8 lectures in Munich, August 24–31, 1913 (CW 147) Rudolf Steiner gave these lectures just after the first performance of his mystery drama The Souls' Awakening in Munich. He offers details of one's experience of spiritual development and crossing the threshold of the spiritual world. Steiner explains that humanity stands today at this threshold, and that the keys to crossing it include self-knowledge, self-control, and a clear recognition of the activities of Lucifer and Ahriman. These lectures contain some of Steiner's most profound insights into the path to higher knowledge. He gave the lectures twice each day, mornings and evenings, in the “Princes' Hall” of the Café Luitpold in Munich. Performances of The Guardian of the Soul Events in Dramatic Scenes and The Souls' Soul and Spirit Events in Dramatic Scenes at the Volkstheaters, also given twice. The drama receiving its first performance was named in the program announcements as “The Awakening of Maria and Thomasius (or The Other Side of the Threshold).” A fifth mystery drama had been planned for summer 1914, and a lecture course titled “Occult Hearing and Occult Reading” would have been given August 18 to 27, but the beginning of World War I prevented further festivals in Munich. Secrets of the Threshold is a translation from German of Die Geheimnisse der Schwelle (GA 147).
Rudolf Joseph Lorenz Steiner 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 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. His philosophical work of these years, which he termed "spiritual science", sought to apply what he saw as the clarity of thinking characteristic of Western philosophy to spiritual questions, differentiating this approach from what he considered to be vaguer approaches to mysticism. In a second phase, beginning around 1907, he began working collaboratively in a variety of artistic media, including drama, dance and architecture, culminating in the building of the Goetheanum, a cultural centre to house all the arts. In the third phase of his work, beginning after World War I, Steiner worked on various ostensibly applied projects, including Waldorf education, biodynamic agriculture, and anthroposophical medicine. Steiner advocated a form of ethical individualism, to which he later brought a more explicitly spiritual approach. He based his epistemology on Johann Wolfgang von Goethe's world view in which "thinking…is no more and no less an organ of perception than the eye or ear. Just as the eye perceives colours and the ear sounds, so thinking perceives ideas." A consistent thread that runs through his work is the goal of demonstrating that there are no limits to human knowledge.