What2 to Be Done
What then are the messages of theosophy and anthroposophy, and how
do they differ? Largely over a variant view of the Christ. In India, when
Leadbeater discovered a thirteen-year-old Brahmin youth from Madras,
Jiddu Krishnamurti, he saw in him such great promise that he took the
boy to England for higher education, believing him to be the forth-
coining Buddha. Besant, going further, believed the boy to be the rein-
carnation of Christ. Krishnamurti, humbler and wiser, repudiated both
roles but developed himself into one of the more enlightened of Indian
gurus.
At this point, in 1913, Rudolf Steiner, then general secretary of the
GermanTheosophical Society, broke away from Besant and Leadbeater
on the ground that the Christ would not reappear on earth in a physi-
cal but only in an etheric body. He then formed his own Anthro-
posophical Society.
Whereas the theosophists' clairvoyant approach to history and sci-
ence was based on the occult practice of minutely comparing the date
obtained from the Akashic Record over the centuries by different
clairvoyants until the evidence could be sufficiently correlated to war-
rant a conclusion, Steiner chose to go a different route, claiming that
the basis of all that he had to say derived directly from his own con-
clusions based on his own scrutiny of the record. This prodigious ef-
fort resulted in some forty books and some six thousand lectures taken
down by his followers. In this monumental work he detailed "cosmic
history" and the "wisdom of the world," his object being to open up
the "secret" and to make what was "occult" available to the whole of
humankind. He said he wished to deepen human understanding by