another noble. He was forced to become this nobles vassal. After a couple of centuries, these two were reborn as Marx and Engels. And Marx's bitterness at having his land

seized would seem to explain why he came to write Das Capital. Uh-huh. While all of this was happening while he was being targeted by Nazis and lecturing Stein still had several projects to manage. Let's start with medicine. Did you know that he was a doctor? no. He wasn't. He had a doctorate in philosophy. He'd received that back in 18-19-19-century from the University of Rostock for his dissertation, discussing 18th and 19th century German philosopher Johann Fictas, concept of the ego. Nevertheless, despite no practical medical training, back in the late 1910, Steiner had started to work with physicians to create a new approach to medicine. Then in 1921, a group of pharmacists and doctors came together under Steiner's guidance

to form a pharmaceutical company called Walida. and still around. Today, Walita distributes natural remedies and beauty products around the world. Its annual revenue is close to 500 million euros. It employs over 2,500 people. Steiner, one of its founders. Around the same time, Dr. Itha Vegman founded the first Anthroposophic medical clinic in Arlesheim, Switzerland.

At Vigman's request, Steiner would regularly visit the clinic and personally suggest treatment plans for individual patients. And these recommendations were not based in any medical knowledge because he had none. As I mentioned up top, Steiner believed that sickness was primarily due to the body, working out its karma from past lives. So while it could appear like someone had, I don't know, lung disease or an ulcer or something, you couldn't treat those conditions according to some standard textbook because that would miss the deeper karma cause.

Practitioners of what came to be known as anthroposophic medicine, often abbreviated as AM, were therefore trained to assess what Steiner called the patient's particular state of soul and spirit before determining a course of treatment. Uh-oh. More often than those treatments

would involve diluted materials similar to homeopathy, like gold, silver, copper and iron, quartz of sulfur, various plans that Steiner thought had special powers. One of the most well-known AM treatments from that last category is mistletoe.

In 1920, Steiner proposed mistletoe as a cancer treatment under the name Iskador. His reasoning was interesting. According to Steiner, a mistletoe is a parasitic plant, and he saw cancer as a kind of parasite in the human body, fair. Therefore, he believed the plant could counteract the disease, and if he would have been right, no more cancer. Of course, it's not that simple. He also taught that the plant's power depended on cosmic forces, like the positions of the sun, moon, and planets. so it had to be harvested at astrologically significant times. And this is blatant fucking whackaddle quackery.

But still today, Iskador continues to be promoted by the Society for Cancer Research, Arlesheim, Switzerland, an organization, of course, strongly connected to Steiner's work. And to be clear, there is literally no scientific basis for Iskador curing cancer. Some experiments have suggested that mistletoe can boost the immune system overall. Others have suggested it could be helpful in killing certain kinds, of cancer cells, but most of the research that claims that mistletal therapy is effective does not conform to double-blind experiment standards, because anthroposophists do not believe in double-blind experiments, since every illness is believed to be caused by an individual's personal spiritual

journey. And a double-blind study, by the way, is a rigorous research method, often used in clinical trials, where neither the participants nor the researchers know who's receiving the active treatment and who's receiving placebo. This technique eliminates bias from both subject to expectations and investigator behavior, ensuring that the results are objective. It is the best way to conduct a study

on the efficacy of medicine and anthroposophists don't believe in it. Pretty convenient. Still, mistletoe-based cancer drugs are widely used in Europe, especially in German-speaking countries because of Steiner. In 2002, nearly half a million

mistletoe-based prescriptions were paid for by the German health insurance or by German health insurance. And in 2006, there were reportedly around 30 types of mistletoe extract on the market. From this, you can probably infer that AM spread throughout the 20th century, and you would be right. A 2017 report estimated that there were approximately 2,000 anthroposophic doctors worldwide and suggest that anthroposophic medicinal products are prescribed by more than 30,000 physicians. There are hospitals, outpatient clinics, rehabilitation centers, and sanatoria operating under an

anthroposophic model in countries like Germany, Switzerland, Sweden, the Netherlands, Great Britain, Italy, the U.S. and Brazil. Seems like the attitude of established medical institutions, actual reputable ones, is to try to at least regulate them a little bit, but basically let them do their own thing. Who, the World Health Organization, for instance, has published training benchmarks for AM as part of its effort to standardize education in traditional and complementary medical systems globally. In Germany, anthroposophic medicine, has been legally recognized as a distinct special therapy system under the National Medicines

Act since 1976, the same status as herbal or homeopathic medicine under German law. But that doesn't mean that these hospitals are completely regulated or completely safe. During the COVID-19 pandemic, Steiner hospitals in Germany became notorious amongst healthcare authorities for forcing quack remedies on sedated hospital patients, some of whom were critically ill. Remedies included ginger polstices, and and homeopathic pellets that supposedly contained the dust of shooting stars. Uh-huh, seriously, star dust pellets. Being used in places billing themselves as hospitals.

There's more we can say about Steiner's approach to medicine, but for now, let's move on to his next project, founding a school. By the late 1910, Steiner still had not given up on his societal reconstruction idea, and he started giving lectures to factory workers about his plans for the three-fold society. No fucking idea with those workers We're supposed to do with that information On April 23, 1919, he gave one of those lectures

to the workers of the Waldorf Historia Cigarette Factory in Stuttgart, Germany, and in that lecture, he would mention the need for a new kind of comprehensive school. This was actually something that the factory's owner and director in anthroposophists, named Emil Molt, had been thinking about for a while,

and he'd ask Steiner if he could help set it up. Steiner, of course, happy to oblige. He would specify for conditions for his new school. One, that the school will be open to all children. Two, that it'd be co-educational, meaning boys and girls would both attend. Three, that it would be a unified 12-year school. And four, that the teachers would have primary control of the school rather than administrators with minimum interference from the state or from economic sources. At the end of August, 17 candidates for teaching positions attended what would be the first of many pedagogical

courses sponsored by the school. Twelve of these candidates were chosen to be. the school's first teachers. School opened, September 7th, 1919, with 256 pupils in eight grades, 191 of the pupils were from the factory families, while the other 65 came from interested families from Stuttgart, many of whom were already involved, of course, with anthroposophy to some degree or another. By 1926, there would be more than a thousand pupils attending the first Waldorf school, and the model would soon spread, to Cologne, Germany, to Kings Langley, England, the Hague, Netherlands, Basel, Switzerland, Oslo, Norway, and more. Today in the speaking world, there are about 200 Waldorf schools in the U.S., 70 in Australia and New Zealand, 40 in Great Britain, 30 in Canada, and these make up just a quarter of the Waldorf schools in the world.

Most of them are in Europe, particularly in Germany, not surprisingly, in Switzerland. The majority of Waldorf schools are independent, so each school may have different structures and policies, but Steiner outlined a basic format. He divided childhood development into stages with special kinds of learning for each stage. In the first age, from birthday to about age six or seven, Steiner thought the kids learned primarily through imitation, empathy, and direct experience. Instead of worksheets or formal lessons, Steinner thought the best thing for young kids to do

would be immersed in real meaningful activities, you know, things like bacon bread, gardening, cleaning, storytelling, and making art. And I don't have a problem with that at all. To tailor their approach to students, teachers use different categories, not gifted or talented categories, but ones based on the classic four temperaments, melancholic, sanguine, phlegmatic, and choleric, you know, the classic four temperaments. Each of these temperaments in Steiner's view gave the kids different abilities. Colerics, according to him, were risk-takers.

Phlegmatics tended to be calmer. Melancholics were sensitive or introverted, while sanguens didn't tend to take things too seriously. To support this wholesome atmosphere, parents are usually asked to keep a media-free environment at home. That's quite the ask in 2026. One Olympia-Washington area, Waldorf School's handbook, stated that lunches must be packed in a basket, not a lunchbox, with two cloth napkins and a ceramic cup. Great call. I mean, we all know that metal lunchboxes. Fuck kids up. The second stage ran from about age 7 to 12 or 13. At this point, Steiner believed children learn best through rhythm, imagery,

and artistic expression. This would be the time around when kids started learning, but not just to check it off the list. In Steiner's view, reading was not an accomplishment in itself. It was a vehicle to immersion in visual arts, music, drama, movement, and foreign languages. The third stage is secondary education, and that begins when students are 14 years old.

This is the first time kids are taught academics in the way that conventional education thinks about them, right? Science, math, history, etc. And all this might sound concerning, and it is, but not for the way you. might think. One of the biggest concerns people raise about Waldorf schools is the lack of transparency. Former students and parents often say they did not fully understand how closely the curriculum and classroom practices would be connected to Anthroposophy. For their part,

Waldorf schools generally maintain that Anthroposophy serves as a philosophical foundation for the pedagogy rather than the primary content being taught in the classroom. Anthroposophy is never woven into the curriculum at all, said Scott Albert, an admissions coordinator at the Princeton-Waldorf School in Princeton, New Jersey. It is simply given the teacher a backdrop from which to work. Most families have recognition of a spiritual energy, but it doesn't play itself out in the classroom. But is that true? Not really. For one thing, Waldorf's theory about, say, delaying reading until age seven or academics until age 14 is based wholly on Steiner's spiritual principles, not science. Many parents say that this was not

made clear to them when they started exploring alternative education, that they thought it had a scientific basis behind it. So already the anthroposophy is woven in, and it goes further than that. As the New York Times explained in 2000, Steiner believed that people experience a type of reincarnation every seven years, beginning with the physical birth and ending at the age of 21, when the spirit of a human being is fully developed and continually reincarnated on Earth. As a direct consequence, at traditional Waldorf schools, certain subjects are taught at times that he thought best coincided with these changes. Students also remain with the same instructor for for periods of about seven years, a technique known as looping.

And some administrators have gone on record to say that the ultimate goal of Waldorf education is to lead kids through the stages of reincarnation, not to provide an idyllic atmosphere for learning. One woman who went by Nancy Frost in a 2007 article said, I heard in a faculty meeting that there were many important souls waiting to reincarnate in this century and that they would only be able to do so if there were enough Waldorf schools. By the end of the year I taught there, I was completely convinced that Waldorf constituted a cult-like religious movement which concealed its true nature from prospective parents. And back in 1999, Eugene Swartz, a respected Waldorf master teacher and former director of teacher training at Sunbridge College in Spring Valley, New York, explicitly said that Waldorf education was intended to convert kids to anthroposophy. I send my daughter to a Waldorf school so that she can have a religious experience.

When we deny that Waldorf schools are giving children religious experiences, we are denying the basis of Waldorf education. The time has come for us to stop pussyfooting around theories that will sound strange if we tell parents what we are really doing. Tell everybody what we are about. The day they walk into the school, let them know it is our responsibility to share with the parents those elements of anthropology, which will help them understand their children and fathom the mysterious ways in which we work. Yes, we are giving the children a version of anthropology in the classroom, whether we mean to or not, it's there. Schwartz was fired right after making these public remarks.

Critics of Waldorf schools thus say that all of this stuff that sounds like it's about unlocking kids' creativity, having them paint, sing, dance, et cetera, is not about letting their minds run free at all. It's about closing them. And the Waldorf School in Stuttgart wasn't the only school Steiner developed in the 1920s. The School of Spiritual Science of the Anthroposophical Society was founded in 1923 as a further development of his earlier esoteric school, which he started back in 1904 during his long split from Theosophy. The school of spiritual science would carry on Steiner's work and applying

spiritual insights to practical life, including agriculture, science, and the arts. Let's talk about agriculture again. 1924, group of farmers concerned about the future of agriculture requested Steiner's help. Steiner put together a lecture series on how to increase soil fertility without chemical fertilizers or pesticides. Some things he advocated for would form the tenants of organic farming, right, like rotating crops, using manure, his fertilizer. Others were pretty fucking out there. For one thing, he advised farmers to bury ground quartz stuffed into the horn of a cow, said to, which was supposed to be done so they could harvest, quote, cosmic forces in the soil. Another preparation, number 505. Consistent of oak bark, which should be chopped in small pieces,

placed inside the skull of a domesticated animal, surrounded by peat. buried in the ground in a place near rain runoff. Very specific. There's number 502. Yarrow blossoms stuffed into the bladders of red deer, which are then placed in the sun during summer, buried in the ground during winter, then retrieved in the spring.

What the actual fuck? To test these methods, Steiner created the agricultural experimental circle of Jesus fucking Christ. This name, check out this fucking name. He created the act. Agricultural experimental circle of the anthroposophical farmers and gardeners of the general anthroposophical society, fuck you. Which would attract about 800 members throughout the 1920s and spread biodynamic agricultural principles across Europe.

Today, its largest certification organization is called Demeter International, started by the Anthroposophis in 1927. And now back to Steiner, as we've established in the early 1920s, he had a lot of irons in the fire. And soon something else would be on fire. On New Year's Eve 1922, Steiner delivered a lecture at the Gerté, Gertianum, at his fucking stupid building. And the crowd trickled out around 10 p.m. Soon after, a watchman noticed smoke coming from the building.

Anthroposophists ran inside to rescue sculptures and paintings, but that was about all they could do. By the morning, all that was left of the building was his concrete foundation. The fire had apparently started inside a wall, meaning it was probably electrical in nature. this of course crushed Steiner he was overheard muttering to himself much work in many years but he wouldn't let this stop him next day he announced the play scheduled for that afternoon would continue just in a new venue that evening's time to give a lecture in a nearby workshop

he would also design a brand new gertayanum gertianum and most of this would be uh this one would be made of concrete but still something was weighing on him on a january 23rd 1923 lecture he told the anthroposophical ah fuck anthroposophical society that it was losing its sense of inner purpose. People, he said, has started premature undertakings and failed to follow through. To combat this,

he started drafting up a complete reorganization of the society and went on another lecture tour, visiting Switzerland, Germany, Czechoslovakia, England, Wales, Austria, Holland. Dude had a lot of energy. He was also writing his autobiography, which was initially released

in weekly parts in the periodical, the good... There was a periodical called... Periodical called the Gert-Tay... on him. I fucking hate some of these words so much. Now he was exhausted. When he returned to Dornack in September of 1924, he was a dying man.

On September 28, 1924, he gave the first part of a two-part lecture, but when members who came to hear the second part arrived, they were shocked to hear he was sick. They figured he'd be back at it in a few days, but he wouldn't. From late September till March of 1925, he was unable to leave his bedroom,

which, of course, he knew what happened, as foretold in the Akashik records, which he of course accessed at will. Rather than go to his apartment, Steiner opted to be cared for in a primitively equipped studio, not much more than a wooden barracks, where he had once carved statues.

There he still continued to work. A friend brought in his correspondence every day. He dictated replies to letters and continued to write his autobiography by hand. He told Marie he was getting better. He'd be back to work soon, but he wouldn't. On March 30th, 1925, he died of an unknown illness at the age of 64, as written in the records.

in the absence of a cause. You'd think he would have given his loved ones a little heads up, a little detailed explanation of what was to come, or what was to come. His wife, Marie, claimed that Steiner had taken on the karma of the members of the anthroposophical society, but since they had not made enough progress on the society's goals, they'd fucking killed him.

Yeah, that was probably it. Others had some other interesting interpretations. In the draft, she prepared for a lecture about Steiner in 1931, Dr. Itha Vigman, Steinner's main physician, said he died because the Gertium, Gertanum had burned down, right? His building burned down and that killed him. Through the burning of the Gertainum, I think that's how he said, Gertainum, which shattered his physical body. There was a powerful loosening of the S, oh, my fucking God.

There was a powerful loosening of the etheric body, even a separation of the atheric from the physical. His health became ever more delicate. And then she added, well, why? did he get sick? The delicate physical body was left behind too much and for too long by the soul spiritual, which was working in its very own homeland. The physical body was left to its weight and physical laws so that it became weaker and digestion failed. Okay, well, there you go. That totally cleared it all up. Thank you, doctor. Steiner had once been treated for an enlarged prostate. Some think he died of prostate cancer, but no fucking way. His delicate physical body was left behind

by his soul spirit. They had to work in his homeland. That makes way more sense. And we could go on and on about various anthroposophy related groups, institutions, and practices, but I'd rather fucking shoot myself in the face. I've had enough.

It was fun for a while, but I've had enough. So let's get out of this timeline. Good job, soldier. You've made it back. Barely. Rudolph Steiner, the founder of Anthroposophy, and so much more.

though his legacy has been preserved somewhat troublingly, but also somewhat nobly in successful Waldorf schools across the globe, most people really haven't heard of Steiner in the same way they've likely heard of other occultists and founders of the modern New Age spiritual movement. He wasn't a rebel or a social outcast, he wasn't hopped up on sex magic, wasn't climbing mountains to perform strange rituals that we know of at least. Indeed, for much of his life, he was an academic. He went to university, studied philosophy, worked at the Gerta Archive,

gave history lectures and was really good at it. Just like he was good at teaching, little autospect, the boy who had been born with hydrocephalus. Indeed, had he been born higher class with more access to a classical education, as possible, Steiner might have become a figure like Sigmund Freud or Carl Jung. Both men developed sweeping theories

about the human condition. Both were criticized. Both are still regarded today as major intellectual figures. Maybe Steiner could have joined their ranks. Or maybe not. Maybe his ambitions, his desire to construct a total explanation for human life, from education to medicine, to agriculture, to reincarnation, to everything.

Maybe that was always going to push him beyond the boundaries of academia and just sanity. Either way, Steiner founded Anthroposophy, the Anthroposophy Society in 1912, which claims today to have a whopping 42,000 members. Some estimates have it at over 50,000 members. So how was Steiner so successful? I would argue it's a combination of a couple of things. First, it's widely acknowledged that Steiner, you know, drew heavily. from plagiarized, from Madam Helen Blavatsky's Theosophy.

In many cases, he adopted core cosmological structures and reframe them, changing terminology, reorganizing spiritual hierarchies, and adding his own elaborations. Whether you call that plagiarism, adaptation, or reinvention depends on how critically you feel about Steiner, but the intellectual and or whack-a-doodle debt is hard to ignore, and it's also hard to ignore how this worked in Steiner's favor. Theosophy already had an audience, and with that audience, it had momentum. Steiner inherited a ready-made spiritual frame, and modified it just enough to carve out his own lane that would keep people excited and interested. Second, he situated Jesus. Well, two Jesus is actually Jesus and Jesus, and actually kind of a

third, a cosmic Jesus. At the heart of human spiritual evolution, something that would have made many people who would have ordinarily been, you know, wary of occultism feel a bit more at home, hearing language, hearing terms they were familiar with. Anthroposophy didn't try to fight Christianity as theosophy did, instead it presented itself as the deeper esoteric truth behind Christianity. Third, he framed Anthroposophy as a spiritual science, legitimizing it further because it has the word science in it. He didn't claim to be a mystic, guessing it hidden truths. Instead, he claimed he was observing spiritual realities with the same rigor as a scientist as they used to observe the physical world. In other words, his beliefs were not beliefs.

They were research. He wasn't rejecting modern modernity. he was claiming to complete it. These three factors allowed Steiner to shape institutions which still operate on this basis today. No matter what you think about Waldorf schools, a common thread runs through them. Beliefs are often presented

as though they were grounded in research when they're just not. We can't blame Steiner for all this of course. Many thinkers of his era proposed theories about the brain, the body, education, society that later proved incorrect or at least incomplete. What he can be held responsible for, though,

is the way he framed his ideas and institutionalized them in forms that continue to grant him enduring almost unquestioned authority over 100 years after his death. Strange guy. Complicated legacy. He did some really great things. I mean, he is considered the founder of the modern organic farming movement. That is good.

His Waldorf schools have helped a lot of kids excel intellectually. But he also claims shit that is insane. Like being able to access the Akashik records it will to commune with ancient deities. to understand the history and design of the universe in the most fucking nonsensical ways to profit off of that understanding in a way that reads definitively as a blatant money and power grab grift to me.

He was like the rest of us, I guess complicated, right? But way more complicated than most. He had a little bit of Scientology maker upper, Elron Hubbard in him, but also had a little bit of educational reformer, Horace Mann in him. Had a little bit of Dr. John Harvey Kellogg in him, the Battle Creek Sanitarium Quack,

who was unhealthily obsessed with enemas and masturbation, but also invented corn flakes and other objectively, you know, helpful nutritional foods. And he had a little bit of dead poet society teacher John Keating in him as well. He saved the first kid. He was in charge of tutoring dramatically. He helped get cancer-causing chemicals out of a lot of gardens. His methods have helped thousands of kids fall in love with learning. But he's also probably gotten a lot of people killed by making them think that the root cause of cancer is carmic.

And his notions of the origin and true nature of man in the universe are just so fucking preposterous and nonsensical. They probably helped a lot of people go literally insane, thinking about their experiences with the Akashic records and oras and clairvoyance and whatever the fuck else he was talking about. Finally, holy shit are the roots of the New Age spiritual movement so bat shit insane. Madam Blavatsky, C.W. Ledbeater, Rudolph Steiner. They had no shortage of imagination. So, see, I don't just pick on Western religion. I've yet to dig into the origins of any religion or major spiritual movement that has not been. left me shaking my head and thinking, how the fuck does anyone dig into all this shit and come away thinking, oh, that's nice, feels good to have all the answers, now life makes sense. Hoo! Let's head to some takeaways.

Time shock. Top five takeaways. Number one, Rudolph Steiner was born in 1861 to a telegraph operator and his wife who lived in remote outposts of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. He was an exceptionally bright kid, but the more he immersed himself in philosophy and science, the more dissatisfied he became with what he saw as materialism, the idea that reality consists only of physical matter governed by impersonal laws. Steiner did not think that was true. He thought there was a spirit world, accessible in all of us, that he had felt numerous times

while reading while spending time in nature. This led him to the Theosophical Society, founded by Helena Blovakki, and he quickly became the German branches leading figure. until his ideas became too big for that world as well. Number two, Steiner developed a comprehensive view of human life called Anthroposophy, designed to address the physical, mental, moral, and spiritual dimensions of existence. Borrowing heavily from theosophy, anthroposophy situate individual development within a larger spiritual and cosmic evolution,

suggesting that our growth and choices participate in universal processes, like karma unfolding across multiple lifetimes. On its own, this is not an essential. necessarily harmful, but applying it to areas that demand price, evidence-based thinking like medicine can be problematic. Number three, the first Waldorf School was founded in 1919 and Stuttgart, Germany, originally for the children of workers at the Waldorf Astoria Cigarette Factory. One view of Waldorf schools holds that they are places where kids are free to be kids, where they don't have to adhere to strict timelines and assumptions about what kids should be learning,

but instead get to experiment with creative expression, learning about the natural world, and learn at their own pace. Another view of the schools is darker. Critics allege that parents do not know when they enroll at Waldorf schools how much the curriculum and teaching style is based off anthroposophy and how Steiner's ideas about how kids should be educated

is based off his own esoteric belief system and hasn't been proven to create better outcomes for learning. Some take it a step further, including those within Waldorf schools, like administrators, and say that Waldorf schools are basically recruiting grounds for future anthroposophists. Number four, Steiner died in 1925, but institutions inspired by his teachings, including Waldorf schools, biodynamic farms, and anthroposophical medical practices, continued to grow and spread across Europe, the Americas, Asia and beyond through the 20th and 21st centuries. In terms of cultural impact and organizational longevity, Steiner stands out as one of the most influential and successful occultists in modern history.

And number five, new info. Of course, Waldorf schools, not the only alternative schools out there. and more seem to be popping up every day. One out there is something called Acton Academy, founded by Jeff and Laura Sandifer. Founded in 2009, Acton Academy is now a network of around 250 independent, learner-driven, private microschools focusing on self-directed education, Socratic guidance, and entrepreneurship,

where Waldorf schools purport to meet the needs of kids who need more creativity in their education, Acton Academy claims to make kids more self-driven, hardworking, and confident. Again, seems pretty reasonable, but maybe not. For one thing, the terminology is pretty bizarre. The teachers seem to be called guides or directors. The students are called heroes who are on a hero journey. How it works that the kids, quote, govern themselves. They sign a contract, then they hold each other accountable. Teachers don't tell the kids what to do or when to do it. Kids do, uh, it looks like, a quick glance, whatever they want. I mean, I'm sure they don't do whatever they want, but that general ethos does seem to exist.

cost almost $25,000 a year. The craziest thing, though, is that the teachers aren't allowed to answer, excuse me, the students' questions. They have to answer their questions with more questions so students can find their own answers. In addition, teachers are not permitted to tell the parents how their kids are doing because that could interfere with their hero's journey. Instead, parents are told to ask their kids about how their schoolwork is going and, you know, just trust that I guess kids are not lying because, you know, kids never lie about that kind of stuff. Oh, and discipline is self-directed. students can vote out kids who they feel are disruptive. You get suspended if your classmates think you need to be.

Or you can get kicked out of school because your classmates think so. Sounds like some Lord of the Fly shit. More concerning, no one there has any kind of certificate, or they don't have to have any kind of certificate or degrees related to teaching kids. One commenter on Reddit said, When our school put out an ad looking for new guides, they specifically said no experience necessary. our head guide told me she did not know the difference between perimeter and area when my daughter was working on geometry.

Did my girls have fun? Yeah, it was basically two years of summer camp. But re-entering school where academics are a necessity will be a huge adjustment in transition. Acton academies aren't all run the same way. So maybe some are better than others. Maybe some are more organized. But if you're considering sending your kid to an Acton Academy or a Waldorf school, you might want to dig into it a little bit further than you have.

Time suck. Top five takeaways. The cosmic teacher, Rudolph Steiner, and the occult roots of Waldorf schools, has been sucked. We live in the strangest world. Thank you to the Bad Magic production team for helping making time suck.

Thanks to Queen of Bad Magic, Lindsay Cummins. Thanks also to Logan Keith, helping to publish this episode, designing merch for the store at badmagicproductions.com. Thank you to Sophie Evans for her research. Thanks to the all-seen eyes, moderating the cult of the curious private Facebook page,

the Mod Squad, making sure Discord keeps out running smoothly, and the people over at the TimeSuck and Bad Magic subredits. And now let's head on over to this week's Time Sucker Updates. Adorable MeatSack, Jennifer B, sent in a message to Bojangles at Timesug Podcast.com with the intriguing. My mouth is fucking exhausted from all those words saying. with the intriguing subject line of my mom fuck the milkman. I thought this was too cute not to share.

Jen writes, Hello, King and Queen, a bad magic. Ask kissing. First, as required, I first discovered your podcast after Dan was on the Lights Out podcast. I was hooked after listening to the first scared of death episode. Since then, I've binged the entire Scared to Death and Time Suck catalogs. Just finally got all caught up as of today. Thanks for listening.

You are both fantastic meat sacks. I'm so happy to have found these wonderful podcasts, especially nightmare fuel, all I can say is wow, I've loved every single one, oh, thank you. Hope to one day be able to attend summer camp or crime wave at sea to meet you both in person. Well, I hope so too. I never thought I'd have a reason to write in,

and this is a very short story that came to mind following the Milk Wars suck. But here it goes. When I was a child, I had bleach blonde hair while both my parents, my older brother, were all brunettes. For some reason, my parents would always tell me I got my blonde hair from the Milkman. As I was a small child, I had no idea what a milkman was,

but what that had to do with my hair color. But nevertheless, it was something I heard them say often. So there we are at church one Sunday. I was probably four years old at the time. Just old enough to vaguely remember this when the pastor comes up to our family to greet us. When he was saying hello

to me, he asked where I got my pretty blonde hair from. Naturally, I gave him the answer I'd always heard from the milkman. He laughed. My parents were mortified. I wasn't sure why until years later. There's probably won't make it on the air, but if you read it, I hope it was at least slightly amusing. PSA for parents

of young children, be careful what you say, because in all likelihood, they will repeat it at the worst possible time. Anyways, I appreciate you guys in the work you put into these podcasts. Apologies for the length, but never for the girth. Three and a half out of five stars wouldn't change a thing. Your loyal sucker and creeper, Jennifer B. Oh, man, Jennifer, thanks again for the kind words. Thank for sharing that.

It definitely made me laugh. A fun, cute moment. And yes, man, kids, repeat. I've definitely had my own embarrassing moments over that kind of stuff. Oh, it's really embarrassing when, like, you've been talking shit about, like, somebody. like a family or whatever, and you don't realize that your kids are like in the next room or you forget,

don't think that they're paying attention, and then they will say something in front of that family member, and you're like, oh, whoops, okay. I wonder where they, why did they say that? Okay, now from a very caring meat sack, has some help to offer. My conscience will not allow me

to not share this message. Sweetest Sack Haney is super supportive on Patreon. She's a gem of a human being. This is the first, time I think she's emailed us. She wrote, Dear Dan Lindsay and the bad magic team, my name is Haney. I've been a long

time listener about TimeSuck and scared to death since 2018, also a supporter on Patreon, usually expressed my thoughts through comments there, but felt compelled to write an email after the recent 4B movement suck in hearing the Time Sucker updates. I've thought about reaching out about this in the past, but after you

shared the message from Fern S, and her experiences with healthcare as a trans person, I felt like it was finding the right time. I don't know where she is currently located in the U.S. or what resources she has available to her, but I live in Massachusetts and have worked at a trans health care organization for the last four years as the only human resources employee on staff and wanted to offer sharing resources with her if she wants to have my email address and reach out directly. And I wanted to share this because this is like, this can help

a lot of people. So I wanted to share it here. I know there may be limitations on what is available across state lines, but one in particular that might be helpful for anyone who is needing support to relocate to an area where they can receive this health care and where it is covered by insurance is trans relocation support of Western Mass. And it's T-R-S-W-Mass.com. Just all one word. T-R-S-W-M-A-S-S and then dot-com. I have several coworkers who ended up relocating to Massachusetts because of the discrimination they face and restrictions and gender-affirming health care in their home states. Most recently, as of this week, you may have already heard that Kansas passed legislation, which essentially makes any driver's license void

if it doesn't have someone's sex assigned at birth on it, which is scary for many reasons and definitely giving Nazi Germany vibes. Anyway, this long ramble is also to let you know that if you do decide to ever do an episode on trans health care or even as a potential consideration for your June pride slash pride month charitable donations, I wanted to share a little bit more about the organization I work for. It's a nonprofit called TransHealth, love a straightforward name, L.O.L.

And we are currently the only independent health care center in the U.S. devoted solely to serving trans and gender diverse communities. Not only do we provide clinical primary care and mental health care, but also offer essential community services slash support and advocacy in supporting federal and state laws, protecting trans health care and rights, were a really small organization, but as the recent executive orders have gone out threatening to take away Medicaid and Medicare funding from hospitals who provide gender-affirming care for people under 19,

we're about to have a massive influx of patients coming from those centers all over New England. I work with some of the most amazing people on the planet, many of whom are also trans and non-binary, and I see every day the mounting burnout. We are all faced with since the Trump administration took office. If you'd like to learn a more, a bit more about us, our website is transhealth.org. Just again, one word, transhealth.

And we have a resources-specific page at transhealth.org slash resources. Sorry for the link, but not the girth of this email. I don't even remember where sorry for the length, but not the girth, even comes from. I'm so thankful for all the work you guys do, and this podcast has genuinely been keeping me grounded in recent times. As a side note, I'm currently expecting my first child, due in May,

so he has been right along with me soaking up all the knowledge from this podcast. Well, hopefully it doesn't become an anthra, fucking anthropological, anthroposophical, a fucking Steiner person. Stay weird, stay weird. Hanny.

Hanny, what wonderful information to share for those who need it? Yeah, thank you. Good on you for doing what you do. you know, you're a constant source of light over on Patreon. I see all your posts. Always smile when your name and picture pop up. You're such a good egg.

The best. Nimrod and Lucifina are very excited. For the little meat sack, you're about to bring into the world and thank you again. And now one more from another super caring sack, Marsh, who wrote him with the subject line of child marriage statistics in the United States. Hey, Dan and gang, thank you so much for the work you do. I've been a listener for many years,

but your 4B episode finally prompted me to write you. in. One of the things I appreciate you haven't consistently called out for a long time is how young girls and otherwise A-F-A-B kids are far too often treated like brood mares instead of being raised like, well, human beings. And that this attitude towards women is somehow still rampant, not only worldwide, but here in the USA. I'm not sure if you've covered this already, but are you aware of child marriage laws and stats in the U.S.? I think, I can't remember if I touched on it for sure, so that's why I'm doing it here. If not, this is bad shit insane and so horrific.

And even worse, it just isn't something that people seem to be aware of. Somehow it's actually legal in most of the country, and it happens a lot. In 34 U.S. states, parents are still allowed to marry off their children, actual children, to grown-ass adults, age of consent, and statutory rape laws waived, all while the child still has legal rights of a minor. They can't divorce, sign contracts, or do anything without parental and or spousal permission. The first aid to ban child marriage didn't do so, until 20 freaking 17.

Guess which party is already trying to reverse these laws? This fight is only going to be more relevant as we descend further into today's pig shit abomination of a fascist nightmare, wondering where the hell this is all going to lead. The stats are wild, especially for something you would think, shouldn't be able to happen here.

For example, to pull a quote from the org I have linked below, 315,000 children as young as 10 were married in the U.S. between 2000 and 2021, mostly girls wed to adult men. There was an organization that has been leading the fight against and can explain it all much better than me, they're called Unchained at Last. And it's just Unchained at Last.org,

founded and supported by survivors of child marriage and other forms of forced marriage. I'm not an official rep or anything, and I really hope this doesn't come across as a pitch. They've just been the best source of this info. I've been able to link people too, and I really appreciate the work they're doing. I'm somebody who is personally affected by this.

My initial draft for this message ended up being way too long because my story is so much to explain. I kept it in case you're curious, but in short, I'm a 28-year-old trans guy who survived a spiritual, not actually legal marriage to a scumbag who was at the time 26 when I was 15. What the fuck? This was facilitated by my extremely right-winged family. I suspected it may have been an attempt at conversion therapy in a very ordinary suburban town. It was exactly the kind of nightmare you'd expect.

I finally escaped at 22, was able to begin my transition, get industrial strength, heavy-duty trauma therapy, start building the life and identity of my own. I can attest to how unbelievably damaging this is, and my heart breaks for every person who has not, or never will, have their own fighting chance at self-determination. Ironically, that would have been all, ironically, that would have all been legal and could have been at the time if my parents had actually legally married me to the guy. In a way, I got lucky that they were so secretive about it, because I never had to deal with divorce, and was eventually able to pursue justice against him. Real justice would involve a shovel. But anyway, ah, yes.

with so many families raising their kids in isolation, I am so worried that untold numbers of kids, mostly girls, are being subjected to patriarchal abuse, having their young lives crushed. Awareness is the first step to solving problems. And it is my hope that mentioning this to you might help bring this issue to the forefront of many people's minds. Thanks so much for taking the time to read this.

Thanks for being amazing allies in the fight for basic human decency. I need not share my rage at what this hideous regime has done to so many innocent people already, nor my fear of what they will do to me and my partner who was queer and a second-generation immigrant in their family. But hopefully one day at a time, we can shift the Overton window to some semblance of, I don't know, good, normal, and maybe even one day render obsolete the notion that one human

being has the right to own another. Anyway, take care, be safe out there. Stay radicalized by the absolutely wild notions of empathy and common sense. Love from Portland, Oregon, Marsh, he him, hail Nimrod. P.S., here's something. Epstein began funding some of the U.S.'s biggest anti-trans campaign. after a trans girl, a minor at the time, was one of the first people to publicly accuse him of assault

only for the press to drag her with disgusting and salacious transphobia in response. I feel like I'm taking goddamn crazy pills over here, but it's true. Not many people are talking about that either. Behind the Bastards has a good series on how Epstein had a major influence shaping the online alt-right of today.

It's where I learned this fact in particular. It's almost as though every accusation is a confession. And for every shithead pointing at us queer people and calling us petos for it there are three scandals pointing right back at them. PPS, say you like inappropriately shoehorn, say you like inappropriately shoehorned notes of levity, I'd be remiss if I left you without a music recommendation. If ever listened to King Gizzard and the Lizard wizard, shit's bomb ass. The fight's a long one, good to disassociate every now and then and find joy where we can fucking wild marsh.

Oh, Marsh, man, I checked your information. Yes. Prior to the past decade, very young child brides, were still legally a thing across the U.S. Until 2019, a 14-year-old could be married off by their parents in New Hampshire. Fucking insane. Now the minimum age in states that allow minors to be married is 16 across the board, from what I can gather. Still too young. We ain't homesteading anymore. There's no justification for that shit in 2026.

Fucking none. And you know there are creeps all over wanting to bring the shit back. There are so many fucking, we have a fucking the biggest creep surplus. in society right now than I think we've ever had my lifetime. It's fucking outrageous to me. It's like people, so many people are trying to normalize the most creepy shit ever. So stay vigilant meat sacks. If you don't, these strange times, they're going to get a lot darker.

If you care about women, if you care about kids, if you care about team meat sack, be aware, take action accordingly whenever, however you can. Hail Nimrod. And also, yes, King Gizzard, Marsh, I went to Gizfest, the first one in Buena Vista, Colorado last summer. Actually ran into a time sucker fucking blast out of my mind on acid. I'm going to be back there. If I run into anybody, I'm going to be back there this next year, hoping to take all three nights this August

with some buddies, King Gizzard. If you do see me at King Gizzard, my pupils will be dilated. It is a fucking psychedelic fest. Oh, God, it's great. It is the best disassociation. Literally everybody I ran into at that festival were so kind,

so helpful, empathetic. Everyone was taking care of everyone else. It was so fucking cool. so yes, I love King Gizzard And I've seen him a few times now And always on something And I plan on keeping that going And let's get out of here

I'm suckers I needed that We all did Well thanks for listening to another bad magic productions Podcasts be sure and rate and review time suck If you haven't already Please don't

Don't try and sell me on root races this week I can't take it seriously No Atlantic talk Atlantic Atlantis You can talk about the Atlantic Ocean if you want. Fine. But not Alanis. No Lemurian talk, no Deezis?

Unless you're willing to show up my house wearing a brightly colored robe and a shaved head with a tattoo of your third eye and your forehead, that sounds kind of interesting. Keep on sucking. Now let's end on some of Rudolph Steiner's Theosophical Wisdom. I'll be reading an excerpt from Chapter 3,

Section 4 of his groundbreaking work, Theosophy. Introduction to the spiritual processes in human life and in the cosmos. This chapter is titled, The Spirit in Spirit Country After Death. In the first region of the country of spirit beings, we are surrounded by the spiritual archetypes of earthly things. During an earthly lifetime,

we only learn to know the shadows of these archetypes, which we grasp in our own thoughts. What is merely thought on Earth is experienced in this region, We are surrounded by thoughts as we proceed on our way, but these thoughts are real beings. What we perceive through our senses during earthly life now works on us in its thought form, but the thought appears to us not as a shadow hiding behind the things, but as a living reality that creates the things. We are in the thought workshop, so to speak, where earthly things are shaped and formed.

Everything in the country of spirit. The spirit is full of lively activity and movement. Here the thought world is at work as a world of living beings, creating and forming. We see here now what we experience during earthly existence is shaped and formed. In our physical bodies we experience sense perceptible things as realities. But now is spirits. We experience spiritual formative forces as real. Also present among the thought beings.

Here is the idea of our own physical bodily nature. physical bodily nature, from which we now feel quite removed. We experience only our spiritual being as actually belonging to us. When we do become aware as if in memory of the body we have laid aside, we see it no longer as a physical being, but rather as a thought being. And then the fact that it belongs to the outer world becomes a direct observation. We learn to regard it as something belonging to the outer world as an extension of the outer world. As a result, we no longer consider our own physical existence to be more closely related

to ourselves. So we cease to separate it from the rest of the world. We experience the entire outer world, including our own physical embodiments as a unity. Our physical embodiments merged into a unity with the rest of the world. At this stage, we view the archetypes of physical bodily reality as a unity, to which we ourselves once belonged. Through observation, we gradually learn to recognize our relationship to our unity with our surroundings to realize that we ourselves once were what is spread out around us here so what does it all actually mean don't even fucking worry about it