Rudolf Steiner (1861-1925) was born in Donji Kraljevec, now in Croatia but then in the Hungarian half of the Austro-Hungarian empire. His father was a telegraph operator on the railroad, rising through the ranks to become a station master. Thus, the family enjoyed a comfortable but peripatetic existence.

Baptised and raised Catholic, young Rudolf began to have mystical experiences from the age of nine. Sent to university in Vienna, he studied philosophy and various sciences; one of his instructors was the apostate priest Franz Brentano. Here he lost his faith in the Church but afterwards continued to have mystical experiences and to study and write about various philosophies and religions. Gradually evolving his own far-reaching system of everything (a favourite habit of German-language philosophers), he came to accept karma, reincarnation and much else, which in 1902 led him to the Theosophical Society (TS). He became head of its German-Austrian branch.