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The Incarnation of Ahriman – When and Where?
This is a revised and slightly extended version of a lecture given by the author at a Der Europäer seminar in the Basel Stadthaus, Basel, Switzerland, 23.11.2019 and published in The Present Age magazine (Vol. 5 Nos. 7/8 Oct/Nov 2019 and Vol. 5 Nos. 9/10 May/June 2020) Rudolf Steiner gave 8 indications about the incarnation of Ahriman in the latter part of 1919. Before I turn to these 8 indications I would like to draw attention to some earlier remarks of his which can perhaps be seen as ‘preliminary’. On 16 July, 1918 (GA 181),...
read moreNATO’s 70th Birthday and UN COP 25
This article was first published in New View magazine Winter Issue 94 Winter Jan – March 2020 To form any judgments about a phenomenon in contemporary events we can keep in mind three elements – the context of the event (awareness of how the event relates to the past), wakefulness (awareness of what’s going on now in relation to the event) and insight (understanding how the event relates to what seems to be approaching us from the future). With these in mind, let us consider two recent contemporary events: NATO’s celebration of its...
read more“UNITE Behind the Science” of Greta Thunberg?
This article was first published in New View magazine, Issue 93 Oct-Dec 2019 It is a challenge in today’s world to think for oneself when from all sides of our electronic public arena, from news broadcasts and current affairs programmes to dramas and advertisements one is being bombarded by the same messages, day in, day out. It is hard enough for supposedly educated mature, middle-aged people who were brought up in the world of print culture and private thoughts and imaginations to think for themselves in this situation, let alone...
read moreBrexit as a Spiritual Question (3) A Personal View
This article was first published in New View magazine Issue 92 July-Sept. 2019 Chester, a city in the northwest of England on the border with Wales and some 17 miles from Liverpool, was the largest base of the Roman army in Britannia during the Roman occupation. The name Chester comes from the Latin castrum, which means fortified military base, camp or fortress. The city, which the Romans called Deva Victrix, was founded by the Roman Army in 79 AD, 46 years after the Crucifixion and Resurrection of Jesus Christ. That was also the year of the...
read moreBrexit as a Spiritual Question (2): The Continental/Catholic Dimension
This article was first published in New View magazine, Issue 91 April-June 2019 My previous article for New View: “Brexit as a Spiritual Question: Why the EU is the Wrong Direction for Europe and the Modern Age”, was intended as the first of a series of three articles looking at the origins of the EU. It considered those origins in terms of one of the two elitist streams mentioned that have been active in guiding the EU project into existence and maintaining and developing it since the 1950s, namely, the Anglo-American stream. This...
read moreBrexit as a Spiritual Question (1) – Why the EU Is Wrong for Europe
This article was first published in New View magazine (Issue 90, Jan-Mar 2019) Brexit is not only an economic and political issue; it is also a spiritual issue, a cultural issue of our time, because the EU is a construct that contradicts the essential spiritual impulses of the modern age, which began in the 15th century. Britain, for good and ill, has played a major role in shaping this modern age, in which, according to Rudolf Steiner, the British people and the other English-speaking peoples who proceeded from them play a vanguard...
read more“Globalism”, “Nationalism”, and “Identity Politics”
This article was first published in The Present Age magazine Nov. 2018 Vol.4 No.8 This month we commemorate the Armistice of 11 November 1918 and the end of the First World War, although fighting of various kinds went on in numerous countries for the next few years, and although the 1914-1918 conflict would soon be seen by more far-sighted observers as the ‘first round’ of a conflict that would sooner or later begin again. Anthroposophers are familiar with Rudolf Steiner’s statements about nationalism1 being a...
read moreMusical Healing (Heilung) for European Culture?
This article was first published in the monthly magazine The Present Age Vol. 4 No. 6 Sept 2018 The events in the eastern German city of Chemnitz (Karl-Marx-Stadt during the Communist era) in late August this year, the brutal murder and assaults, the angry reaction of the citizens, the paranoid, exaggerated response of the mainstream media and the cynical attempts of political parties and factions of the Far Right and Far Left to exploit the situation to their own advantage were a symptom of the social sickness that prevails in Europe today:...
read more‘Narratives’: 1914-2018: The War on Russia, Germany and ‘Hate’
This article was first published in New View magazine #89 Oct.-Dec. 2018 On 5 September the British government revealed, on the basis of what it called “exhaustive CCTV analysis”, the identities of the two men it claimed had arrived in Britain on 2 March and had been responsible for deliberate nerve agent poisonings in and near the city of Salisbury. It said that these men were Russian agents working for the Main Intelligence Directorate (GU, formerly GRU), the military intelligence agency of the General Staff of the Armed Forces of the...
read moreWarum der Engländer Lord Stanhope?
Vortrag bei der Kaspar Hauser Festspiele, Ansbach, Deutschland, 4.8.2018 Ich möchte Eckart Böhmer danken, mir die Gelegenheit zu geben, nochmals hier bei den Kaspar Hauser Festspielen zu diesem Thema zu sprechen, das nicht nur für unser Verständnis der Vergangenheit so wichtig ist, sondern auch für die Zukunft Europas.„Warum der Engländer Stanhope?“ Diese Frage kann auf zweierlei Art beantwortet werden. Die eine eher konventionell, die andere tiefer, aber auch spekulativer. Ich möchte zunächst kurz von einem...
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