MUNICH, GERMANY – According to a news brief in the May 16, 1922 issue of the New York Times, “pandemonium broke loose” at the Four Seasons hotel in Munich when “Germany’s high priest of Theosophy” was nearing the end of his lecture, and the lights were switched off before firecrackers and stink bombs were hurled towards the stage as the melee ensued.
Rudolf Steiner, who was then at the height of his fame, managed to slip out through the hall’s back door unscathed. He knew the attack was coming, but not because of the clairvoyant abilities he claimed to possess or which he asserted could be attained by faithful adherence to his obscure teachings. A few days before, the local weekly Heimatland (Homeland) penned a bristling column branding him a traitor and a “scoundrel”, viciously calling for “rotten eggs and apples” to be thrown at the “anthroposophical Cagliostro”, alluding to a controversial Italian occultist, who died in prison for attempting to found a freemasonic lodge in 18th century Rome.
After the incident, Steiner reassured inner circle member Edith Maryon via telegram: “Survived Munich.” The English sculptor had been dreading her mentor’s appearance in the Bavarian capital, which had become a hotbed of reactionary sentiment since the war. The weekly gatherings of the Thule Society, considered to be among the most important groups behind Hitler’s National Socialist German Worker’s Party, had been hosted at that very hotel for the past several years, which was also used as a venue by other ultra-right wing organizations.
While technically wrong, the Times‘ description of Steiner as a Theosophist was not entirely inaccurate. By 1922, almost a decade had transpired since he had broken away from Mme. Blavatsky’s quasi-religious group to form his own splinter movement called Anthroposophy. Given the American readership’s greater familiarity with the former, and the fundamental similarities between the two, the error was likely deliberate.
Steiner adopted a term coined by Nathan Bailey in 1742 to imbue his initiative with an aura of humanism, rather than the theism implied by the Theosophical Society. Founded in New York City in 1875 by a Russian aristocrat and over a dozen eclectic characters, which included an American Army colonel, Theosophy was part of a wider occult revivalist movement that swept through much of the Western world during the last half of the 19th century, as tectonic geopolitical changes and industrialization upended long-established traditions and socio-cultural norms.
In many ways, the fascination with spiritualism, mediumship, reincarnation and Eastern religious disciplines that flourished in the United States, Britain and Western Europe at this time was a counterpoint to the proletarian class struggle that was emerging simultaneously in the periphery of empire, where new modes of production, electrification and railroads were destabilizing long established power dynamics within the various principalities, duchies and castles of the intermarried royal bloodlines at the empire’s core.
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