Cosmic Eugenics: Rudolph Steiner’s Karmic Racial Evolution

They won’t teach you this in the Waldorf Schools

Just as Steiner’s turn-of-the-century conversion to theosophy resists facile explanation, so too does his simultaneous adoption of the esoteric race doctrines elaborated by his theosophical forebears. One of the chief connecting threads between Steiner’s pre-theosophical intellectual orientation and his mature race theories is the polyvalent theme of evolution, which Steiner eventually came to understand in physical, spiritual, and cosmic terms. Haeckel’s Monism may have played a significant role in this process. Sometimes considered a variant of social Darwinism, Haeckel’s theory – which also incorporated Lamarckian and Goethean elements–offered an evolutionary interpretation for a vast array of social and cultural phenomena. In several respects, however, the particular variety of evolutionary thought that Steiner embraced is perhaps better understood as non-Darwinian or even anti-Darwinian. Indebted in part to his early studies of Goethe’s naturalist writings as well as to Romantic nature philosophy, Steiner’s conception of evolution was firmly progressivist and teleological, positing a succession of ever-higher developmental stages advancing toward an eventual goal of evolutionary perfection.

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Beginning in 1903, soon after his ascension to the leadership of the theosophical movement in Germany, Steiner elaborated a hierarchically structured occult cosmology based on an evolutionary progression of racial groups, relying initially on the traditional theosophical terminology of “root races” and “sub-races” to designate these groups. The basic outlines of this racial mythology were first adapted from standard theosophical works, above all Blavatsky’s Secret Doctrine, which Steiner began reading in late 1902 at the recommendation of theosophist Marie von Sivers, his later wife. In the course of Steiner’s growing tensions with the rest of the theosophical leadership, however, he came to reject the theosophical vocabulary and in particular theosophy’s emphasis on the cyclical nature of racial evolution, with its ever-repeating “rounds” and “root races,” while retaining theosophical ideas about karma and reincarnation as central elements of his racial theory. In place of the cyclical theosophical conception of race development, Steiner proposed a more forthrightly progressive model in which racial evolution displays both a clearly advancing trajectory as well as regressive and backward trends; according to anthroposophy, higher racial forms move forward evolutionarily by overcoming and outpacing lower racial forms. As the culmination of this process, Steiner foretold the eventual disappearance of racial and ethnic identity as such and its subsumption under the “Universal Human,” his term for the future condition of a more spiritualized humanity that has transcended race entirely. The end point of racial evolution was thus meant to signify the conclusive overcoming of materialism, the final goal of anthroposophy’s ‘spiritual science,’ as well as the advent of authentic individuality.

Steiner gave widely differing indications about when this evolutionary process of outgrowing racial and ethnic particularity would be completed. On some occasions he claimed that “in our age the racial character is gradually being overcome.” On other occasions he claimed that this would not occur until thousands or even millions of years in the future. According to Steiner’s theory of cosmic evolution, the existence of racial diversity is itself a deviation from the proper path of human spiritual and physical development. The simultaneous existence of different racial groups was the result of the untimely interference of demonic forces, named Lucifer and Ahriman in anthroposophical terminology, who disrupted the divinely ordained course of evolution, which was supposed to produce a succession of single races rather than a side by side co-existence of multiple races. Had this original evolutionary trajectory been fulfilled, it would have resulted in the unproblematic emergence of a non-racial Universal Human. Since the divine plan for evolution was unable to unfold in this way, however, the simultaneous existence of different racial groups, occupying “different stages of development” and displaying very different “physical and mental characteristics,” necessitated a new approach to racial evolution.

Instead of a mere succession of varying races one after another, Steiner’s racial theory centers on a process of individual development through a series of incarnations in progressively “higher” racial forms. From an anthroposophical perspective, “we are to acquire new capacities through repeated incarnations in the successive races,” a process governed by Steiner’s occult conception of karma. This racialized version  of reincarnation bears important similarities to other varieties of western esotericism though it differs significantly from many non-western models of reincarnation. Within Steiner’s system, the phenomena of racial evolution and the evolution of individual souls are so intimately intertwined that anthroposophical sources sometimes treat them as essentially synonymous. In Steiner’s words:

“Human souls proceed through the different races. In this way the variety of races becomes sensible and reasonable. Thus we see that one is not condemned to live only in a primitive race while another stands at the highly developed stages of racial existence. Each of us passes through the different racial stages, and the passage signifies a progressive development for the individual soul.”

The entwinement of racial evolution and spiritual progress represents a central pillar of Steiner’s esoteric cosmology. Its principal features include a hierarchical scheme of higher and lower racial forms, a contrast between advancing races and declining races, and the crucial notion that individual souls are responsible for their own racial-spiritual progress or degeneration. Moreover, physical aspects of race, according to Steiner, reflect the underlying spiritual realities of race: “For our soul-spiritual nature is physically expressed by the colour of our skin.” In addition, the emphasis on racial difference as a corollary to spiritual progress sometimes led Steiner to denigrate notions of racial equality:

“The most characteristic sign of the time is the belief that when a group of individuals have set up some trashy proposition as a general program—such as the unity of all men regardless of race, nation or color, and so forth – something has been accomplished. Nothing has been accomplished except to throw sand into people’s eyes. Something real is attained only when we note the differences and realize what world conditions are.”

These themes recur throughout Steiner’s works. Through the progress of racial and ethnic karma, and the correlation between soul-spiritual qualities and racial traits, the physical variety and diversity within the human species are invested with powerful esoteric significance, under the rubric of progressive evolution. Indeed such considerations provide an essential key to the anthroposophical understanding of history. As the incarnating souls “became steadily better and better,” Steiner explains:

“the souls eventually passed over into higher races, such that souls which had earlier been incarnated in completely subordinate races developed themselves upwards onto a higher level and were able to incarnate later into the physical descendants of the leading population of Europe. […] That is the reason why there were fewer and fewer descendants in the subordinate races and more and more descendants in the higher races. Thus the lowest strata of the European population gradually died out. This is a very definite process which we must understand. The souls evolve further, the bodies die away. We must therefore carefully distinguish between soul development and race development. The souls then appear in bodies that descend from higher races.”

The steady advance of racial-spiritual progress depends, however, on the willingness of each person, each soul, to embrace the occult version of Christianity that Steiner preached. Failure or refusal to do so leads to racial decadence:

“People who listen to the great leaders of humankind, and preserve their soul with its eternal essence, reincarnate in an advanced race; in the same way he who ignores the great teacher, who rejects the great leader of humankind, will always reincarnate in the same race, because he was only able to develop the one form. This is the deeper meaning of Ahasver, who must always reappear in the same form because he rejected the hand of the greatest leader, Christ. Thus each person has the opportunity to become caught up in the essence of one incarnation, to push away the leader of humankind, or instead to undergo the transformation into higher races, toward ever higher perfection. Races would never become decadent, never decline, if there weren’t souls that are unable to move up and unwilling to move up to a higher racial form. Look at the races that have survived from earlier eras: they only exist because some souls could not climb higher.”

Steiner’s statements along these lines were not limited to general spiritual-evolutionary principles; he offered an array of concrete assessments of specific racial and ethnic groups. His various pronouncements on the topic comprise a range of normative judgements, some of them arranged in a hierarchical scale and many of them plainly pejorative. At times these assertions were broad categorizations; Steiner taught, for instance, that black people are marked by a powerful instinctual life, yellow and brown people by a potent emotional life, and white people by a highly developed intellectual life. Other ethnic racial assessments were more concrete and occasionally quite specific. Jews and Chinese, for example, served as paradigmatic examples of racial stagnation. Steiner characterized indigenous peoples as decadent, stunted and degenerate. Black Africans, meanwhile, were portrayed as highly physical creatures, spiritually immature, and lacking a relationship to the higher spiritual realms. Such claims recapitulated standard European notions about black people as savages, while carrying the additional significance of anthroposophy’s stratified model of spiritual evolution. “Negroes,” Steiner taught, “cut themselves off completely from the spiritual world.” According to Steiner, “younger souls – the majority at any rate – incarnate in the coloured races, so that it is the coloured races, especially the Negro race, which mainly brings younger souls to incarnation.” In contrast to the spiritually mature Europeans, “The black or Negro race is substantially determined by these childhood characteristics.” At times Steiner offered extended and graphic descriptions of the Negro’s powerful physical drives and their cosmic origins. He criticized the presence of black people in Europe and its degrading spiritual effects, decrying in particular the stationing of French colonial troops on German soil during the occupation of the Rhineland in the aftermath of World War One. Several of his lectures during the Rhineland occupation, at the height of German outrage against the deployment of African soldiers in Germany, invoke this theme. In a February 1923 discussion with the original group of Waldorf teachers Steiner declared: 

“The French are committing the terrible brutality of moving black people to Europe, but it works, in an even worse way, back on France. It has an enormous effect on the blood and the race and contributes considerably toward French decadence. The French as a race are reverting.”

In a March 1923 lecture in Dornach surveying the various racial groups on the earth, Steiner offered definite instruction about which races belong where:

“When we ask which race belongs to which part of the earth, we must say: the yellow race, the Mongols, the Mongolian race belongs to Asia, the White race or the Caucasian race belongs to Europe, and the black race or the Negro race belongs to Africa. The Negro race does not belong to Europe, and the fact that this race is now playing such a large role in Europe is of course nothing but a nuisance.”

In a December 1922 lecture in Dornach, Steiner provided a striking instance of the anthroposophical conjoining of physical and spiritual aspects of racial difference:

“Recently I went into a bookstore in Basel and found an example of the latest publishing agenda: a Negro novel, just as the Negroes in general are entering into European civilization step by step! Everywhere Negro dances are being performed, Negro dances are being hopped. But we even have this Negro novel already. It is utterly boring, dreadfully boring, but people devour it. I am personally convinced that if we get more Negro novels, and give these Negro novels to pregnant women to read during the first phase of pregnancy, when as you know they can sometimes develop such cravings, if we give these Negro novels to pregnant women to read, then it won’t even be necessary for Negroes to come to Europe in order for mulattoes to appear. Simply through the spiritual effects of reading Negro novels, a multitude of children will be born in Europe that are completely gray, that have mulatto hair, that look like mulattoes!”

Among anthroposophists, such concerns were sometimes expressed as a fear of the “negroification” of German culture and of Europe as a whole. In anthroposophy’s vision of physical-spiritual evolution, the appearance of the ‘wrong’ racial and ethnic groups in the wrong place and time was not simply an affront to cultural propriety but a potential cosmic calamity.

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Long after his departure from the established theosophical movement, and during the period when his followers proposed him as Germany’s savior, Steiner continued to elaborate his racial doctrines as a decisive component of his broader esoteric teachings. In a 1923 lecture on “Color and the Races of Humankind” Steiner declared:

“One can only understand history and all of social life, including today’s social life, if one pays attention to people’s racial characteristics. And one can only understand all that is spiritual in the correct sense if one first examines how this spiritual element operates within people precisely through the color of their skin.”

Throughout his mature esoteric career, Steiner maintained that “profound differences of spiritual culture” are “tied to external skin color” and that the special destiny of the “Germanic peoples” is to integrate the spiritual and the physical through a “carrying down of the spiritual impulses” onto the physical plane and into the human body, which Steiner posited as the cause of white skin. Indeed these profound spiritual differences, marked by skin color, would eventually lead to “a violent battle of White humankind with colored humankind” before the next evolutionary epoch would be able to commence. Notwithstanding Steiner’s earlier statements about the eventual disappearance of race as such, by the 1920s, according to anthroposophy, the future belonged to the White race. In 1920 Steiner proclaimed that “the new dawn of the White race” would come if the white race chose spirituality over materialism. In 1923 he declared: “The White race is the race of the future, the spiritually creative race.” On several other occasions Steiner endorsed Gobineau’s arguments about the superiority of the White race.

These teachings are directly linked to Steiner’s esoteric version of the Aryan myth. Following the standard theosophical model, Steiner held that the “Aryan race” is the currently predominant “root race” in an evolutionary succession of racial groups, each with differing racial characters and differing cosmic missions. The five root races that have appeared so far are the Polarian, Hyperborean, Lemurian, Atlantean, and Aryan, with two more root races to emerge in the distant future; each root race comprises various “sub-races” and peoples, which are also at different stages of development. According to anthroposophy, at present the Aryan peoples share the earth with remnants of the previous two root races, descendants of the Lemurians and Atlanteans, both of which originally lived on continents that are now lost under the sea. Thus the Aryan race, in theosophical and anthroposophical doctrine, arose on Atlantis and escaped the great flood that submerged the fabled island; under the guidance of higher spiritual beings, the Aryans continued to evolve racially and spiritually, while the leftover Atlantean and Lemurian races devolved. The Aryans went on to colonize the rest of the world.

The anthroposophical variant of the Aryan myth, integrally tied to the Atlantis myth, is a paradigmatic example of the conjoining of ancient and modern elements within Steiner’s worldview. The Atlantis myth has existed at least since Plato, while the Aryan myth is a decidedly modern invention, emerging initially at the end of the eighteenth century through a conflation of philology and ethnology, although the myth’s proponents typically project Aryan origins back to ancient Asia, or Thule, or Atlantis, and so forth. Particularly in his theosophical phase, Steiner endorsed a racial version of the Aryan myth, adopted from other occultists, and gave it a spiritual orientation. This trope was to become central to the racial theories of his anthroposophist followers in Germany, Italy, and elsewhere. Sometimes Steiner spoke of the “the great Aryan Root Race”; at other times he referred to “the Aryans, to the peoples of Asia Minor and Europe whom we regard as members of the Caucasian race.” In line with his theory of racial missions, Steiner held that “it is the task of the Aryans to develop the faculty of thought and all that belongs to it.” On occasion Steiner also referred to “our Nordic race,” and in one instance he posited a direct spiritual connection between intelligence and blonde hair and blue eyes, associating these features with “Nordic” peoples as well. These claims were in turn embedded in a theosophically derived doctrine of racial and national karma.

Beyond the occult meaning of the Aryan myth for Steiner’s anthroposophy, teachings such as these highlight the overall structure of his theory of racial and ethnic evolution, one that is essential to understanding Steiner’s perspective on both nation and race. The basic motif is that of small, specially advanced racial groups progressing upward into the next evolutionary epoch, while the large mass of racially obsolete peoples declines. Steiner repeatedly invoked this pattern throughout his works on race, and applied it to both the past and the future. The culmination of this process of spiritual selection, which one of Steiner’s followers has aptly described as “cosmic eugenics” is the eventual divergence of humanity into a future “good race” and an “evil race” which will be physiologically distinct. Steiner further indicated that his own followers, and the German theosophical and anthroposophical movement that he led, would form the nucleus of the next small group selected to advance into the era ahead, heralds of the new spiritual-racial dispensation in the coming evolutionary epoch. At the same time, Steiner’s racial and ethnic doctrine looked forward to the day when “racial characteristics” will give way to “national characteristics.”

-excerpted from “Between Occultism and Nazism: Anthroposophy and the Politics of Race in the Fascist Era” by Peter Staudenmaier (2014)