Was it Really the “Storming” of “the Temple of Democracy”?

 

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.

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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.

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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.

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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

panopticon-proxy-image

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.