Rudolf Steiner (1861–1925)
Born 1861 CE, died 1925 CE.
Rudolf Joseph Lorenz Steiner (German: [ˈʃtaɪnɐ]; 27 or 25 February 1861 – 30 March 1925) was an Austrian New Age guru, philosopher, occultist, social reformer, architect, esotericist, and claimed clairvoyant and speaker with the dead. Steiner gained initial recognition at the end of the nineteenth century as a literary critic and published works including The Philosophy of Freedom. At the beginning of the twentieth century he founded an esoteric spiritual movement, anthroposophy, with roots in German idealist philosophy and theosophy. His teachings are influenced by (Christian) Gnosticism or neognosticism. Many of his ideas are pseudoscientific. He was also prone to pseudohistory. In the first, more philosophically oriented phase of this movement, Steiner attempted to find a synthesis between science and spirituality by developing what he termed "spiritual science", in which he sought to apply the clarity of thinking characteristic of Western philosophy to spiritual questions, intending to differentiate his approach from what he considered to be vaguer approaches to mysticism.
Text from the Wikipedia article Rudolf_Steiner, licensed CC BY-SA 4.0.