ABSTRACT
Rudolf Steiner (1861–1925) was a modernist esotericist and the founder of Anthroposophy, arguably the most important esoteric movement of the twentieth century. Much of what has been written about him has been written by his followers or by critics and their assessments differ (Lindenberg 2012; Zander 2011). There is no satisfactory study of his total corpus, which includes 42 books and 6,000 lectures in some 350 volumes, as well as a range of works of artistic creation, ranging from architecture to sculpture to painting to dramaturgy. Moreover, it is only recently that critical editions of his major books have been published (Steiner 2017). Here I nuance attempts to associate him with Gnosticism and highlight his projective account of the bodies of the human being in order to suggest how the theosophical fantastic can have real-world effects.
