page_title: Rudolf Steiner
section_title: Early spiritual experiences
hierarchical_section_title: Rudolf Steiner / Biography / Early spiritual experiences
caption_attribution_description: de:Rudolf Steiner als Student
context_page_description: Rudolf Joseph Lorenz Steiner was an Austrian philosopher, social reformer, architect, esotericist, and claimed clairvoyant. Steiner gained initial recognition at the end of the nineteenth century as a literary critic and published philosophical works including The Philosophy of Freedom. At the beginning of the twentieth century he founded an esoteric spiritual movement, anthroposophy, with roots in German idealist philosophy and theosophy; other influences include Goethean science and Rosicrucianism.
  In the first, more philosophically oriented phase of this movement, Steiner attempted to find a synthesis between science and spirituality. His philosophical work of these years, which he termed "spiritual science", sought to apply the clarity of thinking characteristic of Western philosophy to spiritual questions, differentiating this approach from what he considered to be vaguer approaches to mysticism. In a second phase, beginning around 1907, he began working collaboratively in a variety of artistic media, including drama, the movement arts and architecture, culminating in the building of the Goetheanum, a cultural centre to house all the arts.
context_section_description: When he was nine years old, Steiner believed that he saw the spirit of an aunt who had died in a far-off town asking him to help her at a time when neither he nor his family knew of the woman's death. Steiner later related that as a child he felt "that one must carry the knowledge of the spiritual world within oneself after the fashion of geometry ... [for here] one is permitted to know something which the mind alone, through its own power, experiences. In this feeling I found the justification for the spiritual world that I experienced ... I confirmed for myself by means of geometry the feeling that I must speak of a world 'which is not seen'."
  Steiner believed that at the age of 15 he had gained a complete understanding of the concept of time, which he considered to be the precondition of spiritual clairvoyance. At 21, on the train between his home village and Vienna, Steiner met an herb gatherer, Felix Kogutzki, who spoke about the spiritual world "as one who had his own experience therein". Kogutzki conveyed to Steiner a knowledge of nature that was non-academic and spiritual.
caption: Rudolf Steiner as 21-year-old student (1882)
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