Elisabeth Vreede
As the first leader of the Mathematical-Astronomical Section at the Goetheanum, Elisabeth Vreede played a decisive role in shaping its development and work. She possessed clarity, warmth, and the rare ability to support others in their research.
“To understand human life by drawing from the universe through living knowledge—that is what is intended by contemporary spiritual science,” stated Rudolf Steiner, and he gave the responsibility for leading the Mathematical-Astronomical Section of the School for Spiritual Science at the Goetheanum to Elisabeth Vreede (1879-1943), a mathematician and astronomer from the Netherlands. “Anthroposophy is a path of knowledge that would guide the spiritual in the human being to the spiritual in the universe,” wrote Rudolf Steiner in his first anthroposophical “leading thought” (February 17, 1924). At the Christmas Conference of 1923–24, Steiner emphasized the need to develop “a Section for mathematical and astronomical perspectives,” since, (as he’d said years earlier) “astronomical science is, indeed, the one that has the best opportunity of being led back to spirituality.” He entrusted this Section to the highly gifted specialist Vreede, who had come from The Hague in the Netherlands. Her department was at the heart of what Steiner intended with the founding of the Dornach School of Spiritual Science and was in the best of hands. A tribute to Vreede reads: “Her thinking-force had something Jupiter-like and all-encompassing about it. When she lectured or led the Class, her forehead shone like a star. Her way of thinking enabled her to grasp immediately what Rudolf Steiner had presented and, despite her deepest reverence for him, to form her own independent judgment, just as he had hoped the members would do.”
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