Rudolf Steiner (25 or 27 February 1861^[1] – 30 March 1925) was an Austrian philosopher, social thinker, architect and esotericist.^[2][3] He gained initial recognition as a literary critic and cultural philosopher. At the beginning of the twentieth century, he founded a new spiritual movement, Anthroposophy, as an esoteric philosophy growing out of European transcendentalist roots with links to Theosophy.