In a second phase, beginning around 1907, he began working collaboratively in a variety of artistic media, including drama, dance and architecture, culminating in the building of the Goetheanum, a cultural centre to house all the arts.

In the first two years of Rudolf's life, the family moved twice, first to Mödling, near Vienna, and then, through the promotion of his father to stationmaster, to Pottschach, located in the foothills of the eastern Austrian Alps in Lower Austria.

He became part owner of, chief editor of, and an active contributor to the literary journal Magazin für Literatur, where he hoped to find a readership sympathetic to his philosophy.

[52] In contrast to mainstream Theosophy, Steiner sought to build a Western approach to spirituality based on the philosophical and mystical traditions of European culture.

During this period, Steiner maintained an original approach, replacing Madame Blavatsky's terminology with his own, and basing his spiritual research and teachings upon the Western esoteric and philosophical tradition.

When, for example, the Wright brothers began flying with gliders and eventually with motorized aircraft in 1903, Steiner transformed the ponderous gondola airships of his Atlantis story into airplanes with elevators and rudders in 1904.

Fueled by a need to find an artistic home for their yearly conferences, which included performances of plays written by Edouard Schuré and Steiner, the decision was made to build a theater and organizational center.

[29]: 193 [70] The 1923 Beer Hall Putsch in Munich led Steiner to give up his residence in Berlin, saying that if those responsible for the attempted coup (Hitler's Nazi party) came to power in Germany, it would no longer be possible for him to enter the country.

[73] He believed that through freely chosen ethical disciplines and meditative training, anyone could develop the ability to experience the spiritual world, including the higher nature of oneself and others.

[29][76][77] Steiner used the word Geisteswissenschaft (from Geist = mind or spirit, Wissenschaft = science), a term originally coined by Wilhelm Dilthey as a descriptor of the humanities, in a novel way, to describe a systematic ("scientific") approach to spirituality.

[78] Steiner used the term Geisteswissenschaft, generally translated into English as "spiritual science," to describe a discipline treating the spirit as something actual and real, starting from the premise that it is possible for human beings to penetrate behind what is sense-perceptible.

[79] He proposed that psychology, history, and the humanities generally were based on the direct grasp of an ideal reality,[80] and required close attention to the particular period and culture which provided the distinctive character of religious qualities in the course of the evolution of consciousness.

[89] Numerous homes for children and adults with developmental disabilities based on his work (including those of the Camphill movement) are found in Africa, Europe, and North America.

Steiner also suggested timing such agricultural activities as sowing, weeding, and harvesting to utilize the influences on plant growth of the moon and planets; and the application of natural materials prepared in specific ways to the soil, compost, and crops, with the intention of engaging non-physical beings and elemental forces.

[112] In a 2002 newspaper editorial, Peter Treue, agricultural researcher at the University of Kiel, characterized biodynamics as pseudoscience and argued that similar or equal results can be obtained using standard organic farming principles.

In 1921, pharmacists and physicians gathered under Steiner's guidance to create a pharmaceutical company called Weleda which now distributes naturopathic medical and beauty products worldwide.

[133] Steiner's plays continue to be performed by anthroposophical groups in various countries, most notably (in the original German) in Dornach, Switzerland and (in English translation) in Spring Valley, New York and in Stroud and Stourbridge in the U.K.

According to the principles of eurythmy, there are archetypal movements or gestures that correspond to every aspect of speech – the sounds (or phonemes), the rhythms, and the grammatical function – to every "soul quality" – joy, despair, tenderness, etc.

[140] Steiner defended Goethe's qualitative description of color as arising synthetically from the polarity of light and darkness, in contrast to Newton's particle-based and analytic conception.

[147] Steiner postulates that the world is essentially an indivisible unity, but that our consciousness divides it into the sense-perceptible appearance, on the one hand, and the formal nature accessible to our thinking, on the other.

Steiner thus considered what appears to human experience as a division between the spiritual and natural worlds to be a conditioned result of the structure of our consciousness, which separates perception and thinking.

Anthroposophy was meant to apply the systematic methods of the former to the content of the latter[155][156] For Steiner, the cosmos is permeated and continually transformed by the creative activity of non-physical processes and spiritual beings.

[23] Steiner appreciated the ritual of the mass he experienced while serving as an altar boy from school age until he was ten years old, and this experience remained memorable for him as a genuinely spiritual one, contrasting with his irreligious family life.

[119][161][162] He references in this regard the fact that the genealogies in these two gospels list twenty-six (Luke) to forty-one (Matthew) completely different ancestors for the generations from David to Jesus.

[179] Hammer also notices that Steiner's occult doctrines bear a strong resemblance to post-Blavatskyan Theosophy (e.g. Annie Besant and Charles Webster Leadbeater).

To characterize the structure of his thought as derived from Syrio-Egyptian gnosis (Ahern 2010) may be too strong and plays down the fact that he was critical of early Gnostic Christianity as having no adequate idea of Jesus as a man of flesh and blood.

"[213] Albert Schweitzer wrote that he and Steiner had in common that they had "taken on the life mission of working for the emergence of a true culture enlivened by the ideal of humanity and to encourage people to become truly thinking beings".

[215] Anthony Storr stated about Rudolf Steiner's Anthroposophy: "His belief system is so eccentric, so unsupported by evidence, so manifestly bizarre, that rational skeptics are bound to consider it delusional....

[233] Olav Hammer, university professor expert in new religious movements and Western esotericism, confirms that now the racist and anti-Semitic character of Steiner's teachings can no longer be denied, even if that is "spiritual racism".

"[235] The fascist ministers Giovanni Antonio Colonna di Cesarò (nicknamed "the Anthroposophist duke"; he became antifascist after taking part in Benito Mussolini's government[236]) and Ettore Martinoli have openly expressed their sympathy for Rudolf Steiner.