In a death that Rudolf Steiner terms a voluntary sacrifice and that inspires Edith Maryon's relief In Memory of Theo Faiss (pictured), seven-year-old Theo Faiss was crushed by an overturned horse wagon.

Rudolf Joseph Lorenz Steiner was an Austrian New Age guru, philosopher, occultist, social reformer, architect, esotericist, and claimed clairvoyant and speaker with the dead. 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.