The Constitution of the General Anthroposophical Society

GA 260a

Preliminary Remark by the Editor

Rudolf Steiner described the task he set himself when he took over as General Secretary of the German Section of the Theosophical Society in a letter to Wilhelm Hübbe-Schleiden dated August 16, 1902, with the following words:

“I want to build on the power that enables me to bring ‘spiritual disciples’ onto the path of development. That alone will have to be my inaugural act. That is why I want to be positive in everything.”

For this task, a separate institution was established in connection with the German Section, the so-called Esoteric School. Rudolf Steiner began to build it up after his stay in London in mid-May 1904, where Annie Besant authorized him as head of this Esoteric School founded by H.P. Blavatsky to work independently in Germany, Austria, and German-speaking Switzerland. However, even before the establishment of this Esoteric School, he had already given advice on inner development to individuals who asked him for it, as various letters from this period testify.

Rudolf Steiner's Esoteric School existed from 1904 to 1914. Until May 1907, it was outwardly part of the Esoteric School led by Annie Besant, until this connection was dissolved at the Munich Congress — Whitsun 1907 — on the basis of a personal agreement with Annie Besant. Annie Besant wrote about this to Wilhelm Hübbe-Schleiden on June 7, 1907: “Dr. Steiner's occult training is very different from ours... He teaches the Christian Rosicrucian path, which is helpful for some people, but different from ours. He has his own school and bears responsibility for it himself.” With the outbreak of the First World War in the summer of 1914, Dr. Steiner no longer wanted to continue the school.

It was not until the Anthroposophical Society was reorganized as the General Anthroposophical Society at the Christmas Conference in 1923 that Rudolf Steiner also established a new esoteric school in the form of three classes at the School of Spiritual Science. Just as continuity was maintained with the historical existence of the Theosophical Society, Rudolf Steiner also built on what had existed before at the Christmas Conference in 1923. In the opening lecture of the Christmas Conference on December 24, 1923, he said when reading out point 5 of the statutes: " Please, my dear friends, do not be alarmed by these three classes! The three classes already existed in the Anthroposophical Society, only in a different form, until 1914."

This connection was symbolically completed by three ceremonial hammer blows at the laying of the foundation stone of the General Anthroposophical Society on the morning of December 25, 1923. Adolf Arenson, as a member of the three classes of the Esoteric School from 1904 to 1914, attests to this in his letter to Albert Steffen dated December 24, 1926:

"In the pre-war esoteric communities, there were two laws that were repeatedly presented to us. One was that of absolute truthfulness, without which all esoteric striving would be meaningless; the other was that of continuity, that is, of connecting with what had gone before." Rudolf Steiner opened the Christmas Conference not with words, but with symbolic blows, thereby bringing the law of continuity into effect. For everyone who belongs to the institution that Rudolf Steiner describes in the 36th chapter of his ‘Lebensgang’ (Life Course), these strokes said: ‘The new thing that I want to give you, I hereby connect to what has gone before, faithful to the law of esotericism.’ Here, too, any interpretation is out of the question for those who know these opening strokes. It hardly needs to be emphasized that this connection to the past includes the possibility of bringing something completely new, even something radically new, just as in plants the blossom is connected to the formation of leaves and yet is something completely new."

Of the three classes planned for the new Esoteric School, only the first could be established for the time being due to Rudolf Steiner's death. Rudolf Steiner did not appoint a successor.