Only a person who has passed through the gate of …
– Rudolf Steiner

Rudolf Joseph Lorenz Steiner (30 March 1925) was an Austrian occultist, social reformer, architect, esotericist, and claimed clairvoyant. 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 (for heresiologists it is little doubt that these are neognosticism). Many of his ideas are pseudoscientific. He was also prone to pseudohistory.