What is Anthroposophy, and is it different from Theosophy?

Anthroposophy is the spiritual philosophy founded formally in 1912-13 by the Austrian philosopher Rudolf Steiner (1861-1925) after he broke from the Theosophical Society, where he had served as Secretary General of its German Section since 1902. According to the Anthroposophical Society's own history and Britannica's biographical entry on Steiner, the split came to a head over the Society's promotion of the young Jiddu Krishnamurti as the incarnate World Teacher under Annie Besant's leadership. Steiner rejected that claim and, along with most of the German membership, left to found his own movement, taking its name from the Greek anthropos ('human being') and sophia ('wisdom') to distinguish it from Theosophy's theos ('God, the divine'). Steiner described Anthroposophy as a 'spiritual science': a method of disciplined inner training he claimed could develop latent clairvoyant faculties, allowing direct perception of spiritual worlds with a rigor he argued was analogous to empirical science, though it has never been validated by or recognized within mainstream science.

Steiner's system retains core Theosophical commitments (reincarnation, karma, a hierarchy of spiritual beings, and human evolution through successive cosmic epochs) while recasting them through what he called esoteric or 'Christian' Rosicrucianism and his own reading of Goethean natural philosophy. He taught that the being he called the 'Christ' entered the man Jesus at his baptism as a unique cosmic event (the 'Mystery of Golgotha'), a version of Christology historic orthodoxy has never held, since it separates 'the Christ' as an impersonal cosmic force from the eternal Son who is one person from conception (Luke 1:35; John 1:14).

Anthroposophy's most visible legacies are practical rather than doctrinal. Waldorf education, which Steiner founded in 1919 for the children of workers at the Waldorf-Astoria cigarette factory in Stuttgart, has grown into a network of roughly 1,200 schools worldwide built around his developmental theory of childhood; biodynamic agriculture grew from a 1924 lecture series Steiner gave to farmers and combines organic methods with Steiner's own cosmological prescriptions, such as timing tasks to lunar and planetary cycles and burying manure-filled cow horns to concentrate spiritual 'forces' in the soil: practices with no basis in agronomic science but still followed by biodynamic-certified farms today. Both institutions are typically presented to the public in secular or educational terms, with Anthroposophy's underlying spiritual claims about reincarnation, karma, and a graded hierarchy of spiritual beings often left unstated: a genuine departure from a Christian framework in which salvation is by grace through faith in a single earthly life (Ephesians 2:8-9; Hebrews 9:27), not through a soul's own evolutionary progress across many.