anthroposophy.ai is a retrieval API over the Gesamtausgabe (GA 1–354), Rudolf Steiner’s complete published works. The corpus is exposed through three interfaces:
https://anthroposophy.ai/mcp for agent clients (Claude, Claude Code, Cursor, custom MCP clients).https://anthroposophy.ai/v1/ for tools without MCP support and for direct HTTP use.All three interfaces serve identical content under the same trust guarantees and citation contract. Synthesis is the responsibility of the agent or the human reader; the system supplies verbatim passages, citation verification, and trust signals.
The system is not a conversational assistant. It does not paraphrase Steiner from a language model’s training memory. It is a corpus with retrieval primitives, an explicit trust contract, and a marked boundary between retrieval and synthesis.
A stock language-model agent answering questions about Steiner draws on two sources: training memory — uneven, paraphrased, mixed with secondary commentary, and unable to cite specific volume / lecture / paragraph references with reliability — and web search, which returns encyclopedia summaries rather than verifiable primary sources and rarely surfaces the German original alongside an English translation. An agent using this API shifts from hallucination-prone synthesis to retrieval-anchored response. Quotations carry stable per-paragraph URLs; translations declare their edition and their alignment to the German source; references are verified before they are cited; and a negative finding (“Steiner does not say X”) is surfaced as substantive evidence rather than concealed as a retrieval failure. The agent contract at /llms.txt directs the client to preserve the boundary between retrieval and synthesis, and the trust signals on every response carry that boundary through to the reader.
If you use the Claude website or desktop app, this site can be installed as a connector. Once installed, Claude will use the corpus to answer questions about Steiner’s work, citing verbatim passages with stable URLs.
https://anthroposophy.ai/mcp
Where does Steiner discuss the etheric reappearance of Christ? Show me the German alongside the English.
The connector is read-only. It exposes the retrieval tools described under The MCP API and cannot take any action on the user’s account. Claude invokes the tools only when the conversation calls for them.
For Claude Code, Cursor, or any other MCP-capable client, point the client at https://anthroposophy.ai/mcp. The server uses streamable HTTP transport per MCP spec 2025-11-25. Access is anonymous; rate limits may be applied as the service scales.
The server’s instructions field carries the agent contract — verify before citing, distinguish retrieval from synthesis, render citation URLs inline — and is delivered to the client on the initial handshake. The same prose is published at /llms.txt for direct inspection.
Every retrieved passage carries a text_trust value indicating textual provenance:
verbatim — exact transcription from a published edition at a fixed citation.supported — paraphrase or summary with citation.sourced — claim attributed to the corpus with a pointer but not directly quoted.The fetch_passage tool returns quote_safe: true only when text_trust is verbatim. The agent contract at /llms.txt restricts the use of quotation marks to content retrieved under this flag, and prescribes indirect-speech phrasing (“Steiner describes…”, “in the lecture of…”) for material that is not verbatim. This operationalises the distinction between citation and synthesis at the response level.
Any citation not directly returned by a retrieval call should be verified before it is used.
verify_locusThe MCP tool verify_locus and the REST endpoints under HEAD /v1/steiner/verify/... confirm the existence of a GA reference — volume, lecture date, and paragraph — in the indexed corpus. A 200 response indicates that the reference is indexed; a 404 indicates that it is not indexed or is malformed. Verification is intended to occur before a citation is committed to.
Each passage response includes edition_basis (the published edition the passage was drawn from), is_original (true for the original-language source, false for translations), and alignment_confidence (paragraph-count parity between the translation and the original-language source). The original-language source is reachable at the same passage URL via ?edition=original or the relevant lang parameter (for Steiner, lang=de).
fetch_parallel returns the same passage across multiple translation editions side-by-side. The tool is used when translation choices are at issue — for instance, when comparing how successive translators have rendered a German idiom or a Steiner-coined philosophical term.
“Does Steiner say X about Y?” is a research-grade question whose answer may be negative. A 404 from verify_locus indicates that the cited reference does not exist in the indexed corpus, allowing the negative finding to be treated as substantive evidence rather than concealed as a retrieval failure.
The Gesamtausgabe is full-text indexed at paragraph granularity. Searches are language-aware in both English and German, ranked by relevance, and returned with stable per-paragraph citation URLs.
MCP (Model Context Protocol) is the agent-tool protocol used by Claude and several other AI clients. The MCP server at https://anthroposophy.ai/mcp publishes the tools below. The canonical, versioned list is maintained at /changelog.
search_steiner — full-text search across the Gesamtausgabe with language, volume, and date filters. Returns ranked passage hits with citation URLs.search_anthroposophy — unified search across the Steiner Gesamtausgabe, the FMC (Free Man Creator) curatorial wiki, and the /sources/ foundational-texts corpus. corpus='all' fans across all three; corpus='both' covers GA + FMC (back-compat default). Used when the relevant sub-corpus is not known in advance.fetch_passage — retrieve a verbatim passage by (volume, lecture, paragraph, language, edition). Returns the text together with the quote_safe flag.fetch_parallel — retrieve the same passage across multiple translation editions.verify_locus — confirm the existence of a GA reference in the indexed corpus prior to quotation.find_fmc_pages_for_ga_locus — reverse lookup: returns FMC schema pages that cite a given GA reference (volume, lecture, paragraph).fetch_fmc_page — retrieve a full FMC wiki page together with its reference apparatus.fetch_fmc_schema — retrieve a single FMC schema (the diagrammatic synthesis pages, e.g. FMC00.588).traverse_anthroposophy_links — follow the typed-edge graph between entities. Used for cross-figure queries that traverse multiple entities.search_sources — full-text search over /sources/ — Sacred, Inspired and Foundational Texts (Vedic scripture, Greek philosophy, Patrologia, Aquinas, Beguine + Rhineland mysticism, Hermetic Corpus, Theosophical inheritance, Goethean works). Filters by work, stream, tradition, form, year range.fetch_source_chapter — retrieve verbatim chapter text from /sources/ by chapter_locus. Returns text_trust='verbatim', quote_safe=true, parent breadcrumbs, available editions.fetch_source_summary — retrieve the FMC-curatorial paraphrase block for a chapter or work (theme, Steiner engagement with verified GA loci, cross-tradition congruences). text_trust='paraphrase', quote_safe=false — never quote summary content.list_source_works — discovery: enumerate /sources/ works by stream, tradition, form, or summary-presence. Returns minimal metadata for cross-corpus surveys.find_source_chapters_for_ga_locus — reverse lookup (sources → GA): which /sources/ chapters cite a given GA lecture or volume? Returns paraphrase statements with chapter URLs.The REST API at https://anthroposophy.ai/v1/ serves the same content as MCP. Access is anonymous; rate limits may be applied as the service scales.
GET /v1/steiner/search?q=etheric+body&lang=enRequired parameter: q. Optional parameters: lang (en or de, default en), n, ga, ga_range, from_date, to_date, edition, cursor. English uses Porter stemming; German uses Snowball-de.
HEAD /v1/steiner/verify/ga/13
HEAD /v1/steiner/verify/ga/13/1909-08-30
HEAD /v1/steiner/verify/ga/13/1909-08-30/p47Returns 200 if the reference is indexed, 404 if it is not. Required prior to quoting any citation not retrieved directly within the current session.
GET /v1/steiner/en/ga/13/1909-08-30/p47.json
GET /v1/steiner/de/ga/13/1909-08-30/p47.json
GET /v1/steiner/en/ga/13/1909-08-30/p47?edition=RSP1964The JSON response includes available_versions[], edition_basis, alignment_confidence, and is_original. Omitting the .json suffix returns a browseable HTML rendering with a sidebar enumerating other available versions.
/llms.txt — agent orientation prose, agent contract, copy-pasteable examples./openapi.json — machine-readable OpenAPI 3.1 specification for the REST API./ga/index.json — volume catalog./ga/{n}/index.json — per-volume metadata and table of contents./ga/{n}/{slug}.md — raw Markdown for any document (English edition; YAML frontmatter).MCP and REST calls are logged on the server for operational monitoring and capacity planning. Logs record the request (tool name, parameters, timestamp, source IP) and the response metadata (status, byte size, latency). Logs do not capture downstream agent prompts or the wider reasoning context a client may carry; only the requests issued to the retrieval API are recorded.
Rate limits are enforced at the edge per source IP. There is no per-user accounting, as there is no authentication.