The Britannica, 1 Brit 185, has this to say:

Akashic record, in occultism, a compendium of pictorial records, or “memories,” of all events, actions, thoughts, and feelings that have occurred since the beginning of time. They are said to be imprinted on Akasha, the astral light, which is described by spiritualists as a fluid ether existing beyond the range of human senses. The Akashic records are reputedly accessible to certain select individuals—e.g., a spiritualist medium who conducts a seance. Akasha allegedly transmits the waves of human willpower, thought, feeling, and imagination and is a reservoir of occult power, an ocean of unconsciousness to which all are linked, making prophecy and clairvoyance possible.

While not entirely harmonious with Steiner’s comments, the above does reflect the existence of the concept, though its Oriental origin is not stated. Around the turn of this century, Steiner sensed that the Theosophical Society, as it then existed, was the most fertile field in which his spiritual insights could then be revealed. His most practical course was simply to adopt the Oriental terminology prevalent within the Society, to the extent it represented an area of spiritual insight, rather than to coin Western terms. Thus he continued to use such terminology as Karma, but with substantive revisions in meaning and application as his spiritual insight demanded. The term “Akashic record” was such an instance. He specifically did not accept that such record could be accurately read by spiritualist mediums.

Let us look first at some of the relevant things Steiner said about the “Akashic” record (generally referred to simply as “Akashic” herein), and then see what the Bible has to say about it. It is important in regard to the former to bear in mind the complex nature of the “Akashic” and that it is beyond the scope or present needs of this work to attempt a thorough treatment of it here. In her 1939 Preface to the German edition of what is now Cosmic Memory (CM), a group of Steiner’s essays that first appeared in 1904 in the periodical Lucifer Gnosis, Steiner’s widow, Marie, stated, “The one who wishes to obtain a clear idea of the manner in which a reading of the Akasha Chronicle becomes possible must devote himself intensively to the study of Anthroposophy.” In the second essay, entitled “From the Akasha Chronicle,” Steiner says, “Only a faint conception of this chronicle can be given in our language. For our language corresponds to the world of the senses.” After pointing out that the script is “not . . . like the dead testimony of history, but appear[s] in full life,” he goes on,

Those initiated into the reading of such a living script can look back into a much more remote past than is presented by external history; and—on the basis of direct spiritual perception—they can also describe much more dependably the things of which history tells. In order to avoid possible misunderstanding, it should be said that spiritual perception is not infallible. This perception also can err, can see in an inexact, oblique, wrong manner. No man is free from error in this field, no matter how high he stands. Therefore one should not object when communications emanating from such spiritual sources do not always entirely correspond. But the dependability of observation is much greater here than in the external world of the senses. What various initiates can relate about history and prehistory will be in essential agreement. Such a history and prehistory does in fact exist in all mystery schools. Here for millennia the agreement has been so complete that the conformity existing among external historians of even a single century cannot be compared with it. The initiates describe essentially the same things at all times and in all places.

From Occult Science (OS), Chap. IV:

When a being reaches corporeal existence, the substance of his body disappears with his physical death. The spiritual forces that have expelled these corporeal elements from themselves do not “disappear” in the same way. They leave their impressions, their exact counterparts, behind in the spiritual foundations of the world, and he who, penetrating the visible world, is able to lift his perception into the invisible, is finally able to have before him something that might be compared with a mighty spiritual panorama, in which all past world-processes are recorded. These imperishable impressions of all that is spiritual may be called the “Akashic Record,” thus designating as the Akashic essence the spiritually permanent element in universal occurrences, in contradistinction to the transient forms of these occurrences.

Commencing in the first paragraph of the first lecture of The Gospel of St. John (GSJ), the first lecture-cycle in the so-called “Gospel Series,”^{1 we find:}