We then drove at Debbie’s urging to see the Goetheanum, the fruit of Rudolph Steiner’s early 20th century salesmanship, consisting of an enormous, hulking, free-form experiment in reinforced concrete set in a lovely campus of weedy lawns and apple groves. It had a kind of dreamy atmosphere. Steiner, who founded the Waldorf Schools, established the Goetheanum as a kind of conference center for the study of Anthroposophy, which even Anthroposophists have a hard time explaining. It was related somehow to Madame Blavatsky and the Theosophists, who made quite a lot of money holding séances for the families of World War I casualties. Steiner himself was an Austro-Hungarian Goethe scholar born in 1861 who broke with Theosophy when Madame Blavatsky decreed that the Indian philosopher Krishnamurti was the Second Coming. He decided to pursue spirituality at a more scientific level and founded his own movement whose most enduring and substantial legacy are the Waldorf Schools.
Apparently Anthroposophy involves, in Steiner’s own words, “a path of knowledge which attempts to unite the spiritual in the human being with the spiritual in the Cosmos,” which apparently stopped seeing each other some time ago. Another fellow defines it as “a process of development.” But then, so is acne. In any case, it seems to have been attractive enough in its own vague and gaseous way to have appealed to a great many dying heiresses who posthumously foot the bill for the more or less eternal struggle to prevent the Goetheanum’s reinforced concrete from coming apart. The building was designed by Steiner after the original dome-like affair burned down, and he filled it with his own smudgy Blake-like murals and stained glass and crude sculptures of signs of the Zodiac, the Elohim, “The Dance of the Seven,” “the Circle of the Twelve” and so on, copies of which, books of which, postcards and posters of which a girl with a beatific smile will sell you in the gift shop for a pretty franc or two. There is a large and rather impressive auditorium which hosts seminars and concerts and what appear to be rather chaste performances of Faust and Steiner’s own Mystery Dramas.