Steiner, Rudolf (1861–1925)

Rudolf Steiner held that humanity has passed through an astral and an etheric stage and has possessed intuitive and clairvoyant modes of consciousness. People, he held, once enjoyed psychic powers and existed in forms of matter more rarefied than those that characterize their current successors. Nevertheless, people still exist on four levels, the physical, the etheric, the astral and the spiritual, and earlier psychic skills are retrievable. Steiner, who called this theory ‘anthroposophy’, was particularly influenced by Goethe and theosophy.