Pulled from Steiner lectures, 1923; Originally published in German, 2009; Translated by Matthew Barton

Pseudo-science? No thanks. This was easily one of the worst books I’ve read this year. I’ve relegated it to a rarely-used lending library in Laos, where it will wilt away in obscurity, just as it deserves.

I originally picked this book up from a used bookstore in Wisconsin, because I love butterflies and was hoping for some science to boost my studies. I was in such a rush to use my store credit, though, that I judged the book by its cover and never read the back.

Idiot.

A Brief, Scientific Introduction

Wilhelm Hoerner does open the book with a scientific look into the 4 life stages of the butterfly, each with 3 separate sub-stages, for what he calls the “twelvefold sequence of metamorphosis.” For what’s it’s worth, I appreciated this scientific overview of the butterfly. He lists the 12 stages as follows:

EGG: 1. forming 2. developing 3. hatching
CATERPILLAR: 4. growing 5. transforming 6. pupating
PUPA: 7. dissolving 8. configuring 9. emerging
BUTTERFLY: 10. unfolding 11. undergoing combusting 12. illuminating (29)

As an amateur Lepidopterist, I didn’t learn much from this Introduction—though I was skeptical about the “combusting” and “illuminating” portions. I also didn’t catch on to the weirdness that awaited me in the book proper, because it seemed fairly straightforward. In fact, Hoerner even hints at God’s creation when he writes:

The great insect researcher Jean Henri Fabre said that instinct is the work of a divine intelligence, and this cannot easily be disputed. We repeatedly see signs of cosmic intelligence at every stage of a butterflies development. (11)

Of course, the sly swapping of the word “divine” for “cosmic” was a telltale sign of loopy things to come—and once this introduction was over, things got weird.

Rudolph Steiner and Anthroposophy

With Hoerner’s modern introduction out the way, the book turned into a collection of lectures by Rudolph Steiner from 1923 that apply the butterfly’s life stages to a human’s spiritual development. These repetitive lectures unfurl Steiner’s own pseudo-science that he dubbed “Anthroposophy.”

Because I had never heard of this philosophy (and had a hard time pronouncing it), I had to go to Wikipedia for a definition:

Anthroposophy is a spiritual new religious movement which was founded in the early 20th century by the esotericist Rudolf Steiner that postulates the existence of an objective, intellectually comprehensible spiritual world, accessible to human experience. Followers of anthroposophy aim to engage in spiritual discovery through a mode of thought independent of sensory experience. Though proponents claim to present their ideas in a manner that is verifiable by rational discourse and say that they seek precision and clarity comparable to that obtained by scientists investigating the physical world, many of these ideas have been termed pseudoscientific by experts in epistemology and debunkers of pseudoscience.

The title of this particular collection of lectures, Butterflies: Beings of Light, comes from Steiner’s concept that in the final stage of the butterfly’s life, it takes all the elements of its first three stages (water, earth, air, and light) and becomes light itself. It’s an image of how humans can do the same, taking our experiences of life and using them to transcend this physical world and become, like the butterfly, beings of light.

This is not what I bargained for in a book I thought was about butterflies! The more I read these lectures, the more I wondered about the delusions that made Matthew Barton translate this nonsense from German to English—or the delusions that allows a Rudolph Steiner Press even to exist.

The lectures themselves are redundant and unreadable. If I had sat under these words at a public library in 1923, I predict it would have taken me 2-minutes-tops to walk out without feeling the least bit disrespectful. This dude was a nutcase.

Rudolph Steiner, in His Own Words

After all this complaining, I’m sure you’re just begging for a taste of these mid-war lectures, aren’t you? Well, here you go. Rudolph Steiner at his finest:

When I say ’I’ to myself, I invoke light in myself. The same light that dyes the butterflies wings is what I invoked in myself when I say ’I’. It is really extraordinarily interesting to observe that when one says ’I’ this would be light in external nature, if I were able to radiate it out into the world around me. I have imprisoned this I in my body. If I were able to emit it, I could create butterflies with it. The human I has the power to create butterflies, insects, and so on.… In ancient Judaic culture, the word ’Yahveh’ meant the same as ’I’, and only priests were allowed to speak it.… At the moment a priest spoke the word ‘Yahveh’ he saw images everywhere of fluttering butterflies.… When he saw butterflies everywhere, he knew he had spoken the word with the right inner warmth of heart.… What I say is true. (38)

I had pulled other equally nonsensical quotes just like this from the book, but I can’t continue with it. Rudolph Steiner was such a word-salad man, he’d have made Kamala Harris blush.

No thanks. I’m good.

Conclusion

I know that this review is slightly unfair. I came to this book accidentally, and I hated it, because it’s not at all what I expected. And that’s my fault.

But once I recognized my fault, I also gave the book a fair shake by reading it, which is probably more than most people can say. I doubt that even the twelve remaining anthroposophisists (that can’t be right) have read the book—so I’m pretty much in a league of my own.

Pseudo-science just isn’t for me, and I couldn’t care less about a philosophy that’s admittedly made up out of thin air (which incidentally is also why I’m neither Mormon nor a Scientologist). What I do know is this:

• Truth exists, and it’s accessible.
• The spiritual world exists, and we’re part of it.
• God exists, and He wants to renew your broken relationship with Him.

If you’re thinking that some “lost knowledge” or new-age philosophy like Anthroposophy is your ticket to happiness, just stop. Wake up.

The best answer is the simplest: God loves you, and He offers a way to save you from the sin and Hell that keeps you from Him, and He does that through Jesus. Take some time to understand it. What have you got to lose except that gaping hole in your life?

©2025 E.T.