Walter Johannes Stein - Follower of Steiner

Follower of Steiner

Stein became a personal student of Rudolf Steiner from about the age of 21, and enjoyed the unofficial supervision of Steiner while writing his dissertation (a commented edition of which was brought out by Thomas Meyer under the title Dokumentation eines wegweisenden Zusammenwirkens). Broadly speaking, the dissertation was an attempt to write a theory of cognition for spiritual knowledge.

After the war Stein assisted Steiner in promoting Social Threefolding. When it became apparent in 1919 that these efforts were not going to succeed, Steiner asked Stein to teach history and German literature at the first Waldorf School in Stuttgart. It was as part of this work that Stein began his research on the Grail, which culminated in 1928 with his book The Ninth Century and the Holy Grail. The cover of the latest English edition says of this work:

"In studying the central Grail narrative – Parzival by Wolfram von Eschenbach – Stein takes a twofold approach. On the one hand he searches historical records in order to identify actual people and events hidden behind the Grail epic's veil of romance. And on the other hand, he deciphers Eschenbach's hidden spiritual messages, revealing Parzival to be an esoteric document containing mighty pictures of the human being's inner path of development."

Thomas Meyer has also published a collection of articles by Stein on themes related to those in the book under the title Der Tod Merlins.