1 Introduction

Whereas the fascination of esoteric writers and thinkers with India has received much scholarly attention, their more limited engagement with China remains an understudied chapter in the history of religions.¹ The aim of this article is to present and contextualise the views on China, its people, history, and religion as presented by both the founder of Anthroposophy Rudolf Steiner (1861–1925) and later writers influenced by his legacy.

2 Rudolf Steiner: a Thumbnail Intellectual Biography

Rudolf Steiner was one of the early twentieth century’s most successful esoteric entrepreneurs. The fact that the organisation he founded has become a global movement that could count 44,000 members in fifty countries among its ranks in 2017 (Zander 2019: 16) is only part of the story. The practical applications that he and his close collaborators created – Waldorf schools and biodynamic farming in particular – are enthusiastically embraced by innumerable people who may have no other connection to the Anthroposophical movement and who may have little or no understanding of the concepts that ultimately infuse these applications. Steiner is also one of the more paradoxical figures of the intellectual culture of his time. His biographers tell the story of a talented and bright young man who pursued graduate studies in philosophy and completed a doctoral dissertation in 1891, edited the scientific writings of Goethe (1749–1832), and was fascinated by the work of Friedrich Nietzsche (1844–1900) and Ernst Haeckel (1834–1919).² Having failed to gain a foothold in academia, he shifted direction and after 1900 became a frequent lecturer at the Theosophical Society in Berlin, an organisation he joined in 1902 despite having criticised Theosophy in scathing terms prior to his engagement with the movement. As he swiftly rose through its ranks over the course of some very busy years, he continued his activities as a Theosophical lecturer but also became the leader of the German section of the Theosophical Society, launched a journal (Lucifer Gnosis) to which he contributed a sizeable amount of material, and wrote several books. In these texts, he presented a cosmology, an anthropology, and a method of spiritual cultivation that he claimed could allow one to achieve nearly infallible supersensible insight into a reality normally hidden to others.

A period of gradually increasing conflicts with the international leadership of the Theosophical Society culminated in a break with that organisation in the final days of 1912 and the founding of his own movement, the Anthroposophical Society. From that point on, Steiner insisted that his work was the result of his own clairvoyant abilities and was therefore not indebted to the Theosophists. In addition to the presentations appearing in his books, thousands of lectures that Steiner held until shortly before his death in 1925 outline in painstaking detail his pronouncements on a vast number of subjects, from the climate on Atlantis to the future of humanity many thousands of years from now.³ Although such themes as angels and archangels, karma and reincarnation, the mission of Christ, and the role of various spiritual beings in the unfolding of human history are prominent throughout Steiner’s work after 1902, those inspired by his work have generally opposed the suggestion that Anthroposophy is a religion. Despite his claims of having gained insight into innumerable, highly specific spiritual facts, Steiner and most of those who have actively engaged with his work have also traditionally insisted that Anthroposophy is not a corpus of statements but rather an undogmatic path to knowledge for those who choose to undertake the necessary steps to follow where it leads. The final goal of this particular journey, which only a few have claimed to have achieved, is to gain access to the Akashic records, a Theosophical term denoting a kind of cosmic database recording facts inaccessible to “materialistic” mainstream researchers.

Among the most frequently recurring topics in Steiner’s books and lectures is the history of humanity as seen from the vantage point of his purported clairvoyant perception. The first exposition on this topic comes from his Theosophical days. During the period spanning from the fall of 1902 to the spring of 1904, Steiner read works by Helena P. Blavatsky (1831–1891), Alfred P. Sinnett (1840–1921), Charles Webster Leadbeater (1847–1934), Annie Besant (1847–1933), and other Theosophical authors.⁴ The result of his reading and creative retelling was set out in key texts written during two extraordinarily productive years (1904 and 1905). Most important for the present purposes are two works that originated as essays in Lucifer Gnosis and were published as collected volumes a few years later: Aus der Akaschakronik (From the Akashic Records; GA 11, 1910) and Die Geheimwissenschaft im Umriss (An Outline of Occult Science; GA 13, 1910). Here, Steiner presented his interpretation of prehistory and history. In addition to the more detailed accounts provided in these works, there are presentations of his views on these topics to be found in innumerable lecture cycles held over the span of his career, namely: his Theosophical days; the stretch of time marked by his gradual dissociation from the Theosophical Society; and his Anthroposophical period, which followed the schism.

A broad overview of Steiner’s understanding of history will follow in the next section, but, before proceeding, we need to point out three particular issues that arise when parsing his statements. Firstly, Steiner’s China is not always identical to the manner the country is conceptualised in everyday usage or in history as generally conceived of in non-esoteric contexts. As we shall see, Steiner explained what Chinese people were like ten thousand years ago, many millennia before China or Chinese culture as generally understood existed, and he discussed Chinese religion in terms that bear little, if any, resemblance to the way academics in the study of religion understand it. The very title of our article reflects this by referring to China in the Anthroposophical imaginary rather than the Anthroposophical reception of China.

Secondly, due to Steiner’s apparent penchant for forming neologisms through grammatical processes such as compounding and suffixation, his German is at times idiosyncratic. His descriptions of “the non-Western,” for instance, are commonly phrased by means of such neologisms, where he adds the suffix “-tum” to an ethnic label. Thus, Steiner can refer to “das Chinesertum,” “das Indertum,” or “das Arabertum,” terms seemingly designating to the “essential collective qualities” of the Chinese, the Indians, or the Arabs. Whereas these suffixed nouns resist easy translation, their use can in a sense be seen as a linguistic marker of Orientalism: “das Chinesertum” encapsulates a certain set of qualities inherent in all Chinese people – in other words, their “essential Chineseness” – that a person such as Steiner, who has, according to his claims, reached the highest possible level of spiritual insight, can pinpoint.

Finally, the bulk of Steiner’s oeuvre consists of successive editions of transcriptions of shorthand notes of his more than six thousand lectures. The degree to which the transcribed texts correspond to the lectures he held is a matter for debate. Furthermore, the editors of the Gesamtausgabe have introduced changes as earlier editions of some of these books have been replaced by later ones. The editorial decisions are telling. Helmut Zander (2019: 217) notes that Steiner’s wish to distance himself from Theosophy has led to various instances of this term being replaced by the terms Anthroposophy or “spiritual science” (Geisteswissenschaft). By contrast, a seemingly selective loyalty to Steiner’s original formulations has allowed even the most offensive remarks about the characteristics of various “races” to remain unaltered in successive editions. For instance, the lecture cycle Menschheitsentwicklung und Christuserkentniss (Human Development and Knowledge of Christ; GA 100) contains statements Steiner made in 1907, a time when expressing blatantly racist sentiments would cause very few raised eyebrows. The edition that we consulted for the purposes of this article was printed in 1981, in other words during a period when cultural sensitivities had changed dramatically, but the printed text faithfully reproduces Steiner’s declaration (in the seventh lecture of part II) that Native Americans represent a “primitive” people that – contrary to the Europeans, whom he places on a higher evolutionary level – have “fallen into decadence” (in Dekadenz geraten). To illustrate his point, Steiner drew a diagram, reproduced on p. 245 of that edition, charting the evolution of humanity towards the apex represented by Europeans, with two parallel lines leading off to the right. The line on top is labelled “Native Americans / decadent branch” (Indianer / dekadente Abzweigung), and the lower one “monkey genus / decadent branch” (Affengeschlecht / dekadente Abzweigung). Steiner’s mostly very unflattering opinions about the Chinese appear in a just as uncensored form in the volumes we have had at our disposal.

3 Race and Culture in Steiner’s View of Human Evolution

Macrohistory, to quote Garry Trompf (2013: 375), is “the encapsulation of the human past in a unitary vision,” an all-embracing model that subsumes the entire course of history. Under the first and second generation of the movement’s leaders, Theosophy was an “experimental faith” to use a term introduced by David Bromley and Douglas Cowan (2015: 197–198), a quite malleable corpus of concepts that doctrinally productive people could revise and rework, and Theosophical macrohistory comes across as a set of core assumptions that various Theosophical writers then further developed in various ways.

Blavatsky made claims regarding the existence of highly evolved beings referred to as Masters or Mahatmas in Theosophical parlance who had access to a form of knowledge that transcends what is normally available to the human mind. In 1880, these Masters began to share their insights via an elaborate web of correspondence mostly addressed to Sinnett, a leading member of the movement, that continued to be spun until 1884. In 1883, in the volume Esoteric Buddhism, Sinnett published a systematic account of human prehistory based on letters from the Masters. According to his presentation, the unfolding of cosmic and human history can be divided into distinct stages organised in patterns of seven. For instance, the Earth itself goes through seven cycles of evolution, each called a “round,” and human history on the current Earth proceeds via a sequence of seven “root races,” each of which consists of seven “sub-races.” Blavatsky’s version of this macrohistorical model, which, according to her claims corrected some errors found in Sinnett’s book, appears in her 1888 magnum opus The Secret Doctrine.⁵ Broadly speaking, however, Theosophical authors have generally agreed that human development has followed a sequence beginning with the Polar root race and continuing on with the Hyperborean, Lemurian, and Atlantic root races, after which our own fifth, post-Atlantean root race emerged. In the future, two further root races will appear. Later writers have fleshed out this basic outline with additional details, and some have offered their own spins on it, an example being William Scott-Elliot’s (1849–1919) The Story of Atlantis (1896), an influential account of the seven sub-races of the Atlanteans.

Steiner’s macrohistory, which he began to develop early on in his Theosophical years (from 1902 to 1904), is a variation on the shared timeline. According to his reworking of it, the Earth as it is now is one of seven “planetary stages” (planetarische Stufen). Human history on (the present) Earth consists of a succession of seven races or stages, and here we find the familiar Theosophical terms Polar, Hyperborean, Lemurian, Atlantean, and Aryan as well as the two unnamed future races. Steiner divides the Atlanteans into seven sub-races in a system of classification that is nearly identical to Scott-Elliot’s list. The present, fifth stage is divided into seven cultural epochs: after the Old Indian, Old Persian, Egypto-Chaldean, and Greco-Roman cultural epochs comes our own, identified as the fifth post-Atlantean epoch, after which two more will follow in the future. Each historical stage is superseded by those that follow, although far from all groups of people keep up with these evolutionary advances. Steiner’s use of the names of various cultures or peoples in the designations of the first four epochs signals that they represent the vanguard of humanity. Other groups, by contrast, are described as retrograde or lower on the evolutionary ladder. The sheer fact that China does not figure in the name of a culture epoch speaks of the lowly position afforded to it within his macrohistory.

In addition to the innumerable references to the Theosophical root races in his texts and lectures, he also incorporated into them the then culturally prevalent notion that humanity was subdivided into biological races distinguished by skin colour and other physical features.⁶ Johann Friedrich Blumenbach (1752–1840), to take as an example a model of racial classification that came to be particularly influential in “mainstream” culture, divided humans into five such races – white Caucasians, black Ethiopians, yellow Mongolians, red Native Americans, and brown Malays – and Steiner repeatedly discussed these groups. Another idea widespread in the nineteenth century that came to permeate Steiner’s pronouncements posited that ethnic groups were radically distinct entities, and that each of these was characterised by a particular set of more or less immutable characteristics, sometimes referred to as a “folk soul.”

The Steinerian textual corpus is replete with references to races of various colours, to Asiatic or Oriental people, and to particular ethnic groups. For an Anthroposophist who is convinced that Steiner had access to spiritual truths, the many passages that refer to these categories can be conceptualised as pieces of information that can be harmonised to produce a coherent narrative. However, Ansgar Martins (2012) has meticulously documented the changes over time in Steiner’s racial theories, and the reader is referred to his work for the details. What Steiner’s diverse statements about race have in common is that they conceptualise races as being hierarchically ranked, with white people consistently placed on the highest rung of the ladder.

In a lecture held on August 10, 1908 (the sixth lecture of Welt, Erde und Mensch, or World, Earth, and Mankind, GA 105), the difference between races is explained in terms of the suppleness or hardening of their bodies. According to Steiner’s account, white people are the descendants of those Atlanteans whose bodies were supple, whereas the constitution of the forefathers of the “Mongolian race” was characterised by “symbolically speaking, a hardening of the blood.”⁷ In the same lecture, light is shed on the rather cryptic reference to a process of “hardening” when it is identified as a mechanism that transforms a group of people into a “degenerate race” (degenerierte Menschenrasse).

A different explanation is given in what is Steiner’s arguably most detailed and complex set of lectures devoted to the topic of race. In Die Mission einzelner Volksseelen (The Mission of Individual Folk Souls, GA 121), he reveals that racial differentiation is the result of a group of spirits associated with various planets intervening in human evolution (cf. the sixth lecture of that cycle, held on June 12, 1910). Martian spirits, for example, had a hand in the emergence of the “Mongolian race,” whereas Jovian spirits played a role in the creation of the Caucasian race. They accomplished this feat by placing people in particular regions where they would be influenced by forces that radiate from the earth, each of which is connected with a particular stage in human development. At the bottom of the hierarchy are black people, who are, according to Steiner’s remarks, influenced by a force associated with childhood. Native Americans, the reader learns, have inherited the effects of forces associated with old age, which, Steiner explains, is the reason for their near extinction – and not the clash with Europeans. Whites figure at the top, since the forces that have produced them are associated with mature age, and the “yellow” race is under the influence of forces connected with late adolescence.

Many years later, Steiner would link race with mental capacity. In the third lecture of Vom Leben des Menschen und Erde – Über das Wesen des Christentums (On the Life of Man and Earth – On the Essence of Christianity, March 3, 1923, GA 349), he divides humanity up into three primary races, i.e., the black, yellow, and white, which belong to Africa, Asia, and Europe, respectively. In this particular description, black people are said to use a part of the brain that makes them driven by instincts and desires, “yellow” Asiatic people live a dreamlike existence and use the part of the brain that is linked to emotions, whereas white people use the part connected to the faculty of thinking. This, Steiner explains, is why Asians rarely invent anything new but instead just work with inventions made by Europeans.

4 The Place of the Chinese in Steiner’s Macrohistory

Steiner’s account of how the Chinese emerged as a separate group of people, and of what came to characterise their “essential Chineseness,” is centred around the story of the ill-fated continent Atlantis and the migration of survivors in the wake of its destruction. In “Die Grundbegriffe der Theosophie: Menschenrassen” (The Basic Concepts of Theosophy: Human Races), a lecture held on November 9, 1905, and included in Die Welträtsel und die Anthroposophie (The World Enigmas and Anthroposophy, GA 54), he explains that the seven sub-races of Atlantis gave rise to distinct post-Atlantean populations. Of interest for our present purposes are three groups of people from Asia, who, according to this particular lecture, are descendants of as many Atlantean sub-races. The Chinese, the reader is told, stem from the fourth sub-race, whereas the seventh gave rise to the Mongols, and the people of India, who here share a common ancestry with the Europeans, are the heirs of the fifth sub-race, the most evolved of them all, who lived in today’s Ireland. A high initiate led this latter group eastwards, and, as they travelled, they established colonies along the way. Eventually, the migratory wave came to settle in a region known today as the Gobi Desert. It later split up, and one of the groups to emerge became the ancestors of the people of India. In a lecture held on June 16, 1910, the tenth in the lecture cycle Die Mission einzelner Volksseelen (GA 121), Steiner pinpointed and discussed what he identified as the essential psychological difference between the Indians and the Chinese. India, he asserted, has produced a great culture, with a magnificent spiritual life, which continues to evolve, although “within limits,” whereas China is “closed upon itself and remains rigid.”⁸ The Great Wall of China, Steiner tells his listeners, in which a kind of collective memory of an Atlantean past is retained, gives a “poetic-occult impression” (poetisch-okkulte Empfindung) of the way in which China isolates itself from the outside world. Just as the Gulf stream encloses parts of the Atlantic Ocean, the Great Wall does the same for China and its pre-Indian Atlantean culture. And just as the Atlanteans lacked a sense of history, Chinese culture has, according to Steiner’s somewhat cryptic turn of phrase, “also retained something unhistorical.”⁹

The connection between China and the final days of Atlantis and the stark contrast between India and China had already been established by Sinnett in Esoteric Buddhism. He declared that, although most of them were the product of a “hybrid mixture,” the Chinese were originally “the highest and last branch of the fourth race,” i.e., the Atlanteans (Sinnett 1883: 57). They had, however, since then declined precipitously, becoming “degenerate” and a “fallen, degraded semblance of humanity” (ibid.: 58). Thus, although the details regarding Atlantean groups and their various descendants reported in Sinnett’s and Steiner’s histories differ, both present ancient China as a culture whose achievements pale in comparison with what the people of India accomplished.

According to Steiner, the primitive stage at which the Chinese find themselves, is even reflected in their language. In the lecture “Die Geisteswissenschaft und die Sprache” (Spiritual Science and Language, held in Berlin on January 20, 1910, and included as the first lecture in Metamorphosen des Seelenlebens, or Metamorphoses of the Soul Life, vol. 2, GA 59), he states that different languages exist due to the workings of a language spirit, an entity whose impact is determined by the developmental level of a particular group. In the case of the Chinese, their lowly place on the evolutionary path, Steiner argued, is reflected in their language:

We will then understand that this spirit of language – let us call this entity that works through the air the spirit of language – when it manifested itself at a relatively low level of human development, worked like the atomistic spirit that wants to assemble everything from individual parts. Then we have the possibility of a language being constructed in such a way that the entire sentence is composed of individual sound images.¹⁰

Steiner’s disparaging remarks about the Chinese language resemble a truncated version of Blavatsky’s Theosophical linguistic speculations, which in turn can be traced back to the work of writers active in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century, in particular Wilhelm von Humboldt (1767–1835) and August Schleicher (1821–1868).¹¹ Although von Humboldt’s treatment of the topic has been criticised for its “obscurity of expression” (Allan 2007: 207), some passages nonetheless suggest that the fundamental ways in which the grammar of a language functions reflect a difference between “lower” and “higher” forms of language. Schleicher added an evolutionistic dimension to von Humboldt’s hierarchical ranking and claimed that languages that juxtapose words without grammatical affixes were the first to take form (ibid.: 209). Blavatsky borrowed these ideas and claimed that language arose on Lemuria and consisted then solely of monosyllabic words. Like Steiner after her, she characterised the monosyllabic languages of East Asia as having retained the properties of this primitive form of communication.

In one of his later lectures, Steiner provides an additional explanation for what he depicts as the stagnation of the Chinese. Instead of merely being the result of an apparently unfortunate collection of racial characteristics, he claims in the fifth lecture of Die Schöpfung der Welt und des Menschen (The Creation of the World and of Man, July 5, 1924, GA 354) that the people of China once had a great civilisation and were responsible for developing some of the world’s most important technological advances, which Europeans would only later reinvent, such as gunpowder and the printing press. According to Steiner’s narrative, this cultural stage was in fact the legacy of an even higher earlier culture. He assigns at least part of the blame for the current sorry state of Chinese culture to centuries of ill-treatment at the hands of the West.

According to Steiner’s descriptions, whatever the cause of the purported stagnation and decadence may have been, the same pattern will be perpetuated in the future. If we return to the fourteenth lecture of Menschheitsentwickelung und Christus-Erkenntnis, part of which was briefly summarised above, we learn that reincarnation serves as a mechanism that sorts progressive souls within a race from their regressive peers, and, therefore, when seen in this light, the perpetuation of a trait that should have been relegated to a bygone time is problematic. After our ancestors in the distant past left Atlantis, the Mongols were the stragglers who retained some of the cultural traits of the Atlanteans. In the future, souls that do not evolve but instead cling to a past stage of human development will be destined to reincarnate as Chinese people. Even today, some souls presently incarnated in Chinese bodies will be forced to return as members of decadent peoples (in Dekadenz befindliche Völkerschaften) because they are too intensely attracted to that particular race.

Steiner’s comments about the Chinese present them as not only inferior but – perhaps even more insistently – as fundamentally different from “us.” In this sense, they are not just heirs to a distinct culture and history; they are, or at least their forefathers were, in their very essence utterly alien. In the fifth lecture of Die Schöpfung der Welt und des Menschen (GA 354), Steiner paints a picture of the divide separating “them” from “us.” The senses of the ancient Chinese, he related, functioned in a radically different way compared to those of Europeans. Whereas the latter would, for instance, need to open a flask and sample its contents in order to find out what it tasted like, the Chinese of bygone days, on the contrary, would have been able to intuit this directly. Put another way, since no absolute boundary existed between them and the external world, they could simply project themselves into the flask and experience the taste of the liquid internally. Not only did they differ in terms of how their senses functioned; their very way of thinking, according to Steiner, “had as yet no resemblance to that of later humanity.”¹² They could think of individual things but lacked the capacity to generalise and categorise. They had no laws and no state, since they were incapable of the kind of abstract thinking both of these institutions require. Steiner scoffs therefore at those who speak of such things as a Chinese state since they, from his perspective, misuse the term “state.”

For Steiner, the radical otherness of the Chinese can (at least partly) be accounted for if one considers their origin during a period of time when even the physical world itself was very different from what it is today. We can see this exemplified, he tells us, in the way that Chinese styles of painting do not add light or shadows to what is being depicted. This, he states, is how things actually appeared to the ancestors of the Chinese. The atmosphere of their world was vastly different from our own, and it was ruled by physical laws that did not cause shadows to form:

Today we see the way we do because there is air between us and the object. But there was simply no air in the regions the Chinese came from. In those times when the Chinese originated, people did not see in our way. In those ancient times it would have been nonsense to speak of light and shade, for there were not yet any such things in the density the air had. And this has remained so among the Chinese, who still have no light and shade in the things they paint […].¹³

In Steiner’s view, the alien ways of the Chinese have entirely been superseded by later cultural advances. He concludes that when “describing Chinese culture, praise must be given in a certain way, but only in a certain way, because it has something spiritual. It is nonetheless a primitive culture of a kind that one can now no longer engage with.”¹⁴

5 Chinese Religion and Philosophy

In the same lecture from 1924, i.e., Die Schöpfung der Welt und des Menschen, Steiner claimed that since the ancient Chinese had a way of thinking utterly unlike that of other people, they had no religion as he expected his audience to understand the term. When they finally did begin to worship gods, a concept the Chinese had previously lacked, these were figures borrowed from India. Statements such as these, however, need to be understood within the context of Steiner’s terminology and his view of history. His Theosophical inheritance included the idea that certain towering figures were far more spiritually advanced than others. He had presumably encountered this concept in the writings of the French Theosophist Edouard Schuré (1841–1929), who in his book Les grands initiés (1889) suggested that esoteric knowledge had been passed down through history by Rama, Krishna, Hermes, Moses, Orpheus, Pythagoras, Plato, and Jesus. Steiner would eventually produce his own lists of wisdom-bearing luminaries, and in a lecture given at the height of his orthodox Theosophical days, the eighteenth lecture in Spirituelle Seelenlehre und Weltbetrachtung (Spiritual Doctrine of the Soul and Observation of the World, December 8, 1904, GA 52), he names “the Egyptian Hermes, the ancient Indian Rishis, Zarathustra, the Chinese teachers of wisdom Lao Tse [Lǎozǐ] and Confucius, the initiates of the ancient Jews, also Pythagoras and Plato, and, finally, the teachers of Christianity itself” as being among those who have transmitted the esoteric core of the world’s religious traditions to humanity.¹⁵ By the time his Theosophical career came to a close, only months before his break with the mother organisation, this perennialist message changed character. In the sixth lecture of Der irdische und der kosmische Mensch (The Earthly and the Cosmic Human Being, May 14, 1912, GA 133) Steiner insists that:

It is highly significant that, six centuries before our era, Lao-tse and Confucius should have been living at the same time in China, the Buddha in India, the last Zarathustra – not the original one – in Persia, and Pythagoras in Greece. How great the difference is between these founders of religion! Only an abstract mind unable of discerning the differences can suggest, as is often nonsensically done today, that the teachings of Lao-tse or Confucius are identical to those of other founders of religions.¹⁶

However, the interested reader will find little concrete said about Lǎozǐ, Confucius, or their respective teachings in Steiner’s published body of work. Although one comes across generic characterisations, such as a passage in the same lecture (GA 133) stating that both taught a message of compassion and love, the two receive little attention.

Steiner’s remarks about the ancient Chinese lacking religion “in our sense of the word” imply that theirs was of a distinct variety, a spiritual outlook on life that differed greatly from that of other people. Over the years he made repeated comments about this worldview, the “ancient Tao religion” of the Chinese. Daoism fascinated many educated people at the time.¹⁷ Theosophical authors had already in the late 1880s described it as a Chinese expression of the ancient wisdom tradition, and renditions of the Dàodéjīng produced by Theosophists were published in English in 1894 and in German in 1895–1896 (Pokorny 2024: 65–69, 71–72). Steiner’s “Tao religion,” however, does not come across as the result of engaging with this literature, nor is it linked to the Dàodéjīng or the figure of Lǎozǐ. In lectures held during his productive Theosophical period, Steiner explains what he understands to be the essence of this Tao religion. These descriptions present Daoism in quite diverse ways, all of which are thoroughly imbued with Theosophical ideas.

The Tao religion is, he told his audience on November 16, 1905 (“Der Weisheitkern der Religionen” or The Core Wisdom of Religions, included as the seventh lecture in the collection Die Welträtsel und die Anthroposophie, GA 54), thousands of years old. According to Steiner, although the word Tao literally means “way,” its true “meaning […] is both that of a deep, hidden ground for the soul and a lofty future.”¹⁸ The Tao religion, he states, is “based on the principle of [spiritual] development.”¹⁹ In his description of the latter’s aim, Steiner waxes quite lyrical:

[…] this development, in which I find myself, has a goal, that I will evolve towards a sublime goal and that within me lives a force that spurs me on to reach the great goal of Tao. When I feel this great force within me and sense that all beings are steering towards this goal with me, then this force is the guiding force that blows against me from the wind, that resounds from the stone, that shines from the flash of lightning, that echoes from the thunder, that sends its light to me from the sun. In plants, it appears as the force of growth, in animals as sensation and perception. It is the force that will continuously bring forth form after form until that sublime goal is reached, through which I know myself to be one with all of nature, which flows in and out of me with every breath, the symbol of the highest evolving spirit, which I perceive as life. This force I experience as Tao.²⁰

A very different but equally Theosophical understanding is presented in the first lecture of the cycle Die okkulten Wahrheiten alter Mythen und Sagen (The Occult Truths of Ancient Myths and Legends, June 24, 1904, GA 92), according to which Tao was the Atlantean term used to designate the mysterious vril force.²¹ The latter was introduced by Edward Bulwer-Lytton (1803–1873) in his novel The Coming Race, first published in 1871, and which tells the story of the Vril-ya, a subterranean race that is described as being far more technologically advanced than ordinary humans because they have learned to master this force. The Coming Race was met with great public interest, and one of Bulwer-Lytton’s enthusiastic readers, Blavatsky, came to insist that vril really existed and was not just a literary creation. Also interested in this force was Scott-Elliot, who, drawing either directly upon Bulwer-Lytton or upon Blavatsky’s statements about it, wrote that airships on Atlantis had been powered by vril, a claim reproduced in Steiner’s lecture.

Yet other explanations can be found in texts such as the eleventh lecture of Vor dem Tore der Theosophie (At the Gates of Theosophy, September 1, 1906, GA 95), where it is stated that Tao is the sound Atlanteans felt coursed through nature and that they uttered when gripped by this feeling. In the third and fifth lectures in the cycle Innere Entwicklungsimpulse der Menschheit (Inner Development Impulses of Mankind, September 16 and 24, 1916, GA 171), it is mentioned that it was the designation of the Great Spirit in Atlantean times. What unites all of these diverse descriptions is the idea that, although Tao and “the Tao religion” are part of ancient Chinese culture, their true origin lies further back in time, namely, on Atlantis. Steiner’s macrohistorical model creates the link between the two. In his view, life on Atlantis was in its late stages characterised by a very gradual shift away from a kind of intuitive clairvoyance in favour of a more abstract way of thinking. While the understanding of the Tao among the Atlanteans of this period was fading away, some still remembered its true meaning at the time of the continent’s demise. A wave of migration ensued when Atlantis was submerged by the waters, and refugees spread in the four cardinal directions. In light of these circumstances, the inherited understandings of the Tao that were passed down through the ages differed greatly. Some memory of Atlantean spirituality, Steiner informs his audiences, was retained by the eastern stream of migrants, including the word “Tao,” which continues to be used in China in modern times.

Two lecture cycles give different accounts of what happened to the veneration of Tao in its new Asian homeland. The lectures of the cycle Innere Entwicklungsimpulse der Menschheit, discussed above, tell of how the heirs of these Atlantean migrants revived the Tao cult in mystery schools during a period spanning from the ninth to the eleventh centuries CE. However, according to Steiner, since worship of the Tao belonged to a bygone epoch, a revival was destined to lead to “delusions” (Täuschungen) and thus the Tao then venerated was in fact an “unlawful successor” (unrechtmäßiger Nachfolger) to the original Atlantean Tao. A priest of one of these mystery cults transferred the power of this lesser form of Tao to Genghis Khan (d. 1227), who shortly afterwards launched his military campaign. Even later, the original character of the “Tao cult” would be entirely lost, as it became completely “intellectualised” by the “degenerate Chinese” (die degenerierten Chinesen). In Steiner’s account, a western stream of migrants from Atlantis distorted the teachings to an even greater degree, and their successors, the people of Mesoamerica, constructed a mystery school devoted to taotl, an apparently garbled version of the word, which had now become identified with black magic. The taotl cult even required initiates to commit murder in order to access its secrets. A quite different story is found in the first lecture of Die okkulten Wahrheiten alter Mythen und Sagen (GA 92) when Steiner told a Theosophical audience in 1904 that, after the monotheism of the Atlanteans had degenerated into polytheism, an initiated shaman was impelled by his “TAO consciousness” (TAO-Bewusstsein) to wreak vengeance upon those who had abandoned their ancestral religion, and thus the military campaign of Attila the Hun was born.

Disparaging remarks about the religious and philosophical heritage of China, such as the ones discussed above, can at least in part also be read as a polemical attack on Steiner’s main rivals as a religious innovator, namely, the Theosophists. For him, the veneration of the Tao belongs to non-European peoples who lived in a bygone epoch, and any attraction that modern Westerners might feel for Chinese philosophical teachings can only lead them astray. In a lecture held on March 1912, during a period of intense dissociation from the Theosophical Society, (included as the second in the cycle Der irdische und der kosmische Mensch, GA 133), Steiner makes a prophetic remark about a time when the up until then “bound spiritual heritage” (gebundenes Geistesgut) of the Chinese will start to draw Westerners to it and particularly weak individuals will succumb to a fascination with the external aspects of Chinese thinking. This attraction, he instructed his audience, should be resisted since what flows directly out of das Chinesertum, the essential Chinese spirit, is just as inappropriate for European, Western consciousness as the Indian teachings that weak people like the Theosophists draw upon in their own, quite flawed (recht mangelhaft) way.

6 Lucifer in China

The China of the Steinerian imaginary that we have explored so far has, however tenuous, some connection to the China of mundane historiography. The last element of Steiner’s China that we will consider, by contrast, has no link whatsoever to the China of empirical scholarship. In much of the Christian world, Lucifer is understood as a synonym for Satan, but various religious currents of the nineteenth century, not least the Theosophical movement, gave the designation a markedly different range of associations. Steiner incorporated this figure in his cosmology where it stood in contrast to what was at first a shifting array of various other beings and principles. In 1909, Steiner finally came to focus on Ahriman as the counterpart of Lucifer (Zander 2007: 833–835). Although Steiner’s ideas about these two beings continued to develop over time, the polarity between the two can be summarised in the following broad terms. The being known as Lucifer promotes spirituality and creativity. Yet, his influence, if left unchecked, can incite irrational and grandiose mysticism. His counterpart, Ahriman, grounds us in material existence, but, when unrestricted, can also lead people to adopt mechanistic ways of thinking and materialism. Whereas both have vital roles to play in the development of humanity, they also have the potential to be destructive, and, in Steiner’s cosmology, the “Christ impulse” is the necessary and salutary balancing force that allows one to navigate between the two.

In lectures held in the autumn and winter of 1919, Steiner told his audiences that Lucifer had incarnated as a human being in ancient China in the third millennium BCE.²² The Luciferian incarnation is part of one of the Steinerian macrohistorical schemes that we have not touched upon in this contribution thus far. In this particular scheme, the incarnation of Christ serves as a chronological and geographical midpoint, and the overarching idea is that, just as Lucifer became human in the East in the early third millennium BCE, Ahriman will incarnate in the West in the early third millennium CE. The story of the unnamed human Chinese incarnation of Lucifer is adorned with few details in these lectures and can be summarised as follows: A child from a prominent family was permitted to participate in the rituals of a local mystery cult. Years later, he, then a man of forty years of age, found himself suddenly able to comprehend rationally what humanity had up until that point only been able to understand through revelation, a transformation that occurred because Lucifer became incarnated in his body. This manifestation, according to Steiner’s account, was the origin of pre-Christian, pagan culture and initiated a spiritual impulse that spread over the ancient world and ultimately resulted in Greek culture and in the, as he put it, “one-sidedness” (Einseitigkeit) of Gnosticism. Although Steiner emphasised that the incarnation of Lucifer in China was an event with momentous consequences, he never returned to this theme after his 1919 lectures.

7 China in the Anthroposophical Imaginary after Steiner

We can presumably safely assume that Steiner and those who attended his lectures had little if any direct acquaintance with China or its culture. Another important point to bear in mind is that most western Europeans alive at the time of his numerous speaking engagements would themselves have embraced an evolutionistic perspective on other cultures as commonsensical. Racism was ubiquitous in the first decades of the twentieth century and the most insistent critical voices raised against racist ideology came from American anthropologists, a world away from Steiner’s lecture circuit (Farber 2011). The sheer fact that his dismissive statements about the purportedly stagnant Chinese, whose way of thinking belonged to a superseded phase in the grand saga of human development, were reproduced in the Gesamtausgabe suggests that his audience did not find such statements to be particularly shocking.

Individuals inspired by Anthroposophy, who in more recent times have discussed China in books or on the Internet, share a historical legacy in the form of a corpus of texts that can be traced back to the founder of the movement. However, it may be said that a textual corpus is in a sense just a set of raw materials, a collection of elements that can be drawn upon selectively. Like the bricoleur described by Claude Lévi-Strauss (1966: 16), Anthroposophists can fashion seemingly new and sometimes radically divergent narratives by using whatever happens to be at hand in the Steinerian repertoire or elsewhere in their cultural environment. Since they can select and combine elements without having to adhere to a rigidly determined doctrinal framework, those who have written about the Chinese and their culture have done so in very diverse ways.

There are “orthodox” texts that adhere closely to Steiner’s own racial and evolutionist anthropology and his Christocentric perspective on religion. In these accounts, China tends to be presented in ways that are as unflattering as what one finds in Steiner’s lectures – if not more so. Other texts can suggest that, on the contrary, there is great value to be discovered in particular products of Chinese culture, for instance the Dàodéjīng, but insist that the deeper significance of this text only emerges when it is placed within Steiner’s macrohistorical framework. In yet other texts, the allegiance to the founder’s worldview is looser. In these cases, the author adds some Anthroposophical concepts to narratives that are otherwise not constructed around Steiner’s cosmological and macrohistorical models. Finally, there are attempts to extend his purportedly clairvoyant insights, which, in at least one instance, has resulted in a narrative that is clearly rooted in Anthroposophy but includes details not present in the foundational corpus of texts.

8 The Chinese “Race” and People

Several Anthroposophical authors have attempted to provide a systematic overview of the past based upon Steiner’s pronouncements. Since his macrohistory is understood by these individuals to be an accurate model based on spiritual research, his evolutionist views on both race and the essential characteristics of various nations are reproduced in these works, and it is hardly surprising that critics have accused some of these texts of promoting an ideology that is even more blatantly racist than that of Steiner (Martins 2012: 137; Staudenmaier 2012). The place within this general macrohistorical scheme of the Chinese and of the “yellow” or “Mongolian race” to which they, in the racial terminology of Steiner’s time, were said to belong is not always easy to discern. These Anthroposophical authors attempt to harmonise Steiner’s views on races, cultural epochs, folk souls, and similar concepts, which are spread through much of the vast Gesamtausgabe and which changed over time. They also seem to have struggled to various degrees with Steiner’s terminology. In his texts, the term “Mongolian,” for instance, designates a putative race, a particular ethnic group, and an ancient people whose homeland was Atlantis. The word “Turanian,” to take another example, refers both to a (in this case obsolete) linguistic category and another group of Atlanteans and their purported descendants. The idea that race corresponds to the shared characteristics of many different groups of people who have roughly the same skin colour in common furthermore leads to the challenge of explaining how the denizens of imperial China and the nomadic Mongols can have inherited the same racial traits. Attempts to synthesise Anthroposophical macrohistory, concepts taken from other esoteric or fringe authors, and ideas rooted in academic archaeology complicate the picture even more.

The Swiss Anthroposophist Ernst Uehli (1875–1959) presents such an Anthroposophical picture of human prehistory in his Atlantis und das Rätsel der Eiszeitkunst (Atlantis and the Mystery of Ice Age Art), a book that first appeared in 1936 and in a revised second edition in 1957. In view of the then recent history of neighbouring Germany, the thoroughly racist foundation of Uehli’s ideas presented in the updated version of his text is striking. We find reproduced the narrative of the division of humanity into five distinct races at a particular stage in the history of Atlantis. The differences between the races, Uehli tells his readers (1957: 57–59), were the result of a divine plan that gave each group a particular skin colour and specific “mental dispositions and abilities” (seelischen Anlagen und Fähigkeiten; ibid.: 58). The “Mongolian race,” he relates, is incapable of “continued development” (fortgesetzte Entwicklung; ibid.: 61) and is comprised of one group characterised by violence (the Mongols) and another whose culture echoes that of their Atlantean ancestors (the Chinese). Only the white-skinned subgroup of Atlantis, which Uehli explicitly identifies as the forefathers of the Aryan race (ibid.: 64), was able to experience true progress. It is, we learn, the brain physiology of the Aryan race that on a fundamental level makes white people capable of thinking in a way that is impossible for the other four races (ibid.: 67). The cultural epochs that divide up post-Atlantean history are named after various branches of this privileged race, and the most highly developed of them all is the Germanic one (ibid.: 70–71). The Chinese and other representatives of the “Mongolian race,” by contrast, remain very minor players in Uehli’s drama.

Guenther Wachsmuth (1893–1963), who met Steiner in 1919 and became a devoted Anthroposophist and ultimately Steiner’s personal assistant, was a productive writer who in one of his books, the third volume of Werdegang der Menschheit (The Development of Mankind) with the subtitle Kosmische Evolution / Erdenverkörperung / Völkerwanderung / Geistesgeschichte (Cosmic Evolution / Earth Embodiment / Migration of Peoples / Spiritual History; 1953), attempted to present a systematic history of humanity, including that of East Asia, in terms of Steiner’s racial macrohistory. Once again, we read that the various groups of people who emerged from Atlantis had different capacities for development. Wachsmuth reflects on the differences between various ethnic groups belonging to the same racial category and finds two ways to explain this state of affairs. For whatever reason, some peoples had a greater ability to retain the more positive traits of their ancestors (Wachsmuth 1953: 124). For example, the “Turano-Mongolian” migrants from the sunken continent, he relates, were characterised by a nomadic way of life and a base form of “magic” (ibid.: 125), yet one group that descended from them, the Finns, managed to retain the “good aspects of the [Atlantean] mystery cult” (gute Seite des Mysterienwesens). The other explanation involves interactions that occurred between the Atlanteans and the people they met on their way. East Asian peoples, including the Chinese, he writes, are the result of such encounters (ibid.: 125–127). Wachsmuth attributes the purported inability of Chinese culture to evolve to the presence of an even older historical layer. People who had their origins in Lemuria, and who lived in the region when the Mongolian branch of the Atlanteans arrived, were intensely rooted in the past. Cultural advances that seem to contradict the idea that the Chinese were characterised by a “backward-looking element of inertia” (rückwärtsgerichtetes Beharrungselement; ibid.: 126), such as the flourishing of a specifically Chinese form of Taoism based on the Atlantean Tao, can be attributed to the arrival in the region of the Manu, the spiritual leader of the white race. Somewhat puzzlingly in view of his insistence on the conservatism of the Chinese, Wachsmuth mentions that they had invented printing and gunpowder, but he adds that such innovations dealt with earthly matters, presumably a way of implying that true development is spiritual, not material (ibid.: 127). An intense orientation towards the past, Wachsmuth assures us, is characteristic also of present-day China, i.e., that of the early 1950s. It is worth noting that this assessment of the Chinese as a people stuck in the past was written at a time when China, not so long ago ruled by an emperor and a hierarchy of classically trained bureaucrats, had undergone a series of truly revolutionary changes under republican and then communist leadership.

In our small sample, the work of the German Anthroposophist Sigismund von Gleich (1896–1953) comes across as the most Sinophobic. In 1936, he published Der Mensch der Eiszeit und Atlantis (Ice Age Man and Atlantis), a volume on human history with particular emphasis on the Atlantean period. A much briefer work with some further reflection on the topic, Siebentausend Jahre Urgeschichte der Menschheit (Seven Thousand Years of Prehistory of Mankind), appeared in 1950. Both texts were republished much later, in 1990 and 1987, respectively, without any attempt to comment upon or modify their racial ideology. Von Gleich’s account is constructed as a bricolage of elements from Steiner’s work, accounts of prehistory as presented by academically trained archaeologists and geologists, the macrohistory presented by Theosophist Scott-Elliot, and various ideas suggested in “fringe” literature. The latter includes the highly influential volume Atlantis: The Antediluvian World published in 1882 by the American amateur researcher Ignatius Donnelly (1831–1901), and books on the mythical continent of Mu written in the 1920s and 1930s by the British writer James Churchward (1851–1936). Von Gleich is thoroughly Steinerian in that he gives race a central place in explaining human spiritual evolution. Various Lemurian and Atlantean peoples and their racial descendants are placed in hierarchical order. The light skin colour of northern Europeans, descended from a particular Atlantean population, is described as a sign of their superior qualities (von Gleich 1990: 79–80). They are elevated so far above the others that they can be characterised as “angelic humans” (Engelmenschen; ibid.: 83). The “Turano-Mongolian” race is presented as the degraded opposite of the “white” race. Although the designation of this putative race does not immediately reveal that the Chinese belong to this group, von Gleich informs his readers that almost all the inhabitants of East Asia are Turano-Mongols (ibid.: 70) and, on a couple of occasions, explicitly lists the Chinese as belonging to that category (ibid.: 78, 148). In his descriptions of the Turano-Mongols, von Gleich heaps invective after invective upon them. We learn, for instance, that, they, of all the Atlanteans, had the greatest tendency to degenerate into brutal egotism and occult-magical violence (ibid.: 78), that they were possessed by the Ahrimanic war-demon (ibid.: 77), and that they were so evil that they brought chaos into the world and unleashed the disaster that would lead to the downfall of Atlantis (ibid.: 85). In essence, then, von Gleich concludes that the utter moral decay of the “yellow race” led to the destruction of an entire continent. One senses an echo of the politics of von Gleich’s time (1930s) upon reading that the deplorable racial characteristics of the Turano-Mongols were also apparent in their descendants, the Chinese, who had developed “the Bolshevik economic system” (das bolschewistische Wirtschaftssystem) and “agrarian-communist tendencies” (agrar-kommunistische Tendenzen) already a thousand years ago (ibid.: 78). His later book reproduces the same sentiments. We are told that the Ur-Turanian group of Atlanteans was particularly morally decadent and that all Turano-Mongolian peoples are warlike. This, readers are informed, is a racial characteristic linked to their blood, which is dominated by the forces of Mars and iron, and to their souls, which suffer from an unfortunate disposition towards base magic (von Gleich 1987: 20).

9 The Chinese and the “Tao Impulse”

In the books summarised above, Chinese religion is only touched upon in passing. Thomas Meyer (b. 1950), the author of Ichkraft und Hellsichtigkeit; Der Tao-Impuls in Vergangenheit und Zukunft (I-Force and Clairvoyance: The Tao Impulse in the Past and Future; 1988), seems to be the first Anthroposophical author to address this topic at length. The title is tinged with “Anthroposophese” that needs unpacking for those not fluent in it. The first segment employs a neologism, Ichkraft, literally “I-force,” that makes sense within the anthropology proposed by Steiner, in which the I is one of four components of the human being, with the physical, etheric, and astral bodies constituting the other three. The second part refers not to Daoism but to the “Tao impulse”: one of the most characteristic elements of Anthroposophical prose is the use of “impulse” to denote something like a “spiritual influence.” The difference between the -ism and the impulse is, as we will shortly see, crucial.

Meyer’s declared purpose is to gather Steiner’s disparate and unsystematic pronouncements on the topic in one volume. He hastens to add that the reasons for Steiner presenting information on the Tao in this way is not so much his busy schedule as his conviction that a fragmentary presentation, with seeming contradictions between various pieces of information, would have the didactic advantage of spurring the reader to engage actively with the materials. The plot that Meyer finds in Steiner’s texts and constructs by piecing together the relevant quotes is familiar from the preceding discussion in this article. The word Tao is connected to the spiritual development of the Atlanteans. They thought in pictures and could perceive spiritual realities directly and vividly. At some point in the history of Atlantis, its inhabitants began to sense the existence of a powerful deity, and they gave this feeling the name Tao. Over time, a change in the human constitution took place that Meyer described in a passage laden with dense Anthroposophical terminology (Meyer 1988: 23). On Atlantis, the I, the fourth component of the human being, that had in Lemurian times already descended into the astral body, now continued to sink into the etheric and physical bodies in a process that the Atlanteans experienced as “born out of the Tao sound” (aus dem Tao-Klang geboren). Still later, the evolution of thinking began to gradually supersede the immediate perception that the Atlanteans had, but Meyer follows Steiner in relating how the migration out of the fabled continent brought people who preserved remnants of this immediate Tao spirituality to various parts of the world, locations readers will be familiar with from non-esoteric geography as well.

Steiner’s evolutionism dealt with Daoism by partly divorcing it from China and placing its origins in Atlantis, and by painting a picture of the Chinese as a people whose continued veneration of the Tao was marred by errors and whose philosophical and religious legacy is alien to Westerners. Meyer’s detailed imaginal history of the “Tao impulse” takes the ideological core of that narrative even further. Since, according to his account, European spiritual life at least potentially represents the highest form of human development, the Tao impulse has been preserved in a better form among certain individuals in Europe than in China. For Meyer, the eastern, Asian manifestation of the Tao impulse and the westernmost stream that ended up as the bloodthirsty rituals of the Mexican taotl cult represent two “world historical caricatures” (welthistorische Tao-Karikaturen) of what Tao really is (Meyer 1988: 47–49). In short, his allegiance to Steiner’s historiography has resulted in a book-length treatment of a concept that for non-Anthroposophists is one of the most iconic elements of Chinese culture – but devotes a mere half page to Chinese Daoism (ibid.: 31), since the Tao in China not only degenerated into a “caricature” but ultimately disappeared completely (ibid.: 45).

Searching for a moment in the hidden history of the West where the legacy of Atlantean Tao veneration did not succumb to these disfigurations, Meyer zooms in on a figure by the name of Scythianus (“Skythianos” in Meyer’s German text). A possibly historical figure who is mentioned in several early Christian heresiological and anti-Manichaean texts as a progenitor of Manichaeism, Scythianus appears in half a dozen places in the Steinerian corpus as a high initiate who preserved the spiritual legacy of Atlantis (e.g., in the ninth lecture of Der Orient im Lichte des Okzidents or The Orient in the Light of the Occident, August 28, 1909, GA 113), although few details are given in his lectures and the latitude of imaginative reconstruction is considerable. Hence, Meyer (1988: 36–40) connects him to “Hibernian” (i.e., Irish) mysteries, whereas other Anthroposophical authors have interpreted his name as signifying that he was the spiritual leader of the Scythians and hence that of their descendants, the Russians (von Skerst 1961).

A “Western” stream in a much wider sense, Meyer tells his readers, carried the Tao impulse to the indigenous peoples of North America, who are painted in a more positive light than in Steiner’s pronouncements. Illustrated by a quote from a text widely known as Chief Seattle’s speech (that Meyer seems unaware of was written in 1972 by television screen writer Ted Perry and which bears little to no resemblance to any known speech held by the historical Chief Seattle), the connection Native Americans have with nature and their sense of the proximity between the living and their dead forefathers are said to be echoes of the Tao impulse that, Meyer tells us, is far more widely preserved among them than in Europe, where only a very small number of individuals still had access to the spirituality of the Tao. However, he adds, the Native American heritage of the Tao impulse is no longer viable, given Steiner’s understanding of the racial characteristics of these people being connected to the forces of old age and decay (Alters- und Abbaukräfte; Meyer 1988: 46).

Fortunately, modern people will, according to Meyer, once more be able to gain access to the Tao impulse, which, he states, is available in suitable form via Steiner’s work. This is the form of Tao that will serve to develop the Ichkraft referred to in the title of his book (Meyer 1988: 75–87, 107–111). Ultimately, it will even lead to the development of a new form of technology based on a modern counterpart of the vril force of the Atlanteans (ibid.: 90). All contemporary attempts to popularise Daoism or present it to a Western readership that do not accord with the Anthroposophical perspective, he concludes, are, by contrast, infused with the malevolent influence of Ahriman (ibid.: 101).

10 Reading the Dàodéjīng via Steinerian Apocalyptic Hermeneutics

The Luciferic Verses, a commented translation of the Dàodéjīng produced by Eric Cunningham, professor of history at Gonzaga University, contextualises the Daoist classic within a particular, apocalyptic reading of Steiner’s macrohistory. The author’s translation of the Daoist classic is preceded by a very substantial introduction (Cunningham 2023: ix–xxvi, 1–92) that explains what he sees as the significance of this text. Cunningham goes well beyond what we might consider as empirical source-based historical scholarship and places ancient Chinese culture, Daoism, and the Dàodéjīng in particular within the context of what he calls esoteric history, which is essentially the view of the past developed by Steiner. This model is presented at some length in a summary that includes references to the spiritual worldview of the inhabitants of Atlantis and to the migration across the globe of survivors of the cataclysm that destroyed their world (ibid.: 35–52). Some of these refugees came to the Gobi Desert, the reader learns, and are the ancestors of the Chinese (ibid.: 54).

Considerable space is devoted to the story of Lucifer’s incarnation in human form (Cunningham 2023: 53–62). The identity of the human being in whom Lucifer incarnated is never revealed explicitly in Steiner’s lectures, but Cunningham discusses two possibilities: the Yellow Emperor or Lǎozǐ, in both cases attributing historical reality to what mainstream historians see as mythical or at least semi-legendary personages. Sources that suggest that the Yellow Emperor was in fact an incarnation of this spirit are not uncommon in the Anthroposophical milieu, but Cunningham argues for Lǎozǐ as the more likely candidate (ibid.: 60–62).²³ In this perspective, the Dàodéjīng is the work of a depressed soul, Lǎozǐ as Lucifer in human shape, who saw that “the human condition had not been made beautiful, glorious, or spectacular by his false promise to Eve, but rather tedious, frustrating, and seemingly hopeless” and who expressed his sorrow by resorting to paradoxes in order to disclose the truth (ibid.: 61).

Cunningham’s own perspective on the human condition, both as it comes across in his chapter-by-chapter commentary on the Dàodéjīng and in his introduction to the text, seems bleak. There are signs, he tells us, that we have collectively set in motion a process that paves the way for a future destructive event, the incarnation of Ahriman predicted by Steiner. The world we live in is likened to that depicted in the Matrix films, a dystopia in which an alien life form has created a completely illusory simulated reality that only exists in the brains of the humans they have entrapped. Traditional truths are unravelling, conspiracy thinkers, even such radical figures as David Icke (b. 1952), who suggests that shape-shifting space lizards are exerting their malevolent influence over human affairs, are gaining traction in modern society. Yet we cannot function in complete relativism. We need the mooring given to us by the sentiment that something is actually true, and, despite the freedom offered by modernity, the quest for certainty has had the consequence that we “have nurtured a sheep-like mass acceptance of manufactured values” (Cunningham 2023: 78). We are hence “spiritual prisoners of dark forces” (ibid.: 44) in a pre-apocalyptic state (ibid.: 78–79). Doom is nigh (ibid.: 80). From a Steinerian perspective, a Lǎozǐ-Lucifer that regrets its Luciferic excesses can take us a step closer to Christ (ibid.: xviii–xx). The truth that lurks behind the paradoxes is “the correspondence between the Logos-as-ultimate-Truth and the Dao-as-ultimate- Truth” (ibid.: 85). Cunningham’s hope is that his book, by allowing us a view of the drama of human spiritual evolution in which these impulses operate, will contribute to a “recapturing of the Daodejing [that] may allow us – admittedly against great odds – to sidestep oblivion” (ibid.: 82).

The Dàodéjīng is terse and often cryptic, and a commentary that aims to pursue a particular ideological agenda rather than discuss what the text may have meant in its East Asian setting can easily do so. An example of Cunningham’s approach is the way in which he understands the beginning of the third chapter of the text. Roughly rendered, the passage in question states that the sage: does not promote gifted individuals, since this makes people quarrel; does not present things that are hard to obtain as particularly valuable, since this leads to thievery; and does not display desirable things, since this fosters confusion. In Cunningham’s perspective, this passage constitutes a teaching in which there is both “truth and danger.”²⁴ Whereas it is wise to foster a feeling of “contentment and self-reliance,” we have no sages ruling over us, and power-hungry leaders, whether Luciferic or Ahrimanic, will use various strategies to dominate the masses. Hierarchies exist, some people are more talented than others, and some things have greater value, thus pretending otherwise is just not realistic. Luciferic rulers will tell people that they are all “great and glorious, but making people believe that everybody is as good as everybody else is a trick.” Ahrimanic leaders will “cling on to power by keeping people enslaved in their routines and material satisfaction.” The advice offered in the Chinese text comes across in Cunnigham’s exegesis as a rather hopeless ideal vision since we find ourselves in a world governed not by wise leaders but by duplicitous and power-hungry rulers.

11 Anthroposophy with a Lighter Touch

Professor emerita of mathematics Kwan-Yuk Clare Sit has written several books that add elements drawn from Steiner to a loose bricolage that also has other sources of inspiration. Her Lao Tzu and Anthroposophy (2012) is a commented translation of the Dàodéjīng, which, despite some distinctly Anthroposophical interpretations, is very different from Cunningham’s book. Therein she frames the Dàodéjīng in a way that, despite the title, disassociates it from Anthroposophical macrohistory. The Chinese classic is not placed in an evolutionary framework but is understood as an expression of universal truths as presented by respected Daoist masters (Sit 2012: vii–ix). Steiner’s repeated assertion that Tao was a key element of the spiritual culture of Atlantis that was only preserved in a degraded form in “the East” is transformed into a generic statement that, while “someone has even asserted that Taoism is an offshoot of the long-lost civilization of Atlantis,” one does not need to “know about ancient Atlantis to appreciate the sublime wisdom of Tao” (ibid.: 4). The input from Anthroposophy is distributed with a light touch throughout the text, and far from all translated chapters are followed by commentaries that even allude to Steiner.

Some references to concepts rooted in Steiner’s work come across as a way of linking commonsensical observations to an Anthroposophical worldview. A passage in chapter 41 of the Dàodéjīng states that “inferior students who hear of the way of Tao […] laugh loudly,” and Steiner can confirm that those who fail to understand a subject indeed tend to laugh at it “owing to their ignorance and arrogance” (Sit 2012: 86). In other cases, Steiner’s views are treated as authoritative statements that corroborate details in the Dàodéjīng. Chapter 6 refers to the “valley spirit,” an expression that as Sit explains does not have be taken metaphorically, since Steiner often referred to elemental spirits (ibid.: 15). An exhortation to “keep stillness at the bottom” in chapter 6 invites a reflection on meditation and a remark that Steiner recommends a similar practice in How to Know Higher Worlds (ibid.: 35). Yet other references to Steiner are loose associations. The Chinese character wáng 王, “king,” found in chapter 25 of the Dàodéjīng, according to Sit resembles a person situated between heaven and earth with outstretched arms, which leads her to remark that the cross in many of Steiner’s lectures is similarly described as having the shape of a human being with outstretched arms (ibid.: 55).

Sit’s discussion of the passage of the third chapter of the Dàodéjīng that Cunningham elucidates as a stark, political message in troubled times shows how different from each other two Anthroposophically-inspired interpretations of the same text can be. Sit suggests that the passage exhorts the wise ruler to act as a role model and that it applies equally to all (2012: 8–10). By reducing one’s desire and ambition and keeping one’s mind under the control of a firm will, one avoids succumbing to temptation. How does one achieve such a formidable task as strengthening the will? Here, Sit affirms, Steiner can add a valuable perspective. He distinguishes the three functions of thinking, feeling, and willing, and establishes correspondences between each of these domains and a particular physiological system as understood within Steiner’s perspective on the body. The will is associated with the “metabolic and limb system,” which clarifies a sentence appearing later in the same chapter of the Dàodéjīng stating that the sage achieves his goal by following the advice to “empty the mind and fill the belly / weaken the ambition and strengthen the bones.” The text ultimately comes across as an exhortation to self-cultivation and moral improvement. When Sit concludes that the will is brought under the control of clear thinking “when we have eaten and move our limbs,” it is as if the combined voices of Lǎozǐ and Steiner encourage us to eat well and get enough exercise.

In 2023, Sit published New Daoism, a book that builds upon her earlier Dàodéjīng commentary. Her notes on the passages from chapters 3 and 6 summarised above remain essentially unchanged in her more recent volume. New Daoism, however, argues in greater detail that the ancient Chinese classic can be read as containing within it the kernel of an esoteric understanding of Christianity as Steiner understood it, and, compared to her 2012 volume, the connections to Steiner’s concepts are far more explicit. For instance, the Atlantean origin of Tao is now presented as a historical fact (Sit 2023: xxv, xxvii) rather than, as in her earlier book, a somewhat vague and unsourced claim. The general reference to the similarity between a particular Chinese character and a cross in her commentary on chapter 25 now gets fleshed out with a discussion of Steiner’s view of the symbol of the cross and his instructions on how to meditate on the Rose Cross (ibid.: 79–80). The passage on those who “laugh loudly” is now not only an occasion to reflect on the tendency of ignorant people to mock what they do not understand; Sit provides the reader with a summary of relevant parts of Steiner’s occult physiology and in particular the role he gave the astral body in producing laughter (ibid.: 104–105). What we do not find reproduced in her new and more Steinerian exegesis are references to the racial characteristics of the Chinese or the supposed distortions of the Tao at their hands.

12 Clairvoyant Exploration

Although Steiner’s role as the ultimate explorer of spiritual truths remains unchallenged in “orthodox” Anthroposophical milieus, and any suggestion by others that they have reached clairvoyant insight tends to be met with scepticism or outright hostility, there are narratives based on the claim of having attained a level of spiritual development that allows access to a normally invisible reality via first-hand experience, not just through Steiner’s writings. Are Thoresen (b. 1952), a Norwegian veterinarian, presents himself as someone who has achieved this degree of insight, and, freed from the constraints that limit those who merely consult mundane sources such as Steiner’s corpus of works, develops motifs familiar from Anthroposophy – such as reincarnation and karma, etheric bodies, and Luciferic and Ahrimanic forces – in new and unexpected directions. He has argued in books, podcasts, and articles that there are malignant spirit beings that cause illnesses in animals and humans. His book The Lucifer Deception (2020) is an account of his own past life as a healer at the court of the Chinese emperor some 4,000 years ago, i.e., roughly eighteen centuries before China according to conventional historical narratives was united under an emperor. In this previous incarnation, Thoresen was present when the malevolent spirit Lucifer, incarnated in human form as the Yellow Emperor, introduced a particular method of healing, thus setting a chain of events in motion that eventually resulted in the sorry present-day state of conventional and alternative medicine.

13 Concluding Remarks

By the end of the nineteenth and early twentieth century, various aspects of Chinese culture had become a source of fascination for many people with an interest in esotericism, not least in the Theosophical milieu. Steiner spent a decade as a prolific Theosophical writer and lecturer before launching his own movement, but his work shows little evidence of any sustained engagement with topics related to China. Rather than speaking of Steiner’s reception of China, it seems more apt to discuss his views on China as part of an Anthroposophical imaginary. Only to a minimal extent does Steiner’s China resemble the China of conventional historical accounts. Rather, it is a place that in every respect is utterly alien to us, whose “stagnant” people attempted in vain to keep the “Tao religion” of Atlantis alive, and whose role in world history was not least to be the land where the spirit Lucifer incarnated as a human being several thousand years ago. A later generation of Anthroposophically- inspired writers has in turn used this imaginal material in radically different ways. Not much common ground seems to unite such different approaches to Steiner’s books and lectures – von Gleich’s tirades against the “Turano- Mongolians” and their Chinese descendants, Meyer’s radically non-Chinese “Tao impulse,” Cunningham’s apocalyptic reading of the Dàodéjīng, and Sit’s eclectic approach – other than the conviction that the right building blocks for one’s own narrative can be found in that corpus of texts.