Lord Stanhope – The Adversary of Kaspar Hauser, my translation of  Philip Henry, Lord Stanhope, Der Gegenspieler Kaspar Hausers (Urachhaus, 1988) by Johannes Mayer, was published by Temple Lodge Publishing (Forest Row, UK) on 8 December 2025.  For further information about the book, see:                       https://templelodge.com/viewbook.php?isbn_in=9781915776419  

612pp; 23.5 x 15.5 cm; paperback; ISBN 9781915776419; price  £35.00

Mayer’s book is the only biography of Philip Henry, 4th Earl Stanhope (1781-1855), the aristocratic secret agent who played such a significant role in the fate of Kaspar Hauser and thus also in the destiny of Germany, Europe and the world in the 19th and 20th centuries. This published translation, many years in the making, is thus the only detailed English-language account of the 4th Earl Stanhope’s life, especially in relation to his involvement with the life and fate of Kaspar Hauser.

The 4th Earl Stanhope’s home, at Chevening, Kent (southeast England) has since the early 1970s been the official country residence of British Foreign Secretaries and the location of the Chevening Scholarships (founded in 1983 and modelled on the Rhodes Scholarships).

My heartfelt thanks for the realisation of this published translation go to the late author Johannes Mayer, to the late Coen van Houten, who first sparked my interest in the life of Kaspar Hauser  and of Stanhope’s role in it; to Wilhelm Floride and Eckart Böhmer for their inspiration and insight; to Mark Gartner for his friendship and encouragement; to Richard Steele for his generous assistance, to my wife Tomie Ando, for her steadfast forbearance and support throughout my work on the translation  and its editing, and last but not least, to the publisher Sevak Gulbekian, who boldly and professionally undertook to see the book published.

Terry M. Boardman,

January 2026

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.

This summer I went again to the Kaspar Hauser Festspiele (festival) that is held every two years in the south German city of Ansbach. I have been going to the Festspiele since 2004. It is a festival that has been organised since 1998 by its multi-talented director, Eckart Boehmer, and commemorates the life of the remarkable phenomenon that was Kaspar Hauser (1812-1833). Born on Michaelmas Day, 29 September 1812, when Napoleon was sitting in Moscow waiting for the Russian surrender that never came, the individual later known as Kaspar Hauser was in fact the son of Napoleon’s adopted daughter, Stephanie de Beauharnais, and of her husband Karl, the ruler of the Grand Duchy of Baden, which today is part of the southwestern German state of Baden-Württemberg. Kaspar was therefore the rightful heir to the grand ducal throne  of Baden, but he was abducted two weeks after his birth and kept, until the age of 15 in increasingly restricted states of incarceration, the last 11 years of which were in complete isolation, so that he became unable to walk or speak, as he was kept chained to the wall in a sitting position, and shortly before his release was taught to stand a walk a little.  While his initial abduction was for reasons of sordid dynastic ambition all too common in history, his later incarceration and his life in public following his release in Nuremberg in 1828 became involved with ‘high’ issues of European politics and also profound psychological, moral and philosophical issues, all of which are too complex to be described in this article.¹ Suffice it to say that not only was his mother the adopted daughter of the man feared by rulers throughout Europe but if he had become the Grand Duke of Baden, German and European history may well have been very different in the 19th and 20th centuries.

 Another test

I was glad to see that despite difficulties during the COVID-19 years the event continues to flourish. However, the venal opposition to Kaspar Hauser, even after 190 years, has also continued. Although a mountain of evidence now exists that, when seen in combination, proves that Kaspar Hauser was indeed the rightful heir to the Grand Duchy of Baden, in 1996 the German magazine Der Spiegel employed a team at the University of Munich and a British scientist, John Bark (dates? None available, I’m afraid.), to try and use genetic science to disprove the claim that Kaspar Hauser had been the heir to the throne of Baden.² However, it was plausibly objected that the material used for the DNA test did not come from Kaspar Hauser and a second DNA test done in 2002 at the German University of Münster came to a very different conclusion, saying the test did not rule out that that Hauser could have been the heir. This followed the publication of a particularly vicious attack on Kaspar Hauser in a book by a Canadian professor of German military and imperial British history³ in 2001.

This year, on 1 August, while the Festspiele was taking place, news was released that another DNA test had recently been done by a team led by the Canadian Prof. Turi King that has supposedly conclusively proved that Kaspar Hauser was not related to the House of Baden. These findings were immediately taken up by the mainstream media, just as the Der Spiegel test result had been in 1996. It is too early yet to judge whether, as with the 1996 test, they will also be without merit. Against them is the accumulated evidence of almost 190 years, beginning with the investigations by the famous criminologist Paul Anselm von Feuerbach (1775-1833), who was the first to identify Kaspar Hauser’s link to the House of Baden and the crime that had taken place in that House, and paid for the private propagation  of his findings with his life; he was murdered by poisoning in May 1833, exactly 5 years after Kaspar Hauser appeared in Nuremberg and six months before Kaspar himself was murdered.

There will be those who, in view of this latest DNA test, say that the question of whether Kaspar Hauser was the rightful Prince of Baden or not was not the most important thing about him and his story and that it does not matter if he is proved not to have been a member of the House of Baden by a DNA test. Such people could, however, ask themselves why Siddartha Gautama (the Buddha) was the son of a king, why the two Gospels of Matthew and Luke begin with genealogies of Jesus, why Jesus is related to the lines of Solomon and Nathan; why ‘kings’ or ‘wise men’, as well as shepherds, visited the baby Jesus. Jesus was not just any carpenter; He was a carpenter descended from a king. At the end of His life on earth he stood judged between a religious leader (Caiaphas) and a political leader (Pilate) and on the cross He hung between two thieves, one who accepted Him and one who rejected Him. Anthroposophers can recall that the Foundation Stone meditation given by Rudolf Steiner at a conference in Dornach, Switzerland at Christmas 1923 refers in its final verse both to “poor shepherds’ hearts” and to “the wise heads of kings”. Christianity as a religion (the word ‘re-ligion’ means to ‘re-bind’, or ‘re-unite’) brings together the spiritual, or heavenly, with the material or earthly. To be human means to live with the heavenly and the earthly and to unite both in oneself and with others. The question of the truth about Kaspar Hauser’s earthly origins – the truth about which ‘house’ (Haus) Kaspar belonged to – is not therefore unimportant, not least because it is very much connected with the reasons why he was mistreated as he was. His was not only a case of an innocent abused by callous human beings. It was also the case of an innocent who was abused because he was a particularly important prince in a time when lines of descent were still of considerable significance, even if the importance of ‘blood’ in family lineages was at that time already not what it had been for millennia and which over the following 200 years would become even less important.

 Kaspar and Christ

In 2012, all those interested in the story of Kaspar Hauser commemorated his birth in Karlsruhe, Germany 200 years earlier. In 2028, we will commemorate the 200th anniversary of his appearance in Nuremberg, in the Unschlittplatz, the square that was named after the candlewax that came from the slaughter of innocents.⁴ In 2033, 200 years  after his death in Ansbach near the statue of the Ansbach poet Johann Peter Uz (1720-1796 who worked at the imperial court of Justice in Nuremberg), we can remember Kaspar’s sad end by the fatal stabbing attack on him five years after his remarkable appearance at Whitsun 1828 in the Unschlittplatz. This region, which includes the geographical waystages of the 21 years of Kaspar’s life – Karlsruhe – Beuggen – Pilsach – Nuremberg – Ansbach – lies in the very heart of Europe.

In the same year of 2033, Christians all over the world will commemorate 2000 years since the central events that define Christianity: the Crucifixion, Resurrection, and Ascension of Jesus Christ and the Whitsun Event 10 days after His Ascension. Those Easter events brought to a culmination the 3 years of Christ’s preaching, teaching and healing activity in public, which had begun with His Baptism in the Jordan in the year 30. And in the year 2030 we shall also commemorate the beginning, with the Baptism, of those 3 years of Christ’s work activity on Earth. The year 2030 and the decade of the 2030s have, for at least 10 years now, been very much the focus of attention for the world’s elites who have repeatedly referred to that year and that decade as a kind of ‘deadline’, or target date, by which various goals of theirs must be achieved.

We are witnessing the crisis building once again in the Israel/Palestine region, which is near to the salty Dead Sea. North of the region is the Black Sea, the axis of which is basically horizontal or east-west and, south of it, the Red Sea, the axis of which is basically vertical or north-south. To the west of the region is the Mediterranean Sea (the name means ‘the middle of the earth’). The whole region lies in the heart of what has been called the ‘World Island’⁵ of Eurasia and Africa. From the traditionally collectivist societies of East Asia to the individualist society of the USA in the West, Israel/Palestine lies in the heart of Time and Space on this planet and the events which took place there 2000 years ago form the basis of our global chronology in the modern era. In both of these events, with Kaspar in Germany 200 years ago and Jesus Christ in Israel 2000 years ago, an innocent was persecuted and killed by a society that did not care enough about him. In both cases, within about 100 years of each event, the society concerned was devastated by the world power of the age. However, the devastation was not only caused by that world power – the legions of Rome and the bombs of Anglo-America. After what the novelist Jakob Wassermann, in his much-admired novel about Kaspar Hauser (1908) Caspar Hauser oder Die Trägheit des Herzens (“Caspar Hauser or the Indolence of the Heart”), called the uncaring inertia, or indolence of the heart, had come the consequence for those two societies of that uncaring inertia, namely, the turn to materialism and militarism and the awful fate that they brought to that society as a result of inner failures and attacks from outside. 

 Jews and Germans

The Jews turned to the nationalist Zealots and twice – in 66 AD and 132 AD – resorted to violence and war to try to expel the Romans and restore a unified Jewish kingdom. Having ousted the Greek Seleucid dynasty⁶ by warfare more than 100 years before the time of Christ and having restored a native Jewish monarchy, the Jews felt they could also defeat the Romans. In the war of 66-73 AD against the Emperor Nero – and then against Vespasian – they failed disastrously. The Temple in Jerusalem, the very centre and focus of their religion for almost 1000 years, was destroyed. They failed to learn the lesson and repeated the failure some 60 years later in the war of 132-136 AD against Emperor Hadrian. This second war resulted in even greater devastation. Jews were then forbidden even to enter Jerusalem, which was renamed Aelia Capitolina after the family (the Aelia) of the Roman Emperor Hadrian. Millions died in those two wars of nationalist fanaticism.

Masada (now in Israel)  – the place of the Jews’ last stand

in their first war against Rome 73 AD  (Andrew Shiva, wikipedia)

A similar pattern can be seen in Germany in the period from the 1840s-1940s. Looking to the West, to the French models of State nationalism and militarism, and to the British models of commercialism, industrial power, colonialism, and navalism, the Germans sought to build a Reich (‘Empire’) united around the image of the sword that was held high by the Hermannsdenkmal, the great memorial statue built in the 19^th century to Hermann, or in his Roman name, Arminius (he was raised in Rome), the ancient Germanic chieftain of the Cherusci tribe and the victor over the Romans in 9 AD, in a great battle in the Teutoburger Forest, the greatest victory over the Romans by any European people and a defeat the Romans recalled with horror and never forgot.

The construction of the Hermannsdenkmal (see pic. above) began in the mind of Ernst von Bandel in 1836, three years after Kaspar Hauser’s death, and was completed by von Bandel in 1875. He was born in 1800 in Ansbach, the town where Kaspar was killed 33 years later. In his early years as an artist, von Bandel was financed by King Ludwig I of Bavaria but he disliked the king’s neo-classicist preferences and moved to Prussian Berlin in 1834 – a symbolic move perhaps. Ironically, the whole spirit of the Hermannsdenkmal was directed against the West, against France, yet the Second Reich, the Bismarck Reich (1871-1918), was thoroughly western in the many ways it sought to emulate the West instead of looking to a genuinely German cultural spirit. This readiness to adapt foreign models has to do with what the anthroposophical historian Karl Heyer has called ‘the mercurial spirit’ of Germany and the Germans. The German state of Prussia, as distinct from the original Prussian people who were pagan Balts, was created by the German crusaders of the Teutonic Knights in the Middle Ages and therefore always had a strong military aspect to it that was oriented towards the conquest of the remaining pagan peoples of northeastern Europe and then to competition with the Catholic and Orthodox states of Poland/Lithuania and Russia respectively. The later Prussian state therefore became defined by its military struggles towards the East.

British teutophobic propaganda from the 1870s to the end of the First World War usually identified all Germans with the goose-stepping, pickelhaube (spiked leather or metal helmet)-wearing, martial Prussians, but this was a gross exaggeration. The Germans were many peoples speaking dialects of the same language and were shaped by their experience of life in the heart of Europe, east and west Germans, north and south Germans:  Prussians contrasted with Rhinelanders; Holsteiners and Saxons contrasted with Swabians, Bavarians, and Austrians. The anthroposophical writer Maria Schindler, in her book Europe, A Cosmic Picture (1975 and 2019⁷), which related European peoples with the 12 constellations of the Zodiac, saw the Germans as the people of Aquarius, as the mid-winter season of Aquarius is associated with the Roman god Janus, who looks both ways, back towards the old year and forwards to the new. This seems appropriate, because one can see from German history how these Germanic peoples, living in the middle of Europe, readily absorbed and imitated in a mercurial way, elements from East and West and from Scandinavia to the north and the Mediterranean in the south. They did not remain fixed in their own cultures, but adjusted to and adapted elements from those cultures around them.

Baden and Prussia

The last three years of Kaspar Hauser’s life (1830-1833) were a time of growing nationalist zealotry in the German states, inspired not least by the 1830 July Revolution in Paris. The nationalist and militarist spirit, absorbed from France and focused on stablishing a unified German state that had never before existed, culminated in the Prussian victory over France in 1871 and the foundation of the new German Reich in the Hall of Mirrors in the palace built by the French king Louis XIV at Versailles 200 years earlier. In Anton von Werner’s famous painting Ausruf des deutschen Reiches or Die Proklamierung des deutschen Kaiserreiches (the Proclamation of the German Empire; see picture above) the man standing next to Wilhelm I of Prussia and leading the “Hurrah” of the assembled throng with his right arm raised is Grand Duke Friedrich I von Baden, the son of former Grand Duke Leopold of Baden and his wife Grand Duchess Sophie. Leopold and Sophie were the couple who, in 1830, had become the reigning grand ducal couple in the southwestern state of Baden precisely because of the abduction in 1812 of the rightful heir to the Grand Duchy of Baden, the baby who was in fact Kaspar Hauser, the son of Grand Duke Karl and his French wife Stéphanie de Beauharnais, the adopted daughter of Napoleon Bonaparte.⁸ It was the ambitious and ruthless Grand Duchess Sophie who arranged for the murder of Kaspar Hauser in Ansbach in 1833. Grand Duke Friedrich of Baden, the man raising the Hurrah in von Werner’s painting, was married to Princess Luise of Prussia. It had been Prussian troops who had crushed the revolution in Baden in 1849 and restored Leopold and Sophie as Grand Duke and Duchess of Baden. The liberal revolutions in Germany in 1848-49 had begun in Baden and also ended in Baden. If the liberal spirit that had begun in Baden had prevailed in Germany after 1848, then Bismarck’s Prussia would not have become the dominant power in German-speaking lands. If Kaspar Hauser had become the Grand Prince as he was supposed to, he would have been 36 in 1848 – in the prime of life, and not least, able to collaborate with Prince Albert, the young German husband of Queen Victoria; Albert was only 7 years older than Kaspar, and Kaspar’s younger sister Marie Amelie was married (1843) to William Hamilton, who in 1852 became the Duke of Hamilton, the premier nobleman in the hierarchy of Scottish aristocracy.

The nullity…

We should note also that the nephew of Grand Duke Friedrich, and therefore the grandson of Leopold and Sophie, was Prince Max von Baden (see pic below), the last Imperial German Chancellor, who surrendered Germany to the western Allies on the basis of US President Woodrow Wilson’s “14 Points” programme in 1918.⁹  Rudolf Steiner had met with Prince Max in 1918 and had tried to convince him to end the war on the basis of a genuinely Middle European conception – the threefold social organism – Steiner’s ideas about how modern society is constituted in three spheres – the cultural/spiritual, the legal/political, and the economic – which are related to the three main constituents of human physiology (nerves, circulation, metabolism)  and psychology (thinking, feeling and willing)¹⁰.  This would also have been an opportunity for Prince Max to do something in the direction of righting the wrong that his forebears had done to Kaspar Hauser and thus also to Germany. Indeed, Prince Max had earlier declared his intention, when he became Grand Duke of Baden, to transfer the body of Kaspar Hauser from its present grave in Ansbach to the tomb of the Von Baden family in Pforzheim. This shows that he acknowledged the crime that had been committed against Kaspar.

But Prince Max, as Imperial Chancellor, chose instead to end the war on the basis of a western conception that stemmed from the new world power. This was felt by Rudolf Steiner to be a spiritual capitulation by Germany that paralleled the military capitulation by the German High Command and the German government. In his book Kaspar Hauser – The Struggle for the Spirit, Peter Tradowsky wrote that Steiner expected on 3 October 1918 ‘“the new Imperial Chancellor to find the appropriate words, that is, to have the courage, to proclaim straightaway to the German people in his inaugural speech… the idea of the Threefold Commonwealth, as proof of a profound change and wish for peace of the German nation”. Rudolf Steiner was very anxious to learn about the text of the inaugural speech when he got hold of the newspaper. Never afterwards did I see Rudolf Steiner so shattered as by this disappointment, which signified the defeat and path of suffering for the German nation. The Prince (see pic. ) was unable to carry out the task assigned to him by destiny. He subscribed far rather to the thoughts of Woodrow Wilson about the ‘future happiness of nations’. Hardly noticed or acknowledged up till now, a decisive turning-point in German history passed by almost in secret. “The beginning of the war”, said Steiner, “had already demonstrated the nullity of German policy. It was again demonstrated in October 1918. So came that awful spiritual capitulation at the hands of a man on whom many in German lands had staked, as it were, their last hope.” With this spiritual capitulation Prince Max of Baden places himself, unknowingly, among the ranks of Kaspar Hauser’s enemies and the opponents of the spiritual evolution proceeding out of Central Europe.’¹¹

Sun Demon

Tradowsky goes on to note that just 10 days after this failure by Prince Max, who was the grandson of Grand Duchess Sophie of Baden, Adolf Hitler was blinded in a British gas attack on the Western Front at Ypres (13-14 October 1918); this poisoning led to “that sinister change in Hitler which made his human organism into the willing tool of an evil spiritual nature.”¹² At the very same time, 11-13 October, Steiner spoke for the first time about the being of Sorath, or the Sun Demon who, he said, intervenes in human history (though not as an incarnated human being) every 666 years – the Being that directly assaults the human ‘I’ (the kernel of each human being, their essential self) and which Steiner associated with the impulse to black magic. He contrasted the ‘Mystery of Golgotha’ (the Crucifixion, Resurrection and Ascension of Jesus Christ) with the Sorath impulse around the year 666 (the first of three such historical interventions by this Being¹³ up to our present time) and thus gave to humanity knowledge of this Being Sorath at the very time when Adolf Hitler was about to take the path that would eventually lead him and the National Socialist movement to their assault on the freedom of countless human I’s throughout Germany and elsewhere in Europe.

In that same lecture of 13 October 1918, Steiner went on to speak of the Etheric Christ Event of the 1930s, when the Christ would begin to become visible to human beings, not physically but etherically, as a spiritual experience of Christ in the etheric (the life realm)  aura of the Earth.  It was precisely in the 1930s, at the end of the first third of the 20th century, that Adolf Hitler, darkly inspired, was given power in the heart of Europe and chose, not Berlin or Munich, but Nuremberg – the city where, after Kaspar Hauser’s  release from his incarceration, he had first appeared to the world – as the location from which he would proclaim his message to the world in his huge National Socialist Party rallies that were held there.

Because Prince Max had chosen to end the First World War in 1918 in the way that he did, he also brought to an end the imperial, Bismarckian Reich by requiring the abdication of Kaiser Wilhelm II. Germany became a republic, and all the old state titles rulerships were abolished, including that of the Grand Duchy of Baden. Prince Max therefore did not become the Grand Duke and did not fulfil his intention to transfer Kaspar Hauser’s body to the family tomb in Pforzheim.  Almost exactly 3 x 33⅓ years after the killing of Kaspar Hauser – a murder arranged by Prince Max’s grandmother, Grand Duchess Sophie – Adolf Hitler gained control of Germany and just 12 years later, in 1945, the devastation of Germany was analogous to the devastation of Judaea in 136 AD after two terrible wars against the world Power of that time.

                                                                                                  The ruins of Dresden 1945

A better humanity

The Jewish people, or at least the Jewish elite, failed to recognise Who was among them in Jesus of Nazareth for those 3 short years. They turned away from Him and took instead the martial path of Mars, hurling themselves against the very Power that essentially represented the forces of Mars and materialism in that epoch, Imperial Rome. Some 1800 years later, the German people, or at least the German elite, also failed to recognise who was among them in Kaspar Hauser for those five short years of his very ‘public life’ (1828-1833) and failed to respond to the essentially spiritual questions that he posed to them – Who am I? Who are you? Where have I come from? Where am I going? They turned away from him and took instead the path of materialism and Mars which led them ultimately against the very Powers that essentially represented the forces of materialism and Mars in the modern epoch – Britain, the USA and Soviet Russia.

Those forces of Mars and materialism cannot be countered by resorting to the very same means they themselves employ. They can only be transformed by qualities such as those shown by Kaspar Hauser’s three greatest supporters in Nuremberg and Ansbach and also by Kaspar Hauser himself: qualities such as ardent and courageous truth-seeking, as inspired Kaspar’s champion from Ansbach, the criminologist and judge, Paul Anselm von Feuerbach; by a spirit of loving imagination, which filled the heart and mind of Kaspar’s teacher in Nuremberg, Georg Friedrich Daumer; by a sincere and steadfast mood of caring responsibility, as shown by Kaspar’s last guardian in Nuremberg, Baron Gottlieb von Tucher, and by Kaspar’s own spirit of open-hearted listening, and contentment. He himself wrote:

Contentment is the greatest worker of miracles.

It transforms water into wine, grains of sand into pearls,

raindrops into balsam, poverty into wealth,

the smallest into the greatest,

the most common to the most noble,

earth into paradise.

Beautiful is the heart with all its stirrings,

which remains in purest harmony with itself.

Beautiful is that life

 where deeds agree most perfectly with one another

It seems to this writer that there is something almost Buddhistic about the way that Kaspar Hauser uses the word “contentment” here, namely in the sense of calmly contemplating the inner and outer worlds as they are. Then, out of that calm contemplation, we can go through life along ‘the Eightfold Path’ first taught by Gautama Buddha and recommended also by Steiner, which helps us to attain right views, right resolves, right speech, right conduct, right livelihood, right effort, right mindfulness, and right absorption or union (meditation).

Who am I? Who are we? Where have we come from? Where are we going? Especially in the years from 2028 to 2033, people around the world, and not least the people of Germany, will have another chance to consider those questions.

Can we sense that Jesus Christ, in a global, macrocosmic sense, and Kaspar Hauser, in a microcosmic sense, were victims who could ‘reverse destinies’ i.e. alter the downward direction of the lives of those people who encountered them? With Christ it was the destinies of countless individuals, but also the destiny of the world and humanity as a whole. Through Kaspar Hauser, it is perhaps  the destinies of individuals that are changed by coming to know his story, but to my way of thinking, and I sense this is shared by many of those who have attended the Kaspar Hauser Festspiele in Ansbach since they began in 1998, it was also the fate of a nation that was changed in the 19th and 20th centuries by the forced removal of Kaspar Hauser – and not changed for the better. But if enough people in that country and others would turn to Kaspar Hauser and discover what his life actually meant and still means, then they might see him not as a sad victim, but as an inspiration for a better Germany, a better Europe, a better modern human being. A human being who is constantly searching for what he or she can really become; a human being who is always in the process of becoming and who therefore never gives up. 

Afterword

It may be thought today that the Jews and the Germans have finally learned their lesson because today they are not fighting against the global hegemon – the imperial Anglo-America of the past 150 years or so – but, as apparent client states, are now ranged on its side.  However, they are still fighting – now against the opponents of the hegemon. In the case of the Jews, the Israeli elite may feel that that opponent is their opponent (rather than the hegemon’s) – namely, and ironically, the Iranians, the very people who saved the Jews from slavery and exile in Babylon 2500 years ago. But beyond Iran, even if the Israeli elite today may imagine they can do deals with the wealthy elites of Arab Gulf states or even Saudi Arabia, their opponent is actually the whole Muslim ummah (or world community), a billion people, who have looked on for decades now at what Israel has been doing to fellow Muslims in Gaza and the West Bank – and they do not forget. For their part, the Germans, who had seemed to be getting on well with the Russians 15-20 years ago and gradually overcoming the blight of their terrible heritage of their invasion of Russia in 1941, have now been forced by the hegemon to go against their own interests, even to the gross detriment of their own economy, and many (though not all) in the German elite have enthusiastically joined what looks increasingly like a kind of NATO ‘crusade’ against Russia, ostensibly in support of the hegemon’s proxy, Ukraine. And behind Russia are its allies, China, Iran, and who knows, perhaps India in the next decade? Meanwhile, the grip on reality of Germany’s transatlantic masters seems to be slipping, their social and cultural ligaments decaying at a growing rate. At the same time, the old German subconscious fear of “the asiatic hordes from the East” is competing with the new German guilty conscience and sense of shame at what Germany did to Russia (let alone Jews) in the 1940s, the healthy sense that there can be no real peace in Europe when there is enmity between the Germans and the Russians. And, indeed, Steiner repeatedly pointed out that a healthy bridge of understanding between these two peoples was essential for the future.

What does the future hold then for these two peoples of the global Middle – the Jews  - and the European Middle – the Germans? Both Israel and Germany have become economic and technological powerhouses. Israel’s military has been ferocious for decades, although greatly dependent on aid from the hegemon. “Israel is the largest cumulative recipient of U.S. foreign aid: until February 2022, [i.e. since the early 1950s] the United States had provided Israel US$ 150 billion (non-inflation-adjusted) in bilateral assistance”. The US is currently committed to providing Israel with $3.8 billion in aid annually,¹⁴ and Israel (population 9.6 million, 73% Jewish: 2022 census) has the largest number of US-made F-16 jet fighters outside the United States Air Force. Germany’s military is still comparatively small, but under western pressure could very quickly become formidable once again. Nationalism for the Jews has for over a century now been bound up with Zionism, which in recent decades has taken on an increasingly arrogant and violent form, while for the Germans today it is either, on the Right, a nostalgic harking back to the old pre-1918 Reich or else, on the Left, a ‘Pied Piper’s march’ towards the supernationalist ideology of an increasingly centralised EU State in which the likes of EU Commission President Ursula von der Leyen and German Foreign Minister Analena Baerbock seek to lose themselves, just as nationalist zealots in small German states in the 19th century, jealous of England and France, sought to lose themselves in a greater German Reich.

The examples of the catastrophes of the two Jewish-Roman Wars stand before the Jews; the examples of the catastrophes of the two World Wars stand before the Germans. Will these disasters be repeated yet again in the 21st century? Will the Jews be cast out of the Holy Land just as the foreign Crusader kingdoms were shattered and cast out by the Muslim world in the 13th century? Will the Germans be shattered once more in a terrible war between East and West? Also standing before these two peoples of the Middle are the healing examples of Jesus Christ and Kaspar Hauser.

Notes

 1. Readers interested in all aspects of the Kaspar Hauser story are encouraged to read Peter Tradowsky, Kaspar Hauser – The Struggle for the Spirit (Temple Lodge, 1997) and the English translation of Karl Heyer, Kaspar Hauser and the Destiny of Middle Europe in the 19th Century, to be published by Temple Lodge in 2025. 

2. Although the Grand Duchy of Baden no longer exists, the aristocrats of the House of Baden still do. The current head of the family, Prince Bernhard, attended the funeral of Queen Elizabeth II along with his mother and his wife Princess Stephanie and was one of only 30 mourners at the funeral of Philip, the Duke of Edinburgh in 2021. Bernhard is first cousin once removed to King Charles III, and the mother of his late father Prince Maximilian (d. Dec 2022) was sister to Philip, the Duke of Edinburgh, who was partly educated at Salem the school founded by Maximilian’s grandfather, Prince Max of Baden. Bernhard’s courtesy title is: His Royal Highness the Margrave of Baden, Duke of Zähringen.

3. Martin Kitchen, Kaspar Hauser – Europe’s Child (Palgrave, 2001)

4. The butchers of Nuremberg traditionally brought the tallow from the animals they had slaughtered to this square, where it was bought by candlemakers for their wax.

5. This term was used, for example, by the influential Edwardian era ‘father of Anglo-saxon geopolitics’, Sir Halford Mackinder.

6. The Seleucids were a dynasty (312-64 BC) that ruled a large area of western Asia and was founded by one of Alexander the Great’s generals and companions, Séleukos I Nikátōr (Seleukos the Victorious)

7. German original text 1967.

8. Kaspar would have become the Grand Duke, but the pair who arranged his abduction – Countess Luise von Hochberg and her lover (Kaspar’s great-uncle Ludwig) also arranged the deaths of Kaspar’s younger brother, Alexander and Kaspar’s uncle, Friedrich – all so that Ludwig would become Grand Duke and on his death then be succeeded by Countess Luise’s son, Leopold.

9.  14 Points – a utopian programme of 14 abstract and idealist principles presented to the US Congress on 8 Jan. 1918 and intended by President Wilson and his closest adviser, Col. Edward M. House, to serve as a basis for peace negotiations to end the war.

10. See R. Steiner, Towards Social Renewal (RSP, 1999) and S. Usher ed., Rudolf Steiner – Social and Political Science (RSP, 2003).

11. Tradowsky, op. cit., pp. 231-232.

12. Tradowsky, op cit., p. 232.

13. The two others being around the year 1332 (2 x 666) and around the year 1998 (3 x 666). See R. Steiner, Three Streams in Human Evolution, (RSP, rep. 1985), lectures of 11, 12, and 13 October.

12. US Congressional Research Service Report “US Foreign Aid to Israel”, 1 March 2023 https://sgp.fas.org/crs/mideast/RL33222.pdf

Terry Boardman Sept. 2024

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.

In verschiedenen Kulturen halten Menschen Vorträge auf unterschiedliche Weise. In Japan ist es beispielsweise nicht üblich, einen Vortrag mit einem Witz oder etwas Unbeschwertes zu beginnen. In England dagegn ist das sehr oft der Fall – um das Eis zu „brechen“, wie die Briten sagen, das Eis, von dem angenommen wird, dass es bereits zwischen Sprecher und Publikum etwas kaltes besteht. Kein Wunder, dass die Briten von anderen Völkern als „kalter Fisch“ angesehen werden! Tatsächlich ist eine solche Gewohnheit ein Beispiel einer „sanften Manipulation“, die darauf abzielt, dem britischen Redner einen herzlichen Empfang zu sichern, bevor seine Gedanken von den Zuhörern überhaupt gehört werden.

Ich möchte jedoch zunächst Eckart Böhmer meinen Dank aussprechen, dass er mich eingeladen hat, um bei den Festspielen erneut einen Beitrag zu bringen, und ihm auch dafür danken, dass er meinen undeutsch-klingenden Beitrag zu Ihnen bei dieser Veranstaltung liest. Ich werde diesem Dank zwei Entschuldigungen folgen, die ich am Anfang machen muss: erstens eine Entschuldigung, dass ich nicht hier dabei bin, um meinen Vortrag selbst zu halten – ich werde gleich den Grund dafür erklären – und zweitens, dass dieser Beitrag vorgelesen werden muss, weil mein Deutsch nicht gut genug ist, um frei zu sprechen. Sie können daher auch eine Reihe unnatürlicher deutscher Ausdrücke und grammatischer Fehler hören, für die natürlich ich allein schuldig bin, und für die ich bitte um Ihre Verständnis und Geduld.

Der Grund warum ich heute nicht hier anwesend bin, hängt indirekt mit dem Thema meines Vortrags zusammen. Obwohl ich mich sehr darauf gefreut hatte, wie immer, nach den Kaspar Hauser Festspielen zu kommen, habe ich mich selbst entschieden, dieses Jahr nicht teilzunehmen, weil ich mich weigere,  aus England nach Deutschland und zurück eine Gesichtsmaske tragend zu reisen. Unter den gegenwärtigen Umständen halte ich es für völlig ungerechtfertigt. Es hat sich nicht nur gezeigt, dass Gesichtsmasken ungesund sind – es gibt viele Beweise dafür -, sondern es besteht auch keine Notwendigkeit für die Öffentlichkeit, sie in dieser sogenannten Coronavirus- „Krise“ zu tragen. Die grobe Überreaktion der meisten Regierungen auf COVID-19 hat dazu geführt, dass sie extreme Maßnahmen ergriffen haben, autoritäre Maßnahmen, die uns alle erstaunt hätten, wenn uns am Anfang dieses Jahres mitgeteilt worden wäre, dass solche Maßnahmen innerhalb von drei oder vier Monate in Kraft sein würden. Wir hätten das für absurd gehalten. Wenn wir jedoch den im Mai 2010 veröffentlichten Bericht der Rockefeller Foundation (Titel des Berichts: „Szenarien für die Zukunft der Technologie und der internationalen Entwicklung“) gelesen hätten, in dem vier Szenarien für die nahe Zukunft bis dem Jahre 2025 beschrieben sind, von denen einer im Bericht „Lockstep“ genannt wird, dann wären wir nicht überrascht gewesen, denn dieses Lockstep-Szenario beschreibt fast genau, was in diesem Jahr 2020 passiert ist: eine globale Pandemie, gefolgt von autoritären Reaktionen der Regierungen. Diese autoritäre „Sperrung“ – ein Begriff, der aus dem amerikanischen Gefängnissystem stammt – ereignete sich in den meisten Ländern und wurde nur langsam aufgehoben. Die Medien sagen uns wiederholt, dass die Gefahr noch nicht vorüber werde bis wir uns alle einer Impfung unterziehen, die durch Bill Gates, die Oxford Universität und einige angloamerikanischen Unternehmen zur Verfügung gestellt wird.

Ich komme jetzt gleich zu dem Punkt, der die Koronaereignisse mit dem Thema von Lord Stanhope und Kaspar Hauser verbindet: die autoritäre Kontrolle der Gesellschaft im Interesse von kleinen oligarchischen Gruppen.

Denn die europäische Gesellschaft selbst nach dem Wiener Kongress 1815 wurde auch sozusagen „gesperrt“. Es wurde politisch gesperrt, was die Unterdrückung der Redefreiheit und der politischen Rechte der Bürger durch die Aristokraten und Oligarchen betraf. Diese Leute wollten die vor der französischen Revolution, zum Status quo ante von 1789, oder ihm so nahe wie möglich zurückkehren wollten. Leute wie Prinz Klemens von Metternich, der damalige Kanzler von Österreich, wie König Ludwig XVIII. von Frankreich, und Lord Liverpool, [dt:Liwerpul] der britische Premierminister, und Lord Castlereagh [dt:Kasselreh], der britische Außenminister. Sie waren Männer des 18. Jahrhunderts, die im neuen 19. Jahrhundert versuchten, die unaufhaltsam wachsenden Kräfte der Demokratie und des Nationalismus zurückzuhalten, die durch die französische Revolution und die darauf folgenden napoleonischen Kriege ausgelöst worden waren. Aber diese Kräfte stammten nicht ursprünglich aus der französischen Revolution und Napoleon. Sie waren seit dem 15. Jahrhundert, seit der Zeit von Jan Hus, Jeanne d‘Arc und später von Martin Luther, langsam aber stetig gewachsen und wurden nur durch die vulkanischen Ereignisse der französischen Revolution und die darauf folgenden Ereignisse stärker in Schwung gebracht. Sie waren die Kräfte des individuellen Bewusstseins, die sich gegen die alten erblichen, und blutgebundenen aristokratischen Kräfte des Privilegs und der Hierarchie durchsetzten, die durch Jahrtausenden ganze Gruppen von Menschen zur lebenslangen Unterwürfigkeit verurteilt hatten.

Die Geschichte zeigt uns viele Beispiele für polare Kräfte, die in enger Beziehung entweder gleichzeitig oder in enger Reihenfolge auftreten. Heute sind die Kräfte des demokratischen individuellen Bewusstseins, die im 15. Jahrhundert entstanden sind, stärker als je zuvor, aber sie werden jetzt mit dem Aufstieg einer neuen Art von Aristokratie konfrontiert – der von Finanziers, Technokraten und den Meistern der Computerwelt und der Internet-basierten Technologieunternehmen. Es ist diese neue Aristokratie, die nun versucht, die COVID-Krise auszunutzen und die Gesellschaft so zu verändern, dass sie davon profitieren kann. Das wird allzu spürbar wenn man z.B. in die Website des Weltwirtschaftsforums (WEF) ankuckt. Zu Kaspar Hausers Lebzeiten waren neben den alten Aristokratie um den Thron und Altar die “neuen Aristokraten”  die der Banker, der großen Kapitalisten, der Ingenieure und der Verleger.

Konservative wie Metternich und sein rechte Hand, Friedrich von Gentz, hatten einen weiteren wichtigen Grund, nach dem Wiener Kongress keine Veränderungen in Europa sehen zu wollen. Als Männer des 18. Jahrhunderts teilten sie einen kosmopolitischen Lebensstil mit Aristokraten in ganz Europa, insbesondere wenn sie römisch-katholisch oder freimaurerisch waren und eine Ausbildung in französischer Sprache und Kultur sowie in klassischen Sprachen und Kulturen erhalten hatten. Solche Leute hatten Angst vor den radikalen nationalistischen Kräften, die durch die französischen Revolution und Napoleon einen großen Schub erhalten haben. Diese Kräfte hatten sich nun in ganz Europa ausgebreitet und waren gegen Napoleon und gegen die ausländischen französischen Unterdrücker gerichtet. Im deutschen Kulturraum war das  insbesondere in Preußen der Fall. Der Ruf nach einem nationalistischen vereinten deutschen Einheitsstaat wie diejenige in Großbritannien und Frankreich wurde von jungen Menschen, von Studenten und von Militärkreisen, in der gesamten Gesellschaft immer stärker zu hören. Metternich und Gentz sahen diese neuen nationalistischen demokratischen Kräfte mit Furcht und Verachtung an. Sie waren beider entschlossen, sich einem vereinten deutschen Staat zu widersetzen. Wenn das alte Heilige Römische Reich nicht wiederhergestellt werden könnte, dann waren Metternich und Gentz bereit, einen losen deutschen Staatenbund zu akzeptieren, einen Staatenbund den sie selbst kontrollieren konnten aber keinesfalls ein von Preußen geschaffenes vereinigtes Deutschland. Um das zu verhindern, beschlossen sie, nach 1815 irgendeine Änderungen an den Grenzen der deutschen Staaten zu blockieren.

Als Aristokrat mit einem fünfhundertjährigen Stammbaum und als britischer Geheimagent war es auch Philip Henry, Lord Stanhopes Ziel  die Besteigung auf ein europäischen Thron von irgendeinen Verwandte Napoleons. Die Menschen auf dem Kontinent, die mit Stanhope verbündet waren, wollten keine Zunahme der Demokratie in Europa. Ihre Furcht vor dem, was aus der französischen Revolution hervorgegangen war, war sehr groß. Die Angst vor Unordnung, das Umkippen der Hierarchie. Sie glaubten an die fortgesetzte Beherrschung von Gesellschaft und Kultur durch die Aristokratie, durch Thron und Altar. Infolgedessen gehörten die Jahre 1815 bis 1830 zu den repressivsten und konservativsten in der modernen europäischen Geschichte. Stanhope spielte dabei eine Rolle. Er hatte einen großen Hass auf Bonaparte, der sicherlich kein Heiliger war, und wurde von Aristokraten auf dem gesamten Kontinent als Förderer von Anarchie und sozialer Unordnung angesehen – “der große Störer”. Der ‚verlorene Prinz‘ von Baden -  Kaspar Hauser  – daran zu hindern, seinen rechtmäßigen Platz als Großherzog von Baden einzunehmen und damit die Möglichkeit einer radikalen Herausforderung aus Baden kommend für das alte Regime zu verhindern, das nach der Niederlage Napoleons in ganz Europa wiederhergestellt worden war – das war Stanhopes Ziel, seine Mission. Und der Schüsselpunkt – Napoleon Bonaparte war der Adoptivvater von Kaspar Hausers Mutter Stephanie de Beauharnais. Ihr Mannheimer Hof war nicht so weit von Nürnberg und Ansbach entfernt.

Aber Nürnberg und Ansbach sind in Bayern, das damals wegen eines Gebietsstreits über den Besitz der rhenischen Pfalz badenfeindlich war. In einer früheren Zeit vor der französischen Revolution wäre es möglich gewesen, dass Baden und Bayern diesen Gebietsstreit durch Rückgriff auf den Krieg beigelegt hätten. Aber im sensiblen Zusammenhang der Zeit nach dem Wiener Kongress, als politische Instabilität immer eine Gefahr für die Herrscher der etablierten Ordnung darstellte, hatten die Großmächte, insbesondere Großbritannien und Österreich, beschlossen,  den kleinen Staaten gegenüber keine Grenzenveränderungen zu zuzulassen; die auf dem Wiener Kongress genehmigten Grenzen sollten um jeden Preis beibehalten werden. Napoleon lebte noch und seine Anhänger waren noch heimlich aktiv, nicht zuletzt am Hof seiner Adoptivtochter Stephanie de Beauharnais in Mannheim. Die Politik und Machenschaften des österreischischen Kanzler Metternichs beherrschten einen Großteil Europas in der Zeit vom Wiener Kongress bis zur Revolution von 1848 und in den Gebietsstreit zwischen den beiden kleinen Staaten Baden und Bayern bevorzugte Metternich Baden. Die Beziehungen zwischen den Wittelsbachs in München und den Habsburgern in Wien waren selten einfach gewesen und Bayern wurde unter seinem damaligen König Ludwig I. von einem romantischen Nationalisten regiert, der von Metternich und seinem Sekretär Friedrich von Gentz verabscheut wurde.  Metternich bemühte sich im Rahmen seiner Politik zur Wahrung des Friedens und der etablierten Ordnung, die Familie Hochberg als Herrscher von Baden an Ort und Stelle zu unterstützen und die badischen Grenzen zu behalten. Die Familie Hochberg hat 1830 durch dunkle Methoden die erbliche regierenden Familie Zähringen, die Familie Kaspar Hauser, ersetzt, die jahrhundertelang in Baden regiert hatte.

Dies mag wie ein obskurer Streit zwischen zwei Kleinstaaten vor 200 Jahren erscheinen, der heute nichts mit uns zu tun hat. Aber dann können wir uns daran erinnern, dass die deutsche Revolution von 1848, die das Schicksal Deutschlands in den folgenden 100 Jahren bestimmt hat, in Baden begonnen hat und auch in Baden geendet hat, wo die Revolutionäre durch preußischen Truppen niedergeschlagen wurden. Viele der Delegierten des Frankfurter Parlaments in den Jahren 1848 bis 1849 kamen aus Baden, und Baden hatte seit einem Jahrhunderte als der liberalste Staat Deutschlands gegolten. Otto von Bismarck in Frankfurt anwesend, um das Verfahren beim frankfurter Parlament zu beobachten. Letztendlich boten die Delegierten in diesem unglückseligen Parlament Friedrich Wilhelm IV. von Preußen die Krone eines neuen zusammengeschlossenen Deutschlands an. Er hat sie verächtlich ablehnte. Die Parlamentarer hatten sie dem falschen Mann angeboten. Wenn sie jedoch stattdessen dem 36-jährigen Großherzog Kaspar von Baden die Krone angeboten hätten, einem reifen jungen Prinzen von großer persönlicher Integrität, im ganzen deutschsprachigen Raum anerkannt, hätte die deutsche Geschichte – und auch die Geschichte Europas – nach 1848 eine ganz andere Kurs annehmen können. Aber diesem Großherzog Kaspar von Baden stand nicht die Krone eines Deutschen Bundes oder irgendeiner anderen deutschen Zusammenschluss zur Verfügung, da er 15 Jahre zuvor ermordet worden war.

Es gab immer in Deutschland Menschen, die glaubten, dass der Ausländer, der Engländer Lord Stanhope, der Bösewicht in der Geschichte von Kaspar Hauser sei, der Mann, der am meisten für den Tod Kaspars verantwortlich sei. Und tatsächlich entspricht diese „Stanhope-zentrische“ Auslegung den Interessen bestimmter Kreise in Baden und Bayern. Dadurch würde die Verantwortlichkeit weg von den Hofen in Baden und Bayern abgelenkt werden.

Aber die Situation ist nicht so einfach. Ich stimme auch nicht mit der überemotionalen Anschuldigung von Jakob Wassermann überein, der einen schönen Roman über Kaspar Hauser schrieb, Caspar Hauser oder Die Trägheit des Herzens aber meines Erachtens die Situation übertrieben dargestellt hat, als er in seinem Roman geschrieben hat, dass Kaspar „von der ganzen Welt getötet wurde“. Das geht auch zu weit. Denn es gab zu Kaspars Lebzeiten viele gute Leute, die Kaspar Hauser schätzten und ihm auf verschiedene Weise geholfen haben. Es kann nicht behauptet werden daß diese Leute Kaspar getötet haben.

Kaspar wurde auf vier verschiedene Arten angegriffen und Stanhope war direkt an zwei von diesen und indirekt an einem anderen beteiligt. Es gab die Angriffe auf Kaspars Körper, als er 1829 angegriffen und 1833 getötet wurde; Stanhope war an diesen Angriffen nicht beteiligt, obwohl er kurz nach dem ersten Angriff, um die Situation zu beobachten, zum ersten Mal in Nürnberg auftauchte. Er war ein sensibler Mann und konnte groben Gewalt nicht ertragen. Er erschien in Nürnberg Oktober 1829 direkt nach seinem Aufenthalt in Wien wo er sich mit dem österreichischen Kanzler Fürst Metternich und seinem Sekretär und Chefpropagandisten Friedrich von Gentz getroffen hat. Zweitens gab es den Angriff auf Kaspars Lebenskräfte, seine körperliche und geistige Gesundheit, nämlich bei der Inhaftierung im Kerker auf Schloss Pilsach von 1817 bis 1828. Der Schloss gehörte Major von Griesenbeck, einem treuen Diener König Ludwigs I. von Bayern. Auch bei diesem Angriff hatte Stanhope nichts zu tun. Durch 11 Jahre lang wußte er nicht wo den verlorene Prinz eingekerkert war. Drittens gab es den Angriff auf Kaspars Seelenleben, sein Gefühlsleben. Stanhope war bei seinem zweiten und längeren Besuch in Nürnberg im Jahr 1831 direkt und persönlich für diesen Angriff verantwortlich. Mit seinen verführerischen Fähigkeiten drang er in die Zuneigung des Jugendlichen ein, bis es so weit ging dass Kaspar selbst die Stadtverwaltung aufforderte, Stanhope als sein Vormund zu ernennen anstelle des gewissenhaften, wenn auch strengen Baron Tucher. Nebenbei sei angemerkt, dass Tucher der einzige Mann in Nürnberg war, der Stanhope durchschaute – wenn auch zu spät.

Stanhope war auch indirekt für psychische Übergriffe verantwortlich, da er als neuer gesetzlicher Vormund von Kaspar Kaspar den Jugendliche von Nürnberg nach Ansbach wegenommen hat und ihn in das Haus des rachsüchtigen Lehrers Meyer und seiner Frau verlegt. Die grausame psychische Verfolgung von Kaspar durch dieses Ehepaars dauerte fast zwei Jahre lang und Meyer griff Kaspar noch viele Jahre nach Kaspars Tod auch in schriftlicher Form an. Solche Schriften waren Teil der letzten Form des Angriffs auf Kaspar, nämlich diejenige die sich auf seine Identität und seine Glaubwürdigkeit, seinen Ruf bezog. Hier auch hatte Stanhope eine groß Verantwortlichkeit aber nicht im Ganzen. Andere Menschen verleumdeten Kaspar Hauser damals und verleumden ihn noch, in unserer Gegenwart. Stanhope hatte nichts mit der Entführung des Fürstenbabys im Jahr 1812 zu tun. Er war damals in Sizilien, auf einer anderen Spionagemission für seine Arbeitgeber im britischen Außenministerium. Er wusste damals nichts über Kaspar Hauser oder seine Eltern. Das Verbrechen der Entführung des Babys durch Reichsgräfin Luise von Hochberg war ein Verbrechen das im Haus Baden begangen wurde. Aber Stanhope war sehr verantwortlich für die Verleumdungskampagne, die er persönlich sowohl mündlich als auch in schriftlicher Form gegen die Glaubwürdigkeit und den Ruf von Kaspar Hauser vor seinem Mord und auch in Deutschland durch zwei Jahre nach dem Mord durchgeführt hat, 1832-1835. Er beschuldigte seinen ehemaligen Schützling  einen Lügner und einen Betrüger zu sein. Der Mann, den er für Kaspars Unterbringung in Ansbach bezahlte, der Lehrer Meyer, wiederholte in späteren Jahren ähnliche Anschuldigungen. Dann kam Stanhopes Tochter Catherine, die Herzogin von Cleveland [dt: Kliewland], in einem Buch  mit der Titel Die wahre Geschichte von Caspar Hauser – aus offiziellen Dokumenten,  das die Herzogin 1893 zur Rechtfertigung ihres Vaters geschrieben hat.  Die Herzogin war die Mutter des britischen Premierministers Lord Rosebery, Stanhopes Enkel mütterlicherseits. Obwohl seit Lord Stanhopes Tod fast 40 Jahre vergangen waren, als ihr Sohn Anfang der 1890er Jahre Außenminister war, hätte sie sich vielleicht gewünscht, den anhaltenden Verdacht über ihren Vater zu zerstreuen und Lord Stanhope zu berechtfertigen. Es ist bekannt, daß die Königin Viktoria bereits 1856 wegen des Mordes Kaspar Hausers die Familie Hochberg als verbrecherisch ansah. Im Januar und Februar 1850 kam Großherzogin Stephanie auf Einladung von Königin Viktoria nach England. Die beiden Frauen hatten sich 1845 zum ersten Mal getroffen. Während ihres Besuchs im Januar 1850 reiste Stephanie auch zu Stanhope in sein Landhaus Chevening, wo sie zwei Tage weilte. Ein merkwürdiges Treffen, über das leider hinterlassen hat das Paar schriftlich fast nichts.

Die Männer die Kaspar Hauser getötet haben, wurden vom Engländer Lord Stanhope weder befehlt noch bezahlt. Stanhope war zur Zeit des Mordes in Deutschland reisend und verbreitete Fehlinformationen, um seinen sogenannten Schützling zu diskreditieren. Die Mörder handelten im Interesse der Großherzogin Sophie von Baden, die durch den Bankier Moritz von Haber auch Stanhope bezahlte. Die Gemählin Großherzog Leopolds,  sie war eine geborene Schwedin. Sie war entschlossen, dass Kaspar ihren Ehemann Leopold von Hochberg als Herrscher von Baden nicht ersetzen würde und dass ihre Nachkommen den großherzoglichen Thron unbedingt besteigen würden.

Sophies Urenkel war Prinz Max von Baden, der im Oktober/ November 1918 für nur einen Monat der letzte Kanzler des deutschen Kaiserreich wurde – der Mann, der die Kapitulation Deutschlands vor den Alliierten auf der Grundlage von Woodrow Wilsons 14 Punkten anordnete; der Mann der die Abdankung des Kaisers ankündigte und dann am 9. November zurücktrat. Eine große historische Ironie. Das was er getan hat, tat er weil Deutschland am Ende des Weltkrieges, wie Rudolf Steiner es ausdrückte, der Welt gegenüber nichts zu sagen hatte. Deutschland vertritt nichts anderes als das Überlebensbedürfnis und hatte keine Werte und Ideale, die es vor Europa vorlegen (darstellen?) konnte. Steiner hatte 1918 zweimal versucht – das erste Mal in Karlsruhe im Januar – Max von Baden vom Werte der Ideen einer Dreigliederung der Gesellschaft, für die Autonomie der kulturellen, politischen und wirtschaftlichen Sphären, zu überzeugen, aber Prinz Max zeigte wenige Neigung im Sinne dieser Ideen zu handeln. 70 Jahre nach dem Frankfurter Parlament, wo Prinz Kaspar von Baden eine zentrale Rolle hätte spielen können, konnte der Mann, der jetzt Haupt des Hauses Baden und auch Reichskanzler war, nichts für Deutschland vertreten. Seiner Unfähigkeit folgten revolutionäres Chaos, rechte Reaktion und eventuell, der Vertrag von Versailles. Eine andere Ironie ist, dass dieser Mann aus Baden, Prinz Max wurde Reichskanzler , am 3. Oktober 1918.  Heutzutage ist der 3. Oktober  der Tag der Deutschen Einheit, der deutsche Nationalfeiertag, an dem 1990 die offizielle deutsche Wiedervereinigung gefeiert wird. Ein weiterer bemerkenswerter „Zufall“ ist, dass Adolf Hitler gedient hat in der deutschen Armee an der Front während des Krieges, aber erst während des einzigen Monats der Kanzlerschaft von Prinz Max, im Oktober 1918, wurde Hitler bei einem Angriff britischer Truppen am 13. und 14. Oktober in der Nähe von Ypern vergast. Das war das Ende seiner Zeit an der Front. Sicherlich wissen Sie alle daß Hitler nach Kriegsausbruch 1914 in Bayern in die bayerische Armee eintrat und dass München die Hauptstadt der Wittelsbacher Dynastie war, der erblichen Herrscher Bayerns. So begann Hitlers Krieg in Bayern; er war Soldat in der Armee des bayerischen Königs, dem Teil Deutschlands, in dem Kaspar inhaftiert und getötet worden war, und Hitlers Krieg endete unter der Kanzlerschaft eines Prinzen von Baden, Kaspars Heimat und dem Ort, wovon die Mörder geschickt worden waren. Kaspar wurde 1833 getötet und Hitler kam 100 Jahre später an die Macht. Wie die Eliten im englischsprachigen Raum ihm geholfen haben, an die Macht zu kommen, haben der italienische Historiker Guido Giacomo Preparata in seinem Buch Wer Hitler mächtig machte und Prof. Anthony C. Sutton in  Wall Street und der Aufstieg Hitlers gut beschrieben.

Eine Reihe von Deutschen, der  Österreicher Prinz Metternich und eine Schwedin, Großherzogin Sophie, waren für die Entführung, Inhaftierung und den Tod von Kaspar Hauser verantwortlich;  der Engländer Stanhope spielte die Hauptrolle in der Verführung des Jugendlichen. Stanhope glitt wie eine verführerische Schlange in Kaspars Seele hinein, entfernte Kaspar aus dem Kreis seiner Beschützer in Nürnberg und hat ihn in Isolierung in Ansbach verlassen, wo nur ein einzige Beschützer zu finden war: der Richter und Kriminologe Anselm von Feuerbach. Obwohl es meines Wissens noch keine Beweise dafür gibt, ist es möglich, daß Stanhope Informationen über Feuerbachs Untersuchung des Verbrechens gegen Kaspar nach der Großherzogin Sophie übergab. Zu diesem Zeitpunkt erhielte Stanhope regelmässige Zahlungen von Großherzogin Sophie vermittelt wie gesagt von der Haber Bank in Karlsruhe. Durch Schmeichelei und Täuschung gelang es Stanhope, das Selbstvertrauen und sogar die Bewunderung von Anselm von Feuerbach zu gewinnen. Es ist daher auch möglich, daß Informationen, die Stanhope durch Feuerbach gewonnen und an die Großherzogin in Karlsruhe weitergegeben hat, etwas mit Feuerbachs Tod am 29. Mai 1833 zu tun haben.

Johannes Mayer hat in seinem ausgezeichneten Werk Lord Stanhope – der Gegenspieler Kaspar Hausers schlüssig gezeigt, dass Stanhope von 1812 bis 1816 zunächst als Geheimagent der britischen Regierung im Ausland in Sizilien und dann in Sachsen tätig war. Dies lag daran, dass ihm von seinem exzentrischen Vater Charles, dem 3. Earl of Stanhope, Geld entzogen wurde. Der Vater, ein  ungewöhnlich politisch radikaler Aristokrat, missbilligte die konservative Politik seines Sohnes und auch ihm nicht vergeben konnte, dass 1801 sein Sohn aus der Familienhaus in Chevening geflohen ist, um in Deutschland zu studieren. Der junge Stanhope war bei seiner Flucht von seiner Halbschwester Hester, einer engen Freundin ihres beliebten Onkels, des Premierministers William Pitt, und von einem anderen Freund von ihr und einem Untergeordnete Pitts, dem britischen Diplomaten, Francis James Jackson, unterstützt worden. Stanhope studierte in Erlangen, wo Jackson selbst studiert hatte. Jackson hatte auch enge persönliche Beziehungen zu Markgräfin Sophie Karoline von Ansbach-Bayreuth, der Nichte Friedrichs des Großen – und war auch gut befreundet mit Friedrich von Gentz, der später der Sekretär und rechte Hand Metternichs werden sollte. Weniger politisch reaktionär als Stanhope -  Gentz hatte bei Immanuel Kant in Königsberg studiert – um das Jahr 1816 teilten Stanhope und Gentz dieselben politischen Ansichten wie Metternich: nämlich, nach den Umwälzungen der letzten 26 Jahre wollten die drei Männer keine oder möglichst wenig Veränderungen in den sozialen und politischen Verhältnissen Europas. Stanhope war wahrscheinlich der reaktionärste der drei Männer und wurde in politischen Kreisen in England nach 1815 als äußerst konservativ in den meisten Fragen angesehen, ganz anders als sein radikaler Vater.

Es waren drei Männer – Francis Jackson und nach Jacksons Tod im Jahr 1814 sein Bruder George Jackson und der Premierminister William Pitt, Stanhopes Stiefonkel –  die Stanhope in seine Karriere als Agent geführt haben. Die Pitts und die Stanhopes waren bereits seit drei Generationen verwandt und gingen auf Thomas (Diamond) Pitt zurück, den Schöpfer des Reichtums und Einflusses der Familie Pitt. Bereits 1802 hat Jackson begonnen, die außenpolitische Arbeit als Karriere für Stanhope zu betrachten, aufgrund der sozialen und sprachlichen Talente des jungen Aristokrat. Neben diesen Talente hatte der junge Mann nichts viel anderes anzubieten.

Einige Dokumente sehr sensibler, sogar verschwörerischer Art aus der Zeit von 1802 bis 1804 wurde nach Stanhopes Tod in seinem Nachlass gefunden. Einer dieser Briefe wurde am Premierminister William Pitt geschrieben. Die Dokumente zeigen, dass Stanhope zu diesem Zeitpunkt bereits an außenpolitischen Angelegenheiten interessiert war. Stanhopes Biograf Johannes Mayer schreibt über den an Pitt gerichteten Brief von 1802: Will man nicht unterstellen, dass er [Stanhope] auf unlautere Weise in seinen Besitz gelangt ist, bleibt nur die Erklärung, dass Pitt selbst diesen Brief – von dem sich der Schreiber „unter allen Umständen“ sofortige Vernichtung erbeten hatte – mit einer bestimmten Überlegung weitergab. Der Brief bezog sich auf eine Verschwörung auf höchster Ebene. Darin schlug der Franzose, der Herzog von Orleans William Pitt vor, dass England ihn bei seinen Bemühungen unterstützen sollte, die Schweizer in einen Aufstand, einen Befreiungskrieg gegen Napoleon zu führen. Stanhope freundete sich später mit dem Verwandten des Herzogs an, dem Grafen von Artois. Der Graf wurde später König Karl X. von Frankreich. Er war ähnlich wie Stanhope ein Erzreaktionär und hat im Julirevolution von 1830 seinen Thron verloren.

Im Februar 1802 weilte Stanhope in der Kurstadt Baden-Baden, den Treffpunkt der europäischen High Society, ähnlich wie heute Davos solch ein Treffpunkt geworden ist. In Baden-Baden sollten sich die Macher der Welt versammeln. Stanhopes Biograf Johannes Mayer schreibt: Politik und ihre möglichen  Folgen waren sorgenvolles Tagesgesprächin Baden-Baden, und Philip Henry [Stanhope] mit seinem erwachenden Sinn für politischen Zusammenhänge mag hier zu ersten Mal in Kreise von Kennern und Mitakteuren etwas von der Dynamik und der schicksalsgestaltenden Kraft des Korsen [d.h. Napoleon] gespürt haben,  – aber auch von der Angst und Ablehnung, dem Spott und Haß gegen ihn und alle Napoleoniden. …. Schon zu Beginn einer auch die Karriere betreffenden Entwicklung befand sich der Agent in spe, ohne es zu ahnen,  mitten in einem Geschehen, das ihn noch über Jahrzehnten beschäftigen  sollte. Die bevorstehende Erhebung Badens zum Großherzogtum war Resultat einer machtpolitischen Konstruktion Bonapartes, die zwar neue Verbindungen schuf, aber auch Opfer forderte. Für Stanhope sollte sie schicksalsbestimmend werden. [...]

In mondänen Kurstadt… fand Philip Henrys erste Begegnung mit der großen Welt statt. Politische Perspektiven dieses Formats samt ihren dazugehörigen komplizierten  kleinen Verhältnissen, die Machtinteressen einzelner und in deren Gefolge all die vielen offenkundigen, aber vorzugsweise geheimen Zwischenträgereien, die zum Tagesgechäft gehörten, der prickelnde Umgang mit den Gewaltigen  dieser Welt und womöglich deren Dankbarkeit für diskrete Dienste, das hatte ihn fasziniert, Resonanz in seiner Seele gefunden. Eine erste lebensmässige Bestätigung, diesem Kreis in irgendeiner Weise  anzugehören, empfing er hier an einem Platz, den er unter sehr ähnlichen Bedingungen noch oft wiedersehen sollte.

Dieser Besuch in Baden-Baden muß eine Erfahrung von entscheidender Bedeutung für Stanhopes ganzes Leben gewesen sein. Bereits in seinem 21. Lebensjahr hatte ihn sein Schicksal nach Baden geführt, dem Staat, in dem Kaspar Hauser 10 Jahre später geboren wurde. Kaspar würde 1833 im Alter von 21 Jahren sterben, und Stanhope folgte ihm 22 Jahre später.

1802 kehrte Stanhope aus Deutschland nach England zurück. Der berühmte preußische Schriftsteller Friedrich von Gentz, ein Anglophiler, der kürzlich nach Österreich ausgewandert war, kam in diesem Jahr ebenfalls nach England zu Besuch und besiegelte seine Beziehung zur britischen Regierung. Ab diesem Jahr würde er ein gut bezahlter Propagandist für Großbritannien sein, ein ständiger Verfechter des Krieges gegen Napoleon. Stanhope und Gentz ​​würden sich 14 Jahre später in Wien zum ersten Mal treffen. 1816 war Stanhope auf dem Heimweg, nachdem seine zweijährige Spionage in Dresden beendet war. Stanhope hoffte auf eine bequeme Stellung als Botschafter bei einem deutschen Hof, aber offensichtlich hat George Jackson ihm befohlen, Friedrich von Gentz ​​in Wien zu besuchen. Das war nicht der direkteste Weg von Dresden nach England! Dieser Besuch in Wien würde sich als ein anderer wichtigen Wendepunkt in Stanhopes Leben erweisen.

Während des Besuches wurde im Rhein eine Flaschenpost gefunden und in der Moniteur Zeitung einen Bericht darüber abgedruckt. Aus der kryptische Mitteilung in der Flaschenpost war es deutlich, dass eine wichtige Persönlichkeit gegen seinen Willen an einem abgelegenen Ort am Rhein festgehalten wurde. Verdächtige in Wien, Paris, München und natürlich auch in Karlsruhe fragten sich, ob dies der Prinz von Baden sein könnte, der Sohn der Großherzogin Stephanie de Beauharnais, der namenlose Prinz, der kurz nach seiner Geburt 1812 auf mysteriöse Weise gestorben sein soll.

Ab diesem Besuch bei Gentz ​​in Wien, wo die beiden Männer die Botschaft in der Flasche besprochen haben müssen, konzentrierte sich Stanhope darauf, den verlorenen napoleonidischen Prinzen aufzuspüren, den für Stanhope und Gentz ​​zweifellos eine ernsthafte potenzielle Bedrohung gegen alle etablierte Ordnung in Europa darstellte. Er muss um jeden Preis daran gehindert werden, den badischen Thron zu besteigen.

Wir sehen dann, dass eine Frau und drei Männer die wesentliche Rolle bei der Steuerung von Stanhopes Schicksal spielten. Seine Halbschwester Hester, die selbst ein bemerkenswertes Leben führen sollte und als „Königin der Wüste“ im fernen Syrien ihr Leben endete, wandte sich an ihren Onkel William Pitt, um Hilfe bei der Befreiung des jungen Stanhope von seinem tyrannischen Vater zu erhalten. Pitt hatte seine Kontakte in den Bereichen Finanzen und Diplomatie genutzt, um Stanhopes Flucht nach Deutschland zu erleichtern. Der Standort Erlangen war Francis Jackson und seiner Verbindung mit Sophie Karoline von Ansbach-Bayreuth zu verdanken. Schon am Anfang von Stanhopes Beziehung zu Deutschland also finden wir Ansbach, wo sich die Residenz der Markgräfin befand, die Freundin Francis Jacksons. Die Beziehung zwischen Francis Jackson und seinem alten Freund Friedrich von Gentz ​​hatte dazu geführt, dass Stanhope nach Dresden postiert wurde, um die Aktivitäten Preußens in Bezug auf Sachsen im Auge zu behalten. London und Wien waren gegen Berlins Wunsch, Sachsen in der Nachkriegszeit zu erwerben. Der Cousin von Stanhopes Pate, Philip Dormer Stanhope, der 4. Earl of Chesterfield, war in den 1760er Jahren britischer Gesandter am sächsischen Hof gewesen und damals eine dresdene Freimaurerloge führte. In der  sächsische Hauptstadt lernte Philp Henry Stanhope einen der bekanntesten Freimaurer Deutschlands kennen – den „allwissenden“ Karl August Böttiger. Stanhope wäre zweifellos ausgestattet mit einem Einführungsschreiben von Gentz​’ gutem Freund Böttiger nach Wien gefahren, denn Böttiger hatte der Flüchtling Gentz ​in Dresden 1806 viel geholfen.

Als Stanhope auf dem Heimweg von Wien nach England war, starb zu Hause in Chevening sein Vater. Stanhopes Reaktion, als er schließlich nach Hause zurückkehrte und vom Tod seines Vaters erfuhr? “Aus tiefstem Herzen danke ich dem Allmächtigen, dass ich diesen glücklichsten Tag erleben konnte.” Ein Mann, der dies über den Tod seines Vaters schreiben konnte, muss eine starke Abneigung gegen seinen Vater empfunden haben, und das war tatsächlich der Fall. Sein Vater war ein Tyrann, der seinen Sohn einem grausamen Bildungsregime unterwarf und ihm zwei Privatlehrer auferlegte, von denen wir vermuten können, dass sie vielleicht den Jungen sogar sexuell missbraucht haben. Es wurde vorgeschlagen, dass einer dieser Lehrer, ein Mann, den Stanhope „den Schurke“ nannte, ihn nach Deutschland begleiten soll, was jedoch vom Premierminister Pitt selbst ausdrücklich mit den Worten „Auf keinem Fall!“ widerlegt wurde.

So hatte Stanhope wie Kaspar Hauser eine  beschädigte Kindheit. Und diese beide waren nicht die einzigen in dieser Geschichte die eine solche Kindheit erfuhren. Ludwig I., der König von Bayern, in dessen Untergeordnetes Schloss Pilsach Kaspar 11 Jahre lang in einer Kerker eingesperrt wurde, hatte seines geliebten Kindheitsgebiet verloren, als Napoleon die Region, in der sich Ludwig aufgewachsen ist, von Bayern weggenommen hat und sie dem Großherzogtum Baden übergab. Ludwig verbrachte den Rest seines Lebens besessen von dem Wunsch den ehemaligen bayerischen Pfalz zurückzugewinnen. Und die Großherzogin Sophie von Baden, die den Mord an Kaspar arrangierte, war als Neunjährige zusammen mit ihrem exzentrischen Vater, dem schwedischen König Gustav Adolf IV., nach einem Militärputsch gegen ihn aus ihrem Heimatland zusammen mit ihrer ganzen Familie vertrieben worden. Mit einer jährlichen Zahlung von 66,666 Thaler mußten der König und seine Familie ins Ausland wandern. Die Familie ist in Baden gesiedelt, das Heimatland der Mutter von Sophie. Also die junge Prinzessin Sophie hatte als Neunjährige ihr Elternhaus, ihre schwedische Heimat und ihren Status als königliche Prinzessin verloren. Sie war fest entschlossen, die Position, die sie 1830 als Großherzogin von Baden erlangt hatte, nie zu verloren und sicherlich nicht den Thron an diesen Findling in Nürnberg und Ansbach zu übergeben. Immer mehr Menschen vermuteten, dass Kaspar Hauser und nicht ihres Mannes Leopold von Hochberg der rechtmäßige Großherzog von Baden sei. Nach der französischen Revolution im Juli 1830 kam es in mehreren europäischen Ländern zu revolutionären Umwälzungen. Sophies Ehemann Leopold saß in jenen Jahren unbehaglich auf seinem Thron, nicht zuletzt, weil Baden lange Zeit der liberalste Staat in Deutschland gewesen war; radikale und revolutionäre Stimmen waren dort lauter als anderswo. Und dann muss Sophie 1832 in aristokratischen Kreise gehört haben, dass Anselm von Feuerbach die Ergebnisse seiner Untersuchung des Falles Kaspar Hauser in Umlauf brachte, die schlüssig auf Kaspars wirklichen Ursprung im großherzoglichen Palast in Karlsruhe  hinwies. Wir sehen also, dass eine beschädigte Kindheit ein Merkmal mehrerer Hauptfiguren in der Geschichte um Kaspar Hauser war.

Das soll das Verhalten von Sophie, Ludwig und Stanhope nicht entschuldigen. Aber es weist auf das Ausmaß der Unmenschlichkeit in Europa in jenen Tagen hin, in denen Kinder darunter leiden könnten, und natürlich nicht nur die Kinder der Aristokratie. Es war immerhin ein Zeitalter schrecklicher Kinderarbeit in Minen und in den neuen Fabriken. Diese Unmenschlichkeit und harte Behandlung von Kindern war eine Folge der geistigen Entfremdung der damaligen europäischen Kultur nach 200 Jahren eines stetig zunehmenden Materialismus. Menschen, die Kinder so schlecht behandeln konnten, hatten eindeutig vergessen, was es heißt, ein Mensch zu sein. Die meisten von uns, in diesem materialistischen Zeitalter aufwachsen, verlieren die Unschuld der Kindheit, die Erinnerung an unsere spirituellen Ursprünge – dies wurde am eindringlichsten in den Gedichten eines der größten Dichter Englands, William Wordsworth [dt: Wurdswurth], eines Zeitgenossen von Stanhope, erwähnt. Hier ein Paar Seilen aus Wordsworths Gedicht Hinweise auf die Unsterblichkeit aus Errinerungen an die frühe Kindheit:

Geburt, das ist nur Schlaf und ein Vergessen:

Die Seele, die mit aufgeht uns, die unsres Lebens Stern,

ein anderes Zuhaus hat sie besessen

und kommt daher von fern:

Nicht alles sie vergessen hat,

nicht gleicht sie unbeschriebnem Blatt:

Nach uns ziehend Wolkenglanz und Glorienschein,

von Gott wir kommen, er ist unser Heim:

Der Himmel uns umgibt in Kindertagen!

Die Schatten des Gefängnisses sich langsam schließen,

sobald der Junge wächst heran,

noch nimmt er wahr das Licht und sieht’s vom Ursprung fließen

in seiner Freude Überschwang.

Dem jungen Mann von Osten täglich länger wird die Spur,

noch ist er Priester der Natur

und jene visionäre Kraft

begleitet seine Wanderschaft.

Wie schwach und schwächer sie ihm wird, der Mann noch spürt,

bis sich der Glanz im Licht des Alltags ganz verliert.

Die meisten Leute verfolgen und missbrauchen keine Kinder. Aristokratische Kinder waren von der vorher erwähnten unmenschlichen Behandlung und Leiden nicht ausgenommen. Im Gegenteil, im Namen von Blut und Klasse, Familienstand, Rang und Privilegien waren sie oft gezwungen, schwere emotionale und physische Schwierigkeiten und traumatische Erlebnisse zu ertragen. Leider mußten die Auswirkungen auf ihre geschädigten Seelen dann oft von ihren sozialen Gleichen, ihre Untergeordneten und ihren sozialen Minderwertigen im In- und Ausland erlitten werden.

Stanhopes Charakter war in seiner Kindheit und Jugend allzu offensichtlich verzerrt, und dann im ersten Teil seines Erwachsenenalters durch den Bedarf an Geld. Er wurde ein arroganter und überheblicher Geck (Stutzer?), der sich immer seines Status und seiner körperlichen Erscheinung bewusst war. Zusammen  mit seinen exzentrischen, ultrakonservativen Ansichten wurde er im Parlament und in der High Society bekannt, nicht zuletzt wegen seiner Liebe zu zeremoniellen Orden und Dekorationen, seiner parfümierten Perücken und seiner Vorliebe für Orchideen. In der Tat entwickelte er ein exzentrisches Interesse an bizarren Pflanzen aus exotischen Gegenden und diente  1829 bis 1837 als 2. Präsident der Medizinisch-Botanischen Gesellschaft, übrigens sei es bemerkt daß das während der Zeit von Kaspar Hausers 5 Jahren im öffentlichen Leben war.

Diese Gesellschaft, 1821 gegründet, untersuchte die medizinischen Eigenschaften von Pflanzen aus der ganzen Welt, einschließlich solcher, die in Drogen und Giften verwendet werden könnten. Wegen der Weltmachtstellung  Großbritanniens, hatten das Imperium, die Regierung und auch das Militär ein großes Interesse an diesem botanisch-medizinischen Wissen. Großbritannien profitierte zu dieser Zeit zum Beispiel stark vom Opiumhandel mit China, der auf Mohn beruhte, und britische Soldaten, Seeleute, Kolonialverwalter und Kolonisten mussten vor verschiedenen Arten exotischer Krankheiten geschützt werden – um das Empire fortzuführen.

Die Gesellschaft wurde zu ihrer Zeit als sehr erfolgreich betrachtet. Über seine Aktivitäten wurde viel berichtet, und zu seiner Mitgliedschaft gehörten elf europäische Souveräne, die gesamte britische Königsfamilie, über zwanzig Mitglieder anderer königlicher Familien und fast alle ausländischen Botschafter in London sowie viele Gelehrte und Experten der medizinischen Welt. Bei einer Gelegenheit, als Stanhope in Deutschland sich befand, -  ein Besuch, der kurz nach dem ersten physischen, fast tödlichen Angriff auf Kaspar Hauser Stanhope nach Nürnberg führte,  – kam es in der Medizinisch-Botanischen Gesellschaft zu einem Skandal, als ihr Gründer, Dr. John Frost, der zu dieser Zeit der Direktor war und wie Stanhope, ein sehr eitler Mann, am 7. September 1829 im Namen von Stanhope eine Anrede an die Mitglieder hielt und dabei die vielen Medaillen und Insignien der Gesellschaft auf seinem Herrenrock trug. Viele Mitglieder waren der Meinung, dass solche Dekorationen nur von Lord Stanhope, dem Präsidenten der Gesellschaft, getragen werden sollten. Gegen Dr. Frost wurden Beschwerden eingereicht. Als Stanhope nach England zurückkehrte, leitete er im Januar 1830 zwei Gesellschaftstreffen in seinem Londoner Haus, bei denen er Frost gewaltsam angriff und dessen Ausschluss aus der Gesellschaft forderte, der ordnungsgemäß folgte. Frost wurde daher von Stanhope aus der von Frost sich selbst gegründeten Gesellschaft ausgeschlossen und wegen einer Trivialität die nichts mit den tatsächlichen Zielen der Gesellschaft zu tun hatte, sondern nur mit dem sozialen Status und dem Aussehen. Es ist bemerkenswert, dass es eine Gattung mittel- und südamerikanischer Orchideen gibt – später genannt nach Lord Stanhope, der Stanhopea  -, die der Botaniker James William Hooker erstmals im selben Jahr 1829 beschrieben hat, ein Jahr nachdem Kaspar Hauser in Nürnberg aufgetreten war und auch ein Jahr nach dem Tod von Stanhopes zweiten Sohn George in Brasilien im Alter von 21 Jahren. Die ersten Exemplare von Stanhopea waren 1818 aus der Karibik nach England gekommen. Die Gattung ist als Stanhopea insignis bekannt. „Insignis heißt „protzig“ – wie  Stanhope selbst.  Die Gattung hat über 60 Arten und stammt wie gesagt aus Mittel- und Südamerika. Seine Besonderheiten sind, dass sie epiphytisch, d. h. ‚parasitisch‘ auf anderen Pflanzen wächst. Die Blüten sind komplex, sehr duftend, spektakulär und kurzlebig; sie wachsen in feuchten Wäldern, im tiefen Schatten, vermeiden direktes Sonnenlicht und sie wachsen nach unten. Die Gattung ist als „verkehrte Orchidee“ bekannt. Diese Orchideen ziehen Bienen an, indem sie die Form der weiblichen Biene und ihr Sexualpheromon nachahmen. Alle diese Eigenschaften sind im Vergleich zum Charakter des Mannes, nach dem die Stanhopea genannt ist, sehr interessant. Nur das kurzlebige Merkmal passt nicht. Stanhope war 73, als er gestorben ist.

Stanhope war ein Mann seiner Zeit, indem seine Interessen widerspiegelten sowohl die der Aufklärung – der Naturwissenschaften wie der Botanik, aber auch des Fliegens – als auch die der neuen Romantik wie der Geistes- oder Okkultwissenschaften: Mesmerismus, Teetotalismus, Spiritualismus, Magnetismus, Kristallkugel, Kommunikation über die Schwelle des Todes usw. Sein exzentrisches Interesse an exotischen Orchideen ging einher mit seinem ebenso exzentrischen Interesse damals an okkulter Forschung, das von den frühen 1830er Jahren bis zu seinem Tod andauerte. Ich habe dies im Detail in einem Vortrag bei einem anderen Festspiel beschrieben, deswegen werde ich es heute nicht wiederholen, außer um zu betonen, dass Stanhope, wie vom Forscher Jocelyn Godwin in seinem Buch The Theosophical Enlightenment (Die theosophische Aufklärung) ausführlich beschrieben wurde, wohl der engagierteste Engländer in allen Aspekten okkulter Angelegenheiten war in den 1830er, 40er und 50er Jahren. Seine Interessen umfassten das gesamte Thema des  Okkultismus damals und er kannte all die Hauptforscher, die auf dem Gebiet tätig waren. 1854, im Jahr vor seinem Tod  tauschte er mit seinem Freund, dem ehemaligen österreichischen Diplomaten Freiherr Johann Philipp von Wessenberg, seit Jahrzehnten enger Mitarbeiter von Stanhope und insbesondere von Metternich und Gentz, Briefe über internationale Politik aus, in denen er die Russen als „Nordbarbaren“ bezeichnete, über Okkultismus und ein Instrument für okkulte Experimente. Die vier Männer hatten sich im Sommer 1829 in Wien getroffen, um über Baden und den Fall Kaspar Hauser zu diskutieren.

Schluss

Lord Stanhope ist nicht mehr ganz die rätselhafte Figur, die er vor 50 oder 30 Jahren zu sein schien. Das ist dem zu verdanken, was Jocelyn Godwin in seinem Buch The Theosophical Enlightenment (Die theosophische Aufklärung) über Stanhopes Leben in der Zeit nach Stanhopes Verhältnis mit Kaspar Hauser entdeckt hat, vor allem aber zu verdanken wird Johannes Mayer und seiner außergewöhnlichen Stanhope-Biographie. Hoffentlich kann in naher Zukunft meine  Übersetzung ins Englische dieses großen Werkes veröffentlicht werden. Wenig von Stanhopes echtem Charakter und Hintergrund wird in Werner Herzogs wohlbekanntem Film über Kaspar Hauser enthüllt. In Peter Sehrs Film von 1993 wird mehr vom Vorhang zurückgezogen, nicht zuletzt, weil Johannes Mayer ein Berater bei der Entstehung des Films war. Aber es bleibt  über Stanhope noch viel zu entdecken, nämlich über seine Verbindungen in Frankreich und auch zu Gentz ​​und Metternich; seine Verbindungen zur britischen Regierung und seine Beziehungen zu den Okkultisten John Varley [dt: Warlie] und Edward Bulwer-Lytton. Varley war eine Schlüsselfigur in der britischen okkulten Szene des frühen 19. Jahrhunderts, und seine Familie war eng mit der Familie Stanhope verbunden. Ich hatte gehofft, in diesem Frühjahr weitere Nachforschungen in den Archiven der Stanhope-Familie anstellen zu können, aber dies wurde durch die COVID-19-Sperrung (Lockdown) unmöglich gemacht. Ich freue mich auf die weitere Arbeit zu diesem Thema das kein unwichtiger Teil des größeren Themas der anglo-deutschen Beziehungen sich bildet. Weitere Artikel und Vorträge von mir zum Thema Lord Stanhope und Kaspar Hauser sowie über andere Themen – einige davon in deutscher Sprache – finden Sie auf meiner Website: www.threeman.org

Und damit nochmal mit herzlichem Dank an Eckart Böhmer für das Vorlesen meines Vortrags und auch an Ihnen für Ihre Aufmerksamkeit und Geduld komme ich zum Schluß. Hoffentlich sehen wir uns wieder bei den nächsten Festpiele 2022 wenn all dieser Coronawahn vorbei sein wird. Danke schön.

Guten Morgen. Ich freue mich sehr, nach sechs Jahren Pause wieder hier bei den Festspielen zu sein und ich bedanke mich nochmal herzlich bei Eckart Böhmer für die Einladung. Ich war 2004 zum ersten Mal hier und bin seitdem mehrmals hier anwesend. Es hat mich zunehmend ermutigt zu sehen, wie Eckarts Arbeit und die seiner Kollegen hier in Ansbach und anderswo diesen Impuls kultiviert haben, Möge er lange fortbestehen! Im Jahr 2022 konnte ich nicht dabei sein, aber Eckart hat freundlicherweise meinen Text vorgelesen. Dieses Jahr bin ich dabei, um meinen Beitrag selbst vorzulesen, muss mich aber wie immer entschuldigen, daß ich ihn vorlese, da mein Deutsch nicht gut genug ist, um mich frei auszudrücken. Das wäre zu anstrengend für Ihre Ohren! Da ich aber sicher bin, daß das, was ich vorlese, trotzdem hier und da in unnatürlichem Deutsch ausgedrückt sein wird, bitte ich Sie, diese Entschuldigung anzunehmen.

    “Wohin gehst du? Woher kommst du? Wenn dich jemand fragt, hoffe ich, daß du antworten kannst. Wohin gehen sie, die Leute da drüben? Woher sind sie gekommen? Wenn jemand sie fragt, weiß ich, daß sie es nicht antworten können. Wohin gehe ich? Woher komme ich? Wenn mich jemand fragt, weiß ich, daß ich antworten kann.” Diese sind Worte aus ein Musikstück daß das Titel „Where“ (Wohin) trägt  – ein Stück daß ich hatte sehr gern als Student an der Universität in den frühen 1970er Jahren. Damals war ich ein Fan einer Band namens Tony Williams Lifetime. Das war wohl die allererste Jazz-Rock-Band. Diese einfache Worte, habe ich später festgestellt, sehr viel mit der menschlichen Verfassung und der Frage nach der Identität zu tun haben. Die waren Fragen die, meines Erachtens, eng verbunden mit dem Thema ,Kaspar Hauser‘ sind. Sie haben an meine 18-jährige Seele sehr angesprochen. „Wohin gehe ich? Woher komme ich? Wenn mich jemand fragt, weiß ich, daß ich antworten kann.“ Damals konnte ich auf diese dritte Frage tatsächlich noch nicht antworten. Aber die Fragen drückten die Zuversicht und die Hoffnung eines jungen Menschen aus.

Das Album hiess “Emergency” (Notfall, Notlage). Die Telefonnummer, die man in England bei einem Notfall anrufen muss, ist 999. In den USA ist es 911. Hier in Deutschland 110 und 112, nicht wahr?  Wir stehen alle jetzt am Rande des Abgrunds eines großen Konflikts in Europa, nicht nur des Krieges zwischen Russland und der Ukraine, sondern eines Krieges zwischen Russland und der NATO: Russland und dem Westen. Es ist sogar möglich, daß in diesem Konflikt China einbezogen wird und die Krise zu einem echten Weltkrieg werden könnte. In einem solchen Fall ist es natürlich auch möglich, daß Atomwaffen irgendwann eingesetzt werden.

    Ein Krieg zwischen Russland und dem Westen war im Gange, als Kaspar Hauser am 29. September 1812 geboren wurde. Die Nachricht von seiner Geburt wurde dem Kaiser Napoleon überbracht, der damals in Moskau saß und vergeblich auf die Kapitulation von Zar Alexander von Russland wartete. Wahrscheinlich, sind seit 2022 insgesamt mindestens 500.000 Menschen im russisch-ukrainischen Konflikt schon ums Leben gekommen.  Napoleon hat etwa 600.000 Mann nach Russland geführt. Nur die Hälfte davon waren Franzosen, die andere hauptsächlich Deutsche und Polen, aber auch einige Niederländer, Belgier und Italiener. Es war eine Armee aus Mittel- und Westeuropa, die versuchte, Russland zu erobern.

    Mitten in dieser europäische Katastrophe wurde der kleine Prinz Kaspar von Baden hineingeboren, der Adoptivenkel Napoleons, dessen Adoptivtochter Stéphanie de Beauharnais die Mutter Kaspars war. Gaspard war der Name, den seine französische Mutter, eine kaiserliche Prinzessin, ihm geben wollte, aber er war zum Zeitpunkt seines angeblichen Todes zwei Wochen nach seiner Geburt noch namenlos, obwohl er eine Nottaufe erhalten hatte. In Wirklichkeit war er jedoch nicht tot, sondern entführt worden  – ausgetauscht gegen ein anderes, sehr kränkliches Kind. Es war dieses Kind, das zwei Wochen nach der Geburt von Prinz Kaspar gestorben ist, und dieses Kind wurde dann als der tote Babyprinz angekündigt. Das war eine öffentliche Lüge, die vor Kaspars Eltern, dem Großherzog und Grossherzogin von Baden, verborgen wurde. Die Nachricht von seinem Tod wurde auch an den Kaiser Napoleon weitergeleitet, der zu diesem Zeitpunkt seinen langen und katastrophalen Rückzug aus Russland angetreten hatte. Der große Kriegsmann Napoleon am anderen Rande Europas, dessen Handlungen das Schicksal von Millionen von Europäern so drastisch beeinflusst hatten und noch beeinflussen sollten, wurde auf diese Weise  sowohl über die Geburt als auch über den Tod dieses Säuglings informiert. Sieben Jahre nach Napoleons Tod, wurde in Nürnberg, im Herzen Europas, nicht der Kaiser Europas sondern das Kind Europas zu den Herzen der Leute genommen. In der Tat hatte Napoleon, für seine eigenen politischen und militärichen Zwecke die Ehe von Kaspars Eltern, Stéphanie de Beauharnais und Carl von Baden, arrangiert; das Ehepaar selbst hatte einander nicht heiraten wollen.

    Die deutsche Truppen, die Napoleon zum Einmarsch in Russland gezwungen hat, stammten aus Staaten, die nun zu Napoleons neuen deutschen Satellitenstaat, dem Rheinbund, gehörten, den Napoleon anstelle des alten Heiligen Römischen Reiches geschaffen hatte. Das Reich hatte er sechs Jahre zuvor auflösen lassen. Also, im Hintergrund der Geburt von Prinz Kaspar geschah dieser Krieg des Westens gegen den Osten.  Wenn wir uns heute, 212 Jahre später, mit dem Leben von Kaspar Hauser befassen, sehen wir erneut einen ähnlichen Krieg vor uns. Das ist bemerkenswert. Es war auch tatsächlich die Zeit in der Kaspar Hauser lebte, als Russland, besonders für die englische Elite, das “Feindbild” wurde. Diese Sichtweise auf Russland hatte sich in England bis zur Zeit Kaspar Hausers Tod 1833 schon durchgesetzt. Nach der Untergang Napoleons gab es für die englische Elite eine zentrale Frage im Mittelpunkt der auswärtigen Angelegenheiten, nämlich: “Wer könnte jetzt noch Indien von uns wegnehmen?” Die englische Antwort lautete: “Russland”. Dies war der Beginn der englischen Russophobie oder Russlandhass die seither bis heute anhält, eine paranoide Phobie, die sich auf die anderen englischsprachigen Länder dann ausgebreitet hat. Die verantwortliche Antwort auf diese Phobie kann nur m. E. gefunden werden, wenn wir ernsthaft zu fragen beginnen: „Wohin gehen wir? Woher kommen wir?“ Und dazu zwei andere Fragen: wie sind Ost und West eigentlich verwandt? Und wie haben sie sich getrennt?

Napoleon und Kaspar Hauser –  eine größere Polarität als diese beiden Figuren kann man sich kaum vorstellen – und doch sind sie miteinander verbunden, nicht zuletzt durch Napoleons eigenes Handeln. Um eigenen politischen und militärischen Zielen zu dienen, zwingt er Kaspars Eltern zusammen und er erweitet die Größe und Autorität Badens, des Staates, den das junge Ehepaar Karl und Stéphanie  gemeinsam regieren sollen.

    Nach der französischen Revolution und in der napoleonischen Ära stellte sich für viele denkende Menschen die Frage: Wie würde sich Europa im 19. Jahrhundert weiter entwickeln?  Würde es sich in traditioneller Weise entwickeln, wie zum Beispiel im Mittelalter oder im 18. Jahrhundert, das heißt, durch Krieg? Würde es sich durch brutale Wildheit und Abschlachten weiterentwickeln? Seit dem Stammesdenken des sogenannten finsteren Zeitalters vierzehnhundert Jahre zuvor, hatte sich die Völker Europas sich in eine Vielfalt politischer Staaten entwickelt. Von Stamm zu Staat. Wie würde es im neuen 19. Jahrhundert weitergehen? Einige der jüngeren europäischen Erleuchteten wie Immanuel Kant, Friedrich Schiller und Novalis hatten bereits im späten 18. Jahrhundert begonnen, sich ein neues friedliches, harmonisches und vereinteres Europa vorzustellen, das nicht, sozusagen, vom Geiste des Mars, sondern vom Geiste der Philosophie oder vom Geiste des Christentums geprägt sein würde.

    Während des vorhergehenden Jahrtausenden hat sich allmählich der Einfluß des Christentums in Europa vertieft. Dann seit der Renaissance und besonders in der Zeit von 1760 bis 1830 war auch der Einfluß der griechisch-römischen Welt in Europa sehr stark. Als Reaktion auf diese Rückbesinnung auf die klassische Kultur der Antike und den damit verbundenen universalistischen Rationalismus und Intellekt schwang das Pendel in gerade dieser Zeitabschnitt in die entgegengesetzte Richtung: Partikularismus und Gefühlsleben, Nationalismus und Romantik.

    In diesselber kurzen Ära im deutschsprachigen Raum sehen wir damals eine wahre Konstellation bemerkenswerter Persönlichkeiten, die in vielen Bereichen der Gesellschaft aktiv waren und eine enorme Kreativität und Beweglichkeit des Denkens und Inspiration mitgebracht haben, die nur als zutiefst menschlich und heilend beschrieben werden kann. Etwas ganz Ausserordentliches ist in Mitteleuropa in jener Schwellenära geschehen, als die Aufklärung in die Romantik überging, etwas wirklich Außergewöhnliches. Man braucht nur einige der berühmten Namen aufzuzählen, die in dieser Zeit ihre Wirkung enfaltet haben: Kant, Klopstock, Lessing, Haydn, Beethoven, Mozart, Herder, Goethe, Schiller, Fichte, Hegel, Hölderlin, Mueller, Tieck, Schelling, Caspar David Friedrich, Hoffman, von Kleist, die Gebrüder von Schlegel, Schleiermacher, die Gebrüder von Humboldt, Brentano, von Arnim, Eichhorn, Schinkel, die Gebrüder Grimm, von Weber, Uhland, Heine, Schopenhauer, Schubert.

    Und dann ist in diese kulturelle Atmosphäre Mitteleuropas, die von dieser bemerkenswerten Geisterkonstellation befruchtet worden war und immer noch befruchtet wurde, 1812 in Karlsruhe ein namenloser Zähringerfürst geboren, der angeblich bald gestorben ist, doch Jahre später ist als Kaspar Hauser wieder aufgetaucht. Dieser Zähringer-Prinz hätte Großherzog von Baden werden sollen, dem schon damals wohl zukunftsweisendsten Staat Deutschlands, und dieser Prinz, hätte er nicht entführt und dann später ermordet worden, wäre im Vormärz 1848 in seiner 36 Jahr, in der Blüte seines Lebens sein. Die Charaktereigenschaften, die er auch nach seiner Entlassung aus der Einkerkerung an den Tag legte, und die wundersamen Fortschritte, die er in seiner Entwicklung zu einem jungen Mann machte, lassen erahnen, was für ein Fürst und Herrscher er hätte werden können. Anders als der nur ein Jahr ältere Sohn Napoleons, den sogenannten ‚König von Rom‘, der bis zu seinem Tod 21 Jahre lang vom österreichischen Kanzler Prinz Metternich in einem goldenen Käfig sozusagen  im Wiener Schloss Schönbrunn gefangen gehalten wurde und der von Krieg und Soldaten, militärischem Ruhm und der Nachahmung seines Vaters des Kaisers Napoleon immer träumte, zeigte dagegen Kaspar Hauser nichts  militärisches oder kriegerisches sondern erstaunliche Fähigkeiten zur Offenherzigkeit, zum Zuhören und Lernen von Mensch und Natur, zur Geselligkeit und künstlerischen Kreativität.

    Wäre diese als Sohn des Großherzogs Karl von Baden geborene Individualität nicht zwei Wochen nach seiner Geburt entführt worden und wenn er seinem Vater als Großherzog gefolgt wäre, dann wäre er, wie gesagt, 1848-49, zur Zeit der Revolutionen und des Frankfurter Parlaments, 35/36 Jahre alt gewesen. Natürlich könnte man einwenden, daß Kaspar Hauser, wenn er nicht entführt und fast 12 Jahre lang eingekerkert worden wäre und seine Entwicklung nicht so behindert worden wäre, dann hätte er  die bemerkenswerten Charaktereigenschaften und andere Talente nicht gezeigt, die später nach seiner Entlassung aus der Haft so offensichtlich waren. Aber angesichts des Charakters seines Urgroßvaters Karl Friedrich, seiner Mutter Stéphanie de Beauharnais und seiner Schwestern, ja sogar seines Vaters – dessen Charakter sich nach Jahren der jugendlichen Ausschweifung nach der Geburt seiner Kinder deutlich verbesserte und dessen Verhältnis zu seiner Frau, das anfangs sehr schwierig war, sich in den letzten 7 Jahren seines Lebens, bevor sie durch eine Ermordung auf grausame Weise beendet wurden, ebenfalls stark verbessert hat  – vor diesem ganzen familiären Hintergrund ist es zumindest denkbar, daß der junge Fürst Kaspar zu einem guten Fürsten, einem sehr fähigen Herrscher, und einem Mann von eher sozialer als kriegerischer Natur geworden wäre – einem Mann, der mit seinen persönlichen Eigenschaften und dessen Familienverbindungen sich über den ganzen Kontinent erstreckten, viel mehr aus den Möglichkeiten des Frankfurter Parlaments von 1848 hätte machen können als etwa Otto von Bismarck, der zwar bei der Versammlung anwesend war, dem aber fehlte die Vorstellungskraft, die historische Bedeutung des Ereignisses zu ergreifen. Bismarck, in seinen späteren Handeln an der Spitze der preußischen Außenpolitik ist er zu den alten kriegerischen Methoden zurückgekehrt. Es ist daher zumindest denkbar, daß Kaspar Hauser als Fürst mehr Konstruktives für den Frieden und eine gesunde Entwicklung in Europa hätte leisten können, als es die beiden “martialischen Realisten”, Napoleon und Bismarck, oder der träumende “Schwanenkönig”, Ludwig der Zweite von Bayern, vermochten.

    Man könnte weiter einwenden: Selbst wenn Kaspar Hauser zum Großherzog von Baden aufgestiegen wäre, wie hätte er, ein einziger Mann, als Fürst dieses kleinen Staates Baden die Geschicke Mitteleuropas maßgeblich beeinflussen können? Aber ein anderer deutscher Fürst eines noch kleineren deutschen Staates, der nur sieben Jahre nach Prinz Kaspar geboren ist, der würde die Geschicke eines viel größeren Staates, ja eines Weltreichs, maßgeblich beeinflussen. Das war Prinz Albert von Sachsen-Coburg und Gotha, der 1840 die junge Königin Victoria, die Herrscherin des Britischen Empire, geheiratet hat. Albert und Victoria  waren beide im 21. Lebensjahr. Es würde hier zu weit führen, auf den Einfluss einzugehen, den Prinz Albert auf die Kultur und die Entwicklung des viktorianischen Großbritanniens in vielerlei Hinsicht ausübte, aber es genügt zu sagen, daß dieser Einfluss sehr groß war. Der englische Geheimratssekretär, Charles Greville, hat über Albert geschrieben: „… es ist offensichtlich, daß er, während sie [Viktoria] den Titel trägt, in Wirklichkeit die Funktionen des Souveräns ausübt. Er ist in jeder Hinsicht König“, und nach Alberts Tod 1861, im Übrigen am 14. Dezember, dem selben Tag in 1833 des tödlichen Attentats auf Kaspar Hauser, hat Benjamin Disraeli, der spätere Premierminister, über Albert gesagt: „Mit Prinz Albert haben wir unseren Souverän begraben. Dieser deutsche Prinz hat England einundzwanzig Jahre lang mit einer Weisheit und Energie regiert, wie sie keiner unserer Könige je gezeigt hat.“ Noch in der Mitte des 19. Jahrhunderts war es möglich, daß ein einzelner Herrscher einen einzigartigen Einfluss auf die Geschicke seines Landes ausüben konnte.

    In die kulturgeschichtliche Atmosphäre in Mitteleuropa die ich früher erwähnt habe, wurde also der Prinz von Baden hineingeboren, dessen Individualität, ich, dem deutschen Historiker Karl Heyer anknüpfend, möchte als „quecksilbrig“, „merkurial“ bezeichnen, womit Heyer meint, daß sie dem Bereich des Mittleren, des sozial Heilsamen angemessen ist.

   Wenn ich dies über Kaspars Charakter und die Möglichkeiten für Baden und für Deutschland wenn er tatsächlich Großherzog von Baden geworden wäre, vorlege, dann will ich nicht in einer sentimentalen und morbiden Weise beklagen, daß Deutschland sozusagen seine Schicksalsfähre verpasst hat. Vielmehr geht es mir darum, den unterschiedlichen Charakter von Kaspar Hauser gegenüber Napoleon zu kontrastieren: den merkurialen gegenüber den martialischen. Bei dem Versuch, die Geschichte zu verstehen, scheint es mir wichtig, das Kontrafaktische, das Gegenteilige, in einem geschichtlichen Prozess zu erfassen: nicht nur zu sehen, welche Wege ein Volk oder eine Gesellschaft in einer bestimmten Epoche eingeschlagen hat oder als Reaktion auf eine bestimmte Krise eingeschlagen hat, sondern auch, welche Wege nicht genommen wurden – zu spüren oder zu sehen, was in einer bestimmten Epoche möglich war, welche Alternativen da waren. Auf diese Weise können wir etwas aus der Vergangenheit lernen, das sich auf die Gegenwart oder Zukunft anwenden lässt. Es ist doch immer möglich, nicht wahr, daß unterwegs auf einer Reise können wir feststellen, daß wir irgendwo, irgendwann vorhin falsch abgebogen sind, und dann können wir noch einmal darüber nachdenken, welche Abzweigung wir hätten nehmen sollen.

Im Jahr 1920 (22/23.10.1920 GA 200, Dornach) hat Rudolf Steiner über ein europäische Dreigliederung ausgeführt  – nicht die übliche europäische Dreigliederung, die sich auf den Osten, die Mitte und den Westen Europas bezieht, oder die andere Dreigliederung vom Kulturleben, Rechtsleben und Wirtschaftsleben sondern eine, die mit den Volksveranlagungen und Aufgaben dreier westeuropäischer Völker zu tun hat: der Deutschen, der Engländer und der Franzosen. Darüber hat der Historiker Karl Heyer Folgendes geschrieben; ich zitiere:

Die Deutschen haben die Veranlagung für das Geistesleben, die Franzosen für das Juristisch-Staatlich-Politische, die Engländer eine solche für das Wirtschaftliche…. Hier haben wir einen bedeutsamen Hinweis auf einen wichtigen Komplex, auf den es dabei ankäme. Die Geschichte des 19. Jahrhunderts erscheint also insofern als die  Geschichte dessen, was in Bezug auf dieses notwendig gewesene… Zusammenleben und Zusammenwirken der drei genannten europäischen Völker geschehen oder nicht geschehen, von der Entwicklung gleichsam erstrebt in Wirklichkeit aber kontrekarriert worden ist. Ganz auf der Linie eines solchen Zusammenwirkens und Sichergänzens der Völker hätte gelegen was wir … über ein Zusammenwirken  zwischen dem Politisch-Formgebenden des Franzosentums und dem Geistigen (bzw. Geistig-Sozialen!) Mitteleuropas meinten. Dem  hätte sich  als das Dritte  an- oder eingliedern mögen die Wirstschaftsmission der Briten, die von vornherein auf die grösste Weltweite veranlagt war…. Man kann tief empfinden, wie ein solcher  wahrhaft zeitgemässer und produktiver Zusammenklang der Völker und der sozialen Lebensgebiete von Europa ausgehend das...[moderne] Zeitalter sachgemäss hätte vorbereiten und in diesem dann heilbringend auch in die grösseren Weltzusammenhänge ausstrahlen können. Und gerade an einer solchen Gestaltung der Dinge hätten den denkbar grössten Anteil  diejenigen Impulse nehmen können, die von der von uns  gemeinten grossen spirituellen  Individualität [Kaspar Hauser] hatten ausgehen wollen. Hier wäre im eminentesten Sinne ihre Wirkenssphäre gewesen.

Also, wir können in den drei  Völkern, die Franzosen, die Briten und die Deutschen,  eine gewisse Dreifaltigkeit beobachten. Die drei Völker  haben alle keltische und germanische Wurzel, und auch einige römische Wurzel damit.

England

Allerdings ist noch ein wichtiges Element im britischen Volk  das der Wikinger. Diejenige Wikinger die nach die britische Insel und nach Irland gesegelt und sich niedergelassen haben waren Dänen und Norweger. Die Wikinger waren  von der harten Welt des kalten Nordens geprägt: kühn, erfindungsreich, rücksichtslos, gewinnsüchtig, und kommerziell orientiert -  Plünderer und Händler: „raiders and traders“, wie wir im Englischen sagen. Die waren Völker mit großer Fähigkeit zur Zusammenarbeit für gemeinsame Ziele, die sie z. B. für ihre Seereisen benötigten, aber die Wikinger waren auch Menschen mit großem persönlichen Ehrgeiz, so daß sie sich bei ihrer Ankunft in einem fremden Land oft trennten und eigenen Wege gingen.   Die Wikinger die nach England gesegelt sind versuchten 250 Jahre lang, England zu überfallen, dann sich dort niederzulassen und das ganze Land zu erobern. Im Jahr 1066 gelang es ihnen endlich. Die Normannen waren selbst Wikinger, die sich erst 150 Jahre zuvor im Nord-Frankreich niedergelassen hatten. In Nordengland, wo viele Wikinger einsiedelten, gibt es ein Sprichwort: „where there’s muck, there’s brass“, was soviel bedeutet wie „wo Dreck ist, d.h. guter Boden, da kann man Geld machen“. Die Wirtschaft, der Handel, der Land- und Eigentumsbesitz – all das wurde mit der Zeit zum Mittelpunkt der englischen Kultur. Entstanden ist das englische Parlament um den König mit Steuern zu versorgen. Die erste wirklich globale Handelsgesellschaft der Welt, die East India Company, war nicht nur eine Handelsgesellschaft, sondern sie darstellte fast ein Staat in sich selbst, mit eigener Armee, eigenen Hochschulen und anderen Einrichtungen. 250 Jahre lang war diese Gesellschaft, unterstützt von der Royal Navy, die treibende Kraft des britischen Empire. Ursprünglich aber hatte das wesentlich nicht so viel mit Religion oder Politik sondern mit dem Wirtschaftsleben zu tun.

    Anders als bei den Deutschen, die Philosophie ist keine englische Stärke und im Musikalischen 200 Jahre lang, in den Jahrhunderten der britischen imperialian Ausdehnung und Industrialiserung hindurch, brachten die Engländer keine nennenswerten Komponisten hervor. Anders als in Frankreich, haben die Engländer keinen Respekt vor den Intellektuellen. Im politischen Leben in England,  hat in den letzten drei Jahrhunderten wenig entwickelt. Die Engländer halten an ihren langjährigen Traditionen fest, an ihrer Monarchie, ihrem Respekt für die Zentralregierung, ihrem Zweiparteiensystem und ihren besonderen parlamentarischen Eigentümlichkeiten und Gewohnheiten. Sie neigen dazu, politischen Neuerungen zu misstrauen oder sie zu meiden. Im Gegensatz zu den Franzosen neigen die Engländer dazu, der Autorität zu gehorchen, auch wenn sie viel murren, und sie haben Revolutionen vermeidet. Die gelegentlichen Unruhen sind bald vorbei; der lang anhaltende Bergarbeiterstreik in  1984/85 war eine Ausnahme von der Regel. Nur einmal in englischen Geschichte, im Bürgerkrieg der 17. Jahrhunderts, sind sie als Volk politisch außer Kontrolle geraten. Dabei wurden sie unter anderem zum ersten Volk in Europa, das seinen König nach einem Prozess öffentlich hingerichtet haben.

Frankreich

Im deutschen Form des Namen des Landes der Franzosen  - Frankreich – steht das Wort ‚Reich‘. ‚Frank’ oder ,Franken’ heißt etymologisch kühn, wagemutig, offen oder frei. Das ‚Reich‘ in Frankreich erinnert uns daran, daß der französische Staat oder das französische Königreich bis in die Zeit Chlodwigs, des merowingischen Franken, und seine Beziehung zum Papsttum und zum Erbe Roms zurückreicht. Wir können an Karl den Großen und sein fränkisches Reich denken und daran, wie die Franken allmählich zu Franzosen wurden. Oder auch an Ludwig IX. und sein erhabenes Konzept des französischen Monarchen, daran auch, wie Philipp der Schöne (Philipp IV.)  die Anfänge des modernen, zentralisierten, bürokratischen Staates geschaffen hat und wie Ludwig XI. den französischen Staat konsolidiert hat. Dann kam der politische Absolutismus mit Franz I. und „L’etat c’est moi“ von Ludwig XIV. Dann die Vielfalt des einflussreichen französischen politischen Denkens im 18. Jahrhundert, mit Voltaire, Montesquieu, Condorcet, Desmoulins, Robespierre  und Babeuf bis hin zum Code Napoleon, Saint Simon,  de Tocqueville und Comte. Die Franzosen haben im Laufe der Jahrhunderte ein Genie für politisches, juristisches, militärisches und diplomatisches Denken bewiesen.

     Im Napoleon Bonaparte zeigte sich eine ausserordentliche Individualität ganz anderer Art im Vergleich mit derjenigen von Kaspar Hauser. Kein Franzose, sondern ein Korse, ein Mann, der buchstäblich vom Mittelmeerraum stammt, und dessen Vorname an die vulkanische Stadt Neapel erinnert und der das französische mit dem italienischen Element verbindet. Napoleon versucht, Europa auf eine Weise zu vereinen, die es seit der Römerzeit nicht mehr gegeben hat – d.h. mit den alten, traditionellen Methoden des Mars, Methoden die die Römer der Antike sicherlich anerkannt hätten. Wie die römische Legionäre, ehrten die Truppen Napoleons ihre Adlerstandarten. Zum Erstaunen seiner Zeitgenossen reiht Napoleon sich sehr schnell in die Riege der militärischen Genies ein, zu denen gehören Gestalten wie Alexander der Große, Hannibal, Julius Cäsar und Dschingis Khan. Dagegen ist Napoleon aber auch ein moderner Mensch, indem er aus keiner hohen Position in der Gesellschaft stammt, sondern  aus eigener Kraft seinen Weg an die Spitze geschafft hat. Nach seiner Niederlage im Jahr 1815, gefangen auf der britischen Atlantikinsel St. Helena, wie Prometheus an seinen Felsen gekettet, und im Rückblick auf eigenen Leben, betont Napoleon, daß sein wahres Ziel die Einigung Europas, die Schaffung eines neuen Europas, gewesen sei. Doch war Rudolf Steiner der Ansicht, daß Napoleon – so Steiner – „seine Lebensaufgabe vergessen“ hatte: Anstatt zu versuchen, die Europäer auf eine neue und moderne Art und Weise zusammenzubringen, die die wunderbare Vielfalt der europäischer Kulturen, Religionen und Lebensweisen friedlich widerspiegeln würde, und die alten dynastischen Staaten in neue und lebendige Strukturen merkurialisch verwandeln könnte – anstatt auf der französischen innewohnenden Veranlagung zum gesellschafts- politischen Denken aufzubauen und diese weiterzuentwickeln, versuchte Napoleon, die Europäer zusammenzuzwingen,  - angeblich im Namen der neuen Ideale der französischen Revolution  - und die Europäer in ein neues, intellektuell-geprägtes, einheitliches, effizientes System zu zwingen, ein System aber das gleichzeitig mit Blut, Familie und Dynastie eng verbunden war – die alten Merkmale der Welt des Mittelmeers, von Griechenland und Roms, der kriegerischen italienischen Fürsten der Renaissance und der konkurrierenden Blutlinien der Mafiafamilien. Napoleon setzt eigene Familienmitglieder an die Spitze mehrerer europäischer Staaten. Stéphanie de Beauharnais war auch eine von ihnen. Er wendet sich im Laufe seiner Karriere gegen die meisten europäischen Königreiche, einschließlich des Papsttums, versucht aber, sich selbst zu einem neuen, unheiligen römischen Kaiser von Europa zu machen. Er wagt es – dieses Phänomen Napoleon, das gleichzeitig so modern und doch so atavistisch erscheint – die Krone auf eigenes Haupt zu setzen. Er schafft das alte Heilige Römische Reich ab und errichtet stattdessen ein neues, vereinfachtes römisches Reich nach einem einheitlicheren Muster, das sich an den Praktiken des nachrevolutionären Frankreich orientiert. Was wird erzwungen aber durch die modernen Armeen und den Geist des Mars heißt… Uniformität. Diese war bereits im 18. Jahrhundert von Frankreich aus nach Mitteleuropa eingedrungen – im Militärgeist des Preußens von Friedrich dem Zweiten, zum Beispiel. Doch Napoleon versuchte, diese Uniformität und Zentralismus noch viel weiter und tiefer voranzutreiben.  In diesem Sinne sagte Rudolf Steiner daß Napoleon seine Mission vergessen hatte; er hatte vergessen, wozu er eigentlich gekommen war  nicht im geographischen Sinne sondern im geistigen –  und doch können wir in seiner Biographie und in seinen Worten und Taten, trotz seines großen Einsatzes von Gewalt, Beispiele dafür sehen, was er vergessen hatte.

In den Worten von Karl Heyer: „dieser Auftrag hing namentlich dahin in seiner kommenden Inkarnation einen wesentlichen Beitrag zu einer friedlichen Einigung Europas zu leisten….Nehmen wir nun aber einmal an…Napoleon hätte seinen Auftrag nicht vergessen, sondern wie vorgesehen in dessen wahren Sinne gewirkt, dann hätte er aus spirituellen Impulse eine Einigung  Europas herbeigeführt. ER, der selbst ja ein Umfassenderes repräsentiert als nur Frankreich, hätte aber offenbar das, was als besondere, politisch formende sozialbildnerische Fähigkeiten und Kräfte im Franzosentum lebt, in den Dienst einer grossen zeitgemässen Zukunftsmission gestellt und so von dieser Seite her das neue… Zeitalter vorberitet und damit zugleich das, was dessen soziale Auswirking ist…Napoleon wäre, so können wir es vielleicht ausdrücken, ein wahrer „Vater Europas“ geworden. An diese Wirksamkeit Napoleons hätte jene grosse Individualität [Kaspar Hauser], die sich 1812 in dem badischen Erbprinzen, Napoleon schicksalhaft so nahe, verkörperte, anknüpfen können, sie in voller Harmonie  mit ihr weiterführen und ergänzen aus der Kraft des wahren mitteleuropäischen Geistes, aus der Kraft insbesondere des deutschen Geisteslebens  heraus. So hätten dem mehr Politisch-Formhaften starke spirituelle Inhalte gegeben werden können und dem Ganzen eine Wendung in das Soziale, eben im Sinne eines Übergangs zu dem bevorstehenden neuen Zeitalter… Aber Napoleon „vergass“. Er wurde nicht ein wahrer „Vater Europas“, sondern der vielfache Inaugurator des Gegenteils oder der Gegenbilder dessen, was in seinem wahren „Auftrag“ gelegen hätte, ein Inaugurator nämlich des Materialismus, des Militarismus, des Nationalismus, ein mächtiger Förderer des Einheitsstaats im funktionellen Sinne. …Napoleons Vergessen  liegt ganz auf der gleichen Linie  wie die Fehlentwicklung der französischen Revolution, deren Erbe er bekanntlich wurde. Sein Vergessen und diese Fehlentwicklung gehören eng zusammen. Und zusammen erzeugten sie jene Zerr- und Gegenbilder dessen, was aus der grossen positiven Inspiration  des Zeitalters hätte inauguriert werden sollen, und machten es dessen Gegnern, die aus ihrem egoistischen Machtstreben heraus eine solche neue Welt gar nicht wollten, leicht, zum Kampfe gegen die Revolution und Napoleon mit vieler Berechtigung aufzurufen und diesen Kampf schliesslich zum siegreichen Ende zu bringen.“

    Was ist dann in Frankreich, Deutschland und Großbritannien durch das Vergessen Napoleons und die Beseitigung Kaspar Hausers geschehen? Karl Heyers Antwort, die mir sehr treffend zu sein scheint, ist Folgendes:

    Frankreich kam nicht hinaus über seinen „Etatismus“, und es wurde zum grössten Impulsator des Nationalismus. Statt eine grosse europäische politische Mission auszuüben, verfiel es der routinehaften   Politikasterei. Deutschland fand nicht einen geistgemässen Weg vom  deutschen Idealismus  und vom Goetheanismus in das Politisch-Soziale. Die Impulse der grossen Individualität, die sich hier verkörpert hatte [d.h. in Kaspar Hauser], blieben unausgelebt, und die Wirkungen davon erstanden auf allen Gebieten. Englands… Wirtschaftsmission wurde zunehmend  in den Dienst einseitiger Machttendenzen im Sinne eines weltwirtschaftlichen Imperialismus gestellt und geriet immer mehr in den Bannkreis materialistischer, die Welt gewissermassen wirtschaftlich „überfremdender“ Impulse.

[Bild: David Newbatt]   

Kaspar wurde geboren, als Napoleon im Alter von 43 Jahren gerade in die Phase eingetreten war, die manche Biographieberater als die Mars-Phase der menschliche Biographie bezeichnen, d.h. die Zeit von 42-49, die für viele Menschen die Zeit der Krise mitten im Leben darstellt. Als Napoleon 1821 gestorben ist, befand sich Kaspar, damals 9 Jahre alt, in der Merkur-Phase seines eigenen Lebens. Die Merkur-Phase dauert von 7-14 Jahre alt. Es war für Kaspar eine Zeit, die er in fast völliger Dunkelheit und Stille durchleben musste.

     33 Jahre nach dem Tod Napoleons haben die Westmächte England und Frankreich, unter der Führung von Kaiser Napoleon (III.) dem Dritten mit dem Krimkrieg (1853-65) ihren Angriff auf Russland – die gleiche Aggression die Napoleon Bonaparte führte als Kaspar Hauser 1812 geboren wurde – und 1860 führten die beiden Mächte gemeinsam Krieg gegen China. 33 Jahre nach Kaspar Hausers Tod hat Bismarcks Preußen im Österreichisch-Preußischen Krieg von 1866 Österreich besiegt. Man kann sich fragen: War dies vielleicht die Folge der Abwesenheit in Mitteleuropa des heilenden Einfluss, dessen Möglichkeit 33 Jahre zuvor abgeschafft worden war? Das dualistische Staatswesen, das als Österreich-Ungarn bekannt ist, war eines der Ergebnisse dieses Krieges.  Es basierte auf der gemeinsamen Herrschaft von zwei Volksgruppen – von den Deutschen und den Magyaren – über viele andere, kleinere Gruppen und führte schließlich zu dem politischen Konflikt auf dem Balkan, der 1914 den Auslöser für den Ersten Weltkrieg gebildet hat.

    Es könnte sein daß Napoleon dazu bestimmt war, seine Rolle in der europäischen Geschichte zu spielen, bevor der Merkur-Geist Kaspar Hausers seinen heilenden Impuls zur Geltung bringen konnte. Wir haben es hier also mit zwei gegensätzlichen Figuren zu tun, einer Mars-Figur und einer Merkur-Figur, deren Schicksale dennoch durch die Französin Stéphanie de Beauharnais miteinander verbunden sind.

1836 wurde in England der erste Band eines bemerkenswerten und äußerst komplexen Buch über die Geschichte der Religionen in aller Welt und die Verbindungen untereinander veröffentlicht. Der Autor war ein liberaler Richter, Godfrey Higgins, der vier Monate vor Kaspar Hauser gestorben ist. Higgins war Freimaurer und stand in enger Verbindung mit dem herausragendsten englischen Freimaurer seiner Zeit, dem Herzog von Sussex, dem sechsten Sohn von König Georg dem dritten. Vom Jahre 1813 war der Herzog 30 Jahre lang bis zu seinem Tod Großmeister der englischen Freimaurerei. Er betrachtete sich selbst als kosmopolitischer Mensch der Aufklärung und setzte sich dafür ein, alle verbliebenen christlichen Bezuge aus der Freimaurerei und ihren Ritualen auszulöschen, nicht zuletzt, um die nichteuropäische Prinzen und Herrschern im Britischen Empire den Beitritt zur englischen Freimaurerei zu erleichtern. Nach Godfrey Higgins’ ‚bescheidene‘ Meinung waren er selbst  und der Herzog die sachkundigsten Freimaurer in England.

     Sein Buch, an dem er 20 Jahre lang täglich 10 Stunden arbeitete, hat den Titel Anacalypsis und sollte zeigen, daß alle Religionen einen gemeinsamen Ursprung haben. Ein Hauptmerkmal dieses einflußreichen Buches (unter anderen wurde die Gründerin der Thesophischen Gesellschaft, H.P. Blavatsky, durch das Buch viel beeinflußt) betraf den so genannten Neros-Zyklus von 600 Jahren oder 7200 Sonnenmonaten (solar Monaten?) in der menschlichen Entwicklung. Dabei handelte es sich um einen Zyklus von Konjunktionen der Sonne und des Mondes; nach 600 Jahren würden sich Sonne, Mond und Sterne alle in den gleichen zu einander relativen Stellungen befinden wie 600 Jahre zuvor. Higgins, der sich auf frühere Schriftsteller und Astronomen gestützt hat, z.B. Flavius Josephus und Giovanni Cassini, berichtet, daß etwa alle 600 Jahre ein bemerkenswerter Führer, Lehrer oder Reformer geboren wird – ein Avatarfigur, sozusagen. Der Neros-Zyklus wird nicht von diesen besonderen Menschen verursacht; der Zyklus bereitet sozusagen den geistigen Boden der Menschheit vor, auf dem solche großen Persönlichkeiten wirken können. Higgins spricht von dem persischen König Kyros dem Grossen und von Buddha, Apollonius, Jesus und Mohammed, auch von den religiösen Reformern um das Jahr 1200 nach Christus, und der nachfolgende Zyklus, sagt er, war um 1800 begonnen. Der Neros-Zyklus war keineswegs weit bekannt, außer bei Esoterikern oder Forschern wie Higgins selbst.

     Thomas Henry Burgoyne, ein solcher Esoteriker später im 19. Jahrhundert, hat auch viel von dem Higgins-Buch gelernt.  1885/6 hat er geschrieben daß die großen Individualitäten, die mit der Vollendung eines Neros-Zyklus erscheinen „vergleichsweise unbekannt in der Welt ihres Wirken entfalten  werden; diese Menschen werden von denen, die sie kennen, als gewöhnliche Individuen angesehen werden; sie werden die übelste Verfolgung durch das Element erleiden, das die Kraft der Prinzipien fürchtet, die diese besonderen Menschen hinter sich lassen werden. Ihre besten Freunde werden, obwohl sie über das wahre Wesen dieser Menschen im Unklaren sind, ihre Wirklichkeit erst dann begreifen, wenn sie weggegangen sind … erst dann werden diesen Menschen vollständig bekannt sein, wenn sie das Tal des Todesschattens durchschritten haben und diese Welt keine Macht mehr hat, sie zu schmeicheln oder sie zu verurteilen.“

    Thomas Henry Burgoyne war jedoch selbst kein Heiliger. Er war eine der führenden Persönlichkeiten einer kurzlebigen, aber unheimlich einflußreichen anglo-amerikanischen okkulten Gruppe in den 1880er Jahren, der hieß der Hermetischen Bruderschaft von Luxor. Das Wesentliche dabei ist, daß solche Esoteriker, ob in den oberen Rängen der Gesellschaft wie der Herzog von Sussex und Higgins oder von niedrigerem Status, wie Burgoyne, sich dieses Neros-Zyklus und des Auftretens großer Lehrer alle 600 Jahre seit mindestens 600 v. Chr. bewußt waren. Sie wußten, daß um 1800 eine oder mehrere große avatarähnliche Figuren auftauchen würden, um einen neuen kulturellen Impuls zu bringen. Wenn man über ein solches Wissen verfügt, kann man es je nach dem eigenen ethischen Standard nutzen, um solche Gestalten zu identifizieren und zu unterstützen oder sie zu blockieren oder sogar zu töten.

    Graf Ludwig Polzer-Hoditz, einer der engsten Schüler Rudolf Steiners hat im November 1916 geschrieben, daß „jene Kreise, die alles verheimlichen und auch heute noch versuchen zu verheimlichen, was im Zusammenhang mit dem Schicksal von Kaspar Hauser geschehen ist, jene Mitglieder der westlichen Logen und Jesuiten sind, die seit mehr als 150 Jahren, aber nachweislich seit Januar 1802 in ihren führenden Organisationen zusammenarbeiten“…. In Süddeutschland, so Polzer,  war „der geistige Boden gut vorbereitet worden durch all jene Persönlichkeiten, die wir als Goethe, Schiller, Hölderlin, Herder und andere kennen. Kaspar Hauser sollte gleichsam alles um sich versammeln, was in diesem so vorbereiteten geistigen Boden existierte. Aber das war von jenen Kreisen (den westlichen Logen und den Jesuiten) nicht gewollt. Sie konnten ein zur Bewusstheit erwachendes Zentrum nicht dulden, wenn sie nicht auf ihre Macht und ihre Machtansprüche verzichten wollten. Ein Geist wie derjenige Goethes macht ihnen Angst. Die Herausforderung von Napoleon hat diesen Kreisen sich zu einem Bündnis für die angestrebte Weltherrschaft auf den Gebieten der Ideologie und des Handels zu bilden, gezwungen. Napoleon hatte ihre Bemühungen bereits vereitelt; er war es, der die beiden Strömungen im Grunde zu einer Vereinigung gezwungen hat. Die ideologischen und spirituellen Angelegenheiten wurden ausschließlich in die Hände der Jesuiten gelegt; die kommerziellen in die Hände der anglo-amerikanischen Logen des Westens.“  [zitiert aus Tradowsky, Kaspar Hauser oder das Ringen um den Geist]

    Es ist höchst bemerkenswert, daß sich die Freimaurer in Großbritannien während des heftigen und erbitterten Kampfes zwischen der Freimaurerei und dem Papsttum während des 19. Jahrhunderts 1755 in zwei rivalisierende Fraktionen gespalten hatten und auch die Gesellschaft Jesu 1773 vom Papsttum selbst verboten worden war, und dann, genau in der kurzen Zeit nach dem Sturz Napoleons und nach Kaspar Hausers Geburt, 1813-1816, wurden die Freimaurer in Großbritannien 1813 von zwei Söhnen des Königs wiedervereinigt. Das wurde von dem Herzog von Sussex und seinem Bruder, dem Herzog von Kent, durchgeführt; der Herzog von Kent  war der Vater der späteren Königin Victoria. Nach diese Wiedervereingung der englischen Freimaurer 1813, dann kam die Wiedereinsetzung der Gesellschaft Jesu vom Papst im Jahre 1816.

    Polzer-Hoditz schreibt daß was „durch Kaspar Hauser beabsichtigt war, wurde durch die Menschheit zu Fall gebracht. Auf diesen ‚geplanten‘ Trümmern hat das Schwarz-Weiß-Prinzip die Oberhand gewonnen.“ durch die Menschheit zu Fall gebracht   - das heißt durch die Pläne dieser beiden Gruppen, die Freimaurer und die Jesuiten. Heute hat sich die Lage zwar etwas geändert, aber nicht in ihren Grundzügen. Das Papsttum, das seit dem Zweiten Vatikanischen Konzil Ende der 1950er Jahre zunehmend von der Freimaurerei unterwandert wurde, hat sich insbesondere unter Papst Franziskus den sogenannten globalistischen Werten des Westens, d.h. der führenden Freimaurerländer USA, Großbritannien und Frankreich, angeschlossen.  Inzwischen bilden Russland und China den anderen Pol des von Polzer-Hoditz erwähnten dualistischen Schwarz-Weiß-Prinzips. Das war nicht von Russland  gewollt. 2000 hat Putin  US Präsident Bill Clinton gefragt ob Russland  ein NATO Mitglied werden dürfen und Clinto hat gesagt „Nein, Sie [Russland] sind zu groß.“ Nach 2008 und besonders nach 2014 wurde vom Westen her zunehmend Russland nach Osten abgedrängt und zusammen mit China erzwungen.

    Heutzutage sprechen Russland und China von einer neuen Weltordnung der Multipolarität, die ihnen zufolge die behauptete unipolare Vorherrschaft des Westens ablöst. In Wirklichkeit aber vertreten die Führerschaften der beiden östlichen Giganten nichts Neues, sondern nur Formen des alten politischen Autoritarismus und der ideologischen Starrheit, die sich neue technologische Masken überziehen. Währenddessen von innen heraus verrottet allmählich das von den USA geführte Imperium des Westens und seiner Satelliten in Europa, das selbst keinerlei neue gesellschaftspolitische oder wirtschaftliche Ideen entwickelt hat. 1916 hat Polzer-Hoditz geschrieben daß die Pläne der beiden Gruppen, der Freimaurer und der Jesuiten, der beiden veralteten hierarchischen Organisationen,  „werden … zu immer tragischeren Katastrophen führen, weil keiner von ihnen der menschlichen Entwicklung Rechnung trägt.“ „Die Freimaurerei“ – heute heißt,  gleichfalls wie zu Kaspar Hausers Zeiten, Großbritannien und Amerika und in geringerem Maße Frankreich, während der jesuitische Impuls heute hat sich nochmal nach Osten „verlagert“ sozusagen, nicht nach Russland und Preussen wie im 18. Jahrhundert,  sondern diesmal nach Russland und China, selbstverständlich nicht die Jesuiten selbst als Priester, sondern der jesuitische Impuls in Gestalt von politisch-theologischen Obrigkeitsbürokraten – ein jesuitähnliche Impuls, unterstützt von einer ausgefeilten Technologie westlicher Ursprungs die zu Überwachungszwecken verwendet wird.

    Was einen wirklich neuen, einen echten von Mitteleuropa ausgehenden Impuls auf dem Kontinent angeht, so hat es seit den 1830er und 40er Jahren keinen solchen Impuls mehr gegeben. Rudolf Steiners Bewegung für einen dreigliedrigen sozialen Organismus war zwar ein solcher, aber die Bewegung hat nur vier Jahre, von 1919 bis 1922, gedauert. Ansonsten sind die einzigen „neuen“ umfassenden sozialen Impulse, die aus der Mitte Europas, aus Deutschland und Italien, ausgingen, der Kommunismus und der Faschismus gewesen. Und meines Erachtens, hatten beide nicht wirklich etwas mit den eigentlichen Geister ihrer Völker zu tun. Der in diesen beiden innewohnende Geist ist rein atavistisch – purer Kollektivismus und Autoritarismus. Leider ist dies das geschichtliche Szenario, mit dem wir uns seit der Ermordung von Kaspar Hauser, dem Sieg der Reaktion und dem Aufstieg der totalitären sozialen Formen nach 1848 auseinandersetzen müssen.

Zum Thema der Weltmacht

Zu diesem Hauptthema der Weltmacht gehört die Rivalität zwischen Frankreich und England.  Der Krieg zwischen England und Frankreich der 1815 in der Schlacht bei Waterloo beendet ist, erschien damals als nur der kürzlichste der vielen Kriege zwischen den Engländern und den Franzosen zu sein – obwohl er sich eigentlich als der letzte herausstellte. Die Rivalität und erbitterte Feindschaft zwischen den englischen und französischen Eliten, die ihre eigenen Völker wiederholt in diesen langen und zerstörerischen Kriegen hineinzogen, ist wie schon gesagt im Jahr 1066 mit der normannischen Eroberung Englands begonnen. Sie setzte sich mit den hartnäckigen Bemühungen der anglonormannischen Elite um die Eroberung Frankreichs während des Mittelalters fort  - die können als ein langer Rachefeldzug seitens der anglonormannische  Elite für den Verlust der französischen Gebiete angesehen werden  - und nach dem Scheitern dieser Bemühungen hat das Ringen zwischen die beiden Eliten noch weitergegangen  mit dem bereits erwähnten diesmal erfolgreichen Streben der britischen Elite, die Vorherrschaft Frankreichs in Europa zu bekämpfen und die Stellung  Frankreichs in der Welt überhaupt im  18. und 19. Jahrhundert umzustürzen.

   Man kann sehen, wie der Kampf zwischen diesen beiden Kulturen, die keltische, germanische und einige wikinger Wurzeln haben, Teil der grossen, umfassenden, tiefgreifenden Bewegung der europäischen Geschichte bildete, die Bewegung oder die Welle die langsam vorgerückt hat vom südlichen Mittelmeerraum in der römischen Zeit allmählich nach Norden, nördlich der Alpen in den germanischen Raum vordringend, dann im Mittelalter nach Frankreich und die Niederlande und schließlich nach der britischen Insel. Anthroposophisch ausgedrückt hat dies mit dem Übergang im frühen 15. Jahrhundert von der Epoche der Verstandes- oder Gemütsseele zur Epoche der Bewusstseinsseele zu tun, die auch vom 4. zum 5. postatlantischen Zeitalter oder vom Widder- zum Fische-Zeitalter genannt werden.

    Wie gesagt, war Napoleon in Moskau, als ihm die Nachricht von Kaspars Geburt am 29. September 1812 überbracht wurde. Napoleon hoffte, durch seinen Einmarsch in Russland das Bündnis zwischen seinen beiden großen Weltrivalen Russland und England zu brechen. Napoleon wußte auch, daß die Grundlage von Englands wirtschaftlicher Macht in dem Handel mit Indien lag und daß er, wenn er Russland erobern könnte, die Briten in Indien besiegen und diejenige französische Stellung in Indien wiederherstellen könnte, die Frankreich im Siebenjährigen Krieg in den 1750er Jahren verloren hatte. Die Briten in Indien zu besiegen, war das Endziel seiner Expedition nach Ägypten im Jahr 1799 gewesen, die mit einem Fehlschlag beendet ist.

    Der Einmarsch seiner Grande Armee in Russland ist auch mit einem Fehlschlag beendet und 1815 wurde Napoleon von der englischen Regierung nach St. Helena geschickt. Für London und Wien schien das Ungeheuer endlich besiegt zu sein.  Doch im folgenden Jahr, 1816, tauchten Nachrichten auf, die – für diejenigen, die sie deuten konnten – indirekt darauf hindeuteten, daß Napoleons Adoptivenkel, der Sohn von Stéphanie von Baden, nicht, wie vorher angekündigt, kurz nach seiner Geburt gestorben war, sondern irgendwo in Gefangenschaft gehalten noch lebte, wahrscheinlich in Süddeutschland. Auch Napoleon  - nur 47 Jahre alt  – lebte noch, und daher darstellte er für seine Feinde in London, Wien und Paris potenziell eine grosse Gefahr. London und Wien wollte nur Ordnung, Stabilität, Ruhe in Europa. Überall war die alte Ordnung wiederhergestellt, die Aristokraten saßen wieder fest im Sattel. Deswegen lebte 1816 in einem „vergoldeten Käfig“ in Schönbrunn Palast in Wien unter den wachsamen Augen Prinz Metternichs gehalten -  – der fünfjähriger Napoléon François Joseph Charles Bonaparte,  Napoleons eigener Sohn, der ehemalige König von Rom und jetzt der sogenannte Herzog von Reichstadt  – wie Kaspar Hauser, auch einer Spross von zwei Kulturen. Für London, Wien und Paris war es äußerst wichtig, daß jeder, der in irgendeiner Weise mit Napoleon in Verbindung stand, daran gehindert wurde, den Weg zu einem europäischen Thron zu finden.

     Napoleon ist 1821 gestorben doch 1830 kam es zu einer wichtigen Entwicklung in Bezug auf diese Weltmachtwurzel zwischen Frankreich und England: Die so genannte Julirevolution ist in Paris ausgebrochen und stürzte Lord Stanhopes Freund, den ultrakonservativen französisichen König Karl X., der letzte König der Bourbondynastie, der dann nach England zum zweiten Mal in seines Lebens ins Exil fliehen musste. Aber danach hat kein Napoleonide den französischen Thron bestiegen; der neue König der Franzosen war Louis Philippe, der Sohn des ehemaligen Herzogs von Orléans. 1789 hatte der Herzog die Revolution gegen seinen eigenen Bruder Ludwig XVI. unterstützt. Der Herzog von Orléans war ein führender Freimaurer gewesen; ein guter Freund des englischen Establishments und hatte große Geldbeträge von den Briten erhalten.

    Die Briten waren sehr stark in die Vorbereitung der ersten französischen Revolution verwickelt, nicht zuletzt durch diesen revolutionären, anglophilen Herzog von Orléans.  Um etwas von diesem Hintergrund zu ergreifen, sollen wir Graf Stanhopes Stellung im Geflecht der britischen Weltpolitik und der Interessen des britischen Empires verstehen.

Der Lord Stanhope in der Geschichte Kaspar Hausers war der vierte Graf Stanhope. Die Politik seines in Schweizer Genf aufgewachsenen Vater, dem dritten Graf, war radikal und sogar revolutionär. Der dritte Graf Stanhope Charles war ein Mensch der rationalistischen Aufklärung, ein Fan von Voltaire, Rousseau und dem revolutionären Frankreich überhaupt und wurde von vielen in England als exzentrischer Radikaler und sogar als Volksverräter angesehen. Mit Deutschland hatte er wenig zu tun. Sein Sohn Philip Henry, der 4. Graf Stanhope, war dagegen stark von seinen Erfahrungen im deutschsprachigen Raum in der Zeit von 1801 bis 1835 geprägt und stand sozusagen mit beiden Beinen in der Welten der Aufklärung und der Romantik. Obwohl er einige französische Freunde und Bekannte hatte, lehnte er Frankreich als Staat entschieden ab und sprach sich sogar einmal für dessen vollständige Auflösung aus. Im Gegensatz zu seinem Vater, und vielleicht als Reaktion auf dessen strenge radikale Politik, betrachtete Philip Henry Stanhope sich selbst als ein „alter Tory aus der Schule von Mr. Pitt“. D.h. vom Premierminister William Pitt dem Jünger. Im britischen Parlament hatte dieser Stanhope wenig politisches Talent. Er war ein ebenso exzentrischer Ultrakonservativer wie sein Vater ein exzentrischer Ultraradikaler gewesen war; fast alle politische Anliegen unterstützt von Philp Henry sind gescheitert. Das Scheitern seiner politischen Karriere im Parlament war ein weiterer Grund, warum er sich für die Laufbahn eines politischen Agenten für die britische Regierung auf dem Kontinent entschieden hat. Der lange Streit mit seinem Vater hatte ihn seiner finanziellen Sicherheit beraubt. Seine wachsende Familie mußte er ernähren und außer den gesellschaftlichen Umgangsformen eines Aristokraten zusammen mit einer gewissen klugen Schlauigkeit in seiner Manipulation der Gefühle vieler Menschen und auch eine Begabung, sich Fremdsprachen anzueignen, hatte er keine Talente.

     Stanhopes Familie war durch Heirat eng mit der Familie des berühmten, im 1805 gestorben britischen Premierministers William Pitt dem Jüngeren verwandt. Stanhopes Urgroßmutter war die Tochter von Thomas Pitt, der das Vermögen der Familie Pitt in Indien durch den Erwerb eines riesigen Diamanten gemacht hatte. Stanhopes Halbschwester Hester, 17 Jahre jünger als Pitt und eine merkwürdigen Persönlichkeit an sich, viel tapferer als ihr Bruder, war mütterlicherseits die Nichte von William Pitt und hatte eine sehr enge, aber nicht sexuelle persönliche Beziehung zu dem Premierminister. Tatsächlich lebte sie bei ihm zwei Jahre vor Pitts Tod als  persönliche Sekretärin und Haushälterin. Durch ihre familiäre Verbindung zu den Pitts und ihre persönliche Beziehung zu William Pitt, dem Mann an der Spitze der britischen Regierung, konnte die kluge und wagemutige Hester 1801 heimlich die Flucht ihres Halbbruders Philip Henry vor dem tyrannischen Vater nach Deutschland arrangieren, wo Philip Henry in Erlangen* sein Studium fortsetzte und Deutsch lernte. Dies war ein weiterer Grund, warum Stanhope’s Vater William Pitt hasste: Er hatte sich in den Streit zwischen Vater und Sohn eingemischt.

[*Warum Süddeutschland und Erlangen? Das hat auch mit Pitt und mit Hester zu tun.  Francis Jackson war ein Freund von ihr und auch ein Diplomat in Pitts Dienst. Als junger Mann hat Jackson in Erlangen  studiert und dort ein gutes Verhältnis zur Markgräfin Sophie-Karoline von Ansbach-Beyreuth pflegte.]

     William Pitt der Jünger war ein politisches Genie, dessen persönliche Gaben diejenigen  seines Vaters William Pitt des Älteren, des ersten Graf von Chatham in den Schatten stellten. Pitt der Ältere hatte den britischen Staat im Siebenjährigen Krieg gegen Frankreich in den 1750er Jahren geführt. Tatsächlich waren beide Pitts Kriegsführer, aber im Vergleich mit sein sehr tüchtiger Sohn, der die imperiale Politik seines Vaters nur festigt und weiterführt hat, kann man den älteren Pitt mehr als den Architekt des britischen Empires betrachten. Der ältere Pitt war Mitglied einer politischen Fraktion, die als die Patriot Whigs bekannt war, auch Cobhams Cubs (Jungtiere?) genannt. Ein „cub“ ist ein junger Bär, und „Cobham“ hier bezieht sich auf Lord Cobham  – Richard Temple, den Anführer der Fraktion. Er war der Befehlshaber des älteren Pitt in der Armee gewesen und war auch eine Art Ersatzvater für ihn. Die Familien Pitt und Cobham waren auch durch Heirat miteinander verbunden wie auch die Pitts und die Stanhopes. Dieser Lord Cobham kann als der eigentliche Architekt des britischen Empire bezeichnet werden. Er verfolgte ganz bewusst die Politik, Frankreich als Weltmacht zu verdrängen – die Franzosen überall auf der Welt anzugreifen und zu besiegen und ihre Kolonien und Territorien zu erobern, so wie Rom systematisch versucht hatte, Karthago zu besiegen und zu verdrängen. Cobham verbreitete seine Ideen über seine Fraktion und vor allem über William Pitt den Älteren. Dieser Pitt der Ältere hat Cobham als seinen Mentor betrachtet.

    Man kann sagen, daß William Pitt der Jüngere das Empire gerettet und den Grundstein für den größten Sieg über den alten Feind Frankreich und dessen phänomenalen Führer Napoleon gelegt hat, aber es ist auch nicht übertrieben zu sagen, daß William Pitt der Ältere das Empire überhaupt erst geschaffen hat. Dies ist zweifellos der Grund dafür, daß Großbritanniens führende außenpolitische Denkfabrik Chatham House nach ihm benannt ist und in seinem ehemaligen Londoner Haus noch tagt (10 St. James Square).

William Pitt der Jüngere war zwar ein fortschrittlicherer und sozialliberalerer Politiker als sein Vater, aber auch ein Imperialist und ein Tory. Er fortsetzte die Weltpolitik und die Empire-Idee seines Vaters, und daher auch das Konzept Cobhams: nämlich, England muss das Gleichgewicht der Kräfte in Europa halten, nicht zuletzt um zu verhindern, daß eine europäische Macht in der Lage ist, auf dem Land- oder Seeweg, Englands Kontrolle über Indien zu bedrohen. Auf diese Weise soll England weiterhin die Welt beherrschen. So wie Pitt der Ältere den Sieg Großbritanniens über das königliche Frankreich im Siebenjährigen Krieg, in Nordamerika und Indien anführte, so führte sein Sohn Pitt der Jüngere den Kampf Großbritanniens gegen das revolutionäre und dann napoleonische Frankreich. Wie gesagt, als großer Bewunderer des revolutionären Frankreichs, Stanhopes Vater Charles hasste Pitt; im Gegenteil, aus Verbitterung über seinen Vater und aus Abscheu vor dem revolutionären Frankreich, kannte sein Sohn Philip Henrys Bewunderung für Pitt keine Grenzen.

    Nach dem Sturz Napoleons 1815, als Frankreich aus Sicht der britischen Elite sozusagen unter Kontrolle gebracht worden war, können wir beobachten, wie sich die Interessen der konservativen konterrevolutionären britischen und französischen Eliten in den folgenden Jahrzehnten immer mehr deckten, bis zu dem Punkt – 33 Jahre nach dem Tode Napoleons – an dem Großbritannien und Frankreich 1854 im Krimkrieg eine gemeinsame amphibische Invasion auf der Krim-Halbinsel durchgeführt haben. Dann in den 1860ern auch gemeinsam Invasionen in China und in Mexiko durchgeführt haben. Die alte Spannungen zwischen den beiden Mächten blieben jedoch bestehen und führten 1898 in der Faschoda-Krise in Ostafrika fast zu einem Krieg zwischen den beiden. Dennoch kam es dann 1904 zum Entente Cordiale-Abkommen und 1914 zum Zusammenschluss gegen Deutschland. Während des Ersten Weltkrieges kooperieren die beiden westlichen Alliierten unter anderem bei der Aufteilung des Nahen Ostens im Rahmen des berüchtigten Sykes-Picot-Plans und bei der Sabotage der Bemühungen der weißen Armeen, die Bolschewiki im russischen Bürgerkrieg zu besiegen. Die Folgen dieser beiden Aktionen sind noch heute in Gaza und in der Ukraine zu spüren. 1939 zögerte Frankreich, ohne britische Führung, Massnahmen gegen Deutschland zu ergreifen.

    Im Juni 1940 haben Teile der britischen Elite mit Unterstützung Churchills sogar vorgeschlagen, die beiden Länder zu fusionieren, um Deutschland besser bekämpfen zu können, aber es war zu spät; die französische Streitkräfte sind zusammengebrochen. 1947 setzten die Amerikaner Frankreich unter Druck, dem UNO-Teilungsplan für Palästina und der Gründung des Staates Israel zuzustimmen. Das anschließende französische Votum für den UNO-Plan war entscheidend. Auch wenn ihre Rivalität im Nahen Osten anhielt, haben die Franzosen und die Anglophonen den Staat Israel seither grundsätzlich unterstützt. Heute sehen wir, im Nahost und in der Ukraine wie Macrons Regierung immer noch versucht, ihr Gesicht zu wahren, indem sie allerlei möglichen französischen außenpolitischen Initiativen vorschlägt, aber letztendlich hat sich Macron auf die Seite der USA und der NATO geschlagen. Macron und andere französische Staatsoberhäupter vor ihm und die französische Elite im Allgemeinen haben versucht, die Verherrlichung Frankreichs stellvertretend durch den französischen Einfluß in der EU fortzusetzen. Mittlerweile, haben die Briten für den Austritt aus der EU entschieden haben. Letztlich aber haben sich aber sowohl Großbritannien als auch Frankreich den USA und den amerikanischen außenpolitischen Imperativen de facto unterworfen – so wie Bayern und Baden sich Napoleon unterworfen haben.

    Der Krieg Englands gegen das revolutionäre und napoleonische Frankreich, der mit dem Sieg bei Waterloo 1815 scheinbar seinen Höhepunkt erreicht hat, war nur ein Teil eines viel längeren Kampfes zwischen den beiden Völkern, ein Kampf der über 800 Jahre zurückreichte und im 18. Jahrhundert zu einem Kampf um die Weltmacht geworden war. Die britische Elite hatte beobachtet, wie das französische militärische und politische Genie immer wieder sehr talentierte Persönlichkeiten hervorgebracht hatte, die eine echte Herausforderung für die englischen Pläne und Ambitionen darstellten: Philipp der Schöne, Jeanne d’Arc, Franz I., die Kardinäle Richelieu und Mazarin, Ludwig XIV., Lafayette, Napoleon Bonaparte. Nach 1815 schien es immer möglich, daß Frankreich eine weitere solche Figur hervorbringen könnte. In diesem langen geschichtlichen Kampf, der sicherlich nicht bei Waterloo zu Ende kam, spielte Philip Henry der vierte Graf Stanhope, nicht zuletzt durch seine Familienverbindungen mit den Pitts, eine nicht unbedeutende Rolle für die alte hierarchische Ordnung Englands die noch einhundert Jahre existieren würde.

Nachwort  Ich komme jetzt Schluss.

Im Jahr 2012 gedachten alle, die sich für die Geschichte von Kaspar Hauser interessieren, seiner Geburt in Karlsruhe 200 Jahre zuvor. Im Jahr 2028 werden wir den zweihundertsten Jahrestag seines Erscheinens auf dem Unschlittplatz in Nürnberg begehen, dem Platz, der nach dem Kerzenwachs benannt wurde, das aus dem Schlachten von Unschuldigen stammt. Im Jahr 2033, 200 Jahre nach seinem Tod in Ansbach in der Nähe des Denkmals zum Ansbacher Dichter, Johann Peter Uz, der am Reichsgericht in Nürnberg tätig war, werden wir uns an Kaspars trauriges Ende fünf Jahre nach seinem bemerkenswerten Auftritt zu Pfingsten auf dem Unschlittplatz erinnern. Dieses Gebiet, das die geographischen Orten der 21 Jahren des Lebens  Kaspar Hausers – Karlsruhe – Beuggen – Pilsach – Nürnberg – Ansbach – umfasst, liegt im Herzen Europas.

    Im Jahr 2033 werden auch Christen auf der ganzen Welt der 2000 Jahre seit den zentralen Ereignissen gedenken, die das Christentum ausmachen: die Kreuzigung, Auferstehung und Himmelfahrt Jesu Christi und dann das Pfingstereignis 10 Tage nach seiner Himmelfahrt. Diese Osterereignisse bildeten den Höhepunkt der dreijährigen öffentlichen Predigt-, Lehr- und Heilstätigkeit Christi, die mit seiner Taufe im Jordan im Jahr 30 begonnen hatte. Und im Jahr 2030, werden wir auch dieser drei Jahren die mit der Taufe begonnen haben, gedenken. Wir sehen auch, wie seit mindestens 10 Jahren nun, daß das Jahr 2030 und die Dekade der 2030er sehr stark im Fokus der Welteliten stehen. Wir sehen, wie sich die Krise erneut in der Region Israel/Palästina aufbaut, die in der Nähe des salzigen Toten Meeres liegt. Nördlich der Region befindet sich das horizontale Schwarze Meer und südlich davon das vertikale Rote Meer. Im Westen liegt das Mittelmeer (die Mitte der Erde). Das Gebiet liegt im Herzen dessen, was als „Weltinsel“, d.h. Eurasien und Afrika zusammen, bezeichnet wurde. Von den traditionell kollektivistischen Gesellschaften Ostasiens bis zum Hyperindividualismus in der USA im Westen liegt Israel/Palästina im Herzen von Zeit und Raum auf diesem Planeten, und die Ereignisse von vor 2000 Jahren bilden die Grundlage unserer globalen Chronologie.

    Die deutschsprachigen Länder liegen im Herzen Europas, und der Raum Nürnberg/Ansbach liegt im Herzstück dieser Länder. Im 19. Jahrhundert repräsentierten die Staaten Baden und Bayern die Polarität in Süddeutschland zwischen Liberalismus und Konservatismus. Nach 1848 bestimmte die österreichisch-preußische Nord-Süd-Rivalität einen Großteil der deutschen Angelegenheiten. Nach 1948 war Deutschland 42 Jahre lang in Ost und West geteilt: Westdeutschland, das von den individualistischen USA kontrolliert wurde die bis nach Kalifornien reichten, und Ostdeutschland, das vom kollektivistischen Russland kontrolliert wurde das bis nach Wladiwostok reichte. Israel im globalen Sinne und Deutschland im europäischen Sinne – beide sind Herzensgebiete, Kreuzungsgelände und haben als solche daher im Laufe der Zeit viel gelitten.

    In beiden Fällen, in Israel vor 2000 Jahren und in Deutschland vor 200 Jahren, wurde ein Unschuldiger von einer Gesellschaft verfolgt und getötet, die sich ihn nicht genug anerkannt hat, nicht genug um ihn gekümmert hat. Innerhalb von etwa 100 Jahren nach dem Ereignis in beiden Fällen wurde die betroffene Gesellschaft durch die damaligen Weltmacht zerstört. Die Verwüstung wurde jedoch nicht nur durch diese Weltmacht – römische Legionen und anglo-amerikanische Bomben – verursacht. Auf das, was der Schriftsteller Jakob Wassermann die Trägheit des Herzens nannte, folgte für diese beiden Gesellschaft die Konsequenzen dieser Trägheit, nämlich die Hinwendung zu Materialismus, Militarismus und einem nationalistichen Fanatismus. Die Juden wandten sich den nationalistischen Zeloten zu und griffen zweimal – 66 n. Chr. und 132 n. Chr. – zu Gewalt und Krieg, um die Römer zu vertreiben und ein geeintes Königreich wiederherzustellen. Nachdem die Juden mehr als 100 Jahre vor Christus die griechische Dynastie der Seleukiden durch Krieg besiegt hatten, glaubten zu viele Juden, sie könnten die Römer auf die gleiche Weise besiegen. Im Krieg von 66-73 gegen Nero und Vespasian jedoch haben die Juden auf katastrophale Weise versagt. Der Tempel in Jerusalem, der fast 1000 Jahre lang das Zentrum und der Mittelpunkt ihrer Religion war, lag in Ruinen.

    Aus dieser Katastrophe haben die Juden damals wenig gelernt und deswegen haben sie etwa 60 Jahre später erneut gegen die Römer in den Krieg von 132-136 erhoben. Dieser Krieg hat zu noch größeren Verwüstungen geführt. Danach, wurden den Juden sogar verboten, Jerusalem zu betreten. Die Stadt wurde  nach der Familie des römischen Kaisers umbenannt. Über ein Million von Menschen sind in diesen beiden Kriegen des nationalistischen Fanatismus gestorben.

     In den 1840er bis 1940er Jahren war in Deutschland das gleiche Muster zu beobachten. Mit Blick auf den Westen, auf die französischen Modelle des einheitlichen Staatsnationalismus und des Militarismus und auf die britischen Modelle des Kommerzes, der Industriemacht, des Kolonialismus und des Flottenwesens versuchten die Deutschen, ein geeintes Reich um das Bild des Schwertes herum zu errichten, das vom gigantischen Hermannsdenkmals im Teutoburger Wald hochgehalten wurde. Die Errichtung des Denkmals begann 1836, drei Jahre nach Kaspar Hausers Tod, und wurde 1875 abgeschlossen – im Jahr des Todes Georg Friedrich Daumers. Der Schöpfer des Denkmals war Ernst von Bandel, der hier in Ansbach im Jahr 1800 geboren wurde.

    Bandels Kindheit war von der französischen Besatzung und der Befreiungskriege sehr beeinflußt und seine Gesinnung wurde stark national-patriotisch. Zuerst wurde von Bandel durch die Wittelsbach-Könige Maximilian I. und Ludwig I. finanziert, aber er mochte die neoklassizistischen Vorlieben Ludwigs I. nicht und ist 1834 nach Berlin gezogen – ein symbolischer Schritt vielleicht. Ironischerweise richtete sich der ganze Geist des Hermannsdenkmals gegen den Westen, gegen Frankreich, doch das Zweite Reich, das Bismarck-Reich, war in vielerlei Hinsicht durch und durch westlich geprägt, anstatt sich auf einen echten deutschen Kulturgeist zu besinnen. Die letzten drei Jahre von Kaspar Hausers Leben waren eine Zeit des nationalistischen Eifers in den deutschen Staaten, inspiriert nicht zuletzt von der Pariser Julirevolution von 1830.

    Der Nationalismus und Militarismus gipfelte im preußischen Sieg über Frankreich 1871 und in der Reichsgründung im Spiegelsaal des Palastes von Ludwig XIV. in Versailles. In Anton von Werners berühmtem Gemälde Ausruf des deutschen Reiches auch als  Die Proklamation des deutschen Kaiserreiches gekannt, sehen wir, daß der Mann, der neben Wilhelm I. von Preußen steht und der das „Hoch“ für ihn als den neuen deutschen Kaiser anführt, Großherzog Friedrich I. von Baden ist, der Sohn von Leopold und Sophie von Baden, und der Enkel von Reichsgräfin Luise von Hochberg mit dessen Ehrgeiz die ganze Geschichte angefangen hatte. Großherzog Friedrich war mit Luise von Preußen verheiratet.

   Und wir erinnern uns, daß es preußische Truppen waren, die 1848 die Revolution in Baden niedergeschlagen haben und Leopold und Sophie als Großherzog und Großherzogin wieder einsetzten. Wir erinnern uns auch, daß der Neffe von Großherzog Friedrich und der Enkel von Leopold und Sophie Prinz Max von Baden war. Prinz Max wurde der letzte deutsche Reichskanzler, der 1918 Deutschland auf der Grundlage der 14 Punkte von Präsident Woodrow Wilson kapitulieren gelassen hat. Rudolf Steiner war 1918 zweimal mit Prinz Max zusammengetroffen und hatte versucht, ihn davon zu überzeugen, den Krieg auf der Grundlage einer echten mitteleuropäischen Konzeption – des dreigliedrigen sozialen Organismus – zu beenden.  Stattdessen hat Prinz Max aber sich entschieden für die abstrakte Konzeption, die von der neuen Weltmacht des Westens gepredigt wurde, nämlich  die 14 Punkte.

    Fast genau 100 Jahre nach Kaspar Hausers Tod hat Adolf Hitler die Macht in Deutschland übernommen, und nur 12 Jahre später war die Verwüstung Deutschlands vergleichbar mit der Verwüstung von Judäa im Jahr 136, nach zwei schrecklichen Kriegen gegen die damalige Weltmacht.

    Das jüdische Volk, oder zumindest die jüdische Elite, hat in drei kurzen Jahren nicht erkannt, wer in Jesus Christus da anwesend war. Sie wendeten sich von ihm ab und schlugen stattdessen den Weg des Mars ein, gegen eben jene Macht, die damals im Wesentlichen die Kräfte des Mars und des Materialismus darstellte. 1800 Jahre später hat das deutsche Volk, oder zumindest die deutsche Elite, nicht erkannt, wer in jenen 5 kurzen Jahren in Kaspar Hauser da unter ihnen anwesend war; sie haben nicht auf die im Wesentlichen spirituellen Fragen geantwortet, die Kaspar Hauser auf jeden einzelnen Mensch stellt – Wer bin ich? Wer bist du? Woher komme ich? Wohin gehe ich? Sie wendeten sich von Kaspar und von diesen Fragen ab oder zumindest haben sich zu wenige von ihnen mit solchen Fragen beschäftigt und stattdessen haben sie denjenigen Weg genommen, der sie letztendlich gegen eben diejenige weltliche Macht führte, die in der modernen Epoche im Wesentlichen die Kräfte des Mars und des Materialismus darstellt.

    Man kann diesen Kräften nicht mit denselben Mitteln entgegentreten, die sie selbst einsetzen. Verwandelt werden können sie nur durch Feuerbachs Geist der glühenden Wahrheitssuche, durch Daumers Geist der liebenden Imagination, durch Tuchers Geist der fürsorglichen Verantwortung und durch Kaspar Hausers Geist des offenherzigen Zuhörens und der Zufriedenheit. Wer bin ich? Woher komme ich? Wohin gehe ich? Gerade in den Jahren 2028 bis 2033 werden die Menschen auf der ganzen Welt und nicht zuletzt die Menschen in Deutschland erneut Gelegenheiten gegeben, über diese Fragen nachzudenken.

     Können wir nicht spüren, daß Jesus Christus in einem globalen, makrokosmischen Sinn und Kaspar Hauser in einem mikrokosmischen Sinn, Opfer waren, die Schicksale umkehren können? Mit dem Christus war es das Schicksal unzähliger Einzelner, aber es war sicherlich auch das Schicksal der Welt und der Menschheit als Ganzes. Durch Kaspar Hauser sind es vielleicht auch die Schicksale einzelner Menschen, die durch seine Geschichte verändert werden, aber für mein Empfinden, und ich bin mir sicher, auch für das Empfinden einiger von Ihnen heute, war es auch das Schicksal eines Volkes, das in den 19. und 20. Jahrhunderten durch die Beseitigung Kaspar Hausers verändert wurde – und zwar nicht zum Besseren. Aber wenn sich genügend Menschen in diesem Land zu Kaspar Hauser zuwenden und entdecken würden, was sein Leben und sein Opfer tatsächlich bedeuteten und immer noch bedeuten, dann würden sie ihn nicht nur als ein trauriges Opfer sehen, sondern als Opfer für ein besseres Deutschland, ein besseres Europa, ein bessere moderne Mensch. Ein Mensch, der ständig auf der Suche nach dem ist, was er wirklich werden kann; ein Mensch, der immer im Werden begriffen ist und deshalb nie aufgibt.

Ich danke Ihnen herzlich für Ihre Aufmerksamkeit und Ihre Geduld.

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

David Ben-Gurion, Israel’s first Prime Minister, read out Israel’s Declaration of Independence in the Tel Aviv Museum Hall on 14 May 1948; it included the following words:

“In the year 5657 (1897), at the summons of the spiritual father of the Jewish State, Theodore Herzl, the First Zionist Congress convened and proclaimed the right of the Jewish people to national rebirth in its own country. This right was recognized in the Balfour Declaration of the 2nd November, 1917, and re-affirmed in the Mandate of the League of Nations which, in particular, gave international sanction to the historic connection between the Jewish people and Eretz-Israel and to the right of the Jewish people to rebuild its National Home. [.…]

On the 29th November, 1947, the United Nations General Assembly passed a resolution calling for the establishment of a Jewish State in Eretz-Israel [the Land of Israel]; the General Assembly required the inhabitants of Eretz-Israel to take such steps as were necessary on their part for the implementation of that resolution. This recognition by the United Nations of the right of the Jewish people to establish their State is irrevocable. This right is the natural right of the Jewish people to be masters of their own fate, like all other nations, in their own sovereign State. Accordingly, we, members of the People’s Council, representatives of the Jewish Community of Eretz-Israel and of the Zionist Movement, are here assembled on the day of the termination of the British Mandate over Eretz-Israel and, by virtue of our natural and historic right and on the strength of the resolution of the United Nations General Assembly, hereby declare the establishment of a Jewish state in Eretz-Israel, to be known as the State of Israel.”¹

The phrase above  - “national rebirth in its own country”  - is strange because before 1917 few would have denied that the Jews were a nation or a people. They clearly already existed as such and so hardly needed to be ‘reborn’; what was being referred to here was rather, a nation state. The Balfour Declaration issued in the name of the British Foreign Secretary Arthur Balfour on behalf of the government of the UK (following no parliamentary discussion or public debate) in 1917 said nothing about a “national rebirth”. It referred to “the establishment in Palestine of a national home for the Jewish people”; it did not say “the establishment in Palestine of the national home for the Jewish people”. There was no precedent for the term “national home” in international law; it was unclear from the text whether a Jewish state was intended. However, the phrase “in its own country” in the Independence Declaration of 1948 implied that all of Palestine belonged to the Jews. By then, there were some 650,000 Jews in Palestine, far more than in 1917, and most had arrived since the late 1920s. On 3 February 1919 the World Zionist Organisation submitted a statement to the Paris Peace Conference which referred not to “a national home” but “the national home”. The Zionist Statement made much of the Jews’ “historic title” to the land of Palestine, claiming that “Palestine can be made now as it was in ancient times…”, but in ancient times the Jews constituted a kingdom in the land for several periods i.e. an autonomous Jewish State, and this was indeed what the Zionists were always aiming for but which, from the period before the Balfour Declaration on 1917 to the establishment of the Palestine Mandate in 1922, they could not officially mention.  The Zionist Statement also claimed that “by violence they were driven from Palestine”, no doubt referring to an expulsion by the Roman Empire, but such an expulsion did not happen; Palestine was by no means devoid of Jews between 136 AD and the arrival of the Muslim conquerors in the 7th century, despite the Romans’ cruel treatment of the Jews after the suppression of the Jewish revolt led by Simon Bar Kokhba  in 132-136 AD.² Galilee was the main Jewish religious centre after 136 AD. And even for centuries before the two disastrous Jewish revolts against the Romans in 66-70 and 132-136 AD, far more Jews had chosen to live outside the Jewish homeland than inside it: “Perhaps three to five million Jews dwelled outside Palestine in the roughly four centuries that stretched from Alexander to Titus… through most of [this] era, a Jewish regime existed in Palestine. The Jews of the diaspora, from Italy to Iran, far outnumbered those in the homeland. Although Jerusalem [and the Temple] loomed large in their self-perception as a nation, few of them had seen it, and few were likely to.”³

     The Declaration of Independence in 1948 acknowledged that the new State of Israel was brought into being by: a) acts of will by Theodore Herzl until his death in 1905 and by the Zionist movement from 1897 until 1948 b) the Balfour Declaration by the UK Cabinet in 1917; c) the Mandate of the League of Nations (1922) d) an “irrevocable” vote by the UN General Assembly in November 1947. It should be noted that, apart from the first of these four factors, the other three all resulted from the actions of the elites of the UK and the USA, which issued the Balfour Declaration, and created both the League of Nations and the United Nations; indeed, the result of the UN vote itself in 1947 was largely due to American pressure on other countries, notably France (see below).

     The sentence in the 1948 Declaration of Independence “This right”  - of the Jewish people to national rebirth in its own country – “…was re-affirmed in the Mandate of the League of Nations which, in particular, gave international sanction to the historic connection between the Jewish people and Eretz-Israel and to the right of the Jewish people to rebuild its National Home”  is problematic, because the UN Special Committee on Palestine (UNSCOP) report of 1947 (Article 160, Chapter II: The Elements of the Conflict) stated that:

“The Arabs have persistently adhered to the position that the Mandate for Palestine, which incorporated the Balfour Declaration, is illegal. The Arab States have refused to recognize it as having any validity. (emphasis – TB)

(a) They allege that the terms of the Palestine Mandate are inconsistent with the letter and spirit of Article 22 of the Covenant of the League of Nations for the following reasons:

(1) Although paragraph 4 of Article 22 stipulated that certain communities had reached a stage of development where their existence as “independent nations” could be provisionally recognised, subject only to a limited period of tutelage under a mandatory Power in the form of administrative advice and assistance until such time as these communities would be able to stand alone, the Palestine Mandate violated this stipulation by deliberately omitting immediate provisional recognition of the independence of the territory and by granting to the mandatory Power in article 1 of the Mandate “full powers of legislation and administration”.

(2) The wishes of the Palestine community had not been “a principal consideration in the selection of the Mandatory Power”, as provided for in Article 22, paragraph 4 of the Covenant.

(b) The principle and right of national self-determination were violated.

(c) The Arab States were not Members of the League of Nations when the Palestine Mandate was approved, and are not, therefore, bound by it.”⁴

“International law”

In the aftermath of the bizarre events of 7 October 2023, when one of the world’s most technologically advanced states, widely regarded as having the world’s most sophisticated intelligence and security system, supposedly ‘failed’ for over seven hours (!) to foil a serious cross-border incursion involving genocidal attacks by terrorists on foot, on motorbikes, in trucks and on paragliders – a circumstance that has largely been overlooked by media and governments around the world but which certainly bears comparison with the equally bizarre events of 11th September 2001 in the USA – many western governments have since frequently stated that “Israel has the right to defend itself under international law” and also that “Israel must abide by international law with regard to the treatment of civilians in wartime”.

      In democratic societies “law” is supposed to be decided by the majority votes of the democratically elected representatives of the populations of those societies. But when it comes to “international law” and international treaties between governments or between governments and international organisations such as the UN, then the populations of those “democratic societies” and their representatives are often suddenly left out. It seems to be accepted, even in democratic societies, that proposals and decisions in these areas are made by the foreign policy and legal ‘experts’ in the countries in question, i.e. by small circles of individuals, and not by the populations or their representatives, most of whom have neither much interest in nor knowledge of international affairs. The consequent result, however, of these completely undemocratic procedures that result in new “international laws” is that the populations of democratic societies can find themselves bound for decades afterwards by “international laws” that they themselves were neither consulted upon nor played any part in deciding or voting on. Furthermore, extra-parliamentary private lobby groups can have considerable impact on governments’ behaviour and decisions with regard to international law.

     How, for example, did the State of Israel actually come about in 1948? It was due to decisions made under “international law”, namely the UN Partition Plan for (Mandatory) Palestine, which was passed by the UN General Assembly on 29 November 1947 by 33 votes to 13 with 10 abstentions. The UK, which was one of the abstaining countries, had been granted a mandate in 1922 to administer Palestine by the League of Nations, a body which had not existed before 1919. With regard to these League of Nations ‘Mandates’, it should be noted that on 17 May 1922, Lord Balfour informed the Council of the League of Nations that his government’s understanding of the role of the League in the creation of mandates was that:

“[the] Mandates were not the creation of the League, and they could not in substance be altered by the League. The League’s duties were confined to seeing that the specific and detailed terms of the mandates were in accordance with the decisions taken by the Allied and Associated Powers, and that in carrying out these mandates the Mandatory Powers should be under the supervision—not under the control—of the League. A mandate was a self-imposed limitation by the conquerors on the sovereignty which they exercised over the conquered territory.”⁵

These League of Nations “mandates” were in effect acts of ‘legalised theft’ by the victorious Powers (Britain, France, USA, Japan) after the First World War. Certainly, such acts of theft had not been unusual after wars between colonial Powers over the preceding 250 years, but theft it was nevertheless. Britain and France, as colonial Powers now (in 1919) severely indebted to the USA, proposed to help themselves to colonies and territories governed before 1914 by Germany and Ottoman Turkey, the defeated Powers in 1918, and to do so in accord with their national self-interest. However, the USA, which during the war had become the world’s creditor nation, and under the supposed influence of its ‘idealistic’ and ‘anti-colonialist’ President Woodrow Wilson, insisted that, in accordance with the largely American creation of the League of Nations, the defeated Powers’ former colonies should not be simply transferred to the British and French colonial empires but the peoples in those colonies should be prepared for self-government by those imperial states’ administrations. Such was the League of Nations’ understanding of the “Mandates”.

     On Wilson’s leaving office in March 1921, the new US administration declined to participate in either the League of Nations or the Permanent Court of International Justice, both of which the USA under Wilson had foisted on the world in 1919 and 1920 respectively. Thus, acts of veiled theft⁶ by Britain and France in the Middle East (Britain got Palestine; France got Syria) were followed by American irresponsibility in ‘legitimising’ those acts of theft, determining their nature and then declining to take any further responsibility for those ‘international’ actions. British foreign policy mandarins – since all this of course had nothing to do with British voters, who were not allowed to be involved with any of these processes  - having in effect ‘stolen’ the Turks’ colony in Palestine, were thus saddled by this American-devised institution of the League of Nations with the burden of ‘administering’ the former colonial territory of Palestine for unspecified decades into the future.

A “National Home”?

The British mandarins had, however, earlier imposed further burdens upon themselves, during the world war, when they had given contradictory promises to both Jews and Arabs in order to gain their support against Britain’s wartime enemies. To prompt the Arabs to rise in revolt against the Turks, in 1916 the British elite had promised the Arabs that they would have independent states after the war, which would be ruled by Arab princes. Also, to obtain the support of wealthy Jews both in America and Russia as well as elsewhere, in the war effort against Germany⁷, the British Foreign Secretary Arthur Balfour had in November 1917 given a written promise on behalf of the government –  later known as the ‘Balfour Declaration’, which was personally addressed to Lord Walter Rothschild, whom Balfour evidently regarded as the leader of the Jewish Zionist movement in Britain (he was not formally that but was widely regarded by Jews and non-Jews alike as the ‘prince’ of the Jews in the British Empire, one might say)  - that the British government would

“favour the establishment in Palestine of a national home for the Jewish people and [would] use their best endeavours to facilitate the achievement of this object, it being clearly understood that nothing shall be done which may prejudice the civil and religious rights of existing non-Jewish communities in Palestine, or the rights and political status enjoyed by Jews in any other country.”

     There would soon be much controversy over the phrase “a national home for the Jewish people” – did it mean ‘a Jewish State’? The evidence seems to be that most of the mandarins involved felt that sooner or later it would indeed mean that, even if in the early years they claimed to deny this.  For instance, the Prime Minister David Lloyd George, Arthur Balfour and Winston Churchill would later meet with Zionist leader Chaim Weizmann at Balfour’s home in London on 21 July 1921, where

Lloyd George and Balfour assured Weizmann “that by the Declaration they had always meant an eventual Jewish State”, according to Weizmann’s minutes of that meeting. Lloyd George stated in 1937 that it was intended that Palestine would become a Jewish Commonwealth if and when Jews “had become a definite majority of the inhabitants”, and [former Colonial Secretary] Leo Amery echoed the same position in 1946.⁸

The final draft of the ‘Balfour Declaration’ was made in Balfour’s name, but he had actually had little to do with the text; it was written by Leo Amery, Jewish himself, who had been the secretary and righthand man of the figure who was arguably the most powerful man in that War Cabinet – Alfred, Lord Milner, Minister without Portfolio (1916-1918)⁹. But Amery later

“testified under oath to the Anglo-American Committee of Inquiry in January 1946: ‘The phrase “the establishment in Palestine of a National Home for the Jewish people” was intended and understood by all concerned to mean at the time of the Balfour Declaration that Palestine would ultimately become a “Jewish Commonwealth” or a “Jewish State”, if only Jews came and settled there in sufficient numbers.” ¹⁰

Over the following 30 years they did just that. Nor, until 1939, did the UK government seek to prevent them.

How had it come to this? That a people who supposedly had lost their homeland in ancient times were able to regain it some 1900 years later and create a State there? That countless peoples and cultures throughout the world had lost control of or had been driven from their homelands over that same long period, never to return or to regain control of them, whereas the Jewish people had managed to convince ‘the world’  - i.e. the elites of Britain and America, who at that time controlled the destinies of the world and also controlled the UN – that they, the Jews, should be allowed to return to and rule that ancient homeland, but other peoples should not be allowed to return to their ancestral lands? For obviously, if the same principle were applied across the historical board, so to speak, then the world map would look very different: England would have to be returned to the Welsh, for example, and the USA to its native American tribes.

The Age of Gabriel, Arabs and Jews

The answer to the above questions, from an anthroposophical perspective, drawing on the spiritual research of Rudolf Steiner, is this: from the early 16th century, guidance of human history passed from one mighty spiritual being to another – from the Mars Archangel Samael (1190-1510) to the Moon Archangel Gabriel (1510-1879). There are seven such Archangels active in rotation, each ‘responsible’ for an approximately 350-400 year period of history. During the phases of the Moon Archangel Gabriel, humanity turns its attention under Gabriel’s impress, very much to the material world and the demands of physical life, that is, to everything that is bound up with the word ‘incarnation’. This was the period of natural science, of western colonialism and empire, of world trade, capitalism, industrialism and nationalism. It was also the period when the English-speaking people rose to world power and when the influence of Semitic culture – that of the Arab and Jewish peoples – rose to particular power within western culture but especially within English-speaking culture e.g. Britain and, later, the USA. In the 17th and 18th centuries, natural science, often based on translations from the Arab texts, began its march of triumph over the Church. (Interestingly, coffee, imported from Muslim Turkey, accompanied this expansion of the intellect). Deism, a peculiarly English form of philosophical religion, transcendental, abstract, and not a little redolent of Islam and Judaism, became the preferred faith of many ‘enlightened’ Englishmen, not least among the Freemasons, whose occultism and ritual owed much to the Temple of Solomon and to the writings of Jewish Cabalists.  Expelled by King Edward I in 1290 in the Age of the Mars Archangel Samael, the Jews had been readmitted to Britain by Oliver Cromwell in 1655, in the Age of the Moon Archangel Gabriel. By the later decades of the Age of Gabriel, the name of Rothschild was known the world over. Indeed, British imperial power in the Victorian age was unthinkable without it. In the decades after 1810, Rothschild money financed British military campaigns, built British railways, gave financial advice and extended loans to the Royal Family, bought the Suez Canal, steadied the economy and buttressed other British banks. The Rothschilds were also among the first to fund Jewish immigrant settlements in Palestine.

     The success of the Rothschilds in Britain was but a symbol of the rising profile of Jewish culture in British life. Take for example, the 17th century English Puritans; in their religious life they based themselves on the people of ancient Israel and especially on the Old Testament and its strictures. They wore black and white, like the Jews, they covered their heads at all times, they opposed religious imagery, they honoured only the text of Holy Writ and its interpreters, they saw themselves as exiles, fleeing sinful ‘Egypt’ for the God-given Promised Land of America, where they took their fundamentalist values and transplanted them. Their successors in England, the Dissenters, banned from political life, turned to business and industry and became successful capitalists.  These Puritans and Dissenters, later followed by the Methodists and Evangelicals in the 18th century, saw themselves as ‘Israel’, looked to the model of ancient Israel and to the prophets of ancient Israel to read the future and discern God’s Will. They came to believe not only that now they were the new ‘Chosen People’ but that the Messiah would not come again until His ‘ancient Chosen People’, the Jews, had been gathered back in the Holy Land and converted to Christ. Many of the English-speaking Puritans believed that it was the task of the Lord’s (new) Chosen People to enable the Jews to return to the Holy Land. Such notions and interpretations of the Bible took firm root in English-speaking culture during the period 1600-1850 across broad sections of Bible-reading Protestant society, from Low Church Evangelicals and Baptists to High Church Anglicans. Politicians such as David Lloyd George and Arthur Balfour were well aware of such interpretations.

     The Age of Gabriel ended in 1879 but its impulse did not stop then; such archangelic impulses are always strongest at the end of their period and continue for several decades until they begin to fade out as the new archangelic wave comes in. Nationalism was thus at a peak in the years 1870-1970, and especially during the time of the two world wars. Jewish influence in the West also rose to a peak in this period, notably in America. It was hardly surprising then that the Zionist movement, the Balfour Declaration, and the effort to found a political State of Israel should also have occurred in this time. It was, strictly speaking, the early period of the Age of the Sun Archangel Michael, but his impulse was only beginning to grow at that time. His is a truly Christian impulse, and the impulse of Christ is the creation of a kingdom that is not of this world.

National motivations

The League of Nations was a typical manifestation of the outgoing Gabrielic and the incoming Michaelic principles. It was founded by the English-speaking elites to serve their own cultures’ national interests and yet it also had a supranational impulse to it. It was a contradiction in terms – an intended supranational institution that was based on the principle of national self-determination! The Arabs protested already in 1919 that the Wilsonian principle of ‘national self-determination’, the supposed cornerstone of the new League of Nations, meant that it was not right that European Powers should presume to encourage Jews to migrate to Palestine which, as ‘southern Syria’ under Turkish rule in the mid-19th century, had had a Jewish population of only some 5-7% as against 80% Muslims and 10% Christian Arabs.¹¹ By the time of the Balfour Declaration in 1917, the population of Palestine was 10% Jewish and 90 % Muslim. ‘National self-determination’ was widely interpreted to mean that Palestine would belong to the majority Muslim Arab population. But the British and American elites had ‘determined’ otherwise, in accordance with their own British imperial or American pseudo-imperial interests. The Arabs were too backward, they felt, to serve those interests in the region, and those interests above all were the security of the Suez Canal and the safe transport of Mesopotamian oil across the region to ports in Palestine, such as Haifa, on the Mediterranean. For the British, the Suez Canal meant the safeguarding of their imperial interests in India and the rest of Asia and southeast towards Australasia. Mesopotamian oil guaranteed the future of the Royal Navy, without which there would simply be no British Empire; this had been the reality since oil had begun to replace coal as the fuel of the Royal Navy shortly before the world war. Britain had plenty of coal but no oil; it therefore needed to ensure control of those regions which possessed plentiful supplies of oil. The Americans would have the same motivation when their native supplies of oil began to diminish in the 20th century. The Jewish emigrants to Palestine were comparatively modern, educated and culturally European, many of them predominantly secular. Their Zionist champions and leaders in Britain, such as Chaim Weizmann (1874-1952) and Herbert Samuel (1870-1963), emphasised this fact that the emigrants would render effective service to the British Empire if they were allowed to become the controlling element in the region.

Balfour and his Declaration

A further factor was repeatedly stated by Balfour and the circle around Milner during the First World War and it continued to be of great importance in the interwar period: namely, that Zionism – the cause that since 1897 (the first Zionist Congress, in Basel, Switzerland) had sought a nation state for the Jewish people and later specifically a state in Palestine, the ancient ‘Land of Israel’ as the Zionists called it (Eretz Israel) – was of interest to many influential and wealthy Jews  in the USA, Jews whose support Britain could not afford to lose: on 3 September 1917 Balfour

“pointed out that this was a question on which the Foreign Office had been very strongly pressed for a long time past. There was a very strong and enthusiastic organisation, more particularly in the United States, who were zealous in this matter, and his [Balfour’s] belief was that it would be of most substantial assistance to the Allies to have the earnestness and enthusiasm of these people enlisted on our side. To do nothing was to risk a direct breach with them, and it was necessary to face this situation.”12

     In April 1917 Balfour visited the US and amongst others, met with Louis Brandeis, president of the Zionist Organisation of America and one of US President Wilson’s closest advisors. Balfour gained from Brandeis the impression that American Jews, especially the wealthier ones, supported Zionism.

“According to an account written in 1923 by the British Foreign Office, it was during Balfour’s visit to America that the idea solidified of issuing a statement of support for Zionism: ‘[D]uring this visit the policy of the declaration as a war measure seems to have taken more definite shape. It was supposed that American opinion might be favourably influenced if His Majesty’s Government gave an assurance that the return of the Jews to Palestine had become a purpose of British policy’.”¹³

Chaim Weizmann, the Zionist leader in Britain, tried to persuade the British government that the Germans, who were allied to Ottoman Turkey, might seek to use the Zionist tactic to persuade wealthy Jews in America to favour pacifism and thus undermine US support for the war which America had only just joined (April 1917). In the autumn of 1917, evidence appeared which seemed to substantiate Weizmann’s claims.

     The only member of the five-man War Cabinet who spoke against a declaration in favour of supporting a Jewish national homeland in Palestine was Lord Curzon, who argued that:

“….important as may be the political reasons … for adopting such a line of action, we ought at least to consider whether we are encouraging a practical ideal, or preparing the way for disappointment and failure….” Curzon claimed that “most of the Jewish agricultural colonies [in Palestine] had not been successful. And that ‘the Arabs have occupied the country for the best part of 1,500 years. . . . They will not be content either to be expropriated for Jewish immigrants, or to act merely as hewers of wood and drawers of water to the latter.’”¹⁴

This would turn out to be prescient on both counts.

 But in the War Cabinet meeting on 31 October 1917, Curzon’s objections were overruled. Balfour

“chose to rest the case for the declaration mainly on its value as propaganda.” He related that “the vast majority of Jews in Russia and America” favoured Zionism. ‘If we could make a declaration favourable to such an ideal,’ he said, ‘we should be able to carry on extremely useful propaganda both in Russia and America.’ The war cabinet then and there authorised Balfour, in his capacity as foreign secretary, to issue a declaration…[It] was issued two days later, with only minor clerical corrections.”¹⁵

The British government’s formal promise of “the establishment in Palestine of a National Home for the Jewish people”  - the Balfour Declaration – was made for the sake of a temporary tactic to gain advantage in time of war. A confidential memorandum in 1924 by the Colonial Office, also showed that the Balfour Declaration was a war tactic. The Declaration, it said:

“had a definite war object. It was designed to enlist on behalf of the Allies the sympathy of influential Jews and Jewish organizations all over the world. The Declaration was published at a time when the military situation was exceedingly critical. Russia had dropped out of the Alliance. Italy appeared to be at her last gasp; and the Germans, freed from anxiety in the East, were massing hugh (sic) forces on the Western front in preparation for the great offensive of 1918. The promise to the Jews was in fact made at a time of acute national danger.” ¹⁶

     Once the Declaration had been made public, however, the British government was stuck with it and felt it could not go back on it. It soon realised after the war was over that it was hoisted on its own petard, although the original reason for the Declaration – its use as a war propaganda tactic – no longer applied. Despite opposition to the Declaration, to the appointment of Herbert Samuel as High Commissioner and to the government’s general pro-Zionist stance from many within the military in Palestine and within the echelons of the Civil Service, the government stubbornly clung to the Declaration, claiming to try to satisfy the demands of both the Zionist and Arab communities.

     The British and French governments issued a hypocritical statement in Syria on 9 November 1918:

“The object aimed at by France and Great Britain in prosecuting in the East the War let loose by the ambition of Germany is the complete and definite emancipation of the peoples so long oppressed by the Turks and the establishment of national governments and administrations deriving their authority from the initiative and free choice of the indigenous populations.”¹⁷ (emphasis – TB)

But in December 1918 the British and French agreed that Britain alone would rule in Palestine, thus changing their secret agreement finalised with the Russians in January 1916 – for which negotiations had commenced in 1915, the Sykes-Picot Agreement – according to which, after the war, Palestine would be administered internationally.

     Other statements by Balfour show the extent of his cynical appraisal of Britain’s self-interest: in an August 1919 memo discussing the Covenant of the League of Nations, he explained:

“What I have never been able to understand is how [our policy] can be harmonised with the [Anglo-French] declaration, the Covenant [of the League of Nations], or the instructions to the Commission of Enquiry … I do not think that Zionism will hurt the Arabs; but they will never say they want it. Whatever be the future of Palestine, it is not now an ‘independent nation,’ nor is it yet on the way to become one. Whatever deference should be paid to the views of those who live there, the Powers in their selection of a mandatory do not propose, as I understand the matter, to consult them. In short, so far as Palestine is concerned, the Powers have made no statement of fact which is not admittedly wrong, and no declaration of policy which, at least in the letter, they have not always intended to violate,” and: “The contradiction between the letter of the Covenant and the policy of the Allies is even more flagrant in the case of the ‘independent nation’ of Palestine than in that of the ‘independent nation’ of Syria. For in Palestine we do not propose even to go through the form of consulting the wishes of the present inhabitants of the country, though the American Commission has been going through the form of asking what they are. The four Great Powers are committed to Zionism. And Zionism, be it right or wrong, good or bad, is rooted in age-long traditions, in present needs, in future hopes, of far profounder import than the desires and prejudices of the 700,000 Arabs who now inhabit that ancient land.”¹⁸ (emphasis – TB)

     Two things, it seems, may have come together here in Balfour’s mind: although as an offshoot of the powerful aristocratic Cecil family with its strong traditionalist High Church Anglican convictions, he came from a very different branch of Christianity than the Welsh Baptist David Lloyd George, the two men, like so many of their contemporaries, had been brought up on the Bible and knew it very well, Lloyd George famously saying he knew the kings and placenames of ancient Israel better than those of England. Both men being romantics at heart, they had a certain penchant for the ancient fate of the Jewish people and both had been seduced by the charm of Zionist leader Chaim Weizmann and his appeals to their sense of history and religion with regard to the fate of the Jewish people.

     But both men were also well aware of the power of Jewish finance in Britain, especially since the days of Nathan Mayer Rothschild (1777-1836), who had financed Wellington’s victorious Waterloo campaign against Napoleon and much British railway development in subsequent decades. As leading politicians, Balfour and Lloyd George were also aware that Britain’s first Jewish Prime Minister, Benjamin Disraeli (1804-1881) had used his connections with the Rothschild family in 1875 to secure a Rothschild loan that gained for the British government the controlling share in the Suez Canal. Both men too had bent an ear to the practical and strategic arguments advanced by Britain’s first Jewish Cabinet Minister Herbert Samuel, a committed Zionist, who soon after war broke out between Britain and Turkey in November 1914, said that “

by supporting the creation of a Jewish colony east of Suez, Britain could deny that territory to rival foreign powers who might then threaten its control of the Suez Canal…Samuel argued in March 1915 that ‘help given now towards the attainment of the idea which great numbers of Jews have never ceased to cherish through so many centuries of suffering cannot fail to secure, into a far-distant future, the gratitude of a whole race, whose goodwill, in time to come, may not be without its value.’”¹⁹ (emphasis – TB)

The British government would later make Samuel its first High Commissioner for Palestine (see photo below: Samuel right with Balfour centre and Gen. Allenby left.) Serving from 1920 until 1925, he was the first Jew to govern there for 2000 years. Samuel’s appointment was not popular with the Arabs, but he tried to appear impartial and was reasonably successful in his role. However, Jewish historian Bernard Wasserstein wrote that his policy was “subtly designed to reconcile Arabs to the… pro-Zionist policy” of the British²⁰, and Sahar Huneidi, in A Broken Trust – Herbert Samuel, Zionism and the Palestinians (2001), wrote that most of Samuel’s policies in Palestine actually went beyond the notion of  the “Jewish national home” promised in the Balfour Declaration and were aimed at the realisation of a Jewish state.

Allenby (left), Balfour (centre), Herbert Samuel (right)

     Riots broke out a number of times due to Arab feelings of betrayal by the western Allies and against rising Zionist immigration. On 18 August 1921, as the inter-communal situation worsened, although there was no Arab violence directed against British troops in Palestine, the British Cabinet met to discuss the situation, but only the last of the four main points discussed related directly to Palestine:

1) “The honour of the government was involved in the Declaration made by Mr Balfour, and to go back on our pledge would seriously reduce the prestige of this country in the eyes of Jews throughout the world. 2)  The Prime Ministers of Canada and South Africa had recently stated that our Zionist policy had proved helpful in those Dominions. 3) It was not expected that the problem could be easily or quickly solved,

especially in view of the growing power of the Arabs in the territories bordering on Palestine. 4) it was urged that peace was impossible on the lines of the Balfour Declaration, which involved setting up a National Home for the Jews and respecting the rights of the Arab population. The result of this inconsistency must be to estrange both Arabs and Jews, while involving us in futile military expenditure. Against this position it was argued that the Arabs had no prescriptive right to a country which they had failed to develop to the best advantage.”²¹

So, the Declaration had to be adhered to for the sake of Zionist interests in Canada and South Africa and for the sake of the “honour” of the UK government – this after nearly a million Britons had died fighting in the war for that government, often in appalling circumstances  – even though it was recognised that “peace was impossible on the lines of the Balfour Declaration”!

In July 1922, the League of Nations approved the Palestine Mandate, Britain as the mandatory power, and Britain’s implementation of the Balfour Declaration. In August, the Palestine Arab Congress rejected the Palestine Mandate, calling it a violation of Arab rights.

The secret Cavendish report of 1923

Less than a year later, in February 1923 the new Colonial Secretary, Victor Cavendish, the 9th Duke of Devonshire (one of England’s pre-eminent aristocrats), had a secret 10-man committee carry out a comprehensive re-assessment of British policy with regard to Palestine,    including the question of whether to retain the Balfour Declaration and even the Mandate. Cavendish concluded in his report to Cabinet after the committee’s findings that despite the difficulties with the project that he admitted was unpopular with Press and public, Britain should continue with both Declaration and Mandate essentially for the sake of the country’s, i.e. the Establishment’s ‘honour’: “repudiating the Declaration”, “breaking a promise made to the Jews in the face of the whole world”, and “returning the Mandate” to the League of Nations would mean that

“We should, indeed, stand convicted of an act of perfidy, from which it is hardly too much to say that our good name would never recover…. We shall stand for all time as the Christian Power which having rescued the Holy Land from the Turk, lacked the strength or the courage to guard what it had won.”²²

Concerns of honour typical of a 13th century aristocrat. No matter that the Declaration no longer corresponds to reality and makes no sense, it had to be continued with – such was Cavendish’s reasoning in effect.

However, Cavendish also came up with two distinctly dishonourable reasons for continuing with the Mandate.  In 1922 Britain had been negotiating a withdrawal from Egypt. In those circumstances, it would suit Britain, indeed it would be vital he said, to retain forces in Palestine, east of the Suez Canal in order to keep a military presence close to the Canal. This self-interested motive went right against the principle of Mandates, which were supposed to benefit the people of the mandated territory not the mandatory Power, but the League of Nations never got to know, because “the Cavendish memorandum… was made public only well after Britain had withdrawn from Palestine”²³ (i.e. after 1948).

     The second dishonourable motive was that Cavendish claimed that the Jews were bringing much investment into the territory and benefiting the economy: “It may well be argued that, by giving them the opportunity of doing so, we are serving the interests of civilization as a whole, quite apart from any sentimental considerations about restoring a scattered people to its ancient fatherland.” But this was untrue, as Jewish investment benefited only the Jewish economy in Palestine, not the Arab. Jewish capital was employed to buy Arab-owned land, and only Jewish labour was allowed on land owned by the Jewish National Fund. A 1921 report for the Zionist Executive noted that:

“the situation might have been less acute had Zionist activity brought the Arabs the material advantages they had been invited to expect from it.”²⁴

      The Cabinet in 1923 therefore concluded that a Jewish national home could not be realised together with the protection of the interests of the Arab population and their eventual independence. Nevertheless, despite this continuing contradiction the Cabinet decided, for reasons of imperial self-interest once again (i.e. the loss of ‘face’ that would result), to go on with the Declaration’s promise of a Jewish national home. The consequence was inevitable conflict between Arabs and Jews, with which Britain, in its straitened economic circumstances after 1945, would not ultimately be able to cope and which finally led to its ignominious departure from Palestine in 1948, the besmirching of its ‘honour’ and ‘name’ notwithstanding, and leaving behind a situation of terrible conflict that is still ongoing a hundred years after the secret Cavendish report of 1923.

The American historian J.B. Quigley commented:

The Cabinet approved the committee’s report, with minor amendments, on 31 July 1923. The report was nothing short of remarkable. Had it been made public at the time, one can only speculate at the furor it would have caused. The British government was admitting that its support for Zionism had been prompted by considerations having nothing to do with the merits of Zionism, or its consequences for Palestine. The government, for reasons unrelated to Palestine, was willing to relegate Palestine to a posture in which inter-communal conflict was all but inevitable.”²⁵

          The Cavendish committee proposed setting up an Arab Agency in Palestine to serve Arab interests and which would operate alongside the already existing Jewish Agency  – but only if the Zionists agreed and if the Arabs agreed to cease all further agitations. News of this proposal was made public, but the Cavendish committee report stayed secret. The public did not know therefore that the Cabinet actually regarded the Mandate as unworkable.

“The statement that was made public read, disingenuously, that the Government had endeavoured so to conduct the administration of Palestine as to do equal justice to the interests of both the parties concerned. …This public statement was directly at odds with the conclusion the Cabinet reached in private. It did not become known that Britain was more concerned about keeping the Mandate than about the advisability of promoting a Jewish national home. It did not become known that Britain had no plans for implementing the Balfour Declaration in a way that was anticipated to yield an acceptable outcome.²⁶

The British government was telling the Permanent Mandates Commission of the League of Nations in the 1920s that the interests of both communities in Palestine were being served appropriately, but as early as July 1923 its own real assessment was that this was far from the case and was in fact virtually impossible.

     Meanwhile, Jewish immigration continued to rise steadily. The population of Tel Aviv increased from 2,500 in 1920 to 25,000 in 1924, and the overall Jewish population of Mandatory Palestine rose from 90,000 in 1923 to 450,000 in 1940, most arriving after 1929 with the rise of Nazism in Germany; the Arab population was about a million. At the founding of the State of Israel in 1948, the Jewish population was 650,000. The greatly increased numbers in the 1930s led to major Arab protests, rioting and violence, culminating in the Great Arab Revolt of 1936-39, during which irregular Jewish armed forces collaborated with British troops in fighting the Arabs and after which the British government finally imposed considerable restrictions on Jewish immigration and announced that it would end the Palestine Mandate within 10 years i.e. withdraw. In 1937 the British had announced a plan to partition the territory three ways: an Arab state, a Jewish state and a continuing British Mandate over Jerusalem and the port of Haifa; the British obviously still wanted to control Jerusalem and their oil port at Haifa. These British plans of 1937 and 1939 led to illegal immigration and terrorist violence against the British authorities by the Jewish Lehi (Fighters for the Freedom of Israel) and Irgun (National Military Organisation) movements in the 1940s. The British had finally succeeded in turning both Arabs and Jews against them. Jewish violence culminated in the bombing atrocity at the British HQ at the Hotel King David in 1946 where 91 people were killed and 45 injured.

The Americans and the UN vote in November 1947

After the Second World War, the Labour government, under great economic duress, and considerable US pressure, resolved to quit India and Palestine as soon as practically possible. Meanwhile, the Anglo-American-devised League of Nations had given way in 1946 to the Anglo-American-devised United Nations. How did this body give its blessing to the founding of the State of Israel in 1948?  After the death of President Roosevelt in April 1945, Jewish lobby groups sought to put pressure on the new and inexperienced President to force the British to increase immigration quotas to Palestine. One of them, the American League for a Free Palestine (ALFP), was a front for the Jewish terrorist group, the Irgun, and was led by Hillel Kook, a senior member in the Irgun.²⁷ In 1946, with the ghastly film footage from concentration camps in Germany in people’s minds, and many Jews still waiting in miserable conditions in Europe, American Jews were in no mood for compromise. Their lobby pressure was relentless and much money was raised, from Hollywood celebrities and even from the Mafia for the militant Jewish groups fighting the British in Palestine. Kook and others represented those groups’ armed struggle as the struggle of the American revolutionaries for freedom from the British in the 1770s, and as in the 1770s, Kook and his allies did not hesitate to involve the French, setting up a French branch of the ALFP and gaining the support of such luminaries as Simone de Beauvoir and Jean-Paul Sartre. Under political pressure from the significant Jewish lobby in New York City, President Harry Truman called for “a viable Jewish state”, and the Republican governor Thomas Dewey urged that “hundreds of thousands” of emigrants be allowed into Palestine. Truman expressed his exasperation at forceful Jewish lobbying, but felt he had to bend towards it, not least because of the number of Bible Belt American Protestant voters who felt they had to help “the Hebrews” regain the Promised Land. A factor here was the very influential Scofield Reference Bible of American fundamentalist minister Cyrus I. Scofield²⁸ (published in Britain by Oxford University Press) that since 1909 had become popular in the USA with its extensive notes to the King James Version. By the end of the Second World War the Scofield Bible had sold more than two million copies. The Scofield Bible’s notes, amongst other things, promoted eschatological dispensationalism  – the notion that God intervenes in human history in discrete historical phases.²⁹

     Jewish terrorist actions grew more daring, ever more violent and more successful. Gradually, as had been the case with the IRA in Ireland in 1919-21, the British buckled under the terrorists’ ever more gruesome attacks and it became ever clearer that they were losing control of the situation despite their heavy-handed efforts to repress the Jewish armed groups. In September 1947 the British announced they would pull out unilaterally on 14 May 1948, whatever the situation and whatever the UN might decide. On 29 November 1947 the UN debated the partition proposal drawn up by the UN Special Committee on Palestine (UNSCOP). The proposal required a two-thirds majority to pass. New York Jews lobbied effectively both inside and outside the UN building; their focus was on France which until then had taken no clear position. Bernard Baruch (1870-1965), an ardent Zionist and a real powerbroker who had funded Woodrow Wilson to become President in 1912, had advised Presidents Roosevelt and Truman, was a close friend of Winston Churchill and moreover was also a supporter of the Irgun and the ALFP, put direct pressure on the French UN delegate,  Alexandre Parodi, telling him personally that the French stock market would dive if France did not support partition in the UN vote and implying that President Truman might choose to send aid meant for France elsewhere. The clear message was relayed back to Paris. In the UN General Assembly vote on 29 November Parodi voted for partition and so did France’s three neighbours Belgium, Luxembourg and the Netherlands. Those votes helped to secure the two thirds majority (33-13) for partition. In Palestine, Jews shouted “Vive la France!” but they should rather have shouted “Vive Baruch!” Thus it was that the Zionists got their UN support for the State of Israel they founded on 14 May 1948.

The old rivalry: Britain and France

Meanwhile, French money for weapons for the Jewish armed groups in Palestine continued to arrive in Palestine: in January 1948 the French Foreign Minister Georges Bidault authorised US$26 million worth of arms for the Haganah group.

     Until the very end of the British Mandate in May 1948, the two old imperial rivals Britain and France were still trading blows over the Levant and the Eastern Mediterranean that they had been struggling over since the 1870s, when Disraeli had outmanoeuvred France with Rothschild money to buy the controlling shares in the Suez Canal (which had been built by the French!), since 1882, when the British Prime Minister William E. Gladstone had sent British troops to occupy Egypt to consolidate that control of the Canal, and since 1915 when the prickly diplomats Sir Mark Sykes and François Georges-Picot had wrangled over delineating British and French spheres of influence and control in the region and had created the infamous Sykes-Picot lines on a map which largely determined the borders of the postwar territories that still exist today and which as recently as 2014 ISIS declared it would erase to recreate the Islamic ‘Caliphate’.

      It was in fact due to Britain’s frustration over France’s determination to gain control over Syria during the First World War that the British government had first lent an ear to Herbert Samuel’s proposal to create a Jewish homeland in Palestine. When the Turkish sultan, who was also the Caliph of the entire Islamic world, had declared a Holy War (a great jihad) against Britain in November 1914, Britain had responded by launching a massive imperial assault on Constantinople via Gallipoli the following year. This failed disastrously, so in 1916 the British turned to Hussein the Sharif of Mecca, who was descended from the Prophet Muhammed and as such was the one man in the Islamic world who outranked the Sultan/Caliph, but the Sharif’s price for joining the fight against the Turks was high: it included Syria, Lebanon, Iraq, Jordan and Palestine.

     However, Britain’s allies, the French, insisted on having Syria, even though they did not occupy it. Their claim was based instead on age-long romantic cultural ‘ties’ between France and Syria going back to the time of Charlemagne, the Crusades, and Franco-Ottoman alliances in the 16th and 17th centuries as well as educational and trading links with Syria and Lebanon. The French had also wanted Palestine, but Sykes managed to persuade Picot that Palestine should be governed internationally after the war, a solution that pleased neither of them. The British had at least gained control over the oilfields of Mesopotamia, over the port of Haifa and over Transjordan and the Negev desert which bordered on the Sinai and the Canal. Nevertheless, they would much have preferred France to have gained nothing in the region.

“Resentful that they had been forced into the deal [3 Jan. 1916] by Georges-Picot, they immediately began to look for ways to circumvent it and in particular to plug the gap in their defences left by its unsatisfactory settlement of Palestine. To do so, the British turned to an idea that had been circulating in government circles for a year. This was that support for Zionism – the as yet unsuccessful political campaign to create a Jewish state in Palestine – represented a better way for Britain to secure its position in the Middle East.” ³⁰

     Also, following the failure of the Turks’ attempt to take the Suez Canal via an assault on the Sinai in January 1915, the British recaptured the Sinai but were defeated in two battles at Gaza in the spring of 1917. General Edmund Allenby (a descendant of Oliver Cromwell), then led the British forces in a victorious campaign northwards from Sinai to Jerusalem (Dec. 1917) and Damascus (Oct. 1918). This campaign would not have been successful without the support of the Arab forces of Sharif Husein, led by Col. T. E. Lawrence (“Lawrence of Arabia”), a close ally of Hussein’s son, Prince Faisal, who was set on independence and statehood for the Arabs.

     The age-old imperial rivalry between England and France going back to the 18th century and beyond that, to the Crusades of the 12th and 13th centuries, thus had a not insignificant hand in the events that led to the formation of the State of Israel in 1948. Allenby entered Jerusalem on 7 December 1917, on foot, out of modesty, at the head of the first European army there since the 13th century. He is said to have remarked: “Only now have the Crusades ended”, but he did not allow his press officers to use the words “crusade” and “crusaders” and thought of himself as fighting the Ottomans, not Islam. However, the 20th century Zionist settlers in Palestine were overwhelmingly European, and the Arabs saw them and still see them as such – as modern crusaders of a kind, colonial invaders who must be resisted and ejected, as the Crusaders were, 700 years before. The Zionists, following a nationalist impulse from the Age of Gabriel, and believing in their people’s unique and ancient claim to the land, sought to establish a modern nation state in a land that had been inhabited by others for over a thousand years.

Notes

1 https://www.timesofisrael.com/israels-declaration-of-independence-may-14-1948/

It may be noted that this essay does not make reference to the Nazi genocide against the Jews 1939-1945. This is because the section of Israel’s Declaration of Independence quoted from David Ben-Gurion’s speech above does not refer to the genocide but rather, to the four factors mentioned on page 19 of this article (the paragraph beginning: “The Declaration of Independence in 1948 acknowledged…”). If the genocide had not happened, the Zionist movement would still have pressed their case for a Jewish State and if necessary, would have fought the British government militarily in order to drive the British out and gain their objective.

2 See The Invention of the Jewish People (Eng. transl. 2009) by Shlomo Sand, Israeli Emeritus Professor of History at Tel Aviv University, p.181f.

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

4 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mandate_for_Palestine#cite_note-247 Notes [t]

5 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mandate_for_Palestine#cite_note-224

6 The imperial Powers had of course acquired many of their own colonies by other acts of theft, conquest or deception.

7 Previously, many Jews, especially in the USA had been pro-German, and the German government had sought to keep their support.

8 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Balfour_Declaration

9 More powerful than the Prime Minister Lloyd George, who, in order to ensure the continuance of the war, had been put in power by a coup d’état in December 1916 by Milner and his supporters who had been planning such a move for many months. Milner, a greatly experienced colonial administrator and then banker himself, had deep links to high finance and to the Establishment more widely; by comparison, Lloyd George was merely a gifted political rhetorician and former lawyer, a political opportunist, while Milner followed his own thoroughgoing convictions and credo with regard to Britain’s imperial future.

10 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Balfour_Declaration#cite_note-250

11 Cheryl A. Rubenberg, Israel and the American National Interest: A Critical Examination. University of Illinois Press, 1989, p. 26.

12 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Balfour_Declaration#CITEREFHurewitz1979

13 https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=1650658. J. B. Quigley, ‘The Perfidy of Albion: Britain’s Secret Re-Assessment of the Balfour Declaration’, Ohio State University, 2010, p. 3.

14 ibid. p. 4.

15 ibid. p. 5.

16 ibid p. 5. This British government Memo was not quite accurate; the Declaration was made on 2nd November 1917, five days before the Bolshevik coup d’état in St. Petersburg. It took at least three months before the Soviets finally sued for peace with Germany on 18 February 1918, and the Germans could then begin “massing huge forces on the Western front in preparation for the great offensive of (21 March) 1918”.

17 op. cit., Quigley, p. 6.

18 https://www.scribd.com/fullscreen/60431057?access_key=key-136ulpy32ssl2l27p8nb

Documents on British Foreign Policy, 1919-1939. (London: H.M. Stationery Office, 1952), 340-348 Nº. 242. ‘Memorandum by Mr. Balfour (Paris) respecting Syria, Palestine, and  Mesopotamia’, 11 August 1919.

19 J. Barr, A Line in the Sand – Britain, France and the Struggle that Shaped the Middle East (2011) p. 32.

20 B. Wasserstein, The British in Palestine: The Mandatory Government and the Arab-Jewish Conflict 1917–1929 (1978), p. 92.

21 Quigley, p. 11.

22 op. cit., Quigley, p. 13.

23 op. cit., Quigley, p. 14.

24 op. cit., Quigley, p. 14.

25 op. cit., Quigley, p. 18.

26 op. cit., Quigley, p. 19.

27 See  J. Barr, A Line in the Sand, pp. 326-335.

28 Scofield had received much help from wealthy Jews in the creation and promotion of his new Bible, the study notes of which were seen as pro-Zionist. Scofield’s theology was based to a large extent on the dispensationalist teachings of one of the founders of the Plymouth Brethren, the Anglo-Irishman John Nelson Darby (1800-1882).

29 These, it was claimed, would include the return of the Jews to Israel and also ‘the Rapture’, the gathering up of “the Church” of the faithful into heaven during ‘the Time of Tribulation’; these would become major themes of Christian fundamentalism and ‘Christian Zionism’ in the USA in the 20th century.

30 J. Barr, op. cit., p. 32.