A Key to Steiner

The architecture of Rudolf Steiner’s thought, one idea at a time — each sign with his own words, where he said them, and what he joins it to.

All things were made by him; and without him was not any thing made that was made. In him was life; and the life was the light of men. John 1 : 3–4

What this is for, since the question is fair. A catalogue makes material look finished, and a reader who can find an idea in ten seconds may stop doing the thing the idea was for. Steiner sets the ratio himself: “for every one step that you take in the pursuit of the hidden knowledge, take three steps in the perfecting of your own character.” A page of signs is at most the one step. The three are not here and could not be put here. So this is a working notebook that happens to be published, not a reference to lean on — the signs are one person’s shorthand for things already gone through, and what transfers to anyone else is the method rather than the contents. So the signs you make for yourself, out of what you have actually worked through, are worth more than any sign here — and making them is the use of this page that justifies it.

Each sign stands for one idea. Open a leaf to read the idea, where Steiner treats it, and how it bears on the Christic centre; then follow the linked signs at the foot of the leaf to combine it with others. Every mark is plain Unicode, so it can be copied straight into a notebook. Steiner’s own word for such a mark is a sign, and his claim about it is worth keeping in view: the signs “are not arbitrarily invented; they correspond to the forces actively engaged in the world.”

One rule governs everything below. Where a sign says something was not found in Steiner, it means only that — not that it is absent from him. He gave some six thousand lectures and thirty books. What this key searches is a local copy of the Rudolf Steiner Archive — the lectures, the books and the essays, counted exactly under The Sources — and that copy is not all of him: much is untranslated and some was never taken down. An empty search is evidence about the search. Loose ends are marked where they occur rather than gathered into a list: a sign or a link will tell you when the key has looked and not found, and a link drawn by this key rather than said by him is labelled as drawn.