Rudolf Steiner, Satanist?

You can find all sorts of claims about Rudolf Steiner if you search Google deep enough. Consider the following by Lyndon LaRouche. (http://www.rense.com/general61/satanism.htm ) The article starts off:

"The best-organized Satanist forces operating presently inside the United States include the following prominent organizations:"

The first organization named: The Lucis Trust. It is described as "the leading, putatively respectable Britain-based Satan cult". A quick check with their website (http://www.lucistrust.org/) turns up the following description: "The worldwide activities of the Lucis Trust, founded by Alice and Foster Bailey, are dedicated to establishing right human relations. The motivating impulse is love of God, expressed through love of humanity and service of the human race." They certainly sound like Satanists!

To understand the accusation, it helps to consider the insular mind of a Christian fundamentalist. With a narrow conception of Jesus and a literal interpretation of the Bible, they are going for the letter of Christianity, rather than its spirit (Jesus' central message of love, for example, seems often to be overlooked). Any spiritual beings mentioned must be "demons", since most fundamentalists have only noticed the references to "demons" in the Bible. It is under this general understanding that the theory arises, if it is a spirit, it must be a demon, spawn of Satan. That is, the only spirits besides God, Jesus and the Angels are demons. Hence, any interest in spiritual beings is – Satan worship. That is the essence of the Christian fundamentalist argument against everything they label "New Age".

The Lucis Trust is traced back to its roots with Blavatsky, and then all the organizations purportedly sponsored by the Lucis Trust are named, including "The Anthroposophs [sic] of Rudolf Steiner". "The Rudolf Steiner School" is thrown in for good measure, thought the author appears unsure, inserting a parenthetical note that "these could not be genuine followers of Steiner". Further on in the article, the originators of the "Age of Aquarius" are named: "Fyodor Dostoevsky, Friedrich Nietzsche, Alex Muenthe (of Capri notoriety), and Aleister Crowley." That's right, Dostoevsky and Aleister Crowley in one sentence. These are probably just off a list of books that a good Christian fundamentalist ought not to read, though Dostoevsky is still a bit of a puzzle. Perhaps "The Grand Inquisitor" from "The Brother's Karamazov" hits too close to home. And of course, no good Christian fundamentalist discussion of Satanism would be complete without a swipe at Rock music, and of course this article does not fail to name the Beatles as prominent Satanists.

So Steiner is named as a Satanist on the basis that his "Anthroposophs" are sponsored by the Lucis Trust. I must confess I'd never heard of the Lucis Trust before this article, so the claim, if true, would be doubly surprising. And of course, there are no sources cited to establish the fact. In fact, there is no basis in fact for this claim. Steiner's Anthroposophical Society is not affiliated with the Lucis Trust. This is simply nothing more than another case of an sloppy author putting every apparent "New Age" group they can think of in a hat, shaking it up, and putting them together in an ill-informed article.

The best overall assessment of this article comes at the end, in the "Comments" section. Randy Littlejohn writes, "The Real History of Satanism is not a real history at all. It is Christian Fundamentalist propaganda written for the purpose of demonizing perceived enemies of fundamentalist beliefs." I'm with Randy on this one.