I recently returned from a working trip to Italy, which included a stay of 8 days in Rome, my first visit to the city. While there, I went to a number of well-known historical sites, including the Colosseum and the Circus Maximus, the latter of which was used in ancient times for races, notably the very popular quadriga (four horse) chariot races. The Colosseum, as is well-known, was a giant arena for the purpose of entertaining the various classes of the people of Rome, who were ‘treated’ to the spectacle of watching victims (gladiators, criminals, prisoners of war, and countless numbers of animals of various kinds) being killed, or else religious ‘criminals’ such as Christians being put to death or torn to pieces by wild animals. Eventually, the ‘games’ (ludi) came to occupy some 135 days of the Roman year.

Returning to Britain, I found that once again, as before my trip, the news was full of images and reports of Gazans, often women, children and the elderly, day after day, being blown up, burned alive, shot, starved or buried under rubble by the Israeli Defence Force (IDF). This has been going on now since October 2023. Such news would often be followed by cheery reports of sports events at home and abroad. Millions of us around the world have been watching this genocide in Gaza on TV, online or listening on the radio, many no doubt feeling as helpless to do anything about it as some of the ancient Romans watching the constant killings in the Colosseum, or else feeling as indifferent as they may have done. And day after day, mainstream news media distract our attention from the horrors in Gaza – that uniquely bloody small ‘arena’, where so many innocents have been slaughtered – by the endless sports events and other such ‘entertainment’ such as the Eurovision Song Contest, and, in the UK, the Oxford vs Cambridge boat race, the Glastonbury pop music festival, the Wimbledon tennis tournament and so on.

Gaza, Jan. 2025

This time of year is an appropriate time to reflect on such things, as, in keeping with Christian esoteric tradition, midsummer is the time of the Archangel Uriel, also known as Auriel or Ouriel, one of the four archangelic ‘regents’ of the four seasons, the others being Michael (autumn), Gabriel (winter) and Raphael (spring). Uriel is traditionally associated with light, enlightenment, wisdom, knowledge.

In Hebrew, ‘Oriel’ means ‘God is my Light’. Rudolf Steiner, in his lectures on the Four Seasons and the Archangels¹ in October 1923, associated Uriel also with “the historical conscience”. Steiner’s profound contemplation of what he called the “St. John Imagination” describes how at this time of year Uriel’s admonishing, warning gaze penetrates down into the subterranean regions of the earth and sees, rising up from there, the moral errors and failings of humanity, which can overcome us at this hot and drowsy time of year when we are less awake and less conscious, more easily overwhelmed by the heat outside us and by the heat of desire or anger within us.

Uriel, stained glass window,

Chester Cathedral, England

In the brilliant blue skies and magnificent clouds of midsummer, Uriel becomes, in ‘the St. John Imagination’², the representative of the Spirit-Father hovering above the Earth-Mother of the depths and between them is the Son, the Christ, and the human being seeking to raise itself, over time, to the Christ Spirit, indeed to realise itself as a child of Christ between the Spirit-Father and the Earth-Mother, although often failing and falling back. Uriel’s admonishing gaze urges us to stay awake at this time and reflect on our failings in the past so that we may learn from them for the sake of our present and future. In addition to wanting to understand the past for its own sake, this is the real value of the study of history and biography, whose real inspirer could be said to be Uriel: we can learn from the past, and especially from our past mistakes, so that we may create a better future. This requires us to become more ‘enlightened’ as to the unfolding of the human story, its meaning and development.

The spectres

The first Communist political party, the Communist League, was founded in London in June 1847 by mostly German political exiles  in England from the former radical group, the League of the Just, and from the Communist League came the first publication of the Communist Manifesto, in German, at 46 Liverpool St, Bishopsgate, in the City of London on 21 February 1848. The preamble to the manifesto stated: “A spectre is haunting Europe — the spectre of communism. All the powers of old Europe have entered into a holy alliance to exorcise this spectre: Pope and Tsar, Metternich and Guizot³, French Radicals and German police-spies.” Today, two different ‘spectres’ are haunting the western world, but only one of them is doing so in the Marxist sense of a spectre haunting the imaginations of the established power elites; today, those power elites are the ‘old powers’ of the modern world: the US government, transatlantic financial capitalists, the EU bureaucracy, and the pro-Zionist lobby throughout the West. These two spectres are what Steiner calls “the ghost of Rome”, which today we can call ‘elite globalisation’, and the “spectre of the Old Testament”, by which Steiner meant nationalism, and today that also includes Jewish nationalism, or Zionism.

The ‘spectre’ haunting today’s power elites, which they loathe and fear, is that of so-called “populism”, often branded by the elites and their media instruments as “rightwing nationalism” or “the Far Right”. However, this is mostly a false branding because modern populism is a very broad movement of anti-Establishment dissidence that goes beyond the old Left-Right political party paradigm with which political establishments have sought to corral the populace for nearly two centuries. Modern populism is not wholly of the Right, let alone the ultranationalist Far Right. It includes many people who are thoroughly fed up with the Left-Right party paradigm and who consider that the globalist Establishment – forces such as the World Economic Forum and the billionaires who run the mostly American ‘technoligarchy’ (such as Amazon, Alphabet, Meta, Tesla/Space X and others) and the financial oligarchy (BlackRock, Blackstone, Vanguard, State Street et al.⁴) – is not interested in democracy or in countries or nations but rather, in an abstract fashion, seeks to operate on a continental or global level. This globalist Establishment, which emerged from British, American, and Jewish elites, promotes an elite-driven form of globalisation, a standardised cosmopolitanism with aims to impose upon the peoples of the world a single world system through the agency of global organisations such as the UN, the WHO, the WEF, GAVI.⁵  The globalist Establishment  is supported and underpinned by a myriad of lesser organisations and groups, as well as political establishments and mainstream media organs in most of the so-called democratic countries of the West which do the bidding of the globalist corporate and financial elites. This support and underpinning was so evidently clear to see during the years of the COVID-19 ‘pandemic’ and also after the 9/11 event in 2001, when mainstream media narrations of those events were almost entirely synchronised and alternative views were either downplayed or excluded.

Populists, nationalists and elitists

Modern ‘populists’ are, for the most part, not the nationalists of the 19^th and early 20^th centuries, although there are some such people amongst the modern populist or dissident movement. Those nationalists are concerned, as in those earlier times, to assert the rights and values of their own countries against those of other countries. Modern populists, however, recognise that democracy cannot and does not function at a global (e.g. UN) or continental level (e.g. EU). It can only function closer to the people, at the national, regional or local levels.

Canadian truckers’ protest, (2022)

They see that the globalist Establishment of the billionaires and technocrats is in the process of abandoning democracy and wants to move to a technologically mediated form of standardised mass social control at the global level. This is evident from the writings and oral statements of the likes of Klaus Schwab (former head of the WEF), Larry Fink (CEO of BlackRock), Peter Thiel (CEO of Palantir⁶), Elon Musk, Bill Gates, Mark Carney (former Governor of the Bank of England and now Prime Minister of Canada) and others.

This new technocratic elite, together with many members of the old elites who have allied themselves with them – such as Charles Windsor (aka King Charles III), who publicly introduced the WEF’s ‘Great Reset’ programme in 2020 – recognise the danger to themselves of the growing consciousness of the anti-Establishment populist movement, and so through the mainstream media which they largely control (whether the old print and TV media or the new online media), they try to label the increasingly non-compliant, non-conformist populist movements across the West as “conspiracy theorists” and “Far Right”, seeking to link them in the public mind with old forms of authoritarianism such as Fascism and Nazism or newer ones such as radical terrorist groups. To adapt the words of Karl Marx in the preamble to the Communist Manifesto: ‘All the powers of the West have entered into an unholy alliance to exorcise what they regard as the spectre of populism: Pope and King, Macron and von der Leyen, American Technocrats and German Greens.” These ‘aristocrats’ of today fear the rising tide of dissidence from below – they were warned about it by one of their ‘intellectual champions’, Zbigniew Brzezinski, as long ago as 2009:

“For the first time in human history almost all of humanity is politically activated, politically conscious and politically interactive. There are only a few pockets of humanity left in the remotest corners of the world that are not politically alert and engaged with the political turmoil and stirrings that are so widespread today around the world. The resulting global political activism is generating a surge in the quest for personal dignity, cultural respect and economic opportunity in a world painfully scarred by memories of centuries-long alien colonial or imperial domination…. The worldwide yearning for human dignity is the central challenge inherent in the phenomenon of global political awakening.”⁷ (emphasis – TB) In 2005, Brzezinski had written for the bi-monthly magazine, The American Interest, an essay titled, ‘The Dilemma of the Last Sovereign’. In it, he had written: “For most states, sovereignty now verges on being a legal fiction” and “America needs to face squarely a centrally important new global reality: that the world’s population is experiencing a political awakening unprecedented in scope and intensity, with the result that the politics of populism are transforming the politics of power. The need to respond to that massive phenomenon poses to the uniquely sovereign America an historic dilemma: What should be the central definition of America’s global role?”⁸ (emphasis – TB)

He had in fact already given his answer in a book he had written 35 years earlier: Between Two Ages: America’s Role in the Technetronic Era. In that book, Brzezinski, one of the founders in 1973 of David Rockefeller’s Trilateral Commission of global elite thinkers and planners, had called for a “Community of the Developed Nations.” It would consist “of Western Europe, North America and Japan [or rather, of their elites - TB], to coordinate and integrate in order to shape a ‘new world order’ built upon ideas of global governance under the direction of …transnational elites.” America, Brzezinski argued, would have to lead this process in the 21^st century, a view he repeated in his 1997 book The Grand Chessboard, but America, he said, would eventually have to surrender its sovereignty to the new system of ‘global governance’, a phrase of disguise for ‘world government’. However, he pointed in 2004 to a new force of opposition appearing against America: “I see the beginnings, in writings and stirrings, of the making of a doctrine which combines anti-Americanism with anti-globalization, and the two could become a powerful force in a world that is very unequal and turbulent.”⁹

Some people later felt that this manifested in the left-leaning Occupy movement, an international campaign against corporate greed and social and economic inequality, which emerged in  2010-2012 as part of the fall-out from the 2008 economic crisis and subsequent austerity policies adopted by numerous governments. However, that movement soon faded, and from America then came a more fragmented but more widespread, longer-lasting dissident movement from a more Right-leaning direction, arguably beginning with grass roots support for US Presidential candidate Ron Paul in 2010. As this new populist movement began to manifest around the world, facilitated not least by the Internet, it eventually transcended the Left-Right divide in its opposition to the globalist Establishment. It was not anti-capitalist as such, in the old Marxist sense, but was pro-democratic, libertarian, and anti-elitist. It recognised that global elites were acting in an increasingly rash and synchronised way that ignored the views of the majority of the peoples of their own countries. While claiming to support biological ‘diversity’, the elites sought to impose a uniform mode of life upon populations through ‘political correctness’ (originally a term used by Marxists), ‘woke-ism’ and ‘diversity, equity and inclusion’ (DEI) requirements in companies and in numerous institutions.

The elite’s view of populism

Brzezinski was right, however, about one important thing when he said that “the worldwide yearning for human dignity is the central challenge inherent in the phenomenon of global political awakening.” What “human dignity” means here in the anthroposophical sense is the awakening of the human individual consciousness and its refusal to be suppressed by traditional hierarchical authorities which see the human being only in collective terms – religious confession, class affiliation, racial or national belonging etc.

Nevertheless, Brzezinski had spent his life in the service of the global elite and in 2005 and 2009 he was speaking to those same people, warning them they would need to confront the populist challenge ‘from below’, much as Chancellor Metternich of Austria, who dominated the European political scene from 1815-1848, had also recognised the challenge ‘from below’ to the aristocracy of that time from liberal nationalists, republicans and democrats and had sought to suppress it. Much earlier, In the 1510s and 20s, the Vatican authorities had faced similar opposition ‘from below’ in the Protestant Reformation and launched the Counter-Reformation movement at the Council of Trent (1545-1563) to try to meet that challenge.

So how have the global Establishment sought to meet this new challenge to their power and authority from the ‘spectre’ of populism? They have done it by using their control of the old and new media to censor and filter alternative views as far as possible, scrubbing and removing from the Internet countless sites and articles¹⁰ by using their media instruments in the old and new media to label and smear, to accuse those who challenged them of being ‘conspiracy theorists’ ‘disinformation agents’ and ‘Far Right extremists’ and by ensuring that genuinely alternative views never got a hearing in mainstream media. They have sought to frighten the majority of the population by a new version of the old anti-Communist “Reds under the bed” scare of the 1950s i.e. the notion that there is a dangerous new delusional terrorist group at large with crazy ideas divorced from reality who will either seduce young people into believing in ‘crackpot conspiracies’ and confuse their minds or else will lure them into terrorist groups that commit violence. The BBC in Britain, for example, now regularly puts out programmes and documentaries warning in one way or another against ‘disinformation’, ‘misinformation, ‘conspiracy theories’ etc because, as a century-old servant of the British Establishment, the BBC is only too aware of the importance of ‘politically correct’ propaganda in the effort to control the population and of the significance of the ‘information war’ in the age of the Internet. In the modern age, what we think is vitally important for it determines our actions and thus the future direction of society.

The representatives of the Establishment and their supporters in the media and in the general population believe firmly that this new populist movement represents an effort to turn back the clock to the pre-1939 world of ‘autonomous’ nation states, which are something that globalist elites have been trying to undermine and do away with for about 100 years now. The very influential British historian Arnold Toynbee, who was a member of elite circles¹¹ between the world wars, revealed in 1931, In a speech to the Institute for the Study of International Affairs at Copenhagen that: “We are at present working discreetly with all our might to wrest this mysterious force called sovereignty out of the clutches of the local nation states of the world. All the time we are denying with our lips what we are doing with our hands….”¹² Former Council on Foreign Relations (CFR) member and influential Kennedy administration State Department Official, Walt Whitman Rostow, in his 1960 work, The United States in the World Arena, wrote: “It is a legitimate American national objective to see removed from all nations—including the United States—the right to use substantial military force to pursue their own interests. Since this residual right is the root of national sovereignty, and the basis for existence of an international arena of power, it is, therefore, an American interest to see an end to nationhood as it has been historically defined.”¹³ (emphasis TB) In his book The New World Order, published in 1940, the well-known and very well-connected British author H.G. Wells called for the end of the age of the nation state and for a world socialist government, “a collectivist world order”, a global air police force patrolling the world (cf. the US Airforce and Space Force today), world order ideas spread via educational propaganda of all kinds, a fundamental law for mankind throughout the world, consisting of 11 ‘Commandments’ which “must become the common fundamental law of all communities and collectivities assembled under the World Pax” (emphasis Wells). Wells was not just an author favoured by the elite; together with the UK Lord Chancellor Sir John Sankey, he was behind a document known as the Sankey Declaration of the Rights of Man (1940) which prepared the way for, but was later superseded, by the Universal Declaration of Human Rights adopted by the UN in 1948.

In April 1974, former U. S. Deputy Assistant Secretary of State, Trilateral Commission and Council On Foreign Relations (CFR) member Richard Gardner’s article The Hard Road to World Order was published in the CFR’s journal Foreign Affairs, in which he stated that: “… an end run around national sovereignty, eroding it piece by piece, will accomplish much more than the old-fashioned frontal assault”¹⁴ – in other words, the Fabian Socialist strategy of ‘gradualist revolution’ (as distinct from sudden Bolshevik violent revolution) so that the people do not notice what is happening until it’s too late.

“In 1992, Strobe Talbott wrote an article for Time Magazine entitled, ‘The Birth of the Global Nation.’ Talbott worked as a journalist for Time Magazine for 21 years, and has been a fellow of the Yale Corporation, a trustee of the Hotchkiss School and the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, a director of the CFR, the North American Executive Committee of the Trilateral Commission, the American Association of Rhodes Scholars, and a member of the participating faculty of the World Economic Forum. Talbott served as Deputy Secretary of State from 1994 to 2001 in the Clinton administration and currently sits as President of the Brookings Institution, one of the premier American think tanks. In his 1992 article, Talbot wrote ‘within the next hundred years, nationhood as we know it will be obsolete; all states will recognize a single, global authority.’”¹⁵ (emphasis TB)

All of this is evidence – and there is much more available – of a planned, steadily-pursued, insidious and essentially coercive design by widely-networked elites acting behind the scenes in countless conferences, seminars and thinktanks, their goals and actions largely veiled, as far as the world’s masses are concerned, by the constant distractions offered up by the worlds of the media, celebrity and sport and by the constant propaganda of fearmongering claims with regard to pandemics, vaccination, so-called ‘climate change’ and wars.

The ghost of Rome

We could say then that one of the two spectres ‘haunting’ the western world today is that of populism. It does exercise the global elite and they seek to exorcise it. However, there is another spectre to which Steiner referred– one which is fostered by those in the Establishment and which fosters them. It is the spectre, or ghost, of imperial Rome that our English-speaking globalist elite does not wish to exorcise, for they have modelled themselves upon it since the mid-19^th century, when British and, a few decades later, American elite boarding schools began consciously to educate the children of the elite in the service of ‘empire’, to train them in how to control the lower orders at home and abroad, often with the very methods of the ancient Romans drawn from studies of the classics, e.g. the Roman practice of having ‘client states’, such as Herod’s Judaea, in order to reduce the costs of imperial rule and then the Roman habit to “divide and rule” (divide et impera) to keep Rome’s subordinate states in jealous competition with each other for Rome’s favour. We see this in the ways in which the US government deals with its numerous client states in Europe and elsewhere. The client states anguish over which foreign leader is going to be invited to Washington DC first to visit a new President? How much time on the phone are those leaders going to be allowed to speak with the US President? Which country has the most special relationship with the USA? – and so on. Then there were the pseudo-governmental powers granted by Rome to private contractors’ organisations to collect taxes. These private, tax-collecting groups “collected taxes, lent money, fielded troops, and controlled the economies of Roman possessions outside of Italy. All of these pseudo-governmental powers were replicated by the great, modern colonial corporations—the French, Dutch, and British East India companies. ¹⁶

    On 16 September 1916 Steiner gave a very insightful lecture¹⁷ on the differences between ancient Greece and Rome and their influences on European culture and civilisation. He said: “In the first era of its conquests Rome took over Greece [a conquest completed in 146 BC]. Then we see how Christianity pervaded Roman civilisation, allowing itself to be overspread with the formal element that belonged to Rome…With the expansion of Christianity, this Latin-Roman element spread over all of Europe…Public institutions developed right out of Roman thought and custom, and Rome infected everything, grafting its own nature onto European culture.” Steiner describes how, after [Emperor] Justinian [6^th cent. AD] had established the code of Roman legal and political thought, had closed the ancient schools of Greek philosophy and had condemned [the philosophy] of Origen¹⁸, the Roman spirit “continued to live on in the institutions of Europe without the Greek content.” After that Roman spirit had “driven the very sap of its life, its spiritual content, out of itself, only the external remained, petrified in the word and grown strong and stubborn in external institutions. Occultists with insight have always had a certain feeling which still remains today…This is expressed in the statement: ‘The ghost of ancient Rome still lives in the institutions of Europe.’” (emphasis – TB) This external Roman spirit of politics, law, articles and clauses, contracts and treaties entered into the very marrow of the litigious Middle Ages.

 Emperor Augustus (27 BC – 14 AD)

It is still alive and kicking today, particularly in the USA. Steiner reckoned with epochs of time, relating to successive civilisations since what he termed Atlantean times (the time since the flood for Noah in the Old Testament). In 1919, he pointed out that the “… middle point of our century coincides with the end of the period in which the forces from before the middle of the 15^th century – still atavistically with us to some extent – reach their ultimate decadence. By the middle of our present century [1950s] mankind must have taken the decision to turn towards the spirit… the middle of this century is a very important moment.”¹⁹ He was here pointing to the Greco-Roman, and especially the Roman element from, what he termed, the fourth Post-Atlantean Epoch (747 BC – AD 1413), which remained dominant in external life, for example, in politics and the law, in everything to do with contract and treaty, republics and empires, in the first 540 years of our current fifth Post-Atlantean Epoch, that began in 1413, that is exactly one quarter of an epoch: for, according to Steiner, an epoch lasts 2160 years,²⁰ which, when divided by 4, is 540. Thus this first quarter of our current epoch ended in the 1950s.

This external Roman element functions like a ghost, a spectre, in our epoch because it is, anachronistic, out of its time, so to speak, existing beyond its proper time in ancient Rome. American politics in particular, in its forms, its symbolism (the Roman fasces²¹ on the walls beside the Speaker’s chair in the House of Representatives), and its architecture (the White House, and Capitol and various other government buildings) has been wrapped in the garments of ancient Rome since the founding of the American Republic in the 1770s. In correspondence between two of the ‘Founding Fathers’ of the American republic, James Madison wrote to Thomas Jefferson on 24 October 1787: “Divide et impera [Divide and Rule], the reprobated axiom of tyranny, is under certain (some) qualifications, the only policy by which a republic can be administered on just principles.”²² The imperial attempt to dominate the world these past 200 years, whether British or American – such as we read in the writings of the British Victorian imperialist Cecil Rhodes or in prominent and hugely influential modern American geopolitical thinkers such as Samuel P. Huntington (d. 2008), who wrote the controversial book Clash of Civilisations; Zbigniew Brzezinski (d. 2017), the scion of an old Polish Catholic aristocratic family and author of The Grand Chessboard, and Henry Kissinger (d. 2023)(author of Nuclear Weapons and Foreign Policy) – stems largely from ancient Rome, from the fourth Epoch, and many British and American thinkers, politicians and military men instinctively hark back to the Roman Republic and Empire, either consciously or unconsciously. But ancient Rome is a ghost and it needs exorcising so that its influence, baleful because beyond-its-time, does not have a malign influence on the rest of the 5^th Epoch.

Zbigniew Brzezinski (d. 2017) and Henry Kissinger (d. 2023)

Recently, as we have seen during the presidencies of George W. Bush, Barak Obama, Joe Biden and Donald Trump, that imperial will to dominate the world is still there, and it has not only been in those men, but in the confused, mixed-up system which they serve, in which the political, economic and cultural spheres are not separate and autonomous but confused, mutually interfering and mixed-up. The ghost of ancient Rome, a civilisation in which the three spheres were equally mixed up, sustains that imperial system today and is sustained by it.

A symptom of this ghost of Rome was the release in 2000, as the new millennium dawned, of the American Hollywood blockbuster movie Gladiator, directed by the Englishman Ridley Scott and starring the ageing Irish actor Richard Harris as the tired, old Roman Emperor Marcus Aurelius, the young American actor Joaquin Phoenix as his son, the evil perverted young Emperor Commodus, and the Australian actor Russell Crowe as the film’s hero, general Maximus.

In that very period around the turn of the millennium, 1998-2003 – the years when Osama Bin Laden was being painted by the media as ‘the most evil man in the world’ – ‘imperialism’, previously a dirty word in ‘progressive’ circles, was suddenly rediscovered and lauded by sections of the Anglo-American media, especially when preceded by the adjective ‘liberal’. For example, a year before the Anglo-American invasion of Iraq in 2003, Robert Cooper, British diplomat and UK Prime Minister Tony Blair’s close adviser on foreign policy issues, wrote an essay ‘The new liberal imperialism’ in The Observer newspaper (7 April 2002): “The challenge to the postmodern world is to get used to the idea of double standards. Among ourselves, we operate on the basis of laws and open cooperative security. But when dealing with more old-fashioned kinds of states outside the postmodern continent of Europe, we need to revert to the rougher methods of an earlier era – force, pre-emptive attack, deception, whatever is necessary to deal with those who still live in the nineteenth century world of every state for itself. Among ourselves, we keep the law but when we are operating in the jungle, we must also use the laws of the jungle. … All the conditions for imperialism are there, but both the supply and demand for imperialism have dried up. And yet the weak still need the strong and the strong still need an orderly world. A world in which the efficient and well governed export stability and liberty, and which is open for investment and growth – all of this seems eminently desirable. What is needed then is a new kind of imperialism, one acceptable to a world of human rights and cosmopolitan values. We can already discern its outline: an imperialism which, like all imperialism, aims to bring order and organisation but which rests today on the voluntary principle…the lightest of touches will be required from the centre; the ‘imperial bureaucracy’ must be under control, accountable, and the servant, not the master, of the commonwealth. Such an institution must be as dedicated to liberty and democracy as its constituent parts. Like Rome, this commonwealth would provide its citizens with some of its laws, some coins and the occasional road.” (emphasis – TB)

At the end of the film Gladiator, the hero Maximus and the villain Commodus both lie dead in the sand of the Colosseum. As he is dying, Maximus says: “There was a dream that was Rome. It shall be realised. These are the wishes of Marcus Aurelius”. The imperial princess, Marcus Aurelius’ daughter, says to those watching: “Is Rome worth one good man’s life? We believed it once. Make us believe it again”. As the 20^th century passed to the 21^st, there was much awareness that there had long been something rotten in the state of America, but in the era of American unipolar power in the 1990s the ‘imperial’ class still wished to revive the American ‘Rome’ and ‘make it great again’. Hence those last words of Maximus. Arguably, that dream was actually the dream of the Emperor Hadrian (117-138 AD), who passed it on to his successors Antoninus Pius and Marcus Aurelius, both of whom he adopted. Hadrian called a halt to Roman expansion, withdrew from some previously conquered territories and sought to consolidate the Empire and make it more economically efficient, cultured, and peaceful. He was a profuse builder, and one of his greatest buildings in the Roman Forum was the Temple of Venus Felix and Roma Aeterna, which became the largest Roman temple. Hadrian was well aware of the relation between AMOR and ROMA. Venus (corresponding to the Greek goddess, Aphrodite) was the goddess of love, and Hadrian wanted to balance Rome’s focus on the martial by Hellenising the Empire as far as he could on his many travels, fostering Greek models of beauty in the arts, promoting scholarship, design and engineering as well as a more tolerant understanding for the cultures of the East and its ancient Mysteries. Roma was herself the tutelary goddess of Rome, the Roman State, and she was usually shown with a helmet, a spear and holding a small image of Victory on her hand. Her statues were modelled on those of Pallas Athena, and eventually, a sitting figure of Roma morphed into the image of Britannia.

Nationalism and the spectre of the Old Testament

The spectre which the global imperial class does wish to exorcise, is populism, as already mentioned, and which the globalists associate with nationalism, which, as has been argued in this article is false, because while there are nationalists in the broad populist movement, the two things are not coterminous: populism is much broader than nationalism or patriotism. There are elements in the populist movement that are nationalist and retrogressive; they have not yet really ‘arrived’, as it were, in the fifth epoch, which is one of individualism. They oppose globalism because from their clannish, tribal or national perspective, they reject ‘empire’ and imperialism, which seeks to standardise and make uniform. Ancient Rome in the fourth epoch (747 BC – AD 1413) was primarily a political empire. It was preceded by the third epoch, the age of theocratic empires, when religion ruled societies, not politics and abstract law. But our imperialism today, Steiner pointed out in February 1920 to a group of British visitors to Dornach²³, is economic, hence the power of global trade and finance and of the great American technological corporations that span the globe. These forces are not democratic; they are oligarchic and operate behind closed doors. They clearly threaten the older national and tribal communities of earlier ages, which are still with us.

    What Steiner called “the spectre of the Old Testament in the nationalism of the present” was the title of a lecture he gave on 7 October 1918²⁴. In this deep and complex lecture, which is far too complex to paraphrase here, he explains the relation between the Old Testament thinking of the ancient Israelites’ Jehovah religion and modern nationalism, and he shows how the nature of Jewish spirituality led them to their strong sense of cohesion as a culture and also separation from other cultures due to their unique sense of descent from the blood of their common ancestor, Abraham, and through their collective cultural practices. It is the sense of separation from other cultures that leads to modern nationalism and especially, its Jewish variant, Zionism. Although Zionism itself is not mentioned in the Steiner lecture cited above, Steiner considered that Zionism was not in the interest of Jewish people, because he saw it as a form of nationalism, and nationalism separates peoples from each other and pushes them into separate self-contained boxes on the basis of the physical nature of their genetics and/or language, whereas what we need in this modern 5^th Epoch, he maintained, is relations between individuals on the basis of spiritual understanding and mutual recognition. In the case of the Jews, in the late 19^th and early 20^th centuries, Hebrew as a spoken language was artificially revived in the 1880s to become the language of the Zionist movement and the Zionist settlers in Palestine. This paralleled the Zionists’ claim to settle in Palestine after 1800 years.

    Steiner regarded political nationalism, which is associated with a political state – as distinct from a cultural patriotism, an appreciation of homeland – as something that separates human beings from others. In unitary political nation states, in which the cultural, political and economic spheres are all mixed up and interfere with each other, majority communities tend to dominate minority communities, as we have seen in many countries, such as Myanmar for example, where the Muslim Rohingya minority were brutally oppressed in 2017 by the Buddhist majority. Steiner sharply criticised US President Woodrow Wilson’s proposals in 1918 for a League of Nations, which would consist of many unitary self-contained nation states. The UN today is essentially similar to the League of Nations in this regard. Wilson and his advisers drew lines across the map of Europe after the First World War, largely on the basis of abstract studies of language and culture, which led to all kinds of serious problems in the decades between the two world wars. British and French imperialists drew similar border lines across the Middle East. After 100 years, this problem has still not been solved in the Middle East. Steiner felt that Zionism would only add to this problem of the separation and antipathy caused by nationalism. One of the consequences of this is what we see occurring in Gaza today.

    Nationalism then, which champions the rights of the majority community over minorities, is a modern phenomenon, but it is rooted in the ancient concept of ethnic separation, such as we see in the Old Testament where Jehovah, or Yahwe, gives the Israelites 613 commandments (mitzvot), through the observance of which they were to maintain their identity and to separate themselves from other peoples. There were profound reasons for that separation at that time, which I cannot go into here, but since the time of Christ, when individuals, rather than blood communities, begin to come into their own, that kind of separation is no longer appropriate for human development. Jews and Arabs will have to learn to live together in the land of Palestine. The so-called ‘two state solution’ is no solution; it would only be another form of separation. The Jewish nationalists reject that solution anyway and are trying to take over the West Bank region by extending Zionist settlements there and by oppressing the Arabs. Their aim is to drive the Arabs out in time.

The Arabs, of course, will not accept this, nor do they accept the Israelis’ takeover, from 1948 until today, of more land than was recognised by the UN in the 1947 Plan which partitioned Palestine. The bitterly painful struggle will go on until both sides recognise the only truly human solution, which would correspond to the developmental needs of our fifth epoch; this would be a state of Palestine, in which the equal rights of both Jews and Arabs were recognised and in which the cultural and economic spheres of Palestine would communicate and collaborate with those of the surrounding Middle Eastern region and indeed, the wider world.

Nationalism then, is the other spectre confronting the world today. Unlike elite globalisation, the universalist but coercive ideological roots of which are to be found in ‘the ghost of Rome’, in the fourth epoch, the deep roots of nationalism are to be found in the less conscious blood and heredity traits of blood and clan that were the norm in the third epoch, before the 8th century BC. I have argued in this article that the imperial globalist business and technocratic class and their supporters and media instruments claim that populists are the same as nationalists, and smear them all as ‘Far Right extremists’, but this is not the case. Populism spans a very broad spectrum. Some old-fashioned nationalists do associate themselves with ‘populism’, but whereas nationalism is a collective phenomenon in the modern age, populism is essentially a democratic response, rooted in the individual consciousness of people of the fifth epoch, to the accelerationist drive of the ‘imperial globalists’ who are trying to force the pace of historical development faster than it is healthy to go. The French revolutionaries tried the same thing 230 years ago, and the Bolsheviks 100 years ago. They both eventually failed, and the consequences for the world were dire. The same will likely be the case for today’s imperial globalists.

Endnotes

1. Rudolf Steiner, Collected Works GA 229.

2. St John the Baptist. His day is traditionally celebrated on 24^th June.

3. Prince Clemens von Metternich (1773-1859), Chancellor of the Austrian Empire, 1821-1848 and François Guizot (1787-1874), French Prime Minister 1847-1848 under King Louis Philippe.

4. Three asset management firms – BlackRock, Vanguard, and State Street – together constitute the largest shareholder in 88 percent of the world’s top 500 firms https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/business-and-politics/article/hidden-power-of-the-big-three-passive-index-funds-reconcentration-of-corporate-ownership-and-new-financial-risk/30AD689509AAD62F5B677E916C28C4B6

5. Global Alliance for Vaccines and Immunization, founded in 2000 by Bill and Melinda Gates.

6. American software corporation that, amongst other things, services the US intelligence community and the Departments of Defence

7. http://www.nspm.rs/pdf/nspm-in-english/the-global-political-awakening.pdf

8. https://www.the-american-interest.com/2005/09/01/the-dilemma-of-the-last-sovereign/

9. http://www.nspm.rs/pdf/nspm-in-english/the-global-political-awakening.pdf

10. https://tuzarapost.substack.com/p/the-internet-is-being-scrubbed-like

https://therealistjuggernaut.com/2025/02/25/deleted-scrubbed-erased-the-untold-story-of-how-they-tried-to-make-us-disappear/

11. E.g. Chatham House and the Round Table Group.

12. https://christianobserver.net/globalist-agenda-quotes/

13.http://www.nspm.rs/pdf/nspm-in-english/the-global-political-awakening.pdf

14.http://www.nspm.rs/pdf/nspm-in-english/the-global-political-awakening.pdf#_ftnref33

15.https://www.globalresearch.ca/the-global-political-awakening-and-the-new-world-order/19873?pdf=19873

16.https://www.encyclopedia.com/history/encyclopedias-almanacs-transcripts-and-maps/divide-and-rule-legacy-roman-imperialism

17. Rudolf Steiner, Collected Works GA 171.

18. Prolific and brilliant early Christian philosopher, Alexandria c.185-c.253 AD.

19. Rudolf Steiner, 14.12.1919 Dornach, Collected Works GA 194.

20. In accordance with the precession of the equinoxes, which take 2160 years to complete a cycle.

21. Fasces – a bundle of wooden rods, sometimes containing an axe, that symbolised the Roman magistrate’s jurisdiction and power to punish. This is the origin of the word ‘fascism’.

22.https://www.researchgate.net/publication/313006747_

Divide_et_Impera_Federalist_10_in_a_Wider_Sphere

23. See Rudolf Steiner, Lectures 5, 6, and 7 in Ideas for a New Europe – Crisis and Opportunity for the West (Rudolf Steiner Press, 1992)

24. Rudolf Steiner, Collected works GA 186.

We are now perhaps far enough away from the 1960s to be able to look back on that decade – and many of us are still alive who can remember what it was like to be young at that time – and realise that it was a time that is extraordinarily pregnant with meaning and vividly illustrative of the contemporary spiritual struggles going on then, which in many ways prepared and seeded the ground for much, though of course not all, of what is occurring today. After all, 63 years ago, in 1961, when the Berlin Wall went up, was a time when Cold War tensions began to peak – just as they are doing today. That decade began in the year that JFK arrived in the White House, the “winds of change” began to blow in Africa, the Vatican II Council was underway, the war in Vietnam worsened, the Berlin Wall went up and Europe was definitively split in two.

But then, despite those tensions, the 1960s were also a threshold moment when, as it were, in just a very few years, a new young generation responded to those tensions by brusquely pulling back a curtain, and a different world – of freedom, equality, brotherhood, love and peace – was suddenly glimpsed by many, whether with or without the use of ‘stimulants’. Many reached out to grasp or realise that vision of a different world, but it soon slipped between their fingers; the curtain closed again and the vision blurred over. By 1973 certainly, it was no more. Perhaps not since the spring of 1848, that year of liberal revolutions across Europe, had so many people, especially in the younger generation, in many countries, suddenly and dramatically sensed the possibility that the world might so unexpectedly change for the better, in a way that was similar to what happened in the mid-late 1960s. Of the atmosphere of 1848 the German historian Karl Heyer wrote: “A wonderful atmosphere must have prevailed, especially in Germany, beginning with those splendid spring days in March 1848. A breath of liberation passed throughout society, emanations of the strongest feelings, borne by a tremendous enthusiasm, of the will to sacrifice and devote oneself to an ideal of life, permeated by rapturous feelings, and the hope, indeed, the subjective conviction: now everything must get better! ‘My heart feels warm whenever I recall those days’, wrote Carl Schurz (1829-1906) later in his memoirs; he had taken part in the events of the year of revolution, then went to America, where he became a significant American statesman. He especially emphasised the willingness for sacrifice which had then gripped countless people of all kinds. Friedrich Payer, born in 1847, who still strongly felt the afterglow of the year of ’48 in his youth, thought in his old age that the expression ‘the Peoples’ Spring’ most resembled what the German people were experiencing at the time, namely, that it was like a proliferation of the feeling which young people felt awaken in themselves when the oppression and night of winter gives way to the bright, warm spring sunshine. ‘There must be something glad and victorious in the air’, a feeling that in a miraculous way renewed itself for months on end…”¹ There had also been a comparable upsurge in enthusiasm in America in the mid-1770s and in France in 1789-90, but those upsurges had only occurred in two countries. In the 1960s, the feeling of tremendous change in the air was more worldwide, from Japan and China, across Europe and right across N. America as far as California.

The forces demanding cultural and political freedom in Europe in 1848-49 were harshly suppressed by the powers of Old Reaction – monarchy, aristocracy and the Church – in most cases supported by the power of the banks. Liberalism failed in the second half of the 19th century, and new, poisonous forms of politics arose to challenge the old conservative forces that would not and could not yield: radical nationalism, fascism and communism. These challenges shattered Europe in the first half of the 20th century, but even after the world wars, and despite all the guff about the movement for European unity, 100 years on from 1848, forces opposed to real change in Europe had not shifted; they had only put on new authoritarian masks: monarchy, aristocracy and the Church may no longer have had the power they exercised in 1848, but in their place, or alongside them now in 1948 were Big Business, Big Finance, Big Science, Academia, the Establishment-buttressing mass media, and the new, sinister intelligence agencies of the centralised, modern Big State.

Rudolf Steiner had said in 1919: “if the teaching at our universities goes on as it does now for another 30 years, and if people continue to think about social matters in the same way for another 30 years, then, by the middle of this century, Europe will be a desert…everything will be in vain if there is not a fundamental transformation in human souls in the way they think about the relationship between this world and the spiritual world. If nothing is learnt anew in this sense, if people do not reshape their thinking, then a moral deluge will engulf Europe!…[the] middle point of our century coincides with the end of the period in which the forces from before the middle of the 15th century – still atavistically with us to some extent – reach their ultimate decadence. By the middle of our present century [1950s] mankind must have taken the decision to turn towards the spirit… new forces must be drawn up from the depths of human souls…”.² The decadent “forces from before the middle of the 15th century” that Steiner was referring to were the forces of the previous Greco-Roman epoch, its politics, legalism, and academic intellectual thought, as well as the forces of Old Testament Hebraic culture carried by church dogmatism, and also ancient pagan sentiments and values from pre-Christian times. But teaching had not essentially changed by 1950, nor had social thinking, nor had there been any fundamental transformation or turn towards the spirit before the beginning of the 1950s, and the result had been that Europe had indeed become a physical ‘desert’ in many areas in the 1940s. For many younger souls who had been born during the war or in the postwar years it remained a psychological desert in the 1950s.

The three waves of the 1960s

But then came the great shift of the 1960s as those born into the chaos of the war years reached adulthood. The shift occurred in 3 discernible phases that bore some resemblance to what happened in France (and to an extent elsewhere in Europe) from 1780-1815 as the classical Enlightenment era gave way or was overlapped by the newer, Romantic sensibility.

First, there was a wave of enthusiasm for all things in areas of scientific and technological knowledge; this was driven by the Establishment and its media instruments to a large extent, as it depended greatly on high finance. Something similar had happened in the 1780s, when Europeans were fascinated by new scientific ideas and technological fads and developments, including: hot air balloons, steam cars, electricity, mesmerism.

The elegant ‘modernist’ look of the early 1960s

In the early 1960s high employment, consumer goods such as TVs, transistor radios, and motor cars and improved transport links such as motorways generated great enthusiasm that was boosted by the new satellites and rockets to ‘outer space’, the new shiny skyscrapers going up around the world with their abstract, scientific, Modernist designs that were soon echoed in the sleek lines of young people’s fashions and hair styles. Politicians indulged in rhetoric about changing society in “the white heat of the technological revolution”. But all this was not yet a protest, an effort to transform fundamentals, let alone those of a spiritual nature. It was more a consequence of the confluence of growing prosperity plus the percolated effects of the first Modernist wave in art and design that had begun around the time of the First World War some 50 years earlier and had been ‘held up’, as it were, for a generation by the two world wars.

However, this first, rather ‘top-down’ level of knowledge and science-based cosmetic change which saw the sleek style of the early 1960s already looking very different from the dowdy early 1950s, was followed by a ‘bottom-up’ movement of social imagination and feeling as millions of the new baby-boomers became involved in campaigning activism, first against the horrors of nuclear weapons and then inspired by the civil rights movement in the USA and the worsening Vietnam war situation, confused and disturbed by the assassination of US President Kennedy in November 1963 and the feeling that perhaps, somehow, the Establishment had killed one of its own, who had yet seemed to be the ‘people’s tribune’. After the killing of Kennedy (followed by other assassinations of prominent popular leaders such as Malcolm X, Martin Luther King and President Kennedy’s brother Bobby), the USA soon began to slide into psychological disequilibrium and growing tension and trouble between the generations, the races, and within families. France had been the stoker of protest in the period 1770-1870, but the USA has largely filled that role since 1945 and certainly did in the 1960s. In the 1950s there had been no great youth movement in the West in support of the Vietminh struggle against French armies, but by 1960 the ‘baby-boomer’ generation³ had come of age in consumerist America; it had not previously needed to fight in wars or hustle for its economic survival like previous generations; it was ‘literate’ and its students had time on their hands and money in their pockets. Born into the terrible strife of world war and the social problems that followed, the indignation of this generation over the racist civil rights abuses in their own country still going on 100 years after the US Civil War was combined with what they saw as yet another imperialist American war overseas, in Vietnam and the stultifying consumerism and materialism of 1950s America. By the mid-60s, political activism and campaigning among both black and white youth was becoming a matter of serious concern to the Establishment.

Civil Rights march mid-60s USA – Martin Luther King and Coretta King

This second aspect of the 1960s, that of a social and political activism that owed much to older traditions of collective social action over the previous 100 years, lasted until approximately the middle of the decade, by which time it was being overlapped and increasingly infiltrated and ultimately weakened by the decade’s third wave or aspect: a very new, individualistic, hedonistic and also more anarchic, self-conscious cultural movement that was concerned above all with personal development but in a ‘new’, ‘tribal’, collective context, which came to be called “flower power” and from 1965, was centred on LSD and other hallucinogenic substances. Scott Mackenzie (1939-2012, b. Philip Wallach Blondheim III) – one of the instant troubadours of this cultural new wave that was soon recognisable by its oriental and tribal fashion statements, its long hair for both men and women, its headbands, flowers, bells and sandals – sang the song which in May 1967 became the anthem for the hippie ‘movement’: “San Francisco (Be Sure to Wear Some Flowers in Your Hair)”: “All across the nation, such a strange vibration, people in motion. There’s a whole generation with a new explanation….people in motion.”

The Summer of Love 1967, USA

Many people have written⁴ about how the second, ‘political action’ wave was either partly or substantially subverted by government agents behind the scenes in order to weaken and undermine the political activism of the second wave. These agents seeded young people’s communities with mind-altering substances such as LSD and the ideas of Pied Piper Establishment scientists such as ‘acid prophet’ Timothy Leary and his colleague Richard Alpert (aka Baba Ram Dass), A turning point here was the much-hyped first “Human Be-In – a Gathering of the Tribes” at San Francisco’s Golden Gate Park on 14 January 1967, which began with the words: “Welcome to the first manifestation of the Brave New World”. The main speaker at the “Be-In” was the self-appointed guru of the new psychedelic movement, Timothy Leary, who urged the assembled 25,000 young people to “turn on, tune in and drop out”. What those in the park did not know was that the event was the brainchild of veteran American occultist John Starr Cooke,⁵ who lived in wheelchair-bound seclusion in Cuernavaca, Mexico, and of his artist disciple Michael Bowen, who had moved to the ‘hippie central’ Haight-Ashbury area of San Francisco at Cooke’s request in order to stimulate the ‘Brave New World’ by organising the “Human Be-In”.

This is not to say that the whole of the 60s or the whole ‘flower power’ hippie movement, which looked so much to Asia and to other non-western cultures for inspiration and spiritual guidance, was a mind control operation run by the CIA or other ‘occult’ (i.e. forces hidden behind the scenes), as has often been argued online over the past 20 years or so. It’s not difficult to trace the many orientalising influences present in the western states of the USA, notably California, that had been growing there especially since the first World’s Parliament of Religions in Chicago, held 11-16 Sept. 1893. These influences permeated a not insignificant part of the ‘baby boomer’ generation. “There was a fantastic universal sense”, wrote Hunter S. Thompson⁶, “that whatever we were doing was right, that we were winning …And that, I think, was the handle – that sense of inevitable victory over the forces of Old and Evil. Not in any mean or military sense; we didn’t need that. Our energy would simply prevail. There was no point in fighting – on our side or theirs. We had all the momentum; we were riding the crest of a high and beautiful wave.” This optimism and confidence were similar to the mood of the “Peoples’ Spring” in 1848.

However, by the end of 1969, after the Woodstock festival and the Manson murders in the summer of that year (both in August), the mass murder of over 400 students in Mexico City in October, the murder at the Altamont rock festival in December, and the worsening hard drugs situation in San Francisco, the hippie dreams of 1967 had already darkened. Many sensed that the dream was already dying, or even dead.

Music reflected this darkening and turning inwards; although musical creativity in the pop, rock and jazz scene was truly remarkable between 1963 and 1973, and affords real insights into the very wide spectrum of ‘spiritual’ and cultural influences at work⁷ in popular consciousness in those 10 years, rock music in general got heavier, louder and darker, more ‘Gothic’ in the Romantic sense, driven both by technological ‘advances’ and ever-increasing indulgence in drugs and alcohol. One can compare a gentle idealistic song like San Francisco (Be Sure to Wear Some Flowers in Your Hair) by Scott McKenzie in 1967 with a hard rock number about a heroin dealer, The Pusher, by Steppenwolf in 1969, just two years later. One saw more and more people at festivals and rock music gigs who, either ‘high’ or ‘heavy’, were obviously out of their minds in one way or another. Indulgence in sex, drugs and rock ‘n’ roll had become the unholy trinity for all too many in this generation; its children would often have to pay the price in the coming years in terms of the broken minds and relationships of their young parents. It was as though an entire generation had embarked on a spiritual quest without fully realising it – and the ‘initiation’ had failed.

A failed initiation?

One of the first late 60s British rock bands I saw play live, Jethro Tull (see pic below) , had a hit song called Living in the Past in 1969. The lyrics speak of a hedonistic love affair between two people who choose to ignore those around them who are concerned about wars, disasters and revolution: “We’ll go walking out while others shout of wars, disasters… . Once I used to join in, every boy and girl was my friend. Now there’s revolution, but they don’t know what they’re fighting. Let us close our eyes. Outside, their lies go on much faster. We won’t give in, let’s go living in the past”. Jethro Tull’s visual image was also of a Pied Piperish nature, with Ian Anderson, their seemingly half-crazed flame-haired singer and flautist stalking around the stage dressed in a motley jacket with tails.

The band and the song very much evoke a harlequinesque Romantic sensibility that spoke to many of the later baby-boomers who preferred not to commit to social activism on a mass scale but at most, tried to set up small-scale communities of friends who had all more or less “dropped out” of conventional society, rejecting the conventional mores of the first half of the 20th century altogether. Inspired by the Beatles’ odysseys to India or contemporaries’ trips to the Himalayas or Latin America or any non-western culture, these young people, encouraged by the likes of older ‘wayfarers’ such as the Americans Timothy Leary (1920-1996) and Baba Ram Dass (aka Richard Alpert, 1931-2019), and the English ‘Zen’ philosopher Alan Watts (1915-1973), imagined they wanted to turn their backs on the West and on its religion and culture completely, seeking either to create their own from scratch, or to emulate, to a greater or lesser degree, some non-western village or tribal society. Such efforts had nearly all failed by the early 70s, like the manic ‘Family’ project of the multi-murderer Charles Manson, which ended in ghastly scenes like something out of Goya’s more nightmarish paintings, and those ‘communes’ that managed to continue, did so because, like the communities of gurus such as the Indian Bhagwan Sri Rajneesh (later known as Osho) and James Edward Baker (Father Yod) they were held together by the ‘iron butterfly’ discipline of a more or less authoritarian guru figure to whom all looked up and on whom they had become psychologically dependent to a greater or lesser extent.

The arrest of Charles Manson (kneeling) and his “Family”

Just as the Romantic generation of the period 1790-1840 looked to Ossian’s⁸ Celtic stories of ancient times or to Rousseau’s evocation of the non-European ‘noble savage’ living in harmony with nature far from the urbanised intellectual artificiality of European salons, palaces and gardens, many baby-boomers sought what Terence McKenna (1946-2000) later dubbed ‘the archaic revival’. McKenna was one of the more deep-thinking among them.

A psychedelic explorer and ‘philosopher’ and the man who Timothy Leary, with characteristic ‘modesty’ called “the Timothy Leary of the 1990s”, McKenna felt western culture was deeply sick and was trying to heal itself by returning to ‘neolithic values’, among which he included: “surrealism, abstract expressionism, body piercing and tattooing, psychedelic drug use, sexual permissiveness, jazz, experimental dance, rave culture, rock and roll and catastrophe theory”⁹, in other words, anything which inclines towards the breakdown of concepts and forms of space and time -

a kind of cleaning of the cultural slate, “getting back” to an imagined ‘Year Zero’, regarding everything in the evolution of the West over the past 5000 years as a mere bubble or an error in comparison with the wonder of a butterfly or a single psilocybin mushroom. Critical of the New Age movement of the 1980s, which he saw as a sham, McKenna wrote: “The New Age is essentially humanistic psychology ’80s-style, with the addition of neo-shamanism, channelling, crystal and herbal healing. The archaic revival is a much larger, more global phenomenon that assumes that we are recovering the social forms of the late neolithic, and reaches far back in the 20th century to Freud, to surrealism, to abstract expressionism, even to a phenomenon like National Socialism which is a negative force. But the stress on ritual, on organized activity, on race/ancestor-consciousness – these are themes that have been worked out throughout the entire 20th century, and the archaic revival is an expression of that.” 10

Many in this Romantic third wave of the 1960s, the ‘flower power’ ‘love and peace’ hippy sub-generation and its adherents and fellow-travellers, did indeed try to ‘turn to the spirit’ and seek to transform their souls by ‘drawing up new forces’ but all too often they did so not by ‘reshaping their thinking’ as Steiner would have urged, by morphing their modern intellectual thinking into what he saw as three higher, developmental forms of consciousness – Imagination, Inspiration and Intuition¹¹ – that would eventually, if pursued diligently and patiently, enable them to perceive in the spiritual world. Instead, and usually not knowing about his ideas, they chose not so much to transform themselves as to trance-form themselves by not thinking at all – by becoming en-tranced, deliberately losing their heads, by giving their bodies and their heads over to modern synthesised drugs or ancient organic mushrooms or other hallucinogens and by using the massive force of technology via hugely amplified music, to overwhelm their thinking minds and push their bodies into movement. Change agent Timothy Leary said of himself and his fellow ‘turned-on’ academics: “we saw ourselves as unwitting agents of a social process that was far too powerful for us to control or to more than dimly understand.”¹² The young generation in the 1960s had become, as modern people, so alienated from their own organisms that they were prepared to subject them to any mis-or maltreatment for the sake of ‘getting high’, ‘far out’ or ‘out there’. And certainly, many of them did so, a number were indeed psychic explorers in this sense who came back changed for the better, but others were lucky to survive and lost friends and loved ones who did not. Many had their sense of themselves shattered by the experience and in many cases, never recovered, or else they moved on to harder drugs, addiction to which eventually destroyed them. Steiner had commented 120 years earlier that those who sought to cross the threshold of the spiritual world, to “break on through to the other side” (as Jim Morrison put it in one of The Doors’ famous songs, Break On Through, 1967) under the impact of drugs or mystical spiritual exercises that did not work with clear thinking, actually ‘broke on through’ not to the objective spiritual world but to the inner world of their own organism, their own body, which was of course deeply conditioned by their own karma, the state of their own minds, which is why so many had such different experiences on drugs.

They took such risks with their bodies because they were so distrustful of western intellectual thinking, the thinking they’d been educated in, the thinking their culture was permeated with, and because – despite two world wars and the deaths of millions – the culture had failed to make the change referred to earlier by Steiner in 1919 – the need to draw new forces from the depths of human souls. They therefore opted to throw out the baby of thinking together with what they regarded as the dirty bathwater of intellect. They opted to go “living in the past”, trying to return to ancient modes of thought and life, whether those of their own culture (e.g. ancient Celtic or Scandinvian, Slavic) or of completely alien cultures in McKenna’s sense of ‘archaic revival’. Alien, that is, in this lifetime. It is always possible, after all, that some of these people were in fact reincarnated tribal people from non-western cultures or else a pre-Roman European tribal culture, trying, in a modern context, to ‘get back to where (they had) once belonged’, as “Get Back”, the famous Beatles song of 1969, puts it.

Will, Wisdom, Love

The young people of the 60s did this in one of two ways, depending on their personal karmic history: the outer path of union with the gods of outer nature (which Steiner called the northern or Apollonian path) or the inner path of union with the gods of the soul’s inner depths (the southern or Dionysian path). Some of them tested themselves on both paths. Ancient India, Steiner tells us, was a culture in which both paths were in balance, while ancient Persian culture with its worship of Ahura Mazdao was of the macrocosmic, northern path and ancient Egypt looked to find Osiris and Isis on the microcosmic, southern path.¹³ It is fascinating to see how in the 1960s some young western people sought the spirit by testing themselves in outer nature, by outer travel in dangerous and unfamiliar conditions, experiencing mineral, plant and animal life, mountains, deserts, ice floes and glaciers, jungles, while others tested themselves not in nature but through intense inner meditation, whether through drugs, through guided or self-taught meditative praxis or through artistic exploration.

Another polarity which they explored was that of Will versus Wisdom. The path of Will is that of the will of God as revealed in the world outside the human being, whether in the forces of Nature or through the outer commandments of a human leader. Young western people in the 1960s were aware of this path through what they could see in film recordings or movies of the mass movements of the 1930s – the Nazis and the Communists and also their contemporaries in Communist China waving their Litte Red Books with the thoughts of Chairman Mao Ze Dong – or else they obediently followed guru-like figures in their own societies, such as Malcolm X, A.C. Bhaktivedanta Swami Prabhupada (of the Hare Krishna movement), Anne Hamilton-Byrne (The Family, Australia). The inner path of Wisdom in the 1960s was either that of inner exploration of one’s own organism through drugs, or else through guided meditation in the context of an oriental spiritual discipline such as Zen, Tibetan, or Theravada Buddhism. Steiner, in his 1914 lectures on Christ and the Human Soul (Collected Works GA 155) contrasted these two paths of Will and Wisdom with the path of Love, which is that followed by deepening one’s relationship to Christ within one’s heart. Steiner describes how the Hebrews experienced Will through the burning thorn bush and through the Ten Commandments given to Moses and the 613 rules for life given in the Hebrew Bible. Pre-Christian pagan cultures experienced Wisdom through the ritual processes of the Mysteries in which the soul was separated from the body in an initiatic sleep. “But Love was given when God became man in Christ Jesus. And the assurance that we can love beyond death, that by means of the powers won back for our souls a community of Love can be founded between God and man and all human beings among one another – the guarantee for that proceeds from the Mystery of Golgotha. In the Mystery of Golgotha the human soul has found what it had lost from the primal beginning of the Earth, in that its forces had become ever weaker and weaker. Three forces in three members of the soul: Will, Wisdom, Love! In this Love the soul experiences its relation to Christ”. ¹⁴

In the life experiences of so many musicians, artists, film stars and others one could witness how the young generation tried to find their way among these three soul forces, and in those who found their way to Love, even if they didn’t regard themselves as ‘church Christians’, one could feel something of Christian love in those people. On 25 June 1967, on the eve of the hippies’ ‘Summer of Love’ in California, in London The Beatles performed their song All You Need Is Love for the world’s first international satellite TV link broadcast which was seen by 400 million people in 14 countries around the world. The song began with a brass phrase from the Marsaillaise, the martial French national anthem. The first words of that anthem are: “Let’s go children, of the fatherland, the day of glory has come…” meaning ‘let’s go and kill the invading enemies of France’, but after that initial phrase from the brass, The Beatles morphed it immediately into a sung chorus of “Love, love, love”… .

The Beatles “All You Need Is Love” 25 June 1967

The turbulence of the 1960s threw up so many stark contrasts – between, for example, the collectivism of the ‘love-in’, the ‘be-in’, the ‘happening’ and the creative individualism of a John Lennon or a Jimi Hendrix, artists who very much went their own way. Hendrix (1942-1970), a unique genius of the new instrument, the massively amplified electric guitar, trod a path that passed from a flamboyant, libertarian, ‘luciferic’ or Dionysian individualism in early songs like “Stone Free”, “If 6 was 9” and “Are you Experienced?” to an affirmation of the collective values of his generation and his people in his last year of playing and recording (with songs such as “Message to Love”, “Angel”, “Power of Soul”, “Earth Blues”). In his last year, he was stretching out in various new creative directions, playing with a wider span of musicians, notably in the jazz field. It was tragic that his early death from apparent accidental barbiturate poisoning (too many sleeping pills) in 1970 at the age of only 27 cut short the great promise of his burgeoning career, which can be surmised from, for example, the great creativity shown in his Electric Ladyland double album (late 1968). Fans of his music and his musical peers were in awe of Hendrix’s dynamic live performances and his innovative creativity in the recording studio. He seemed to be on a different level altogether from all other rock musicians, although certainly, his generation did produce numerous extremely talented and creative musicians, many of whom shared the ideal of freedom and going beyond boundaries.

“Supermen”

On 13 May 1921 Steiner gave a lecture in which he said something he never repeated, most likely because, unfortunately, no-one ever asked him about it again: “…a time is beginning when beings who are not human are coming down to earth from cosmic regions beyond. These beings are not human but depend for the further development of their existence on coming to earth and on entering here into relationships with human beings.” This has been happening, he said, since the 1880s, and “it is thanks to the fact that beings from beyond the earth are bringing messages down into this earthly existence that it is possible at all to have a comprehensive spiritual science today.” He called these beings Übermenschen, which can be translated as “supermen” or beings who are “beyond human”. It is noteworthy that he does not call them ‘angels’ or ‘archangels’, but notes that the first to arrive were “beings dwelling in the sphere between moon and Mercury and associates others with (the presumably spiritual dimensions of) the planetary spheres of our solar system: Moon, Mercury, Sun, Jupiter, and Vulcan (a higher octave of Saturn). But, he said, humanity is ignoring them and shows no interest in having anything to do with them. This was of course truer in the 1920s than it is today, when countless Hollywood movies are concerned with aliens and UFOs, usually in an antipathetic sense. “It is this [ignoring of these beings] that will lead the earth into increasingly tragic conditions. For in the course of the next few centuries, more and more spirit beings will move among us whose language we ought to understand. We shall understand it only if we seek to comprehend what comes from them, namely, the contents of spiritual science. This is what they wish to bestow on us. They want us to act according to spiritual science; they want this spiritual science to be translated into social action and the conduct of earthly life… Upheaval upon upheaval will ensue, and earth existence will at length arrive at social chaos if these beings descended and human existence were to consist only of opposition against them… The beings I have spoken about will descend gradually to the earth. Vulcan beings, Vulcan supermen, Venus supermen, Mercury supermen, Sun supermen, and so on will unite themselves with earth existence. Yet, if human beings persist in their opposition to them, this earth existence will pass over into chaos in the course of the next few thousand years. People will indeed be capable of developing their intellect in an automatic way; it can develop even in the midst of barbaric conditions. The fullness of human potential, however, will not be included in this intellect and people will have no relationship to the beings who wish graciously to come down to them into earthly life.”

These beings are, therefore, apparently above human beings yet are not angels or archangels. If instead of welcoming them and their message of spiritual science, humanity continues with its intellectual way of thinking, it will create a plane of reality in the future that will cover the earth with what Steiner calls “spidery machine-animals”, “a horrible brood of beings… in between the mineral and plant kingdoms… beings resembling automatons, with an over-abundant intellect of great intensity, … a network or web of ghastly spiders possessing tremendous wisdom… In their outward movements they will imitate everything human beings have thought up with their shadowy intellect, which did not allow itself to be stimulated by what is to come through new Imagination and through spiritual science in general.” The movie trilogy The Matrix (1999-2003) showed a nightmarish picture of such a future dystopian world in which humans lived in an underground city called ZION, trying to shelter from the ‘machine-animals’ that dominated the ruined surface of the world. Meanwhile, human intellect had also created a computer simulation of the entire world into which human beings were drawn and made to live as programmes that did not challenge the machines’ control of the real world.

Steiner suggested in that lecture of May 1921 that such a ghastly future may well come about if humanity continues on its current intellectual course and does not turn towards the spirit, drawing new forces from the depths of human souls¹⁵, by paying attention to what the planetary ‘supermen’ wish to share with us. His picture, however, is not that of a Hollywood alien invasion by ‘greys’ or little green men in giant interstellar space ships. This is precisely a product of materialist, intellectual thinking. The beings Steiner had in mind evidently do not seek to interfere with our human freedom and do not impose themselves. It’s up to us to open ourselves to spiritual contact with them, for they are spiritual beings approaching us since the time, about 130 years ago, when the threshold between the spiritual and material worlds has been ‘thinning’ and humanity has been crossing the threshold unconsciously. Some human beings, especially in artistic fields, have evidently been more open to positive inspiration from such beings, while others, notably those in science and technology, have been inspired by beings at the threshold who are of a much less beneficent nature and which seek to push us into a dystopian future well before we are ready to cope.  Acceleration is the leitmotif in this case which we need to be wary of, as well as the drives for ever more power and convenience. Once again, the 1960s offer many instructive examples of both positive and negative inspiration by beings at the threshold.

Conclusion

In anthroposophical terms, the 1960s began in an ahrimanic atmosphere of geopolitical fear and tension as well as one of a technological and Modernist optimism rooted in a materialist philosophy of life both in the capitalist and the communist blocs. The historic Vatican II Council was under way in Rome which would ‘reform’ various traditional aspects of the Roman Catholic Church, but the official Christianity of the churches was increasingly seen as failing throughout the West. However, by the middle of the decade, there had been a huge luciferic counterwave against the ahrimanic mood of the early 1960s, a great rebellious rejection by many young people of the conventional intellectual systems thinking of 20th century urban civilisation and a turning away from it back to the past and to non-western cultures, an inchoate seeking for a spiritual path or at least for personal freedom. This rebellion included empathy for and solidarity with oppressed peoples as well as the beginnings of the environmental movement and care for the Earth. In the midst of all this confusing miasma, in the year 1967, a theme broke through for a short time, which in its essence was Christian but was usually not identified as such at the time – the theme of Love, in the West at least, if not in the East, where the generational solidarity of the young Chinese Red Guards in the Cultural revolution (1966-76) was directed towards fanatical violence and hatred against older people and against traditional culture. That breakthrough of Love in the West was brief but it planted many seeds for the future, which have since grown vigorously.

What we can learn from our culture’s ‘failed initiation’ in the 1960s is to understand the evolution of consciousness and how things came to be how they are now, how they were in earlier times and how they need to move forward. Through a spiritual scientific understanding of cultural history, young westerners can begin to make more holistic sense of their culture’s complex story instead of the intellectual construct they are given at school and in the media. We can also learn that the unholy trinity of drugs, rock ‘n’ roll, and sexual license was and is but an unholy inversion of the eternal verities of the ‘holy trinity’ of the true, the beautiful and the good.

Endnotes

1.  Karl Heyer, Kaspar Hauser und das Schicksal Mitteleuropas im 19. Jahrhundert, 4th ed. 1999, p.218.

2.  Lecture of 14.12.1919, Collected Works, GA 194.

3.  The term “Baby boomer” is something of a misnomer. They are the generation who were born during and in the aftermath of the Second World War, with Neptune in Libra, 1942-1956.

4.  E.g. Martin Lee and Bruce Shlain, Acid Dreams – The Complete Social History of LSD: The CIA, the Sixties, and Beyond (1985).

5.  See Lee & Shlain pp.157-160.

6.  See Lee & Shlain , p. 163.

7.  From an anthroposophical perspective, one can easily discern the whole gamut from ‘luciferic’ influences (in dreamy neo-folk and neo-tribal music) to ‘ahrimanic’ influences (in hard rock and the first manifestations of occultic, even satanic, heavy metal and proto-punk) in these years – and all things in between, as the searching human soul tried to find its way between the two compulsive poles of the luciferic and the ahrimanic. Indeed, one could say that between 1963 and 1973 almost all the subsequent musical developments of the next 40 years and more can be found in seed form in those 10 years.

8.  Epic poems published in 1761-65 purported to be by the ancient bard Ossian but were actually by the Scottish poet James Macpherson (1736-1796).

9.  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Terence_McKenna

10.  See n. 9.

11.  See R. Steiner, Anthroposophy – An Introduction (Rudolf Steiner Press, 1983).

12.  See Lee & Schlain, p. 89.

13.  See R. Steiner, The East In the Light of the West (1922).

14.  R. Steiner, Christ and the Human Soul, 12 July 1914. GA 155.

15.  R. Steiner, lecture of 14.12.1919, GA 194.

CHRIST IN

ANSBACH

The Working of the Logos

                                                                       Or

                                                                       The Beginning of the 5th Creation

                                                                         through Kaspar Hauser

Vienna November 2015

by Johann

on the PATH

(24.10.1959 – 25.3.2016)

Prologue

The Beginning is the LOGOS

And the I-Man is this beginning.

So the beginning is in Man.

In the first Creation, human beings

Spanned space, chiselled atoms.

In the second Creation, human beings

Time space, life, the world of plants.

In the third Creation, human beings

Ensouled nature with forms, colours, movements.

The present human being, Anthropos, is to

Reveal the Logos, individual and original.

This brings the birth of freedom.

Yes, the creative cosmic Word wants

To become Man; we are allowed to determine that.

But the daily I is not the true I.

The I that is attention and empathy,

Free of preconceptions and limits.

So seek the PATH to true being …

*The Logos depends on us

0

I) Do you believe in God? People ask today,

Without thinking that the image of God and his name

Have been lost. His golden head

Was radiant in India; his silver heart in

Persia, his bronze will in Israel.

Buddha provided the soul foundation.

Genesis speaks of the Elohim. They are

Seven Sun spirits. JeHoVaH is their leader.

Actually, his name is: IEOUA, and Ieshua,

His son was originally named IEOSHUA. Through Ieshua

Was implanted in all I-hearts the Logos on the Cross.

Since 1998 this has sought to awaken.

Since Agrippa von Nettesheim people have forgotten

The names of the nine realms of gods above us.

God is not dead. He has become Man! All is spirit:

Around us, the world, in us attention and presence.

Where are we actually?

The atheist is lazy, the believer cowardly.

The I in our core is the seed of God.

*God’s name is simply: the Good

1

It is no longer the time to believe in God.

We must unfold spirit, life, creative powers.

If something is not right in the world,

We must put it in order ourselves!

Through war, misery, and sickness God asks: help me!

There is no good and evil, only what is good

And what is comfortable. One who wishes

To be served, declares himself a creature and finally

Ends on the compost. One who takes on

Responsibility without pushing himself forward,

Unfolds ever more godly powers. In doing so,

We must learn to be free, creative thinkers:

No more babbling after the fact.

What is the motif of my destiny? Each one of us

Is a living word. Let us distinguish between

Rigid, dead concepts and living thinking that comes from

Perception. One who seeks to do this sees that

The All is the body of God, evolution his destiny,

Human beings his sons and daughters …

*His oldest name: the ONE without a second

1′

II) We must learn to think of Ieshua in two ways:

There are two places in the New Testament,

Which are completely unlike each other:

In Matthew, Mary of the Temple and

Joseph of the royal line live

In the house of David in Bethlehem.

The line of heredity passes through the Babylonian Captivity.

The Child is visited by the three Magi from the East.

They bring gold, incense and myrrh.

The parents soon flee away to Egypt.

The birth is about six years ‘before Christ’

At a Saturn-Jupiter conjunction in the Virgin.

In 2 BC the cosmic Mary and the carpenter from Nazareth

Journey to Bethlehem for the census.

They do not flee and they are visited by shepherds.

The line of heredity through Galilee

Is almost twice as long.

Priesthood and royalty, wisdom and love become

United in 12 years in one body.

*Life is a living contradiction

2

Science does not grasp the Creation,

Because it only accepts the painting of existence.

Churches do not grasp relationships

Because they only want to hold fast to their rigid dogmas.

The Luke Ieshua is the Son born of the Oneness.

He has borne the Earth for 3½ eternities.

From Him has come all that is in the Earth’s atmosphere.

The Matthew Ieshua is the most-developed individuality on earth.

He was the pupil of Zarathustra and could be mistaken for him.

He has appeared since the division of the sexes

In the middle of Lemuria and throughout the Earth epoch.

The highest being and the highest consciousness.

His full incarnation was as Isaac. The Luke Ieshua

Had never before been incarnated. The wisdom-filled one

Therefore passed over into the bearer of love

In order to build up his body.

They were together for 18⅔ years before the royal one

Left the other at the Baptism in the Jordan.

Working to understand this is a challenge …

*Knowledge and religion are not contradictory

2′

III) Mary wants to be experienced anew.

For this we need the power to discriminate.

In the third Creation JHWH accomplished

The division of the sexes, which became physical

In the recapitulation in Lemuria. Woman arose.

She had magic. She was the leader of the cosmic Mysteries.

She had no share in original sin.

There was as yet no sexuality.

She became Mary of the Temple of cosmic wisdom.

Eve came later, below the Cross as Magdalena.

The Luke Mary had never before been incarnated.

Michelangelo painted the woman who had remained in the heavens

On the left of the creation of Adam

This was unnoticed by most people.

She died at the age of 26

And had given birth only to the Son of God.

In the 4th century the Testament was altered by “correctores”.

Angels encouraged Mary and Joseph to embrace! Then they did so.

Mary, Johannes and Lazarus were all immaculate.

*Mary lives amongst us compassionately.

3

God does not intervene arbitrarily, magically. No!

We must all learn to bring immaculate children into the world.

In doing so, we must speak with the child

BEFORE it is conceived! In the will to conceive.

The goddess was forgotten, the Holy Spirit.

She is the woman of the Moon, the Sun, the stars

In the ancient churches. One could name her in three revelations:

Luna (white), Philia (red), Astrid (black).

Then would the Trinity at last be again complete.

Genesis was written down in Babylon.

But everywhere where today Elohim or JHWH is written

Originally was written: the goddess. At that time it was right.

JHWH received his task as Folk Spirit.

Today female spirituality must again be freed.

Priestesses are urgently needed.

It is the woman who is prominent in the heavens.

The heavenly Mary gives her blessing from the spiritual world.

The earthly woman has been with us through all stages of incarnation,

Inspiring and leading …

*Celibacy leads to degeneration

3′

IV) We live in Four Worlds:

The body in space, touch –

Life in time, hearing –

Light in the ground of the soul, seeing –

With an I in the centre of our being, thinking.

The materialistic worldview by itself

Kills human beings and destroys the earth.

For too long have children been forced into matter

And old people maimed in living corpses.

We have been through four Creations and

There are four stages of Adam:

The warmth-Adam, Man in the image of God:

Cosmos, space, mineral, form-being (divine).

The sun-air Adam, the Man of breath and earth:

Sun, time, plant, strength-sound (hermaphrodite).

The watery, divided, feminine Man (erotic):

Planets, order, primal animal images, primal soul images – image.

The physical Man of separation (sexual):

Earth, ego, human being, word as concept …

*4 worlds declare the open secret

4

This is researched in all realms, for example:

In health, in pedagogy, in art,

In agriculture, in the course of destiny. There is:

Body, life, soul, the Logos-kernel as the I.

The I-Man therefore needs 28-35 years

To find himself and place himself into life.

Three worlds were forgotten and were lost.

We therefore grope around, unknowing.

Even when we wanted to love, everything went wrong.

Since 700 AD the life forces have been lost.

We urgently need  a rhythm and pauses.

Everything now ends in burnout. We have to

Intervene and put things in order. Therefore

We bear four kinds of consciousness in and with us:

Logos-being (the child) – sound (the pupil) – archetypal image

(the youth) – concept (the adult).

The child moves from being to understanding.

The adult must win back the four worlds.

He can ripen in freedom to childlikeness …

*Life wants to open itself to us anew

4′

V) Is there reincarnation?

When someone holds only to the physical, then

There is not. For the situation does not repeat itself and

The connections cannot express themselves.

Nevertheless, one grows after death and realises:

I still am. One can then lead only a shadow-existence

And remains the plaything of alien powers.

Every third citizen today is possessed.

This powerfully disturbs the balance of the soul.

If there were really no reincarnation,

Creation would be improper and meaningless, evil.

In the course of time, all balances out.

What you don’t want to do, what is done to you,

No-one else does to you. And: to give is better than

To receive. In the First Creation we were

Led through the mineral realm. In the Second, through the

Plant realm, in the Third we wandered through

The Zodiac, without ourselves ever becoming animals.

Therefore, we were always present!

*All suffering will become love

5

 Physical incarnation began around 15000 BC.

At first, it was a metempsychosis, a wandering

Of the soul. The Old Testament is a document

About how we slowly descended from the spiritual world.

We stem from the angels, who for almost 1000 years

Have the mission of constituting epochs of memory, not the

Ages of bodies. From the Flood until Abraham Man still

Had almost 350 years of memory.

Only since Jacob has Man arrived on earth.

It’s wrong to claim I was this person and that person.

That lacks the long periods in between lives.

Only with the pouring out of the Logos-I

Did reincarnation actually begin.

But this true I we first have to work out.

Normally, we are drowned in daily life.

I must learn to place myself every day into the Logos being.

Otherwise, I only live in ideas. They are blown away

After death. Therefore: here is eternity. Presence is now!

Reincarnation begins with one life:

The present one. I accept it gratefully …

*Attention! Your deeds will follow you.

5′

 VI) Man and woman are the two sides of the Logos.

Like point and periphery, like No and Yes!

The feminine lives in the periphery, accepts all things.

It consists of unconditional devotion.

First, it exists and seeks to connect everything with

Everything else. That is the power of a will, pure being.

This kind of devotion was lost 5000 years ago.

The masculine strives towards to the point; it pushes Everything back. It consists of undivided attention.

It penetrates everything in the search for depth of knowledge.

The feminine protects life, existence.

The masculine seeks the experience of death.

The feminine accepts the body in the present.

The masculine lives in the soul, in the eternal Ideal.

Both should support, complement and serve each other.

It is about harmony in contradiction. The woman

Is inwardly masculine, the man inwardly feminine.

He helps her to the I – she helps him to the You.

Today this is no longer affirmed nor practised.

*We learn to distinguish: creative – destructive

6

 It is about the emancipation of both sexes.

Let us therefore begin from the beginning. For we

Can say neither Yes nor No. It is chaos.

We practise the archetypal feminine gesture in the evening,

After our daily work: we accept the periphery in that

We bless it, so that it becomes good. This blessing

Can be accomplished in singing and dancing.

The archetypal masculine gesture we practise in the morning,

Before sunrise: we gather ourselves into our heart

In the unborn. We let go, relaxing the body:

I am! Away with all thoughts, back to

Undivided attention, for a new beginning.

Feminine devotion, surrender, primal trust –

Masculine attention, concentration, penetration.

When that is practised, assured, the I am practising in time

The complementarity: a man full of devotion, a woman

With clear self-knowledge. Man/woman are half

Creatures. Ultimately, we will be Logos beings. This means:

Attention and compassion at the same time, now …

*Logos is feminine and masculine at the same time

6′

 VII) Who is the All-Christ? The Word Christ

Is not in the New Testament. It speaks of

The Messiah, the One who is sent, the healer.

Ieshua the World Soul, the Soul,

Who bears the Earth. In the Beginning there was only Him.

Er separated the Earth, Nature, human beings from Himself.

In Germanic cultures he was called Ymir and In India

He was Atma. The concept Christ

Comes from the Tarot, the Hebrew ABC.

There the Creation is described in 22 stages of initiation.

I/Yod stands for the human being,

CHRSHT for the highest stages.

Ieshua is everything within the atmosphere of the Earth.

Christ stands for all that is cosmic. Translated, it is:

CH       Giver of the Logos power of the I

R          Master of the worlds of soul

Sh        Source of all life and of all that is alive

T          Lord of the elements  and of the Earth

I           for the growth of the I of the free human being …

*What is “I” (ICH) actually?

7

 At every level there is a Christ bearer.

For human beings the Father: Ieshua Christ.

For the angels the lion-headed one : Ra-El-Christ.

For the planetary archangels: Michael Christ.

And for the Archai of the First Creation: Vidar Christ.

The Luke Ieshua protects the Spirit-Body

And no longer incarnates on Earth.

The Matthew Ieshua incarnates every 100 years

And leads us to the Fifth Creation.

When people speak of Christ, they mostly mean

Their deeper I, which lights up at the age of

14⅓, 23⅓, 30⅓. Today, we must work to understand:

Not Christ in me, Christ in the other!

More angels are dying because we are not going

Our WAY and the Folk Spirits have to become angry.

The All-Christ is the union of Ieshua, Rael, Michael, Vidar

Today. For matter and the senses are to be fully christened:

From the existence of the body to the body of existence …

*There has been Christ since the touch of Thomas

7′

VIII) Death becomes the transition

The grandfather is a convinced materialist. He believes

That after death there is nothing else. He dies.

Then his granddaughter wakes every midnight with

Foam around her mouth and speaks in a deep voice.

She is in danger of being put in a madhouse …

After death our passage runs as follows:

The physical body sinks down into space.

Within three days pictures and life forces are released.

There is a panoramic review of the life that has passed.

This is best done with friends who maintain a vigil in familiar Surroundings. For ⅓ of the past life we work through

That experience in the dream world.

The life forces have long since been inscribed

Into the widths of space. The soul journeys

Through the spheres: Moon – letting go, Mercury – healing,

All attachments are now to cease. Venus –

One enters into the Other and experiences what one has

Done to others, in one’s own body! Compensation.

*Death is like a wedding.

8

A model of the next life is sculpted

Ahead of time by the Other.

One passes through the Sun Sphere

And experiences the meaning of Creation.

One is allowed to grasp the world with the eyes of God.

That ripens one’s decision for one’s next life.

One turns about and clothes oneself anew, beholds

One’s coming karma and accepts it, seeks out

One’s parents and is reborn. A period of incarnation

After 300-350 years if one dies after the age of 35.

Material life is held in arrest. Ever more forces

Can no longer be released after death.

One comes back into the world, having “slept inadequately”.

Our angel puts on dark clothes.

One who does not nurture the spiritual in life

Cannot work creatively at the Earth after death.

An ocean of people remain weak in death.

They fall into a hole. This has consequences

For the whole of Earth evolution. Standstill ….

*One who lives rightly can also die rightly.

8′

 IX) The problem is the intellect

We are spiritual beings in four worlds.

As small children we are at one with everything. Intuition.

We practise such magic as standing up, speaking, thinking.

And we live in a kind of trance, beyond gender.

As young pupils at school we are open to the world. Inspiration.

We can place ourselves in other beings, even in trees.

Often we are awake in dreamland, open to Nature.

We act out of a kind of deep sleep.

We are still bisexual, hermaphrodite.

As adolescents we are interested in the world.

Puberty is also a maturing of the world. And we

Live wholly in the periphery, in the realm of the folk spirit.

Visions, dreams, images are determined for us.

As adults we become physical, in the intellect.

The ego condition establishes itself. Three worlds:

Spirit (word), soul (sound), life (image) are forgotten.

Knowing and doing remain: dead concepts, power.

This is the condition of the sickness of sin.

*How stupid actually can intelligence be?

9

Intellect appears to give security, a grip on things.

It bestows clear contours, memory, boundaries.

We do not see through the death process within it.

Concepts are end-products and resemble shit.

No-one eats again what he has already eaten.

But in the intellect we chew on it over and over.

This is why we live in a civilisation of death.

Let us look once more into the eyes of the sickness of sin:

All day long we live within fixed, rigid thoughts.

We are thus constantly focused on the ‘person’.

But our knowledge has long since passed that by!

We gradually come to pass life by, the Now.

And the worst is that we no longer feel.

Three higher worlds are forgotten at the same time.

Unless we practise image  – sound – essence

We lose the connection to the soul’s depths, to the

Processes of life, to the body, that is, to health.

We must turn around and win back

The 3 gifts of the Magi from the East and ripen to the childlike …

*Knowledge is, in truth, ignorance

9′

X) The daily self is not the true I.

Our senses serve us conveniently.

And we live in dead concepts, in an inner dialogue.

It has no foundation and always gets lost.

Perception is reality:

Remain in perception and you are in the I!

And: we are UNABLE to think at all.

We constantly recall what we have heard.

Our ideas are therefore all untested.

What is the original motif of my destiny?

I find my way to thinking through questioning and writing.

Let us learn to think freely and creatively!

The child descends from being, to sound, image,

And concept. That is incarnation. We adults

Should rise from concept to archetypal image (adolescence),

To archetypal sound (childhood), to being (infancy).

The true human being goes through seven stages of the I.

The true I is undivided attention

And unconditional devotion: we are truthfulness!

*We cannot think, because we want too much.

10

Let us distinguish firmly between ideas and

Perception. Behind ideas is hidden

Fear. We must learn to let go, many times a day.

Behind the clinging is hidden pain, displeasure.

We must accept suffering, as a life counsellor.

How does suffering speak, what is its message?

Half of mankind clings to reality.

That is too deep, it leads to addiction.

The other half is drawn out by ideals.

That is too high and leads to escapism.

Friedrich Schiller worked this out in his notion of play,

Which he sent as aesthetic letters to Philipp v. Augustenberg.

That is the social midpoint which is also there

In the blessings of the Sermon on the Mount: POVERTY:

Let go of ideas, I Am attention! Within that

I am always, livingly, at the beginning, unassured.

SUFFERING: accept and release suppressed suffering.

MEEKNESS:   act without feeling of self. What wants

To become, in the sense of what is good for the world? …

*The concept is a dead mirroring without being

10′

XI) The Mystery of Golgotha has almost been forgotten.

People think: first, Jesus never lived. Second,

If he had, his grave would have been found. Third, He

Would have been married to Mary Magdalene

And would have had two sons. So, no Christmas,

No Easter, no Whitsun or Holy Spirit.

The churches have completely distorted His original Image.

What did actually happen? The Warmth-Adam hung on the Cross. His body permeated by the Water-Adam,

The 7 Elohim, the power of the FATHER. On His left stood

The woman, Mary of the Temple, her body permeated by the Heavenly Mary, Ra-El, the Holy Sophia. On His right stood Lazarus, the Sun-Adam, his body permeated

By the Separating-Earth-Adam, St. Michael,

The power of the SON. The Lamb, Vidar, goes as witness

Through death and resurrection. The Trinity has

Since then become human. Human beings received

From the Cross the creative Logos-I. Why has nothing Changed since then? This is what people ask …

*The primal fathers became the 12 Apostles

11

The church is not the Body of Christ, the Earth is.

Heaven is not the Beyond. The Earth is to become heaven.

We should not become brave believers, but

Enlighten our souls, spiritualise our lives,

Christen our senses. Become gods ourselves!

Ieshua Christ does not come from outside. He wants

To become a free original human being in us.

We already have a human self, the person.

Each for himself individually and different.

We must take hold of our common cosmic I

Which now, after 2000 years, wants to be born.

The whole truth is shattering: through the

Coming of materialism Ieshua Christ died

In the 19th century. He was torn from His fifth dimension

And fell. It seemed as though mankind was lost

The Earth wants to be obliterated. No-one has noticed.

Satan prepares to incarnate in order to enslave

The human I’s. What is the answer of St. Michael?

How can the Resurrection be continued?

*The unexperienced Good becomes Evil.

11′

XII) Logos reveals Itself in rhythm.

The Logos does not intervene in consciousness.

It does not Itself in ideals and fine conversations.

That is the realm of the intellect, which blocks It.

That would also deeply injure freedom.

The Logos does not appear physically.

That would be material and forceful.

The reality of deeds tends ever more towards hardening.

Logos can touch consciousness and

It was visible in the concentration camps.

But that is an exception, and most people

Can not cope with such experiences.

Logos shows Itself in swings and loops,

In rhythm. It shows Itself and liberates.

Through it, free decisions remain guaranteed.

And life, in becoming, can develop.

Mass movements are no longer valid.

It’s about small groups of up to 15.

Then out of the being of the I, community can emerge.

*I was, you are, we will grow from you.

12

We meet in small groups, for example, monthly.

The archetypal images of the year want to be reflected:

Michaelmas, Martinmas, Advent, Christmas, Three Kings,

Shrovetide for the elementals, the Spring Equinox,

Easter, Ascension, Whitsun and newly:

The Eleusinians, the Feast of the Holy Sophia c.15-18 Sept.

Besides these, the 12 senses are to be deepened: e.g.:

July – touch, August – the sense of life, Sept – movement,

Oct – balance, – Nov – smell, Dec – taste,

Jan – sight, Feb – sense of warmth, March – hearing,

Apr – the sense of the word, May – thought,

June – the sense of the I in you. In daily life

We only use 1½ sense qualities.

We can purify the senses: 40 h of water and salted bread,

In the dark, without speaking, from 6 pm Fri to 10 am Sun.

And the senses want to be deepened and extended.

Otherwise, intellect rules and that is the death of the soul.

Leading thought: what is my destiny question? When and How do I practise attention, compassion and real trust?

What are we?  – The mystery of encounter?

*Can I place myself in another’s shoes?

12′

XIII) Kaspar Hauser, the Child of Europe

Kaspar’s father was as a Zähringer the actual

King of Germany. He was done away with.

His grandfather** Napoleon was the Emperor of Europe.

His mother, Stephanie de Beauharnais, came from

Martinique, and so Hauser had Atlantic,

Indian roots. He was exchanged with

A servant’s sick child  who Stephanie

Was not allowed to see. The exchanged child

Was made to die in a documented list of soldiers.

Hauser was brought to Beuggen Castle on the Rhine.

When he had learned to speak and ask questions, he came

To Salem Castle and from there to Pilsach Castle in Bavaria.

There he was unable to stand, speak or think,

Kept in a dungeon that was always at the same temperature.

To this dynastic crime, an occult crime was added.

The highest-ranking Freemasons were involved,

And also the leaders of England, Prussia,

Austria, France, Bavaria and Baden.

*Napoleon ended the age of Mars, Hauser opened the age of Mercury

** Napoleon was Hauser’s adoptive grandfather. Hauser’s mother, Stephanie de Beauharnais, was adopted by Napoleon.

13

Lord Stanhope, a secret agent, had no other task

Than to find the princely child. 7 years before Hauser

Appeared in Unschlitt Square, Stanhope knew all about him.

He made himself Hauser’s adoptive father, and he used

The alibi of travel abroad when Kaspar was killed in Ansbach.

Appeal Court Judge Feuerbach, who had abolished torture, Was poisoned in Frankfurt. Stanhope was in the area.

Kaspar Hauser was a pure human being

From BEFORE the fall of Man. The speech of his body

Was clear: I will rule over no-one!

He was kept in darkness for over 12 years,

Which no human being can withstand. The words: “If Kaspar

Hauser had been able to rule, Europe today would have

Developed much further” is fundamentally false.

It implies a spiritual leader, but Man is to liberate himself.

But Hauser – only after his death – gave the strength for this

From above. An angel dwelt within him, so that we can Become angels. He had wanted the exchange and his death.

He was fully the human being of the Sermon on the Mount…

*Kaspar Hauser is a brother of Ieshua

13′

XIV) Pedagogy is the fulcrum point.

We live in dead intellect, which is the actual problem.

The resurrected one died. Evil is strengthened.

How can Man become   creative?

Christianity is no religion, but a stream of life,

(Said Rudolf Steiner). The starting point lies in

Pedagogy. In the Waldorf school the life sequence

Of growth – being-sound-image-concept – must be followed.

But there are no more teachers who are

Grounded in Logos. We can hardly still clearly distinguish

The four worlds, let alone actually see them. Sweet images

Of Jesus and Christian dogmas – the time for these is over.

Intellect wants to be addressed only after the 12th year,

And then every pupil needs training in the senses:

In art, handwork, science. Teachers become mediators.

They are the ones who learn. Pupils should choose

Their own area of study in the senses: no more Pisa studies

And the curriculum. No more learning by heart.

Now they must learn through interest.

*Education is oppression today.

14

Today it is often recognised that the children who start

School are 95% genial. Those who leave school

Are only 5% genial. No more of this!

Are we to live in an economic fascism and taught to be

Functionally virtuous little cogs in the machine? No!

The goal is the creative human being. The child is the meaning,

Not money. There are three Christian tasks here:

-        Brotherly economy with the human being at the centre.

-        Equality before the law, free of arbitrariness and finally,

-        Freedom in spirit, also in schools.

In communism, politics determines the economy.

In capitalism, the economy determines social life.

Both are fundamentally wrong. A general threefolding

Is needed: of economy – law – spiritual life.

These three are our social thinking – feeling – willing

No more pastors. The teacher shapes the future.

We must beware of and avoid totalitarian systems.

So Hauser comes to us like a child.

As an adult, he has the consciousness of a five year-old.

*Adults should mature into children.

14′

XV) Ownership and accommodation are the next task.

Many want to live in community. But when they are not

Grounded in Logos, it always ends in suffering and power.

We are standing only at the beginning of the birth of the

True I. How the individual goes about owning something is

Original. Groups of 12 to 15 people develop: who learn,

Lend, exchange, gift, share. Some of them buy houses

Which then belong to no-one. Soon people speak of

Basic security, so that all can have accommodation and food.

But work on Logos must go on as well, otherwise

There will be only abuse. Everyone takes what he really

Needs. He gives up the rest, to create more free space,

So not caritas but philia is the solution today.

Only when many communal groups pulsate with life

Is an upper limit on income required. No-one needs

To possess a billion Euros. So what do we do about this?

The most difficult question is marriage: possession

Is forbidden; permissiveness ultimately destroys

The clarity of the soul.

*It is not Christian to hoard wealth.

15

The intellect can juggle internationally.

The Logos-I needs perception, relationship.

It is no longer about profit but about social bonding.

Workers should work together to serve the Whole.

But there is still no I in sight.

Dairy farmers still don’t receive their due, because

In East Asia bad milk comes onto the market.

What is organic, living? A village should again

Become a comm-unity, with a baker, school, and park.

Now the country is stuffed with supermarkets,

Large central hospitals and large central schools.

Everyone feels he must have a car. The model for this

Is the body, the organ, the cell. Work and money

Must be available for people, not people for

Banks and companies. Development aid has led

Always to exploitation. Christian groups build

Houses instead of slums and bore springs in dry regions.

Every revolution until now has turned into oppression.

From the Logos-I works a gentle will and world benevolence.

*From the Logos-I flows moral imagination.

15′

XVI) We know little about the angel of the Buddha.

When Buddha became enlightened under the Bodhi tree,

He knew that the Logos sleeps in the stone,

He breathes in the plant, and dreams and calls in the animal.

All is spirit. Gautauma wanted to go his way in silence.

Then his angel touched him: tell of your enlightenment!

There is no point, answered the Buddha,

For I have found no ears to hear it, let alone

A heart that is open for it. You are right, replied

The angel, but think about your own participation!

What do you mean by that? asked Buddha.

If YOU tell of your spiritual experience clearly today,

In 3000 years spiritual seekers could still awaken through it!

Now I admit you are right, said the Tathagata, bowing,

And began to turn the Wheel of the Law of the overcoming

Of suffering. This angel of the Buddha became,

As a follower of St. Michael, the Folk Spirit of Middle Europe.

The Folk Spirit St. Michael rose to become a Time Spirit.

And the Time Spirit became our new Folk Spirit from 1879.

*Buddha was involved in preparing the birth of Jesus.

16

There is now a Buddhist, Christian stream in Europe.

This means an inner training of the soul

Plus outer social brotherhood in the economy.

Buddha called forth another personality for Europe:

Before he died, he had already achieved Transfiguration.

He said: Ananda! If you had asked me whether I would help

Mankind in the struggle against Mara, the evil one,

I would have said no. All were shocked and listened carefully.

Buddha repeated his words a second time.

What did he mean? And then he let the cat out of the bag.

Ananda! If you had asked me a third time whether I would

Help mankind, standing by its side in the struggle against Mara, the evil one, I would have said yes! Ananda was Astonished. He was to transform evil. He is the new Bodhisattva Maitreya. And he took up within himself

As Dmitrii, the “False” Czar, the worst human being.

Maitreya is to waken Logos in the I of the people in Russia

Until c. 3500 so that the spirit itself can become free in us.

*The Eightfold Path is recommended for all today.

16′

XVII) The name of the angel is Vidar. Buddha and

Odin were the same individuality, according to R. Steiner.

And Vidar, the son of Odin becomes the angel of Buddha.

He works as a kind of angel of humanity: he helped

Abraham at the sacrifice of the lamb, Ahkenaten in his

Vision of Christ, Jason with the Golden Fleece.

Vidar took the 5 year-old Ieshua’s magic from him

So that he could become a human being. And at Gethsemani

Vidar gave the magic back at the third prayer so that

Ieshua  could survive the scourging. Vidar was given

These tasks by the Holy Spirit Sophia. After She had created

Human beings with a piece from each angel, and all of them Bowed before her new creation, she asked: we have guided The Logos into warmth, air, water. Who will help me

To guide it into what is solid and to spiritualise what is solid

For the salvation of the Father? Then all became quiet

And the small angels hid themselves behind the large ones,

Who also made themselves very small. I shall help you,

Piped up the brand-new human being

And stepped before the Goddess.

*Vidar is the I of all I’s, of the first Creation.

17

She said: but you will lose everything and even

Forget me, your mother. Ask the others: who will help him

So that he does not go under? Again a deep silence.

Then Vidar stepped forward. I want to serve him,

As he once served me at the beginning of the Creation!

She said: you too would have to fail pitifully at the task.

Therefore, I give you my Son, the Lamb of God.

Then the heavens opened and the eternal Lamb

Descended to Vidar. From now on, your name is “Vidar”.

Protect mankind, the new member of the spiritual world,

For me. Vidar’s mother was Grid, a giantess, and Odin,

The prince of the sky, was his father. He went wandering

Like his father and looked for pity in the form of

The remains of leather shoes. From these, he made

For himself a giant fighting boot. While his brothers

Were boasting about their heroic deeds, he served

Silently at table. He knew that soon Ragnarök would

Break out  – the war between the gods about mankind.

He had to defeat the Fenris Wolf and raise

The new human I’s  – Lif and Liftrasir – into life for the Logos.

*Vidar is one with the earth (Grid) and the sky (Odin)

17′

XVIII) We shall outline the Mystery of Pilsach as

Unthought-out, unfamiliar ideas as follows:

Around 1805 the world soul Ieshua died supernaturally.

In 1812 Lazarus was born in Hauser as a human bearer.

Until 1819 Vidar descended into the child.

He brought darkness, temperament, loneliness

As foundations of life. In 1821 the Son-Body of the

Lazarus-Vidar became free. At the same time  Ieshua Christ

Fell from etheric heights. Holy Michael protected

The Spirit-Man of Vidar. Holy Rael distributed the shattered Soul among I-men. Holy Vidar collected the destroyed Life Body and, bestowing his healthy ether body upon Ieshua,

He maintained Ieshua’s life in an intermediate condition.

From Vidar’s body of being, Holy Michael

Opened the Apocalypse. From the sacrificed soul Rael

Awakened depth psychology. Rudolf Steiner called

The whole process the repetition of the Mystery of Golgotha

In the Etheric. Only this concept. Nothing more.

No-one asked him about it. There was no resurrection!

*Vidar needed a human bearer: Lazarus

18

Hauser’s suffering after death was infinitely greater:

The Christ Power is now in the earth, with us. We must

Christianise our souls, then resurrection will be  -

Through us! As long as Ieshua Christ’s blessing was external,

We developed only self-seeking, arrogance, stupidity.

First we must learn to think freely and creatively.

Then, we should practise sense experiences with one another:

Celebrate festivals. The human law for becoming an I is:

Persist, examine, start again. By oneself and with others.

The Sermon on the Mount shows the sequence of steps

For this: poverty – we are nothing yet. We are attention and

Devotion. Suffering – we take the suffering upon ourselves;

What is its meaning for us? The wrong actions of ourselves and Of others. Meekness – acting without feeling of self.

The 3 opponents that have to be worked on are:

Fear of poverty-fear/knowledge, displeasure at suffering/Moulding and meekness-indolence: transformed

Into surrender, deep trust. We dive down into our I Am …

Into unbornness. Evil fears unbornness above all.

*Ieshua dies 300 million times a day!

18′

XIX) The Fifth Creation began in Ansbach.

Ansbach appears like a higher octave of Jerusalem:

⅓ soldiers, ⅓ officials ⅓ church leaders. It is the

Evangelical Rome, even still today. The Mystery

Of Golgotha ended the Fourth Creation.

Everyone received the Logos-I. But what

We call “I” is not the true Logos-I. We call

Our inner dialogue, which consists of ideas

And Memories, “I”. It is the ego, the mortal person.

The Logos-I has been within human beings for 1800 years. Today, the call for freedom and dignity has flared up, even

In Arab lands, where the concept of the I was not known.

The two Mysteries can be compared with one another:

The stab in the heart as the sign of the Lamb,

The apostles and disciples here; at that time there were

120 poets and thinkers, Hauser in their midst.

Ieshua died physically, today etherically. The Adam of Wisdom was concealed behind Steiner who first saw Hauser

Free of the body. 2 thieves on the cross: Lt. Hickel

*All will be renewed: from the being of the I.

19

Hennenhofer the murderer. Annas lived again in Amalie

Hessen-Darmstadt. Novalis and Sophie von Kühn lived

Through double incarnations. Novalis, the former Baptist,

Died and was corrupted as Hauser’s father.

What a triumph of Jezebel-Herodias-Geyer von Geyersberg.

The child that was able to flee to Egypt was captured.

Ieshua experienced 3 days lying in the grave,

Hauser 12 years (!). Sophie died when still a child and

As Stephanie de Beauharnais suffered through all the stages

Of Christ’s passion. The World-I Ieshua Christ descended

And idealists only want to look at the loving couple Sophie

And Novalis? The 3 bearers of Christ: Vidar – Holy Michael – Rael are one in the salvation of mankind.

Vidar receives Ieshua in life until people grasp their true I. The Lamb Has opened the Apocalypse.

I’s are not yet conscious of Their responsibility.

The 5th Post-Atlantean Epoch 1413-3573 is one of Confrontation with evil and ends in a war of all against all!

*I Am Bread. I Am Light, I Am Door, I Am Lamb.

19′

XX) Evil fears the unborn. Let us stop

Identifying ourselves with the body or losing ourselves

In consciousness of the past. Body is a microcosmos,

The image of the universe. We receive

Under the Cross the spirit of the universe. Therefore,

We must hold to: letting go – examining – beginning anew.

If we proceed from our knowledge, we strengthen evil.

Knowing and doing is the primal sin of our time.

Let us struggle for primal image – primal sound – essence!

Then working together as a play group is easier and deeper.

I let go of my dead ideas, grounding myself in the groundless,

In the I AM. Every day I begin anew.

The creative life is insecure. Instead of:

Knowing and doing … I practise attention and empathy.

For I live in you and feel myself open to the world spirit.

What is unformed, attentive, compassionate leads

To the unborn: what I really am is never born.

All that is around me – that is what I AM! And the

Still centre, full of empathy: that is the living Christ!

*One who wants to be humble, develops strong arrogance.

20

When I take back my Self, my Self first enters in.

In the renouncing of the knowing-doing ego, my Logos-I

Comes in. What wants to happen?

My fear, my ideas, my attachments, my displeasure  -

All recede. Fear-displeasure-indolence are my real enemies.

Interest-empathy-creativity are the gifts of my I.

He who does not practise the Buddha’s eightfold Path

Loses his soul. He who does not serve in social life,

Does not grasp what creation is. The unborn is free

Of attachment, of knowing and wanting.

The Now is eternity. The spirit world is here. What is positive

In the negative? Here in one’s innermost soul is freedom.

Otherwise, I am only spatial, programmed. Fallen spirits

Want to rule us through technology. 3000 years before Christ, Lucifer forced us into the intellect. Ieshua replied

For us with the Logos-Being. Now Satan is coming

As a human being and wants to rob us of our free Logos-Being. Only the unborn will withstand him …

Creation is much more than that which we know.

Seek what is not thought. Become those who become …

*The 5th Creation flows from that which is not object

20′

CHRIST IN ANSBACH, Overview, Prologue 0

I)                  God

II)                Twofold

III)              Mary

IV)             4 worlds

V)               Reincarnation

VI)             Man and woman

VII)           All-Christ

VIII)          Death

IX)              Intellect

X)                True I

XI)              Golgotha

XII)            Rhythm

XIII)           Kaspar Hauser

XIV)           Pedagogy

XV)             Ownership and property

XVI)           Buddha

XVII)         Vidar

XVIII)       Pilsach

XIX)          5th Creation

XX)            The Unborn, Epilogue

Epilogue

These words were spoken in:

Ansbach, Nuremberg, Freiburg, and Vienna.

Nowhere was an I-man to be seen.

In the end Johann on the path was no longer able

To rent a space in Ansbach.

The theme “Angel Kaspar Hauser” became the cause of panic.

In Dornach he was blacklisted.

The Kaspar Hauser  – Vidar connection

Was the cause of discrimination against him; he was shunned.

His best friends turned away from him.

As long as he gave his pupils wisdom and humour,

They were apparently all fire and flame.

But when he asked them for practice and decision,

They suddenly all disappeared.

We want to remain just as we are!

The spirit of darkness goes on with his chess moves:

He already has dreamland well under control.

He is now preparing a natural disaster …

*Holy Michael, save us in this peril!

This translation is placed here in remembrance of the writer, whom I was grateful to have met for the first time in 2004 in Ansbach (Germany), and thereafter several times, always around the biannual Kaspar Hauser Festspiele (festivals) in Ansbach  – until his death in 2016. The translation will be followed by others from his works.

- Terry Boardman

Illustration: water colour by Kaspar Hauser

Part 1 of the article is here: http://threeman.org/?p=3182

IN the presence of Rudolf Steiner during his visit to Britain in the late summer of 1923, on 2 September the Anthroposophical Society in Great Britain was founded, and Daniel N. Dunlop proposed that Rudolf Steiner become its president for life, which Steiner accepted. After a lecture he held later that day, Steiner gave this verse to the members of the Society in Britain:

I gaze into the darkness. In it arises Light – living Light.

Who is this Light in the darkness? It is I myself in my reality.

This reality of the I does not enter into my life on earth; I am but a picture of it.

But I shall find it again when, with good will for the Spirit,

I shall have passed through the Gate of Death.

The Goetheanum, at Dornach, Switzerland, the fruit of ten year’s hard work destroyed by arson on 31 December 1922, had lain in ruins since the beginning of the New Year. The situation in a postwar Germany beset by hyperinflation was absolutely dire – hunger, poverty, corruption, crime, decadence, extremist political violence – and nationalist attacks had prevented Steiner from lecturing there in 1923. But he felt that the summer school at Penmaenmawr, north Wales, in particular was one of the most significant episodes in the story of the anthroposophical movement and frequently referred to it as such. Seeds were planted there, not least in relation to the anthroposophical medical work, which were very positive for the future: light in the darkness.

Our present circumstances today in 2024, on the surface, look very grim. Doomsayers abound. For some three decades, many have been predicting catastrophe for humanity and nature as a whole through a climate crisis centred on ‘greenhouse gases’, notably CO₂, allegedly caused by ‘man-made’ (now renamed anthropogenic) ‘global warming’ (now renamed ‘climate change’). With each passing year, their warnings have become ever more shrill, to the point where we are now being urged to eat insects instead of animals, because animals’ gaseous methane emissions are adding to ‘climate change’. Others have warned that since the banking crash of 2007-2009, we have been standing on the edge of a financial precipice which might collapse beneath us at any time. Then there are those who have been telling us over the past ten years or so that ‘democracy’, which looked so triumphant in the 1990s, is now tottering, through corruption and apathy, towards authoritarianism. The techno-utopian Transhumanists and their techno-dystopian opponents, from their differing optimistic and pessimistic perspectives, both declare that humanity will be replaced in this century by artificial intelligence and cyborgs. Most recently, the political instruments of the global elite urge us to prepare for war against Russia, and possibly China, apparently forgetting that this is not 1939 and that those two countries, like the West, possess nuclear weapons supposedly capable of destroying much if not all life on the planet. Clearly, in such circumstances, one needs cool nerves.

Steiner pointed out many times that disasters and catastrophes in the modern age, such as the First World War, which he lived through, have occurred and will go on occurring because of the onset of materialism in our thinking around the year 1600, its subsequent application to all aspects of culture and our failure to wake up to this fact. In particular, he urged that without awareness of the activities of spiritual beings, including those of the human so-called ‘dead’, historical and contemporary events could not be understood. The spiritual world, after all, is not ‘up there’ or ‘over there’ or ‘beyond’, it is all round us; we are moving through it all the time, but we don’t see it, just as we don’t see the objects in our bedrooms when we lie asleep in our beds. We are not conscious of them, but they are there nevertheless.

In daily life, when we look at another person, we see the body, but we do not see the soul, the spirit, the ‘I’ (the kernel, the essential self of the human individuality) and yet they are invisibly associated with the person’s body. Likewise, when we observe the planets in the heavens, we see the ‘heavenly bodies’ of Mars, Jupiter or Saturn, for example, but we do not physically see the spiritual beings associated with those planetary bodies. Both modern and ancient spiritual science, however, speak of the existence of spiritual beings associated with the heavenly bodies and not only with the planetary bodies we can actually see but also with the regions or spheres which the orbits of those planetary bodies delineate. In other words, the planet is but an indicator of a zone, region, layer, or sphere – if we imagine our solar system rather like an onion with thick layers – and the beings of our solar system have their habitations in the layers of the onion but are able to move freely throughout the various layers.

                                                        The Saturn-Jupiter conjunction Dec. 2020

The 800-year cycle of Saturn and Jupiter

Saturn is the planet traditionally associated with the past, with restriction, limits and boundaries  and with the beginning of the solar system, while Jupiter is traditionally associated with the future, with prosperity and expansion of all kinds). The 60-year invisible equilateral triangle patterns formed by the meetings of these two giants (3 meetings, or conjunctions, every 60 years) rotate around the Zodiac over a period of approximately 800 years, as noted by Renaissance astronomers such as Tycho Brahe and Johannes Kepler.¹ They recognised this 800-year periodicity as signifying the birth of a new and particular historical and cultural impulse. Approximately every 400 years there is a particularly close conjunction between Saturn and Jupiter. These ‘super-close’ conjunctions mark the midpoint, or the onset of the descending phase of the 800-year cycle of conjunctions.

What is meant by ‘descending’ here? Each 800-year cycle passes through four phases: Saturn and Jupiter conjunctions occur for approximately 200 years in Fire signs of the Zodiac, then for 200 years in Earth signs, followed by 200 years in Air signs and finally, 200 years in Water signs – always in this order. The new historical and cultural impulse launched by a new 800-year cycle always begins with a Fire sign (Aries, Leo, or Sagittarius). Over 400 years this new impulse builds in momentum to a certain peak and then begins gradually to fade over the following 400 years. In 1603 a new 800-year cycle began (in Sagittarius); we are still in that cycle today, but the super-close Saturn-Jupiter conjunction of December 2020 was important because with that conjunction the two giants began to meet in Air signs, which they will do for the next approximately 200 years. Four years ago, we therefore entered the descending arc of the historical impulse that had begun in c.1603. We can see this impulse as the impulse of materialistic natural science that began with the likes of Bacon, Galileo, Kepler and Newton.

The previous 800-year cycle had begun (again in a Fire sign, Sagittarius) in October 809. In the West, we can see that the impulse that began at that time was that of the political power of the Papacy in relation to the ‘new’ Roman Empire, founded when Pope Leo III crowned Charlemagne ‘Roman Emperor’ on Christmas Day 800; (the term Holy Roman Empire was not used until 1254). This universalist impulse of Papacy and Empire reached its mid-point, or high point 400 years later with the conjunction of April 1206. Two years earlier, in the so-called 4th Crusade, the ancient Byzantine Empire – the direct successor to the Roman Empire in that it had been founded by the Emperor Constantine I (‘the Great’) who had moved the capital of the empire from Rome to Byzantium and first renamed the city Nova Roma (New Rome) in 324 and then in 330 Constantinople, after himself – was extinguished by the Crusaders of the West as a favour to the Venetians and their Doge (Duke), Enrico Dandolo (1120–1205), who had long wanted to see the Byzantine Empire destroyed; he had been blinded there in his younger days. He was a man, incidentally, whom Steiner identified as “an incarnation of the ahrimanic spirit”.² So, the older form of universalism, the old Roman Empire, which had been transferred to the East by Constantine and had come to represent a continuation of the Greek (Orthodox) rather than the Latin (Roman Catholic) spirit, was extinguished by the Catholic Crusaders of the West and many of the relics, works of art and precious documents of Constantinople were transferred to Venice and other places further West.

                                                                             Pope Innocent III  r. 1198-1216

In the Christian world from 1204 onwards, the ‘newer’ universalist impulses of the Italian Papacy (most of the Popes were Roman or Italian aristocrats) and of the Western Roman Empire of the Germans were dominant. But that moment of the apparent triumph of Latin Christianity over the Greek ‘Romans’ of the East in 1204 – Rome’s triumph over its old rival Constantinople – proved to be the moment when the cosmic scales began to swing the other way into the second half of the 800-year cycle that had begun in Rome, with the Pope’s coronation of Charlemagne in the year 800. 1206 was the beginning of the end of the newer universalist impulses of Papacy and Empire, even though the two most prominent rulers of the next 20 years were very outspoken representatives of those same universalist impulses: (see pics.) Pope Innocent III (1198-1216) and Frederick II, who was King of Germany from 1212 and Roman Emperor from 1220 until his death in 1250.³

                                                                                 Frederick II, 1194-1250

                            King of Sicily from 1198, King of Germany from 1212

King of Italy and Holy Roman Emperor from 1220, King of Jerusalem from 1225.

Outsize figures of tremendous ambition and overweening claim for the institutions they ruled, the two men frequently clashed with one another. Frederick was excommunicated several times by the Popes and was called preambulus Antichristi (predecessor of the Antichrist) by the Vatican and by his contemporaries stupor mundi (the astonishment of the world), so from 1220 to 1250 a man was Roman Emperor in the West who his contemporaries clearly felt was extremely unorthodox and radical, a most unusual genius in some ways but also immoral, or even amoral, not least because of his bizarre ‘scientific’ experiments on live human beings and his employment of Muslims and Jews at his court.

While the universalist claims of Papacy and Empire, which arguably had their roots in the Pope’s coronation of Charlemagne in 800, seemed in the ascendant in the West c.1206, with both Pope and Emperor making claims of their sovereignty over almost everyone in Europe, in the East universalism was also about to rise to its zenith, in a way that would make the claims of Pope and Emperor seem insignificant. This would combine with another fact of cosmic history that is referred to by Steiner many times but had been known of by European esotericists for at least four or five centuries before him – the cycle of the rulerships of seven archangels over approximately 350-400-year periods throughout history. Archangels are normally associated with groups (tribes, clans, peoples, nations) of human beings, as distinct from Angels, who ‘guide’ individuals, but there are seven named Archangels, each associated with a particular planetary sphere, who have the special task of guiding those peoples who have a particular ‘leading role’, for about 350-400 years, within larger historical epochs of 2160 years which relate to the apparent passage of the Sun through the Zodiac.⁴ In 1190 (according to Rudolf Steiner, but 1171 according to Abbot Johannes Trithemius of Sponheim in 1508)⁵ the Archangel Samael, associated with the planet Mars, took over the rulership of humanity from the Archangel Raphael, associated with Mercury. The 13th century then, was the first century of the age of the Mars Archangel Samael.

How does this relate to our time 800 years later? 1226 saw the first Saturn-Jupiter conjunction after the midpoint of the great Saturn-Jupiter conjunction cycle that began in 809. The 1226 conjunction occurred in Aquarius, an Air sign. What was the midpoint of the Saturn-Jupiter cycle through which we are living in the 21st century and which began in 1603? It was the December 2020 conjunction. The last Saturn-Jupiter conjunction to appear as close and as visible as the one at winter solstice December 2020 occurred in March 1226. In terms of Saturn-Jupiter conjunctions then, 1226 relates to 2020; these two conjunctions were both close to, or at, the midpoint of an 800-year cycle. The 809-1603 grand cycle can be described as that of the impulse of political and religious universalism, its rise and fall. The 1603-2398 grand cycle can be seen as that of the impulse of materialistic natural science, a universalist impulse of another kind, which seeks to universalise the claims of materialism in all areas of life, beginning with natural science in the 17th century. There is a resonance then, between the 13th and the 21st centuries. In 1226 and 2020 these two broad 800 year-long cultural impulses were at their peak but beginning to head downwards.

The Mongols and Mars

Astronomer Patrick Hartigan at Rice University in Houston,⁶ USA notes with regard to the 1226 conjunction that “[f]or perspective, Genghis Khan was still roaming Asia then.” A particularly interesting observation! Genghis Khan, who arguably could be called the most martial warlord who launched the most martial, even genocidal empire in recorded history, died the following year (1227) whilst on a campaign against the Western Xia (the Tangut kingdom of northwest China) who his forces subjected to genocide. Born in c.1162 just before the beginning of the Mars Archangel period began, Temüjin – the name comes from a root meaning ‘iron’⁷ – took the name Genghis Khan (‘master of the ocean’, i.e. ‘universal ruler’) and had been declared Great Khan of all the Mongols in 1206, the year of the previous Saturn-Jupiter conjunction and the turning point conjunction in the 800-year cycle from 809 to 1603. Steiner pointed out that two of the most significant things about the Mongol invasions of the 13th century – quite apart from their effects on the history of China and India – were the Black Death (and its many ramifications) throughout the vast continent of Eurasia some 100 years later and the ‘discovery’, or rather re-discovery, of America by Europeans in 1492;⁸ we can then realise the world-historical significance of the 13th century.

Campaigns of Genghis Khan and his generals 1209-1227

In short, this was the time when humanity began to be aware of the world as a whole. The Mongols not only killed millions of people across Eurasia, often in the most brutal fashion, –and along with it a psychic shock wave that still rumbles in the subconscious of many cultures – but they also created the largest empire the world had ever known and the most extensive trade network in history to that point, which went from Korea in the East to what we now call Ukraine in the West, underpinned by their roads and postal service and ‘policed’ by their terrifying armies and the brutal but very clear laws of their empire. In fact, they created the first truly Eurasian political and economic system, which also facilitated many cultural contacts. In the Holy land at various times in the 13th century from 1220s onwards the Mongols confronted the forces of the Islamic Near East and the Christian Crusaders of Europe who launched six Crusades in the 13th century⁹ ostensibly to defeat the Muslims in Palestine. In the last year of the century the Mongols successfully raided in Syria and Palestine as far south as Gaza. In that tumultuous century, for the first time ever, three religious and cultural spheres were meeting each other on a large scale. In the Mongol armies were Mongol worshippers of their native sky god Tengri, Buddhists, pagans and animists of various kinds, Christian Nestorians, Persian and Central Asian Muslims, and Chinese Taoists and Confucians. East Asia was meeting the Middle East and Europe for the first time. Much of Asia, from East to West, was united under a single, universal ruler, while the Crusades, the first few at any rate, united European nobility more loosely, under the papal banner.

This meeting in the 13th century between Europe, the Middle East and the Far East would lead to much remarkable cultural, literary, and artistic fructification among those human spirits who were developed enough to sense something of the meaning of what was happening in this historic cultural confluence, which ostensibly was occurring for martial reasons but actually concealed something much deeper. Some 1250 years before, in the Holy Land, the Christ Event had occurred against the background of a dominant universal empire within which Romans, Greeks and Jews struggled to live together in Palestine. In the 13th century, this time along with Muslim Arabs, Egyptians and even Mongols and all those who came along with them, Romans (European Crusaders), Greeks (Byzantines) and Jews were struggling and striving with one another once more in the same region. Amidst all the conflict, much observation and mutual learning also went on. Out of all this came the great 13th century Gothic cathedrals of Europe, the poetry of the minnesängers and the troubadours, the songs of Walther von der Vogelweide (1170-1230), the Parzival of Wolfram von Eschenbach and numerous other cultural and artistic impulses, including Jewish kabbalah and Arabist-influenced Aristotelian thought. A number of versions of the tale of Barlaam and Josaphat (aka Bilawhar and Budhasaf – a Christianised version of the story of Gautama Buddha) appeared in numerous versions in European culture in the 13th century. The Austrian poet Rudolf von Ems (c. 1200-1254) wrote a version, which was described by the 19th century writer Heinrich Heine as “perhaps the flower of religious literary creativity in the German Middle Ages”. Marco Polo noted the similarity between the tale of “Sakyamuni Burkham” (as he called the Buddha) and St. Josaphat.¹⁰ The story would find its way into Pedro Calderón de la Barca’s play, La vida es sueño (Life Is A Dream – c.1630), a classic of Spain’s “Golden Age” of drama, not long after the end of the 800-year Saturn-Jupiter cycle. Finally, in 1265, soon after the end of the “short period of spiritual darkness”, the great Dominican philosopher and teacher Thomas Aquinas (1225-1274), who both combated Islamic philosophical thought and also made use of precious Arab translations of Aristotle, began to write his key work Summa Theologica, which he worked on till the end of his life but did not finish. In this universal work he sought, not least through his understanding of Aristotle, to create a harmonising balance between reason and faith, which would sustain Christian theology in the face of the challenges of heresy, Islam and Nominalism. Aristotle too almost fell foul of the doctors of the Church, despite being regarded as one himself, but in later centuries he became an authority in European academic life. Nevertheless, this attempt by Aquinas to harmonise reason and faith soon came under sustained attack from Nominalist philosophers in the 14th century as the materialist impulses of Mars grew ever stronger in western philosophy. Nominalists had a utilitarian approach to universal concepts, regarding them as mere convenient labels without any spiritually real content.

The 13th century and our time

Today, 800 years on from the 13th century, in an age driven more by economic competition than by military conflict, we see similar East-West cross-cultural influences arising even more intensively. China is part of the BRICS economic bloc alongside Russia, India and Iran, and has deepening economic relations with most of the countries of the Middle East and Europe as it develops its vast Eurasian transport infrastructure network known as the ‘Belt and Road’, or colloquially, ‘the New Silk Road’. Trains run from Shanghai to Düsseldorf and London. The Chinese state-owned COSCO Shipping company operates the port of Piraeus in Athens. China also conducts regular military exercises with Russia and China has a large military base in Djibouti at the southern entrance to the Red Sea as it develops its interests in Africa and the Indian Ocean region.

                                                              New (‘iron’) silk road map

The Chinese are not Mongols, of course. In the 13th century, they had a rich civilisation of millennia behind them and regarded the Mongols as barbarians. The Chinese were farmers and city dwellers; the Mongols were nomadic pastoralists. Nevertheless, from the esoteric perspective, all the peoples of northeast Asia such as the Mongols, Han Chinese, Tibetans, Manchurians, Koreans and Japanese have since Atlantean times all belonged to ‘the Mars race’, and it is no accident that they are known for martial arts.¹¹ Despite the differences between the Chinese and the Mongols, we see nevertheless, how in waves of 800 years –, waves determined not by climate change and CO₂ but by cosmic and spiritual forces – a certain kind of vigorous impulse has suddenly and rapidly spread across Eurasia from the Far East to Europe: the Huns in the 5th century, the Mongols in the 13th century, and the Chinese today in the 21st century.

                                                                              Mongol warriors

In the 13th century, the civilisation of the Islamic Near East, hard-pressed between the European Crusaders and the Mongols, came close to suffering collapse some 600 years after the death of the Prophet Mohammed. The 600-year-old Abbasid Caliphate was destroyed when the Mongols took Baghdad, and there were efforts between the Christians and the Mongols to combine against the Muslims but they came to nothing, and eventually, most Mongols in Central and West Asia adopted Islam. The Egyptian Mamluk Sultanate defeated the Mongols at the Battle of Ain Jalut in Palestine (southeastern Galilee) in 1260 – it was the first time the Mongols had suffered a major defeat. Islam survived the Mongol storm.

Today, there are those who are concerned that the encounter between the ‘Christian’, the Sinic and the Islamic worlds in our time might result in another world war, centred this time on Israel and Palestine. They point to the serious plans being made in Israel by religious extremists to rebuild the Third Temple, which would involve the destruction of Islam’s third holiest site, the al-Aqsa Mosque on Temple Mount.¹² Some claim that a letter supposedly written by Albert Pike, a prominent mid-19th century American Freemason in 1871 to Giuseppe Mazzini, the Italian nationalist activist, prophesied that there would be three world wars in the future and that the third would break out in the Holy Land through a struggle between “Political Zionism” and “Islam”. This ‘prophecy’ has spread around much of the Internet, but researcher Terry Melanson has shown conclusively, however, that it is a fake that can be traced back to the famous arch-hoaxer, Léo Taxil¹³ (real name: Marie-Joseph Jogand-Pagès, 1854-1907).

Meanwhile, there are similarities between the Crusader territories in the Holy Land in the 13th century and the State of Israel today in that both were formed by considerable numbers of people from Europe – people from a different civilisation – who moved to what was then overwhelmingly the Muslim majority land of Palestine and took much of it by force (1098, 1948). In the early 13th century, the Crusaders expected to remain in the Holy Land, and in 1226 Emperor Frederick II managed to conduct the Sixth Crusade (1226-1229) without fighting and successfully negotiated the peaceful return of Jerusalem to the Crusaders (the city had been lost to Saladin in 1187). Yet by the end of the century, after the fall of Acre in 1291, the Crusaders had been forced out of the entire Holy Land, never to return.¹⁴ The foreign invaders were thus expelled after almost 200 years of occupation, but the Muslim world had also suffered a tremendous blow in the region: in 1258 the Mongols had utterly destroyed Baghdad, capital of the Muslim world since 750, bringing to an end the Arab “Golden Age”; this was another world-historical event.

The Ottoman Turks would soon take the place of the Arabs as the main standard bearer for militant Islam. The ancestors of the Turks (Oghuz Turks) were originally from east central Asia and were related in language and religion (Tengriism) to the Mongols; according to some scholars, genetic evidence shows that Mongolia was actually the original homeland of the Turkic peoples. The Ottoman Turks migrated from central Asia to Anatolia (central Türkiye today) in the 13th century and by the very end of that century, the House of Osman had established itself as a principality in western Anatolia, from where in the next century the Osmanlis (Ottomans) would launch their attacks into the Balkans and eventually take Constantinople in 1453. Today, 800 years after their arrival in Anatolia, the Turks, having been blocked from joining the EU, are looking to bring together the Turkic peoples of Asia from Türkiye to Kyrgyzstan, in a loose confederative association.¹⁵

The Mongol Empire itself soon fell victim to the separative and warlike impulse of Mars. Civil war among the descendants of the Shengwu Huangdi – the ‘Holy Martial Emperor’ Genghis Khan – broke out some 33 years after his death, and by the time of the death in 1294 of his grandson Kublai Khan, who ruled from Dadu (in Mongolian – Khanbaliq, modern Beijing), this most universal of empires, the largest land empire in history, had already fragmented into four khanates: that of Kublai in East Asia and China, the Chagatai khanate in central Asia, the Golden Horde in northwest Asia and southern Russia, and the Ilkhanate in southwest Asia and Iran. Their struggles against each other and against their own enemies would determine much of the history of Asia throughout the rest of the 800-year Saturn-Jupiter cycle until the early 17th century.

The ‘heretics’ of the 13th century

In 1226, the year of the Saturn-Jupiter conjunction that corresponds to that of 2020, King Louis VIII of France led his armies on crusade against the Albigensian (Cathar) ‘heretics’ and their supporters among the nobility of the Languedoc region of southern France. There was something almost Asiatic and Buddhistic about the Cathars, who sincerely wished to remove themselves as soon as possible from what they saw as a world of pain, a veil of tears, a material realm of illusion which, they believed, had been constructed by a satanic Demiurge. The previous crusade in 1209-1216 had been a private affair conducted with the Pope’s blessing by the nobles of northern France¹⁶ greedy for land and treasure and, despite appalling bloodletting by the ‘crusaders’, had ended in failure with the death of the crusaders’ leader Simon de Montfort and the defeat of his son. The crusade of 1226-1229, however, was conducted by the king of France and lasted only three years. Despite the death of the king in 1226, the crusade was successfully concluded by his wife, Queen Blanche, with the utter defeat of the Cathars and their supporters and the beginning of a century of persecution of the Cathars until they were finally extinguished in 1321. The fortress of Montségur was the last Cathar stronghold to hold out, until 1244 when, after a year-long siege and eventual surrender, some 200 Cathars surrendered themselves to be burned alive at the foot of the mountain fortress.

But here too, we see the beginning of the end for the forces of orthodox universalism. The 13th century witnessed the Church’s almost desperate attempts to stamp out what it considered to be an increasing number of heretical groups: the Cathars, the Waldensians, the Bogomils, Fratelli, Apostolic Brethren, Brethren of the Free Spirit and others. There were various differences between these groups, but they all tended to focus on the individual coming to Christ rather than on merely accepting the authority of the Church and its doctrines, and many were millenarian in spirit, believing that the end of the Age or the end of the world was nigh. In this sense, these heretical groups of the 13th century were the forerunners of the European proto-Protestant and Protestant groups of later centuries. Steiner describes how the spiritual sphere of Mars in the spiritual world is that sphere where we experience the spiritual archetypes of the mineral, solid aspect of the physical world.¹⁷ The materialism with which our own age is still so sorely afflicted is deeply bound up with the spiritual sphere of Mars –- the planet that draws Elon Musk and so many others in our time who are keen to go to Mars.¹⁸ The impulse of the Mars sphere and the Mars Archangel is therefore one of separation, fragmentation and individuation: this can frequently bring conflict but also the courage that puts iron in the blood and enables the individual to stand up for ideals and against oppression. Furthermore, since the year 1604, the spiritual sphere of Mars has been undergoing a profound transformation.¹⁹

There was one group which, unlike the others mentioned above, did not become visible in the 13th century and if the Church had known of it, would no doubt have sought to suppress it. This was the beginning of the Rose Cross impulse somewhere in central Europe, most likely southwest Germany, around 1250. Steiner describes the process in a series of lectures given from September 1911 to December 1912:²⁰ “The middle of the 13th century”, he says “was the beginning of a new culture. At this time a certain low point in spiritual life had been reached. Even the most highly developed could not approach the spiritual worlds”.²¹ This sense of a dark age in which genuine spirituality was almost unattainable was also shared at that time in Japan.

A detour – Japan in the 13th century

Before continuing with the Rose Cross theme, let us first cast a sideways glance at 13th century Japan that will provide further evidence of the nature of the 13th century. At the end of the 12th century, as the Age of Mars was dawning across the world, the samurai warrior class had firmly established its control over Japan, supplanting the rule of the Emperor and his courtiers who remained only nominally in charge. The centre of power had shifted from the imperial capital in Kyoto in central Japan to the samurai stronghold of Kamakura, just south of what is today Tokyo. For most of the 13th century (1203-1333) the samurai family of the Hōjō regents (shikken) ruled Japan on behalf of the Emperor. One Emperor, Go-Toba, rose against them in 1221 but was easily defeated and exiled. In 1232, the Hōjō regency council imposed Japan’s first military code of law, the Goseibai Shikimoku, which remained in force for 635 years. In 1274 and 1281, the Hōjō regency, with ‘a little help’ from divine winds (kamikaze) – seasonal typhoons – managed to beat off two attempted invasions by large Mongol invasion fleets. Japan remained independent and not subject to the Mongols – a fact of world-historic significance. Direct universal rule in Japan – that of the Emperor – was undermined and defeated by the samurai warriors decades before the barons in England temporarily imposed their will on King John and made him sign the Magna Carta document of rights in 1215. In Japan, the warriors ruled in the monarch’s name while paying him lip service. These were signs of the new Mars Age.

Buddha statue in the 13th cent. samurai capital, Kamakura,

with cherry blossoms, the symbol of the samurai

It is symptomatic that in the ‘Mars culture’ of Japan in the 13th century, several new sects of Buddhism emerged at that time. None of them featured the complex esotericism of earlier schools – all were marked by great simplicity of practice: the Sōtō Zen sect founded by Dōgen (1200-1253) in the 1230s, with its central practice of shikan taza – seeking satori (enlightenment) simply sitting facing a blank wall, focusing only on one’s breath; the Nichiren shōshū sect founded in 1253 by Nichiren (1222-1282) urged its followers to focus on chanting only the title of the vast Lotus Sutra: Namu myōhō renge kyō (Devotion to the Ineffable Dharma of the Lotus Sutra) and to aggressively proselytise other sects in debate by the technique of shakubuku (‘break and subdue’); the Jōdō and Jōdō Shinshū sects founded by Hōnen (1133-1212) and Shinran (1173-1263) respectively both emphasised the fact that humanity was now living through the Mappō (the final, degenerate age of the Buddhist cycle of Time, when people find it hard to live according to the Buddhist Law – Dharma), so Buddhists could only depend devotionally on tariki (the power of the Buddhas and the saints) not jiriki (one’s own power) and could only seek to constantly keep in mind (13th century ‘mindfulness’!) and chant the name of Amitābha Buddha (the Buddha of Infinite Light in the West) endless times: Namu Amida Butsu (Devotion to Amitābha Buddha), in order to be saved and be reborn in his ‘Pure Land’ (Jōdō). Such practices of the new Japanese Buddhist sects were all characterised by simple acts of will, which reflected the new Age of the Mars Archangel, and not by knowledge of sutras, philosophy, precepts, or by techniques of imagination, visualisation, symbolic gestures and postures etc as in the older Buddhist sects that were reflective of the previous Ages of the Mercury (Raphael) and Jupiter (Zachariel) Archangels.

The Beginnings of the Rose Cross in the 13th century

In the Christian West there were certain parallel developments among new sects that the Church was wary of, such as the Order of the Franciscans (founded 1209), or else actively persecuted, such as the Waldensians and Cathars (the Albigensian Crusades (1209-1229), and also teachings such as those of the hugely popular and respected Italian preacher, Joachim of Fiore (1135-1202) who taught, on the basis of his millenarian interpretation of the Book of Revelation, a doctrine of Three Ages: the notion that after the Age of the Father and the Age of the Son, from around the year 1260, humanity would soon enter the final Age, that of the Holy Spirit when the Church would become unnecessary, and when infidels and Christians would unite. This notion of the Age of the Holy Spirit would have huge resonance in Europe among religious radicals, especially in the religiously fervent 16th and 17th centuries.

In both East and West then, in the middle of that 800 year-long cycle of Saturn-Jupiter conjunctions, people felt that their era was a momentous and very difficult time in history. The coming of the awesome Mongols who destroyed so many kingdoms, including the venerable ones of China, Arabia, and Russia – Genghis Khan called himself “the punishment of God”²² – seemed to bear that out. The dark period of spiritual void in the first half of the 13th century of which Steiner spoke came to an end, however, around 1250-1260, the very time when the unitary Mongol Empire split, and in Europe, hidden and in a secret, unnamed place, the seeds of the Rose Cross movement began when, according to Steiner, “a 13th came to join the 12” and to be initiated by them. This initiation “could take place only after the short period of darkness had run its course.”²³ (Nb. this was in the middle of the 13th century) : a pious and fragile youth who had been incarnated at the time of the Mystery of Golgotha and who would later be known as Christian Rosenkreutz was educated and brought up by 12 initiates who represented the seven ages of Atlantis, the subsequent four post-Atlantean epochs,²⁴ and the intellectual knowledge attainable by the culture of the 13th century. These 12 “were conscious that the external Christianity of the Church was only a caricature of the real Christianity. They were permeated with the greatness of Christianity although in the outside world they were taken to be its enemies. Each individuality worked his way into just one aspect of Christianity. Their endeavour was to unite the various religions into one great whole. They were convinced that the whole of spiritual life was contained in their 12 streams, and each one influenced the pupil to the best of his ability. Their aim was to achieve a synthesis of all the religions…”²⁵ The youngster grew greatly in spiritual stature but physically, he wasted away until he lay near death. The 12 gathered in a circle around him, ministering to him, praying over him. After a while, he awoke, transformed in body and spirit. Over a few weeks he then revealed to them what he had learned from them but in the light of a new revelation he had received: the vision of the etheric Christ such as Paul had seen on the road to Damascus. “This new form was as though given by Christ Himself. What he now revealed to them, the 12 called true Christianity, the synthesis of all the religions, and they distinguished between this Christianity and the Christianity of the period in which they lived.”²⁶

The initiated one died “relatively young”, but his life (etheric) body remained within the spiritual atmosphere of the earth, from where it could inspire the 12 and their pupils “so that it could form the occult Rosicrucian stream”, and it became once again part of the new etheric body of the 13th when he reincarnated again in the next century, in the year 1378.²⁷ According to the first Rosicrucian Manifesto, Fama Fraternitatis (1614), after travelling for years in the Near East, N. Africa and Spain, he returned to Germany and in 1413, aged 35, started to teach his own pupils of the Fraternity of the Rose Cross in ‘the House of the Holy Spirit’ and send them out into the world, where they worked outwardly as unpaid medical doctors. In 1604, one year after the close conjunction of Saturn and Jupiter of 1603 which began the new 800 year cycle in the Fire sign of Sagittarius, one of the members of the small Rosicrucian circle in Tübingen, southwest Germany, Johann Valentin Andreae, aged just 17, wrote down the inspired work, The Chymical Wedding of Christian Rosenkreutz, which was published in 1616 in Strasbourg. In that same year 1604, according to the Roscrucian legend in the Fama Fraternitatis, the tomb of Christian Rosenkreutz was discovered.

From its seed-like beginnings at the end of that short period of great spiritual darkness in the 13th century which had begun with the Age of the Mars Archangel (the sack of Constantinople, the Albigensian Crusade, the Mongol invasions across Eurasia…), a completely new spiritual and social impulse that sought to unite Spirit and material Nature – on the basis of the individual’s free research and efforts – now, 400 years later in the early 17th century, began to emerge into the light and make itself known. What the 12 had learned from the 13th in the 13th century, the new Christian knowledge revealed by the young Christian Rosenkreutz, they put into the form of symbols and passed on to their pupils. Eventually, these symbols were published in the early 17th century by the alchemist Adrian (or Hadrian) Seumenicht (1603-1638) alias Hinricus Madathanus Theosophus in a book titled The Secret Symbols of the Rosicrucians, which was republished in 1785 in Altona, near Hamburg (Altona was then ruled by Denmark). They represented Rosicrucian wisdom expressed in an outer pictorial symbolic form appropriate for the early 17th century. With Anthroposophy, Steiner sought to recast Rosicrucian wisdom in a cognitional form appropriate for our time that works with natural objects and mantras.²⁸

The Rosicrucian alchemists of the 17th century meditated on the deeper meaning of salt, mercury and sulphur on the path of spiritual development and understood the role of these three in relation to natural processes of salt formation, dissolution and combustion.²⁹ They knew also how these processes in the macrocosm relate in turn in the microcosm to spiritual purification of all that putrefies the soul, spiritual love that dissolves all hatred and coldness, and spiritual sacrifice that devotes us to God just as in past aeons of the world the lesser gods made sacrifices to the gods above them and Christ Jesus sacrificed Himself for us and for the greater glory of His Father. These qualities of purification of thought, the dissolving power of love, and the will to sacrifice self to what is higher we can see in three of the characteristic movements that appeared in Europe in the 13th century: the Dominicans with their focus on the purification of thought, the Franciscans with their empathy for all beings, and the Cathars, who gladly sacrificed themselves for each other and for God.

After the intense darkness of the first half of the 13th century a living light emerged in the twelvefold initiation of the young individuality who became Christian Rosenkreutz. In his lectures on esoteric Christianity and Christian Rosenkreutz, Steiner describes how in an event unique in history twelve streams of knowledge were synthesised, harmonised and bestowed upon the ‘I’ of this young human individuality: the wisdom of Atlantis and of the four post-Atlantean epochs up to his own time, as well as the experience of beholding Christ in the etheric world such as Paul had had on the road to Damascus. This living light that would become Christian Rosenkreutz was not intended for the world of the Middle Ages but for the modern age that began in the early 15th century. From the Rosicrucian manifestos of 1614-15 we learn that Christian Rosenkreutz started his European ‘school’ in the year 1413 when he was 35 years old. What began with his initiated I, after the darkness of the 13th century, was destined gradually to permeate modern culture and unite science, art and religion and, according to Steiner, Christian Rosenkreutz has reincarnated again in each century since then to help his impulse develop and benefit humanity. When, with good will for the spirit, we shall have passed through the desert of materialism that is our modern age and witnessed the transformation of the martial spirit,³⁰ we shall surely find Christian Rosenkreutz waiting to welcome us in the age that is to come.

Notes

1. See Irma von Lorentz, Sternenrthymen in der Geschichte (Star Rhythms in History) 1986, pp. 111-123.

2. R. Steiner lecture of 16 July 1918, GA 181.

3. See map 1200-1250: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Holy_Roman_Empire

4. Every 72 years the Vernal (Spring) Point (Equinox) – i.e. the relationship between the Earth, the Sun on the Spring Point day, and the constellation ‘behind’ the Sun on that day passes through one degree of the Zodiac. When the constellations are considered to be 30 degrees each in span then 30 x 72 years = 2160 years i.e. it takes 2160 years for the Spring Point (SP) to ‘move’ through one constellation or sign of the Zodiac. Today, the SP is at about 5° of Pisces and will therefore enter Aquarius in about the year 2375.

5. In his book A Treatise on the Seven Secondary Causes i.e. Intelligences, or Spirits, Who Move the Spheres In Accordance with God, published in 1515 and presented to Emperor Maximilian I. Trithemius insisted  that each of the seven planetary rulerships always lasts 354 year and 4 months.

6.https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/jupiter-and-saturns-great-conjunction-is-the-best-in-800-years-heres-how-to-see-it/

7. Legend has it he was born holding a blood clot in his hand.

8. The shock of the encounter with the Mongols led Europeans to try to find out where they came from. The 21-year-old Venetian Marco Polo thus ended up at the court of Kublai Khan, Genghis Khan’s grandson, in 1275. Polo’s book about his travels in Asia to the Mongol court and its account of China and ‘Xipangu’ (Japan) were read by many in Europe, including one Christopher Columbus…

9. The first was the 4th Crusade, in 1204, which sacked Constantinople. The last was the 9th Crusade, sometimes called Lord Edward’s Crusade, after Prince Edward of England who led it. There were no more Crusades after that. The Crusades therefore ended in the 13th century.

10. The Travels of Marco Polo (Penguin, 1958) p. 257.

11. In his 1910 lecture cycle The Mission of Folk Souls, (Collected Works GA 121) Rudolf Steiner described the origins of the five main races of humanity and their relation to spiritual centres focused on planetary oracles. After its relocation from Atlantis, the Mars oracle was established in northeast China, in the region of what later became Beijing. Before they adopted Buddhism, the Tibetans too were known for their martial abilities and several times defeated the forces of the Chinese empire. The peoples of southeast Asia were guided by the Venus oracle; they are ‘the Venus race’ (see lecture cycle GA 121 above).

12. Rabbi Menachem Mendel Schneerson (1902-1994), the most significant leader of the worldwide Chabad Lubavitch sect of Hasidic Judaism, apparently told Israeli Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu that he would be the last Prime Minister before the coming of the Jewish Messiah and would hand over to the Messiah. The Rabbi urged him to accelerate the arrival of the Messiah. See: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EgeWVgNGeAA and https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2T5t22DZjlQ

13.https://www.conspiracyarchive.com/2015/01/10/albert-pike-to-mazzini-august-15-1871-three-world-wars/

14. In 1917 British and French troops did return, however: in the secret 1916 arrangement between Britain and France (the Sykes-Picot talks) the two countries agreed that Palestine and Jerusalem should be ruled jointly between them, but later, the British persuaded the French that the city should be under ‘international’ control and then in September 1918, under British control. Eventually, the region and the city came under the League of Nations Mandate for Palestine, which was given to Britain and lasted until British withdrawal in 1948.

15. https://www.aa.com.tr/en/world/turkic-council-eyes-forming-united-states-of-turkic-world/2192579 and: https://thediplomat.com/2023/11/organization-of-turkic-states-seeks-to-unite-europe-with-asia/

16. See Part 1 of this article, New View #109, Oct. – Dec. 2023, pp. 20-27.

17. See R. Steiner, Theosophy (1904) Chapter Three: 3. The Spiritland – The First Region, and R. Steiner lecture of 1 April 1913, (Collected Works GA 141, titled Between Death and Rebirth).

18. Steiner pointed out that this connection between materialism and Mars is the deeper reason why Christian Rosenkreutz sent the spirit of Gautama Buddha to the Mars sphere c.1600 where, in the year 1604, Buddha performed for the inhabitants of that sphere a task similar to that of Christ Jesus on earth in the Mystery of Golgotha. There is no space here to enter further into this topic.  See R. Steiner, Esoteric Christianity and the Mission of Christian Rosenkreutz (RSP, 1984), pp. 173- 85. Lecture of 18.12.1912.(GA 130)

19. See n. 18 above.

20. Esoteric Christianity and the Mission of Christian Rosenkreutz (GA 130: German title: Esoterische Christentum und die geistige Führung der Menschheit).

21. R. Steiner, lecture of 27 Sept. 1911, Neuchâtel (in GA 130).

22. “O people, know that you have committed great sins, and that the great ones among you have committed these sins. If you ask me what proof I have for these words, I say it is because I am the punishment of God. If you had not committed great sins, God would not have sent a punishment like me upon you.” As quoted in Tarikh-i Jahangushay [History of the World Conqueror] by Ala-ad-Din Ata-Malik Juvaini (ca. 1252-1260), translated by J.A. Boyle (1958), p. 105.

23. R. Steiner lecture of 27 September 1911, GA 130.

24. The Indian (Age of Cancer), the Persian (Age of Gemini), the Egypto-Chaldean (Age of Taurus) and the Greco-Roman (Age of Aries). The 12th was a man “who possessed intellectually all the knowledge of his time, while the others…. acquired their knowledge by returning in memory to their earlier incarnations.” – R. Steiner, lecture. of 27.9.1911, Neuchâtel. (GA 130)

25. Ibid.

26. Ibid.

27. This date was given in the Confessio Fraternitatis, the second of the published Rosicrucian Manifestos, in 1615.

28. See R. Steiner, Knowledge of the Higher Worlds – How Is It Achieved? (1904).

29. See R. Steiner lecture of 28.9.1911, in GA 130.

30. See n. 18 above: R. Steiner lecture of 18.12.1912 in GA 130.

For Part 1 of the article, go to: http://threeman.org/?p=3182

 “The past is a different country; they do things differently there”.

                        – L.P. Hartley in The Go-Between (1953)

This past summer my wife and I escaped the relentless eight weeks of the cool, dull, grey English “summer”, in which we rarely saw the sun, (at least where I live) and headed off to the south of France, where the temperature was rarely below 32°C while we were there. For many years we had intended to go to that region of France but time and money had never quite seemed to allow it. This year, however, turned out to be appropriate in view of recent events, which will be mentioned later. From the Channel ferry port of Caen and its memories of wartime devastation by Allied bombing and assault following the D-day landings in Normandy in June 1944, we drove down to Languedoc (also traditionally known as Occitania, above) in southern France with its own tragic memories of devastation 700 years earlier that culminated in 1244 when, after a siege of some nine months, the 100 or so besieged defenders of the castle of Montségur (Mt. Secure), perched on its peak 1,200 metres (3,900 ft) high, surrendered to a 10,000-strong French royal army, and over 200 people were then burned to death. Montségur was the last stronghold of the Cathars or Albigensians (named after the city of Albi, their previous centre in Occitania), who held an unorthodox Christian faith that the orthodox Roman Catholic church regarded as a great heresy and a mortal danger.

The Albigensian Crusades

Before we travelled to Languedoc and also while we were there, we read more about the Cathars, their origins and about the Crusade that sought to destroy them. My wife had long been interested in the Cathars, and I had wanted to see Carcassonne castle since I was about ten years old.¹

                                                                              Rousillon, Languedoc

The Cathars referred to themselves as ‘good Christians’, ‘good men’ and ‘good women’, or ‘friends of God’. But they were no friends of ‘the world’, which in their dualist theology they regarded as created by the Devil. Even water they held to be stained by this world and they therefore rejected baptism, along with all the Church’s other sacraments including the Mass and Transubstantiation. They also denied purgatory, prayers for the dead and prayers to saints or the Virgin Mary. Believing in reincarnation, their rather ‘Buddhistic’ aim was to escape from the wicked world as soon as possible by reincarnating as people who would become members of the Cathar perfecti. Within the Cathar faith there were three ‘grades’: the perfecti  (initiated ascetics who lived an austere life, rather similar to Buddhist monks, although the Cathar perfecti had no monasteries; they were always travelling in pairs), the credentes (believers) who lived regular lives, subscribed to the faith and supported the perfecti but were not (yet) perfecti  themselves,  and the auditores (listeners) – sympathisers. The perfectus could escape the cycle of reincarnation and return to the Light of spirit where God and Christ dwelt (cf. in the Theravada or Hinayana Buddhism of SE Asia one can only escape the world by reincarnating as a Buddhist monk and following the Buddhist Path to Nirvana). One had to avoid procreating in this ‘vale of tears’ by not engaging in sex. Following a strict pescatarian diet and believing that fish were generated spontaneously, the perfecti ate nothing that had come about through procreation. Catharism in Languedoc was a neo-Gnostic form of radical dualism that believed in a struggle between two eternally opposed gods of Light/Good/Truth/Spirit and Darkness/Evil/Lies/Matter.²

     By 1244, the Catholic Church had already spent 35 years, 20 of them on crusade, and also a great deal of money, trying to stamp out this ‘heresy’. It had encouraged the new Dominican Order, created by the Spaniard, Dominic de Guzmán, in 1203 and formally recognised by the Papacy in 1215, to try to preach the Cathars out of their ‘heresy’, which had evidently stemmed from the lands of the Byzantine Empire whose Orthodox form of Christianity the papacy also regarded as heretical. In 1204, a large army of western crusaders en route to the Holy land on the Fourth Crusade had been diverted by the Venetians, who were transporting them by sea, to destroy Venice’s trading rivals in Constantinople, the Byzantine capital. The city founded by Constantine almost 900 hundred years earlier in Byzantium now became the centre of the “Latin Empire of Constantinople” for several decades (1204-1261) ruled by western European Catholic feudal lords loyal to Rome.  Its long-term Christian religious rival in Constantinople now seemingly defeated, but under great pressure in the Holy Land following the loss of Jerusalem to Islam after the Muslim leader Saladin’s victory at the Battle of Hattin in 1187, the Vatican resolved to deal with its heretics in the West before attempting to launch another crusade to recover Jerusalem. ‘Persuasion’ had not succeeded with the Cathars in Languedoc, so in 1209, after the murder of a papal legate the previous year, who Pope Innocent III suspected had been killed by Raimon VI, Count of Toulouse, the Pope summoned a crusading army of 10,000 northern knights and their feudal levies, mostly French and some Germans, Austrians and English, who intended to wipe out the Cathars physically and also help themselves to the rich territories of those nobles of Languedoc who tolerated or supported the Cathars. The army was led by the papal legate Arnaud Amalric, the Cistercian Abbot of Cîteaux, and carried out a terrible massacre of Cathars and the population of the city of Béziers. It moved on to the great walled city of Carcassonne, which surrendered after a short siege in the hot August sun, as the crusaders had captured its water supply. The leadership of the crusading army then came to be commanded by the very able but ruthless Simon de Montfort, a lord from northern France who also owned lands in England as the Earl of Leicester.

     From 1209 until the death of de Montfort in 1218 during the nine-month-long siege of Toulouse, the northern crusaders were largely successful, but the Occitanians were able to turn the tables in the 1220s. De Montfort’s son was not the military leader his ruthless father was and in 1224 he ceded to the French Crown all the lands his father had conquered in Languedoc. The King of France himself, Louis VIII, then led an even larger crusading army to Languedoc in 1226 to take control of what he now saw as his lands. He soon died but his widow and regent, Queen Blanche of Castile, pursued the crusade to a victorious conclusion in 1229.

                                                                                  Carcasssonne

The Inquisition

In 1233 the Church then set up the “Holy Inquisition” to root out all the surviving Cathars in the region. By 1321 it had succeeded, when the last perfectus in Languedoc, Guillaume Bélibaste, was burned at the stake. Some historians have pointed out that the papal Inquisition was established to bring legality and proper procedure into cases of heresy and that previously, secular lords or mob rule had led to people being casually condemned and murdered or burned out of hand. In his book Empires of Trust: How Rome Built–and America Is Building–a New World, published exactly 800 years after the beginning of the Albigensian Crusade, Prof. Thomas F. Madden of the private Jesuit St. Louis University wrote: “The Inquisition was not born out of desire to crush diversity or oppress people; it was rather an attempt to stop unjust executions. …Heresy was a crime against the state. Roman law in the Code of Justinian made heresy a capital offence”.³The Inquisitors, it is said, were able to save many accused heretics from the fire by getting them to recant and thus enabling them to ‘rejoin the community’. This is no doubt true; not all accused heretics were burned. The Middle Ages was a period when Europeans became very particular about legal process: rights, charters and documents; heresy was indeed a crime against the state, and mob rule did tend to get out of hand in an age when public executions of various kinds were, alas, also a popular form of entertainment.

                                                       Inquisitors examine a friar suspected of heresy

    But Madden was also wrong; the papal Inquisition was specifically created to suppress the Cathar faith, which the Vatican rightly saw as its chief ideological danger in western Europe at that time; the Cathars, after all, were not only – as they tend to be seen by their modern enthusiasts – mostly gentle and holy incorruptible men who accepted women as perfecti  and whose exemplary ethical behaviour in contrast with that of Catholic priests and bishops made a deep impression on many Occitanians, they were also skilled debaters, in an age of public debates and theological conflict, who effectively repulsed some of the best theological minds the Catholic Church could employ against them, such as St. Dominic, and they believed that the Catholic Church was the Church of Satan and based on tricks and lies, in a world created by the Devil. They consistently attacked the luxury and corruption in the Church while at the same time advocating that procreation was a sin. The logic of their argument was therefore that human life on earth was an abomination to be endured, and Christ’s Incarnation in Jesus, they claimed, had not been physical but only spiritual. The Church’s theological argument against them was therefore soundly based. If Jesus Christ was only spirit, and the physical world was intrinsically evil, then if the Cathar faith had spread, Europeans would increasingly have come to reject life on earth itself.

Clashing worldviews

The whole situation was deeply tragic: both the Cathars and the Catholics had inherited a worldview, ancient Persian in its origins, that saw the world, indeed the universe, as the arena of a cosmic battle between Light and Dark, Good and Evil. The difference was that the Cathars had embraced a dualism that had its origins in an ancient Asian sentiment that longed for the spirit and regarded the physical plane as illusion and at worst, evil. They rejected original sin and saw the root of evil in the Devil’s act of the creation of matter itself. The Catholics by contrast, more influenced by Judaism and Greco-Roman philosophy, had a worldview that positively affirmed the physical world as created by God and yet saw the root of evil as man’s (or rather, woman’s) fault (original sin) in falling for the Devil’s temptation in the Garden of Eden. The problem was in people’s different understandings of their respective faiths in an age when most people no longer had any natural direct clairvoyant vision but were just beginning to think for themselves. These cognitive differences and interpretations led to increasing division but also to a corresponding psychological need for unity, or ‘oneness’ (as with Emperor Justinian’s insistence in the 6th century on one emperor and one faith in one empire) and consequent accusations that heresy would disturb that unity.

    Furthermore, since the 11th century, the Popes, who were the spiritual heirs of the Roman imperium,⁴ had increasingly sought to extend their own rule over the kings and princes of Europe. This drive reached a peak with the two Popes who ‘bookended’ the 13th century, Innocent III (1198-1216) and Boniface VIII (1294-1303). The latter declared in the papal bull Unam Sanctam in 1302 that since the Church is one, and since the Church is necessary for salvation, and since Christ appointed Peter to lead it, “…it belongs to spiritual power to establish the terrestrial power and to pass judgment if it has not been good” and the bull ended: “Furthermore, we declare, we proclaim, we define that it is absolutely necessary for salvation that every human creature be subject to the Roman Pontiff.”

    However, any claim to theological correctness on the part of the Church obviously does not excuse the appalling inhumanities of the Crusades against the Cathars and the people of Languedoc by men who claimed to be Christians. Even those ‘saved’ by the Inquisition from the stake were subject to the psychological trauma of the examinations (as we know from the Inquisition’s meticulous record-keeping) and then often had to suffer cruel and humiliating punishments such as being forced to wear a yellow cross in public, being imprisoned or scourged in public at their church at regular intervals, being obligated to go off to fight the Muslims in Spain or the Holy Land etc.

                                                                                                             Montségur

Montségur today

At the siege of their last stronghold, Montségur castle, in 1244 there were some 211 Cathar perfecti within the castle. On the surrender, the perfecti walked down the steep and precarious winding path to the foot of the mountain, where they were all burned to death by the besiegers within a palisade on 16 March. 21 of the credentes in the castle, from all ranks of society and including Corba, the wife of Raimond of Pereille, the lord of the castle, and her daughter Esclarmonde, also chose to die in the flames with them. After this, Catharism went underground in Languedoc, and the Inquisition hunted down the fugitive perfecti and credentes. The last of them, Guillaume Bélibaste, was burned in 1321.⁵

     As we travelled around the region, the fate of the Cathars and the attitude of those who persecuted them could not but remind me of recent contemporary events. I reflected on the fact that the year 2021 came 700 years after the burning of the last Cathar perfectus in Languedoc and 777 years after the siege of Montségur.  2021 was the middle of the COVID-19 pandemic event, and we all witnessed how that event caused deep dissension in society, and how those who opposed the lockdowns and/or refused the injections were insulted, ostracised, and treated as second class citizens by everyone from politicians to media figures, celebrities and comedians. Many argued they should be locked up or denied their civil rights.

    We have observed this same intransigence and intolerance towards others who think differently from us in recent years. It has grown markedly since the 9/11 event. How many times have we heard the angry words: “There is no place in our society for people who …..”? or: “I do not want to see that book/newspaper/campaign in my town!”? In the age of the Internet and social media two old sayings that many used to regard as bastions of a humane and liberal (in the true sense of the word) society seem to be fading away: “I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it” (the writer Evelyn Beatrice Hall) and “Innocent until proven guilty”. Today, it’s more likely to be: “I disapprove of what you say, and what’s more, if you try to say it, you should not be allowed to appear in public in this town/region/country!” and “Guilty as charged by media until proven innocent!” Just as the Church feared that the Cathars’ ideas would undermine society 800 years ago, so today do those who believe in the orthodoxy of the secular “church” fear that society will be undermined if ideas not supported by that “church” are even allowed to be aired in public, let alone to spread. Rather, they are either deliberately ignored or else redacted, censored, excised, deplatformed, banned. Diversity of bodies is welcome; diversity of minds is not. The church of the secular science is One and its dogmas and decrees are to be enforced.

    I recently read a review of a book about the Cathars that was published in March 2014. The reviewer, John Hopper, wrote that “the whole experience [of reading the book] is a classic illustration of the vast gulf between the medieval and modern mindset in assuming the measures that are appropriate in even a civilised society to decide which of two (or more) competing views of the world will prevail – a stark and somewhat depressing affirmation of the old adage that ‘the past is a different country, they do things differently there’”. Reflecting on the passionate disputes and fiercely intolerant attitudes in the West in the years since 2014, the destruction of people’s reputations by the mainstream media and the decay of the notion of “innocent until proven guilty”, the ‘excommunication’ from social media of people deemed contemporary ‘heretics’ and occasional physical attacks upon them, the vicious burning hatred directed against them, the lack of forgiveness or the lack of any understanding that people can change over time, the stultifying and dogmatic uniformity of opinion enforced by government,  media, and even professional academic and scientific institutions on issues such as climate change, gender, Brexit, migration, COVID-19, and the war in Ukraine – reflecting on all this, and having travelled through Languedoc this summer and familiarised myself with the history of the Albigensian Crusades, I feel that I have to question whether it is true 800 years later, that ‘the past is a different country, they do things differently there’. It may be true in some respects but it surely calls for qualification.

Black and white?

Unless one had a heart of stone, or else was a cynic who might have looked at Languedoc in terms of tourism and money, it would surely be difficult to travel around this region today and not be affected by the tragic story of the Albigensian Crusades which, even after 800 years, is still so much a part of its history. Languedoc is a lovely part of Europe, and before the Albigensian Crusades of 1209-1229, it was a very independent-minded, prosperous, cosmopolitan and cultured region, with stronger cultural and linguistic ties to Catalonia and Aragon than to France. But the crusades led to its eventual acquisition by the French Crown later in the 13th century, and the province never really recovered from the trauma of what was a kind of rape by the crusaders from the north. In the French state it became a backwater, economically depressed and politically suspect; resentment smouldered and in later centuries the region became a hotbed of Protestantism.

    But the issue, as ever, is not black and white. It is not a case of Cathars good and Catholics bad or vice versa. Indeed, many Catholics in Languedoc, including those in the nobility, tolerated or supported the Cathars. While many individual Cathar priests were genuinely holy men, which is what made them attractive to the people of Occitania at a time of much obvious corruption and self-indulgence in the Church, Cathar theology was a strange combination of views and practices which may seem ahead of their time to us today in that they rejected many of the rules and dogmas of the Catholic Church, but at the same time the Cathar faith was a world-denying neo-Gnostic remnant from ancient times that was out of place in Europe and at odds with Europe’s future as Europe prepared in the 13th century to descend into the materialism that would eventually bring about the modern world of science and technology four centuries later, and prepared also to descend into the age of deepening darkness out of which would come, by the mid-19th century, the freedom of the individual. This freedom came about through an enthusiastic embrace of the physical world, not a rejection of it.

    A key preparatory stage in that process was the emergence precisely at the time of the Albigensian Crusades in the 13th century of the two new mendicant Orders, the Franciscans (1209) and the Dominicans (1206/1216). Both of these Orders were approved by Pope Innocent III and his successor Honorius III respectively in an effort to combat heresy, which at the time meant predominantly the Cathars, who were seen as the most dangerous heretical challenge to the Church in southern France and northern Italy. The Franciscans’ focus was on compassion in this earthly world; the Dominicans’ was on spiritual truth. The Franciscans sought to show the people a moral example that they felt was more truly Christian than the Cathars, or at least, as moral as theirs, whereas the Dominicans attempted to teach people how the Cathars had strayed from the true Christian path.

                                                                                  Dominicans (left) and Franciscans (right)

    Christ had said (Matt. 22: 36-40) that the two most important commandments are: “‘Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind. This is the first and greatest commandment. And the second is like it: ‘Love your neighbour as yourself.” The Dominicans’ focus was on the first of these, and their great 13th century Scholastic teachers, such as Thomas Aquinas and Albertus Magnus, sought to defend the Christian faith against what they regarded as anti-Christian ideas coming both from Islam and from heretics; in philosophy, they also defended the spiritual nature of ideas, a notion that was termed Realism. However, as time went by, the members of the Dominican Order, who wore a black cloak over a white habit, became especially associated with the Inquisition, the spiritual ‘thought police’ of the Roman Catholic Church, often acted at the expense of the second commandment and with an uncompassionate dogmatism that insisted on absolute submission to the authority of the Church – the rigid principle of ‘oneness’; they were concerned that if this were not adhered to, Christian society would founder. The focus of the Franciscan Order (founded in 1209, the year the first Albigensian Crusade was declared by Pope Innocent III) was on the second commandment, care for the world and one’s fellows, but not only were the Franciscans also involved in the papal Inquisition from its beginnings in the 1230s, and later, the use of torture, their ‘this-worldly’ focus led Franciscan Scholastics to embrace Nominalist philosophy, which rejected the spiritual nature of ideas, a key stage on the way to empirical natural science and the materialism of the modern western world.⁶

    There is something symptomatic in the way these two Orders emerged 800 years ago at the time of the Cathar ‘heresy’ and in the way their attention was focused mainly on just one of the two commandments mentioned by Christ. The Orders and their concerns are symptomatic of a split in European consciousness in the 13th century that began at that time and grew wider over the following centuries. In the culture of the ancient Greeks a focus on the heavenly and on the earthly, such as one can see in the respective philosophies and concerns of Plato and Aristotle, had been held together in Greek culture; they did not fall apart. Plato has sometimes been called ‘the last Asiatic’ philosopher in Europe and Aristotle ‘the first European’ philosopher.

In the 82 lectures that Steiner gave on karma and reincarnation in 1924 he referred on several occasions to a process that took place in the spiritual world behind the scenes of historical events. As the 12th century drew to a close, the illustrious teachers of the great School of Chartres died away. These teachers and their pupils, said Steiner, belonged to a Platonist stream of spirituality; they were the last in Europe who still felt and taught something, albeit very tenuous by this time, of the spiritual forces at work in nature. After they crossed the threshold of death, they took part in a ‘conference’ in the spiritual world with members of an Aristotelian stream who were about to incarnate into earthly life. A spiritual ‘baton’ was passed over, so to speak, from Christian Platonists to Christian Aristotelians at the end of the 12th century. Most of these Aristotelians then became Dominicans in the 13th century as the Middle Ages headed into an era of great contrasts of darkness and light and tremendous clashes of world forces.

    Right in the centre of those contrasts and clashes, in the still, mid-century eye of the storm, around the critical year 1250, a quiet process and a gathering took place in central Europe that would plant the seeds of a healing culture for the future. It is to that year and that gathering that Part 2 of this essay will turn.

Go to Part 2 of this essay: http://threeman.org/?p=3212

Notes   

1. In August 1209 the lord of Carcassonne castle, Béziers and other cities, the 24 year-old Viscount Raimon Rogièr Trencavel, who had a ‘live and let live’ attitude to the Cathars, surrendered Carcassonne to the crusaders led by Simon de Montfort after a short siege and the crusaders’ capture of the castle’s water supply. During a parley to negotiate terms, de Montfort had Trencavel seized and thrown into a dungeon where he later died, likely murdered.

2. Dualism in the Near East many centuries before had been more moderate, holding that there was one eternal god (Zurvan, or Zervan) and below ‘him’ were two opposed spirits, Ahura Mazdao (Light, Truth) and Ahriman (Darkness, Lies). In the distant future, it was believed, Ahura Mazdao would triumph over Ahriman. As such dualism moved westwards over the following centuries, Zurvan became fused with Ahura Mazdao, metamorphosing in the Balkans into an absolutist form of radical dualism. It was this more extreme and radical form which then, via Italy and Sicily, passed to Languedoc. See Yuri Stoyanov, The Hidden Tradition in Europe (1994)

3. Thomas F. Madden, Empires of Trust: How Rome Built–and America Is Building–a New World (2009).

4 Pope Boniface VIII in his Bull Salvator Mundi (1301): “God has placed us over the Kings and Kingdoms.” In the Bull Unam Sanctam (1302), Bonface declared: “Therefore, of the one and only Church there is one body and one head, not two heads like a monster”  and also: “We are informed by the texts of the gospels that in this Church and in its power are two swords; namely, the spiritual and the temporal.”

5. It is often said that Bélibaste, who had a local reputation of being something of a prophet, is supposed to have declared: “In 700 years the laurel will become green again, and the good people will return.” However, it seems that this saying actually stems from the late 20th century: https://www.reddit.com/r/Throawaylien/comments/ocjqss/cathar_prophecy_not_debunked_further_thoughts/ The laurel was supposedly the symbol of pure love in Languedoc at that time, and traditionally, in ancient Greece it had been the symbol of Apollo and his love for Daphne, a symbol also of the highest status and of victory.

6. It is noteworthy that in the French Revolution, the headquarters of the Jacobins, the revolutionary ‘Dominicans’ of the era, was in the rectory of the Dominican monastery in the Rue St Jacques, named after St James the Great. French Dominicans, who wore black cloaks over white habits, had always been known as ‘Jacobins’. The Jacobins’ more populist rivals in the Revolution, the Cordeliers Club, had their headquarters in the Paris convent of the Cordeliers; “Cordeliers” was a name traditionally given to the French Franciscans, who in the Middle Ages wore simple, peasant-like brown or grey habits.

Go to Part 2 of this essay: http://threeman.org/?p=3212

J. Paul Greenaway’s waspish hit-piece on Rudolf Steiner (1861-1925) (published on the UK Column website on 25 May 2023) is an odd thing.  I shall not try to give an organised and systematic form to a piece which does not have such form. Instead, I shall take the reader through the rambling process of Greenaway’s article, commenting and critiquing as I go, and will seek to show that: it is inaccurate in various particulars in its account of Steiner’s work, which is known as  Anthroposophy (pronounced like the word ‘anthropology’) or ‘spiritual science’; it hardly manifests a “scientific” attitude, although its preoccupation with “science” is at the centre of its criticism of Rudolf Steiner; it bases much of its criticism on discussion of just two or three sentences from only two of Steiner’s 6000+ lectures given over 22 years and also on  personal experience relating to work in only two of the hundreds of anthroposophical institutions worldwide and to difficult experiences with a single individual in one of those institutions, and is therefore greatly exaggerated, very unbalanced and over-generalised; it draws on a number of sources which have nothing to do with the anthroposophical environment or else are hostile to it.

Greenaway’s introduction provides a reasonably correct thumbnail sketch of aspects of Steiner and his work, but it fails to put that work in historical context, and without context, one cannot appreciate or properly evaluate what Steiner was trying to do. Materialistic natural science had come to dominate most aspects of life in the West, including philosophy and religion, by the last decades of the 19th century, and was underpinned by the formidable progress of technology, which for many people seemed magical. But the rapid urbanisation that science and technology made possible tended not only to physically oppress many of the new urban working class and rob them of their human dignity but also to psychologically depress many in the middle and upper classes, who turned for solace to the arts and to spiritual pursuits such as Spiritualism and Theosophy. Traditional Christianity, many felt, was already being steadily undermined by the influence of critical academic theology which increasingly leaned, post-Darwin, Huxley and Haeckel, towards natural science. Nevertheless, many westerners still longed for a Christian path or for some other spiritual path that would relieve the grim but relentless pressure from modernism and materialistic urban life.

    One can notice that in history new developments have invariably been ‘balanced’ by counter-movements, so in this increasingly materialistic culture of the West, the Spiritualist movement (1848) and the Theosophical movement (1875) emerged to counter this materialism, both of which began in the USA, and soon made substantial inroads in Europe among people whose souls felt parched in the expanding desert of scientific materialism. Spiritualism, however, unfortunately drew many people into a morbid fascination with the world of the dead, while Theosophy, founded in New York by the Russian, Helena P. Blavatsky, pulled many others into the direction of Asian mysticism, notably Hinduism and Buddhism.

    Rudolf Steiner (1861-1925) (pictured above aged 18, in 1879), as a child had had direct spiritual experience of a relative who did not live nearby and whose spirit visited him when she had only just died.  He also perceived elemental beings in nature in the countryside in which he grew up around the rural railway station where his father was employed as stationmaster. However, it was through his interest in geometry that he realised that invisible worlds can be grasped through thinking, and he went on to have a very modern natural scientific and technical education. In his 20s in Vienna, he met a wide-ranging constellation of searching individuals, some of them quite well-known, and his interests were in philosophy, where he sought a way to overcome what he saw as the nefarious influence of Immanuel Kant, and in pedagogy, where he worked as tutor in the home of a wealthy Jewish family, the Spechts, whose son suffered from a form of autism. Steiner’s PhD dissertation, directed against Kantianism, was titled Truth and Science, and he expanded greatly on the theme in his major philosophical work, The Philosophy of Freedom (1894). In both works Steiner opposed Kant’s concepts of duty and limits to knowledge and put forward a profound critique of the philosophical basis of materialistic thought, affirming   free will and the supreme importance of thinking as the individual’s prime human instrument, without which freedom, science, or any real human life are impossible. Greenaway, however, in his article’s section on “Higher Worlds”, dismisses the Philosophy of Freedom, which Steiner regarded as the most important of his thirty books, merely as “a philosophical approach to the psychology of perception (and not the most readable or concise, it must be said!)”. This is untrue because perception in the act of knowing takes up only two of the fifteen chapters of Steiner’s book, which deals with many things: the nature of knowledge, thinking, freedom, moral imagination, values in life, individuality and genus, the basis of ethics and morality and much more. Greenway expects a book on such themes to be “concise”! As for “readable”, Steiner did not intend the book to carry passive readers along but wanted them to work at it and become inwardly active in their thinking.

    For most of the 1890s, Steiner was in Weimar, where he worked on editing Goethe’s scientific writings. Until then, he would have called himself a radical libertarian and philosophical anarchist – not of the bomb-throwing kind, but someone who opposed excessive State control and  racial, national, religious or sexist dogmas of any kind that sought to restrict individuals’ efforts to think for themselves; his philosophy of life was what he called “ethical individualism”, as he wrote in The Philosophy of Freedom: “To live in love of one’s actions and to let live in understanding of the other’s  volition, this is the fundamental maxim of the free man.”  It was only in 1899, when he was 38, that he had his most profound experience of Christ. From then on, his life became something other. By 1902, convinced that western culture was heading for the abyss (it arrived 12 years later), he had become a spiritual teacher who was determined to do what he could to clarify and bridge various worlds: east and west, ancient and modern, men and women, Christians and non-Christians, the artistic and the scientific. He felt that modern people in the West had to find their way to Christ and to the spirit not as the Theosophists and others sought to do, by turning to ancient, non-western religions, or by returning to pre-modern collective states of ‘tribal’ consciousness, as modern totalitarians and many in today’s New Age would later do, but rather, by understanding themselves as beings of body, soul and spirit  – as modern individuals whose consciousness has developed over millennia from ancient blood-based collectives through modern individualism, the eye of the needle, towards a culture far off yet in the future, in which free individuals will freely choose or create their communities and societies. Our modern predicament, he felt, called for a modern understanding of karma and reincarnation in a Christian context, the need to see that we are each evolving spirits, ultimately unbound by body, blood, genes, race, nation and tribe. From life to life, we choose these for our needs in any one particular life. To understand myself fully, which will not normally be possible in a single life, I need to know my past lives, not only this one I am living now. Then I can understand the particular nature of the long path I have been taking from God, not back but forward, to God again. And what applies here to the individual also applies to human culture as a whole. History, Steiner taught, cannot be understood without taking into consideration the actions of spiritual beings (both human and non-human) incarnate and disincarnate. The teaching of karma and reincarnation in a modern context that took account of western, Christian development would become Steiner’s essential task.

Greenaway in his introduction says that both Theosophy and Anthroposophy “can be seen as developments within, or from, the broad tradition known as Rosicrucianism. However, that does not mean that either or both of these late-nineteenth-century currents is broadly accepted, or accepted without adverse criticism, within the Rosicrucian tradition”. This is rather misleading, because Steiner always made clear that the essence of Rosicrucianism, with which he did indeed associate Anthroposophy, was esoteric Christianity and that the Rosicrucian stream began secretly in 13th century Europe and emerged somewhat more publicly in Central Europe (SW Germany) in the early decades of the 17th century. Steiner regarded H.P. Blavatsky, the founder of Theosophy as a remarkably gifted woman but one who, unfortunately, was firmly opposed to Christianity, which is why she focused so much on non-Christian and non-European spiritual traditions. This was Steiner’s main objection to Theosophy. Most of what called itself “Rosicrucian” in the late 18th and 19th centuries had little to do with the Christian Rosicrucian stream of the early 17th century and far more to do with alchemy, Freemasonry and ancient Egypt. Greenaway implies that both Theosophy and Anthroposophy are regarded as ‘oddballs’ or worse within a single thing called “the Rosicrucian tradition”. However, much of what has come to be called “Rosicrucianism” today is not really interested in Christianity, whereas for Steiner, Rosicrucianism was unthinkable without Christianity; it was and is esoteric Christianity, and he saw his own work as a modern development of that Rosicrucian esoteric Christian stream.

   In his brief overview of Anthroposophy and the practical activities that have sprung from it, Greenaway refers to “a therapeutic dance known as eurythmy”. Steiner never referred to eurythmy as “dance”. For him, eurythmy was an art of movement intended for performance on stage (see above), and out of it came two other applications, in pedagogy and therapeutics. It is therefore taught to children in Steiner schools to connect the growing human soul to physical movement, as distinct from gymnastics, which focuses only on the physical body. Curative Eurythmy therapy is used in medical contexts, like art therapy or music therapy. Steiner saw music, dance and theatre in his time as having reached a crisis point, a certain spiritual threshold, and the danger was that European artistic culture would descend below the threshold into what he called ‘sub-nature’ and into something essentially anti-artistic and anti-human but that this would erroneously be called ‘art’ and ‘humanity’. By the end of the First World War, this had certainly happened in forms such as Vorticism, Futurism, Constructivism, Serialism and Dadaism – all based for the most part on abstract intellectual ideas. He sought to find a new way forward, crossing the threshold in a more positive way by relating the art of movement to the formative forces that are objectively within speech and music. These forces are inherently healthy; they are the forces that shape our human organism, our soul life and the natural world as a whole. They are the formative forces that eurythmy works with.

   In all his work in the arts, Steiner rooted his impulse in the human “I” which holds the balance between two forces of radical imbalance, for example, between expansion and contraction. In his nine-meter-high wooden sculpture (see above) which he created together with the English sculptress Edith Maryon in Dornach, Switzerland, he portrays a Christ figure known as “the Representative of Humanity” between, and warding off, two spiritual counterforces: Lucifer and Ahriman (Satan), which Steiner always insisted are not the same, but polar opposite forces of radical imbalance (evil). Both are shown in two ways – within the human soul and in outer nature: within the soul, they struggle for dominance: in the sculpture, Lucifer above struggles with Ahriman below; externally, the two are separate, and the Christ figure’s raised lefthand gesture causes Lucifer to fall through the air from above, while his lowered righthand gesture holds Ahriman firmly in his subterranean place. This balancing “I” gesture between the two polar forces of radical imbalance is what we all struggle to achieve in our souls and what informs so much of the arts in general.

   Greenaway also refers to “a religious sect called the Christian Community” that has emerged from Anthroposophy. The Christian Community certainly does not refer to itself as “a sect”, any more than do Roman Catholics, Orthodox, Baptists or Methodists refer to themselves as “sectarians”. The Christian Community, which Steiner always regarded as completely separate and independent from the Anthroposophical Society, was formed when a group of pastors and priests (mostly from within the Lutheran tradition; see picture above) asked Steiner how the life of the Christian sacraments could become the basis of a Christian communal life in the modern age. On the basis of his indications, they formed their “Christian Community” (1922) and within it began to ordain priests and build congregations. Their priesthood included some of the first ordained women priests in Christian history.

   After Greenaway’s initial overview, the reader soon comes to an indication of Greenaway’s prejudice with the words “I offer a few pointers which I hope will assist interested readers to do some further research for themselves, beyond the propaganda of the devotees of the Steiner movement” (my emphasis). And with that phrase, his article departs from balance and becomes an open attack.

Fifth Gospel

Instead of beginning where Rudolf Steiner himself began in the 1880s and 90s, with his philosophical work, which Steiner regarded as the basis of all his other activity, Greenaway goes straight to a cycle of what he mistakenly calls five lectures that Steiner gave in Oslo in 1913, whereas there are actually thirteen lectures and they were given in Oslo, Berlin and Cologne in late 1913 and early 1914. They have the title The Fifth Gospel – From the Akashic Record  (Steiner Collected Works GA 148). It is interesting that Greenaway begins his point of attack here, no doubt aware that for some readers, the very title “Fifth Gospel” will sound presumptuous, even blasphemous or heretical along the lines of: how dare anyone add something to the four canonical Gospels with which we have all become familiar!

   Two points should be made here: 1) Christianity is not something frozen in aspic 1700 years ago by the dogmas, definitions and censorings of the early Church Fathers in the early Christian centuries, any more than “science” was frozen in aspic in the time of Francis Bacon in the early 17th century. Christianity is something that grows and develops as humanity grows and develops; Christ, after all, said He would be with us until the end of the world (Matt.: 28:20) 2) St. John’s Gospel ends with the words: “And there are also many things which Jesus did, the which, if they should be written every one, I suppose that even the world itself could not contain the books that should be written. Amen.” (John 21:25) St. Paul witnessed none of Jesus’ deeds in the Three Years from His Baptism to His Ascension yet all the pages in the New Testament written about or by Paul considerably outnumber those written by each of the Gospel writers. Paul, in his own words, was commissioned by the Ascended Christ and achieved remarkable things, but many great Christian teachers have appeared in the centuries since St. Paul, and any impartial observer of the life and activity of Rudolf Steiner would have to recognise that he too was a significant Christian teacher who achieved remarkable things. Paul was enabled to ‘hear’ the voice of the Ascended Christ. That was a suprasensory experience. Steiner, from childhood, had suprasensory abilities, and he gradually developed the ability to read in the ‘Akashic record’, that is, the cosmic memory of all that has happened in the evolution of the earth and of the activities of humans and spiritual beings. This does not mean that Steiner could read everything in that record or even read clearly what he could read. He was frank about how his abilities in this regard were developing over time. What he was able to do at one point, say, in 1913, he could not do years earlier. But why should a person with such an ability not communicate what he has been able to observe? Of course, everyone is free not to consider or to trust what he says. If we do not have that ability of suprasensory vision ourselves, we can, however, investigate the life of the observer and decide for ourselves whether he is trustworthy or not, just as people in St. Paul’s time had to decide for themselves whether or not to accept what he said.

   Greenaway describes The Fifth Gospel as a “core text” “in the sense of being much revered by all Steiner affiliates” (my emphasis). As someone who has been involved with Steiner’s work and his movement for 42 years, I can say with confidence that it is not true that all “Steiner affiliates” revere the Fifth Gospel lectures. There are many different streams of people within the anthroposophical movement, and they have many different interests within it. Steiner himself distinguished two broad streams in the movement: those he called ‘old souls’, who had already had one or two, or possibly even more Christian incarnations, and ‘young souls’ who had either had only one Christian incarnation or else were having their first Christian incarnation in the modern world now. These ‘young souls’ had had more non-Christian incarnations and still had leanings to the pagan world and to more cosmological themes, whereas ‘the old souls’ were more Christocentric and often more devotional. Some of the young souls can go through decades of interest in Anthroposophy before they develop an interest in Christ or Christology, whereas with others, it is precisely what Steiner has to say about Christ that attracts them from the very beginning. Contrary to Greenaway’s implication, The Fifth Gospel is not normally regarded within Anthroposophy as a “core text”. There are four such “core texts”: The Philosophy of Freedom (1894), Theosophy (1904), Knowledge of the Higher Worlds – How Is It Achieved? (1905/08) and An Outline of Esoteric Science (1909). Those with an especial interest in Christianity are usually drawn to Steiner’s work by reading his lectures on the four Gospels (1908-1912) or by his early lectures Christianity as Mystical Fact (1902), by The Fifth Gospel (1913-14) or by Christ and the Human Soul (1914).

    Greenaway describes The Fifth Gospel as having “a dense and driven style….hyper-conceptual and impenetrable to some”. This is much exaggerated. The Fifth Gospel is far from Steiner’s most difficult work nor is it “hyper-conceptual and impenetrable”; the style is not particularly “dense” nor is it “driven”. By contrast, there is his more difficult work such as his book The Riddles of Philosophy (1914), his ultra-condensed and cryptic lectures Anthroposophy – An Introduction (1924) or scientific lectures such as The Fourth Dimension – Mathematics and Reality (1905-1922). Many works of English theology are far less accessible or readable than The Fifth Gospel, for example, those of Steiner’s contemporaries in the English Lux Mundi movement (in the Church of England) of the 1890s. Nevertheless, Greenaway does admit, in a most unreligious turn of phrase, that with The Fifth Gospel, “perseverance pays dividends”, although this is rather disingenuous, as he omits to tell us what the “dividends” actually are.

   He chooses to “focus on Lecture 2, in which Steiner purports to examine the developing state of consciousness of some of Christ’s disciples in the period leading from the death of Jesus up to Pentecost.” But Greenaway doesn’t actually consider this developing state of consciousness of the disciples. Instead, he focuses on Jesus’ dead body in the tomb and what Steiner says about it. Greenaway is evidently disturbed by Steiner’s “clairvoyant observation” of what went on in the tomb at the time of the earth tremors following Jesus’ body being placed in the tomb. Steiner says that these tremors caused the body of Jesus to fall into a fissure and that further tremors closed the fissure over the body, so that later, the tomb seemed empty “for the Earth had received the dead body of Jesus”.

   Greenaway notes that “this assertion asserts new knowledge, not known to the historical record nor to archaeology. Any critical evaluation requires us to ask the question: How does Steiner know that Jesus’ body fell into a crevice? …. (Steiner) propagated the concept of “spiritual science”,  [so] it seems reasonable to ask: What evidence does Steiner adduce?” Greenaway brings in the word “science” here, because he suggests that Steiner’s “spiritual science” is not what he, Greenaway, thinks science properly is, as we see from the title of his article. Steiner would answer: “Jesus’ body fell into the crevice; that event is visible in the Akashic record”. A clairvoyant has access to things that non-clairvoyants do not. He has an ‘instrument’ that others do not, with which he can investigate reality. A natural scientist may have an instrument that others do not, such as an electron microscope, a radio telescope or even a super instrument like the Large Hadron Collider at CERN. But the natural scientist then has to interpret  – through thinking – what he claims to observe through his instruments. Do we believe and trust him? And if so, why? The astronomer or microbiologist uses his instrument and tells us: “this is what I saw, and this is what it means”. Steiner used his instrument and told people: “this is what I saw and this is what it means.” In both cases one has to look at the wider context in order to be able to make a judgment as to whether to trust the investigator.

    Greenaway says nothing here about the wider context of the lecture in question or about whether one can trust Steiner as investigator. Instead, he suddenly goes off at a tangent and brings in the concept of “the resurrection of the intellect” to “justify” his “critical approach”. “This concept” he claims, rather tackily, “permeates the vast Steiner corpus like the lettering through a stick of Brighton rock”. Having read a great deal of Steiner over the past four decades, I can assure readers that Greenaway is wrong and that this particular concept, “the resurrection of the intellect”, certainly does not “permeate the vast Steiner corpus” as he claims. Intellectual thinking, as first developed by the ancient Greeks, is only one kind of thinking, and a very abstract kind. Steiner was concerned to help people develop three kinds of thinking beyond the intellectual; he used three technical terms for these: Imagination, Inspiration, and Intuition. But as preparation for this, he insisted that first, people need to think in a clear and organised way. Those who call Steiner a “mystic” simply have not read him.

    Greenaway does not help his readers even to understand what he means by this concept – “the resurrection of the intellect”. Instead, he uses it merely as a lever with which to attack Steiner’s teaching of reincarnation. He suddenly says that “Steiner regarded himself as a reincarnation of Aristotle, though with some other interesting incarnations in between, including Thomas Aquinas.” He puts this in such a way that readers might think that Steiner regularly spoke about himself as an incarnation of Aristotle or Aquinas, as though to give himself some kudos. On the contrary, Steiner never spoke about his former incarnations in public, saying “I was this person or that.” He made only some indirect allusions to his previous incarnations in a very few private conversations with individuals. Nowhere in the book (Rudolf Steiner’s Mission and Ita Wegman by Margaret and Erich Kirchner Bockholt, Rudolf Steiner Press (1977), to which Greenaway refers  as ‘evidence’ that Steiner regarded himself to have been Aristotle and Aquinas,  will the reader find Steiner saying “I was Aristotle…I was Aquinas”. Steiner was far too modest and tactful a man to make such statements. The distribution of that book, first published in English in 1977 and privately printed for members of the Anthroposophical Society, was even numbered and restricted; it was not generally available. Not even in the cycle of 82 lectures that Steiner gave on karma and reincarnation in the last year of his life did he say that he had previously incarnated as Aristotle and Aquinas. It was his pupils who worked that out in subsequent years and decades from reading between the lines and relating various things Steiner had said over the years. More to the point here than the book cited by Greenaway is Rudolf Steiner’s Core Mission: The Birth and Development of Spiritual-Scientific Karma Research (2010) by Thomas H. Meyer, which is available to the public through the usual channels. This book focuses on Steiner’s connection to Aquinas and to the subject of the nature of human thinking.

Greenaway says that “Whether Steiner was factually correct in this insight is, of course, highly debatable, but that is a side-issue here.” “The point”, he says, “is that Steiner’s ‘Anthroposophy’ attempts to apply a further development of Aristotle’s thought to various issues and problems of our time.” (emphasis – TB) Again, this is highly misleading for those unfamiliar with Steiner, Anthroposophy, or Aristotle. First, Anthroposophy is not merely a “further development of Aristotle’s thought”, as Greenaway implies, since Anthroposophy considers all the major developments in western thought before and since Aristotle’s time, nor is it merely the attempt to apply some kind of neo-Aristotelian thought to various issues and problems of our time” which “further development” Greenaway then says is “not clear”. Actually, it could not be clearer. There have been few more powerful critics of modern society and its problems than Rudolf Steiner and few individuals who have offered as many profound practical solutions to those problems across a whole range of activities, from farming and banking to social issues, education, healthcare and the arts, from bees to Buddhism and from limestone to Lucifer. Greenaway says he has been able since the 1970s to discover only “one unvarying fundamental” in this “further development” of “Aristotle’s thought”, which is what, grossly overgeneralising, he claims Anthroposophy is. But Greenaway does not tell us what this single fundamental is, i.e., he does not give us a ‘what’; instead, he gives us a ‘how’. He claims that students of Anthroposophy invariably start addressing any topic by looking for an indication about it by Steiner. In other words, he seeks to accuse those interested in Anthroposophy (not Steiner himself, please note!) of dogmatism; he attacks how they consider things rather than what they come up with.

    Firstly, what Greenaway says is simply wrong, in my experience. In many anthroposophical groups I have attended, a subject is first approached, whether it is, for example, the question of the EU or COVID-19, by trying to understand the outer, descriptive aspects of it, e.g. the conventional natural scientific, objective explanation. Then, the group would consider their personal, subjective, response and feelings about it. Next, and only here would anthroposophical knowledge (e.g. indications from Steiner) perhaps enter the process, and not necessarily. The group members would seek to identify one or a few key gestures or identifying markers in the phenomenon; they would try to get at the essence of it.  Certainly, anthroposophical knowledge could be of help at this point in for example, relating the phenomenon to Steiner’s indications about spiritual history. They would try to distil the phenomenon, if possible, to a single key concept or word or picture. Then, and this is important, they would sleep on it, preferably, for more than one night, having taken the question about the phenomenon into sleep. They would then reassemble and see if any member of the group had had any illumination as to the spiritual origin of the phenomenon i.e. what spiritual being, or what kind of spiritual being, underlies or informs the phenomenon, the point being that all phenomena in this world have their origin in the spiritual world, the lowest level of which is the world of thought, of concepts and ideas, sometimes called (though not by Steiner) the ‘noosphere’, into which spiritual beings from higher realms can and do act, for good or ill. All this is very far from what Greenaway asserts is the anthroposophical approach, namely, simply to find what Steiner says about something and then repeat it. Steiner himself would have been appalled at such a dogmatic approach and said so many times. Freedom of thinking was his central concern from his earliest philosophical writings onwards, and if any person engaged in Anthroposophy merely regurgitates what Steiner said about something without any attempt to think it through by him or herself, that person would not have understood what Steiner was all about. But unthinking dogmatism, after all, can be found in just about every walk of life; we saw plenty of it during the COVID years.

National Sovereignty

By way of example of what he regards as anthroposophical dogmatism, Greenaway immediately goes to a subject that he surely knew would be of interest to UK Column viewers – national sovereignty. Without giving any indication of the depth and complexity of Steiner’s thinking about nations, nationhood, nationalism or national sovereignty, Greenaway grossly misrepresents Steiner’s view by saying simply: “if the topic is ‘national sovereignty’, then the permissible stance in a Steiner study group is to view it as a philosophical viewpoint which may or may not have been useful once, but which is now out of date.”

    This is another misrepresentation. Steiner strongly argued that what he often called the “unitary state” (Einheitsstaat) in which national governments claim to manage all aspects of society (e.g. cultural, political and economic) like the executive board of a corporation, is indeed out of date and must be superseded or else it will only cause more suffering and wars which result from economic competition between unitary nation states. He pointed out that two central facts have emerged in the modern age: 1) since the 19th century certainly, and arguably even since the 16th century, we all live in an increasingly interdependent world economy, and 2) individuals have been increasingly asserting their right to dignified treatment by others and to full participation in social affairs; Steiner saw this as the result of the gradual individualisation of western society under the growing influence of the Christian spirit. This second factor of the dignity of each individual human being has led inexorably to democracy, and the proper place for that is in the national community, not in any artificial ‘global citizenship’ or H.G. Wellsian ‘World State’, because individuals grow up in communities in which they share language, culture, traditions, history and natural environment. Steiner was therefore firmly opposed to world government in an abstract political sense but argued that humanity has to find a way to regulate the world economy by economic means through representation, not by socialistically inclined politicians, lawyers and bureaucrats, but by cooperation between those people involved in the three aspects of the economic process itself – production, distribution and consumption. This is a deeply social, not socialist process. In the modern economic world, we depend on each other (fraternity). In the political world, individuals and interest groups try to balance their mutual interests, rights and responsibilities (equality) within national communities, each of which has its own unique history and traditions different from those of other countries, and in the cultural world (the arts, sciences, “research”, philosophy, religion), individuals require the liberty to develop their individual talents, capacities, and insights, so here too the State has no place and no right to dominate or interfere. The cultural sphere is cosmopolitan, but in a different way from the economic sphere, which is intrinsically cooperative rather than competitive; in the cultural sphere, where competition is rightfully at home, artists and scientists, also those engaged in sports, need to be able to operate throughout the world, free from both political and economic interference.

    This is only a thumbnail sketch of the broadest outline of Steiner’s threefold picture of society which has sophisticated ramifications that can be extended throughout each of the three spheres[TB1] . While Steiner saw that cosmopolitanism and internationalism have inevitably developed over the past 500 years and therefore have to be reckoned with in the cultural and economic spheres, national sovereignty inherently belongs in the political/legal sphere and should continue to do so. This calls for a greatly reduced role for the State, but not in any traditional Tory Party sense. This is because the Christian spirit underlying the fact of economic interdependence requires a new ethos in economic life, one that is based on local, regional, national and international threefold economic associations of producers, distributors and consumers. This is a fully threefold, or trinitarian, ethos that will lead away from the current direction towards economic warfare between national economies fighting egoistically for resources and for profits for oligarchs and mega-corporations. Greenaway’s simplistic misrepresentation of Steiner’s view of national sovereignty is just that – a misrepresentation. Even Steiner’s lectures on economics were called the National Economy course (Nationalökonomischer Kurs) because at that point he was trying, to begin with, to get across the threefold ideas within the more national context of that time. The English title of those lectures is “World Economy”, a title with which he would no doubt agree today. If threefold economic associations linking networks of producers, distributors and consumers on an ongoing basis were active at local, regional and national levels in many countries, the world economy could likewise be regulated more ethically, unlike today’s WTO or GATT, which are controlled by financial, political/national and megacorporate oligarchical interests.

    Greenaway’s critique then wanders, via reference to Thomism and Aquinas’ own apparent acknowledgment, at the very end of his life, of the limitations of thinking (Steiner never accepted that there were limitations to human thinking), into the difference between Steiner’s approach and negative theology or mysticism. Greenaway insists that the dogmatism in the anthroposophical movement which he personally encountered (it can, however, be encountered in just about every sphere of human social life, in academia, for example)  has led to friction and splits within the ‘Steiner movement’.  There has indeed been some friction and splits in the movement, but again, of what part of human social life has that not been true? For support, Greenaway points us to a book that is markedly hostile to all the main esoteric and spiritual endeavours of the past 150 years or so – The Occult Establishment by James Webb (1986), which he calls a “somewhat neglected classic”. Webb’s book, however, fails to examine the real “occult Establishment” operative in British society for over 300 years, namely Freemasonry, which is only mentioned on 11 of the book’s 535 pages. There was a serious split in the Anthroposophical Society from 1935 until c.1970, after which it was overcome, and the two wings came back together again. Since then, the broad movement has remained unsplit, a rather unusually positive development in such movements. Greenaway asserts that “the more independent-minded tend to leave the Steiner movement, or to maintain only partial linkage”. This may be true, I do not know, but Greenaway offers no numbers to back his claim. I can only say that in 42 years I have met countless people within the movement who are independent-minded, just as I have met many who are not.

    After this superficial effort to smear the anthroposophical movement as being “dogmatic” and which always follows the Master’s indications and nothing else, Greenaway suddenly cuts back to that crevice in the tomb in The Fifth Gospel, and again to lecture 2. Indeed, throughout his whole article, he refers to no other specific lecture but this single one from Steiner’s 6000+ collection of lectures. Now he tries to undermine the concept of the Akashic record and refers us to an online talk and a single phrase by Teal Swan, (aka Mary Teal Bosworth) an American New Age spiritual teacher, who he freely admits is “not herself an Anthroposophist.” She is 39 and only began her career as a self-help spiritual teacher in 2011, thus in her late 20s! This unserious diversion leads Greenaway to question Steiner’s statements about the prehistory of the Earth, accessed via the Akashic record, as presented in one of his four core texts –– An Outline of Esoteric Science (1909). Greenaway writes: “Anyone who seriously wants to get to grips with Steinerology should obtain this book and read this incredible chapter [Chapter 4]; but without expectation of historical or scientific evidence, as it will be found wanting.” In fact, what Steiner presents there is hardly any more incredible than what cosmologists, astrophysicists and evolutionary biologists urge us to believe. The main difference between what they, and Steiner, present as explanation of how our solar system, the Earth and humanity came to be, is that Steiner’s complex picture is all about the formative activities of conscious intelligent beings – divine servants of God, who used to be called spiritual hierarchies, from the lowest (angels) to the highest (seraphim), whose activities fulfilled a divine plan for humanity, whereas the cosmologists,  astrophysicists and evolutionary biologists  would have us believe that the solar system, the Earth and humanity came about as the result of the materialistic mysticism of the Big Bang and the later lottery of random natural selection – mere accidental meaninglessness. Most people never even think about it, but this is the abysmal level of today’s materialistic explanations of why or how we are here, which bamboozles so many people because they are overawed by the more earthbound and seemingly ‘magical’ achievements of technology: ‘if the scientists can produce the Bomb and AI, surely they can understand what space and energy are?’ But no. Even the more honest cosmologists now finally admit, after some 150 years of scientific materialistic hubris, that they have no clue what 95% of the matter and energy of the universe consists of. That honesty at least is a step in the right direction – though obviously not for Mr Greenaway, who continues to adhere faithfully to “the science”. Steiner’s picture, by contrast, is complex, intelligent, internally coherent, beautiful and awe-inspiring. Above all, it is permeated by meaning, which relates all levels of creation to each other and to the divine.

Higher Worlds

Greenaway next moves to critique Steiner’s book Knowledge of the Higher Worlds but not without another swipe at the concept of the Akashic record: “It seems there is some disagreement as to the level on which the Akashic record is located— ‘you can’t expect experts in any field to agree’ is Teal Swan’s comment.” Greenaway thus implies that there is disagreement among spiritual scientists who speak of the Akashic record, and yet in the natural sciences, which he obviously esteems, there is disagreement among experts in all fields of knowledge – that is, after all, part of the process of how science advances.

    Greenaway follows this swipe with an anecdote, obviously intended to be humorous, about one lady who ran an anthroposophical institution (Camphill Delrow in the UK, for adults and children with special needs) where he worked some 45 years ago (!). This lady spoke of “a buzz of energy” which the exercises in Knowledge of the Higher Worlds produced “at the end of her nose, which indicated to her that she was on the right track”. Clearly, this anecdote was included to stimulate ridicule in the reader. He then says: “no aficionado of Steiner has ever developed an ability to ‘read’ the Akashic record; not even in part, so far as I am aware.” To this, one can only reply: has Greenaway then been aware of all the people in the anthroposophical movement across the whole world since the 1970s? And even if he were correct in his surmise, one has to remember that our culture has been deeply enmeshed in materialist thought and action for some 400 years; it is only reasonable that it will take quite some time for individuals to develop really effective spiritual capacities such as reading the Akashic record. Even in ancient cultures and also in tribal cultures today, only a very few people within those cultures (wizards, witches, sadhus, ‘medicine men’) developed effective spiritual skills. When our culture seriously begins to expand its view of what “science” is – beyond the conceptual limits of natural science asserted since the early 17th century  - into  suprasensory realms, then we can expect that more and more people will become spiritual scientists, some of whom will also have the capacity to read the Akashic record. Indeed, Steiner claimed that from 1900, humanity was slowly emerging from a 5000 year-long period of spiritual darkness (in which, paradoxically, it developed individual freedom apart from its divine parentage though with constant help from reincarnating human beings who have been at higher stages of spiritual or ethical development) and he predicted that more and more people from the 1930s onwards (he died in 1925) would begin to have natural clairvoyant vision again, as most human beings had had over 5000 years earlier but had since lost. But that would be very problematic, he said, because most, due both to the materialism of modern culture and the lack of any spiritual education, would not be able to make sense of what they were experiencing i.e. they would not be able to bring the right concepts to what they were perceiving. It was one of Anthroposophy’s main tasks to help with this.

    Even Greenaway admits that he accepts or at least tolerates the idea of the Akashic record as a hypothesis – “unproven, though possibly useful”. A theory then, as are those of Darwin and Einstein. He leans for support here on biblical references to “records in the ‘Book of Life’” but insists that reading the Akashic record “does not of itself constitute proof of the facts read therein, at least not if we feel beholden to ideas of scientific method or historical evidence.” The first part of his statement here is true: a natural scientist can observe something with his microscope or telescope, but the concepts he brings to interpret the percepts he observes may not necessarily be the correct ones. The same is true of a spiritual scientist reading the Akashic record. However, the second part of Greenaway’s statement shows the limitation of his own thinking, as he speaks of feeling “beholden to ideas of scientific method or historical evidence”. These ideas are not something fixed, as he seems to think; they are not stuck in the period from 1600 -1900. We cannot speak of “the science”, as Greta Thunberg and others do; there is no such thing. Science simply means “knowing”. The knowing of the ancient Egyptians was different from that of the ancient Greeks, which differed from the mediaeval period, which differed in turn from that of the rigid materialism of the 19th century, which differed again from the more fluid approaches to science that are beginning to emerge in our time and for which Steiner was one of the early and significant pioneers.

    Greenaway, once again referring to the only lecture he cites  (lecture 2 in The Fifth Gospel) from Steiner’s enormous oeuvre, points out that Steiner himself admits in that lecture that it is not easy to read the Akashic record with precision. Greenaway then cites the last sentence of the lecture: “‘Nevertheless’, concludes Steiner, ‘when you hear these words, you may feel an indication of what lives in me when I speak about the secrets which I would like to call the secrets of the so-called Fifth Gospel’.” This quotation by Greenaway lacks context. Firstly, in those years before the First World War, Steiner was quite open about the fact that his spiritual vision was not perfect or fully formed but that it was developing. In this particular lecture, after describing the difficulties he had in reading the Akashic record, Steiner suggested a reason why and said: “I am certain it would have required less effort if, like many people today, I had received a truly Christian education in early youth. I did not have this. I grew up in an entirely freethinking environment and my studies also went in that direction. My higher education was purely scientific. I now have some trouble finding the things of which I am obliged to speak.” But he then points out that he also felt obliged to mention this because there were those (e.g. Annie Besant, the head of the Theosophical Society) spreading lies that he had been trained by Jesuits. Also, he says, he felt that his lack of an ordinary Christian upbringing made him less biased towards Christianity; he came to it out of his own spiritual experience, not out of family conditioning. He felt also that in the modern age, many people would place more reliance on a scientifically trained person speaking about Christianity who had not had a typical Christian upbringing. It is after this that he speaks the last words of the lecture, which are quoted by Greenaway: “If you take my words seriously, you will feel an indication of what lives within me when I now speak of the secrets that I would like to call the secrets of the so-called Fifth Gospel.”

     Providing none of this context, and after considering a few lines from only one of Steiner’s 6000+ lectures given over a period of 22 years, Greenaway comes to a colossal, exaggerated generalisation: “Thus—as happens over and over again when we try to close on some aspect of so-called “spiritual science” according to Rudolf Steiner—we encounter a nebulous morass.” Certainly, Steiner could sometimes be unclear, but then most of his teaching was oral and given in the form of lectures not in books (of which he wrote about 30), so it could be affected by conditions such as health, tiredness, travel etc. Some of his lectures absolutely sparkle while others may feel more laboured. Also, he was not exactly helped by the German language, which does not have clarity as its forte, and Greenaway was dependent on translations, some of which can further obscure matters. Nevertheless, on the whole, Steiner was a very clear, sober, comprehensive and remarkably incisive and insightful thinker whose presentations, in print and at the podium, were very well-organised, aesthetic, humane, engaging and full of warmth. There is much testimony to this, even from those who were not his pupils or supporters. To characterise his work as a “nebulous morass” is the language of an ‘intellectual’ vandal.

    Greenaway at least recognises that Steiner did acknowledge that his insights should be tested—in various applications—for their efficacy, and indeed Steiner repeatedly said that he did not want to be “believed”, but rather, urged people only to be open-minded enough to keep his statements in mind as they experienced life. “Many of his leading so-called clairvoyant insights”, says Greenaway, “are simply untestable”. It is true that some are untestable, but how many people have “tested” the Big Bang, or Darwin’s Theory of Natural Selection or Hawking’s black hole theories? Natural science is full of “untestables” for ordinary people. In Steiner’s work there are also many testable and also ‘semi-testable’ insights and indications. There are statements which one can immediately recognise from one’s own experience, others which one hasn’t experienced but which one can make sense of and can at least entertain as possibilities, and then there are more bizarre statements, which might seem incredible, until one recognises that many bizarre statements by other people have been proven correct in the past. There was the ‘bizarre’ statement by Steiner on 13 January 1923 (See Health and Illness, Volume 2, Anthroposophic Press) that if farmers began to feed dead animals to cattle, the cattle would start going ‘mad’! This was shown to be true in the BSE crisis of the 1990s.

    Greenaway then claims that in his experience every “Steiner aficionado” is a blind devotee who believes everything Steiner said. “Such blind devotion constitutes a theocracy, the polar opposite of science in any meaningful sense of the word.” Devotion, he says,  cannot “constitute a theocracy”.  Devotion, however, is a feeling; “theocracy” is a system of rulership. Devotion may be useful to a theocracy but cannot be said to constitute one i.e. to be one. A theocracy is the polar opposite of science, says Greenaway, but in the theocracy that was ancient Egypt, who were the men of science, the men of knowledge? The priesthood! Something similar was held to be true in medieval Europe. And who are today’s cardinals, who constitute today’s theocracy, if not the scientists who the media constantly urge us all to look up to? Whose strictures were the politicians in governments throughout the world following when they imposed their totalitarian controls on their populations in 2020-2022? Those of “the scientists”, whose science at that time turned out to have feet of clay.

Science?

Here we arrive at the nub of Greenaway’s critique of Anthroposophy and Steiner’s work, namely, that it is not “science”. His claim about the blind devotees is based only on his own personal experience. I have met many thousands of people in my 42 years of experience of Anthroposophy and I have certainly met some blind devotees, but I have met many more who were the opposite, who strove to think for themselves as well as quite a number who challenged or questioned what Steiner said. I have also met, seen, witnessed or read blind devotees in universities, in academia, in “science”. The very world of academic “science” is built on authority; it should not be, but it is. Most scientific progress has been halted or held up when scientific authorities have blocked the work and research of the brave few who dare to question. Again, we have seen this during the COVID-19 years. Progress in science, in anything in fact, has very often come from the periphery, not so often from the centre. Greenaway uses the word “theocracy” incorrectly: “theocracy”, as a system of rulership, belongs to the world of politics and society, not science. Only in his last two years, in 1923, did Steiner take on the leadership of the Anthroposophical Society, after the remarkable building he had spent 10 years constructing had been destroyed by an arsonist influenced by a local Catholic priest, and the Anthroposophical Society, which had been founded 10 years earlier, fell into a crisis due not least to the rampant hyperinflation of that year 1923, Until then, he had been the teacher of the Society, not its leader or administrator.

    Forgetting the abominations that happened in the name of “science” in the COVID years, when the whole world could arguably be described as having been “on the cultic spectrum”, Greenaway declares that Anthroposophy is a theocracy and that although “a theocracy is not necessarily a cult”, Anthroposophy is “on the cultic spectrum”. He goes on to concede, however, that the anthroposophical movement is not actually a ‘cult’ and even grudgingly admits, though without giving details, that its practical ‘draw-downs’ (his term) “can be useful to the broader community” but he insists once again that Anthroposophy’s “cornucopia of ideas…barely adds up to ‘spiritual science.’” Evidently, he thinks ‘spiritual science’ must be the same as ‘natural science’. But this is by no means the case. What the two have in common is observation and the attempt to think clearly and precisely. However, natural science since Francis Bacon has proceeded by way of hypothesis and induction, from the particular to the whole; spiritual science proceeds by way of vision and deduction, from the whole to the particular.

    Greenaway now asks if spiritual science (Anthroposophy) is ‘proved’ by Anthroposophy’s practical activities (e.g. biodynamic agriculture, viticulture, and healthcare). The evidence is mixed, he says: anthroposophical products (e.g. wine, biodynamic agricultural produce) “compare well with other comparable produce, though the devotion applied in their production renders scientific comparison virtually impossible” – what does that latter part even mean? That one is not supposed to strive for quality? That one is not supposed to work hard to make quality products? Either the products are tasty, healthy or efficacious, or they are not.

    He recognises that the British Medical Association has a “generally dismissive”, “blinkered attitude” towards alternative remedies such as homoeopathic and anthroposophic medicines but he continued to use them “for over forty years” even though “objective testing of them is virtually impossible” “as there is no agreed common methodology”. But the point is: if they work, then surely, they should be used. Anthroposophic remedies have been used for a hundred years, and customers continue to use them. One can only say that if they did not work, all those customers must be fools. People must have had success with them; otherwise anthroposophic medicine would have withered on the vine many decades ago.

Camphill

Now Greenaway comes to a significant institutional offshoot of Anthroposophy: the Camphill Communities (for people with special needs), founded by Dr. Karl König in 1939 near Aberdeen, Scotland. There are over 100 of these communities in more than 20 countries. The Camphill Movement, Greenaway says, “has had some notable success through provision of curative education in a supportive environment for mentally less able members,” especially in relation to childhood autism. But, as usual, he doesn’t detail that and prefers to focus on downsides – the exhaustion of staff members and cases of bullying, which he experienced at two Camphill communities, where he worked, it has to be said, not for a very long time, and he acknowledges that he was not Camphill-trained when he was working there. His lack of education in the Camphill ethos might explain his lack of sympathy with the “village community lifestyle” that he dismisses as excessive “busyness”. He also acknowledges, “in mitigation”, that in his experience, the bullying he witnessed was “staff-on-staff, never staff on vulnerable members”.

I shall omit further discussion of Greenaway’s negative judgment of Camphill, which is by far the longest section of his whole article, because much of it is his complaints about a particular individual under whom he worked, a personal experience and one in which he obviously suffered a great deal. Instances of bullying or other wrongdoing in any institution should of course be acknowledged and dealt with. However, to generalise negatively about an entire institution largely on the basis of one’s resentment or antipathy towards a single individual and then to generalise further that one’s negative judgments about that one anthroposophical institution somehow ‘prove’ that Rudolf Steiner or Anthroposophy as a whole are at fault is, in the view of this writer, poor judgment indeed. One can encounter unpleasant, domineering or even bullying individuals in any institution, including churches and scientific institutions. Just because an individual within a spiritual movement or institution clearly has not sufficiently (or even not at all) internalised the teachings of that movement does not mean that that movement should be condemned in toto. “By their fruits ye shall know them” – fair enough, but for that criticism to stand across the board in this case, Greenaway would have needed to  have worked in a number of Camphill communities around the world, or to have detailed knowledge of people who had done so over a long period of time; alternatively, lacking such personal experience, he would need to have carried out a systematic survey of such institutions in various countries over a considerable period in order to substantiate a public criticism of, or accusation against, Camphill or Anthroposophy as a whole. Such would surely be more in the line of a “scientific” approach. Instead of this, Greenaway has chosen to present only his own personal experience and anecdotes, in which a strain of long-held personal antipathies towards a particular individual would appear to be admixed.

    Greenaway seems to be conscious of his lack of a “scientific” stance here, because he then refers to “some research” (undetailed) by a “Jungian analyst”, Kevin O’Dowd, in the early 1970s (50 years ago!) “on the efficacy of western ashrams”. He does not say whether anthroposophical communities or institutions were included in this research. O’Dowd’s conclusions were that “in every instance he investigated, these structures eventually devolved into two groups of people who needed each other in symbiotic relationship. These two groups were: 1. people who needed to dominate, and 2. people who needed to be dominated”, and Greenaway then declares that “Camphill-trained staff… appeared to fit that study at the two Camphill communities that I worked in during the 1970s. People who did not fit this dichotomy tended to leave.” How many Camphill-trained staff  “appeared to fit the study” and how many of those “who did not fit the dichotomy tended to leave” he does not tell us.

    Such is the extent of the “scientific proof” of the “downside” of Camphill offered by a man who has chosen to attack Anthroposophy and Rudolf Steiner on the basis that they are not “scientific”.

Prejudice?

Perhaps because his attack lacked sufficient “scientific” backing, in the final part of his argument, Greenaway, in the section – very appropriately – titled Prejudice? turns for support to an article co-written by Peter Zegers, a bookseller from Amsterdam, and the American Leftist academic Peter Staudenmaier  – not exactly an impartial and balanced scholar. Staudenmaier (pictured below), a left-wing anarchist and radical Green professor at the private Marquette University in Milwaukee, one of the largest Jesuit universities in the USA, is an academic ‘pugilist’ who has spent much of his career trying to smear Steiner with the tarbrush of racism and anti-semitism. Greenaway nowhere acknowledges these aspects of Staudenmaier’s background; instead, he refers to the “carefully-referenced article” (i.e. it has many footnotes), which brings up the racism question. This is not the place to enter into a detailed discussion of Staudenmaier and his “academic” methods[TB2]  – that has been done elsewhere, but two points should be made very clearly. First, Staudenmaier often claims to be open and honest in his approach to debate and to Anthroposophy, but he often quotes things out of context or else provides no context. Secondly, he is so determined to prove that specific remarks by Steiner were racist and/or anti-semitic that he fails to look at Steiner the whole man. For someone who has written much about eco-fascism, he pays little regard to the holistic context of Rudolf Steiner’s biography and therefore does not see that that particular individual could not possibly have been what we call a “racist” or “anti-semite” who saw white people as intrinsically superior to other races because of the colour of their skin. Indeed, no-one with a genuine Christian viewpoint and who regards reincarnation to be true, as Steiner did, could possibly hold that view.

Following the accusations of racism by Staudenmaier and Zegers, Greenaway then provides his own and refers to a lecture (13.12.1922[TB3] ) in a cycle titled Health and Illness where, without any context whatsoever, he quotes Steiner simply as saying “Blond hair actually bestows intelligence.” On the surface, this certainly seems like one of Steiner’s more bizarre statements, but what is the context? Before the lecture, Steiner had been asked why people with blond hair were becoming increasingly scarce. Greenaway claims that Steiner’s argumentation “descends from premises or assertions that can only be seen by Steiner, often nebulous, and some of which must sound to non-devotees as sheer nonsense.” In fact however, Steiner first describes the eyes in some detail in a completely natural scientific manner. He begins by noting the connection between blond hair and blue eyes and goes on to talk about the different ways in which food substances penetrate people’s heads – either only as far as their brains (blonds) or all the way to the hair and the eyes (dark-haired and dark-eyed people). From here he develops an argument to show that, within the broader context of an ageing planet, blond and fair-haired people are gradually becoming extinct faster than dark-haired people and why it is vital for the human race to develop new sources of intelligence and wisdom that are not based on the physical body as intelligence and wisdom were in ancient times throughout the world. It is a complex and sophisticated discussion, far too long to repeat here, and it is one that Greenaway completely ignores with his simplistic one-sentence quote.

     With regard to the issue of racism, Greenaway does at least mention – although it is tucked away in his footnotes  – A Refutation of the Allegation of Racism against Rudolf Steiner by Richard House, a Steiner Waldorf teacher, in New View Magazine, (Issue 68, Summer 2013) and quotes from House that: “anyone harbouring the slightest doubts about Steiner’s alleged racialism should actually visit a Steiner School [...] or a Camphill Community, or a bio-dynamic farm, or any anthroposophically inspired company [...] and reach [their] own informed conclusions.”

    After leaning on the antipathies of Staudenmaier and Zegers, Greenaway then briefly proffers three points summarising an article carried on the PLANS anti-Anthroposophy website run by veteran anti-Waldorf campaigner Dan Dugan in California. The article is a lengthy sustained diatribe against Steiner and Anthroposophy in general and Waldorf education (aka “Steiner schools”) in particular by an American parent, Sharon Lombard, originally from S. Africa, whose family clearly had a negative experience when their child attended a Waldorf school in the USA. It contains many inaccuracies and also draws heavily on the racialist and utterly biased discourse of Peter Staudenmaier. The first part is a full-on attack on Steiner and Anthroposophy; the second part describes her family’s experience at the school. I would make just two observations here about two things that should have happened before the Lombards’ child joined the school: 1) The school should have made the anthroposophical basis of its educational approach absolutely clear to the parents. The parents’ letter to the school when they later removed their child shows that the school had not done that. 2) The Lombards should have fully informed themselves about Waldorf education before opting to put their child in the school. Sharon Lombard’s article makes very clear that the parents had not done that. There is not the space here to go into Lombard’s article; it is much more detailed than Greenaway’s and contains far more points of interest than his but also far more inaccuracies and untruth. Many parents have unhappy experiences at many different types of schools, private or State-run. Equally, countless parents and children around the world have had very positive experiences indeed at Steiner schools over the 104 years of their existence.

Finally, Greenaway arrives at his disingenuous conclusion in which he allows himself to say that “there are commendable aspects of the Steiner legacy, aspects of its school education” but no more than that; he has not mentioned what these “commendable aspects” are in his article, which has been almost entirely a one-sided attack on Steiner and Anthroposophy. In his brief concluding paragraph, he makes more sideswipes at the “blind”, “faithful followers inhibited by their totalist attitude to the words of the Master” and contrasts “proven (or at least plausible) science” with “inflated, pretentious conjecture, both of which can be found in plenty in Steiner’s work”. He admits therefore that some “science” is only “plausible”, but he does not extend that plausibility to what Steiner has to say. This man, whose experience of Anthroposophy and its institutions, as revealed in his article, is based largely on the 1970s (!), shows that he is not up-to-date with the latest developments when he writes that “within the new Academy/Free Schools structure in the UK, three Steiner-based schools have been able to open as Free Schools.” In fact, by early 2019, four State-supported Steiner Academies were in existence, but in that year, three of the four (Exeter, Bristol, Frome) were judged inadequate by Ofsted, then were closed and handed over to the Avanti Schools Trust, which operates under the I-Foundation, the religious authority governing Avanti schools. The I-Foundation is part of ISKCON (International Society for Krishna Consciousness, the Hare Krishna movement). In 2023, one of the three former Steiner Academies (Exeter) has been transferred from the Avanti Academy Trust to the Reach South Academy Trust.  This champion of the free spirit and former State bureaucrat ends his article by calling for more “informed probing” by the State: “Due critical attention must…be applied from outside, particularly in the form of informed probing by appropriate regulatory authorities.”

Conclusion

Greenaway has little positive to say about Steiner and Anthroposophy beyond a few begrudging remarks made perhaps to give the appearance of a ‘balanced’ viewpoint, but it is in fact hardly a balanced critique. Inaccurate and incorrect in various particulars, it is overly subjective and over-generalised. It attacks Steiner and Anthroposophy for not being “scientific” but itself can hardly be called scientific.

Steiner’s Anthroposophy appeared at a time when the West seemed like it was about to emerge from several centuries of gross materialism. The decade before the First World War was a time both of great pessimism and tension in politics and economics and of great optimism in the arts and sciences. The two world wars then arguably set that optimistic emergence from materialism back, and within twenty years of Steiner’s death in 1925, another Austrian of a very different kind had brought Europe to ruin. 80 years on, and Europe and the West are still racked with profound crises and problems, at the root of most of which is still materialism. Steiner was a remarkable modern polymath who stood at the crossroads of Europe’s deep-rooted spiritual, social and scientific problems and tried to offer practical solutions on the basis of a profound understanding of the human being and history. However, he has been largely and consistently ignored, almost deliberately overlooked, especially in the English-speaking world, whose elite claims both that its culture leads, and should lead, the globe. But every now and then, articles or news items appear which reinforce the ignoring, and which say, in effect: “Ignore Rudolf Steiner. Do not look to him for new ideas and solutions.” John Paul Greenaway’s article would seem to be another example of this. This ignoring is an interesting phenomenon in itself, but history is full of examples of how people with genuinely constructive impulses who are ignored for long periods are eventually rediscovered by later generations and their ideas taken up anew as seeds of healing and rebuilding.

Terry Boardman  1 July 2023

To the majestic heights of summer

The Sun’s brilliant being arises

It draws my human feeling out

And into its vast expanse of space.

Intuitively, within my soul

A sense is stirring that dimly tells me:

In future time you will understand

That you now were perceived by a being divine.

from Rudolf Steiner, The Calendar of the Soul, 10th week 9-15 June

There are two moods in “Summer” from Vivaldi’s “Four Seasons” suite which most aptly portray in music the two sides of midsummer when the sun rises to the solstice. First there are the slow, heavy, languid moods that express the noonday heat when little moves and we have to struggle to stay awake and active. We feel the sensual oppressive heat and moisture. It is a time when we can easily fall into error or else into temptation. But the second, dynamic part brings the summer thunderstorm and the lightning strikes; then we can feel as if the weight of heaven comes down like a judgment telling us to “wake up!” and we run for cover. We are all well aware of the two sides of the sun: the giver and sustainer of life, but also the sun that can deal death, especially in the desert. Rudolf Steiner speaks of the sun not as one ‘positive’ thing such as a giant nuclear power plant but as an ‘empty’ or negative space which is the ‘dwelling’ place of numerous spiritual beings – to give them their traditional names in order of ascending spiritual rank: Angels, Archangels (notably Michael), Archai, Exusiai (Elohim), Dynamis, and Kyriotetes. Western esoteric knowledge (e.g. as in the Three Books of Occult Philosophy by Heinrich Cornelius Agrippa 1486-1535) has also been aware that two other particular beings indwell the sun – the beneficent Nachiel, or ‘Intelligence of the sun’, whose number, Agrippa notes, was 111, and the evil Sorath, or ‘Spirit of the sun’, whose number was 666.

On the fifth day of the fifth month this year, 2023, the BBC reported¹ that the World Health Organisation (WHO) had declared that Covid-19 no longer represents “a global health emergency”. Although these two organisations, WHO and BBC, which had played major roles in promoting the damaging lockdowns and the injection programmes from 2020 to 2022 that proved fatal or harmful for so many people, were loath to admit that this meant “the danger was over”, preferring to say that “the emergency status could be reinstated if the situation changed”, the news did in effect signal that the pandemic catastrophe of the past three years was indeed over.  Back in 2020, when the mainstream media informed us that pharmaceutical companies were racing “at unprecedented speed” to develop a “vaccine” against SARS-Covid-19, we were told that it may not be ready for the global population until 2023.² In Britain, the public was assured, for example, that “all three… vaccines [from Pfizer, AstraZeneca and Moderna] have had analysis of safety and efficacy data from phase three trials (involving tens of thousands of participants) published in peer-reviewed articles in medical journals such as The Lancet [UK] and The New England Journal of Medicine [US]. The collection of long-term protection and safety data will continue over the next couple of years, and so the completion dates for the trials are in 2022 and 2023.”³ (emphasis – TMB).  2023 was thus the end date determined for the completion of the trials for the Covid-19 “vaccines”. We now see that it has become the end date for this whole global three-year experiment that was conducted on such a colossal scale, arguably the greatest coercive propaganda experiment in history.

Agenda 2030

We are rapidly approaching another very significant three-year period which begins in seven years’ time, in 2030 – the anniversary (2030-2033) of the three years when, according to Steiner’s spiritual science, 2000 years ago, the Christ was incarnated in Jesus of Nazareth, from His baptism in the River Jordan to His Ascension forty days after His Resurrection. We can also note that various prominent individuals and global organisations such as the UN and the World Economic Forum (WEF) have, for several years now, been focusing the attention of the world’s publics specifically on the year 2030 and the decade of the 2030s. For example, on 13 June 2019, the WEF, a private, non-democratic organisation, and the UN, another non-democratic organisation, signed the portentously named “Memorandum of Understanding between the UN and the WEF on the Strategic Partnership Framework for the 2030 Agenda”. This outlined areas of cooperation to “deepen institutional engagement and jointly accelerate the implementation” of the UN’s “2030 Agenda for ‘Sustainable Development’”, which was itself a further development of the UN’s Agenda 21⁴ that had first been laid out in 1992 at the Earth Summit in Rio de Janeiro, the city above which stands the colossal statue of Christ the Redeemer (built 1922-1931) on the 2,300 ft. (700 m.) high Corcovado peak.  On 25 September 2015, the 193 countries of the UN General Assembly – without any permission from their member countries’ citizens – adopted the 2030 Development Agenda titled “Transforming our world: the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development”.⁵ In October 2019, the same month in which the “Event 201” “table-top exercise” began at Johns Hopkins University in New York, an event which, three months ahead of time, simulated a coronavirus pandemic and how the world should respond to it, not least by “flooding the zone” of public information (such was the phrase repeatedly used at the event) with a single narrative  –  the WEF published a paper laying out 30 goals to be achieved by the year 2030; it was titled: “What if we get things right? Visions for 2030”.⁶ A further “Strategic Partnership Framework” was signed between the WEF and the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) on 23 January 2020.

Soon after the alleged Covid pandemic began, in June 2020, Charles Windsor, then Prince Charles (above), and Klaus Schwab jointly launched the much-trumpeted “Great Reset” project, which aimed at nothing less than a proposed total transformation of our entire civilisation as well as human nature itself, all in the name of the “Fourth Post-Industrial Revolution”, the “A.I. Revolution”, the “Zero Carbon” targets of the Climate Change agenda, and the 17 UN Sustainable Development Goals (i.e. Agenda 2030/Agenda 21). Again, the focus was on the decade beginning in 2030. Clearly, the unelected global elite are very focused on this particular period of time 2000 years after what Steiner called the Mystery of Golgotha – the death and resurrection of Jesus Christ. But does Jesus Christ figure anywhere in their grandiose and ambitious projects? He does not.

The Sun Demon

What could be the connection between the three-year “Covid-19 pandemic” and these plans and projects for the 2030s? There are those who may see all these developments since 1992 – in my view, mistakenly – as further examples of the “globalisation” that they believe is an inevitable, cosmopolitan – and therefore positive – concomitant of the Age of Michael, the Archangel of the Sun, in whose era we have been living since the year 18797, according to esoteric knowledge that goes back at least to the late 15th century.  I am of the view that the answer can be found in two words known to those familiar with Anthroposophy: Ahriman and Sorath.

Just as, in most cases, the human physical body has a spiritual being associated with it, which we call our ‘self’ or our ‘I’, so also do the planetary bodies, including the Earth and the Sun, have spiritual beings associated with them. Just as the Earth currently has some 8 billion human spiritual selves associated with it, so are whole communities of spiritual beings associated with the Sun. And just as human beings can have dark spiritual forces that can influence or even possess them for part or most of their lives, so do the heavenly bodies also have dark forces, which can dwell within their spiritual spheres. The Sun is no exception: the dark being that indwells it is called Sorath.⁸

Steiner calls Sorath the “Sun Demon”, a powerful inspirer of materialism⁹ and black magic. Sorath does not incarnate in history as a human being but has made three major interventions into human history in the Christian era thus far – the first around the year 666, the second around the year 1332 (2 x 666) and the third around the year 1998.¹⁰ The first, according to Steiner, came through Sorath’s influence over an important teacher at the Academy of Gondishapur in Sassanid Persia in the mid-7th century AD, approximately the time of the Arab conquest of the Sassanid Persian Empire (see picture of the ruins of the academy below). The centre of that academy was its School of Medicine. Sorath’s goal here was to advance human scientific and technical knowledge prematurely to the point where mankind at that stage of its development, and especially the population of Europe at that time, would not have had the morality to cope with such knowledge (we are dangerously near another such a point today in relation to biotech and A.I., for example). This effort was swamped and largely prevented by the religious enthusiasm of the Islamic conquest in the 7th century AD. However, this premature knowledge was not suppressed totally by Islam; part of it ‘escaped’, as it were, from Gondishapur and, via Baghdad and then Islamic North Africa and Spain, made its way to western Europe, where it eventually laid the basis of modern natural science in the 17th century. One could thus say that a thousand years earlier, around the year 666, a ‘dark Sun’ ‘scientific’ influence was blunted by the crescent Moon ‘religious’ influence of Islam.

The second intervention came 666 years later, around 1332. Steiner associated this with the destruction of the Order of the Knights Templar by the French king Philip IV (the ‘Fair’) (picture below). The Templars ran an international banking operation on a moral basis, i.e. the money they handled belonged to the Order and not to the Knights personally. Philip was greedy for gold and wanted to seize that of the Templars. He also created the beginnings of the first European centralised modern state, in which civil servants were mostly secular and loyal to him; they were not clerics, whose loyalty might first be to the Church. This efficient centralised system is why he was able to arrest all the Templars across France within 24 hours on 13 October 1307. A hallmark of this second Sorathic intervention then, was a powerful centralised political State system.

1332 fell in the middle of what I would call the second ‘Sorathic window’ in the Christian era: 1307-1332-1357. Sorath’s intervention was not only in one year, 1332, but occurred during this window from 1307 (when the Templars in France were arrested) and 1357, by which time the Order of Templars throughout Europe was over: 1307 and 1357 are 25 years on either side of the axis point of 1332. My own research has convinced me that the first window of time in which Sorath intervened was from 641 to 691; 666 fell in the middle of that period. The second Sorathic window of time was 1307-1357, with 1332 in the middle.  The third Sorathic window was from 1973 to 2023, with the central axis year of 1998 (3 x 666). One can see this “window” of time like a lemniscate with the axis point at the centre of the lemniscate:

  641  –   666   –   691

1307  – 1332  –  1357

1973  – 1998  –  2023

Key events in this third period were the end of the Soviet Union and the emergence of China in the global capitalist economy, the development of the Internet, terrorism and the struggle between the West and Islamic states, 9/11, the beginning of the incarnation of Ahriman c.2000¹¹, the beginning of the second Cold War (2014), and the Covid-19 “pandemic” of 2020-2023 with its relation to the UN/WEF plans for a Great Reset to bring about a “new world order” in the 2030s. At root, most of these issues were economic ones, but the period has closed by combining in 2020-2023 aspects of all three Sorathic windows since the 7th century. The Covid years were the years of an engineered ‘health crisis’¹² in which drastic medical and political measures were forced onto populations throughout the world after being voted through in many countries by compliant parliamentarians; this was a coordinated and centralised global action carried out by so-called ‘democratic’ state governments that were driven by the WHO and its main financial funder, the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. Governments spent billions of their taxpayers’ money to compensate their taxpayers from the effects of the ruthless and completely unnecessary lockdown measures that the governments had imposed upon their populations, and this has had terrible economic (and social) consequences, which are likely to be with us for many years to come. This third ‘Sorath window’, then, which opened around 1973, closes this year in 2023, 7 years before the 2030 anniversary of the three years of the Mystery of Golgotha, which occurred 2000 years ago.

End Times?

Many people have for some decades now been convinced we are living through the biblical “End Times” prophesied by the books of Ezekiel, Daniel and the Revelation of St John (the so-called Apocalypse) and many Green, secular atheists are equally convinced we face extinction due to “climate change” unless we take drastic remedial action, which would require the end of democracy and a new ‘Green’ global authoritarianism – world government, in fact – or “global governance”, as it is euphemistically called. Indeed, what happened in 2020-2023 can be seen as having been a kind of ‘test-run’ for that authoritarianism. I am not convinced by either of these views. Certainly, our times can seem ‘apocalyptic’ in various respects, but they are not the biblical End Times, which, according to spiritual science, are not due for another four millennia at least, when the physical earth as we know it will enter the next phase of its development.¹³

What seems like the End Times today is actually more likely the atmosphere created by the incarnation (in the West – N. America) of Ahriman, one of the two main forces of spiritual evil who, according to Steiner is embodied as a human being only once in human evolution, as was the case with Christ, in Jesus 2000 years ago, and also the case with the other spiritual force of cosmic evil, Lucifer, in China 5000 years ago. In human evolution, Christ holds the balance between the two polar forces, Lucifer and Ahriman. In 1919 Steiner said in a lecture in Switzerland that Ahriman would appear in a physical (fleischliche) human being (his words: “Ahriman in the flesh”) before even a part of the third millennium would elapse.¹⁴ It is very likely that Ahriman’s approaching manifestation as an adult human being in the 2030s¹⁵ has been behind the sense of accelerating oppression and darkness that so many people have been experiencing.  There are sometimes very dark periods in history; the 1930s was one such and we can perhaps imagine how we might have felt to have lived through that era and to have been aware of the darkening shadow that many more sensitive or awake souls perceived at that time.

Philip IV (the Fair)

Ahriman will likely present himself not as a dark tyrant like the Big Brother figure in Orwell’s 1984, but rather as a benevolent positive saviour of humanity from all its woes, a figure of tremendous knowledge, as indeed the great teacher inspired by Sorath would have seemed no doubt to his pupils in the Academy of Gondishapur, and as the French king Philip the Fair (see below), tall, handsome and seemingly religiously moral and orthodox, presented himself to his court and his officials. Philip was autocratic and inflexible, known as the Iron King (le roi de fer); Bishop Saisset of Pamiers said of him: “He is neither man nor beast. He is a statue.” This royal ‘statue’ was the monarch who even dared, after his conflicts with the Papacy, to arrest the Pope and move the Papal institution to France, where Philip could better control it. The “Babylonian Captivity” of the Popes, as it became known, lasted from 1309 to 1376 and resulted in a considerable loss of respect for the Papacy throughout Europe. Julien Théry argues that by his persecution and cruel destruction of the Christian Order of the Knights Templar in order to take their money and set up a new military Order with himself as its head, Philip IV sought to erect a kind of ‘religion of royalty’ in France: “Being the ultimate defender of the Catholic faith, the …king was invested with a Christ-like function that put him above the pope. What was at stake in the Templars’ trial, then, was the establishment of a ‘royal theocracy’.”¹⁶

Here then, in the ‘second Sorath window’ – almost 200 years before Henry VIII of England  – was an attempt to merge and centralise the political and religious spheres in the person of the king.¹⁷ Many of Philip’s troubles came from his economic woes, a lack of money caused by his numerous wars and his attempts to manipulate and devalue the French currency. Within a year of the burning at the stake in Paris near Notre Dame of the Grand Master of the Templars and the Master of the Templar Order in Normandy, both Philip and the Pope, who had unwillingly assisted him in destroying the Templar Order, died. Then, within 14 years of Philip’s death, his three healthy adult sons each succeeded to the throne one after the other but all died without issue. Edward III of England, whose mother was Philip’s daughter Isabella, then insisted that he was the rightful ruler of France; the French nobility objected that the succession to the throne of France did not pass through a woman – and so began the Hundred Years’ War between England and France. Philip’s actions in life would result in disaster for France.

Emperor Go-Daigo

In that same Sorath window, in the 1330s on the other side of the world, there was a parallel situation when another ruler attempted to combine the religious and the political in his own person in order to turn back the tide of history. In the early 14th century, the emperors of Japan had no real power; they had lost it two centuries earlier to the rising samurai (warrior) class whose leading families dominated. The Emperors had become impotent, mere symbolic figures.

However, the Emperor Go-Daigo (1318-1339, above) who, like all the emperors of Japan, regarded himself as the direct descendent of the Sun Goddess Amaterasu Ōmikami, wanted to regain for the Imperial House the powers Japanese emperors had possessed in the 8th-10th centuries, when the emperors had ruled on the highly centralised and absolutist Chinese model. He organised uprisings in 1331 and 1333 that eventually overthrew the samurai military government of the shoguns in Kamakura, (near modern Tokyo) and returned power to the ancient capital in Kyoto, far to the southwest. But his short-lived Kenmu Restoration (1333-1336), as it was known, failed because Go-Daigo could not recognise how the times had changed¹⁸ nor understand the real power and ambitions of the great samurai families or the realities of the lives of the minor samurai, the townspeople and peasants. His former samurai ally, Ashikaga Takauji, rose against him, and shattered Go-Daigo’s loyalist forces. Takauji set up a new emperor under his own control in Kyoto, while Go-Daigo escaped to the mountainous region south of Kyoto and set up a rival court there. So began the era of the civil wars between the Northern and Southern Courts, which split Japan for most of the 14th century, until 1392, when the Southern Court founded by Go-Daigo surrendered to the Northern Court. Thus Go-Daigo’s attempt around 1332 to return Japan to the ancient days of its solar “royal theocracy” failed disastrously. Japan’s Imperial Family today is descended from the emperors of the Northern Court, not the line of Go-Daigo.

Akhenaten

Some 2600 years before Go-Daigo and Philip IV, another ruler, more famous than both of them, sought to establish himself and his values and desires for his kingdom in a position of absolute power that was a challenge to the existing order. This was the pharaoh Amenhotep IV (see illustration below), who changed his name to Akhenaten (c. 1351 – c.1334 B.C.)¹⁹, and who some have argued was the father of Tutankhamen (whose original formal name was Tutankhaten), though this is disputed. Many people believe that Akhenaten was a “progressive reformer” who sought to change Egypt’s religion and culture for the better, a forerunner of Jewish and Christian monotheism, a pioneer of enlightened marital relationships, and so on. Beginning with Sigmund Freud, some have even seen him as identical with Moses and the biblical Exodus as having occurred during or just after his reign. But these views often look at Akhenaten through modern lenses,²⁰ focusing on Akhenaten himself, and often do not see him in the context of the pharaohs before him. If they did, they would realise that there was not a great difference between the way Akhenaten regarded his god, the Sun-Globe Aten²¹, and the way other Egyptians regarded their gods e.g., Atum, Amen, Ra/Re, Osiris, Horus. Each great city in ancient Egypt, for example, Memphis, Thebes, Edfu, Heliopolis (Iunu/On), Hermopolis (Khemnu) and Akhetaten (Amarna) had its own cult and chief god, which it regarded as the god, superior to all others. There is no great difference, for example, between Akhenaten’s well-known “Hymn to the Aten”, and the “Hymn to Amen-Re” preserved in the Egyptian Museum in Cairo.²² What was different about Akhenaten was his fanaticism and lack of tolerance in his exclusion of the traditional gods in favour of his own, first removing funds for their temples and then actually defacing their images and cartouches (their formal names on buildings) so as to banish them from Egyptian memory (which was what later happened to his name too, after his death: he was condemned as a heretic).

His father Amenhotep III had been a more ‘inclusive’ pharaoh, who accepted all the traditional gods even while welcoming and affirming the cult of Aten. The Egyptologist Wallis Budge points out that “To Aten, Amenhotep [IV i.e., Akhenaten] ascribed the attributes of the old gods, Tem [Atum], Ra, Horus, Ptah, and even of Amen, and he proclaimed that Aten was “One” and “Alone”. But this had been proclaimed by all the priesthoods of the old gods… the worshippers of every great god in Egypt from time immemorial declared that their god was “One”. “Oneness” was an attribute… of everything that was worshipped in Egypt… .” Budge also indicates that Akhenaten “possessed a determined will and very definite religious convictions and a fearless nature” but that he “did not lightly brook opposition… with all [his] gifts he lacked a practical knowledge of men and things. He never realised the true nature of the duties which as king he owed to his country and people, and he never understood the realities of life. He never learnt the kingcraft of the Pharaohs, and he failed to see that only a warrior could hold what warriors had won for him… .None but a man half-insane would have been so blind to facts as to attempt to overthrow Amen and his worship, round which the whole of the social [and economic] life of the country centred.”²³ The above characteristics were shared also by Go-Daigo and Philip IV: great willpower and firm religious convictions but a certain fanaticism and an ignorance of the realities of the lands and people they ruled.

Egyptologists are still arguing over whether Tutankhamen, the most famous yet one of the most insignificant pharaohs of ancient Egypt, was the son of Akhenaten, his younger brother, his stepson or no relation at all. But what is clear is that it was this pharaoh Tutankhamen (only 19 when he died c. 1323 BC), whose tomb has remained the greatest Egyptological sensation ever since it was discovered on 4 November 1922 by the British archaeologist Howard Carter (1874-1939, on the left in the photo above). Carter was funded by the archaeological enthusiast, George Edward Stanhope Molyneux Herbert, the 5th Earl of Carnarvon, (1866 – 1923, on the right in the photo above). The earl was property rich and cash poor, so he married Almina Wombwell, a young lady whose mother, Marie Wombwell, was able to blackmail millionaire banker Alfred de Rothschild, who however, cared much for Almina.²⁴ It was Carnarvon’s wife’s money i.e., Rothschild money, that enabled the discovery of Tutankhamen’s tomb by Howard Carter, who worked persistently for Carnarvon for 16 years.  Besides the Rothschild connection, the other point of interest about Carnarvon is that he was a descendant of Lord Edward Herbert of Cherbury (1583-1648). Steiner speaks about Lord Cherbury in lecture 9 of his Historical Symptomatology course.²⁵ Cherbury was the founder of English Deism, which would become the de facto ‘religion’ of Freemasonry in England. Deism was the rationalistic belief in a supreme being, for which Cherbury put forward five propositions, but in them there is no mention of Christ. Freemasons, whose symbolism and rituals are largely based on the Temple of Solomon in Jerusalem and the cultic forms of ancient Egypt, have to affirm, in order to be accepted into the Freemasonry of England (United Grand Lodge, based in London), that they believe in a supreme being; it does not matter which one.  ‘Speculative’ (i.e., symbolic) Freemasonry itself is an example of what Steiner called the resurrection of aspects of the culture of the 3rd Post-Atlantean (Egyptian-Babylonian-Chaldean) epoch (2907-747 BC) within our current 5th Post-Atlantean epoch (1413-3573). It is not unreasonable to sense a certain connection between the abstract transcendent ‘spirit’ of the ‘modern’ god of Deism and Akhenaten’s sun god Aten, which was abstract compared to the very concrete, even sensual nature of the many other Egyptian gods. It may indeed have been no accident that connected Carnarvon with Tutankhamen.  Carnarvon was one of those involved in the excavation who died not long after the tomb was opened (the tomb was discovered in November 1922; he died in Cairo in April 1923).

Many may have wondered: why of all the pharaohs of Egypt, it should have been the insignificant Tutankhamen whose tomb has proved to be the most sensational discovery in Egyptology so far. And why was it discovered just at the time it was? Definitive answers to these questions may never be found, but besides speculation about reincarnation e.g. possible former lives of Carnarvon and Carter at the time of Tutankhamen²⁶, as well as the fact that the discovery came exactly 100 years after the vital decipherment of the ancient Egyptian hieroglyphic script by Jean-Francois Champollion in 1822, there is also the fact that the discovery of the tomb of Tutankhamen (reigned c.1332-1323 B.C.) whose original reign name was Tutankhaten) directed attention back to Akhenaten’s era (c.1353-1323 B.C.) and the momentous but short-lived religious change that Akhenaten tried to impose upon his kingdom. Scholars have determined that Tutankhamen reigned for 9 years; he became pharaoh in c.1332 B.C., that is 2 x 666. It is also possible that Akhenaten himself died in 1332 B.C., as the dates of Egyptian chronology are not completely secure. The pharaoh Smenkhkare is supposed to have reigned in the one or two years (1334-1332 B.C.) between Akhenaten and Tutankhamen, but that too is debatable. (Egyptologists are still unsure whether he even existed, was merely Akhenaten’s co-regent in his last years or whether he was Akhenaten’s widow or daughter in disguise.)

The axis of history

The key point in all this, I feel, is that the period of the Atenist religion came to an end in the time (1330s BC) that was as far before Jesus Christ as the 1330s AD were after Jesus Christ, the years of the Christ Event being regarded by Steiner as the focal axis of human evolution. The years on either side of that axis seem mysteriously related to each other. Steiner discussed  this mirroring in history that occurs on either side of the Christ Event in Palestine from another perspective when, in 1910, he spoke of how the 3000 years from the beginning of the Age of Darkness (known in India as Kali Yuga) in 3101 BC, down to the time of Jesus Christ, can be divided in three periods of approximately 1000 years each, the ages of Abraham (c.3000 – c.2000 BC), of Moses (c.2000 – c.1000 BC) and of Solomon (c. 1000 BC to the Christ Event) and that something of the character of these three ages recurs, mirrored as it were, in reverse order in the 3000 years after Christ: the first Christian millennium – the Age of Solomon; the second Christian millennium – the Age of Moses; and the third Christian millennium – the Age of Abraham. In the Age of Abraham before Christ (i.e., 3000-2000 BC) natural clairvoyance faded, humanity became dependent on the physical brain and the concept of One God began to appear; in the Age of Moses BC (2000 – 1000 BC), humanity descended still lower into the material world, and the One God revealed Himself externally through the physical forms of nature (wind, storm, burning bush etc) and through external commands such as the Ten Commandments); in the Age of Solomon BC (1000-1 BC), human beings began to think for themselves; philosophy and politics emerged. However, the Age of Solomon AD (1 AD – 1000 AD) was one of the development both of Christian esoteric wisdom and also of barren and rigid intellectual theology and dogmatism; the Age of Moses AD (1000 AD – 2000 AD) was one of the development of Christian mysticism and inwardness within the soul; the Age of Abraham AD (2000-3000 AD) will be one in which humanity will gradually free itself from the physical brain, and natural clairvoyance will develop, including vision of the Christ, not as a physical presence but in the spiritual biosphere that surrounds the earth. The respective gestures of the three ages are thus related but mirrored in time. Another example of this mirroring around the Christ Event was that Buddhism emerged in the late 6th century BC and Islam in the late 6th century AD. A further example was that in the 6th century BC, between 597 and 538, many Jews were exiled in Babylonia following King Nebuchadnezzar’s destruction of the Kingdom of Judah, while in the 6th cent. AD, the Byzantine Emperor Justinian passed many anti-Jewish laws and restrictions, and the Babylonian Talmud (a central text of Rabbinic Judaism) was completed in the early 6th century. It is of great importance for our understanding of history that we learn to look at and compare historical events before the Christ Event with those that occurred in the same periodicity after it. In the context of this article, for example, this means the 1330s BC and the 1330s AD.

From the 1330s to today

In 1328 AD, King Charles IV of France died after a reign of only six years. He was the last of the three unfortunate sons of Philip IV (“the Fair”) and thus the last of the main branch of the Capetian dynasty, which had ruled France since the 10th century. Like his father, Charles was also known as “the Fair”. In 1328, Philip IV’s daughter Isabella was reigning in England with her lover Roger Mortimer, the couple having overthrown her husband, Edward II, two years earlier. After the death of Charles IV in 1328, the French nobles declined to accept Isabella or her son Edward (Edward III) as ruler of France and instead crowned Philip of Valois king of France. He was the brother of Philip IV (d. 1314) and the head of a cadet branch of the Capetian dynasty, henceforth known as the Valois dynasty. So, from the 1330s there was a new dynasty in France after the deaths of the three sons of Philip IV, the king who had tried to create a “royal theocracy” centred on himself as ‘Vicar of God’, rather as Akhenaten, who saw himself as “the Son of Aten”, had tried to do in Egypt, some 2660 years earlier, and, as mentioned above, Emperor Go-Daigo had also tried to do something similar in mediaeval Japan, also in the early 1330s. The ‘gesture’ that all three men had in common was that they saw themselves as ‘sunlike’ in their respective countries, which they wished to make revolve around themselves. Akhenaten, like Sorath in Gondishapur c. 666 AD, tried to push his people too far forward too fast, while Go-Daigo wanted to take his country backwards in time to the 9th or the 7th centuries. Philip IV was not as anachronistic as the other two; he understood his country or at least his nobles and clergy somewhat better, but he nevertheless caused his country and its people great suffering through his headstrong, ill-judged and stubborn decisions.

The discovery of Tutankhamen’s tomb came in the 1920s. It was a decade when monolithic, absolutist totalitarianism, which one could call a modern ‘resurrection’ of ancient Egyptian behaviour in our time, was rapidly growing in Europe: the Bolsheviks had come to power in Russia in 1917, and the USSR was formally established in 1922; Stalin took over after Lenin’s death in 1924; Mussolini took power in Italy in 1922, and the Nazi Party was founded in Germany in early 1920; Hitler became its leader a year later. The common point of all these forms of totalitarianism, besides their materialist underpinnings, was that they combined the cultural, political and economic spheres of society under State control – a theme of “Oneness”. All three of them had Egyptian overtones in their use of dictatorship by all-powerful leaders and those leaders’ control of the masses in an almost religious way, often through huge, ritualistic spectacles. In this second Age, the Age of Moses (second millennium AD), these regimes were very much ‘command societies’, absolutist theocracies as the earlier ‘Age of Moses’ (BC) had been. In Germany in particular, the cultic symbolism and style of the new regime was that of an inversion of the motif of the Sun, for example, in the omnipresent swastika.²⁷ Imperial Japan’s symbol was also that of the rising sun disk.

On 26 November 1922, after the arrival of Lord Carnarvon and his daughter Evelyn Herbert in Egypt, Howard Carter, together with Carnarvon and Evelyn, became the first people in millennia briefly to enter the tomb’s burial chamber, 33 centuries after the lives and deaths of Akhenaten and Tutankhamen. Evelyn, being smaller, was actually the first person to enter Tutankhamen’s burial chamber. Work inside the tomb proceeded slowly and carefully in 1923. Lord Carnarvon, who had already been suffering from a serious illness in 1922, died in April 1923, and Carter resumed work at the tomb in autumn that year. But on 12 February 1924 he stopped work in protest against interference by the Egyptian authorities and did not recommence work at the tomb until 25 January 1925. It is worth noting that Steiner had fallen seriously ill at the end of September 1924 and in January 1925 was still ill in his sickbed. It was only in October 1925, almost three years after the initial discovery of the tomb, that Carter and his team removed the now fabled and world-famous golden funerary mask of Tutankhamen from the mummy and finally gazed upon the pharaoh’s face. By that time, Steiner had died six months earlier (30.3.1925) and Adolf Hitler had been out of prison almost a year and had refounded the Nazi Party in February 1925 under his firm command, calling himself “der Führer”.  So much about Hitler (except for his normal speaking voice) and about the National Socialists is an image of rigid hardness. The stern “Man of Destiny” facial image he presented to the world resembled that of an Egyptian pharaoh – apart from the moustache of course! Nazi architecture resembled ancient Egyptian architecture in certain respects. The black swastika (itself an ancient Hindu symbol of the Sun) was set within a white disk in the centre of a blood red ground. Ancient Egypt was known as the Two Lands, black and red. Hitler, who idolised the figure of Parsifal, was represented as though he were the Sun’s representative on earth, and Nazi ideologues spoke of him as such. Akhenaten regarded himself as the Son of the Aten, the son of the Sun. Replacing all the priests of the old gods, he claimed in effect to be the Sun on earth, something which not even Louis XIV would have claimed for himself. Hitler came to power in 1933, (exactly 100 years after the death of Kaspar Hauser in 1833) and 66 years before 1999, which is close to 3 x 666 =1998.

The Beast

Steiner said in 1910 that some human beings would begin to perceive the Christ in the Earth’s etheric field (its spiritual biosphere) beginning in 1933²⁸ and in 1924 he remarked that “before the Etheric Christ can be comprehended in the right way, humanity must first cope with encountering the Beast who will rise up from the abyss. This is what the apocalyptic language tells us…”²⁹ Beasts of another kind did indeed arise, not in the heavens but on Earth, in human souls in 1933, inspired by a spiritual being, the Sun Demon, that made its own major intervention during the third ‘window’ of its activity in the Christian era³⁰, when it struck all three spheres of that period – in economic, political and cultural events – most recently in the area of health and medicine in the Covid crisis.

The German businessman, Klaus Schwab, who founded the WEF, and the WEF’s ‘court philosopher’, the Israeli historian, Yuval Noah Harari, (left) author of ‘modestly’ titled books such as Homo Deus and Unstoppable Us − How Humans Took Over the World, believed that Covid-19 was intimately related to the coming Great Reset; Schwab’s 2020 book was even titled Covid-19: the Great Reset, which almost suggests that Covid 19 was the Great Reset. But for Schwab, the Great Reset means the total transformation of our civilisation to an AI-driven, Transhumanist form of what he calls “stakeholder capitalism”, by which he means a form of global capitalism run in the interests of a few elites. This is what they have scheduled for the 2030s, when Ahriman will likely make his main move in the human realm. But before that momentous event, which will no doubt deeply affect the rest of this century as the two world wars did the last century, ‘the ground’ for the Great Reset by Ahriman was prepared during the last 50 years (1973-2023, the third Sorath ‘window’) by Sorath, the Sun Demon. Those years culminated in the three years of a catastrophe based on deception by the UN/WHO, WEF, Bill Gates, Anthony Fauci, the American Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) and the British Scientific Advisory Group for Emergencies (SAGE) as well as numerous national governments and media organisations which unquestioningly followed the ‘advice’ and the strictures of these institutions and individuals. It was a scientific (‘medical’), political, and economic catastrophe³¹ in the early years of this crucial 21st century, this new third millennium, and in the last 3 years of the third intervention of Sorath the Sun Demon, (the “two horned beast” of Revelation chapter 13), a pseudo-pandemic was conjured up in order to ‘save us all’ from an allegedly dreadful global disease. Hundreds of millions, from nonagenarians to infants, were injected with a deceptive “vaccination” that was no vaccination at all but a technological bioweapon³² that is steadily killing off considerable numbers of healthy, fit human beings, notably young sportspeople – some drop dead suddenly or fall seriously ill – and is implicit in women’s pregnancies that fail and the increasing excess mortality rates³³ – all of which the mainstream media largely ignore. Those in government, the media and the entertainment industry, who fell under Sorath’s spell and followed the official narrative on Covid and the “vaccinations”, spoke at first with comforting words and all kinds of encouragements and inducements but then finally with threats, insults and vicious propaganda that “spake as a dragon” against those who refused to have the injections, demanding they be locked up, interned, denied their civil rights etc.

Meanwhile, Schwab, the WEF, the media and national governments used the ‘crisis’ to push the new technology of surveillance and control with “Covid passes”, “health passes”, “Green passes”, “vaccine passports”, which were all dependent on smartphone apps and QR codes. We were told we would have to work from home, travel less and get used to a lifestyle within 15 minutes of our homes, where everything would be “within reach”, as it were – all so that we wouldn’t “spread the virus” and would also “reduce our carbon footprint” on the way to the “Zero Carbon” economy and society. Carbon has been turned into a hate object… People seem to forget that our bodies consist mostly of water and carbon. During the window of Sorath’s third intervention (1973-2023) not only have the technologies of microchipping both animals and human beings emerged along with those of smartphones, QR codes, automated payment and social credit surveillance systems, but we have also been pushed from fear of “global cooling” in the late 1970s to fear of “global warming” in the 1990s and fear of “climate change” since the 2010s. All of these fearmongering developments since the early 1970s, culminating in fear of Covid-19, bear the signatures of Ahriman (the “first beast” mentioned in the Book of Revelation Chapter 13) and Sorath the Sun Demon (the second, two-horned beast) who

“….deceiveth them that dwell on the earth by the means of those miracles which he had power to do in the sight of the [first] beast; saying to them that dwell on the earth, that they should make an image to the [first] beast, which had the wound by a sword, and did live.

And he [the second beast, Sorath] had power to give life unto the image of the [first] beast, that the image of the [first] beast should both speak, and cause that as many as would not worship the image of the [first] beast should be killed.

And he [Sorath] causeth all, both small and great, rich and poor, free and bond, to receive a mark in their right hand, or in their foreheads:

And that no man might buy or sell, save he that had the mark, or the name of the beast [Sorath], or the number of his name.

Here is wisdom. Let him that hath understanding count the number of the beast [Sorath]: for it is the number of a man; and his number is Six hundred threescore and six.”³⁴ (The Book of Revelation)

These are dark times indeed, times when, as a civilisation, we have achieved so much materially but fallen so far ethically and spiritually. Nicanor Perlas wrote about our time strikingly and helpfully in his 2018 book Humanity’s Last Stand – The Challenge of Artificial Intelligence, A Spiritual Scientific Response.  I personally feel that “Last Stand” is exaggerated, but nevertheless, it is true that ours is a time when only through the encounter with great darkness are many people waking up to the spiritual reality of what is happening and realising that darkness is followed by dawning light, as is said in the 4th verse of Steiner’s Foundation Stone Meditation, referring to the Mystery of Golgotha 2000 years ago: “Darkness of night had run its course. Day-radiant light now streamed into human hearts…” Christians should never forget that the spiritual forces of darkness were already comprehensively defeated 2000 years ago and that those forces have only conducted a huge and complex rearguard action since then, an action that has also included major offensives on their part, but ultimately all in vain. This 21st century is a momentous time for the future of humanity.  In a mood of equanimity, watching and praying, observing, understanding and acting, we should keep in mind that we have chosen to live in this time and to play our part for the sake of humanity’s future.

Endnotes

1. https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/health-65499929

2. https://www.thechemicalengineer.com/news/experts-warn-global-covid-vaccine-could-take-until-late-2023/

3. https://fullfact.org/health/covid-vaccines/

4. “Agenda 2030, also known as the Sustainable Development Goals, was a set of goals decided upon at the UN Sustainable Development Summit in 2015. It takes all of the goals set by Agenda 21 and re-asserts them as the basis for sustainable development, saying, ‘We reaffirm all the principles of the Rio Declaration on Environment and Development…’ Adding onto those goals from the original Rio document, a total of 17 goals have been agreed on, revolving around the same concepts of Agenda 21; people, planet, prosperity, peace, and partnership.” https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Agenda_21

5. See a Romanian whistleblower and expert on sustainable development expose the UN, WEF and Agenda 2030: https://www.brighteon.com/a6d160b9-8794-438c-bc09-775534add11e  Interview with Reiner Fuellmich.

6. https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2019/10/future-predictions-what-if-get-things-right-visions-for-2030/

7. Following Steiner’s indications, it will end approximately in the period 2250-2300. Following that of the mediaeval esotericist, Abbot Johannes Trithemius of Sponheim, it will end in exactly the year 2233.

8. See Heinrich Cornelius Agrippa, Three Books of Occult Philosophy (1533) chapter XXII. Agrippa’s esoteric teacher at the time he wrote the book was Trithemius of Sponheim.

9. See lecture of 12 Sept. 1924 in Steiner’s Collected Works GA 346, and also lecture of 29 June 1908, in Collected Works GA 104.

10. See n. 9 above. See also lectures of 11th and 12th October 1918, in Collected Works GA 184 (published in Rudolf Steiner, Three Streams in Human Evolution, Rudolf Steiner Press 1965, rep. 1985)

11. See my article ‘The Incarnation of Ahriman: When and Where?’ at http://threeman.org/?p=2905

12. See the speech by Dr David Martin to the EU Parliament 28 May 2023 https://rumble.com/v2ncp8w-dr-david-e.-martin-phd-covid-summit-european-union-parliament-may-2023.html

13. See R. Steiner, The Apocalypse of St. John, Collected Works GA 104 (1908), lectures 8,9,10,11,12 and the chart at the back of the book.

14. Steiner lecture of 1 November 1919, Collected Works GA 191.

15. ‘He’ may not appear on the public stage, as it were, but may conceal ‘himself’ and act behind or through a number of human ‘frontmen’. Either way, humanity will notice a tremendous acceleration towards total control of the planet and the human race.

16. Julien Théry, ‘A Heresy of State. Philip the Fair, the Trial of the “Perfidious Templars”, and the Pontificalization of the French Monarchy’, in Journal of Mediaeval Religious Cultures, 2013.

17. In 1534 Henry VIII broke with Rome decisively and set himself up as the Head of the Established  Church in England.

18. This was, after all, the martial Age of the Archangel Samael (late 12th to the early 16th century). The characteristics of this age were war, conflict, fragmentation, but also individuation.

19. His dates, like those of most Egyptian pharaohs, are not exactly certain. Scholarly opinion includes 1353–1336 or 1351–1334 BC.

20. “Before much of the archaeological evidence from Thebes and from Tell el-Amarna became available, wishful thinking sometimes turned Akhenaten into a humane teacher of the true God, a mentor of Moses, a Christlike figure, a philosopher before his time. But these imaginary creatures are now fading away one by one as the historical reality gradually emerges. There is little or no evidence to support the notion that Akhenaten was a progenitor of the full-blown monotheism that we find in the Bible. The monotheism of the Hebrew Bible and the New Testament had its own separate development – one that began more than half a millennium after the pharaoh’s death.” – From ‘Aspects of Monotheism’ by Donald B. Redford, Biblical Archaeology Review, 1996.

21. The Aten is often translated as Sun disk, but this is a mistranslation. ‘Globe’ is more accurate.

22. See E.A. Wallis Budge, Tutankhamen – Amenism, Atenism and Egyptian Monotheism (1923, repub. 1991) chaps. 2 and 3.

23.  Wallis Budge, pp. 77-78. Akhenaten’s closure of the temples of the other gods meant great hardship for the common people of Egypt as well as for the priests and scribes.

24. https://lord-carnarvon.blogspot.com/

25. From Symptom to Reality in Modern History, Collected Works GA 185, lecture 9 3 November 1918.

26. Carnarvon and Carter were close for 16 years, from 1907 until Carnarvon’s death in 1923: Lady Burghclere, Carnarvon’s sister, wrote that for 16 years “….the two men worked together with varying fortune, yet ever united not more by their common aim than by their mutual regard and affection” (my emphasis). See n. 24 above.

27. Looking at some other background events to the discovery and opening of Tutankhamen’s tomb, we find that in 1919 serious rebellions broke out in two parts of the British Empire – Egypt and Ireland, and in 1922, the two peoples gained their independence from Britain – Egypt in February and Ireland in December. Then on 31 December 1922, the Goetheanum Building (1913-1922) designed by Rudolf Steiner in Dornach, Switzerland, was destroyed by arson.

28. Steiner lecture of 6.3.1910 Stuttgart, in Collected Works GA 118.

29. Steiner lecture of 20.9.1924 in Collected Works GA 346.

30. During the 49/50 year ‘window’ of 2023-1998-1973 BC (in the 21st/20th centuries BC) that corresponds to the period 1973-1998-2033 AD, the 11th Dynasty (c.2150 BC – c.1991 BC) ended in Egypt and was followed by the 12th Dynasty (1991-1802 BC). In 2023 BC Pharaoh Mentuhotep II (2060–2009 BC) was ruling; he reunited Egypt after the turbulence of the ‘First Intermediate Period’ (2181–2055 BC) and became the first pharaoh of the Middle Kingdom. He was succeeded during that third 666 window BC by Mentuhotep III (c. 2009–1997 BC), Mentuhotep IV (1997–1991 BC), and Amenemhat I (1991-c.1961 BC)

31. Medical, because of the injections which are gradually killing off countless numbers of people across the world and ruining the lives of many others; political, because of the huge extension during Covid-19 crisis and since, of the coercive powers of the national states which obey the will of the UN, WHO and WEF; and economic, because of the terrible economic effects around the world of the unnecessary lockdowns and injections.

32. See Dr. David Martin’s presentation to the “Covid Summit” at the EU Parliament May 2023 https://rumble.com/v2ncp8w-dr-david-e.-martin-phd-covid-summit-european-union-parliament-may-2023.html and also, biotech and patent lawyer Karen Kingston’s analysis of the Covid injections in the documentary Final Days: https://stewpeters.com/final-days-video/

33. Even the British MD, Dr John Campbell on Youtube, one of the most widely watched ‘experts’ who supported the official narrative 2020-2022, changed his tune last year out of his concern over the excess mortality figures.

34. See: The Book of Revelation, ch. 13: verses 14-18.

©Terry Boardman

People born in the middle of a century, like me (1952), tend to look back to the beginning of the century, the time of their grandparents’ youth, as well as to the end of the century, the time of their own maturity and old age and also of their own grandchildren. As someone interested in history since childhood, this has always been true for me. As a 12 year old already I had become fascinated with the First World War, was aware of the dangers of nuclear war and also wondered with expectation and some concern what the new 21st century, the new millennium, would be like. But I was also born ‘in between’ in space as well as time: I was born on the Welsh side of the southern end of the border between England and Wales, near a town, Caerleon, which, 2000 years ago, had been garrisoned by the II Legion Augusta of the Roman army, and I grew up from ages 3 to 18 on the English side of the northern end of that same border, in the city of Chester, where, 2000 years ago, the XX Legion Valeria Victrix of the Roman army was stationed for about 330 years. The two places are almost vertically aligned at the north and south end of the border. My father was a Welsh soldier and my mother an English local government civil servant. So, my entry into and early upbringing in this life was spent on this border and between those two locations, both once ancient Roman army bases, north and south, east and west of each other -  between the English and Celtic cultures.

My father was in the Royal Signals, traditionally the British Army’s communications specialists, who have as their cap badge the symbol of Hermes, or Mercury, the messenger of the gods, who was always travelling ‘up’ and ‘down’ between the human and divine worlds. In astrology, Mercury is said to ‘rule’ the sign of Gemini (The Twins), under which I was born. The two major stars of Gemini are those of Castor and Pollux. Castor looks like one star to the naked eye, but is actually a sextuple star system consisting of three binary pairs, while Pollux is a single giant star. In Greek mythology, Castor was mortal and Pollux immortal. Traditionally, the 12 signs of the Zodiac are said to relate to parts of the human body. The binary sign of Gemini, with its two vertical and two horizontal (slightly curved) lines, is usually associated with symmetry and the shoulders and arms in the human body.

“Do you know about the number 23?”

Given all these things, plus the fact that from the age of 21 until 29, I lived in Japan and so my small east-west bicultural (Anglo-Celtic) experience in Britain was expanded across Eurasia, it is not surprising that even before I encountered the mysterious number 23 at the age of 30, the question of finding a balance between two poles and overcoming dualism had already become something of an existential one for me. It is perhaps the Geminian issue. By the time I had arrived at university aged 18, I had understood that political extremes were to be avoided, so I was drawn to none of the extremist groups that were then common in university politics. Yet in Japan I found myself encountering a culture that was in many ways, compared to Britain, one of extremes: of climate, of natural disasters, of the soul life and behaviour of the people, of religious practice, of ancient and modern. How on earth to bridge East and West between Japan and Britain and within myself? It took years to find an answer to this question.

In my first week at university to study history, I bonded in friendship through a shared interest in architecture and music with a physics student from Yorkshire. We were born just 16 days apart at midsummer. His interests at the time mostly had to do with aspects of space and technology, mine with time and history.  We were like chalk and cheese but remained close friends, despite my years in Japan, until his death 4 years ago. A Cancerian very much concerned for his material environment and proud of his Yorkshire heritage, he travelled very little outside of Britain yet was one for extremes and spent most of his life veering from one to the other. While I was expanding my mind and experience in Japan, he expanded his by plunging into the world of drugs and was lucky to survive. Then, like his LSD ‘hero’, American professor Timothy Leary, he moved on, aged 30, from drugs to computers. At that time, I too was 30 years old and had discovered the work of Rudolf Steiner only months before. After my years in Japan, I was more than ready for it. I soon found that in Steiner’s work I had finally discovered the bridge that I had been looking for between east and west, between past and present, arts and sciences, Christianity and Buddhism. It was around that time when I was visiting my friend’s flat in London one day, he suddenly asked me: “do you know about the number 23?”

The Threefold Social Order of the Body Social (1925), an old English collection of Steiner’s ideas on the threefold social organism, was the first thing by Steiner I ever read, aged 29. And as stated above, having just returned from my first seven years in Japan with questions about East-West relations, my encounter with Steiner’s emphasis on threefolding, as distinct from western dualism in philosophy, politics and economics, gave rise to numerous conversations on such matters with my friend. It was in that context that he asked: “do you know about the number 23?”

The Discordians

He had come across “the mystery of the number 23”, also sometimes called “the 23 enigma”, through his reading of the Discordians. They were a group of Americans in California in the late 50s/early 60s who created the pseudo-religion of Discordianism, which worshipped the ancient Greek goddess Eris, the goddess of chaos, confusion, strife and discord. Much influenced by ancient Chinese Chan and Japanese Zen philosophies that were fashionable among the 1950s Beat Generation, the American Discordians sought to rebel against society in a playful and paradoxical, absurdist way by declaring that all concepts of order and disorder are illusions. In their principal text, the Principia Discordia, they wrote: “If you can master nonsense as well as you have already learned to master sense, then each will expose the other for what it is: absurdity. From that moment of illumination, a man begins to be free regardless of his surroundings. He becomes free to play order games and change them at will. He becomes free to play disorder games just for the hell of it. He becomes free to play neither or both. And as the master of his own games, he plays without fear, and therefore without frustration, and therefore with good will in his soul and love in his being.”(1) It was perhaps no coincidence that one of the two originators of Discordianism, Kerry Thornley (1938-1998)(left), was a good friend of Lee Harvey Oswald, the alleged killer of President John F. Kennedy. This friendship drew Thornley into the murky world of the Kennedy assassination conspiracy, and ardent conspiracism, as well as the equally ardent lampooning of conspiracism, became a staple of Discordian writings.  Later in the 1960s, Thornley and fellow Discordian founder Greg Hill (1941-2000) got to know novelist William S. Burroughs (1914-1997), and also Robert Anton Wilson (1932-2007) and Robert Shea (1933-1994), two editors at Playboy magazine of libertarian, anarchistic and agnostic mind, who also became Discordians and wrote the cult classic book The Illuminatus! Trilogy, published in 1975, which amongst other things spawned a fascination with the secret society of the (Bavarian) Illuminati. Wilson, together with Timothy Leary (1920-1996) and Terence McKenna (1946-2000), became iconic figures of the 1970s counterculture. The influence of the Discordians appealed to the antinomian inclinations of the youth movements of the 1960s and 70s and was ‘recycled’ with the growth of the Internet in the 1990s; it has since permeated varied aspects of contemporary postmodern culture: the fascination with Far Eastern philosophies, paradox, absurdism, nihilism and meaninglessness, synchronicity, and conspiracism, as well as experimentation with drugs. Having learned of the 23 enigma from William S. Burroughs, the Discordians chose the number 23 as a kind of emblem or icon of their pseudo-religion. My friend was very fond of the Discordians because of their wacky sense of humour, and did not enquire too far into the 23. But I did enquire, and was to find that the 23 enigma was far from wacky; on the contrary, it is profound and awesome.

Robert Anton Wilson (below) described how he first heard of the 23 enigma from William S. Burroughs, who “had known a certain Captain Clark, around 1960 in Tangier, who once bragged that he had been sailing 23 years without an accident. That very day, Clark’s ship had an accident that killed him and everybody else aboard. Furthermore, while Burroughs was thinking about this crude example of the irony of the gods that evening, a bulletin on the radio announced the crash of an airliner in Florida, USA. The pilot was another Captain Clark and the flight was Flight 23.” (2) The Discordians, approving of all things paradoxical, were drawn to apparent synchronicities like this. Both Burroughs and Wilson made extensive collections of examples of weirdness relating to the number 23, but they never came to any conclusion about what the number signified. Wilson in particular was opposed to conclusions per se!

A 23 database

Like Burroughs and Wilson, after I learned of the supposed significance of the number 23, I also made such empirical collections of incidences of the number that appeared in my life and in history, in the news, in movies etc. almost every month from 1989 until 2008 in Britain, and in Japan when I was living there from 1991- 1994; they became quite a large database, far too large to be replicated here. When I did not actively search, I remained open, and the number would ‘appear’ to me in many places. This search and these serendipitous appearances convinced me that there was indeed something special about the number 23, so to test it, I used other numbers as ‘controls’: I looked in current events and history for other numbers, chosen at random, such as 17 and 37. I did not come across them in history and current events anywhere near as frequently as I found 23. I became convinced that the number was deliberately placed in movies, TV dramas, news broadcasts, sometimes subliminally – this was not the case with other numbers – and that furthermore, it was not so much the number 23 itself that was important, i.e. two 10s and 3 units, but rather, the combination of a 2 and a 3, the juxtaposition of the numbers of duality and threefoldness.

For good or ill, and so far, one would have to say the balance has been for the most part ill, Hollywood has become the English-speaking world’s way of presenting stories and mythologies to the peoples of the world, and Hollywood movies have been full of references to 23 for many decades. One only has to be alert and open one’s eyes to see them. I did not see them myself before the mid-1980s, they passed me by, but once I became aware of their existence, they soon showed themselves, often in sinister contexts which reflected Hollywood’s predilections. For example, the murder victim would be found in hotel room number 203, or the drug deal would be worth $230 million dollars or the key percentage in a corrupt financial scam would be 2.3% etc. In other words, all permutations of 2 and 3, the numbers of duality and trinity, were and are very frequently presented to us in movies, often in subliminal and fleeting ways. This means by the screenwriters, directors or producers. But at other times, they occur very blatantly. In 2007 a humorous but ultimately sinister American horror movie, not one of the most gruesome, was released, titled The Number 23 (left), directed by Joel Schumacher and starring comedian Jim Carrey. It was about a dog handler who became obsessed with a book about the number 23. Here, Hollywood literally thrust the 23 enigma into the faces and minds of the public, and in a dark and sinister way. Yet even after this movie, the references to 23 went on occurring in many, many more movies, and still do.2 Sometimes, I sense that a 23 is inserted into a movie by a screenwriter or a director just as a fad, a fashion with no ulterior motive, done in a trivial way just because it appears in other movies, but other times, in more  important cinematic contexts, the number is clearly very deliberately placed to signify, usually, that something sinister is about to happen or that an important choice is about to be made or has been made.

To give just a few examples of the significance of the number from my 23 database: ‘macrocosmically’, the angle of the Earth’s axis is tilted at 23.44o to the plane of the earth’s orbit around the Sun (above).(3) The Tropics of Cancer and Capricorn are at 23.26° north and south respectively. It’s worth keeping in mind perhaps, especially in this year 2023, that the Tropic of Cancer runs right through the island that is currently a bone of contention between China and the USA, namely Taiwan. This 23° angle of the Earth’s axis to the Sun and the ecliptic gives us the seasons of the year, around which most human cultural life has been based throughout history. ‘Microcosmically’, human cells normally have 46 chromosomes arranged in 23 pairs. Of these 23 pairs, 22 are alike in males and females; these are called the “autosomes.” The 23rd pair are the sex chromosomes ‘X’ and ‘Y’. So, we see that both on the planetary scale and on the individual human scale the number 23 is profoundly related to human physical life on this planet. Rome is located on a line of longitude 23 degrees west of Jerusalem – for many Christians the world’s true centre. Due north of Rome on that line is Venice, a city of beauty, intrigue and decadence. Further north lie Leipzig/Chemnitz and Copenhagen. The line also passes just west of Potsdam, outside Berlin. It is in fact roughly the line of the Iron Curtain 1945-1989. South of Rome the line touches the westernmost point of that beautiful but troubled isle of Sicily, with its dark and turbulent past.

Turning to events in history and current affairs, the Tropic of Capricorn passes through French Polynesia (where A-Bomb tests were conducted from 1966-74), northern Chile/Argentina, Paraguay, Sao Paulo and Rio de Janeiro in Brazil. Rio de Janeiro is located at exactly 23° south of the equator. The colossal statue of Cristo Redentor (Christ The Redeemer) which stands above Rio de Janeiro is situated at 22° 57′ south. The observation deck at the foot of the statue is reached by 223 steps and is located on the Corcovado peak, which is 2,300 ft (700m) high.

King James I

Turning from space to time, when I was a young boy, I memorised the reign dates of all the monarchs of England. This became a useful framework for me to orient myself in my study of history. When in my early 30s I discovered that Rudolf Steiner had said that King James I (1603-1625),(4) of the House of Stuart, was one of the most significant British monarchs in whom “an extraordinary initiate soul lived”(5), a statement that might surprise many people. This does not necessarily mean that James was an initiate soul in his life as James but could mean that he had been an initiate in a previous life and that something of those previous abilities had passed into his life as James. After all, elsewhere Steiner also described him as “one of the greatest, most gigantic spirits of the British realm” who “stands quite close to the opposition against what is merely commercial within the British commercial empire”. “James,” he says, “brings in a new element by continuously inoculating into the substance of the British people something that they will have forever, something that they must not lose if they are not to fall utterly into materialism. What it is that he inoculates into them is something that is linked by underground channels to the whole of the rest of European culture. Here we are confronted by a significant mystery.”(6) Steiner does not tell us overtly what this mystery is, but he did drop a hint, because in the same lecture, immediately before speaking about King James, he mentioned the lawyer, statesman and philosopher of science Francis Bacon (1561-1626), the great playwright William Shakespeare (1564-1616), the German mystic Jacob Böhme (1575-1624), and Jacob Balde (1604-1668), a southern German Jesuit poet, and said that these four very different men were all inspired from the same source!(7) Bacon and Shakespeare, very ‘worldly’ men, were both personally connected to James, Bacon as his Attorney-General and Lord Chancellor, and Shakespeare as one of his favoured entertainers – the King’s Men – and the country’s leading playwright, who wrote several plays with themes specifically intended for James, such as Macbeth and Hamlet. Bacon was eventually found guilty on 23 charges of corruption in 1621 and briefly imprisoned. Shakespeare’s collection of plays, known as the “First Folio”, was published in 1623, seven years after his death. Böhme and Balde, who did not know each other, were both men of the spirit, of mysticism and poetry respectively. In indicating these four men, Steiner was pointing to “an impulse which says that a link ought to be created with the opposite pole”(8) – the link between the spiritual and the material. This is the essence of Rosicrucianism – the black cross and the red roses.

I decided I should look more closely at King James (above), and soon found that he had the same birthday as me! Around the time I discovered that particular Steiner lecture in which King James I was mentioned, my godson was born with the same birthdate as King James and me, and his parents, not knowing about King James I, decided to name him James. Many years later, when I was giving a lecture on British history in Newbattle Abbey, the former home of the Marquesses of Lothian about seven miles from Edinburgh, I found that directly opposite me on the wall at the other end of the room was a very large portrait of King James VI and I. The king had made the first Earl of Lothian, Mark Kerr, a Privy Counsellor; he was an important nobleman very close to the king. I found that very many significant things did indeed occur during the reign of King James I. Born in 1566, he became King James VI of Scotland at the age of only one year old. In July 1589, when he was 23, his betrothal to Anne of Denmark was sealed; he married her by proxy in August 1589 and in November he travelled by sea to Norway in the one romantic episode of his life to meet his bride, with whom he then travelled to Denmark before returning with her to Scotland in May 1590. He thus spent almost all the year when he was aged 23 on securing his wife, with whom he would later have the son who would become Charles I, of infamous memory (beheaded in 1649 during the English Civil Wars, the first English monarch to be tried and publicly executed). In the early 18th century, when the modern political party system was emerging in Britain, the system was defined by men’s attitudes towards the Stuart monarchy – for or against. The German Hanoverian monarchs of Britain (from 1714), from whom stem the present Royal Family, were descended from James VI and I’s daughter Elizabeth Stuart, who married the German Prince Elector Frederick V of the Palatinate. During his return to Scotland from Denmark in 1590, James, concerned that witches may have tried to sink his ship, became fascinated by the question of witchcraft, of which, as he was a scholarly king, he then made a study and published a book, Daemonologie (1597). Here we have the darker side of the number 23. The Discordians linked 23 with what they called ‘the Law of Fives’, because 2 + 3 = 5 and they were keen on pentagons and pentagrams, both of which rightly have 3 points above and 2 below, but when turned upside down, place the 2 above the 3 – the inverted pentagram being a traditional sign of the Devil. The moral ambiguity of the pentagram appealed to the Discordian penchant for chaos over law and order.   James became King of England by succeeding Queen Elizabeth I, who died early on 24 March 1603, so 23rd March was her last full day as Queen of England and James’ last day as King only of Scotland. James was the 23rd king of England since the Norman Conquest in 1066, and he died on 27 March 1625, just 3 days into the 23rd year of his reign. Many significant things happened in James’ reign, not least the joining, in James’ person, of the two crowns of the old enemies England and Scotland. James’ government made peace between England and Spain only one year after the very pacific James, who had a horror of violence, came to the throne in 1603. This peace was not popular with the people of England but was very farsighted, because by it, the East India Company (founded 1600) was able to flourish, and England extended its trade throughout the world and planted its first colonies in N. America (Jamestown, Virginia) and the first English trading factory at Surat in India (1615). Then there was the Gunpowder Plot of 1605, in which Guy Fawkes and other Catholic rebels sought to blow up King James, all his court and the members of Parliament, and the planting of Scottish Protestant settlers in Ulster, N. Ireland (from 1606), which still has difficult consequences today. There was also the production of arguably the two greatest treasures of the English language – the King James’ Bible (1611)(9) and the First Folio of the plays of William Shakespeare (1623).

The King James Bible is replete with examples of the number 23. In verse 23 of Chapter 1 of the Book of Genesis, we read: “And the evening and the morning were the fifth day.” On the fifth day God had created the first living creatures, in water and air.  23 is thus related to the number 5 and to living beings. Chapter 23 of Genesis, however, entirely concerns the death and burial of Abraham’s wife, Sarah. In the Book of Numbers in the Old Testament, in Chap. 23, verse 23, we read: “Surely there is no enchantment against Jacob (= Jacobus = James), neither is there any divination against Israel: according to this time it shall be said of Jacob and of Israel, What hath God wrought!” What do we find on either side of this verse? Verse 22 says: “God brought them (Jacob and Israel) out of Egypt; he hath as it were, the strength of an unicorn”, while verse 24 says: “Behold, the people shall rise up as a great lion, and lift up himself as a young lion; he shall not lie down until he eat of the prey, and drink the blood of the slain.” King James I added the unicorn to the lion in the royal coat of arms of the monarchs of England, which pair of creatures have been the royal heraldic animals of Britain ever since.(10) The two animals, the unicorn and the lion, represent wisdom and strength. In I Kings 7:15-16 we are told that the two pillars of the temple of Solomon, Jachin and Boaz measured 18 cubits each, plus 5 cubits for the capitals, a total height of 23 cubits for each pillar. The erudite King James was frequently referred to as “Solomon” in his time.

This purported ‘Solomon’, as King James VI of Scotland was initiated into Freemasonry in Scotland in 1601 (in the Lodge of Scoon), and when he also became King James I of England two years later, the beginnings of modern ‘speculative’ Freemasonry (i.e. Freemasonry as a symbolic system rather than as an operative craft) came down to England from Scotland after him. The two pillars Jachin and Boaz from the Temple of Solomon, representing thinking/wisdom and feeling/strength respectively, are an important feature of Freemasonic symbolism. According to Steiner, these pillars refer back to the “cosmos of wisdom” (also called the Old Moon in Anthroposophy), which was the phase of the  development of the earth and solar system that preceded our present phase, and also to the still earlier phase known as the “cosmos of strength” (aka the Old Sun). ‘Old Saturn’, ‘Old Sun’ and Old Moon’ were terms Steiner used for the three conditions of the solar system and of the earth that, many aeons ago, preceded the present condition. They do not refer to the three heavenly bodies we see today. “What the earth has inherited from the cosmos of strength is expressed in [the present] Mars and what it has inherited in the cosmos of wisdom is expressed in [the present] Mercury. The mission of the earth itself is to add love to these” – the impulse of the heart between those of will and thought respectively. Mars puts iron in the earth and in the blood, brings form and condenses matter. Mercury brings the relational aspect of wisdom that enables thinking to relate things to everything else. Steiner also spoke in his lecture on the Apocalypse of St. John of these three principles, strength, wisdom and love,  represented on earth when Christ appeared between Moses (wisdom) and Elijah (strength) in His Transfiguration on a mountaintop, most likely Mt. Tabor.(11) The two pillars were represented in the 4th of the seven Seals of the Apocalypse that Steiner had made in 1907.(12) of that year. (see below).

Shakespeare, Hamlet and 23

Shakespeare’s greatest or most well-known play is probably Hamlet (full title: The Tragedy of Hamlet, Prince of Denmark), about the doubts of a Danish prince who lived at Elsinore Castle, which James himself had visited aged 23. First published in 1603, in the first year of James’ reign, this is arguably the quintessential play about the modern human soul. Hamlet is haunted by the vengeful ghost of his murdered father, the king, and revolted by his mother’s marriage to his uncle Claudius, who had killed his father, but Hamlet is paralysed by doubts as to how to apply his own will. The play ends tragically, with all the main characters, the whole Danish royal family, dead, including Hamlet. We can recall in passing that the Angles, Saxons and Jutes had invaded England from the Danish peninsula about 1100 years earlier. Act 5, Scene I is one of the most famous scenes, where Hamlet and his friend Horatio chat with a churchyard gravedigger who is digging a grave. The gravedigger hands Hamlet a skull and tells him “this skull has lien you i’ th’ earth three and twenty years”. Hamlet asks whose skull it is and is told it is that of his father’s court jester Yorick. Hamlet holds it up and muses on the vanity and pathos of life. King James’ own father had been murdered when James was only an infant. The exact date when Hamlet was written is unknown but 23 years before publication would take us back to 1580; James had formally become an adult ruler in 1579.

The skull and the grave: the imagery puts us in mind of Golgotha (the place of Christ’s Crucifixion), which means ‘place of the skull(s)’, and after His Crucifixion, His body was placed in a grave belonging to Joseph of Arimathea, a merchant whom tradition connects with journeys to Britain to buy tin. The whole oeuvre of Shakespeare’s plays brings the audience historically to the point in evolution of the solitary individual on this material earth, fallen away from the spiritual world and open to all kinds of errors, crimes and sins, but free, as an individual, to find his or her own path. A dangerous place. Will modern man fall into the grave that is a fixation on materialism? Or will he, through finding his way to Christ, finding his real self, turn away from that which is decayed and rotten and, overcoming doubt, transform his thinking to find the way out of the graveyard of the ancient into a new future?

This is the real ‘Matter’ of England, the problem of England, the choice of those whose native tongue is English: death or resurrection. And because, as Steiner described, the Germanic peoples of northern Europe (who include the English) provide the ‘vanguard’ for humanity in this current historical epoch (from the 15th century until the mid-4th millennium), it is also the problem for humanity in our time. And in this central place in his oeuvre, at this churchyard grave, Shakespeare set the number 23, the number of death and resurrection, or rather, the choice between them, between the 2 and the 3. The number is here associated with humour, with Yorick the jester: humour and death are juxtaposed. The English are known for their humour and comedy; names such as Alice in Wonderland, Charlie Chaplin, Monty Python, Mr Bean, and Ricky Gervais are known around the world. The English are not so well-known for philosophy or religion, and therefore, not really understanding life, or making philosophical sense of it, they take refuge in laughing at it. Hamlet throws the skull back into the grave in disgust: “Pah!” The gravedigger, known in the play  – humorously – as a ‘clown’, is under the mistaken impression that Prince Hamlet has been sent to England. Hamlet asks: “why was he sent to England?” and the clown/gravedigger replies: “Why, because ‘a was mad: ‘a shall recover his wits there; or if ‘a do not, ‘tis no great matter there.” “Why?” asks Hamlet, and the clown replies: “Twill not be seen in him there. There the men are as mad as he”. So, there is the choice: to recover one’s wits in England or not to, and be as ‘mad’ as the English, or as ‘mad’ as the Discordians, who also spoke English. As I dwelt on the mystery and pathos of the graveyard scene, eventually, the significance of the number 23 became clearer to me.

23 in Steiner’s work

I had parted company with mathematics around the age of 9 – largely due to an incongenial maths teacher, I told myself for years. But I later realised it was something much deeper than that; I could not blame Mr Roberts for my bewildering incapacity to calculate. All maths lessons and those others which required maths were torture for me throughout my high school years. Aged 15, I was introduced in maths lessons to binary numbers, a new school subject in the 1960s, and I thought that perhaps I could start again with this new form of mathematics, but no, after a short promising start, the familiar block re-emerged, and I was shut out from the world of maths once again. Perhaps just as well; I might otherwise have gone on to become a computer programmer. And yet, while I could not use maths for calculating and quantifying, I was always strangely drawn to the qualities of numbers, even to the different shapes of them. I was easily able to remember numbers, historical dates, dates of all kinds, and telephone numbers.

After meeting Steiner’s work, I noted that he was an esoteric teacher for 23 years (1902-1925) and 1923, when he entered his 63rd year, was the year of crisis in his life and work, as will be touched on later in this article. In a lecture cycle he gave  in 1914 titled Human Thought, Cosmic Thought(13), I came across a pregnant indication about the number 23. There are, says Steiner, “19 possible worldviews” which people can have: 12 are based on the Zodiac, and 7 on the planets, but there also 3 “tones” which “modify” these 19 worldviews. These 3 tones he calls Theism, Intuitionism and Naturalism, and they relate to thinking that is oriented to the Sun, the Moon and the Earth respectively, for example, people whose thinking is oriented religiously in a sun-like way are Theists; those whose thinking is oriented in an aesthetic way are Intuitionists, while those whose thinking is more scientifically inclined are Naturalists. This makes 22 “world pictures”, but there is one more:  the 23rd, Anthropomorphism: “It occurs only in a single case, when a person, taking all the world-pictures to some extent, restricts himself only to what he can experience on or around or in himself. That is Anthropomorphism. Such a person corresponds to the man who observes the Earth on its own account, independently of its being shone upon by the Sun, the Moon, or anything else. Just as we can consider the Earth for itself alone, so also with regard to world-outlooks we can reckon only with what as men we can find in ourselves.” The Anthropomorphist thus ignores the cosmos, sun, moon, planets. He looks only to himself and to the earth. A rather ‘English’ perspective, one might say… Steiner goes on: “You see, it is not true to talk in terms of one cosmic conception, but of 12 + 7 = 19 + 3 = 22 + 1 = 23 cosmic conceptions which all have their justification. We have twenty-three legitimate names for cosmic conceptions.” Here of course, the point is not the difference between 2 and 3 but the total number of “cosmic conceptions”. Nevertheless, the fact that it adds up to 23 is not without interest, given the number’s macrocosmic and microcosmic dimensions mentioned earlier in this article.

Each of the 12 zodiac signs Steiner associates with a particular form of thinking.  ‘Mathematism’ was one of the 12 forms, and he associated it with … Gemini. Moving from Cancer (Materialism) to Aries (Idealism) via Gemini (Mathematism) and Taurus (Rationalism), Steiner says:(14)

“The most uncompromising materialist would say, ‘No, I do not even calculate, for that would presuppose a superstition — it would imply that I assume that things are ordered by measure and number.’ And anyone who raises himself above this crude materialism will become a mathematical thinker, and will recognize as valid only whatever can be treated mathematically. From this, results a conception of the universe that really admits nothing beyond mathematical formulae. This may be called Mathematism.”

Clearly, the mathematist viewpoint that recognises only number as the basis of the world is something extreme. Yet in our ‘smart’-phone- (i.e. pocket computer)-obsessed, digitalised societies today, increasingly, the way we see the world is made of just two numbers, 1 and 0, the binary electro-numerical basis of our digital technology. In a lecture given on 25.11.1917,(15) Steiner spoke about the polarity of Gemini-Sagittarius, the midsummer and midwinter (or midday and midnight) signs, in contrast to the polarity of Pisces-Virgo, the spring and autumn (or sunrise and sunset) signs (see above). He associated the Gemini-Sagittarius axis with N. America and India respectively and foretold that the binary polarity at work in electromagnetism, which, he said, has its cosmic origin in the constellation of Gemini, would be used by scientists associated with western occult brotherhoods to employ technology that would foster super-materialism. Today, this electro-magnetic binary force is at work in all our modern technology that is all based on sequences of 1s and 0s, which represent on or off states of electrical impulses. We could thus say that our modern, increasingly digitalised civilisation is entirely based on the number 2.

In the lecture cycle (GA 186) which includes the above-mentioned lecture, Steiner speaks about an etheric being called the ahrimanic double,(13) which unites with the bio-electrical nature of our bodies when we are born and remains with it until shortly before we die. This being facilitates ahrimanic impulses in us, and individuals are variously inclined to it depending on their past karma, some people more, some less, and some hardly at all. Through technological devices such as ‘smart’-phones, the ahrimanic double can work on our thoughts, feelings and will impulses to nudge, push or drive us in an ahrimanic direction – that of egotism, fear, contraction, fragmentation and materialism, material satisfaction. When we see people utterly focused on their mobile phones, they are as if possessed, shut off from other people and from the world around them. They have ‘split’ – left their surroundings – and have entered another domain, which we could call a counter-spiritual domain; the domain of Ahriman. This is all related to the number 2, which can be called the number of duality, dualism, splitting and fragmenting.

The negative aspect of the pole associated with Sagittarius, on the other hand, would tend to boost the bestial, animal-like tendencies in us; we are, after all, centaur-like beings; we have a human and an animal nature, and the task of Sagittarius is to assert the human control over the animal element, not in a domineering but in an understanding way. Animals are guided by their instincts, which are powerful spiritual forces that work into them from outside, from their collective group soul beings, which, Steiner describes, exist in the spiritual world. As such, animals are ‘moral automatons’; their behaviour is instinctive and automatic. As moral automatons, they are governed by an outer code; they have no inner sense of freedom as humans have. The centaur-like quality of human nature – part animal, part human – can be used, said Steiner in that same lecture, by “egotistical brotherhoods of the eastern, Indian stream” to mislead eastern Europe (the Slavic peoples), which has the task of preparing the next cultural epoch after our present one, which since the 16th century, has been carried by the Germanic peoples. On their ‘smart’-phones today, young Europeans in both East and West can, for example, first be drawn to eastern notions of “enlightenment” through physical practices such as Yoga and Tantra which work with the human body, but these practices, especially under the influence of unethical spiritual teachers, can degenerate in the West to lower, westernised forms of Tantric sexual practices (the so-called ‘Left-hand Path’) and even to orgiastic activity, rather as soft drugs can lead on to hard drugs.(16)

The dualistic forces inherent in the Gemini-Sagittarius axis would thus be used to boost human egotism in different ways: technological or animalistic. Steiner described how instead of these forces and this midday/midnight axis which represents extremes in the natural cycle (midsummer and midwinter), scientists need to work in their laboratories with the inherently ethical and moral sunrise and sunset forces of the Pisces-Virgo axis, which are of a mediating, in-between nature. The combination of forces working from these two cosmic directions of the Fishes and the Virgin, he said, would serve human healing. These two signs are between the polar extremes of Gemini/Sagittarius and as such represent the mediating balance – a third element between the poles.

869 and 1923

When I was growing up in Chester, two numbers, two dates, regularly impinged themselves upon me. Aged 7-10, I would take the bus into town on Saturdays, get off near the City Hall, look up at the grand Victorian Gothic building and there on the front clearly visible was the year of its construction – 1869. In my teenage years I would cycle to school every day across the suspension bridge over the River Dee from what had once been Roman Chester to what had been a Celtic settlement outside it, the suburban area of my school. I would look up and see the date of the bridge’s opening: 1923. A thousand years before 1869, which incidentally was the year of the First Vatican Council, was the year 869. 8 + 6 + 9 = 23. There is a mysterious connection between 869 and 1923 which I realised not long after I had embarked on the path of Anthroposophy. I soon discovered that 1923 was a critical year in the life of Steiner and in the story of the Anthroposophical movement and Society.

On the first day of that year 1923, the Goetheanum Building, the international centre for Anthroposophy, which Steiner had laboured for 10 years to construct with the help of countless supporters, lay in ruins, after an arson attack on the last night of 1922. But despite this shattering blow, Steiner was not dismayed or defeated. He immediately set to work to reconstruct the Society and the building, and at Christmas 1923, organised a large international gathering later known as “the Christmas Conference”, at which he re-founded the Anthroposophical Society on a completely different basis.

On the second day of that conference, Christmas Day, he laid in the hearts of the 800 or so members of the Society gathered there the foundation stone of the re-founded Society by speaking aloud three verses, which came to be known as the Foundation Stone Meditation. Its three multi-layered verses were addressed to the willing, feeling, and thinking of the human soul. With this act, Steiner restored to Europe, to the world, and to Christians throughout the world something vital that had been lost in the 9th century, specifically in the year 869/70: the Trichotomy, the understanding of the threefold nature of the human being as a being of body, soul and spirit. He had been speaking since at least 1917 of the world-historical importance of the 8th Ecumenical Council(17) at Constantinople, (5 October 869 – 28 February 870), an importance that had gone unnoticed by Christians in the West for over a thousand years, and at the Christmas Conference of 1923 he brought six years of speaking about the threefolding of the human being and of society to a culmination by openly restoring the Trichotomy in place of the human Dichotomy that had been imposed by the Church in the Council of 869-870. For several years before 1923, he had made the radical claim that at the Council of 869, the human spirit had been “abolished”. By this, he meant that the Church had proclaimed a dogma at that Council with regard to the understanding of what a human being is that reduced the human being from a threefold entity of body, soul and spirit to a twofold entity of body and soul only. This “abolition of the spirit”, as he called it, was to have enormous consequences for the whole of western civilisation from the 9th century onwards. It meant that no longer were Christians allowed to seek their own way to God through their own individual spirit; henceforth, they were supposed to depend for salvation on the dogmas of the Church and the words of the Church authorities.

However, if we look at the 27 canons (church laws) promulgated by the Council of 869-870, we find no such declaration of the “abolition of the spirit”. Instead, it was deviously concealed in the text of Canon XI as part of an attack on a particular doctrine alleged to have been taught by Patriarch Photios of Constantinople, who was not even named in the canon. Indeed, the very purpose of convening the Council had been to condemn Photios, and so it is sometimes known as the ‘Anti-Photian Council’. The doctrine anathematised in Canon XI was known as the doctrine of the ‘twin, or two, souls’, which referred to the two souls that the doctrine claimed human beings have: one which looks to the needs of the body and one which looks to the human being’s higher, spiritual needs.

This notion of ‘the two souls’ was a last remnant of the older, threefold teaching from the New Testament, that of the pneuma (spirit) psyché (soul) and the soma or sarx (body), the ‘higher’ of the two souls being seen as the pneuma. The early Greek Church Fathers had of course known of and taught the human Trichotomy, but in its later battles against those it called ‘heretics’, the Church, especially in the Latin West, lost sight of it and dropped the pneuma altogether, merging spiritus into anima, which resulted in the human Dichotomy of body (corpus) and soul (anima) only. The anathema at the Council of 869/70 against the teaching of the two souls was the effort of Rome’s representatives at the Council to do away with the final remnant of Trichotomy by insisting that a human being has only one soul, which, they insisted, is a “rational and intellectual soul”. The estrangement between the eastern and western Churches that was much increased in 869-70 by the disagreement over Photios, a highly educated Patriarch who stood up against Rome’s claims to primacy, culminated in 1054 with the Great Schism(18) between the Roman Catholic and the Orthodox churches, when the Roman papal legate laid a ban of excommunication upon the altar of the great cathedral of Hagia Sophia (the Holy Spirit, see pic. left), and the two confessions then stopped communicating with each other – a schism which even today is not yet properly healed. It was also a schism between the two cultures, the Greek and the Latin, which dominated the entire Greco-Roman epoch from the founding of Rome in the 8th cent. BC (753) to the Fall of Constantinople in the 15th century AD (1453).(19)

Mysterious arithmetic

Mysterious in this context is also the arithmetical fact that not only does 8 + 6 + 9 = 23, as mentioned earlier, but there are 54 years (6 x 9) between those two dates in the Chester years of my youth, 1869 and 1923, and I noted that 869 + 1054 (the year of the Great Schism)= 1923, which was the year of the existential crisis and resurrection of the Anthroposophical Society. Exactly 1000 years after the 8th Ecumenical Council of 869-870 (accepted as ecumenical by the Roman Catholic Church, but not recognised by the Orthodox confessions) was the First Vatican Council (1869-1870), at which the doctrine of Papal Infallibility was defined and proclaimed. In the year 869 in the 9th century, we see the numbers 6 and 9. In the year 1054 in the 11th century, just after the beginning of the second millennium, we see the numbers 6 and 9 in a different way: 6 x 9 = 54. So the year 1869 that was 1000 years after the Council of 869 is numerically related to the year of the Council of 869-870, to the year of the Great Schism of East and West  (1054) and to the year 1923, when, after the ‘crucifixion’ of the Anthroposophical movement,   Steiner ‘resurrected’ the Anthroposophical Society and ‘restored’ the threefold image of Man.

In December 1923, at the Christmas Conference in Dornach, Switzerland,  in the “Goetheanum” building he had designed (above), Steiner not only refounded the Anthroposophical Society but did so specifically on the basis – the Foundation Stone Meditation – of Trichotomy, the threefold image of Man, and in doing so, restored the Trichotomy to western culture, thus signifying that the time to begin to draw back the heavy  veil that had closed off the individual spirit since 869 had now arrived. It was the historical moment for the announcement of the modern spiritual freedom of the individual in the face of traditional authorities that had sought to repress and control that freedom, and it was immediately confronted by new, modern forms of authoritarianism – Communism, Fascism, and National Socialism – that sought to do the same. Those three new forms of authoritarianism can be said to be based on the numbers 1 and 2 – the number 1 because they were all monolithic and insisted on commanding the whole of society and culture and demanding the full subservience of every individual, and the number 2 because they were all based on the materialistic and dualistic natural science (or their interpretation thereof) that had emerged in the West since the 17th century, the science that had divorced the reality of the inner human being from the reality of outer nature by separating the scientist’s inner life from the object of his enquiry.

In passing, it may be noted that two of the first three individuals to whom Steiner taught the fundamentals of threefold social thinking in the summer of 1917 were born in 1869. These were Count Otto Lerchenfeld (1869-1938), a Bavarian, who was the first to ask Steiner how the First World War could be ended in an honourable way on the basis of a true Central European impulse – the question that first enabled Steiner to speak about social threefolding – and the Austrian Count Ludwig Polzer-Hoditz (1869-1945), one of Steiner’s closest pupils and a man deeply concerned with East-West issues, the future of Europe, and the threefold social impulse. He was born in Prague, the very centre of Europe, and did much to illuminate and expose the contemporary activities of both Freemasons and Jesuits.(20) The third in this honourable trio was Walter Johannes Stein (1891-1957), who was then an army officer from Vienna.

Hexagram 23

If we extend the upper lefthand side of the figure 8, we make the figure 6 and if we extend the lower righthand side of the figure 8, we make the figure 9. The 6 (2 x 3) and the 9 (3 x 3) would thus be included in the figure 8. The well-known ancient Chinese Yin-Yang symbol  represented a profound form of philosophical dualism and is composed of shapes which resemble the figures 6 and 9 and a form of it (left) was used as the symbol of the Technocracy movement in America in the 1930s. Technocrats believed that electricity – a binary force – was the way of the future and that society should be governed scientifically by technocrats (designers and engineers). The Yin-Yang philosophy was merged in China about 2300 years ago(21) with a much older divinatory system called the I Ching (Book of Changes). This system of foretelling the future consists of 64 hexagrams (Nb. 8 x 8), each of which has 6 horizontal lines, either broken (yin) or unbroken (yang). Each hexagram has profound multi-layered meanings that are rooted in concrete natural events or actions. Hexagram 23 (left), for example, is named 剝 (bō or pō), which means “splitting” in the sense of stripping, peeling, or removing that which is unusable or outmoded, such as a rice husk, or a building. The outer (upper) trigram means ‘bound’ in the way a mountain is both a boundary of something and marks a new beginning, e.g. a boundary between countries, while the inner (lower) trigram  means field, which offers up produce. The image is of a still mountain resting upon the earth.

Here is the I Ching scholar Richard Wilhelm’s interpretation of this hexagram: “the dark (yin broken) lines are about to mount upward and overthrow the last firm, light (yang) line by exerting a disintegrating influence upon it” [recall the Discordians!] and “The inferior forces overcome what is superior not by direct means, but by undermining it gradually and imperceptibly, so that it finally collapses. ….the hexagram presents the image of a house, the top line being the roof, and because the roof is being shattered, the house collapses….the yin power pushes up ever more powerfully and is about to supplant the yang power altogether.” The divinatory advice in this case is that lower elements are rising inexorably and “it is not favourable for the superior man to undertake anything” in such circumstances. “One should submit to the bad time and remain quiet [as] it is impossible to counteract these conditions of the time”. “The mountain rests upon the earth. When it is steep and narrow, lacking a broad base, it must topple over. Its position is strong only when it rises out of the earth broad and great, not proud and steep.” Rulers therefore – and the I Ching was especially directed at rulers – “should be generous and benevolent, like the earth that carries all. Then they will make their position as a secure as a mountain is in its tranquillity.” The concluding line of the advice means that when the splitting apart “has reached its end and misfortune has spent itself, better times return. The seed of the good remains … and when the fruit falls to the ground …. the good sprouts anew from its seed. The superior man again attains influence and effectiveness, but the inferior man’s wickedness is visited upon himself. His house is split apart. A law of nature is at work here. Evil is not destructive to the good alone but inevitably destroys itself as well. For evil, which lives solely by negation, cannot continue to exist on its own strength alone.”(22)

The 2 and the 3

So, we see that Hexagram 23 means that a split, a separation must take place. This can be seen as something negative – splits usually are seen that way – but it can also be necessary and inevitable, as the hexagram says, and can result in a new beginning and new growth. If we focus on the 2, we focus on the split; if we focus on the 3, we focus on the new. It is like Crucifixion and Resurrection. 23 is of course 2 x 10 and 3 x 1. The larger 2 x 10 seems superior to the smaller 3 x 1.  If we see the 2 over the 3, as in two thirds ⅔, then the two is shown as above or superior to the three, but if we see the number horizontally, from left to right, then we can see the 2 giving way to the 3, being succeeded by the 3. In the pentagram, the 3 should be above, not below. Steiner spoke of the number 5 (2 + 3) as the number of evil,(23) because the godhead, he said, created the human being with a physical body, an etheric body (of life forces), an astral body (of feelings) and an ego (a “sleeping seed of the will”) i.e. a fourfold being, but when the seed of the fifth element, the spirit self (Geistselbst) was added, human beings were no longer mere creatures of the divine, they were now able to rebel against the divine, become free to do their own will, fall into error and thus do evil. The number 5 (2 + 3) is thus that of the creative individual between good and evil. Ernst Bindel, in his fascinating book Die geistigen Grundlagen der Zahlen (The Spiritual Basis of Numbers) (4th ed., 1980) points out that Steiner also regarded 5 as the number of crisis; this word comes from the Greek verb krinein, to separate, or one could say, discriminate between two things, as in separate the wheat from the chaff, the sheep from the goats (as in the Gospel of Matthew 25:32). From this viewpoint, it is therefore no accident that in our modern age, which Steiner called the 5th Post-Atlantean Epoch, since the 15th century, the English-speaking peoples have played such a prominent role. For not only are they, according to Steiner, the pre-eminent people of the Consciousness Soul (the last of the three soul elements),(24) which it is the task of humanity as a whole to develop in this epoch, the age of the individual’s rediscovery of the spirit, they have also initiated the modern world into the age of radical materialism through the Industrial Revolution, which began in England the process of creating, from the subterranean realms of the earth  a new species of beings – the machines. Furthermore, the number 23 has played a particular role in the history of the English people, out of whom the other English-speaking peoples developed. We have seen this with King James I, the 23rd monarch since the Norman Conquest in 1066, in whose reign England’s global role can be said to have begun in East and West, and with Shakespeare, who was supposedly born and died on 23 April,(25) which is also St. George’s Day, England’s national day and in Psalm 23 in the Old Testament – the most beloved and well-known Psalm among the English-speaking peoples since King James’ time. The psalm speaks of confidence in the beneficent guidance of God, despite the evils and enemies that may confront one.

Conclusion: 23 as the number of choice

To reiterate, 23 is the number of choice in this modern age when humanity is challenged to take responsibility for itself and for its planetary home, which happens, as mentioned earlier, to be angled at 23° to the plane of its orbit round the Sun. 2 is the number of materialism and dualism; 3 is the way beyond them. We can either see 23 as: 2 comes before 3, i.e. is superior to 3 – this is the negative and sinister aspect of 23 which is largely dominant in popular culture, as in Winston Churchill’s V for Victory sign (two fingers up, three down)(26) and ultimately in the inverted pentagram of black magic -  or we can see 23 as moving on from 2 to 3, from duality to threefoldness.

The choice is between crucifixion on the twofold cross of materialism if we opt to sink ever further into materialism and self-destruction -  and resurrection in the rediscovery of our spiritual nature as threefold beings of body, soul and spirit. This rediscovery leads to affirmation of our individuality and freedom, on the threefold basis of which we can build a new sense of community free of ancient blood ties, a new society that reflects our modern human reality.  This is why Steiner’s ideas about social threefolding are so important.(27) They point to the new way forward for society in this third millennium, because a threefold society in which the three spheres of culture and research, law and politics, and economic life (industry, agriculture and commerce) are disentangled, clearly separated and yet harmoniously interrelated with the real movement of the age.

The second Christian millennium was marked by a strong dualism in many fields of human life, not least in philosophy, science, politics and economics, and this dualism culminated in the 1990s in the World Wide Web – WWW: 23-23-23, W being the 23rd letter of the alphabet. This technological web, which has been conjured up and spun around us all so quickly these past 30 years, as if by some wizard, Harry Potter-like, cannot be allowed to dominate our lives in the third millennium. For this millennium, we need fundamentally new social thinking.

Such thinking is clearly beyond the ‘high priests’ and would-be ‘Illuminati’ aristocrats of the World Economic Forum, the World Health Organisation, the United Nations and the Bank of International Settlements, with their much touted “Agenda 2030” – an authoritarian, technocratic and digitalised vision of an Artificial Intelligence (A.I.)-driven surveillance dystopia, which is continually represented by the mainstream media as inevitable. Those elitist ‘high priests’ are merely recycling the dualism of the last millennium and the collectivist monism of the millennia before that, dressed up in modern garb, in their top-down, patrician prescriptions for a neo-feudal order, a one world government by corporate elites and a passive global populace, hooked on benefits, drugs, cheap chemicalised food and entertainment ‘circuses’, and cowed into compliance by technological ‘magic’. The new social thinking that we urgently need today is based on a thoroughgoing threefold approach to society, such as is found in Steiner’s ideas about social threefolding. At its heart is the threefold picture of the human being. The first requirement here is the freeing of the cultural sphere from the joint grip of the State and of Big Business so that education, medicine, religion, philosophy, jurisprudence and artistic and scientific research are not subjected to dictates and influence from the political and economic spheres. This emancipation of the individual human spirit in the West, fettered since the dogma of the Council of 869, is now essential if we are to move on from crucifixion on the twofold cross to resurrection in a threefold society.

Endnotes

1 From The Principia Discordia or, How I Found the Goddess and What I Did To Her When I Found Her by Malaclypse the Younger (aka Greg Hill) https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Principia_Discordia#THE_LAW_OF_FIVES

2 Another movie about 23, German this time, called simply “23”, was made in 1998 (Nb. 3 x 666). This was based on supposedly a true Cold War spy drama from the 1980s; the real life protagonist died on 23 May 1989, a presumed suicide.  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/23_(film)

3 The angle of the Earth’s axial tilt varies with respect to the plane of the Earth’s orbit. These variations take approximately 41,000 years to move between a tilt of 22.1° and 24.5° and back again.

4  James was also King James VI of Scotland from 1567-1625, so is also known as King James VI and I. But here I focus on him as King of England because England, as the much wealthier country, was the one that embarked in his reign on its global endeavours.

5 18.7.1916 Collected Works GA 169.

6 Lecture 15.1.1917 Collected Works GA 174, in The Karma of Untruthfulness, Vol 2.

7 As to who this source may have been, see Who Wrote Bacon?: William Shakespeare, Francis Bacon and James I, a Mystery of the Twenty-first Century  (2004) by Richard Ramsbotham.

8 See n. 7.

9 Also the revised Book of Common Prayer (1604).

10 1914, Collected Works GA 151.

11 (26.6.1908, GA 104)

12 They were made for the Munich Congress of the German Section of the Theosophical Society, held in 1907. Steiner began to develop the artistic impulse in his work and teaching at that time, when he was still in the Theosophical Society, which he left at the end of 1912 and helped to form the Anthroposophical Society in early 1913.

13 https://rsarchive.org/Lectures/GA151/English/RSP1961/19140121p01.html  21 Jan. 1914, Berlin, Collected Works GA 151.

14 Collected Works GA 186.

15 Ahrimanic: the adjective from Ahriman, the name Steiner gave – from the ancient Persian Spirit of Lies and Darkness – to the powerful spiritual being who, amongst other things, inspires materialism and the ideas behind our modern electromagnetic and electronic technology.

16 A number of ‘spiritual masters’ in the Tibetan or Indian Tantric traditions have been found over the past several decades to have been sexually exploiting or abusing their followers.

17 Also known as the 4th Council of Constantinople, as the Orthodox tradition does not recognise this Council as ecumenical. It was held from 5 October 869 to 28 February 870.

18 Another factor in the split was the disagreement over the meaning of the filioque (“and the Son”) clause relating to the definition of the Holy Spirit: did it proceed from the Son as well as the Father? The West said yes, the East said no.

19 Constantinople fell to the Ottoman Turks, who were Muslims. The Muslim Holy Book, the Qur’an, was revealed over a total of 23 years (609-632 AD) to the Prophet Muhammed.

20 See Thomas H. Meyer, Ludwig Polzer-Hoditz – A European (Temple Lodge, 2014).

21 The time of the great philosopher, scholar and spiritual writer, Zou Yan, 305-240 BC.

22 See R. Wilhelm, The I Ching or Book of Changes (3rd ed. 1968), pp.93-96.

23 Lecture of 15.9.1907, Stuttgart.

24 The Self expresses itself over the course of millennia of historical time, through the three aspects of the soul: Sentient Soul, Intellectual/Mind Soul, Consciousness Soul. These correspond to feeling, thinking and willing respectively. See R. Steiner, Theosophy (1904)

25 He certainly died on 23 April; his birth on 23 April is anecdotal; there is no firm proof of it, but clearly there was a wish that he should have been born and died on the same day, which points to the significance of that date in the minds of the English.

26 Churchill was all his life a man of war and imperial domination. The only member of the UK Cabinet in both world wars, he played a major part in starting and perpetuating those wars.

27 See R. Steiner, Toward Renewal, Rudolf Steiner Press, 1999, The Social Future, Anthroposophic Press, 1972, and S.E. Usher ed., Rudolf Steiner’s Social and Political Science,  Sophia Books (Rudolf Steiner Press), 2003.

The lead illustration above is that of the Archangel Uriel, the Archangel of midsummer.

Terry Boardman April 2023

This article was first published in The Present Age magazine Vol. 6 Nos. 3/4 2020/2021

2020 - a year which began with hope in the West, despite the news of a new virus that had very recently emerged in distant China, a year in which many Europeans looked forward to celebrating the 250th anniversaries of the births of Beethoven, Hegel, and the poets Hölderlin and Wordsworth with numerous artistic events, while Japanese and others around the world looked forward to the Tokyo Olympics. But 2020 turned out to be surely one of the worst years in recorded history, not in terms of deaths from disease or war – there had been many worse years – but in terms of the truly pandemic scale of lies, deception and stupidity in 2020, a pandemic wilfully engaged in and driven onwards by the antics of governments around the world. The year had begun inauspiciously with a conjunction between Saturn and Pluto on 12 January at 23˚ of Capricorn and a few days before that, on 3 January, the assassination by Donald Trump’s government of the Iranian general Qasem Soleimani in Baghdad by a drone attack. People wondered how long it would be before Iran retaliated. A year has gone by with no such retaliation from the Iranians, but in January 2021 America has suffered a ‘drone strike’ of sorts against its own political system, a strike that began with the presidential election on 3 November and culminated in the so-called ‘storming’ of the US Capitol in Washington DC on 6 January, the day of the Three Kings and Epiphany, the day when three wise men (Magi) ‘from the East’ (most likely Persia = Iran) brought gifts for the baby Jesus (of the Matthew Gospel) and the day when the Christ Logos entered into the body of the man Jesus, who gave up his own ‘I’ for that to happen, and the three-year process of the Incarnation commenced that led to the Mystery of Golgotha.

21 is traditionally the year of adulthood in the West, when after the 3 x 7 year periods of childhood, the young person was recognised as an autonomous adult. Today, in most developed countries, the age of adulthood officially recognised by society is 18, which, interestingly, is 3 x 6 years, but that modern legal innovation does not change the age-old fact of the emergence of the fully developed ego after the threefold development of the physical, etheric, and astral bodies of the human being over 3 x 7 years. This 21st Christian century marks another kind of ‘coming of age’ – that of ‘christened’ humanity as a whole, the word ‘christened’ here meaning of course not only those people who are Christians but all of humanity in the era of time since the Incarnation of Christ, the solar Logos, in Jesus of Nazareth. As the fourth verse of Rudolf Steiner’s Foundation Stone of Love puts it: “At the Turning Point of Time, the light of the cosmic Spirit entered the stream of earthly being/Dark night’s rule had ended/Day-radiant light streamed into human souls.”

In effect, a new humanity, a new period of human life began on earth at that time, a new period which is now in its 21st century. And we can see, from the history of the last 20 centuries, how this new humanity has grown up to adulthood and how it now is calling upon itself to take responsibility for itself and for its earthly home. To take over responsibility from the divine beings who created this planet Earth and this human body which is part of it. One of the great starry markers of the development of time and history has long been the meetings (conjunctions) every 20 years of Saturn and Jupiter, the planets traditionally associated with the past and the future respectively. After they have met three times in 60 years, their three meetings have traced out an invisible equilateral triangle around the Sun – the ancient origin of the well-known symbol of “the eye in the triangle”, as the conjunctions of Saturn and Jupiter, the mightiest planets for the ancients were observed by them over millennia. It is a symbol which is also found, among other places, on the back of the US dollar bill and on the Great Seal of the United States. The 60-year equilateral triangle patterns formed by the meetings of Saturn and Jupiter rotate around the Zodiac over 800 years, and this periodicity of 800 years was recognised by astronomers and astrologers in the Renaissance, for example, as signifying the birth of a new and particular historical and cultural impulse. Such a new 800-year cycle began in 1603. Last year’s conjunction of Saturn and Jupiter became exact on winter solstice, the 21st day of the 12th month. It was a beautiful sight for those whose view was not observed by clouds, and it came in Advent, just as in 7 BC the two planets’ conjunction was the ‘Star of Bethlehem’ observed by the Magi as they followed the movements of the two planets to conjunction. So the conjunction of these two mighty planets heralded the birth of Jesus and thus the Incarnation of Christ 30 years later. Likewise, their conjunction 20 years ago, on 28 May 2000, very probably marked the birth of the human vessel for the incarnation of Ahriman in May that year¹. Today (Jan. 2021), they are still in conjunction, but are slowly moving apart, and by mid-February will no longer be said to be in conjunction.

Mars and Uranus

Meanwhile, at the time of writing, Mars approaches conjunction with Uranus in January. Their conjunction will be exact on 20-21 January – Inauguration Day in the USA, when Joe Biden is expected to be sworn in as the 46th US President, but on 6 January, Three Kings Day, we saw a remarkable event occur which already showed all the hallmarks of a meeting of the two planetary energies of Mars and Uranus, known for their violent and dramatic characteristics respectively. First, around noon, President Donald Trump gave a speech outside the White House at a rally attended by hundreds of thousands of his supporters who had come from all over the country. They heard speeches by high-profile supporters of the President and members of his family and then the President himself, who spent most of his speech detailing how the 2020 presidential election had been fraudulent, a “stolen” election.

So the events that unfolded that day began with a highly charged speech by the President. Speech is a function of the Mars chakra, the 16-petal lotus in the throat centre. His enemies have accused him of “inciting” his followers to go and “storm” the Capitol. This is untrue; the full speech is online, anyone can listen to it and hear that in fact he told them to walk down to the Capitol and “cheer on our brave Senators and Congressmen and women…because you’ll never take back our country with weakness, you have to show strength ….I know that everyone here will be marching over to the Capitol building to peacefully and patriotically make your voices heard”. He told them that “we fight, we fight like hell, and if you don’t fight like hell, you’re not going to have a country anymore”. Some of these are somewhat ambiguous phrases admittedly, but they were hardly a rousing call to storm a Bastille, let alone the ‘sacred temple of American democracy’, or of democracy worldwide, as many Americans like to see the Capitol.

Trump is not an inspiring orator, and not even before this, perhaps his largest audience, did he rise to heights of fury and screaming invective like Mussolini and Hitler. Politicians of all stripes talk constantly about “the need to fight”, it’s one of the problems of our democratic system, so the claim that Trump incited the crowd, whipping them up and rousing them to go and trash the Capitol and overthrow democracy in a coup or armed insurrection is simply nonsense. Anyone can confirm that for himself by watching the speech. He did say, however, that he would never accept the result of a fraudulent election and would never concede.

From the rally to the Congress

Many of Trump’s supporters were certainly angered by the release of a crucial letter by Vice-President Mike Pence at 1 pm, before Trump had even finished speaking, in which Pence announced that he would accept the results of the election. It had been thought that Pence would perhaps not accept the results because of the doubts about their validity; many Republicans, citing an 1877 precedent, hoped that the results of debates in Congress on 6 January about the contested election in half a dozen states would lead to an audit commission being appointed that would investigate the alleged election fraud in those contested states. After Trump’s speech, large numbers of the crowd of about 200,000 then walked over to the Capitol. Meanwhile, in the Senate, the Congress members, led by Pence, were meeting to certify the results of the election. This final step in the long process of the US Presidential elections ends when the Vice-President announces who the President and Vice-President will be on the coming Inauguration Day. Congress began to go through the results of each of the 50 states alphabetically. When they got to Arizona, one of the six contested states, there was an objection from the floor, and Pence therefore broke up the meeting, sending the House of Representatives members back to the House to debate the arguments about the Arizona results; in doing so, he was only following procedure. The sight of all those elected representatives willingly wearing masks in Congress on the day of certification of votes after an election that millions of Americans had come to believe was fraudulent, not one of the members of Congress showing the courage or intelligence to challenge the stupid and ineffective masks, seemed like a double muzzling of America and of democracy,² while outside, Trump’s supporters, representing the 74 million Americans who had voted for him, were shouting their disapproval of the process going on inside, which they saw as certifying a criminal fraud, a crime against democracy being signed and sealed in the ‘shrine of American democracy’ itself.

The US Establishment had tried for four years to get rid of Trump, most notably through the false Russia-collusion charges; they hated him with a vengeance. Do we really imagine that, having tried through all their four years of conniving to bring him down, that they would calmly accept the prospect of another four years of Trump? That they would not try to rig the election? In 2016 they had been supremely confident that their candidate Hillary Clinton would win, and the surprise of Trump’s victory appalled them. This time they were determined that he would not succeed. Last summer the Democratic Party-aligned Transition Integrity Project (launched by Rosa Brooks and Nils Gilman) was created to wargame scenarios designed to bring the President down by force in the event of his not accepting the result of the election.³

However, if the certification process in Congress that day had continued without interruption as Pence had intended, then many of the arguments and details relating to the fraudulent election would have been laid out for the American public to hear. The mainstream media had been insisting since the election that all talk of fraud was ‘baseless’ ‘conspiracy theory’ and that Trump and his advisers were lying. The election had been sound and secure, they said, and Biden had won fair and square. Almost all the 60 lawsuits that Trump’s team had brought to contest the results had been thrown out by the courts over the previous weeks since 3rd November, often on formalities. But the media did not present the courts’ reasonings in many of the cases. Media reports often simply stated that the cases were: “Denied” or “Withdrawn”.⁴ “Some judges said the Trump campaign lacked legal “standing” to challenge voting procedures. Others said Trump electors or individual voters lacked “standing”. Many cases were thrown out for laches — a legal principle barring untimely suits. Others were declared to be moot or precluded by ongoing litigation at the state level. At least two suits were deemed to violate the Eleventh Amendment — the constitutional provision limiting federal-court litigation against states and state officials. “The Trump campaign and their allies weren’t working with the most skilled lawyers,” said Loyola Law School professor Justin Levitt. “They weren’t paying close attention because, all of a sudden, they found out to their surprise that the courthouse doors are quite narrow. They’re only open a crack.”⁵ Those last two sentences are very pregnant…

The certification process in Congress was thus the last chance for at least some of the evidence to be put before the American people. If things had proceeded normally, the process would have been televised and all would have been over by the early evening. That means the nation would have heard in Congress details of the fraud, and that a 10-day delay had been granted and an audit commission appointed. Neither of these things happened, because the whole process was suspended during the protestors’ intrusion and then after it, 6 hours later, the certification process was resumed and went on until 3:41 am, by which time it was 00.41 am on the West Coast and most people in the whole country were asleep! It was at that time, in the dead of night, that Biden and Harris were officially declared by Pence to become the next President and Vice-President on 20 January.

The so-called “storming of the Congress” thus robbed the Trump supporters of a chance for the country to hear what they had been complaining about – the fraud in the six ‘swing states’ and also, given the shock of what had happened in the intrusion, members of Congress were very unlikely to grant an audit commission. It was a completely useless action on the part of the intruders, because they got nowhere near the assembled Congressmen and women, many of whom were mostly swiftly hurried away from the chambers. The crowd could therefore exercise no pressure on them. They might possibly have done so if indeed they had stood outside the building and chanted slogans while the certification was going on, thus letting the members of Congress know their strength of feeling. Intruding into Congress undermined their own purpose in gathering there. The mainstream media, which has given plenty of evidence of its utter contempt for Trump supporters over the past four years, would have us think they were all zombies ‘incited’ by the words of President Trump to go on a rampage, as if they were incapable of thinking and acting for themselves, and therefore broke into Congress. This can make one wonder: were they in fact instigated by agents provocateurs to break the thin lines of Capitol police officers and penetrate the building? It is very hard to prove that without precise, clear and sustained video footage from various sections of the crowd.

The “storming”

The protestors turned up at the Capitol at around 1.20 pm, but once they got through the outer fence onto the extensive lawn, there was quite a long and noisy standoff right outside the Capitol building itself between sections of the crowd and the Capitol police. This stand-off only gradually built up in energy over about 90 minutes, the police slowly giving ground and responding with chemical sprays and occasional baton blows. The crowd threw no missiles but eventually, some of them forced their way past the police at ground level and up the steps. Around 2.30 p.m., while it is true that a few windows were broken and entry was forced that way (though other protestors strongly objected to the windows being broken), it is also the case that protestors were simply let through by police officers who removed barriers outside the building, and in one case, the doors were opened to them and they strolled in while police officers inside watched and did nothing⁶. This was the US Capitol building, the centre of American democracy and normally a top security location with its own dedicated police force. Yet the police response looked very messy and uncoordinated, undisciplined. There seemed to be no police announcements addressing the crowd. There were definitely too few police to defend such an important building, and they did not have the situation under control inside the Capitol until around 5.00 p.m. – which shows how few police there were at first. They had retreated from the crowd and ran back up the Capitol steps, virtually inviting the crowd to follow them. Policemen were filmed urging protesters to advance to the Capitol through metal barriers.⁷ If there had been enough police at ground level, the crowd would never have been able to get to the steps. At one point, a line of police simply stood and watched from a distance while a group of protestors walked through a door that had been opened for them from the inside by police who were standing inside.⁸ The authorities had had plenty of time to prepare for this event. They knew that Trump was planning to hold a speech near the White House and they knew that the vote certification – a very important Congressional procedure – was planned for 6 January. They had known this for weeks, if not months. Yet the security was minimal, given the potential for trouble. Apparently, the Capitol Police had not asked for reinforcements in the preceding days or weeks from the metropolitan police or the National Guard. In effect, it was as if security at this key national site had been stood down; it was grossly ineffective. One cannot but recall what happened on 9/11 with the equally ineffective air defences… On 6 January, the National Guard – apparently deployed by Vice-President Pence – did not arrive till around 5.30.

All these developments suggest that this event, this intrusion into the Capitol, may have actually been wanted and encouraged in certain quarters within the Establishment and allowed to happen in order to ensure that the fraudulent election results would be certified and to humiliate Trump and drive him from office, or at least begin impeachment proceedings against him which, although they would have no chance of succeeding before 20 January, would serve to permanently stain his reputation and that of his family, thus preventing him or them from leading any future ‘Trumpist’ movement.

The response

The BBC were soon salivating at the prospect that Trump could be ejected by force in line with the 25th Amendment that provides for the removal of Presidents mentally or physically incapable of performing their duties. This would make Vice-President Mike Pence President until Inauguration Day on 20 January. Former Secretary of Defence William Cohen (one of 10 former Defence Secretaries who wrote a letter to the Pentagon urging them to remove Trump) was on BBC Radio 4 at lunchtime on 8 January: “The US is standing on the abyss of the destruction of our democracy”, he said, grossly exaggerating the situation. He ignored the fact that millions of Americans regard the 2020 election as having been fraudulent.

At around 4.37 p.m. on 6 January, in the middle of the intrusion, three powerful business groups – the National Association of Manufacturers, the Business Roundtable (representing major corporations), and the US Chamber of Commerce – contacted the Vice-President. The first urged him to remove the President from office for having fuelled this attempt at “mob rule”; the other two called on the President to end the intrusion immediately.9 Within ten minutes of receiving those calls, Trump put out a video message urging his supporters to “go home”. He told them “I know your pain. I know your hurt. But you have to go home now… we can’t play into the hands of these people. We have to have peace. So go home. We love you. You’re very special.” Within 24 hours Twitter had blocked liking, retweeting or sharing tweets of Trump’s message, citing “the risk of violence” and within 48 hours, in an unprecedented step that shows only too blatantly the power of the Big Tech companies and the real abyss facing US democracy, Twitter and Facebook banned the President of the United States (!) from their platforms altogether for the foreseeable future on the grounds of possible “further incitement of violence”.

Having said at his rally on 6 January that he would “never concede” the election, it appears that Trump did, in effect, concede a day later; in a video released from the White House on 7 January, he promised “an orderly transition”. At the rally, he had called his supporters “special” and said he loved them, but in that video he condemned the Capitol intruders in no uncertain terms. Perhaps, counting on the strength of Capitol security, he had not foreseen an intrusion and had been hoping the crowd would just stand outside the Congress and chant slogans, “cheering on our brave Senators and Congressmen and women”, but that would have been a naïve hope. Sections of his audience were already too fired up, not by his lacklustre speech, but by their own righteous indignation about the state of the country and by what they saw as a fraudulent election.

What was “trashed”, or who?

Since the event, Establishment politicians and the media have unrestrainedly slammed the protestors as “insurrectionists”, “thugs”, “zombies”, “goons”, “enemies of democracy”, “domestic terrorists” and of course, “fascists”, amongst other insults. Trump has been accused of “inciting a mob to riot” and “insurrection” but in fact, it was not a very energetic speech, and he was only speaking to a rally of his supporters, a perfectly normal political activity; he did not address them at the Capitol afterwards. He did not walk down to the Capitol with them, though he had told them at the rally that he would do. BBC Radio 4 lunchtime news on 7 January said that the Capitol was “stormed and ransacked”. Actually, only a few windows and door glasses were smashed or damaged and few items removed, usually from the offices of key anti-Trump figures such as Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi. Papers were strewn around her office and her laptop was stolen but her office was not ‘trashed’. The word “ransacked” conjures up images of a total trashing of a building, and that would be a complete lie in this case. Even “stormed” is disingenuous; while the intrusion can indeed be said to have been more of an aggressive action than the so-called “storming of the Reichstag” in Berlin in August last year, this was no 1789 Bastille event or 1917 Winter Palace¹⁰, because the few police outside the Capitol ran away from the protestors up the steps, inviting them, as it were, to go up there. Many police made no move to stop these so-called “domestic terrorists” and some opened barriers and doors for them; Nor did the police open fire at these alleged “armed insurrectionists” and “threats to democracy”, except for one woman who was shot at and killed simply for climbing through a door. In any case, the violence of the protestors and intruders cannot be compared with the BLM/Antifa mayhem and killings across the USA (mostly in Democratic Party-controlled cities) during the summer, when whole areas of cities were trashed, looted, burned and areas of Seattle and Portland were occupied. Joe Biden and Kamala Harris exculpated the rioters as “mostly peaceful protestors”.

If the intruders on 6 January had really been violent, fascist, communist or anarchist insurrectionists, they could and indeed would likely have done what Senator Lindsay Graham has said: “They could have blown the building up. They could have killed us all. They could’ve destroyed the government,” he said, reported by the BBC. And that shows the sheer extent of the Capitol police force’s failure in allowing so many people to get into the Capitol and roam around at will. Yet the Capitol police force is supposed to be highly trained, well-equipped and well-paid: 2200 officers to defend just two square miles and with an annual budget of $460 million. By their weakness and ineffectiveness, the police and their superior officers put the lives of the country’s elected representatives at risk. The intruders got into the Senate chamber but not the House of Representatives chamber, which was defended by armed guards, although most Congressmen and women had been evacuated.

One video that has emerged is a real ‘smoking gun’ of sorts.¹¹ It shows a line of police outside the building just standing there at a distance facing a group of protestors who are walking into the building. Those police officers are not facing outwards to guard against others coming from that yonder side; they are just standing there, watching as the protestors enter the Capitol, the doors having been opened from the inside for them and the Capitol police inside are also just standing there as the intruders walk past them. One policeman is even heard to say “I disagree with it…” but like his colleagues, he does nothing. If these intruders were really ‘domestic terrorists’ trying to destroy American democracy, as Democrat leaders Nancy Pelosi and Chuck Schumer have claimed, those police officers should have all been firing their weapons ‘in defence of American democracy’ and its “national shrine”. The same video even shows an intruder who has only just entered the building and is walking up a staircase inside wearing a backpack, which is an unthinkable lapse of security in normal circumstances. Security at the Capitol is not the job of the President, but of the Capitol authorities i.e. the legislature, so that particular buck stops at Vice-President Pence.

It seems increasingly likely that this whole ‘event’ was set up i.e. allowed and even encouraged to happen by the controllers of the Capitol police in order a) to prevent the American people from seeing and hearing evidence of the fraudulent election being presented in Congress (and thus televised) b) to prevent the extra 10 day investigation into the election results which the Congress, and notably Pence, could have ordered, and c) to cast the maximum aspersions on Trump, including a second impeachment, so he would leave office under the darkest cloud and not represent any political threat to the Establishment in the future.

Senator Lindsey Graham said: “they could have blown the building up. They could have killed us all”¹², and yes, they could have, if the intruders had been real armed insurrectionists intent on mayhem, murder and the destruction of the Capitol – but they weren’t! They were unwitting pawns in an utterly cynical game, as most likely, were the police, including the officer who shot and killed one of the intruders, Ashli Babbitt. After all, why on earth did anyone need to be shot upstairs if the police downstairs had let people in? This suggests police with different agendas or different loyalties. One cannot but be reminded of the total (deliberate) security malfunction on 9/11, the failure of the air defences etc. Then too, security was, in effect, stood down and came into operation far too late – after the damage had been done.

The intruders did not do what Lindsey Graham feared, because they weren’t domestic terrorists trying to overthrow the Republic, despite what the Establishment politicians and the media are now trying to portray them as. There were indeed some wilder and more bizarre types among the intruders, but most of those who attended the rally and who gathered outside the Congress seemed simply to be ‘patriots’, concerned that democracy in their country was being destroyed. That they were such people is clear both from video footage of the Trump supporters the day before, the crowd at the rally and outside the Capitol – which is why, apart from a few broken windows and doors, they did not trash this building for which, as ‘patriots’, they had respect as the symbolic home of American democracy. Instead, the intruders just wandered around it for the most part like tourists and were eventually ‘ushered out’ by police. They should not have intruded into the building as they did, and not least because by doing so, they stymied their own cause. But nevertheless, they do not deserve to be regarded as virtually subhuman, which is how they have been described by the media and most of the political class since 6 January.

Trump’s supporters on 6 January were for the most part ordinary Americans who embodied the frustrations of millions like them who have for years, decades even, been fed up with the Washington ‘swamp’ and the gridlocked uselessness of so many American politicians, moneygrubbers like Roman senators of old. His supporters are those who Hillary Clinton called “the deplorables” – the people whose ancestors built the country and died for it in its wars; the people who have, again and again, been abused, exploited and deceived by the business, economic, academic and media elites. But they are also the hardy, ordinary people of the age of the Consciousness Soul, and although most regard themselves as patriots who love their country and its national community, they wish to stand on their own feet as autonomous individuals in self-governing local communities, not existing as puppets or dependents of the State. This is also why few of them wore COVID masks at the Capitol – because they think for themselves and are able to see through the lies and/or stupidity of the highly paid professional experts and authorities who presume to subject them to the tyranny of this COVID dictatorship.

Ashli Babbitt

One of the deplorables at the Capitol was not ‘ushered out’ by the police. She was shot and killed by the police. Ashli Babbitt (pic. above), a 35 year-old woman from San Diego, California, and a former US Airforce veteran of 14 years who had done four tours of service abroad, was carried out on a stretcher after being shot in the neck from the handgun of a plainclothes policeman hiding by doors, one of which Babbitt was about to jump though. She later died in hospital some three hours later. Yet right behind her at the door had been other, uniformed police officers with assault rifles who could have stopped or arrested her. As she lay on the floor bleeding, one of those filming her was 25 year-old John Earle Sullivan from Utah, as ardent a leftwing revolutionary and BLM activist as Ashli Babbitt was a Trump supporter and conservative. What he was doing there among all those Trump supporters no-one knows; he said later on CNN(!) that he was just trying to film what was going on.¹³

The BBC and other mainstream media stated that Babbitt was shot by the Capitol police officer while she was trying to get into a corridor that led to the House chamber where Representatives were “sheltering in place”, and implied that she and her fellows were perhaps going to slaughter or at least physically attack the politicians. Yet no Congressmen or women were harmed by the protestors and most had been evacuated by the police. One Capitol policeman, Brian Sicknick (42), later died from injuries sustained in the intrusion; details at the time of writing are still scant on his death.

Ashli Babbitt was a passionate ‘patriot’, a martial and bold woman, fiercely opposed to communism and what she saw as the excessive State control spreading through American culture and society, as can be seen in videos of her online. She had travelled all the way from San Diego on the Pacific coast of southern California to be at the Trump rally. In her forthright manner, on her way to Washington for the rally she wrote in an online message that “Nothing will stop us….they can try and try and try but the storm is here and it is descending upon DC in less than 24 hours…. dark to light!” – the Mars-Uranus motif again. It seems she sensed something about the coming drama. One is reminded of the second verse of Rudolf Steiner’s Foundation Stone Meditation here: “Work at Spirit-Sensing in balance of soul, where the surging deeds of the world’s becoming unite your own I to the I of the world, and you will truly feel in the soul activity of man….You spirits of light, let there be fired from the East what forms itself in the West, speaking: In Christ, death becomes life.” Ashli Babbitt was a woman in the prime of life, dynamic, fierce even and striving for inner balance at the beginning of the Consciousness Soul phase of her life (35-42). She sought to unite her I to something larger – to the destiny of her country and what was going on in the world around her, engaged in the feverish soul activity of politics, which is the struggle of the balance of interests and feelings. Her last journey was from West to East; in herself, she brought inner fire and passion to the cold formalism of Washington DC and the Capitol.

It may seem perhaps to many that she died in a trivial way, throwing away her life in an ignoble cause, but she surely did not see it like that: she believed that her country and its democracy were threatened by a steadily creeping tyranny (“they can try and try and try…”) and that she had to confront this (“Nothing will stop us…”).

The Capitol and the ghost of Rome

That was also what many Americans believed in the 1770s when they took up arms to free themselves from the British Empire. The American colonials were regarded as near subhuman “deplorables” by many in the British Parliament, the British elite and the British army, all of whom lived lives framed by the Greco-Roman norms of those days, the legal-political intellectual thinking of the 4th Post-Atlantean Epoch, still echoing on in the 18th century and also today, and materialised so powerfully in the architectural forms, statuary and decorations of the US Capitol, a building named (by Thomas Jefferson) after the Temple of Jupiter Optimus Maximus on Capitoline Hill, one of the seven hills of ancient Rome.

None of this 4th Epoch formalism, the cold and stiff ceremonies of the US Congress, has anything to do with people like Ashli Babbitt. It all stems ultimately from the ancient Mystery centres of the 3rd and early 4th Post-Atlantean Epochs. When we hear the talking heads and politicians in the media endlessly repeating mindless empty phrases such as “the hallowed shrine of democracy”, “the temple of democracy”, “the sacred halls of democracy” etc. we are hearing politics dressed up in the faded old garments of ancient religion. We witness the same in the formal procedures at the Palace of Westminster (the UK Parliament) in Britain and in British lawcourts. When we watch similar stiff formalities in the US House of Representatives played out before the two symbols of the authority of the Roman Republic (the bundles of rods and axes known as fasces, from which comes the word fascism) located to the right and left of the Speaker’s chair, we are looking at the very ghost of Rome. When we exercise Spirit-Remembering in the sense of the first verse of the Foundation Stone, we recall how the evolution of human consciousness has unfolded and how what was appropriate in the past is no longer so in the present.

A hundred years ago, Rudolf Steiner pointed out that old 4th Epoch ways of thinking and behaving, which are rooted in the spiritual impulses of the Exusiai, the Spirits of Form, had run out of energy and had ceased to have any meaning in the 20th century; he specified the 1950s as a decade by which this must be understood.¹⁴ Our 5th Epoch, the Age of the Consciousness Soul, began in 1413. 1953 minus 1413 = 540 years, a quarter of an epoch (2160/4 = 540). During that first quarter (1413-1953), 4th Epoch impulses of legalism, hierarchy, formalism, symbolism and intellectualism continued on into the 5th Epoch, like a gradually fading echo. The notion that some classes of people with access to formal education, universities and paper qualifications – all of which characteristics stemmed ultimately from the hierarchical structures of the ancient Mystery Schools, mediated via the Church – should regard themselves as somehow superior to “the lower orders”, is something that unfortunately is still, nearly 70 years after 1953, hanging on and all too evident in western societies. Jesus rejected the professionals of His day, the Pharisees and Sadducees, and chose for company those of “the deplorables” of His time. We are seeing now the utter contempt and disdain expressed for the “deplorables” of the Trump movement following the events at the Capitol on 6 January. All recognition of the suffering of ordinary Americans over the past several decades as the US economy has been undermined and ruined, of the continuous violence against conservatives and Trump supporters – which is there for all to see online¹⁵ – is forgotten as politicians and pundits express their outrage and horror that members of the people, the plebians, dared to enter uninvited “the hallowed halls” of what is supposed to be ‘the House of the People’ but which has largely become a pseudo-masonic club, a clubhouse for millionaire ‘gentlemen and gentlewomen’.

The so-called “storming” of the Roman Capitol of the USA on 6 January 2021 may have been a tactical blunder on the part of the populist movement in America, it may have been a defeat in the sense that the intruders allowed themselves to be drawn into a situation in which they and their movement have been made to look foolish, but it can also be seen as a potent sign that the ‘ordinary people’ of the 5th Epoch will no longer put up with governance by high scientific priests and magisterial political judges, leftovers from the 3rd and 4th Epochs, in their gleaming classical ‘temples’ with their all-embracing unitary domes, so redolent of the empire of Hadrian and Justinian.

In 1794, the British philosopher of Utilitarianism, Jeremy Bentham, commissioned the architect Willey Reveley to design a logo for Bentham’s ‘Panopticon’– a revolutionary new prison that would enable continual surveillance of each prisoner’s cell from a single dome.16

The logo of Bentham’s Panopticon – another Eye in the Triangle!

Today’s ‘Benthamite’ elites, such as Klaus Schwab, Elon Musk and Bill Gates with their ancient thinking, are on the verge of realising Bentham’s ‘vision’ through modern technologies of surveillance, biotech, and the manipulation of information, and they are seeking to apply Bentham’s 18th century ‘vision’ to the whole of 21st century society; China is already pointing the way with its hi-tech Social Credit surveillance system. If these modern Benthamites succeed, the result will make the totalitarian controls of 20th century dictatorships seem primitive and inefficient by comparison. But unconsciously, more and more people sense that such ancient architectural and social forms, however dressed up in hi-tech guises, do not breathe the spirit of the modern epoch. However, not enough of us yet practise Spirit-envisioning in the sense of the third verse of the Foundation Stone meditation: not enough yet see – just as not enough could see in the late 18th century¹⁷, at the time of the American and French revolutions – that the society of our modern, 5th Epoch must be based on the threefold image of the human being, as Steiner described a century ago, for only in our epoch has the third and most recently developed sector of social life – the economic sphere – emerged as an autonomous sphere alongside the older ones of culture and law/politics.

We have only just arrived in the 21st year of the 21st century, after three 700-year periods have passed since the conjunction of Jupiter and Saturn guided the Magi to Bethlehem. The often brash but still youthful American spirit in one such as Ashli Babbitt will continue to throw itself boldly against the ancient hollow halls of hierarchy, even if that spirit is shot down by a gun from a black-suited figure hiding in the shadows, until that American spirit in countless people comes to see and understand the threefold image of man and how that can be realised – peacefully.

Notes

1 TPA, Vol. 5 No. 7/8 Oct/Nov 2019. ‘The Incarnation of Ahriman – When and Where (Part One)’.

2 Meanwhile, here in Britain, on the same day Parliament voted retrospectively (!) – by 524 votes to 16 (!) – to approve Johnson’s new full-on lockdown of the whole country which he announced on TV the previous Sunday night. Most of the MPs voted via computer screens from their homes, because of “social distancing”. Only 16 elected representatives thus had the courage and/or the intelligence to stand up against the absurdity of the COVID measures.

3 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transition_Integrity_Project

4 https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/2020-election/trump-s-electionfight-includes-over-30-lawsuits-it-s-n1248289

5 https://www.politico.com/news/2021/01/01/donald-trump-courtselection-legal-hangover-453217

6 https://twitter.com/christina_bobb/status/1347596278583197698

7 https://twitter.com/bumbera_steven/status/1347270969988173825

  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lX2gQsQElJY

8. See n.6 above.

9 https://www.mysuncoast.com/2021/01/06/associated-press-timelineevents-capitol/

    https://news.trust.org/item/20210106212934-za0c4/

10 Modern historical scholarship has revealed that neither of those two ‘seminal’ events were as dramatic or bloody as they were made out to be in subsequent centuries and decades, and this may also turn out to be the eventual verdict on the “storming” of the US Capitol on 6 Jan. 2021.

11 See n. 6 above.

12 https://www.wistv.com/2021/01/07/graham-riots-they-could-have-killed-us-all/

13 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y7PXvchh2WQ

     https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lc1WJA5CE5Q

14 Lecture of 14 December 1919 in Collected Works GA 194.

15 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VUBpRexwiPg

16 https://www.bbc.com/culture/article/20201112-the-eye-of-providencethe-symbol-with-a-secret-meaning

17 The threefold slogan of liberty-equality-fraternity emerged from Rosicrucian circles early on in the French Revolution, but no-one was able to translate it from  an idea into social reality.

This article first appeared in New View magazine Issue #95 Spring 2020. The accompanying title illustration is of the rotating hexagonal structure, first observed in 1981, at the north pole of the planet Saturn.

  Some 25 years ago I started attending an annual world events seminar at Peredur Centre for the Arts in East Grinstead, England, organised by the late Coen Van Houten. They were valuable meetings. They were always held in early or mid-January and they continued until the early years of the new century. The meetings had a very deliberate ‘Janus’ focus, both on the year behind and then the year ahead. First we would always look back at the year that had passed, at what we considered to have been the main world events of the old year. We sought to describe the events objectively, in their outer aspect, going into quite some detail if necessary. Then we would speak about how these events made us feel; we described our inner subjective response to them. Coen would then lead us through a process that tried to encapsulate the event in an image, perhaps something we drew or painted and then, eventually, a single short phrase, or even just one word. We would then sleep on that and see if anything arose from it in the morning. The ultimate aim was to see if we could come to an intuition of the spiritual being that stood behind the event. On the second day, we would speak about the coming year and what we thought might occur, in the light of our findings about the previous year and also out of an approach to history and evolutionary cycles and rhythms in the light of Anthroposophy. Obviously, not all events are simply extrapolations of the events of the previous year and many world events seem to come “from out of the blue”, as we say, as though unconnected to anything we currently recognise, though this is often because we are ignorant of certain aspects and facts of both spiritual and/or earthly history. It was good to maintain this annual focus once a year in the threshold month of Janus, the god of classical antiquity who stood on the threshold of the year looking both back and forward.

The Karma of Untruthfulness

For me, as someone interested since childhood in history and, since the age of 12, in the First World War and its consequences – an event that proved epoch-making for Britain, and indeed the world, in that one could say that the 20th century was born out of that cruel crucible – one of the most inspirational of Rudolf Steiner’s many lecture courses was that of the 24 lectures he gave in Dornach, Switzerland, in the winter of 1916-1917. These are known in English as The Karma of Untruthfulness¹ but in 2010 a new, revised and enlarged German edition of these lectures was published in three parts: Vol. 1: Ways to the Formation of Objective Judgments; Vol.2: The Karma of Untruthfulness; Vol. 3: The Reality of Occult Impulses.² The first German edition of these lectures was only made in 1966, 52 years after the end of the war they do so much to illuminate, and the first English language translations, based on the second German edition (1978 and 1983) appeared in 1988 (The Karma of Untruthfulness Vol.1) and 1992 (The Karma of Untruthfulness Vol.2) respectively. In 2005, Rudolf Steiner Press brought out a second, two-volume English edition of the lectures. These were more attractive publications than the 1998/1992 edition and contained longer introductions, but in terms of content they were essentially the same as the earlier English edition. The 2010 German edition, however, contains previously unpublished material, including maps, notes and diagrams by Steiner.

I would like now to introduce some of the things I have learned from studying Steiner’s Karma of Untruthfulness lectures, which, in my view, can be regarded as a kind of media studies course (and all quotes in this article, unless otherwise stated, come from these lectures).³  Although the media he was dealing with were print media, in our electronic digital Internet era one can still learn a great deal from these lectures through paying attention to how Steiner approached world events, and to what he paid attention. He had three broad aims in these lectures: 1. To give an understanding of the great spiritual streams behind current events. 2. To show how these streams work in different places and through brotherhoods, groups and individuals. 3. To discern characteristic elements (he called these ‘symptoms’) that are crucial to understanding events on the physical plane. To realise these aims he showed that he was thoroughly au fait with what was happening behind the scenes on the physical plane as well as in the spiritual world.

Again and again in these lectures, he emphasised the importance of the search for truth. He began with the question that was in everyone’s minds at that time of the First World War: “what can I do in this crisis?” – and answered simply and directly: “Endeavour to understand! See through things!” Thoughts, he said, are forces and have effects. What people think is far more important than what they do, because thoughts become deeds in the course of time. We live today on the thoughts of past times; these thoughts are fulfilled in the deeds of today. Clear and proper understanding of what is going on is the only way – “Nothing else is of any use”. We need wide-awake vigilance and discrimination in all things. All forms of atavistic mediumism and spiritual practice that avoid the conscious mind are anti-modern and harmful. At the very beginning of his public life, in his book The Philosophy of Spiritual Activity (1894; a.k.a. The Philosophy of Freedom), Steiner showed how it is vital to combine the correct thought with the object, to find the concept that truly corresponds to the percept. Nothing is better for a person, he said, than real insight into how things work in the world. The truth can never be as damaging as an untruth and to adhere to the truth is a solemn and holy act of worship. Have courage for truth, he urged; stand on the foundation of truth, even if it is harmful or embarrassing. It is essential “to develop the will to see things, to see how human beings are manipulated, to see where there might be impulses by which people are manipulated. This is the same as striving for the sense for truth. …. One who possesses the sense for truth is one who unremittingly strives to find the truth of the matter, one who never ceases to seek the truth and who takes responsibility for himself even when he says something untrue out of ignorance.” He emphasised the role of one’s own karma in investigation. All depends on the historian’s karma leading him to the right information at the right moment. Karma, he said, brings us to places where we can ‘sniff out’ knowledge if we are awake to the surroundings.

But of course, we have to know ourselves well if we are to guard against personal inclinations in making judgments about historical or contemporary events. In the lectures Steiner continually interweaves descriptions of outer events with warnings of the need to change our inner state in order to observe correctly and draws attention to the difficulty of working with our sympathies and antipathies when we are faced with apparent contradictions. We should not, for example, form judgments about nations on the basis of criticism of representative individuals of those nations. One must be aware of one’s own standpoint and be able to exercise what he called “ethnic self-knowledge” i.e. understand how one’s own views may be affected by the habits and inclinations of one’s own folk soul. For this, it seems to me, one needs to be able to view one’s own people with a certain distance, as if observing a foreign object, just as he recommended each of us to observe earlier periods in our own biography as if they were those of another person. When one lives abroad for a substantial period of time, something can happen in one’s soul that serves to sever its connection, to some extent, to one’s own people. In what Steiner often called a ‘homeless’ inner condition on the path of spiritual development, one can then come to see one’s own people and culture in a fresh light and because one has this new more objective relationship to one’s people, one can find new and different ways to serve them more effectively. “Every people has its own mission”, it is “only possible to approach this through a longing to attain an understanding“ of that people.

We need, judiciously, to combine open-minded, imaginative thinking that can relate seemingly disparate elements and a simultaneous insistence and reliance on solid facts [much as a keen police investigator might]. Both are necessary to see through the distractions and the fog of untruth that is spread to confuse the unwary. Long periods of time and a certain cool detachment are necessary for this work. Clarity is the fundamental prerequisite for the formation of any judgment. We cannot take things at face value but must examine them, preparing by looking at things from many different sides. We cannot afford to reject anything on the basis of dogma or prejudice, but rather, we should learn to look at things side by side and wait for them to speak, keeping in mind motivation and perspective in the people or events under consideration. We should look for those people who seek to understand and interpret things clearly. “One cannot claim there is no way of getting to the bottom of these things” says Steiner “…if one seeks honestly, there are many ways of finding out what is going on” and “No true Anthroposopher can allow himself to be deafened to current events by all those methods used by the powerful to distract us from seeing ‘what they are really playing at’.”

We can train ourselves to observe the ulterior reality of a phenomenon and seek to see through what Steiner called “the outward comedy”. He gave the example of the fine rhetorical speeches of the British Prime Minister Lord Rosebery⁴, (see pic. above) which were but masking the imperatives of those men of power who stood behind him. We can think of the “outward comedy” of George W. Bush in our own era, sitting telling school children a goat story on the morning when the terrible events of 9/11 were unfolding, or of the hair and gestures of Donald Trump and Boris Johnson and their habits of speech that have been so quoted on in the media and been lampooned by cartoonists. All these can become pointers for us. How people speak is often more revealing than what they say. But we should learn, says Steiner, to avoid people’s words and illusions, and look instead at their aims and desires, become aware of the rhetorical devices they employ: describing in pictures, using images and comparisons, bringing intensifications. In our time, we can think here of the polished rhetoric of Tony Blair, Barak Obama, and Emanuel Macron and their own habits, gestures and quirks.

Besides urging his listeners to pay attention to the significance of names, for example, of people, events and organisations, Steiner also draws attention to what occurs, or what is deliberately done, on certain dates, or days and under certain starry and planetary constellations that echo similar configurations in the past.  A recent example occurred on the 23rd day of the 3rd month (March), the day when, incidentally, Mars entered into conjunction with Pluto, and Boris Johnson gave a TV address to the people of Britain at prime time 8.30 pm (which is 20.30 in the 24 hour clock) in which he announced the most stringent measures yet in order to deal with the coronavirus situation. The number ‘23’ occurs throughout this event, as we can see. In the BBC News programme that immediately followed his broadcast, it was claimed that Britain would now follow the Italian pattern of events if it did not do what the Prime Minister had just announced (at that point, Italy had had over 5476 deaths allegedly due to coronavirus and Britain had had 281). In other words, the British were held to be interchangeable with the Italians, British society was held to be the same as theirs and, of course, as the assumption evidently was that we are all not individuals in medical and health terms but the British are all exactly the same as the Italians – medicine apparently not recognising human individuality – therefore Britain must follow the Italian pattern. On this 23rd day of the 3rd month the British people, whose national day, we can recall, is 23 April and whose national poet and philosopher Shakespeare has a name beginning with the 23rd letter of the alphabet (W) and is thought to have been born and died on a 23 April, we were told by the BBC that the “turning point” came at 233 deaths in both Italy and the UK: Italy had 233 deaths on 7 March and Britain had 233 deaths on 21 March. This “turning point” is evidently supposed to prove something beyond the similarity of the figure of 233, but what was not exactly made clear. I couldn’t help recalling that on 23.3.1933 Adolf Hitler pushed the Enabling Act through the Reichstag which completed the process that brought about a ‘legal dictatorship’. Obviously, the mere similarity of date does not mean there will now be a dictatorship in Britain, but one can pay attention to the kind of event – the gesture or direction of the event – that happens on the same date and under what starry constellation.

Symptomatology and the ‘spiritual weather’

But besides the striving for self-knowledge to improve the quality of our judgments and besides training ourselves in observation of world events in the ways outlined above, one of the most fundamental factors referred to repeatedly in the Karma of Untruthfulness lectures is the actions of spiritual beings who create ‘the spiritual weather’, we could say, that brings about the spiritual evolution of mankind. When we study history and current events, Steiner pointed out, we need to see phenomena against the background of spiritual knowledge; this is the study of what he called ‘historical symptomatology’: seeing through symptoms to the “illness” behind them. Sometimes, he said, a single phenomenon can illuminate decades. What is important in history is to point out what is characteristic or characteristic about facts, and not just to list them one after the other – a history of symptoms or gestures is needed. Ultimately, behind these symptoms spiritual beings are active, and that is where we find real causality in the interactions between spiritual beings, never forgetting that we too are spiritual beings, but incarnated ones.

World events on the physical plane then, have to be seen against the background of the actions of invisible spiritual beings, as well as human actions. My ‘I’ (the essential human self) is physically invisible to others, but they can get an impression of it through my outer actions and through the state of my body, my caring, my indignation, my tears and so on. In the physical world we are free to ignore the weather, to go out walking in a severe rainstorm without a hat or an umbrella, but we may catch cold and die of pneumonia. Similarly, we are free to ignore ‘the spiritual weather’, the actions of invisible hierarchical spiritual beings who are far beyond us in ‘rank’ (i.e. consciousness). To speak of this spiritual weather then, and the actions of high spiritual beings acting ‘above history’, as it were, is not to speak deterministically, any more than to speak of the weather is determinist. We are free to act as we will, but just as it is common sense to go out on a rainy day with an umbrella, so is it ‘spiritual common sense’ to seek to perceive the nature of the times consciously and correctly and act in accord with it. The Roman Empire in the West ended in 476 AD with the deposition of the Emperor Romulus Augustulus by the East Gothic military leader Odoacer and the Roman (Byzantine) Empire in the East was terminated by the Turks’ conquest of Constantinople in 1453 AD. But many people today, in what is a completely different epoch, still behave as though the culture of that Empire was still with us and was still valid: all those people whose life centres around official documents and constitutions, ordinances, paragraphs and clauses, for example – lawyers, politicians and bureaucrats. If we choose, as a culture, and also as individuals, wilfully or out of ignorance, to disregard changes in the spiritual weather, which according to Steiner are the actions of high spiritual beings, then, just as we get soaking wet when we are out in the rain without an umbrella and may contract pneumonia, we may well suffer in some way a personal or a cultural, societal crisis. It happened to Germany and Japan in the 1930s and 40s and to Russia in 1917-1991; it is happening to us all right now in this so-called “coronavirus crisis”. In recent weeks (the end of March at the time of writing) radical, authoritarian actions have been taken by governments in advanced countries in the name of ‘health and safety’ that starkly contradict the democratic and individualistic direction in which evolution has been moving since the 15th century i.e. since the end of the era of the previous 2160 years that was influenced by Classical Antiquity. And in Britain we find ourselves ruled at this time by Boris Alexander de Pfeffel Johnson, a man who idolises the Roman Empire and the Classical world of that ancient epoch. Millions have allowed Johnson and other leaders of the advanced countries to inflict severe damage on their countries’ cultures, societies and economies because they are simply unaware of the spiritual weather and what it requires.

Steiner on epidemics and cosmology

Interestingly, what Steiner has to say about epidemics and pandemics relates very directly to this question of spiritual weather, when we bear in mind that just as our physical bodies are moved about by our will, our invisible spirit, so are the heavenly bodies up above merely the outer marker for the location of activity by spiritual beings of an awesome nature. On 20 October 1918,⁵ Steiner, who spoke of viruses as ‘bacilli’, said the following in reference to the outbreak of what has come to be known as the ‘Spanish Flu’ pandemic of 1918-1919:

“In man there exists a polarity — the psychic centre and the periphery…. If in order to understand history we must look inward, as I have indicated, to the underlying symptoms, then in order to understand medicine, for example, hygiene and medical health services we must look outwards, to cosmic rhythms for the source of pathological symptoms. …Just as modern history fails to penetrate to spiritual realities, so modern medicine, modern hygiene and medical health services fail to penetrate to the symptoms which are of cosmic provenance. …Clearly, just as the external facts are true that the outward aspect of James I was such and such, as I pointed out earlier [in this lecture he was giving], so, from the external point of view it is also true that a certain kind of bacillus is connected with the present influenza epidemic. But if it is true, for example, that rats are carriers of the bubonic plague, one cannot say that rats are responsible for the plague. People have always imagined that the bubonic plague was spread by rats. But bacilli, as such, are of course in no way connected with disease. In phenomena of this kind we must realize that just as behind the symptoms of history we are dealing with psychic and spiritual experiences, so too behind somatic [physical body] symptoms we are dealing with experiences of a cosmological order. In other cases the situation of course will be different! What is especially important here is the rhythmic course of cosmic events, and it is this that we must study. We must ask ourselves: In what constellation were we living when, in the 1890s, the present influenza epidemic appeared in its benign form? In what cosmic constellation are we living at the present time? By virtue of what cosmic rhythm does the influenza epidemic of the nineties appear in a more acute form today? Just as we must look for a rhythm behind a series of historical symptoms, so we must look for a rhythm behind the appearance of certain epidemics. …Do you regard it as impossible that something takes place in the sun — since its rays are directed daily towards the earth — which has significance for the earth emanations and is related to the life of man, and that this reaction varies according to different geographical localities? Do you think that we shall have any understanding of these matters unless we are prepared to accept a true cosmology founded upon a knowledge of the soul and spirit? The statement that man’s inclination to resort to war is connected with the periodic appearance of sun spots is, of course, regarded as absurd. But there comes a point when statements of this kind cease to be absurd, when certain pathological manifestations in the emotional life are seen to be connected with cosmological phenomena such as the periodic appearance of sun spots. And when tiny creatures, these petty tyrants — bacilli or rats — really transmit from one human being to another something that is related to the cosmos, then this transmission is only a secondary phenomenon. …People will only achieve results in the sphere of health, hygiene and medicine if they study not historical, but cosmological symptoms. For the diseases we suffer on earth are visitations from heaven…We can only advance the cause of progress in the epoch of the Consciousness Soul, when people recognise the validity of spiritual realities. Therefore everything depends on this one aim: the search, the quest for truth.”

If we investigate the cosmological phenomenon of sun spot cycles, and look at sun spot minima – those years when there are very few or zero sunspots – we find, for example, a study in the Journal of Astrobiology & Outreach (23.6.2017) entitled ‘Sunspot Cycle Minima and Pandemics: The Case for Vigilance?’⁶ The conclusion of this study is that the “three major sunspot minima – Sporer [1400-1520], Maunder [1645-1715] and Dalton [1790-1830] – are known to have been associated with devastating pandemics caused by viral or bacterial agents. Whilst some of these agents could be interpreted as being newly introduced to the Earth, others probably represented mutated or re-activated entities that were in circulation at the time… The modern period 2002-2017 has been characterised by the lowest solar activity since the Dalton minimum… These conditions taken together arguably provide the best opportunity for the onset of pandemics. An open gateway is offered for the ingress of new pathogens which are inevitably electrically charged in space. Virions, phages, bacteria, and other micron-sized biological entities can cross the weakened interplanetary magnetic field and readily reach the Earth’s surface.”

When we look to planetary movements, we find that many astrologers seem to agree the coronavirus epidemic was unleashed at the time of the Saturn-Pluto conjunction (meeting) in Capricorn⁷, which was more or less exact in January this year, although astrologers disagree about the extent (orb) of a conjunction (meeting). The smaller the orb, the greater the effect of the conjunction, and the conjunction was within a 3°orb from 6 December 2019 to 17 February 17 this year i.e. during the outbreak in China and the beginning of the spread of the virus globally. 

In March this year, Mars moved into a conjunction with Jupiter and Pluto, and it was in March that the coronavirus outbreak intensified. On 18 March five celestial bodies (!) were in Capricorn, in a very tight conjunction (within 8° of each other). Mars and the Moon were at 21° Capricorn, Jupiter at 22° Capricorn, Pluto at 24° Capricorn and Saturn at 29° Capricorn. Capricorn is traditionally associated with government, authority, and order, the father. The days between 18 and 23 March – when Mars joined the Jupiter-Pluto conjunction – were very difficult; the disease surged and governments took the most drastic action, requiring most of their populations to stay at home. On 21 March Saturn moved from Capricorn into Aquarius; amongst other things, Saturn is associated with discipline, restriction and limitation and Aquarius with freedom and togetherness, science and electricity. Will 5G technology be restricted by governments because of this crisis or will the forces of authority and order use it to impose 5G?

In 1348 King Philip VI of France investigated the causes of the terrible plague (the “Black Death”- see pic. above) that decimated Europe in the 1340s, and his astrologers decided that conjunctions of Saturn, Jupiter and Mars, all in Aquarius in March 1345, were the original, or ‘distant’ cause of the plague. Finally, the last time there was a triple conjunction of Jupiter, Saturn and Pluto, as there is now, was in 1284. That was the year in which the historical events that gave rise to the story of the Pied Piper of Hamelin occurred in Germany. Also, in 1284, the Republic of Venice began production of the ducat, the gold coin that would become the standard for European coinage for the next 600 years. Are the peoples of the world being deceived in this crisis by elites intending to use the fear and paranoia associated with the disease to bring about a fundamental shift in our financial and economic system? Will this crisis be used to effect the elimination of cash and to justify the move to a fully digital economy, including the introduction of the much-vaunted “Green New Deal” programme advanced by Al Gore, US Congresswoman Alexandra Ocasio-Cortez and the Extinction Rebellion movement as well as the technology required to sustain this?

Hierarchical Beings

The following is based on Steiner’s understanding of how spiritual beings work into human affairs. There are three levels of consciousness far above the human that determine the world’s ‘spiritual weather’. Just as the physical weather has a purpose – to bring about changes in the condition of the physical earth – so do these ‘levels of consciousness’, which are in fact spiritual beings, (as we are, only they are invisible and far more advanced in their development than us), have a purpose, which is to bring about changes that assist us in our development. To use traditional nomenclature for these, they are the seven planetary Archangels who each in turn preside over periods of history that last for 350-400 years at a time; they are called ‘planetary’ because they mediate forces from the spiritual spheres associated with those physically visible planets. In those spiritual spheres higher beings dwell that are responsible for those regions of the spiritual-physical realms. In the Middle Ages, from approx. 1190-1510, the Mars Archangel Samael was presiding over the spiritual weather of that period and ‘his’ divisive, assertive energy prepared the way for the growing individualism of the modern world, which became evident in the Reformation of the sixteenth century. From 1510 to 1879 the Moon Archangel Gabriel performed the supervisory office and whenever ‘he’ does so, he orients us towards an ever deeper incarnation into the physical earth. Since 1879 the Sun Archangel Michael has been directing the spiritual weather; we have all been living within his influence which has steadily grown over the past 140 years. Traditionally, Gabriel was represented standing at the gate of birth as we left the spiritual world and entered the physical plane, while Michael was shown standing at the gate of death with his scales, weighing up what we had achieved in our earthly lives.

Michael’s influence orients us in the opposite direction to Gabriel, as it were, towards the spirit and the cosmopolitan world of mind and thought. In this Michaelic era, how we form our judgments is especially important, because it depends on how consciously we think and how extensive and ‘sun-like’ our understanding of the world is. Michael’s era will be followed by that of the Saturn Archangel Oriphiel (c.2300-c.2650), whose rulership, according to Steiner, is always a particular time of testing for humanity.

Beyond the seven planetary Archangels are the 12 Archai, one level higher in rank or consciousness than the Archangels. These 12 mediate Zodiacal impulses to mankind for periods of 2160 years each, that is 30 x 72 years, for it takes 72 years for the spring equinox point to move through one of the 30 degrees of a single one of the 12 Zodiac signs. In many of his works and from various angles Steiner explained how these 12 signs affect the evolution of the human organism over the course of time. Currently, since the early 15th century, we have been in what he calls the Age of the Consciousness Soul⁸, in which the will aspect of our threefold soul is being developed, the two others being the thinking aspect and the feeling aspect, which were developed in the two previous Zodiacal periods. This Consciousness Soul epoch (1413-3573), which according to Steiner  lasts 2160 years, will continue until the middle of the 4th millennium. A crucial aspect of this epoch is for individuals to become conscious of themselves as spiritual beings and of their relationship to the worlds of spirit, nature and other human beings. This is something that only individuals can do in freedom; it cannot be done en masse, as a group, and it is to be done in the course of at least two incarnations during the Consciousness Soul Age, normally once as a man and once as a woman, thus providing individual souls with a balanced human experience of each phase of human development on Earth. In this epoch the main challenge is for individuals to penetrate their mental life so that they can become the conscious masters of their thinking. The Consciousness Soul Age will be followed by the Age of the Spirit-Self, the first period in which the spirit of man will be developed, as distinct from the soul. The focus in that epoch will not be so much on individuals and thinking but on the development of new communities and a higher, more refined life of feeling.

In this context, in The Karma of Untruthfulness lecture cycle Steiner gave two extremely important indications about modern history; the first was that  “the whole of recent history [by which he meant the period from the beginning of the Consciousness Soul epoch in the early 15th century until his own time] has to do with the struggle between the ancient Roman-Latin element  and that element that is to be made out of the English-speaking peoples if they fail to put up any resistance to it.” This points to the struggle between those elements hanging over from the Greco-Roman epoch (747 BC – 1413 AD) before the Age of the Consciousness Soul which are today historically retrogressive or ‘illegitimate’, as it were, and the historically progressive and legitimate impulses of our epoch, the Age of the Consciousness Soul. One of these progressive impulses is democracy, the striving of each individual, whatever their social status or affiliation, to have a say in how the community is run. Another is the economic impulse, as distinct from the purely political or legal impulse of the Greco-Roman epoch and the theocratic impulse of the previous, ancient Egyptian epoch, for example. In our epoch, the English-speaking peoples have a particularly important role to play in the sphere of the economy.

The second important indication⁹ Steiner gave in these lectures was that the elites of the English-speaking peoples are determined to prevent the Slavic peoples from playing the significant role that they are destined to play in the epoch of the Spirit-Self, that is, the epoch after ours, when the Slavic peoples will be in the vanguard of a new impulse for ethical community based on the refinement of feeling. Instead, the English-speaking elites wish to hold evolution back in the Age of the Consciousness Soul when the English-speaking peoples play a vanguard role, so that evolution can be held back at the level of the ‘lower octave’ of individualism, namely, self-centredness. This is because the English-speaking elites have not become sufficiently conscious of how they, as individuals, are gripped by their own folk soul and its inclinations, one of which is the inclination to materialism. Steiner indicated how  “certain elements” of the British people are most suitable to promote this via the use of what he called ‘grey magic‘, by which he meant above all media manipulation and propaganda. Again, we are seeing this to a remarkable degree right now in the coronavirus ‘crisis’.

On 18 October 2019, the 7th World Military Games (see above) opened in Wuhan, China, a city of 11 million people and a major transport and technological hub, as well as being one of the first cities where 5G was being rolled out in China. 10,000 athletes from over 100 countries competed in 27 sports, and on that same day the “Event 201” conference¹⁰ (see above) took place in New York, hosted by Johns Hopkins University and organised by the World Economic Forum (which hosts the annual jamboree events for ‘world leaders’ in Davos, Switzerland) and the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. Event 201 was held in order to simulate, as an exercise, a global coronavirus pandemic. This was two months before that pandemic first appeared in …. Wuhan, China. Discussing the communications element of the simulation¹¹, the participants agreed there would be a need to “flood the zone”, as they put it, i.e. to fill the global media with the same messages and this is what we have seen and heard in the mainstream media during this current crisis. Alternative views of the crisis and serious critiques of government reactions have hardly had a look-in. This is an important aspect of ‘grey magic’: people are prevented from gaining access to information that would help them to form better judgments by a relentless media focus on a single message, a single narrative. The English-speaking peoples, who have dominated global media for most of the last 100 years, are the “most suitable national element for transforming the whole world into a materialistic realm”, Steiner said on 15.1.1917. This is because of their inclination to materialism that has been deeply ensconced within their culture especially since the time of Francis Bacon (1561-1626), the instigator of the natural scientific method and inspirer of the Royal Society (1660). “Secret Societies know this and want to set their foot on the neck” of their own people “and strip them of all spiritual endeavour” that is genuine. “Just because karma has ordained that the Consciousness Soul should work here [in Britain] particularly strongly, the secret brotherhoods have sought out elements in the British national character. Their aim is to send a wave of materialism over the earth and make the physical plane the only valid one. A spiritual world is only to be recognised in terms of what the physical plane has to offer.”¹²

Finally, in addition to the actions of the seven planetary Archangels and the 12 Zodiacal Archai, there are the actions of four beings that have more profound influences yet than them. According to Steiner, three of these beings –  Lucifer, Christ and Ahriman – all have incarnations on the physical plane just once in human evolution: Lucifer c.3000 BC in China, Christ in Jesus of Nazareth 2000 years ago, and Ahriman now, in the early 3rd millennium “before even a part of the 3rd millennium has elapsed”¹³  “in the West”, most probably N. America. These three incarnations are like three great pillars in the history of the last 5000 years, framing human development in that period. Each incarnation requires a lengthy preparation and a particular people or culture to bear it. In the case of Ahriman, that is the people of the United States, a country that was birthed from Britain. Europe became the continent primarily associated with Christianity, and today Europe finds itself squeezed between the economic and military impulses of China, whose vast “One Belt, One Road” transportation project across Eurasia is the greatest Asian movement westwards since the Mongols in the 13th century, and America, the ailing global hegemon which, led by semi-visible financial and economic powers, is determined to reassert its still formidable global hegemony.

The current coronavirus crisis in this 21st century since the time of Christ is taking place within this struggle for the corona (crown) of world power between China and America. But it is also taking place within the window of activity of a fourth being known to esotericism¹⁴ as ‘the Sun Demon’, or Sorath, the being associated with the number 666 in the Bible (Rev. ch. 13) who does not incarnate but strikes into human affairs every 666 years (666-1332-1998); my own research has led me to the conclusion that around each of those axial years can be seen a ‘window’ of 49/50 years¹⁵ in each case, so that the present window is either side of 1998 (1973-1998-2023). The Sorath being seeks to undermine and destroy the human I, to reduce us to the animal part of our human being, where we become subservient to our animal needs and drives. From the early 1970s until today we have seen countless examples of this animalisation. In their paranoid overreaction to the coronavirus, governments have sought to reduce whole nations to sheep, locked up in domestic ‘pens’, unable to move freely until their ‘shepherds’ allow, and whole nations have meekly complied. Public social and cultural life has all but been sheared off and we wait dumbly for we know not what. Perhaps a vaccine that, like sheep, we shall all be required to take for purposes of “health and safety”, our vaccination records accessible on an implanted ID chip in our bodies, just as farm animals already have. In Sweden it has even become fashionable in recent years to have ‘ID chip parties’ where, as well as eating chips and other food, partygoers have chips of a different sort implanted in their hands or arms. Once again, Britain has been in the forefront here; in 2019 The Guardian reported¹⁶: “In 1998, Kevin Warwick, a professor of cybernetics at Reading University, had a chip implanted in his hand both to demonstrate that it was possible, and as a way of exploring the transhumanist idea that fusing technology with the body is the next step in humanity’s evolution.” (emphasis – TB)(see pic. below)

Meanwhile, as we are not in fact sheep but human beings, we can at least use this current imposed detention in our ‘pens’ to study, research, think and meditate, and try to understand what is going on, even though much of that research and study may have to be in the ahrimanic realm of the Internet (the inspiration for which, like almost all modern technology, came from that  realm). We can take courage from the knowledge, a result of Rudolf Steiner’s spiritual research, that in this Age of the Consciousness Soul, in this 21st century of the Christian Era, and in this Michaelic Age, since the 1930s¹⁷ the Christ Being, the Divine Logos, has been visible to those who can perceive Him in the etheric mantle of the Earth, which is the realm of the angels. There He is borne by an angel, as in Palestine He was borne for just three years by a human being. Since the Ascension he has united Himself with the Earth. This can become a great source of strength and comfort to people in times such as ours.

                                                          Overshadowed by the Etheric Christ by Ninetta Sombart

Christ came in Jesus in the epoch before ours. As our epoch is, in astrological terms, the Age of Pisces, the Fishes, when He walked the Earth it was in the Age of Aries, the Ram, and so he referred to those who followed him as his sheep. In that epoch people were only just learning how to think – that was a task of the epoch. But in our epoch, now that we can think, the task is to think for ourselves: through thinking, to realise how we are related to all being, visible and invisible, to overcome fear, isolation, alienation, and to use our thinking for the sake of the Good: In this epoch, to speak of human beings as sheep, even symbolically, is no longer appropriate. In the Age of the Consciousness Soul we strive to advance from intellectuality to Imagination, the first step to spiritual vision into the realm of life itself, by perceiving the outer form of spiritual realities, but Steiner warned that what works against Imagination is inattention to truth; it is fabrication and untruthfulness. He considered this was already rampant in the media of his day and often said that untruthfulness was the norm in the Press. What would he have made of today’s media world! Many are under the impression that ‘fake news’ and ‘post-truth’ are things that only emerged c.2016. Far from it. Steiner was pointing out such things a hundred years ago already. That is one reason why the lectures were titled The Karma of Untruthfulness. If more and more people made the effort to engage with the content of these 25 precious lectures, they would find their understanding of world events in the modern era immeasurably enriched and strengthened.

Notes

1. (Collected Works GA 173 Vol. 1 and GA 174).

2. (GA 173a-c).

3 All Steiner quotations, unless otherwise indicated, are from The Karma of Untruthfulness Vols. 1 and 2 (Rudolf Steiner Press, 2005).

4 Archibald Primrose, 5th Earl of Rosebery (1847-1929), Liberal Imperialist, Foreign Secretary 1886, 1892-1894, Prime Minister 1894-95. Widely recognised as the finest political orator of his age, he was married to Britain’s wealthiest heiress, Hannah Rothschild, from 1878 until her death in 1890. He was for many years the political mentor of the three close political colleagues who took Britain into the First World War: Herbert Asquith, Prime Minister 1908-1914, Sir Edward Grey, Foreign Secretary 1905-1916, and Lord Richard Haldane, Minister of War 1905-1912 and Lord High Chancellor 1912-1915.

5 Collected Works GA 185.

6 https://www.longdom.org/open-access/sunspot-cycle-minima-and-pandemics-the-case-for-vigilance-2332-2519-1000159.pdf

7 The planetary positions given in this article are for the Tropical Zodiac used by most western astrologers and not the Sidereal Zodiac, used by a minority of western, and most Indian astrologers.

8 Coterminous with the Age of Pisces. The dates Steiner gives for this are  1413-3573. There is a time lag of 1200 years (1199 to be exact) from the beginning of the astronomical Ages and their reflection in human history and culture. The astronomical Age of Pisces – when, as viewed from Earth, the Spring point entered the sign of Pisces – began in 215 AD. The cultural Age of Pisces on earth began 1199 years later in 1413/14. The time lag is accounted for by the time taken for the ‘Venus pentagram’ (a configuration of conjunctions between the Sun and Venus, often called ‘the cosmic timepiece’ on account of its harmonious movements) to ‘rotate’ around the entire Zodiac. See R. Powell, Hermetic Astrology, Vol. I (1987) pp. 58-66.

9 Here Steiner drew partly on a lecture given by the British occultist, C.G. Harrison in London in 1893 and included in the book The Transcendental Universe (1894).

10 See Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0-FQbhkWYuY

11 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LBuP40H4Tko

12 Here, one can think of the growing cult of “Gaia” – the reverence for the physical earth as a near or  actual ‘divine’ physical being felt by many people in ecological and New Age circles.

13  Lecture of  1.11.1919.

14 For example, Abbot Johannes Trithemius of Sponheim (1462-1516) in his book The Seven Secondary Intelligences (1508). He was the teacher of the important 16th century esotericists Heinrich Cornelius Agrippa and Paracelsus.

15 This is from my own work, but building on Steiner’s indications; he associated the second 666 year, i.e. 1332, with the fall of the Knights Templar (12.9.1924 GA 346). But they were arrested on Friday 13 October 1307, the Order was dissolved in 1312 at the Council of Vienne, and the two leading Templars in France were burned at the stake in Paris in 1314 – those dates are all well before 1332. 1307-1332 is 25 years. Working by analogy with the lemniscate, and moving 25 years beyond 1332, we arrive at 1357. By this latter date, the Order of the Templars (under that name) had completely disappeared from Europe. The second 666 window, associated by Steiner with the destruction of the Templars era, is thus 1307-1357, with the axial point at 1332. The same principle can be applied to the first and third 666 years thus: 641-666-691 and 1973-1998-2023. The activity of Sorath does not occur in only one year, although that axial year is a kind of culmination, but during a 49/50 year-long window of time around it.

16 Oscar Schwartz, ‘The rise of microchipping: are we ready for technology to get under the skin?’ in The Guardian, 8.11.2019

https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2019/nov/08/the-rise-of-microchipping-are-we-ready-for-technology-to-get-under-the-skin

17 See R. Steiner, The Reappearance of Christ in the Etheric (Anthroposophic Press, 1983) lectures of 25.1.1910 and 6.3.1910, both in GA 118.