I am aware that much talk in this vein is already on the Web, and that there is generally a sense "in the air" that something big is happening, with the turning of the Millennium, the end of the Mayan calendar, etc.
I believe that this sense of "something in the air" is a correct perception, albeit sometimes highly distorted.
Most of the information in this essay is not new; it has been open to the public at least since the aftermath of the First World War.
Yet it has not reached the wide public that needs to hear it.
I hope that the advent of the World Wide Web and the search engines will make this important information available to many around the world who have not yet encountered it and who might put it to good use.
I claim no special knowledge concerning these matters; I have merely drawn on published sources.
I expect no one to take my word for anything.
I do ask the readers to read and think through this information, to follow the leads that I give, and do their own investigations.
Conscientious investigations might well cause some intellectual upheavals and change the course of some lives; and this is exactly what is needed, many times over, around the world.
This essay is based, directly or indirectly, on the "spiritual science", or "Anthroposophy", promulgated by Rudolf Steiner in the first quarter of the Twentieth Century.
I say "based on" because this exposition can only be grossly oversimplified and must contain whatever misunderstandings that derive from my own (more or less) weak grasp of the subject-matter.
The reader must assume that this essay is almost wholly derivative; it contains scarcely any original ideas of my own.
In the interest of readability (and to give my strained resources a break), I do not provide full citations in the text.
If I did, almost every sentence would be footnoted.
I do provide below some bibliographic remarks, which I hope will be useful to the conscientious reader.
It is probable that hundreds, or thousands, of people in this world are better qualified than I to write this notice.
I wrote it because:
I was not aware that anyone else was writing it, and it needed to be written, and published.
The events of which I speak are the approaching incarnation of a powerful super-human spiritual being, following the concomitant:
Therefore, in this essay I will use the name "Ahriman", and will attempt to give a clearer understanding of his nature and aims than generally obtains.
Plaque Depicting the Birth of Ahura-Mazda and Ahriman, from Luristan, Western Iran, 799-600 BC
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I realize that many are not inclined to take seriously the possibility of such an event, or to believe that such matters are known, or can be known.
Nevertheless, again I ask the reader to read this essay with an open mind, at least open enough to take in the thoughts and concepts.
I will give a few epistemological considerations which support the notion that such matters can be known.
And I will give some references which will help the readers to conduct their own epistemological researches, and thus to be able to make an informed estimation of this report.
This is a matter of some importance; it is essential for the future of mankind and the earth that as many people as possible become wakeful and not be caught sleeping by the impending events.
A full explanation of the nature of Ahriman and his incarnation is far beyond the scope of this essay (as well as beyond the understanding of this author).
If I only give enough of an explanation so that the readers become conscious enough to see the necessity, and to have the means, of becoming more conscious about these matters, then I will have fulfilled my purpose.
Since this essay speaks of "spiritual" matters, I would like to bring into focus the concept of spirit, along with the concepts of soul and body. (I follow Steiner's exposition in his Theosophy.)
The "body", of course, is the physical form, perceptible by the outer senses, in the world that is usually perceived in common by people's outer senses.
By soul I mean the inner world of subjective feelings and sensations of a Man (or animal).
The sensation of an outer sense-perception (such as the green of grass), as well as feelings (such as pleasure or pain), are in the soul.
Also, the inner being acts through the soul by the will, though the will is not usually conscious.
We might say that the physical world acts on the soul through sensation, the soul lives in its own feelings, and acts upon the world through the will.
We (generally) experience sensations in wakefulness, feelings as if in a dream, and will as if in deep, unconscious sleep.
In addition to living in the inner world of the soul, the Man can live in the world of thought.
Through thinking, we make contact with the being of the things of the world.
By spirit I mean the essence of thought.
Contrary to common misconception, thought is not subjective, but objective, in that it belongs to the whole world, accessible to all.
Many people can grasp the same thought and through that thought contact the same objective reality, though they do not (usually) experience each other's sensations and feelings.
As the physical world interacts with the soul, so also does the spirit; we can call forth thoughts by our acts of will, and the thoughts give us feelings.
Much of the confusion about the supposed subjectivity of thinking arises from the subjectivity of feelings and sensations connected with thinking, as well as from the fact that much of what usually passes for thinking is hardly thinking at all, but a kind of semi-conscious, automatic pseudo-thinking.
(In modern times, people experience thinking as if it comes, usually automatically, out of themselves, yet, paradoxically, thinking in essence is objective and universal [as we can best see in mathematics]. I will say more about this below.)
Thus, through our experience of thinking, we can attach an experiential, "empirical" meaning to the concept of spirit. (All this should, of course, be taken as only a bare introduction to a vast, deep subject.
For now, I am trying only to counter the widespread opinion that soul and spirit are nebulous, meaningless terms.)
And while it is usually true that we hardly experience our thinking, thinking may be intensified so that it becomes conscious, and this development of consciousness may lead to the perception of the world and beings of soul and spirit -- and thus become the basis of "spiritual science".
Spiritual Beings & Earthly Evolution
Following the communications of this spiritual science, I will posit that spiritual beings, known as "angels", live invisibly (to us, usually) and involve themselves in earthly affairs. (This idea has been gaining acceptance in the general culture in recent years, with a surge of interest in angels.)
I will also posit the existence of other spiritual beings, higher and more advanced than the angels, called the "archangels" in theology or angelology.
Modern spiritual research (by Steiner), as well as ancient tradition (from Dionysius the Areopagate, pupil of St. Paul) speaks of at least nine orders of angels and supra-angelic beings -- which, taken together, are called the "hierarchies", sometimes the "choirs of angels", or sometimes the "Gods". (Other, still higher Beings are not discussed here.)
Some of the names given to the nine hierarchies, in ascending order, are:
Angels (Angeloi, Sons of Twilight, Sons of Life; all Men have individual angels as guardians and carriers of their eternal Selves)
Archangels (Archangeloi, Spirits of Fire; the "folk-spirits" are of this rank)
Archai (singular "Arche"; Spirits of Personality, Primal Beginnings, Principalities; the "Time Spirit" or "Zeitgeist" is of this rank)
Exusiai (Spirits of Form, Powers, Authorities; the "Elohim" and "Jehovah" are of this rank)
Dynamis (Spirits of Motion, Mights, Virtues)
Kyriotetes (Spirits of Wisdom, Dominions)
Thrones (Spirits of Will)
Cherubim (Spirits of Harmony)
Seraphim (Spirits of Love)
Although the doctrines of Dionysius were long considered to be heretical, the existence of these Hierarchical beings is mentioned in the Bible.
Cherubim -- Gen. 3: 24; Ex. 25: 18-20,22; Num. 7: 89; Ezk. 9: 3, ch. 10; Ps. 18: 10
Seraphim -- Isa. 6: 21
These spirits are not all "angelic", in the sense of "good and holy".
Some, sometimes, oppose the regular, good world-order.
Ahriman ("the Unjust Prince of this World") is a "retarded" Spirit of Form, working as an Arche, opposing (in a sense) the good world order. (Yet, this opposition is not purely "evil", as I will discuss below.)
Since Ahriman is a spirit of opposition, we might begin to understand his nature by understanding what he opposes: the Gods' plan of earthly and human development.
But the situation is not as simple as a two-sided contest; basic to competent understanding of the world-process is the recognition of at least three kinds of spiritual influence upon the evolution of mankind and the cosmos.
(We must be clear that this "evolution" is something very different from the random, meaningless, material process conceived by the neo-Darwinists and suchlike theorists.
I mean by "evolution" a thoroughly purposeful, thought-filled process of development initiated and guided by spiritual beings.)
The normal Gods (the regular hierarchies) create and nurture the evolvement of the world and mankind, so as to bring about the possibility of Men attaining the status of divinity as "Spirits of Freedom and Love" -- the tenth hierarchy. (At the present stage of evolution, the Man progresses through alternating periods of earth-lives and purely spiritual lives: birth, death, and reincarnation.)
As the name implies, essential to the fulfillment of mankind's task is the realization of "freedom", meaning not so much political freedom as spiritual freedom -- that Men should become independent, unique individuals acting consciously as the originators of their own deeds.
Occult wisdom, independently rediscovered and made public by Steiner (and greatly simplified here, to put it mildly), explains this evolution as being created and guided through seven great cosmic ages.
We are now in the fourth great age, called the "Earth" Age. (All ages' names here are given in order of succession.)
The previous three ages are called "Saturn", "Sun", and "Moon".
Again, these are past ages of cosmic development, not to be confused with the present-day heavenly bodies of the same names.
The same holds for the three future ages: "Jupiter", "Venus", and "Vulcan".
The great Earth Age comprises seven lesser ages, of which we are in the fifth.
These five are called "Polarian", "Hyperborean", "Lemurian", "Atlantean", and "post-Atlantean".
And the Post-Atlantean Age comprises seven cultural epochs, of which, again, we are in the fifth.
The previous four are called "Indian", "Persian", "Egypto-Chaldean", and "Greco-Roman".
Recorded history begins only with the Egypto-Chaldean Epoch; what is generally known of ancient Indian and Persian culture derives from records made in the third epoch. -- These names of epochs do not imply that nothing important was happening in other regions of the earth, but that the archetypal evolutionary impulses of the times were centered in the regions designated.
The epochs last approximately 2160 years; and the present, fifth post-Atlantean epoch began about 1413 AD.
Neither are these epochs considered to be sharply differentiated; transitions happen gradually, future developments being prepared in advance, and past influences lingering after.
Note: This account is ridiculously simplified, for the purpose of providing a bare conceptual framework for this essay.
To get a faint idea of how simplified, consider that on Old Saturn "space" did not exist; "time", paradoxically, "began" only during that age; and the only quasi-sensory phenomenon was a kind of heat-substance.
Conditions on Old Saturn were so vastly different from earthly conditions that we can imagine them only faintly.
Indeed, perhaps better than trying merely to picture Old Saturn as a physical existence, would be to conceive of this "heat" as only an outer appearance of the "soul-warmth" of the Creator-Gods.
The basic reality is spirit-beings and their deeds.
The "beginning" might be pictured thus: the Thrones offered sacrifice of part of their own being to the Cherubim; the warmth of this devotional sacrifice rose as smoke, and from this fiery smoke was born the Archai -- the Time-Spirits.
Thus: a sacramental, creative act of holy Beings, viewed "externally" as "heat" and the "beginning of time". --
We can properly approach these sacred Mysteries (made public only in our time) with reverent inner activity, calling forth inner pictures imbued with devotional feeling of respect for even our physical existence as a gift of the Gods' own being-substance.
And again, this is only to give the dimmest conception of these tremendous facts, and of their remoteness from our usual, materialistic imagining.
Conditions only very gradually, over inconceivable aeons, approached those of the present.
For example, a kind of "space" came into existence only on the Old Sun, and so on.
Always, the reality "behind" the "outer appearances" is beings and their deeds.
The central event of the Earth Age occurred during the Greco-Roman Epoch, in Palestine.
It was the incarnation of a very high spiritual Being, a God of the normal current, called the "Christ" -- culminating in the events surrounding the Crucifixion: the "Mystery of Golgotha".
This Event was the turning-point of Earth-evolution from descent from spirit into matter, toward ascent back to the spirit, with the fruits gained from the sojourn into matter. (Steiner himself did not begin with a Christian worldview.
He independently, and unexpectedly, rediscovered the "mystical fact" of Christianity during the course of his consciously clairvoyant experiences.)
Besides the normal Gods, a host of abnormal spiritual beings, called "Luciferic", also influences earthly evolution.
In a sense, these oppose the normal Gods' plans for evolution.
The Luciferic beings try to draw mankind away from the normal earth-evolution to their own abnormal psychic-spiritual cosmos of light.
In the human soul they inspire pride, egotism, disinterest in one's fellow Men:
fiery emotionalism
subjectivity
fantasy
and hallucination.
In the human intellect they inspire generalization, unification, hypothesizing, and the building of imaginative pictures beyond reality.
Human speech and thought are Luciferic in origin; so are human self-consciousness and the capacity for independence and rebellion against the normal Gods' world-order.
Also, the susceptibility to disease originated from Luciferic influence.
A high spiritual being, in a sense the leader of the Luciferic host, "Lucifer" himself, incarnated in a human body, in the region of China, in the Third Millennium BC.
This event brought about a revolution in human consciousness.
Before then, Men could not use the organs of intellect and lived by a kind of instinct.
Lucifer was the first to grasp by the intellect the wisdom of the Mysteries theretofore revealed by the Gods to mankind in other forms of consciousness.
The effects of this incarnation inspired the wisdom of Pagan culture, up through the Gnosis of the early centuries AD, and lingered even into the early Nineteenth Century.
This wisdom should not be considered to be false in itself; it is good or evil depending on who holds it, and for what purposes it is used.
The great Pagan initiates took it upon themselves to enter into the Luciferic influence and turn it to the good of mankind.
Only through the Luciferic influence has mankind risen above the status of childishness. (Apart from the Pagan culture of Nature-wisdom was the Hebraic culture, which [in a sense] separated the Man from Nature, and which prepared an hereditary current to provide a body for the incarnation of Christ.
In Pagan culture the Man felt membered into the starry cosmos, without what we now know as moral impulses.
Moral impulses in the human soul were prepared by Hebraism and furthered by Christianity.
Christianity is also a culmination and fulfillment of Pagan wisdom.
Here "Christianity" means not so much "organized religion" as the deeds and continuing influence of the Christ-Being and His hosts, not necessarily confined to formal-religious organizations.)
A third spiritual influence working into human and earthly evolution is the Ahrimanic.
The intention of Ahriman, and his hosts, is to freeze the earth into complete rigidity, so that it will not pass over to the:
Jupiter
Venus
Vulcan
ages, and to make the Man into an entirely earthly being -- unindividualized, unfree, and divorced from the normal Gods' cosmos.
The essential Ahrimanic tendency is to materialize; to crystallize; to darken; to silence; to bring living, mobile forces into fixed form -- in other words, to kill that which is living.
This tendency in itself, within proper bounds, is not evil; the dead, material world is necessary for the regular Gods' plan of human and cosmic development.
The Ahrimanic tendency is evil only when it exceeds proper bounds, when it reaches into what should be alive -- and Ahriman does try to exceed proper bounds.
Again, the basic reality of the world is spiritual beings together with their deeds, but Ahriman promotes the illusion, the lie, that matter is the basic reality, or the only reality.
In fact, Ahrimanic spirits, not "atoms" or "ultimate particles", are the reality behind the apparently material world.
Ahriman lives upon lies; he is a spirit of untruth, the "Father of Lies".
Ahriman in Modern Times
In the present, fifth cultural epoch the Ahrimanic influence in human culture is reaching a climax.
The modern scientific revolution, since the fifteenth century, has been inspired largely by Ahriman.
He is the inspirer of amoral, atheistic, mechanistic materialism, and the kind of cleverness that goes with it.
The regular Gods' intent for the present epoch (also called the "Consciousness Soul Epoch") is that mankind should develop increased consciousness, together with the individuality and spiritual freedom that go with that consciousness.
Ahriman opposes this; he wants the Man to live from unconscious instincts as an unindividualized, impulsive animal -- clever, but an animal, nonetheless. (Ahriman is the teacher of the lie that the Man is an animal: neo-Darwinism and similar theories.)
To the modern mind it might seem a contradiction to say Ahriman opposes increased consciousness but promotes intelligence and science.
This is because the modern mind is so immured in what is generally considered to be "scientific thinking" that it has almost no conception of the true nature of conscious thinking.
(Steiner, especially in his book Die Philosophie der Freiheit [1894], has been our teacher of real thinking, but the general intellectual culture has not learned the lesson.)
The fact is that the "scientific" thinking normal in this epoch, no matter how clever, is hardly conscious at all (possibly with some relatively rare exceptions at moments of "insight" or mathematical discovery).
In the kind of consciousness usual in our "scientific" culture, we become conscious only of the fixed results of the thinking, after it has been accomplished; we are not (usually) conscious of the thinking-process itself.
And since it is unconscious, it is not our free action; it is automatic.
When we think in the manner usual in our epoch, we are sentient automata, acting from instinct.
(Formerly occult fact: this instinctive thinking in the wide culture had been inspired by Jehovah up to about 1840 AD.
Since then, it has been inspired by Ahriman, resulting in the Nineteenth-Century torrent of materialism, which, aided by the withdrawal of the German folk-spirit, drowned the life-positive Romanticism in culture.)
And this is what Ahriman wants: he wants to stamp out all traces and all possibility of free, individualized human consciousness; he wants the Man not to be an individual, but only a member of a general species of pseudo-mankind -- to be a clever, earth-bound animal, a "homunculus".
As indicated, Ahriman is the inspirer of the most extreme kind of "scientific" materialism: the doctrine that there is no spirit or soul in the world; that life itself is not in fact alive, but is only a complex of mechanical processes; that reality is at base only quantitative, that there is no reality in the qualitative -- color, sound, etc.; even that the human's inner being is a confluence of material forces.
On the emotional level, he works in the human subconscious instincts, inspiring:
fear
hatred
lust for power
and destructive sex impulses.
On the mental level, he inspires rigid, automatic thinking: (in Steiner's phrase) thinking almost entirely without thoughts, but thinking tremendously strongly in the language, in the literal words, which easily become empty words, which in turn easily become lies.
This "abstract" thinking is devoid of any conscious, inner activity and devoid of any real connection to living experience, and creates a darkened consciousness without light, color, or images.
The Degradation of Language
According to Steiner, it is characteristic of the present culture of Ahrimanic scientism and Anglo-American economic imperialism that language has lost its instinctive spiritual meaning; that is, the connection is lost between the literal word and the spiritual impulse that constitutes meaning.
Without real, spiritual content, language consists only of "empty phrases", such as rule by the will of the people, the free world, individual freedom, and so on.
These phrases are largely devoid of reality in our socio-political structure; here the pervasive actuality is the power of money over Men and over life.
And where the empty phrase rules in language, mere conventions -- rather than living human contact -- rule in social life, and mere routine -- rather than lively human interest -- rules in economic life.
And: "It is only a short step from the empty phrase to the lie."
Again, this is especially true in politics and economics, for the prevalence of empty words makes possible the falsification of realities -- a potent weapon in the hands of those with occult, conscious intentions to manipulate people for devious ends. In our time, people en masse act as if they are possessed by evil forces, because, in a way, they are.
The demons of materialism speak through empty words.
A language in which the demons of materialism have taken the place of human spiritual impulses can lead only to destruction.
Certainly Steiner was not the only one to notice this aspect of modern language.
George Orwell was perhaps the most prominent writer to decry this trend.
See, for instance, his classic essay "Politics and the English Language".
Having no apparent knowledge of spiritual science and working with only keen observation and a love of truth, he saw what was happening in the political discourse of Western Europe and carried to extremes in the totalitarian regimes.
On the socio-political level, the antidote for this poison of empty words is the liberation of cultural life, especially education, from political and financial power. (As outlined in Steiner's concept of the "threefold commonwealth": the separation of the political-rights state, the spiritual-cultural sphere, and the economic sector -- along with the elimination of egotism and coercion from the economy.)
On the individual-personal level, the antidote is the infusion of active, creative thought into language, thus creating a language in which the words point to the thoughts, evoking living thinking in the listeners.
If we do not put effort into creating our original thoughts, then ready-made pseudo-thoughts, trite words and phrases, come automatically to mind and carry us along with them, resulting in "thinking almost entirely without thoughts".
We can at least make the effort to resist these ready-made phrases and generalizations that effortlessly come to mind, and to form mental pictures of particular people, things, and events -- and further, to make original word-formations describing these things and pictures from varying points of view.
The essential point is that we not let our speaking and writing be determined by unconscious influences, but that we call forth through our own efforts new, original thought-creations and convey them with original, fluid, artistic word-formations.
We will not always fully succeed; we are not all poets all the time; but if we consciously make this effort, then we will go far toward recovering the lost human-spirituality of language, and consequently, toward the humanization of culture. (I will say more on this subject in another context.)
And, not incidentally, we will thus progress toward living consciously in the thinking-free-of-literal-words that is the "language" of the spirit-soul world in which we will live after death.
"Men must learn to see through words; they will have to acquire the capacity to grasp the gesture in language."[From Symptom to Reality in Modern History, p. 124]
The Ahrimanization of Culture
In the social-cultural sphere, Ahriman's influence is apparent everywhere, especially strong and growing stronger throughout the Twentieth Century.
Chief among the Ahrimanic trends are:
Antagonistic nationalism based on ethnicity. (Moderate folk-nationalism was a progressive principle in the past, but ethnic nationalism is retrogressive and destructive today.)
Dogmatic party politics, engendering hatred and bitterness arising from the refusal to see other, equally valid (or invalid) points of view.
The subjugation of cultural life (e.g. medicine, education, research, criminal jurisprudence) to political and economic power.
The mechanization of the political state, bound by rigid laws everywhere, with little place for free human initiative.
In everyday life: Philistinism, tedium, and alienation, lack of interest in one's work, even in intellectual work.
(Ahriman wants knowledge to be devoid of warm human interest and connection, to be stored in libraries and not to live in human souls.)
In medicine: materialistic, mechanistic (and atrocious) experimentalism and treatment, without understanding of the living human individual (The related practice of embalming corpses tends to bind the human entity to earth; this is an Ahrimanic reflection of ancient Egyptian mummification.)
In social science: blind acceptance of statistics, and the belief that the satisfaction of economic needs by itself will secure human welfare.
In economics: the subjugation of all living and human interests to the inhuman, impersonal mechanism of profit-seeking, to the "artificial person" of the corporation.
(In the USA this has reached such a state that the humanizing influence of the labor movement is being obliterated, and the exigencies of "making a living", along with other destructive Ahrimanic trends, are destroying the human family -- this in the so-called "richest country in the world". (A perspicacious American folk-wisdom has coined the phrase "the Almighty Dollar".)
The Ahrimanic "Mammon" is archetypally the god of "filthy lucre" and of the power of money over life, as well as of all low and dark forces; his hosts also attack the human body and soul to corrupt and destroy them.)
In the Christian religion: narrow, simplistic interpretation of the Gospels, without appreciation for the occult wisdom needed for an approach to the deep mysteries of the Christ Being.
In literature: books inspired directly by Ahriman, works of great intelligence that further Ahriman's goals (e.g. some parts of Nietzsche's Antichrist and Ecce Homo).
In techniques: very refined developments, but directed only at satisfying animal needs, promoting human immersion in the sense-world to the exclusion of the supersensible.
In worldview: Men as animals, animals (and all living things) as mechanisms, the non-existence of soul and spirit, and the non-existence of moral reality: amoralism.
Obviously, these impulses are running amok in this world, more so all the time.
They are, in fact, approaching a climax; they are preparations for the incarnation of Ahriman himself in a human body.
Good & Evil
To sum up this description of the triad of spiritual streams:
The conflicts of human and spiritual life do not derive from a simple, two-sided war between good and evil.
It was one of the great insights of Steiner to renew the ancient teaching of the "Golden Mean", of good as the middle way between opposing extremes.
Lucifer is too warm, too flighty, too unstable; he inspires human fanaticism, false mysticism, hot-bloodedness, and the tendency to flee earthly reality for hallucinatory pleasures.
Ahriman is too cold, too hard, too rigid; he tries to make people dry, prosaic, philistine, materialistic in thought and in deed -- and hardens what would be healthily mobile, supple thoughts, feelings, and even bodies.
Christ, as the Exemplar of the regular Gods, represents the middle way between the too-much and the too-little, holding the opposites in balance -- and leading mankind to find the healthy middle way.
Seen this way, Lucifer and Ahriman are not purely evil; they both bring to human and earthly evolution forces that are needed for good, healthy development and the fulfillment of the Gods' plans.
Evil results only when events get out of balance and run to extremes.
However, neither do Lucifer and Ahriman simply oppose each other; in a sense, they work together in opposition to the Gods' intent for evolution; they both work to prevent mankind and the earth from progressing together to the New Jupiter.
Lucifer draws human spirits away from earthly embodiment toward his own psychic-spiritual "planet" of light; Ahriman pushes the individual human spirit out of the human organism and away from the earth, so that only a hardened, mechanized, ghostly human organism, devoid of free individuality and living an instinctive-but-clever animalistic species-life remains on the hardened "cosmic slag" of the earth (surrounded with Old Moon forces).
Mankind's rightful task for the present is to lead lives of healthy, progressive alternation between the earthly and the cosmic (life, death, and rebirth), so as to lead the earth over to New Jupiter. --
The profound mystery of evil is that in a higher sense, in the long run, it serves the good.
Not to imply that we would be justified in doing evil with the rationalization that good would result. "...it must needs be that offences come; but woe to that man by whom the offence cometh!" [Matthew 18;vii]
Note: This is a deep subject, and I am not altogether sure of my grasp of it.
My impression is that Steiner was developing and expanding his insights during his career, so that reading just one of his treatments of the subject will not give the whole picture.
The picture I have drawn so far is this:
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View full-sizeDownload The true picture of the workings of evil might be even more complex than outlined above.
Steiner did make some statements which might be interpreted as indicating a third stream of spirits of opposition: the "Asuras" (a borrowed Eastern term), which are retarded Archai who work to destroy the human "I", the Ego itself.
While it seems true that the numerological interpretation of the Hebrew spelling of "Sorat" gives the number 666, still the position of Sorat in relation to Lucifer and Ahriman is not altogether clear (to this writer).
A possible solution to this question might follow from the imagery of the Apocalypse: Michael casts the Dragon out of heaven; immediately afterwards arise the two "beasts" -- the first from the sea (Lucifer) and the second from the land (Ahriman).
Thus, Lucifer and Ahriman appear on earth as two beings or principles, but they are the progeny of the one spirit of opposition -- the Dragon -- in Heaven.
If we identify the Dragon, the Antichrist, as Sorat, we can picture Lucifer and Ahriman as the left and right hands of Sorat.
Christ strives to hold Lucifer and Ahriman in balance so that they serve the good, while Sorat strives to keep them out of balance, so that they work for destruction.
While Lucifer seeks to draw the human "I", the Ego to his own planet, and Ahriman seeks to harden the earth and the human organism so that no Ego can live in a human on earth, Sorat -- through the Asuras -- seeks to destroy the Ego itself, along with the earth.
Sorat uses Lucifer and Ahriman as spirits of seduction to mask his own true intention of pure destruction.
And Sorat manifests in social evolution as pure destruction, especially in the wars and mass murders of our century. (Some suggest that he manifests in the human organism as the destroyer of the immune system -- the so-called "AIDS".)
Thus, the true picture might look something like this:
There is ample reason to suspect that the destined place for this event is (North) America, for the effect of the American natural environment on the human body and soul especially favors Ahrimanic tendencies.
According to Steiner's insights, each of the various regions of the earth has its unique effect upon the human organism.
In America the Ahrimanic influence is strong, rising from the center of the earth, carried by electromagnetism.
This strengthens the entity known to occultism as the human "double" or "Doppelgänger".
This Doppelgänger is an astral quasi-personification of a Man's karma, both "good" and "bad"; it is a being with intelligence and will, but with no individual, spiritual ego, and tends to bind the human soul to the body, hardening human thinking, feeling, and willing.
All Men have a Doppelgänger living in their nerve-electricity, infusing into their souls all sorts of degrading, depressing impulses, as well as instigating internal illnesses. (Electricity is the "sub-natural", rigidifying shadow of soul forces.)
The Ahrimanic tendencies in America are well-known even to those whose perception is not enlivened by occult knowledge; American culture has long been famous for its violence and "hard-boiled" materialism, and, more recently, for its degeneracy and decadence.
As to exactly when Ahriman's incarnation will happen, Steiner (as far as I am aware) does not give a precise time.
In at least one passage he seems to indicate the end of the Third Millennium; in other places he indicates the early part of that millennium. In many places he points to a great crisis at the end of the Twentieth Century, even a "War of All against All", when mankind might well "stand at the grave of civilization".
In any case, it seems highly likely that a major Ahrimanic onslaught -- either the incarnation of Ahriman himself, or the advent of the "false prophet" of the Apocalypse, or some other attack -- occurs around 1998 AD (approximately).
To see why this is so, we need to do a few simple calculations, based on the occult principle of meaningful rhythms in history. (Let the skeptical reader be a true skeptic and suspend judgment and take in the following discussion with a mind open to possibilities unsuspected by the materialistic mind.)
Some Occult History
It is a fact, unknown to history but revealed by Steiner's spiritual research, that while the Incarnation of Christ was happening in Palestine another stupendous drama played out in Mexico.
A high initiate of the negative Mysteries, the most advanced "black magician" in the world, had reached, by repeated ritual murders of an especially horrible kind, the threshold of knowledge of certain deep, cosmic secrets.
This knowledge would have given him the ability, as was his intention, of achieving the Ahrimanic goals of completely rigidifying the earth, so as to draw it out of the progressive development toward the New Jupiter, and of binding human organisms as automata in that "slag" of the earth.
He was thwarted in this intention by the incarnate high Sun-being "Vitzliputzli", who caused the black magician to be crucified at the same time as the Crucifixion of Jesus Christ -- a shattering reflection in the American continent of the Events in Palestine. (Since then, the soul of this black magician has been held in a kind of "prison".)
Vitzliputzli mirror, silver gilt, pearl and pyrite, ca.1550—1600 Museen der Stadt Nürnberg, Gemälde und Skulpturen
Recall that the Greco-Roman Epoch ran approximately 2160 years, from 747 BC to 1413 AD.
The midpoint of this epoch was 1413 AD minus 2160/2 = 333 AD.
Consider (as a hypothesis) the occult teaching that events in history occur at times that, as it were, reflect and balance the events equidistant in time from a midpoint.
Taking 333 AD as the midpoint, the fulcrum of the balance, and on one side the Birth in Palestine, on the other side of the scales would be 333 AD + 333 = 666 AD.
The big event, known to history, of the Seventh Century was the rise of Islam.
Another event, not so famous but still known to history, was the transfer of ancient Greek philosophy (especially Aristotle's works, probably including the lost work on alchemy) to the Academy of Jundi Sabur (near present-day Baghdad).
Following the expulsion of the philosophers from Syrian Edessa in 489 AD and from Athens in 529 AD, the philosophers had found refuge in what was then the Persian Empire, and at that Academy they pursued their calling.
Then this knowledge passed to the Islamic Arabs, and science of a particular bent reached a high development under them, while Europe was in the "Dark Ages".
Only gradually, over many centuries, did this science pass over to Europe, where it developed into the modern scientific revolution.
Again, the trend of modern science, as it has in fact developed, is Ahrimanic.
The direct ancestor of scientific materialism was this Arabian science, which was itself derived from the Academy of Jundi Sabur.
Thus, on the other side of the 333 AD midpoint from the Birth in Palestine was the rise of an active materialistic, anti-Christian world view in Jundi Sabur.
Occult history (as given by Steiner) reveals how this came about: Sorat intended to approach physical manifestation in 666 AD, at Jundi Sabur, and to bestow upon the philosophers there a super-human knowledge.
This knowledge was to consist of everything that mankind, under the plan of the regular Gods, was to learn through its own efforts by the height of the present, Consciousness Soul Epoch.
This epoch began in 1413 AD, so its midpoint will be 2493 AD.
In other words, Sorat wanted to give to mankind, prematurely and without the requisite human effort and experience, the knowledge that would be right and healthy for mankind to achieve through work and evolution by the middle of the Third Millennium.
The regular Gods' plan for the Consciousness Soul Epoch is for mankind to acquire, through self-education and self-discipline, the free, conscious, individualized human personality.
If the mankind of the Seventh Century had been given this advanced knowledge at that immature stage of development, when people could not think in full consciousness, the result would have been disastrous.
Just consider how much evil mankind has done with the science we have acquired up to now, at our present stage of maturity (or immaturity), and then try to imagine what the relatively primitive people of the Seventh Century would have done with the science of 2493 AD.
This picture is bad enough, but we need to recall Steiner's occult insights to begin to get the whole picture.
If Sorat had succeeded, Men would have lost the possibility of developing our true nature, and would have become egotistic, animalistic automata, with no possibility of further development.
We would have become earth-bound, and the earth could never then pass over to the:
Jupiter
Venus
Vulcan
stages.
The normal Gods' plan would have been seriously hindered, and Men would have lost their due and timely opportunity to become Spirits of Freedom and Love. -- However, the rise of Islam thwarted this plan of Sorat.
It is a deep, mysterious paradox that Islam, which was, and is, opposed to Christianity in many ways, also in effect worked jointly with the Christ-impulse in history, by blanketing, by "skimming the cream off", this Sorat-science, and by watering it down.
Still, this science survived, and has worked on into the present day, but the worst was averted, for those times.
The weakened Jundi Sabur impulse, as a distorted quasi-Aristotelianism, passed to the Arabs, over Africa and Spain, to France, England, and through the monasteries (e.g. Roger Bacon) back over to the Continent.
The "Realism" of the Medieval scholastics (especially the revived Aristotelianism of Thomas Aquinas) opposed this Arabian influence, somewhat correctly seeing it as inimical to Christianity; but with the decline and decadence of Medieval Aristotelianism, and with the dawn of modern, anti-Aristotelian "empiricism" (e.g. Francis Bacon), the diluted, but still powerful, Sorat-science came to dominate world-culture.
The true spirit of this kind of scientism can be illustrated by a telling metaphor coined early in this epoch by scientism's seminal spokesman, Francis Bacon.
He said, propounding scientific experimentalism, that we must put Nature on the rack and force Her to answer the questions we put to Her.
This figure will speak volumes to those who meditate upon it: We, seeking information for whatever motives, are to torture the Goddess who gave us birth and nurture, so as to cause Her, through unbearable pain and injury, to blurt out secrets which She, in her wisdom, conceals from the impure and self-seeking. In much of so-called "physiological research" and "medical training" this is hardly even a metaphor; the torture unto death is quite literal.
The usual victims are animals, but all too many "researchers" are not above using human "subjects" when they can get enough power over them.
And even a slight whiff of occult knowledge shows us a deeper meaning: The central rite of "Satanism" or "black magic" -- sometimes crude, sometimes sophisticated -- is the deliberate, ritual torture and killing of animals and, at a more advanced level, of human beings.
When done in a precise way, this practice confers knowledge and power upon the practitioner; also, it affects the whole earth, hardening and rigidifying it, to the characteristic Ahrimanic purpose.
Thus, we can see the hordes of "researchers" and medical students -- who hurt, injure, and "sacrifice" animals -- as undergoing an unconscious, Ahrimanic black magic initiation, which hardens, brutalizes, and Ahrimanizes their souls, and through them also the culture, and even the earth itself. (Sacrifice is the actual word they commonly use, not thinking which "god" they sacrifice unto.)
Vivisection is truly the archetypal act of modern science as it is generally understood and practiced.
In contrast to our Baconian science, there does exist a little-known scientific trend, inaugurated by the German poet Johann Wolfgang von Goethe.
Johann Wolfgang (von) Goethe[a] (28 August 1749 – 22 March 1832) is widely regarded as the greatest and most influential writer in the German language. His work has had a profound and wide-ranging influence on Western literary, political, and philosophical thought from the late 18th century to the present day. Goethe was a German poet, playwright, novelist, scientist, statesman, theatre director, and critic. His works include plays, poetry, literature, and aesthetic criticism, as well as treatises on botany, anatomy, and color. Goethe took up residence in Weimar in November 1775 following the success of his first novel, The Sorrows of Young Werther (1774). He was ennobled by the Duke of Saxe-Weimar, Karl August, in 1782. Goethe was an early participant in the Sturm und Drang literary movement. During his first ten years in Weimar, Goethe became a member of the Duke's privy council (1776–1785), sat on the war and highway commissions, oversaw the reopening of silver mines in nearby Ilmenau, and implemented a series of administrative reforms at the University of Jena. He also contributed to the planning of Weimar's botanical park and the rebuilding of its Ducal Palace. Goethe's first major scientific work, the Metamorphosis of Plants, was published after he returned from a 1788 tour of Italy. In 1791 he was made managing director of the theatre at Weimar, and in 1794 he began a friendship with the dramatist, historian, and philosopher Friedrich Schiller, whose plays he premiered until Schiller's death in 1805. During this period Goethe published his second novel, Wilhelm Meister's Apprenticeship; the verse epic Hermann and Dorothea, and, in 1808, the first part of his most celebrated drama, Faust. His conversations and various shared undertakings throughout the 1790s with Schiller, Johann Gottlieb Fichte, Johann Gottfried Herder, Alexander von Humboldt, Wilhelm von Humboldt, and August and Friedrich Schlegel have come to be collectively termed Weimar Classicism. The German philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer named Wilhelm Meister's Apprenticeship one of the four greatest novels ever written, while the American philosopher and essayist Ralph Waldo Emerson selected Goethe as one of six "representative men" in his work of the same name (along with Plato, Emanuel Swedenborg, Montaigne, Napoleon, and Shakespeare). Goethe's comments and observations form the basis of several biographical works, notably Johann Peter Eckermann's Conversations with Goethe (1836). His poems were set to music by many composers including Mozart, Beethoven, Schubert, Mendelssohn, Berlioz, Liszt, Wagner, and Mahler.
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In the general culture he is known primarily as the author of Faust; but he was also a scientist, known for (if known at all) the prediction of the discovery of the intermaxillary bone in Man, or, less often, for his anti-Newtonian theory of color.
His mode of scientific thinking was quite different form the Baconian-Ahrimanic mode, and likewise he illustrated it with a telling metaphor.
He said (in paraphrase) that we must approach Nature as a reverent lover, and, perhaps, She will whisper to us Her intimate secrets.
The contrast to Bacon's metaphor could hardly be more stark.
Also, the Goethean method of scientific investigation, in contrast to amoral experimentalism, is a method of self-improvement and self-development -- a reverent meditating upon the facts of experience, in the hope that they will speak.
This scientific method has, of course, been all but buried under the Baconian-Ahrimanic avalanche, even in Goethe's own country.
And it was no mere accident that Steiner's first professional appointment was to edit Goethe's scientific writings, in the Goethe-Schiller Archive in Weimar.
Steiner and his successors have developed and expanded the Goethean method to an amazing extent, giving us a reasonable hope for renewed life in our deadened, death-dealing scientific culture.
Steiner too has been almost totally ignored by scientists in the West, slightly less so in Central Europe.
Also, the practice of Goethean-Steinerian science has vast implications for the soul of the practitioner, as well as for the whole earth.
Spiritual science sees soul and spirit in Nature, in a real, practical way, completely consistent with the "empirical" facts.
It reverently approaches the scientific laboratory as a holy place, and the experiment as a sacrament, as a revelation of the Creator-Spirits through the sacred symbols of Nature.
Little is known to history of the true nature of the Templars, because of their secretive nature and the distortions passed to history by their triumphant enemies.
But these Knights did cultivate an esoteric Christianity that, although somewhat flawed, had the potential of bringing about a more humane civilization in Europe.
This possibility was thwarted by the power of the French King, Philip the Fair, and his allies in the Church.
Philip, through the torture and killing of the Templars, and through the material inspiration from their looted gold, attained a kind of Ahrimanic initiation-knowledge, but he died soon thereafter.
The Templars were either killed or driven underground, and Medieval culture declined until the Renaissance and Reformation.
The Templar-impulse did continue underground, to pass over to the "Lodges", especially York and Scottish Rite Freemasonry.
These Lodges worked in opposition to Roman Catholicism (at least until the end of the Eighteenth Century, when Freemasonry and esoteric-political Catholicism united in opposition to Napoleon), but the esoteric content of Freemasonry became decadent and Ahrimanized.
Nevertheless, many of the modern institutions of "liberal republican democracy" (such as freedom of speech, religion, and the press) are very largely due to the influence of Freemasonry, especially in the USA.
-- This is a huge and interesting story, but it is beyond the scope of this essay (as well as the knowledge of this author).
And, of course, another 666-year cycle ends around 1998AD.
As stated already, it is apparent that the Ahrimanic influence in culture is building to some kind of climax.
Indeed, as is obvious to all with eyes to see, that civilization in the USA, despite (or because of) the triumphant march of technology, human culture and civilization are decaying (regardless of erstwhile "rising economic indicators").
It is an easy guess that the times around 1998 AD are a propitious period for a major Ahrimanic manifestation: perhaps the incarnation of Ahriman himself; or since 1998 = 3x666 years since the Birth of the body for the incarnation of Christ, perhaps the body was born which is to be the vehicle for Ahriman, possibly 30 years later; or perhaps some other major event, such as the advent of the "false prophet" of the Apocalypse.
(These are approximate times only; the outer effects of occult [="hidden"] events may manifest only gradually.
In 1998 we did not see newspaper headlines announcing a spectacular, "supernatural" event.
But if we had been alive in 666 AD or 1332 AD neither, would we have likely been informed by the then contemporary analogues of headlines that any major, "supernatural" events had occurred.
Those manifestations of evil did not fully succeed according to the "plan"; other influences intervened and moderated the outcomes.
The occult machinations were hardly known to the public.
Such may also be true in the present: the actual course of events depends on many contending forces, and upon the consciousness and will of Men; and the crux of the struggle will likely be hidden [="occult"] to the wide public.
We will live and/or die in the outer effects of the occult causes, as uncomprehending [most of us, probably] as is usual in social cataclysms.
This essay is an attempt to lessen the incomprehension, and to lighten the mental atmosphere of this planet, even a little.
Surely, as "thoughts are things", even a slight change in consciousness can influence physical event in the right direction.)
Steiner repeatedly pointed to the turn of the Century/Millennium as a time of crisis. (As is the turn of every millennium: every 1000 years Lucifer and Ahriman work together with special power.)
Also, the Dutch Anthroposophist Bernard Lievegoed, in his deathbed testament, made the following remarks:
"From indications by Rudolf Steiner, we have to assume that in the year 1998 Ahriman will play an important role.... it is a part of the development of the earth and of mankind that Ahriman will at one time be on earth in a physical body.
In lectures, Rudolf Steiner has mentioned a time in the third millennium:
'before even a part of the third millennium after Christ has passed'.
However, he said at a meeting of young people in Breslau, that Ahriman will do everything in his power to advance this moment as much as he can.
Steiner then mentions the year 1998. It will depend on all of mankind together whether Ahriman will succeed in this or not....
Whether he will succeed in this will depend on the question whether there will be enough people who see through his designs....
In 1916 Rudolf Steiner said that at the beginning of the twenty-first century, evil will appear in a form which at that time [1916] could not yet be described....
My estimate is that the nadir of this battle will fall around the years 2020 to 2040.
Then the abyss of the demons will open.
National Socialism and Bolshevism will pale in comparison with this.
A cynic might say that these predictions allow for plenty of "wiggle room" for the incarnation of Ahriman: 1998 to the first part of the next millennium, or even the end of that millennium.
I will concede that the predicted time is not very precise, but I believe nevertheless that it is highly likely that this incarnation will manifest in the next few years to half-century or century.
And even without occult insight, one who observes the present social/cultural decline can hardly avoid seeing some kind of wrenching changes approaching.
Again, it is not certain that Ahriman's incarnation will be immediately known to the public: Steiner warns that Ahriman wants mankind to be unconscious of his true nature and to see his advent as progressive and good for human welfare.
Says Steiner:
"If Ahriman were able to slink into a humanity unaware of his coming, that would gladden him most of all.
It is for this reason that the occurrences and trends in which Ahriman is working for his future incarnation must be brought to light."
Ahriman will establish a (possibly secret) school for powerful "magic" arts and clairvoyance.
The technical applications of this highly intelligent spirit will indeed look like "magic" to us, even as advanced as we might consider our science to be -- for Ahriman's understanding is not limited by the crude materialism he foists upon mankind.
And the clairvoyance bestowed upon Ahriman's pupils will be effortless (not won through the long preparation of soul-purification and self-discipline of legitimate occultism).
It will give spirit-vision, but the visions will be subjective and deceptive; people will see differing, conflicting visions of the soul/spirit worlds, and will fall into confusion and conflict.
Ahriman-in-the-flesh will be an overwhelmingly powerful and impressive figure, when he reveals himself.
And it seems probable that, as the Father of Lies, he will present himself as that which he is most certainly not: Christ, in His Second Coming.
And again, it is America, where many religious people are expecting the Second Coming in a physical body, that will be especially susceptible to Ahriman's deceptions.
It is entirely possible that they who cling to the Gospels with a superficially literalistic interpretation closed to occult insight will be the very people who will be the false Christ's followers.
(For us, occult insight is needed to understand what the Scriptures do literally say, for they were written in occult terminology, out of higher consciousness.)
The True Second Coming
Another tremendous revelation from Steiner's spiritual science concerns the true nature of the Second Coming of Christ.
Steiner was adamant that the physical incarnation of Christ can happen once and only once.
"Just as a pair of scales can have only one balancing point, so in Earth evolution the event of Golgotha can take place only once".
The amazing fact is that the Second Coming is happening now, but that most of mankind is unaware of it.
Actually, the term "second coming" is not in the New Testament; the Greek word is parousia, meaning roughly "active presence".
It was this "presence" that Saul/Paul experienced on the road to Damascus; Paul being mankind's "premature birth" of the coming new experience of Christ.
Parousia was translated into Latin as adventus, which means arrival, thus helping to give rise to the expectation of a physical arrival of Christ.
The original Greek term seems in consonance with Steiner's explanation.
See Emil Bock's St. Paul.) In fact, it is the driving force behind the "apocalyptic" convulsions and struggles of our time.
For, as the picture is given in the Apocalypse of John, the bottomless pit is opened, Michael casts the dragon and his hosts onto the earth, the vials of wrath are poured out, and Babylon is overthrown -- all in preparation for Christ's triumph that brings the New Heaven and New Earth.
Most of us are unaware of this present Second Coming because it is not happening in the visible, material world, but in the "ethereal" region of the earth.
"Ethereal" means the system of "formative forces", bordering on the physical, that raise inert matter to the realm of the living.
Plants, animals, and Man all have ethereal, formative-force "bodies", and when the ethereal body forsakes the physical body, the physical body becomes ordinary matter; in other words, it dies.
The earth, being the body of a living Being, also has a formative-force body, the "ethereal earth".
These ethereal forces manifest especially in weather phenomena, such as cloud formation. (It is a false, Ahrimanic science that sees cloud formation as a merely material process of evaporation and condensation of "water molecules"; this is rather a process of de-materialization and re-materialization through the workings of the ethers.)
With these concepts, we can see new meaning in the Bible verses concerning the Ascension and Return of Christ. "...a cloud received him out of their sight" (Acts I;9) seems to be saying that Christ ascended into the ethereal, formative-force region of the earth.
And the statement that He "...so shall come in like manner as ye have seen him go into heaven" (Acts I;11) seems to say that He shall return from the ethereal regions: "Behold he cometh with clouds...." (Rev. I;7) Steiner's assertion that Christ shall not come again in the flesh seems to be in consonance with the Bible:
"Then if any man shall say unto you, Lo, here is Christ, or there; believe it not....Wherefore if they shall say unto you, Behold, he is in the desert; go not forth; behold he is in the secret chambers; believe it not."
(Matt. XXIV;23,26)
On the contrary, the Second Coming shall be a tremendous event, not limited to a particular location:
"For as the lightning cometh out of the east, and shineth even unto the west; so also shall the coming of the Son of man be."
(Matt. XXIV;27)
The ethereal is super-physical, not bound by the laws of material space; Christ's appearance in the ethereal earth is everywhere-at-once.
And since the ethereal is super-physical, some degree of super-physical vision, or "clairvoyance", is needed to see into it.
Few people at the present stage of evolution have that kind of clairvoyance, and some may have it only sporadically.
But the Second Coming is only at its beginning; true clairvoyance (as opposed to the deceptive Ahrimanic clairvoyance) will reveal to consciousness the ethereal Christ in the centuries to come.
Ahriman dreads human consciousness of the ethereal Christ, and fights against it.
It is essential for us to grasp the fact that he who shall come in the flesh is not Christ, but Ahriman:
"For there shall arise false Christs, and false prophets, and shall show great signs and wonders...."
(Matt. XXIV;24)
Steiner revealed the occult fact that, since the beginning of the present reign of the Sun-Archangel Michael as the Time Spirit in 1879 AD, the human ethereal body is becoming less closely bound to the physical body, thus opening the possibility of new clairvoyance.
1933 AD (two 950-year cycles of the precession of the nodes of Saturn since the Crucifixion and Resurrection in 33 AD) would have been an especially propitious time for the beginning of widespread perception of the ethereal Christ.
But this was hindered by the rise to power of Hitler -- one expression of Sorat himself "rising from the Abyss" -- and by the many convulsions and distractions around the same time in earth-life.
A very interesting theory (by David B. Black) interprets the progressive mechanization of culture not only as an Ahrimanic influence, but as the actual "macrocosmic incarnation" of Ahriman:
This is being brought to completion through the development of the electronic computer.
Black traces the milestones in the evolution of the computer as reflections of the spiritual events in the heavens.
For example, in the 1840's, around the time of Jehovah's abandonment of human blood-bound thinking to Ahriman, Boolean algebra was developed.
The year 1879 -- the time of Michael's accession as Time Spirit and the final expulsion of the "dragon" onto earth -- saw the publication of Frege's Begriffschrift, a great milestone in the development of "formal logic": the separation of logic from the spiritual "Word".
Edison invented the electric light (light is separated from the sun and plunged into the "sub-earthly": "Electricity is Ahrimanic `light'.")
Trotsky and Stalin were born.
Merganthaler invented the Linotype machine.
Bessemer introduced the hard steel process.
the US Census Bureau hired Herman Hollerith, who developed the first large-scale punched card tabulating machine.
The Christ's"coming in the clouds" in the early 1930's was reflected on earth by the publication of Gödel's "incompleteness theorem", which demonstrated that a truly thinking machine is impossible, but which also led to the development of "recursion theory", which is the essential conceptual framework for "artificial intelligence" and "artificial life".
Also in 1930, by a fortuitous comedy of errors, the planet Pluto was discovered.
Pluto, of course, is the god of the underworld, and the discovery of "his" planet was a synchronistic harbinger of the unleashing of the sub-material "powers of the pit" upon earth: later transits of Saturn and Uranus to Pluto's discovery position marked the bombing of Hiroshima and the explosion of the first "H-bomb".
As is well-known, the development of the electronic computer proceeded exponentially, from von Neumann's development of the "stored program" to the desktop and the laptop.
A lesser-known development was the "Josephson effect", which allows the construction of semi-conductors from superconducting materials.
Thus, electrical circuits can operate without "Luciferic" heat, and Ahriman, whose nature is "freezing cold", can completely enter into electrical devices.
As superconducting computers become more common, Ahrimanic beings higher than "elementals" might actually incarnate in them, since no physical energy is consumed in a superconducting circuit. (Ahrimanic "elemental spirits" inhabit our artificial machines, just as normal "elementals" [or "nature spirits": gnomes, undines, sylphs, salamanders] work in and throughout the living processes of Nature.) Black sums up: "Sunless light and Wordless logic intertwined, and out of them came the computer."
Thus, while Ahriman incarnates "microcosmically" in a human body, we might also face the "macrocosmic" literal incarnation of Ahriman in our machines.
An Evolutionary Leap
The incarnation of high spiritual beings in human bodies has the special significance that new possibilities for human development are opened up, because, as it were, the way is cleared by these high-spiritual-beings-in-the-flesh being the first to accomplish these developments.
Lucifer was the first to use the organs of intellect.
Christ was the first to redeem the "fallen" death-prone human body with the Resurrection Body.
(This was but one of the tremendous deeds of Christ. Even a minimal exposition of the scope of the accomplishments of this Incarnation is far, far beyond the limits of this essay.
Suffice it to say, for now, that Steiner, out of his clairvoyant initiation-knowledge, revealed that the Incarnation of Christ was the turning-point of the evolution of the earth, and of mankind, from descent into the physical toward ascent into the spiritual.
Not that this evolution "turned on a dime"; the downward momentum is obviously still very great; but the seed for the upward growth was planted.
The true "stigmatists" have participated somewhat in the Redeemed Body, as harbingers of future evolution.)
Likewise, Ahriman-in-the-flesh will try to inaugurate a new human capacity, for his own ends: he wishes to bring the shadowy, brain-bound, semi-conscious, clever Ahrimanic "thinking" into the human ethereal body.
This would be an especially evil development if it is carried into the average human organism.
It is normal and healthy, at the present stage of human evolution, for the human ethereal body to dissolve into the wide cosmos in the days immediately following death (after "one's whole life passes before one's eyes").
Afterwards the human soul-and-spirit entity rises to higher regions, where it is purified and prepared for a new earth-life.
But materialism in the earth-life hardens the ethereal body so that it does not dissolve, but remains near the earth for a longer time, while the dead human entity serves Ahriman.
Only slowly and in unconsciousness do such dead spirits enter the spirit-worlds to prepare for a new incarnation.
Ahriman wishes to be the first to so harden the ethereal body so that it becomes the vehicle of automatic, intellectual thinking-devoid-of-will, and thus to make it possible to keep human ethereal bodies permanently in the region of the earth.
Then the earth would become so hardened that it would not pass over to the Jupiter Age, and Man would become clever, animalistic, ghostly, earth-bound creatures.
The Gods' plan for human and earthly evolution would be obstructed.
Steiner put it this way:
"Ahriman works against the word 'Heaven and earth shall pass away, but My words shall not pass away'.
He wills that the words shall be thrown away, that heaven and earth shall continue on."
(Here we can get a glimpse into the motives of the sophisticated "Satanists" or "black magicians".
Ahriman's acolytes seek a kind of "immortality" in the slag-earth-surrounded-with-Old-Moon-forces, but an immortality with egotistic, earthly consciousness instead of the cosmic consciousness of the individualized spiritual Ego.)
The regular Gods intend that in the present epoch people should indeed think free of the physical brain, but with free, conscious, self-created thinking.
This development would gradually open the possibility of the reintegration of mankind into the spiritual cosmos, and further the passing of the earth over to the New Jupiter.
Mankind could eventually rise to the rank of Spirits of Freedom and Love, and not sink to the level of earth-bound, animalistic, clever automata.
-- To put it mildly: a lot is at stake here.
Turning Evil to Good
But Ahriman's incarnation needs not be an evil event, as he wishes it to be.
This incarnation is necessary in human and earthly evolution, and it can be turned toward the good, if mankind meets it in the right way: On the mundane level, we can remedy Ahrimanic tedium in the work-life and the intellectual life, by filling them with warm, Luciferic enthusiasm, by finding what is interesting in them, by getting ourselves interested in objective, impersonal facts and processes.
On the psychological level, we can remedy Luciferic subjectivity and fiery emotionalism by observing ourselves coolly, as we would an external natural process.
(Indeed, we can personally experience how the Ahrimanic principle can be a blessing if applied in the right way, through cold, objective self-contemplation in impersonal thinking.
If we can find satisfaction in dry, but correct, evaluation of our own wants, fears, and vicissitudes, as we could, say, in a mathematical proposition, we will gain thereby a wonderful liberation.
And we can truly understand and feel how Ahriman's influence need not be evil, but can be quite decidedly good, if we bring to it the right consciousness.
-- And so, it will be with Ahriman's incarnation: very much depends on the consciousness with which mankind meets him.
He wants us to be unconscious; it is our responsibility to strive to be more and more conscious, and to inculcate consciousness in as many people as we can.
Such are the motives behind this essay.)
On a higher level, we can become more aware of the meaning of our own lives, and of the world-process, by studying and filling ourselves with the modern form of cosmic wisdom, given by spiritual science (mainly from Steiner, but from others also).
This is a renewal of wisdom that was formerly kept hidden, or "occult", in the Mysteries.
Today it is essential that more of this wisdom becomes generally known, if human culture is not to succumb to Ahriman.
Just as the ancient Initiates entered into the Luciferic wisdom and rescued it for the good of mankind, now must mankind, with the consciousness gained from spiritual science and from the Ethereal Christ, enter into the coming Ahrimanic knowledge and turn it to good purpose.
The Ahrimanic knowledge will show what cleverness can, and cannot, produce from earthly forces.
If we meet Ahriman consciously, we can acquire through him the realization that the earth is becoming old and must decline physically, eventually to die and enter the spiritual worlds, to be reborn as the New Jupiter.
And through this decline, mankind is to be lifted above the earthly, as the seed survives the dying plant in winter, to sprout and grow in the spring.
The Epoch of Consciousness
The fundamental principle in this, the Consciousness Soul Epoch, is the emergence in the Man of conscious, individualized, independent thinking.
Concurrent with the emergence of this soul-force (as a by-product, as it were) are wider possibilities for the workings of the forces of Death and Evil.
But these workings are (as is characteristic of Ahriman) so falsified that, for example, the cultural institutions that are generally regarded as most beneficial -- education and medicine -- are in fact among the worst carriers of evil.
(Not to imply that these institutions should be shunned of destroyed, but purified and renewed -- in part by their liberation from money and politics.)
When this epoch has run its course (if it will have fulfilled its potentials), human culture will be vastly changed.
For example, the distinction between "civilized" and "primitive" peoples will have been erased, and a kind of moral "socialism" will have become instinctive.
Our specific task for the Consciousness Soul Epoch is to acquire three great truths, the same truths that Sorat wished to foist upon mankind in the Seventh Century, with his own slant.
We might presume that Ahriman-in-the-flesh will likewise try to insert them into our culture and distort them to his own ends.
It is the task of an alert and conscious mankind, schooled in spiritual science and led by the Christ, to gain these three truths through our own striving and to use them for the good development of the earthly creation.
The first truth concerns the Mystery of Birth and Death: that the human soul in the physical world has but the semblance of the true soul-life that it had before conception and will have again after death.
The life in the sense-world interrupts the supersensible soul-life in the world-between-death-and-rebirth, so that we can gain, for the spirit, that which can be gained only in the sense-world.
To see this truth, we must "look Lucifer in the eye", and thus see through the distortions and illusions he spreads over the human soul.
The destiny of the "East" (meaning the Slavic regions and eastwards) is to give rise to an "eugenic occultism": the knowledge of how, through astrological regulation of conception, to bring the right human entities to birth at the right time and place for forward evolution, or conversely, to bring in the wrong entities, for the hindrance of right evolution.
Thus, this eugenic occultism can cause great good or great harm, depending on how it is used.
The second truth concerns the Mystery of the Body: that the human body is not a lump of matter, but a form, which is spiritual in origin, and through which interchanging substances are constantly in flux.
This knowledge will lead to a true medical art, the essence of which is to keep intact the natural healing forces of the body.
The destiny of the "Middle" (meaning Central Europe) is to give rise to this "hygienic occultism" -- which, of course, can lead to great good, but can also cause great harm if it is used without strict conscientiousness.
The third truth concerns the Mystery of Matter: that the reality behind "material substance" is not "atoms", "molecules", or "ultimate particles", but is spirit -- to be exact: Ahrimanic spirits, in rhythmic inter-relations. The true picture of "solid matter" is not a machine, but a rainbow: a ghostly appearance, an outcome of spiritual processes.
Modern physics, in some advanced theorizing, may have made some halting moves toward this truth, but the dead, mechanistic world-conception still holds sway over the scientism which dominates world-culture.
This scientism is the Ahrimanic lie, the descendant of the Jundi Sabur influence, which, even though weakened, banished soul and spirit from the scientific worldview.
To see through this lie, we must "look Ahriman in the eye" -- a dangerous undertaking if we are not prepared by spiritual science.
The destiny of the West (meaning primarily the English-speaking world) is to give rise to a "mechanistic occultism", which will bring about fantastic machine forces, based on rhythm and resonance. (The lost, fabled "Keely motor" was a start in this direction.)
But the introduction of such machine forces would cause harm to society if the political, cultural, and economic spheres are not made mutually independent, and if egotism is not banished from the economy.
(Steiner laid down the basis for this healthy social re-ordering, in his concept of the "threefold commonwealth".)
Ahriman seeks to divert and pervert these three destined developments of the Consciousness Soul Epoch, through the activity of angels who rejected the Christ influence during the Egypto-Chaldean Epoch.
In the present times, the "Christian" angels pour pictures of spirit-realities into the deep regions of the human soul-organism.
If the Man does not take up these pictures consciously, they sink down into the ethereal body and act as unconscious instincts through the influence of the Ahrimanic angels.
These unconscious instincts work against the three progressive evolutionary trends in the following ways:
Perverting the Eugenic Occultism, destructive sex impulses affect the whole social life, working against the development of conscious human brotherhood, and making a mankind entirely egotistical and entirely controlled by instinctive urges carried in the blood.
Perverting the Hygienic Occultism, medicine becomes materialistic and can be used to heal or harm, according to egotistic purposes.
Perverting the Mechanistic Occultism, powerful, Keely-like machine forces are employed, controlled not by the "vibrations" of good people (seeking the liberation of the workers), but by egotistic people for the evil purpose of attaining power and control over the masses.
The first two perversions are readily apparent in modern society; the third has yet to emerge in public.
-- Again, the direction that these three trends of the present epoch will take depends upon human consciousness and will.
Some Occult Politics
Some powerful, Ahrimanic secret societies, linked to the Lodges, in Britain and the USA strive to keep their version of this third truth (of the spirituality of matter) as their own secret and to ensure that the wider public knows only a crude atheistic-mechanistic scientism, in which spirit and soul have no place. (In more recent times, one can notice that the "crude materialism" given to the public is beginning to be replaced by a more quasi-esoteric materialism.)
These societies also strive to guide political and economic trends over the world so that the budding potentialities of the Middle and Eastern peoples come under their domination.
The history of modern times has very largely been the story of the outworking of this struggle.
(The crimes of the secret Anglo-American power groups include the instigation of the First World War and the consequent establishment of the Bolshevik regime in the East.
These power groups believe that the English-speaking peoples are destined to justifiably dominate the East-Slavs in this, the fifth cultural epoch, for the purpose of guiding their nascent potentialities, which should blossom to lead the world-culture in the sixth epoch -- just as the Romans, during the fourth epoch, dominated and educated Britain for her future leadership in the fifth epoch.
Some truth does lie behind this concept: this is the epoch of the consciousness soul, and the English-speaking peoples are gifted to develop the consciousness soul in an instinctive way, and it is true that the Slavs are destined to lead world-culture in the sixth epoch.
But these power groups seek, through illegitimate means, to guide toward illegitimate, Ahrimanic ends these inherent potentialities, which are loosely "written into" destiny.)
Many historians and "paranoid right-wing conspiracy nuts" have, solely through common sense and open-eyed observation of external events, discerned some of the outworking of the influence of these secret societies through their semi-secret instruments:
But these observers, lacking occult knowledge, can only guess at the true aims of the secret power groups.
The "Anglophile" societies may disagree among themselves about means and details, but essentially, they aim to gain world-domination for themselves (though certainly not for the good of the masses of the English-speaking peoples) and to influence all cultural trends in an Ahrimanic direction.
Now, in "post-Cold War" Europe, the Anglo-Americans and the Jesuit-Catholic power groups apparently are working together to make the basic arrangements of this part of the "New World Order": Central Europe, from France to Poland, is to be dominated by the Jesuit interests, while the "East" (meaning roughly the regions historically Orthodox Christian) is to be dominated by the Anglo-American "West".
This arrangement furthers the aims of the Anglo-Americans by preventing cultural collaboration between Central Europe and the Eastern Slavs, thus preventing the rise of a strong, healthy, and independent Central European culture that could mediate and balance the East and the West.
Thus, the present push toward the "New World Order" in Europe is a continuation of the long-standing Anglo-American policy of obliterating Central Europe (especially Germany) as a political/cultural force and of controlling the future-seeds being prepared in East-Europe -- the same policy that led to First World War and the Bolshevik Revolution.
The deeper, Ahrimanic aim of the Anglo-Americans is to defeat the Gods' plan for Earth-evolution, by turning the earth into a heap of dark, frozen, cosmic slag, haunted by an earth-bound mankind of ghostly homunculi -- and to secure for themselves a privileged place in this Ahrimanic world-order: an Ahrimanic immortality, with earthly consciousness and with power over the uninitiated.
(The late Professor Carroll Quigley, mentor of the young Wm. Jefferson Clinton, wrote the fairly well-known tome Tragedy and Hope, and the lesser-known work The Anglo-American Establishment, in which he described, from a sympathetic point of view, some of the machinations of semi-secret "Anglophile" [his word] power groups.
Carroll Quigley (/ˈkwɪɡli/; November 9, 1910 – January 3, 1977) was an American historian and theorist of the evolution of civilizations. He is remembered for his teaching work as a professor at Georgetown University, and his seminal works, The Evolution of Civilizations: An Introduction to Historical Analysis, and Tragedy and Hope; A History of the World in Our Time, in which he states that an Anglo-American banking elite have worked together for centuries to spread certain values globally.
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Prominent among these "Anglophile" groups was the secret society organized by Cecil Rhodes around 1891.
Its members included Wm. T. Stead [a spiritualist known to Annie Besant of the Theosophical Society], Lord Esher [an advisor to Queen Victoria], the Earl of Rosebury, Nathan Rothschild, Alfred Milner [whose posts included Colonial Secretary, and War Minister during the First World War], H.A.L. Fisher [sometime Education Minister], and A.J. Balfour.
I do not imply that Quigley, or Clinton [or all those working for the goals of these power groups] were, or are, fully aware of the deeper aims behind the "Anglophiles", but that they are more or less knowingly, or unknowingly, under the influence of the occultists and will usually act in the way desired by these occultists.
Altogether, of those who work in accordance with the aims of what may be loosely called the "Anglo-American power groups" [e.g. the Freemasons (or at least some factions of them), C.F.R., Round Table, Rhodes Scholarships, Skull and Bones, and their associated political and economic instruments] -- or of the Jesuits -- very few are aware of the true, occult aims.
This is true even of most of the "initiated", for the ceremonial magic of the initiation-rituals works on the ethereal bodies of the acolytes so as to make those lower initiates into receptive, unsuspecting instruments for the wishes of the few who are more aware.
This process might loosely be likened to a sophisticated kind of "post-hypnotic suggestion".
In general, we should hold suspect any secret society that practices ceremonial magic and is administered by higher "grades".
Nor do I wish to imply that one super-secret power group on earth "controls everything"; various occult power groups, arrayed in various and shifting alliances and antagonisms, vie for their various aims.
The centers of the conspiracies do not lie on the physical plane, and no matter how great their power, they are not omnipotent.
Again, the primal force behind present-day turmoil is the Coming of the Ethereal Christ.
As an old saying goes: "Where there is bright light, there are deep shadows.")
But much depends on us, on mankind.
We need to become conscious of these power groups, as well as their deeper aims and the aims of Ahriman himself.
If we do not acquire this alert consciousness, Ahriman might have his way, and the future of the earth, and of mankind, will be dark and bleak.
The earth's future, as well as our own, is our responsibility.
-- Any real progress toward a healthy social order depends on mankind's development of a new kind of thinking.
The present, Ahrimanic, brain-bound pseudo-thinking is inherently anti-social; it (subconsciously) tries to dominate other people and put them to sleep.
Most present anti-social aspects of society proceed from anti-social consciousness; the brain-bound pseudo-thinking is determined by subjective, unconscious instincts, not by concurrence with the objective truth, not by the meaning-process of the thinking itself.
An anti-social society is a physical picture of the anti-social human consciousness.
If human consciousness becomes harmonious with objective reality, then a truly social society will be possible.
Again, it all depends on human consciousness -- and will.
The foregoing discussion can help us understand a presently unfolding event: the "emergence" of the so-called "Maitreya", now being promoted by Benjamin Creme and others.
Allegedly this "Maitreya" is not only the Christ but also the Messiah, Krishna, and the Imam Mahdi.
The story goes like this:
In 1977 "Maitreya" left his "ancient retreat in the Himalayas" to reside incognito in London.
Allegedly he has created his own physical body -- a "mayavirupa" -- which can appear in many places at once, according to his intention.
Nevertheless, he supposedly rode an airliner from Pakistan to London, "coming in the clouds".
He also appears in dreams to many people around the world.
The "Maitreya" is a highly advanced Man, not a god.
He has been working behind the scenes to inspire many recent events, such as the "environmental" movement, the end of Communism in the Soviet Union, the end of apartheid in South Africa, and the end of the East-West confrontation.
Since 1988 he has "miraculously" appeared to speak before religious groups worldwide, causing miraculous healings and "charging" water with healing power.
Other miraculous phenomena around the world are said to emanate from him: Marian appearances and weeping Madonna statues, "crop circles", holographic "crosses of light", and mysterious hitchhikers who announce the Return of Christ and then vanish.
These phenomena are leading to a fast-approaching "Day of Declaration" when "Maitreya" will announce his "true identity" over world-wide radio and television, and listeners (and even those not listening) will hear him telepathically in their own languages -- and, simultaneously, spontaneous healings will occur around the world.
Thereafter, "Masters" (advanced initiates who have reached the stage that they no longer need to incarnate but return to earth voluntarily) of "Maitreya's""Vanguard" will reveal themselves to support his efforts.
One of these "Masters" will be the "Jesus" whom the supposed Christ-Maitreya"overshadowed" from the Baptism to the Crucifixion.
The social teachings of "Maitreya" oppose unfettered market forces and support the easing of the vast disparity between the rich and the poor by "the principle of sharing".
Governments will be forced to institute sharing after the coming collapse of the stock markets (beginning in Japan) and the resulting upheavals.
Under the leadership of "Maitreya" and the "Masters" a new world-wide civilization will emerge, based on the principles of:
lessened regulation
liberty
freedom
environmental equilibrium
solar energy
-- and the guarantee to all of enough:
food
clothing
housing
health care
and education.
"What's wrong with all that?"
It is true enough that runaway "market forces", aided by their agents in government, are grievously oppressing mankind; the gap between rich and poor is cruel and dangerous; the natural environment is being degraded; and so, on and on.
We can begin to see "what's wrong" when we consider, as explained above, that Christ appears once and only once in the flesh, and that His Second Coming is now taking place in the supra-physical, ethereal earth.
Clearly this is inconsistent with the supposed Christ-Maitreya coming down from the Himalayas to live in London and appear around the world to the physical senses.
Furthermore, the "Maitreya's" supporters teach that the "anti-Christ energy" will not be manifested through individuals on earth, until 3000 years will have passed since the defeat of Hitler.
Again, this is the reverse of the truth, as explained above: this is the time of climaxing activity of the Antichrist, through Ahrimanic influence, leading to the physical incarnation of Ahriman.
Evidently, this supposed Maitreya-Christ is an impostor who tries to falsify the tremendous events breaking upon us.
We get a strong clue to the true nature of the "Maitreya" from this statement of his supporters:
"For the last 100 years, the Ageless Wisdom teachings have been released through individuals such as Helena Blavatsky, founder of the Theosophical Society, and later by Alice A. Bailey and Helena Roerich.
In 1948, the imminent return of Christ was revealed in Alice Bailey's book, The Reappearance of the Christ."
[Emergence Quarterly, No. 9]
Steiner and, following his research, Sergei O. Prokofieff (grandson of the composer) have uncovered the occult influences behind:
Blavatsky
Bailey
Roerich
This story, much abridged, goes as follows: Around 1875 Blavatsky gave voice to some true Western (Rosicrucian) wisdom, much garbled, in her Isis Unveiled.
She later came under the influence of a particular group of Eastern, Tibeto-Indian occultists, who inspired her Secret Doctrine, with its strongly anti-Christian bent.
These inspirers were the "mahatmas", the supposed "Morya" and "Kut Humi". (The true identity of these "mahatmas" is problematic.)
Under her influence, and that of A. P. Sinnett (whose Esoteric Buddhism was inspired by the same "mahatmas"), the Theosophical Society took a decidedly Eastern turn, even moving its headquarters from New York to Madras.
Sinnett was born in London. His father died while he was young, as in 1851 Sinnett was listed as a "Scholar – London University", living with his mother Jane Sinnett, an author and translator, who is listed as a widow and whose occupation is listed as "Periodical Literature"; his older sister Sophia, age 22, was a teacher. Jane's sister Sarah, age 48, was also a teacher. In 1870 Sinnett married his wife Patience, probably in the London area. He is listed in the 1871 England Census at age 31, as a journalist, born in Middlesex. His wife Patience is 27, and her mother Clarissa Edenson a "Landowner", is living with them. By 1879, Sinnett had moved to India where he was "... the Editor of The Pioneer, the leading English Daily of India..." He relates in his book, The Occult World that: "...on the first occasion of my making Madame Blavatsky's acquaintance she became a guest at my home at Allahabad and remained there for six weeks..." In 1880 Helena Blavatsky and Henry Steel Olcott visited the Sinnetts at their summer home in Simla. The Mahatma Letters, which generated the controversy that later helped lead to the split of the Theosophical Society were mostly written to Sinnett or his wife Patience. The letters started at this time when Sinnett asked Blavatsky whether if he wrote a letter to her Mahatmas, she could arrange to have it delivered. By 1884 Sinnett was back in England, where that year Constance Wachtmeister states that she met Blavatsky at the home of the Sinnetts in London. Sinnett asked Charles Webster Leadbeater to come back to England to tutor his son Percy and George Arundale. Leadbeater agreed and brought with him one of his pupils Curuppumullage Jinarajadasa. Using "astral clairvoyance" Leadbeater assisted William Scott-Elliot to write his book The Story of Atlantis, for which Sinnett wrote the preface. Sinnett was later president of the London Lodge of the Society. By 1901 Sinnett is listed as an author. His son Percy is also listed as an author and born in India.
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The teachings of the "mahatmas" derived from a pre-Christian occult wisdom and held Lucifer higher than Christ, but also had a strongly materialistic and atheistic tinge.
This "occult materialism" did not deny the existence of higher beings (up to a point), or the human afterlife and reincarnation under the law of karma (indeed, the concept of karma entered Western culture mostly through the Theosophical Society), but it did deny the existence of a theistic God and held that the higher realms consist only of refined, subtle matter.
Blavatsky traveled to India and a secret location in Tibet to be initiated into these teachings.
The "mahatmas" aimed to get a kind of revenge on the Western world for having overwhelmed the East and suppressed Eastern occultism.
We have Blavatsky's (hearsay) testimony that at least one of her "mahatmas" even hated and despised the white race.
On a deeper level, the aim was to work with Lucifer and Ahriman to draw mankind into the illegitimate realm known to occultism as the "Eighth Sphere".
This realm lies outside the normal seven great ages of the Saturn-Vulcan series.
It arose through Lucifer's introduction, into the Earth Age, of the supersensible Old Moon forces, containing reflected images of higher worlds.
Ahriman tries to take earthly, dense matter and join it to these images to create "densified imaginations" or "specters".
Materialistic thoughts in human brains, especially the "occult materialism" taught by the "mahatmas", greatly furthers this process.
If human evolution could be diverted into this Eighth Sphere, the Gods' plan for earthly and human evolution would be defeated.
Later, after Madame Blavatsky's death, the Theosophical Society, under Annie Besant, tried to put forth the young Krishnamurti as the Christ, or Maitreya, or both. Krishnamurti was prepared over a number of years, going through some "initiations", but later lost faith in his putative mission, at least in part because his ailing brother died despite the assurances of the "Masters" that he would recover.
Annie Besant (née Wood; 1 October 1847 – 20 September 1933) was a British socialist, theosophist, freemason, women's rights and Home Rule activist, educationist, and campaigner for Indian nationalism. She was an ardent supporter of both Irish and Indian self-rule. She became the first female president of the Indian National Congress in 1917. For fifteen years, Besant was a public proponent in England of atheism and scientific materialism. Besant's goal was to provide employment, better living conditions, and proper education for the poor.[3] She became a prominent speaker for the National Secular Society (NSS), as well as a writer, and a close friend of Charles Bradlaugh. In 1877 they were prosecuted for publishing a book by birth control campaigner Charles Knowlton. Thereafter, she became involved with union actions, including the Bloody Sunday demonstration and the London matchgirls strike of 1888. She was a leading speaker for both the Fabian Society and the Marxist Social Democratic Federation (SDF). She was also elected to the London School Board for Tower Hamlets, topping the poll, even though few women were qualified to vote at that time. In 1890 Besant met Helena Blavatsky, and over the next few years her interest in theosophy grew, whilst her interest in secular matters waned. She became a member of the Theosophical Society and a prominent lecturer on the subject. As part of her theosophy-related work, she travelled to India. In 1898 she helped establish the Central Hindu School, and in 1922 she helped establish the Hyderabad (Sind) National Collegiate Board in Bombay (today's Mumbai), India. The Theosophical Society Auditorium in Hyderabad, Sindh (Sindh) is called Besant Hall in her honor. In 1902, she established the first overseas Lodge of the International Order of Co-Freemasonry, Le Droit Humain. Over the next few years, she established lodges in many parts of the British Empire. In 1907 she became president of the Theosophical Society, whose international headquarters were, by then, located in Adyar, Madras, (Chennai). Besant also became involved in politics in India, joining the Indian National Congress.[1] When World War I broke out in 1914, she helped launch the Home Rule League to campaign for democracy in India, and dominion status within the British Empire. This led to her election as president of the Indian National Congress, in late 1917. In the late 1920s, Besant travelled to the United States with her protégé and adopted son Jiddu Krishnamurti, who she claimed was the new Messiah and incarnation of Buddha. Krishnamurti rejected these claims in 1929. After the war, she continued to campaign for Indian independence and for the causes of theosophy, until her death in 1933.
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As is well known, Krishnamurti later disavowed his nomination, and the whole undertaking collapsed. (This affair also led to the departure of Steiner from the Theosophical Society -- wherein he had been the Secretary of the German Section -- and subsequently to the founding of the Anthroposophical Society.)
Helena Roerich
Helena Ivanovna Roerich (Russian: Елена Ивановна Рерих; née Shaposhnikova (Шапошникова); 12 February [O.S. 31 January] 1879 – 5 October 1955) was a Russian theosophist, writer, and public figure. In the early 20th century, she created, in cooperation with the Teachers of the East, a philosophic teaching of Living Ethics ("Agni Yoga"). She was an organizer and participant of cultural activity in the U.S., conducted under the guidance of her husband, Nicholas Roerich. Along with her husband, she took part in expeditions of hard-to-reach and little-investigated regions of Central Asia. She was an Honorary President-Founder of the Institute of Himalayan Studies "Urusvati" in India and co-author of the idea of the International Treaty for Protection of Artistic and Scientific Institutions and Historical Monuments (Roerich Pact). She translated two volumes of the Secret Doctrine of H. P. Blavatsky, and selected Mahatma's Letters (Cup of the East), from English to Russian.
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(and her husband, the painter Nicholas Roerich) came into the picture in the 1920's.
Nikolai Konstantinovich Rerikh[a] (Russian: Николай Константинович Рерих), better known as Nicholas Roerich (/ˈrɛrɪk/; October 9, 1874 – December 13, 1947), was a Russian painter, writer, archaeologist, theosophist, philosopher, and public figure. In his youth he was influenced by Russian Symbolism, a movement in Russian society centered on the spiritual. He was interested in hypnosis and other spiritual practices and his paintings are said to have hypnotic expression. Born in Saint Petersburg, to a well-to-do Baltic German father and to a Russian mother, Roerich lived in various places in the world until his death in Naggar, India.[4] Trained as an artist and a lawyer, his main interests were literature, philosophy, archaeology, and especially art. Roerich was a dedicated activist for the cause of preserving art and architecture during times of war. He was nominated several times to the longlist for the Nobel Peace Prize. The so-called Roerich Pact (for the protection of cultural objects) was signed into law by the United States and most other nations of the Pan-American Union in April 1935.
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Helena Roerich started receiving telepathic dictations from a "mahatma", and she began to write these inspirations in her multi-volume work Agni Yoga.
Then began a series of journeys, the most amazing of which (1925-28) was an expedition which, under the American flag, crossed India, Tibet, Mongolia, and the new Soviet Union.
Incredibly, they traveled to Moscow -- with aid of the OGPU (later called the "KGB") -- to meet with high Bolshevik commissars, and to deliver a letter from the "mahatmas", along with some Tibetan soil for the grave of "our brother Mahatma Lenin".
Though the Anglo-Americans and Indo-Tibetans oppose each other in some ways (the Indo-Tibetans opposed British rule in India), they were united, for somewhat differing motives, in supporting the Bolshevist war against the Russian people and culture.
For the destiny of the Slavic East is to create a humane, Christ-inspired society in the Sixth Cultural Epoch; both these occult groups wish to divert this destiny into other paths -- even by the destruction of human civilization, which would have been the result of Bolshevism, had it succeeded.
(Today, after the "fall of communism", Russia, and much of Eastern Europe, lie prostrate, both physically and morally.
Russia is grievously wounded, but not yet dead; she might yet rise to her destiny, if "free market reforms" and other destructive Western influences don't kill her first.)
It even turns out that the Indo-Tibetans were behind the depredations of the "Mongol Hordes" of Genghis Khan and his successors, who devastated and enslaved almost all of Russia.
-- And even today the supporters of "Agni Yoga" are active in Russia; Mikhail Gorbachev is among them.
Mikhail Sergeyevich Gorbachev[f] (2 March 1931 – 30 August 2022) was a Soviet and Russian politician who served as the last leader of the Soviet Union from 1985 to the country's dissolution in 1991. He served as General Secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union from 1985 and additionally as head of state beginning in 1988, as Chairman of the Presidium of the Supreme Soviet from 1988 to 1989, Chairman of the Supreme Soviet from 1989 to 1990 and the only President of the Soviet Union from 1990 to 1991. Ideologically, Gorbachev initially adhered to Marxism–Leninism but moved towards social democracy by the early 1990s. Gorbachev was born in Privolnoye, Russian SFSR, to a poor peasant family of Russian and Ukrainian heritage. Growing up under the rule of Joseph Stalin, in his youth, he operated combine harvesters on a collective farm before joining the Communist Party, which then governed the Soviet Union as a one-party state. Studying at Moscow State University, he married fellow student Raisa Titarenko in 1953 and received his law degree in 1955. Moving to Stavropol, he worked for the Komsomol youth organization and, after Stalin's death, became a keen proponent of the de-Stalinization reforms of Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev. He was appointed the First Party Secretary of the Stavropol Regional Committee in 1970, overseeing the construction of the Great Stavropol Canal. In 1978, he returned to Moscow to become a Secretary of the party's Central Committee; he joined the governing Politburo (25th term) as a non-voting member in 1979 and a voting member in 1980. Three years after the death of Soviet leader Leonid Brezhnev—following the brief tenures of Yuri Andropov and Konstantin Chernenko—in 1985, the Politburo elected Gorbachev as general secretary, the de facto leader. Although committed to preserving the Soviet state and its Marxist–Leninist ideals, Gorbachev believed significant reform was necessary for survival. He withdrew troops from the Soviet Afghan War and embarked on summits with United States president Ronald Reagan to limit nuclear weapons and end the Cold War. Domestically, his policy of glasnost ("openness") allowed for enhanced freedom of speech and press, while his perestroika ("restructuring") sought to decentralize economic decision-making to improve its efficiency. His democratization measures and formation of the elected Congress of People's Deputies undermined the one-party state. Gorbachev declined to intervene militarily when various Warsaw Pact countries abandoned Marxist–Leninist governance in 1989. Internally, growing nationalist sentiment threatened to break up the Soviet Union, leading Marxist–Leninist hardliners to launch the unsuccessful August Coup against Gorbachev in 1991. In the coup's wake, the Soviet Union dissolved against Gorbachev's wishes. After resigning from the presidency, he launched the Gorbachev Foundation, became a vocal critic of Russian president's Boris Yeltsin and Vladimir Putin, and campaigned for Russia's social-democratic movement. Gorbachev is considered one of the most significant figures of the second half of the 20th century. The recipient of a wide range of awards, including the Nobel Peace Prize, he is praised for his role in ending the Cold War, introducing new political and economic freedoms in the Soviet Union, and tolerating both the fall of Marxist–Leninist administrations in eastern and central Europe and the German reunification. In Russia, he is often derided for facilitating the dissolution of the Soviet Union—an event which weakened Russia's global influence and precipitated an economic collapse in Russia and other states.
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The hidden Tibetan "mahatmas'" headquarters visited by the Roerich expedition was the same as was visited by H. Blavatsky.
This is the "earthly Shamballa", whose high ruler, according to H. Roerich, is the "Maitreya".
(In its true meaning "Shamballa" is an Eastern term for the soul-spirit world which was lost to ordinary human perception with the decline of atavistic clairvoyance.
The "return of Shamballa" refers to the coming recovery of this perception with the new, higher clairvoyance.)
And it is this same "earthly Shamballa" and these same "mahatmas" who inspired Alice Bailey, and her organizations, the "Servants of the World" and the "Secret School" (Schola Arcana).
Creme's group uses the same prayer, now called the "Transmission Meditation", given in Bailey's The Reappearance of Christ.
And, of course, Bailey's "Christ" who will "reappear" is none other that this so-called "Maitreya".
The truth, as given by Steiner, about the real Maitreya is roughly this: There are twelve exalted beings, called "Bodhisattvas", who serve the Christ Spirit in the guidance of mankind.
One of these Bodhisattvas was incarnated in the Sixth Century BC as Gautama, who rose to rank of "Buddha".
The excarnate Gautama Buddha closely cooperated with the mission of Christ-Jesus in Palestine, and later took on a mission of redemption on Mars.
His successor was "appointed", so to speak, to take his place in the Lodge of Bodhisattvas, and this Bodhisattva is destined to become the Maitreya Buddha, "the Bringer of the Good", approximately two and a half millennia from now.
Meanwhile, he repeatedly incarnates, at least partially, on earth, in the service of the Christ.
One of these incarnations (or "incorporations" -- not quite incarnations in the usual sense) was as Jeshu ben Pandira, the Essene teacher and martyr (circa 105 BC).
Today this Maitreya-Bodhisattva works to proclaim and further the coming of the Ethereal Christ.
When this Bodhisattva becomes the Maitreya Buddha the earth and the human organism will be constituted very differently than now: thinking, speaking, and doing will be morally consistent.
Thus, it is evident that the so-called "Maitreya" presently "emerging" is not only a false Christ, but also a false Maitreya.
The "mahatmas" of "Shamballa" have deep knowledge and far-reaching influence and abilities, but they are severely limited and falsified by their blindness, or opposition, to the Christ.
Their occult vision extends only to this "solar system", and backwards only to the Old Moon.
They do not comprehend the Cosmic Christ, Who descended from the starry realms to the sun, and thence to the earth.
They are basically Luciferic, with strong Ahrimanic tendencies.
It is not clear (to this writer) exactly what role the pseudo-Maitreya will play in the incarnation of Ahriman: perhaps he will be the bodily vehicle for Ahriman; perhaps he will work in that uneasy, problematic of alliance that sometimes holds between Lucifer and Ahriman.
But this much is clear: if mankind accepts him as he presents himself to be, much evil will follow.
Again: The consciousness of Men is essential. If the stated aims of the pseudo-Maitreya seem benign, remember that, not very long ago, many otherwise intelligent people believed Bolshevism to be the inauguration of a just civilization.
The "mahatmas" of "Shamballa" inspired:
Genghis Khan
Marx
Lenin
they are not to be taken lightly.
Epistemological Considerations
Now, some might say:
"Your occultist Steiner says one thing; these Indo-Tibetans say something else; still others say yet other things.
What's to choose between them, or among them; it's all incomprehensible anyway."
Again, the aim in this short essay is not to prove things conclusively, but to get some important information to a wider public.
Those who absorb these concepts will at least be forewarned, so that they need not be caught wholly unprepared, and unaware, by onrushing events.
It is hoped that those thus forewarned will not easily take at face value the phenomena surrounding the putative "Maitreya" or "Christ", and that they will not be wholly oblivious to the real, Ethereal Christ.
And further: it is hoped that people will take the information given here, and begin their own investigations, and even set out on the "Path of Knowledge".
There is no need to be dismayed and defeated by the complexity and abstruseness of this subject-matter: truth does live in the human heart, and it speaks to us through a "sense of reality", if we are truly willing to listen to it.
Those who have a real, persistent will-for-the-truth will eventually find truth, even though most may stray temporally into byways.
The Law is: "Seek, and ye shall find".
Many modern people, especially those trained in the sciences, regard such concepts as spiritual beings, spiritual worlds, divine Providence, etc., to be preposterous, impossible, or at least unknowable.
The prevailing epistemology (usually unconsciously assumed) of scientific-technical culture holds that whatever "knowledge" we can gain, whether considered certain or hypothetical, we can gain only through the physical senses, mathematizing, and inductive reasoning.
But, as we are taught primarily by Steiner in modern times, we can find other approaches toward gaining experiential knowledge.
Sense-bound, mechanistic-mathematical scientism is peculiar to a particular mode of human consciousness, which mode is prevalent in our time but is not the only kind of consciousness available to mankind. (We might regard the "psychedelic revolution" as a muddled attempt to open up these other kinds of consciousness.)
In ancient times mankind had a dream-like consciousness of "supersensible" realities. (This consciousness is often and somewhat confusedly called primitive animism).
In the course of evolution, we lost this faculty in order to enter deeply into the sense-world, losing our experiential membership in the spiritual cosmos, thus, to gain the possibility of individuality and freedom.
We have now reached the evolutionary stage at which we are poised to regain this supersensible experience ("clairvoyance") at a higher level; that is, with the ability of independent, self-willed thinking.
And the practice of this consciously self-willed thinking, as opposed to the Ahrimanic thinking discussed above, is the gateway to true clairvoyance.
For thinking itself, when consciously self-willed and freed from dependence on the subconscious human organism, is itself the first stage of clairvoyance -- a "waking-up" to a higher state of consciousness, which is just as experientially distinct as is ordinary waking day-consciousness from dream-consciousness.
Still higher development of clairvoyance leads to experiences which can be metaphorically described as spiritual "seeing", "hearing", and "touching".
Steiner has given detailed instructions for the orderly, healthy development of these higher faculties of experience.
To entertain another figure of speech, we might consider the developing of these faculties as the refining of the human organism itself into an instrument for scientific investigation -- just as the mineral substances of the earth can be refined and developed into, say, a telescope -- only, the human organism consists of body, life, soul and spirit, and its refining is to make us conscious of supersensible realities.
Rudolf Steiner accomplished this self-development to a higher degree than anyone else who has made himself publicly known in our times, and his teachings on "spiritual science" flow from his supersensible experience. (There are other, dubious -- or downright evil -- ways of gaining some kind of supersensible experience, but these can lead to delusion and/or moral and spiritual ruin.)
But this knowledge is not altogether closed to those who do not yet have this clairvoyance. Steiner time and again emphasized that those of us without spiritual vision can, because true thinking itself is a kind of living-into spirit realities, understand and justifiably believe true information given by the spiritual seer:
"It would be wrong for anyone to say: `I cannot accept the teachings of spiritual science until I myself become a seer,' for without inward application to the results of spiritual research there is no chance whatever of attaining genuine higher knowledge.
It would be as though child, during gestation, were to refuse the forces coming to it through its mother, and proposed to wait until it could procure them for itself.
Just as the embryonic child in its incipient feeling for life learns to appreciate what is offered to it, so can the non-seer appreciate the truths of spiritual science.
An insight into these teachings based on a deeply rooted feeling for truth, and a clear, sound, all-round critical and reasoning faculty are possible even before spiritual things are actually perceived.
The esoteric knowledge must first be studied, so that this study becomes a preparation for clairvoyance."
[Knowledge of Higher Worlds; p.189 f.]
"For in thought itself an inner entity is present that is connected with the supersensible world."
[Occult Science; p.294]
"...one, by really thinking, finds oneself in the region of a living supersensible world."
[Occult Science; p.295]
"...if we read communications about supersensible facts in the right way, we are living into the stream of spiritual existence."
[Occult Science; p.18]
"Certain powers are required to discover the things referred to, but if after having been discovered they are made known, every person can understand them who is willing to bring to them unprejudiced logic and a healthy sense of truth."
[Theosophy; p.xx]
"...all knowledge of the worlds of soul and spirit slumbers in the profoundest depths of the human soul.
We can grasp, however, not only what we ourselves have brought to light, but also what someone else has brought up from the depths of soul.
This is so even when we have ourselves not yet made any preparations for the treading of the Path of Knowledge.
Correct spiritual insight awakens the powers of comprehension in anyone whose inner nature is not beclouded by preconceptions and prejudices.
Unconscious knowledge flashes up to meet the spiritual fact discovered by another, and this `flashing up' is not blind faith but the right working of healthy human understanding."
[Theosophy; p.156]
"The thoughts [presented by the seer] are, indeed, already present when one [the non-clairvoyant reader] surrenders to them; but one cannot think them if one does not, in every case, recreate them anew within the soul.
What is important is the fact that the spiritual researcher calls up thoughts in listeners and readers that they must first draw forth out of themselves...."
[Occult Science; p.296]
We can find our way toward the truth about soul and spirit through our healthy human feeling for reality:
"The feeling for truth and the power of understanding it are inherent in everyone....This feeling, which perhaps at first perceives nothing at all of what it is told [about higher worlds], is itself the magician that opens the `eye of the spirit'.
In darkness this feeling stirs, the soul sees nothing, but through this feeling it is seized by the power of truth.
The truth then gradually draws nearer to the soul and opens the higher sense in it."
[Theosophy; p.xviii-xix]
Of course, we must learn what is so hard for most of us: to distinguish between a healthy feeling for truth and the feeling of satisfaction of our egotistic prejudices.
The key here is unsparing self-examination and a sincere preference for objective reality over our short-sighted, selfish interests and subconscious impulses.
We must have a firm grasp of the fact that the truth is still true regardless of our ignorance or resistance and have an energetic Will-to-Reality. Again, the Law is: "Seek, and ye shall find."
If we really love the objective truth above all else, we will come to feel healthy and happy in the presence of truth, and to feel sick and pained in the presence of falsehood.
These pure feelings, and pure, objective thinking are our touchstones of reality and of guidance, and, if fostered, will eventually develop into personal, firsthand, higher cognition -- perhaps not in the present incarnation, but the Will-to-Reality is itself an indestructible reality which carries into future lives and into eternity.
-- Of course, treading the "Path of Knowledge" does not immediately confer infallibility.
In occultism the possibilities for illusion and deception are vast.
One might yet stray into error; however, the essential thing is the seeker's purity of striving for truth.
In Steiner's words:
"...the truth is what leads to the highest and noblest impulses for human evolution; the truth should be dearer to us than we are to ourselves.
If our relationship to truth is guided by these words and we still make a mistake in this life, the truth will be strong enough to draw us to itself in the next incarnation.
Honest mistakes we make in this incarnation will be compensated and redeemed in the next. It is better to make an honest mistake than to adhere to dogmas dishonestly.
After all, our path will be lit by the promise that truth will ultimately prevail, not by our own will, but by its own inherent divine power."
[Spiritual Guidance of the Individual and Humanity; pp. 88-9]
(Note: One of the questions which occasion much illusion and confusion is that of reincarnation.
Even many of those who readily accept the reality of the supersensible worlds can easily fall into error here, if they do not appreciate the complexities and possibilities for illusion.
According to Steiner, not only does the individual human spirit undergo reincarnation on earth, but so also might, in a way, the ethereal bodies, astral bodies (i.e. the soul-organisms), and even "copies" of the individual Ego.
All these latter are not at all necessarily unique and individualized; they might be shared by many incarnated individual Men. [See the lectures published in English as The Principle of Spiritual Economy.]
It is possible that one with insufficiently developed clairvoyance might misperceive these other kinds of reappearance of supersensible entities, taking them to be the true reincarnation of human individualities.
To see how and why, we need some understanding of the stages of higher knowledge metaphorically called "spiritual seeing, hearing, and touching".
Steiner calls these stages (in his special, restricted meanings) "Imagination", "Inspiration", and "Intuition".
"To have knowledge of a sense-being means to stand outside it and to judge it according to the external impression.
To have knowledge of a spiritual being through intuition means to have become completely one with it, to have become united with its inner nature.
Step by step the student of the spiritual ascends to such knowledge.
Imagination leads him to sense the perceptions no longer as outer characteristics of beings, but to recognize in them the outpouring of something psycho-spiritual; inspiration leads him further into the inner nature of beings.
He learns through it to understand what these beings are to each other; with intuition he penetrates into the beings themselves."
[Occult Science, p. 310]
And further:
"What is released after death from the human bodily nature goes through various states in the subsequent period.
The states directly after death might be described in some measure through imaginative cognition.
What, however, takes place when man advances further into the period between death and rebirth would have to remain quite unintelligible to imaginative cognition, if inspiration did not come to the rescue.
Only inspiration is able to discover what may be said about the life of man in the land of spirits after purification....
Whoever wished to fathom the nature of man by imagination and inspiration alone, would miss the innermost processes of his being that take place from incarnation to incarnation.
Only intuitive cognition, therefore, makes possible adequate research into repeated earth lives and into karma."
[Occult Science, pp. 310-1]
In general, those of us who have not attained to "intuitive cognition" should use great caution in forming judgments on our own about the identities of particular individuals in cases of reincarnation.
We might be misled by an incomplete perception of the reappearance of unindividualized parts of the human entity.
To judge these as being "reincarnation" might be partially true, in that some supersensible human "energies" are indeed reappearing in the physical world, but such judgments could be seriously misleading if one were to read uncritically from them deep meanings concerning an individual's destiny through repeated earthly incarnations.)
We might first set foot on the Path of Knowledge as skeptics, but if we are true, consistent skeptics, we must admit that we cannot claim to know of the impossibility of higher knowledge.
This realization should make us unprejudiced and open-minded about that possibility.
With this attitude, and with a Will-to-Reality, we then can assimilate the concepts of higher knowledge (without "blind faith"), and their truth will call forth inchoate recognition in our souls, because the truth is already in our souls.
We might find that this "knowledge" is much more alive and paradoxical than we conceived it to be in our skepticism.
Says Steiner:
"When you look at reality you do not arrive at concepts which can be fitted into systems, for one thing is always at the same time and in a certain way the other thing."
[Ideas for a New Europe ]
Even our skepticism can carry truth, if we are imbued with a sincere desire for reality. Steiner again:
"And our high goal is this: that we may know more exactly how much we still need to know.
Then we shall be more and more permeated with the truth of the old Socratic saying:
'The more a man learns, the more he knows how little he knows.'
But this conviction is good only when it is not a confession of passive, easy-going resignation, but testifies to living effort and will towards an ever-extending knowledge....
The right result is to be more and more inspired to further striving: to regard every new thing learnt as a step towards the attainment of yet higher stages."
[From Jesus to Christ]
We can, further, work upon ourselves, through the proper training, to begin to develop our own higher perception.
Bibliographic Remarks & Links
For a quick overview of Rudolf Steiner's lifework see A. P. Shepherd's Scientist of the Invisible [Inner Traditions; New York; 1983].
This work provides only the barest introduction; the serious investigator will need to probe deeper.
Steiner left a stupendous, vast body of work in German; not all of it is available in English.
Most of the publications bearing his name are not his writings, but his lectures, preserved in stenographic records and published without his review and corrections.
Most of these lectures were given to audiences who were familiar with his basic teachings, and he spoke directly to the particular needs of his listeners.
He only reluctantly allowed (most of) the stenographic records to published, with the disclaimer that they might contain errors and could be rightly judged only by those who already had a thorough understanding of the basics of spiritual science.
Thus, the investigator might best begin by studying Steiner's basic writings, which he intended for the general public, and which systematically set forth his fundamental concepts.
Chief among these basic works is Theosophy [1904] and Occult Science, an Outline [1910].
These are indispensable for an understanding of Steiner's spiritual anthropology and cosmology and give condensed expositions of the "path of knowledge".
The chapter by that name in Theosophy should almost be memorized by the serious truth-seeker.
An extended exposition of this Path is given in Knowledge of Higher Worlds [1904-5], also in a new translation: How to Know Higher Worlds.
Steiner's basic work on the enlivenment of thinking itself is The Philosophy of Freedom [1894]. (Other translations: The Philosophy of Spiritual Activity and Intuitive Thinking as a Spiritual Path.)
This book can be hard reading; we can get some help from Otto Palmer's compilation: Rudolf Steiner on his Book the Philosophy of Freedom [Anthroposophic Press; 1979] and from Georg Kühlewind's Stages of Consciousness, "Chapter One" [Lindisfarne Press; 1984].
Steiner gave many lecture cycles expounding his clairvoyant insights into Christology, but his basic written treatment of that subject is the early work Christianity as Mystical Fact (another translation: Christianity and the Occult Mysteries of Antiquity).
For a reading guide to Steiner's works, see Robert McDermott's The Essential Steiner, which also contains introductory essays by McDermott and selections form Steiner's works.
The primary sources for the foregoing essay are Steiner's lectures published as:
The Ahrimanic Deception
The Influences of Lucifer and Ahriman
Three Streams in Evolution
and Inner Realities of Evolution.
Another source, which I have used almost to the point of plagiarism, is Carl Stegmann's great work The Other America (two volumes, typescript; 1975), a deep study of Americanism in the light of Anthroposophy.
Stegmann lived almost 99 years, dying early in 1996.
His efforts, stemming from his feeling for America's true spiritual destiny as the battleground in the war to turn Ahriman's influence on the good, culminated in 1976 in the founding of Rudolf Steiner College near Sacramento, California.
The Other America has just been published, at long last, by the Rudolf Steiner College Press. [Bookstore: 9200 Fair Oaks Blvd., Fair Oaks CA 95628; (916)961-8729; FAX (916)961-3032] If people will meet their responsibility for wakefulness, this book should have a press run in the millions.
Some other sources relevant to this essay include: (Here mention of a source should not necessarily be taken as an endorsement of everything therein.)
Ere the Century Closes; Peter Tradowsky; Camphill Books; 1995
(Another work by Tradowsky, Kaspar Hauser, The Struggle for the Spirit [Temple Lodge], has a deep discussion of the spiritual destiny of Central Europe and some more indications pointing to the year 1998. Well worth reading.)
Also by Tradowsky, first published in EEEnglish in 1998: Christ and Antichrist, Understanding the events at the end of the century and recognizing our tasks [Temple Lodge.]
In the Name of the New World Order by Amnon Reuveni [Temple Lodge; 1996] -- This is a very interesting series of essays on the workings of the "Anglophile" secret societies from the Second World War to the Yugoslavian break-up. Includes information on the cooperation of the "Anglophiles" with the Catholic Church in shaping present-day Europe.
Apparently the Freemasons and the Jesuits are not always implacable enemies; Steiner said that the Freemasons and Jesuits have been cooperating somewhat since around the turn of the Nineteenth Century, at least at the higher, more esoteric levels.
Reuveni's book also contains an interesting discussion of the inter-relations of Sorat, Lucifer, and Ahriman, based on Steiner's lecture cycle Apokalypse und Priesterwirken.
(This cycle has more recently published in English as The Book of Revelation and the Work of the Priest; Rudolf Steiner Press; London; 1998.
The text of this publication is not an exact stenographic record of Steiner's words, but it does contain much material on the theme of the manifestations of Sorat and Ahriman, with especial reference to the years 1933 and 1998.)
Also in the same vein as Reuveni's workkk, with emphasis on the machinations surrounding the First World War: Mapping the Millennium, Behind the Plans of the New World Order by Terry M. Boardman [Temple Lodge].
The East in Light of the West, Part 1: Agni Yoga; Sergei O. Prokofieff; Temple Lodge; 1993.
A deep work on the occult influence of the "mahatmas" of "Shamballa", with emphasis on the Roeriches. (See also Stephen E. Usher's review of this work in the Newsletter of the Anthroposophical Society in America; Summer 1994; pp. 32-35.)
Two more volumes on the "Mahatmas'" movement are published in German.
Prokofieff is probably the most popular living Anthroposophical writer; he has many very influential volumes in print.
He has recently become a member of the Executive Council (Vorstand) of the General Anthroposophical Society.
In his first publication, Rudolf Steiner and the Founding of the New Mysteries [Temple Lodge], Prokofieff makes a strong case for identifying Steiner as the reincarnated individuality of Aristotle/Thomas Aquinas.
-- (However, many aspects of his work are, in this writer's opinion, dubious.
For a critical look at Prokofieff's work see this book advertisement.)
For a more mundane account of the "Anglophile" support of Bolshevism (and more) see the works of the late Antony C. Sutton, especially America's Secret Establishment; Liberty House Press; Billings, Montana; 1986.
Antony Cyril Sutton (February 14, 1925 – June 17, 2002) was a British-American writer, researcher, economist, and professor.
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Sutton had no apparent background in spiritual science, but he did, through normal journalistic research, document some "smoking guns" in this stupendous crime story and did as well discern a hint of the occult background of the story and gave a fairly accurate account of the twisted Hegelianism behind the "Anglophiles'" support of both opposing sides in conflicts.
For some Anthroposophical elucidation of Christianity, see Steiner's many lecture cycles on the subject -- as well as any and all books by Emil Bock, especially The Three Years, St. Paul, and The Apocalypse (Floris Books; Edinburgh).
For some excerpts from the book The Crisis of Civilization (Anthroposophie auf der Kreuzung der okkult-politischen Bewegungen der Gegenwart; ANTROPOSOFIYA na skryeshchyenii okkultno-politichyeskikh tyechyeniy sovryemyennosti), by the somewhat controversial Russian Anthroposophist Gennady Bondarev (Gennadij Bondarew)
This webpage also contains a short introduction to Bondarev's work and links to four complete chapters from this book. -- Bondarev's books are published in German by Moskau-Basel-Verlag.
I regret that I cannot cite chapter and verse for the metaphors of Bacon and Goethe.
I may have read about them in Rudolf Frieling's Christianity and Islam (Floris).
For some of Steiner's insights on occult conspiracies, social decadence, linguistic decadence, and future destiny and renewal, see, for example, his lecture cycles published as:
The Challenge of the Times
Spiritual Science as a Foundation for Social Forms
Ideas for a New Europe
Social Issues: Meditative Thinking and the Threefold Order
Materialism and the Task of Anthroposophy
and The Karma of Untruthfulness.
For some information on the occult background of the Theosophical Society and the "Anglophiles", see Steiner's cycle The Occult Movement in the Nineteenth Century and a recently republished work by an "Anglophile" sympathizer: The Transcendental Universe; C. G. Harrison (Lindisfarne Press; originally published 1894).
This last, rare work let some of the truth slip out about conspiratorial preparations for the First World War and the "socialist experiment" in Russia.
For some profound insights into the detailed inter-workings of individual and world destiny (karma), including the karma of the Anthroposophical Movement, see the series of volumes of Steiner's lectures called Karmic Relationships, especially Vols. III and IV.
Bernard Lievegoed's deathbed message, born out of a long lifetime of Anthroposophical service to mankind, is published as The Battle for the Soul [Hawthorn Press; 1994].
It gives his deep considerations on the interweaving of Anthroposophical and world karma, with special reference to the coming crisis.
He also identifies Rudolf Steiner as the reincarnation of the Nature-man Enkidu, storied in the Sumerian epic of Gilgamesh; then as Cratylus, the priest of the Ephesian Mysteries and teacher of Plato; then Aristotle; then Schionatulander, the tragic character in the Grail saga; and then Thomas Aquinas.
David Black's basic work on the "macrocosmic" incarnation or Ahriman is The Computer and the Incarnation of Ahriman; (St. George Publications; 1981.)
Black has also published a more recent essay on the same subject in the Newsletter of the Anthroposophical Society in America -- in which issue, unhappily, I don't remember.
The 950-year Saturn-cycle in connection with the Ethereal Christ is mentioned in the works of Willi Sucher.
He gave the basics of modern "astrosophy" -- astrology raised to a higher level -- in his published works, especially Cosmic Christianity.
The contemporary writer Robert Powell is attempting to develop astrosophy further; his Chronicle of the Living Christ [Anthroposophic Press] also points to a crisis around the turn of the Millennium.
Through some calculations assuming that mankind's life as a whole recapitulates the Incarnation, with one Saturn orbit corresponding to one day of Christ's life on earth, he points to the year 869 AD as the start of mankind's "40 days in the wilderness". (And Steiner many times also named this fateful year as a major turning point in history: the Eighth Ecumenical Council's "outlawing" of the Spirit as heresy.)
According to Powell's scenario, the years circa 1960--2049 AD mark the last three "days" in the wilderness: the temptations by Lucifer and Ahriman.
Also, Powell points to the year 2010 AD as the time of mankind's choice between Christ and the Antichrist: Pluto transits its sidereal position at the time of Christ's temptation. (Powell also gives many other correspondences from the turn of the Century to the time of the Incarnation.)
Caveat: Many of Powell's calculations are based largely on the dubious visions of Anne Catherine Emmerich, and his work has been questioned within present-day Anthroposophical discussions, for reasons not having to do with astrosophy as such.
His readers might do well to get a different perspective from Prokofieff's The Case of Valentin Tomberg, Anthroposophy or Jesuitism? [Temple Lodge, 1997].
The influence of Tomberg is very much controversial within the Anthroposophical movement.
For some information on the occult background of Nazism, see Trevor Ravenscroft's work The Spear of Destiny (Samuel Weiser; 1982; and Neville Spearman; 1973), as well as one in German (which I haven't read): Karl Heyer's Wesen und Wollen des National-Socialismus; Perseus Verlag; Basel; 1991.
(I should note that some Anthroposophists have a low opinion of Ravenscroft's book. -- My opinion is that, while many of the details of Ravenscroft's narrative may be dubious, the book is still well worth reading, for it provokes many questions that need to be asked about many aspects of European and world history. In writing the book, he was apparently fulfilling a task that fell to him because of the sudden death of the man [Walter Johannes Stein] who was best suited to write it, and he was working under the disadvantage of not having the best information at hand.
Still, he has brought before a fairly wide public some knowledge of many previously unknown forces in the world, and to me that seems a considerable accomplishment.
Hopefully, whatever deficiencies that may be contained in his writings will be corrected by further research. -- An effort in that direction was recently published [in its English language version] by the Rudolf Steiner Press: Light for the new Millennium [ed. T.H. Meyer].
This is a meticulously documented account of some of the deep forces involved in the beginning of the First World War and in further European destiny -- centering on the individuality of Helmuth von Moltke/Pope Nicholas I.
-- One can find information on the deeper significance of Nazism in Bondarev's Anthroposophie auf der Kreuzung der okkkult-politischen Bewegungen der Gegenwart, in English: The Crisis of Civilization.)
Another, more recent, book by Ravenscroft (with Tim Wallace-Murphy) is Mark of the Beast.
This work covers many of the same themes as this essay: the incarnation of Ahriman, the turning of the Millennium, Jundi Sabur, and more.
It contains much, very interesting information that I have not seen elsewhere -- including some apocryphal statements by Steiner concerning upcoming disasters -- but, again, I wouldn't want to vouch for its complete accuracy.
And again, hopefully, it could be a springboard for further research. (Thanks to Richard Metzger of Disinformation for bringing this book to my attention.)
For a well-informed account of the Krishnamurti episode, occult Jesuitism, the Maitreya, and more, see T. H. Meyer's The Bodhisattva Question (Temple Lodge).
Creme's reply to Steiner's assertion that Christ will not reappear in a physical body goes as follows:
"Rudolf Steiner died in 1925.
The revelation of Christ's need to come back to the physical world occurred only in 1945.
The decision to come back took place indeed earlier, but the way in which He was to appear was still undecided at the time.
Actually, there were certain initiates in the world...who had been prepared as possible vehicles for the Christ.
Altogether there were four, one of them [Krishnamurti] is known to all of us.
Then, however, the plan to make use of that vehicle was abandoned."
(From The Reappearance of Christ and the Masters of Wisdom, quoted in The Bodhisattva Question)
Creme's remarks seem to ignore the deep, profound cosmological reasons for the uniqueness of the Incarnation, and seem to imply that these could be superseded "on the spur of the moment", and further, to completely ignore the appearance of the Ethereal Christ.
But beyond this comment, I will leave it the readers to investigate Steiner's cosmology and Christology, and to evaluate Creme's statement for themselves.
In the interest of fairness, I give a link to Creme's organization: Share International
And for some Anthroposophically enlivened explorations of the UFO phenomenon, weather modification by ethereal manipulation, and much more, see Trevor J. Constable's classic The Cosmic Pulse of Life, if you can find a complete edition.
Try the Borderland Science Research Foundation.
[Thanks to Tom Corcoran for the following note on a relevant book (which I haven't read) in French: De Jundi Shapur a Silicon Valley.
"It really is an excellent book and deserves to be translated into English.
The author is Francis Paul Emberson, head of Anthro-Tech in Suisse Romande.
Here's a list of the contents:
Good and Evil. Manes. Jundi Shapur
Harun-al-Rashid. Francis Bacon of Verulam. The universal code. In the quest of wisdom
The war between the disciples of Michael and the "idols" (from Bacon's opus)
The fall into matter. Silicon Valley
Beyond Silicon Valley. Future development of demonic technology. The 6th and 7th post-Atlantean epochs.
Spiritual Science and technology. Moral Force.
Moral Technology and the 5th post-Atlantean epoch. Moral Tech during the 6th and 7th.
Epilogue. The mystery of thought and electricity. Michael and the Solar Demon."]
[Emberson's book now has been published in English by Etheric Dimensions Press.
A short extract from the book can be found here.]
Most of the works I have listed are, of course, translations from the German; the Lievegoed book from the Dutch, and the Prokofieff books from the Russian.
Originally in English are works by:
Shepherd
Sutton
Harrison
Black
Usher
Ravenscroft
Powell
and Constable.
One could go on and on referring to important topics in Anthroposophical literature; at this point I will refer the reader to some resources available for independent investigation.
Steiner's work touches almost all aspects of culture, and would, if it were seriously and widely assimilated, bring life-giving renewal to civilization.
It is the wonder, or the crime, of the Twentieth Century that this did not happen.
(The power of the Adversaries has been that strong, even though they were working from the non-physical world.
Of course, they were working with their incarnated human accomplices, and with human indolence and just-plain-cussedness.
Again, it is far beyond the scope of this essay to provide an overview of Steiner's work and its ramifications.
Many of his (and his collaborators') works are available, and a number of independent organizations worldwide are applying and developing his teachings in practical ways.
Chief among them is the international headquarters of the Anthroposophical Society; contact:
Anthroposophische Gesellschaft, Goethaneum, CH-4143, Dornach, Schweiz. There are many national branches around the world. The Society in the USA can be reached at: The Anthroposophical Society in America, 1923 Geddes Ave., Ann Arbor MI 48104-1797; (313) 662-9355, (888) 757-2742, FAX (313) 662-1727.
The lending library of the Society in the USA is: The Rudolf Steiner Library; 65 Fern Hill Road; Ghent, NY 12075 -- (518) 672-7690; FAX (518) 672-5827.
They have available many, many of Steiner's (and other Anthroposophists') works in both English and German, as well as catalog and research assistance.
Books can be loaned by mail, and services are also available to non-members of the Society, for a reasonable fee.
A good online Anthroposophical resource is The Rudolf Steiner Archive and eLib. (That's where I lifted the background color for this page.
No inference should be made that the views presented in this essay are necessarily those of the Archive, or of any of the links and references listed here.)
This site has the texts of a number of Steiner's books and lectures, in English, ready for downloading.
Some more Anthroposophical links:
The Anthroposophy Network -- The mother of all Anthroposophical link pages
Anthroposophie Online -- Rudolf Saacke's renegade Anthroposophical site (in German); see also anthroposophie.pl .
The Jaerna Bridge
Planetary Qualities
Info 3 (in German; some English)
InfoSophy (in German; some English planned)
Waldorfsidora
Sune Nordwall's Home Page (has essay on occult background of European Union)
anthroposophy.com (Frames only; in German)
Perseus Verlag In German; some English; some French
Projective Geometry Nick Thomas' presentation of ethereal mathematics
Jos Verhulst Home Page
rudolf-steiner.de Thousands of links re Steiner
Vermont Sophia Leans generally toward Tomberg, but has essays both pro and con. Has some astrosophical essays by Robert Powell regarding the "Second Coming".
Triform An astrosophical site
Valdemar Setzer's Brazilian site; much in English
Terry Boardman's socio-political site -- much good reading
David Heaf's Home Page Good discussions, especially on genetics, and on the foundations on the Anthroposophiocal Society
The Southern Cross Review
Antroposophia en Argentina (in Spanish)
Sun Logos Richard Distasi's site: stories, questions, and speculations
There some Anthroposophical bulletin boards at: The Steiner Archive and Discussion Forums.
The main publisher of Anthroposophical works in the USA is:
The Anthroposophic Press; 3390 Rte. 9; Hudson, NY 12534 -- (518) 851-2054; FAX (518) 851-2047 or (800) 925-1795 -- E-mail: anthropres@aol.com.
An annotated catalog is available.
The Press also distributes books from other Anthroposophical publishers, including an important publisher in England: Temple Lodge Publishing; 51 Queen Caroline Street; London W6 9 QL; UK. (Phone) 0181-748 0571; (FAX) 0181-748 5451.
Many of the books listed above have bibliographies which can lead the reader to many more, relevant works.
The books by:
Prokofieff
Reuveni
Tradowsky
Stegmann
and Meyer have especially informative citations and bibliographies.
And of course, many of the Web sites will lead to other links, which will lead to still more links, and so on.
Steiner produced over 40 books and 6000 lectures.
The complete edition is (still) in preparation (in German) by the Rudolf Steiner Nachlassverwaltung, Dornach, Schweiz.
The total number of volumes is well over 300 and growing.
A full and detailed Bibliographic Survey is available from the Nachlassverwaltun.
Conclusion
To recapitulate some history, from a slightly different, panoramic viewpoint, using Steiner's insights into the interplay of individual and world karma:
The ruling Time Spirit, since 1879 AD, is now the Sun-Archangel Michael (the "Countenance of Christ").
His previous rulership encompassed the time of Aristotle and Alexander.
Michael is the administrator of Cosmic Intelligence, and a promoter of cosmopolitanism.
Ideas to Plato had been living spiritual beings, attainable in higher vision.
His pupil Aristotle put this pictorial wisdom into conceptual thoughts, suitable for the age of lost clairvoyance; Alexander carried this Greek thought-culture into the wider world -- both in the service of Michael.
But this ancient Greek thinking was not experienced as coming from within the Man; it was rather experienced as coming, like perceptions, from the outside, a cosmic Pan-Intelligence.
Later, this Aristotelianism was carried over to Jundi Sabur, and thence into Arabian/Muslim culture.
Perhaps the most brilliant and influential proponent of this Arabian culture were the Caliph Haroun al Rashid and his associates, in the Eighth Century AD.
This culture was, as indicated above, brilliant in a way, but was also anti-evolutionary in that it failed to appreciate the Christ-Impulse and was infected with the Sorat/Ahriman influence from Jundi Sabur.
Around this time the cosmic Intelligence began to "fall to earth", out of the rule of Michael and in the "heads" of Men; the Pan-Intelligence becoming individualized, personal intelligence.
This process was a preparation for what was to culminate after the dawn of the Consciousness Soul Epoch in the Fifteenth Century: that Men were to experience their thoughts as coming from out of themselves, as a personal intelligence in individual freedom.
In 869 AD the fateful Eighth Ecumenical Council in Constantinople declared to be heretical the doctrine of "trichotomy": that the Man is body, soul and spirit -- thus effectively "outlawing the spirit" in Western Christendom and plunging West-European mankind ever more deeply into material experience.
While this Council was happening on earth, in the soul/spirit world Haroun al Rashid and his associates, who had recently died, conferred with the individuality of Aristotle and associates: Alexander and the "Aristotelians", together with the "Platonists" and the Knights of Arthur's Round Table.
In this meeting Aristotle and his associates resolved to bring to earth a renewed and Christianized wisdom suitable for the epoch of individualized intelligence of the Consciousness Soul, but al Rashid and his party remained opposed to this Christianization.
Subsequently, on earth, the Arabian impulse was carried forward by philosophers such as Avicenna and Averroës, who upheld a decadent and retrogressive quasi-Aristotelianism, which denied human-spiritual individuality surviving death.
And the Platonists descended to earthly incarnation, up through the Twelfth Century, as teachers of the Christianized Nature-wisdom of the School of Chartres. (This wisdom later inspired Bruno Latini, and consequently his pupil Dante.)
In the Thirteenth Century the Aristotelians incarnated into the Dominican Order, wherein, with the help of the Platonists then in the spirit-world, they upheld the doctrine of human-individual intelligence and immortality, in the subtle conceptual thinking of the Scholastic "Realists", as against the Arabian philosophers.
The greatest of the Scholastics was Aristotle himself, incarnated as Thomas Aquinas, the proponent of the reality of Pan-Intelligence in the form of concepts -- the "universals" -- and of the reality of human-individual experience of intelligence.
-- After the end of Medieval culture and the beginning of the Consciousness Soul Epoch, al Rashid himself incarnated as none other than Francis Bacon, the fountainhead of modern, Ahrimanic scientism. (Paradoxically, Bacon was inspired by a high Initiate, who also inspired Shakespeare, Jacob Boehme, and Jacob Balde. [Karmic Relationships, Vol. II]
Again: evolution is not a simple, two-sided conflict between "good" and "evil" -- in a way, a nominalistic-empirical science "had to" enter cultural development.) Ahriman intends to make the now-earthly human intelligence entirely, overly individualized and personal, so that it degenerates into mere cleverness, driven by lower instincts and divorced from universal reality.
But while Baconian science gained ground on earth, in the spirit/soul world the Platonists and Aristotelians convened in a "school" under the leadership of Michael.
This school prepared the impulses which were to appear later on earth as the renewing and enlivening of culture in the coming Michael Age.
(Meanwhile, in the Fifteenth to Eighteenth Centuries, Ahriman had convened a "school" of his own, for the purpose, among others, of preparing his human acolytes for their coming incarnations, especially those in our time.
This school was "sub-earthly" in the sense that it was beneath the earth's surface, and in the sense that it was "sub-sensible" -- the opposite of supersensible.)
This heavenly gathering, around the turning of the Eighteenth/Nineteenth centuries, culminated in a mighty Ritual, while on earth the Romantic Movement brought life into culture, before the deep descent into the materialism of the later Nineteenth century. (Goethe in a previous incarnation had been a sculptor associated closely with Plato.)
After 1879 the Aristotelians were in incarnation (led, as Prokofieff and Lievegoed maintain, by Aristotle/Thomas himself as Rudolf Steiner) and brought to earth the content of the Michael School as Anthroposophy ("spiritual science"). (Plato himself had been incarnated toward the end of the Nineteenth century as the Goethean scholar Karl Julius Schröer, teacher of Rudolf Steiner at the Technische Hochschule in Vienna.)
And, shortly before his death, Steiner prophesied that the Aristotelians, together with the Platonists, would again be on earth for the battle against Ahriman at the end of the Twentieth Century.
"...those who stand with full intensity within the Anthroposophical Movement will return at the end of the century, and others will then unite with them, for by this means the salvation of the earth and earthly civilization from destruction must eventually be settled. This is the mission of the Anthroposophical Movement...."
[Karmic Relationships, Vol. IV]
The troops are mustering; the armies are forming up for battle: The hosts of Ahriman against the hosts of Michael.
Note: This struggle is further complicated by the fact that, besides the coming physical incarnation of Ahriman, a non-physical, ethereal manifestation of Ahriman will occur, with the aim of obscuring the appearance of the Ethereal Christ.
This aim is being furthered by the supra-Masonic, occult "power groups" (or "brotherhoods") mentioned earlier.
Steiner says:
"These brotherhoods of which I have just spoken, whose aim is to banish the souls of men into materialistic spheres, are also making it their aim to ensure that the coming of Christ should pass by unnoticed in the twentieth century, that His coming as an etheric Being should not be noticed by mankind.
This aim is developing under the influence of a very definite idea, a very definite impulse of will, to win the sphere of influence which should come to us through Christ in the twentieth and later centuries, for another being -- to conquer that sphere for another being....
These brotherhoods of the West do exist.
They aim to thwart the impulse of the Christ and put in his place another individuality that has never appeared in the flesh -- an etheric being of a strongly Ahrimanic nature."
[lecture of 18 Nov. 1917; quoted in Tradowsky's Kaspar Hauser, pp. 198-9]
Prokofieff [in The Spiritual Origins of Eastern Europe...], tries to explicate the inter-relations of Sorat, Lucifer, and Ahriman -- thusly: The ethereal Ahrimanic manifestation will be of a being still mightier than the "Ahriman" who will incarnate in the flesh, an ethereal "emissary" of the Sun Demon, Sorat.
This "emissary" was the being who inspired the demonic impulse of Jundi Shapur, and might "temporarily incorporate" in the incarnated "Ahriman" in "the culminating moments of the earthly activity of the latter". (Sorat himself will directly enter earthly evolution only in the distant future.)
Further, this "emissary" works through Luciferic spirits to inspire Jesuitism, through Ahrimanic spirits to inspire the Western "brotherhoods", and directly to inspire Bolshevism [and perhaps Nazism].
-- And [in The Cycle of the Year...], Prokofieff tries to explain the present crescendo of phenomena surrounding "UFOs" as proceeding from these Western "brotherhoods" which seek to:
"...conjure forth a spectral ream which will -- in accordance with the intentions of this [ethereal, Ahrimanic 'emissary'] Being -- be formed immediately beneath the surface of the Earth in the region of its solid and liquid elements....
That is, in that sphere where during the fifteenth to the eighteenth centuries the sub-earthly Ahrimanic school began its operations....and from which [sphere] the many so-called 'unexplained' phenomena of our time, mistakenly ascribed to extra-terrestrial influences, proceed."
[pp. 299, 410]
As mentioned above, these "brothers" seek to so harden their ethereal bodies as to attain an "Ahrimanic immortality" for themselves in the environment of the Earth, and to so harden the Earth as to prevent it from passing over to the New Jupiter.
Tradowsky, in his more recent work >>Christ and Antichrist gives a somewhat similar, and perhaps somewhat differing, view: "...three stages [re Jundi Shapur] are defined: Sorath, the Beast, as the impulse-giver; and Ahrimanic being as inspirer; a Man, who, so to speak, propagates and acts as the representative on earth of his doctrines.
With that an indication is given of the co-operation between Sorath and the ahrimanic beings, which have several characteristics in common."[pp. 21-2]
Tradowsky seems to see the 666-year rhythm as pertaining more essentially to Sorat than to Ahriman.
Here is an excerpt from the same book, quoting Steiner's lecture to priests of the Christian Community in Sept. 1924:
"We can say, as the writer of the Apocalypse would put it, that before the Etheric Christ can be properly understood by people, mankind must have passed through the encounter with the Beast, which will make its appearance in 1933....
At the end of the century [1998] we come to the time when Sorath again rises his head most powerfully from the surrounding flood of evolution.
He will oppose the vision of Christ which will appear in the etheric world to those who are prepared to receive it in the first half of the twentieth century..."
(It is startling that Steiner named the exact year of Hitler's [and FD Roosevelt's] accession to political power as the time of the direct intervention of the Beast Sorat in earthly affairs.)
"...the present situation [re Sorat] is far more dangerous [than in 1933], if only for the reason that people imagine that it is less dangerous....
At present, however, the situation is the reverse [vs. 1933].
One is exposed to an inner undertow, which is so insidious because it gradually creeps up on the soul unawares in tiny steps, in such a way that truth and the reality of the spiritual world become ever more shrouded in oblivion.
Truly, it is so difficult to tackle such an elusive foe because he does everything to remain unnoticed."
[p. 48-9]
Tradowsky apparently sees the present incursion of Sorat as distinct from the impending incarnation of Ahriman, though both are closely related.
For some, this may seem a fine point, given the horrific and tremendously critical nature of the crisis. However, in the end it may not be a superfluous distinction; we may need all the understanding we can get, in order to face the crisis correctly.
Again, I refer the reader to this excellent book, as well as to Steiner's 1924 lectures, both now available in English.
Steiner sums up the nature of the struggle between Michael and Ahriman for the formerly-cosmic and now-earthly Intelligence:
"...in Ahriman there stands before us a cosmic Being of the highest imaginable Intelligence, a cosmic Being who has already taken the Intelligence entirely into the individual, personal element.
In every conceivable direction Ahriman is in the highest degree intelligent, over-intelligent.
He has at his command a dazzling Intelligence, proceeding from the whole human being, with the single exception of the part of the human being which in the human forehead takes on human form.
"To reproduce Ahriman in human Imaginations we should have to give him a receding forehead, a frivolously cynical expression, for in him everything comes out of the lower forces, and yet from these lower forces the highest Intelligence proceeds.
If ever we let ourselves in for a discussion with Ahriman, we should inevitably be shattered by the logical conclusiveness, the magnificent certainty of aim with which he manipulates his arguments.
The really decisive question for the world of men, in the opinion of Ahriman, is this: Will cleverness or stupidity prevail?
And Ahriman calls stupidity everything which does not contain Intelligence in it in full personal individuality.
Every Ahriman-being is over-endowed with personal Intelligence in the way I have now described; critical ... in the repudiation of all things unlogical; scornful and contemptuous in thought.
"When we have Ahriman before us in this way, then too we shall feel the great contrast between Ahriman and Michael.
For Michael is not in the least concerned with the personal quality of Intelligence.
It is only for man that the temptation is ever-present to make his Intelligence personal after the pattern of Ahriman.
Truth to tell, Ahriman has a most contemptuous judgment of Michael.
He thinks Michael foolish and stupid -- stupid, needless to say, in relation to himself.
For Michael does not wish to seize Intelligence and make it personally his own.
Michael only wills, and has willed through the thousands of years, nay through the aeons, to administer the Pan-Intelligence.
And now once more that men have the Intelligence, it should again be administered by Michael as something belonging to all mankind -- as the common and universal Intelligence that benefits all men alike.
"We human beings shall indeed do rightly...if we say to ourselves: the idea that we can have cleverness for ourselves alone is foolish.
Certainly, we cannot be clever for ourselves alone.
For if we want to prove anything to another person logically, the first thing we must presume if that the same logic holds good for him as for ourselves.
And for a third party it is again the same logic.
If anyone were to have a logic of his own, it would be absurd for us to want to prove anything to him by our logic."
[Karmic Relationships, Vol. III]
And Steiner makes this concept of "Intelligence" more concrete:
"What is Intelligence?
These abstract generalizations do not of course exist in reality.
`Intelligence' means the mutual relationships of conduct among the higher Hierarchies.
What they do, how they relate themselves to one another, what they are to one another -- this is Cosmic Intelligence.
And since as Men we must first consider the Kingdom that is nearest to us, concretely speaking the Cosmic Intelligence will be for us the sum-total of the Beings of the Hierarchy of Angeloi. If we are speaking concretely we cannot say `so much Intelligence', but rather `so many Angeloi'.
This is the reality."
Around that fateful year of 869 AD there was a split in the world of angels: the other six "Planetary Archangels", which until then had been led by Michael, "rebelled" against the Sun-rulership, taking with them their associated angels.
Since the angels are the carriers of the reincarnating human individualities, this split brought human karma into "disorder"; much of the chaos in recent history is the result of this schism.
And those Men whose angels fell away from Michael,
"...receive their personal Intelligence as a complete matter of course.
This means that it works in them automatically, through their bodily nature.
It works in such a way that they think, think cleverly, but are not fully and deeply and humanly concerned in what they think."
[Karmic Relationships, Vol. IV] --
These now-earthly angels can "incorporate" themselves into Men, the cleverest ones who deny the spirit, when human consciousness becomes impaired or dull: a very real kind of Ahrimanic "possession":
"Ahriman's perpetual endeavor is to appropriate the intelligence of human beings and not allow them to realise what they can achieve through their own intelligence....
Men must strive as time goes on to keep their intelligence under their own individual control, to keep unceasing watch over it.....
Ahriman takes full advantage of moments when, in full waking life, a man falls into a state of vertigo or dizziness, into a kind of twilight consciousness, when he feels not quite securely anchored in the physical world and begins to yield himself to the whirl of the universe, when he does not stand firmly and steadily on his own feet as an individuality...
The best way we can protect ourselves is to develop clear, exact thinking, not simply skimming over things in thought as is the general custom today.
We should go even farther and try to avoid colloquialisms and current catchwords, for directly we use such words which come, not from thoughts but from habits of speech, we are not exercising thinking -- even if only for a very short time.
These are particularly dangerous moments because they are not heeded.
We should really be careful to avoid using words behind which there is not sufficient reflection."
[The Occult Movement in the Nineteenth Century pp. 170f.]
It really does matter how we use language!
[What is now happening in mankind is nothing less than a further Incarnation of logic (the Logos, "Word"), which is Cosmic Intelligence.
The "Word" is "becoming flesh" in the individualities of Men on earth.
The Christ (Logos/logic) is indwelling individual Men.
Ahriman -- the Spirit of Lies -- seeks to falsify this intelligence by severing it from the Cosmos and making it, and mankind, entire earthly.
But just as logic (Logos) is universally true for all Men, an entirely individual, subjective logic/intelligence is false -- a lie, an unreality.
To think truly, as an individual being with universal Intelligence, is a deed important for the whole earth, for all mankind.
It is an act in the battle for the future of the earth, for Michael against Ahriman, for the Cosmic Christ Who descended to become the Spirit of the Earth.]
Again, Steiner says that the time of decision is around the end of the Twentieth Century.
We "will either stand at the grave of civilization" or we will turn toward a spiritualized culture. We may face a scaled-down "War of All against All". (This War is known to occultism as the catastrophe that will end the Post-Atlantean Age, as the Flood ended the Atlantean Age.)
We are given help through the present Second Resurrection of Christ -- in the consciousness of Men -- following the Second Crucifixion of Christ by the materialism in the souls of the dead from the Nineteenth Century onward.
We can now think angel-thoughts, have Christ-thoughts and Christ-feelings on earth.
This ability prepares, but is not to be confused with the perception of the Ethereal Christ.
This natural clairvoyance, which was hindered in 1933 may again become possible from 2000 AD onward, as a reflection of the Deed of Abraham around 2000 BC.
He was the first Man to transform the old clairvoyance into brain-thinking: the reflection of this event will be the freeing of thought from the brain and transformation into free, conscious clairvoyance.
[The date of 2000 BC for Abraham derives from Stegmann. Prokofieff puts the calling of Abraham around 2100 BC.]
There will be no real social healing unless Men allow the Christ into their souls.
To outward appearances, the Christ-influence might seem so weak, and the Ahrimanic influence so strong, that we might lose heart.
But we can take heart by ever recalling that the greatest, most powerful event of our times is the coming of the Ethereal Christ.
It is the unseen driving force behind the visible depredations of the Adversaries.
A new clairvoyance is coming as a natural development; Ahriman seeks to divert it into the earthbound, intellectual pseudo-thinking of the hardened ethereal body, so that the Ethereal Christ passes by mankind unnoticed, and another (Ahriman) is substituted in His place.
But cosmic wisdom in the human mind has power: Men permeated by this wisdom -- spiritual science -- instill horror into the Ahrimanic spirits.
If we meet the Ethereal Christ and the earthly Ahriman consciously, with spirit-will, both events will serve the good of mankind and the world.
The battle against Ahriman in the West will require greater inner force than elsewhere (as indicated, because the "spiritual geography" of the American continent favors the Doppelgänger and Ahrimanic spirits generally), therefore the gain from the eventual victory can be all the greater.
Ahriman can be defeated in America, just as the Mexican black magician was defeated by the Sun-being Vitzliputzli almost 2000 years ago.
And we have the prophecy from Steiner that, while the present American materialism is strong, it is youthful and childlike; it is destined to be outgrown, into a spiritualized culture -- during the sixth (Slavic) epoch.
The power Ahriman is great, especially in America, but the power of Christ is greater.
Yet the Christ and His hosts (with Michael in the forefront) respect and wait upon human freedom; and with freedom comes responsibility.
A note on some un-PC terminology:
The English language does not have as clear a word for human being irrespective of sex as does, for instance, the German language, which has Mensch in contradistinction to Mann, which means (male) man.
I have decided to avoid, when possible, the use of the word human, for, as Terry Boardman has pointed out, human has the same root as humus, (soil, earth), whereas man has the same root as manas.
The natural English word man, of course, can mean either human being or (male) man -- or at least it could before the advent of PCism.
The context would usually make the meaning clear, but even disregarding PC considerations, confusion still could sometimes happen.
So, one might use human being to mean man in the sexless sense, however, besides being awkward and cumbersome, this usage does deny the wisdom contained in the natural English language: that man means a creature having an inherent spiritual principle (manas), not necessarily a (male) man, still less a creature of the soil, of the earth.
So, I use Man, capitalized, to mean human being, and mankind to mean the aggregate of human beings.
I usually use the Man to refer to the individual, so as to avoid confusion with the universal archetype, the Platonic Idea, MAN.
However, I do use the adjective human; somehow, manly just won't do.
But, after all, human is not altogether a "dirty word", it is related to the Latin homo = man.
