The MysTech online conference on the theme of ‘Facing the Incarnation of Ahriman’ was held from 7th to 10th August 2025. Organised by Andrew Linnell and his colleagues, it offered an impressive range of talks by some excellent speakers. I was not able to listen to all sixteen speakers, but I did manage to hear presentations from: Inessa Burdich, Harrie Salman, Bastiaan Baan, Benjamin Cherry, Adriana Koulias, Doug Smith, Florian Sydow, Robert McKay, Are Thoresen and Andrew Linnell. The text of my own talk is given below.
In a lecture given in Dornach on 18th November 1917, Rudolf Steiner said: “What people in our epoch must learn is the need to wage a fully conscious fight against the evil that is making its way into human evolution.”
The epoch to which Steiner was referring is our present stage of human development which he called the Age of the Consciousness Soul, or the fifth post-Atlantean epoch. This has been with us since the early 15th century and it will last for around 2,200 years, ending approximately in the year 3600 of our present era. Steiner tells us that, since the beginning of this Age, the propensity for evil lies in the subconscious of every person, and that there is no crime, however dreadful, that each one of us, as people of this epoch, does not have the potential to commit. Paradoxically, confronting this reality is the only way that we can solve the riddle of evil, which is the most important task of our age.
The existence of evil is also, of course, a powerful reason why many people say they do not believe in God, for how can a god of love who is omnipotent, omniscient and omnipresent allow evil phenomena to exist? Yet initiates tell us that God has two aspects, which when understood and viewed correctly, enable us to see the purpose of evil. Evil can be seen as the unevolved and undeveloped aspect of life, the force which tests us and absorbs and removes that which is unwanted.
So this is the scale of the challenge each of us is facing in this very difficult period in human physical existence. Anthroposophists characterise our present time as one in which we shall see the actual incarnation of the great dark archangel, Ahriman. Ahriman could be defined as the power which prevents man in his physical-sense world existence from perceiving the spiritual-soul beings lying behind the surface of our physical world – but Ahriman is also an actual being, whose incarnation in physical form is imminent. This will be the last of three unique incarnations of which Steiner spoke – the first was the incarnation of Lucifer in about 3000 BCE (believed by many to have been as the Yellow Emperor in China, he of the terracotta army); the second was the incarnation of Christ in Palestine two thousand years ago; and the third will be the incarnation of Ahriman, which to quote Steiner will take place “before only a part of the third millennium of the post-Christian era has elapsed”, probably in the USA. Each of these incarnations is prepared for many years, indeed centuries, in advance, and we can see quite clearly already the kind of evil influences that the future Ahrimanic incarnation is bringing to bear upon our human societies.
In my view, the past one hundred and fifty years has been the most terrible period in the whole of human history and the evil is worsening and intensifying as we approach the actual incarnation. Some of the notable characteristics of what is happening across the world right now include:
A huge increase in personal stress levels
A loss of faith or confidence in governments and public institutions of all kinds, both nationally and internationally
Rancour and divisions between families, friends and colleagues, with irreconcilable positions taken on issues of the day
A collapse of the systems on which we all rely, including the international rules-based order
The gradual disappearance of many of the old certainties on which society is based.
For anthroposophists, these social phenomena indicate that what is happening is Ahrimanic, clear signs of the impending incarnation of the being that Christ called the ‘ruler of this world’. Wherever we look, we see many examples which are indicative of this and perhaps even of the actual incarnation itself. The signs are all around us, and you don’t need me to list them. We are all aware of the ever-increasing range of threats which confront humanity and the entire web of life.
For me, the Covid pandemic has been one of the most significant of the Ahrimanic phenomena. Covid is a viral disease, which means that it is mineral in nature and does not have its own life processes and therefore needs a host organism so it can reproduce itself. But it also has astonishing intelligence, for example in the resistance it can develop to medicines, or in the way it can mutate, partly in response to vaccinations. But I can’t help asking, where does this astonishing intelligence live? In what being does this intelligence reside?
Second, the Covid pandemic produced fear, much of it stoked by deliberate government policy, as well as anxiety and division between people, even within families. It also led governments to dismantle existing civil liberties with an ease that they had not expected to find in Western democracies. It became impossible to have a fruitful exchange of views between those taking different standpoints and we saw instead heightened emotions, rejection and hatred of other people’s opinions. This process was driven even further by our news outlets and social media, who censored the views of anyone, even distinguished professors of medicine, whose expert opinion did not fit the official line. Again, one must ask: whose interests are being served by this fracturing of social cohesion?
Such attitudes have also radiated out into wider society, causing dissension between ordinary people. We see it internationally and we see it also in our national lives, with both the USA and the UK having more divided societies than ever before. And during Covid we also began to see discord and division growing in our localities. Here are just two examples of these polarised attitudes from the time of Covid, from my own local community: the first one was told to me by a woman who has a mother in a care home. This woman did not want to have the jabs and was told that as a result not only would she not be able to visit her mother but that unless she had both jabs her mother would no longer be able to stay in the care home! The second comes from someone who runs a kindergarten, who at the height of the pandemic was told by some parents that if she herself had the jabs, then they would remove their children from the kindergarten. Tyranny runs in both directions… Such unkindness and the breaking-down of relationships are characteristic of the impending incarnation.
When contemplating a theme as weighty as the incarnation of Ahriman, it is helpful to have in our minds a picture of ourselves as human beings and our current evolutionary progress. For we are undoubtedly at a significant point of change and our evolution can go either in the way intended by the spiritual hierarchies or else in the direction wished for and worked towards by Ahriman and his helpers. The issue is still in the balance and the outcome depends on each one of us.
Anthroposophy teaches us that we human beings are engaged on a path of development that leads us to ever higher levels of consciousness and existence. And it’s clear today that we are at a critical point along that path. What we are now being called upon to do is to connect and work with our higher spiritual self, which everyone of us has and which Steiner calls the ‘I ‘or higher ego: the image of God, our true nature, which is within each of us.
It is particularly confusing for us at this time that there are three processes going on simultaneously, some of which are cause for despair and others which are as, Ita Wegman said in another context, “full of future”.
The first process is that we are coming to the end of the old path of development, which brought widespread prosperity and progress; but which also increasingly led us to materialism, selfishness, greed and disconnection from the environment and the spiritual world, and hence to the multiple crises facing us. It is the breaking-down of this first process which we tend to see reflected in our news media. That is also the aspect which Ahriman and his helpers want us to focus on because it induces great fear in us. This old developmental stage made us become who we are today: independent personalities with an ‘I‘ and self-consciousness. But now that humanity has accomplished this developmental stage, the old path is breaking up and is slowly coming to an end amidst chaos and confusion, which increases the fear and uncertainty felt by so many people.
The second process is that a new way of being is seeking to be born, as the old is breaking down all around us. This is occurring as people ask themselves questions on their life paths, search for answers, go through processes of change and, as a result, perceive, think, and do things differently. This new kind of consciousness, arising as it does from inner transformation, is happening everywhere and can be recognised worldwide. It is leading to the emergence of a new culture in which people connect to their feelings, think about what they believe, make conscious choices, know what values they stand for, and consciously interact and cooperate with other people and with nature. It is those who can ride the wave of this change who are creating the new culture.
The third process is about building new ways of being. Instead of an attitude of competition and rivalry, opposing and fighting each other, people are increasingly seeking connection and cooperation. Instead of blindly obeying an authority outside our self, we would rather trust our own authority, our own inner knowing. This is accompanied by a shift of perception from separateness to wholeness – the recognition that we are connected to the greater whole in all aspects of life and reality, our humanity, the earth, the cosmos, everything that lives. There is an increasing realisation that everything is dependent on everything else.
One way of looking at this might be to say that humanity has lived in a state of adolescence for two thousand years. Now it is time for us to grow up, become true adults and work for unity and understanding throughout the world. We have progressed in our intelligence and our mastery of scientific discoveries but our capacities for wisdom and love have not progressed to the same extent. We have uncovered the workings of the laws that govern Nature without being sufficiently attuned to the Cosmic Law as it is reflected in Nature; and have thus brought ourselves ever closer to destruction.
In this MysTech conference we are considering the role of Ahriman but we should also consider other adversary forces. Steiner spoke about another spiritual entity, an opposing principle to the Lamb of Christ, that he calls the ‘Sun Demon’ or ‘Sorat’. It is this being, the adversary of the Lamb, who is literally the anti-Christ. It is an open question for me as to how much Sorat, and his demonic helpers, the Asuras, have been behind the work of Ahriman during the last century and a half. Whereas Ahriman’s aim is to lead us into an ever-intensifying form of brain-bound, earth-bound materialistic thinking, and Lucifer’s is to tempt us into disembodied fantasy and to believing that we are gods, the aim of Sorat the Antichrist, the Sun Demon, is to destroy the human ‘I’ (the Self, the bearer of the Christ principle or the indwelling divinity in the human being), to drag us towards the so-called Eighth Sphere and to destroy the Earth itself, which our ‘I’ needs for the future development of the human soul. Yes, we and the Earth need each other for our evolutionary paths. Climate change, war, the sixth great extinction, genocide, materialism, racism, and transhumanism – these are all facets of attacks from the same enemy. This is the true scale of the battle with which we are now engaged.
A quick explanation about the expression just used, the Eighth Sphere. Anthroposophy teaches us that humankind in its total evolution from the very beginning to the end of time must pass through seven planetary spheres, which correspond to our seven bodies, which are members or aspects of our being. We are currently in the Fourth Sphere, which is our dear planet Earth and which corresponds to our ‘I’ or higher ego, the individuality which we take with us from incarnation to incarnation. Over aeons we have already lived through the first three spheres which are: Saturn, which corresponds to the physical body; the Sun, which corresponds to the etheric body; and the Moon which corresponds with the astral body. There are three further bodies which we have within ourselves as potential for future development, that is to say Spirit Self, Life Spirit and Spirit Man. (You can read more about these seven bodies or members of the human constitution in Steiner’s book Outline of Esoteric Science.) The adversarial forces are working together to try to divert us from our natural evolutionary progress through the seven planetary spheres, and to take us instead into the Eighth Sphere. If they are successful in this, it means that we would be unable to progress with evolution, nor have the possibility of the encounter with Christ, but instead we would be thrown back to a lower level. Both Ahriman and the Asuras work from the Eighth Sphere. This is the realm which the religions call Hell.
Steiner says that in their will to evil and in their fullness of power, the Asuras surpass both the Luciferic and the Ahrimanic beings:
“The Asuras – the evil ones – are beings who are again one degree higher in their will to evil than the ahrimanic beings and two degrees higher than the luciferic ones.“
“These are the beings who strive towards the Eighth Sphere. They want to compress matter more and more, so that it cannot be spiritualised again, i.e. returned to its original state. They want to drag human beings down into the Eighth Sphere and thus snatch us away from progressive development and its goal – the Christ.“
And alongside this, we are also facing the challenges brought to us by transhumanism. Many scientists, technologists and engineers are working on the development of these concepts, which in a nutshell are designed to transcend human limitations through technological interventions within the human body. Targeted genetic, neurotechnological, prosthetic and pharmacological interventions are meant to optimize our bodies, feelings and brain and broaden them so that biologically programmed human limitations, such as sickness, ageing and death can be overcome and ultimately left behind. Andrew Linnell, our conference organiser, and several other of our speakers, specialise in these matters and I am hoping they will have more to say about them during this weekend. (They did!)
A prominent figure in all of this is Ray Kurzweil, Google’s former futurologist, who is a leading computer scientist and inventor. His prediction, made in his book The Singularity is Near, is that we human beings will become more godlike as we become more machine-like and as machines develop more god-like powers. Kurzweil says that we humans are nothing special in the animal kingdom: we have no immortal soul, there is no essential human self and our thoughts and emotions are the product of electrochemical impulses which can in the future be modelled by algorithms. Our future lies in the hands of technologists, people who are experts in biotechnology, artificial intelligence, cognitive and computer science. Their work will produce new tools that will become parts of our bodies. We will have bionic hands, feet and eyes, while nanorobots will move through our bloodstream looking out for disease and repairing the damage of age and injury. We shall have wearable and implanted devices to expand our senses and alter our moods, while biological tools will enter our cells, remodel our genes and give us new and better flesh, blood and neurons.
it is clear that Kurzweil, who is a highly intelligent man, is nevertheless one of the Useful Idiots preparing the way for Ahriman. As part-evidence for my statement that Kurzweil is an idiot, it should be noted that he has joined the Alcor Life Extension Foundation, a cryonics company. In the event of his death, Kurzweil plans for his corpse to be perfused with cryoprotectants, vitrified in liquid nitrogen, and stored at an Alcor facility in the hope that future medical technology will be able to repair his tissues and revive him. If only he had studied Steiner, he’d know that his consciousness is already immortal and he could have saved himself $200,000!
But it does seem quite possible that those of us alive today are likely to be the last generation of pure human beings that the world will know. Within a single generation the transhumanists intend that we will become a hybrid species of biological and synthetic bodies. Ray Kurzweil says: “Some people find this frightening. But [The Singularity] is going to be beautiful and will expand our consciousness in ways we can barely imagine, like a person who is deaf hearing the most exquisite symphony for the first time.” But it’s surely also possible that these developments will limit our ability to think, to love, to adapt to the conditions of the emerging world in a healthy way. Behind all this is Ahriman, who wants us to lose our capacity for emotion, empathy, intimacy and forgiveness – the very qualities that we value and cherish in our humanness.
The historian of humankind, Yuval Noah Harari, also points to a near future in which “people will no longer regard themselves as autonomous beings who follow their own wishes according to their life, but rather as a collection of biochemical mechanisms that are constantly monitored and directed by a network of electronic algorithms”. He says that “Humans, giraffes, viruses are all algorithms. They differ from computers in so far as they are biochemical algorithms which have evolved at the caprice of natural selection over millennia.” “The individual authentic self is no more real than the immortal Christian soul, Santa Claus or the Easter bunny.” As a not entirely humorous aside, my wife has a fear that in the future those of us who refuse to be microchipped or to accept technological improvements to our bodies will be forced by the rest of society to live in nature reserves where we can be visited and observed as quaint throwbacks by the medically enhanced ‘normal’ people, as a kind of millennium seedbank of the human genome.
Do all these phenomena mean that Ahriman has already incarnated? Rudolf Steiner predicted that Ahriman would incarnate in the flesh in the first part of the third millennium in which we are now living. The details of how, when and in whom this incarnation would happen have of course been the subject of much speculation since Steiner spoke about this over one hundred years ago. Steiner also said at a meeting with young people in Breslau that Ahriman will do everything in his power to advance the moment of his incarnation as much as he can. Steiner then mentions the year 1998, which for anyone interested in numerology is 666 multiplied by 3.
My own view is that, rather in the way that the incarnation of Jesus Christ was preceded for around 500 years by all kinds of what might be called precursor indications, the various phenomena we are seeing now are also indications of what is heading our way. At present, I don’t see any convincing candidates for the role of Ahriman, despite strong competition among current world leaders, so even if Ahriman is now here in a physical body, he has not yet assumed the prominence we might expect.
For how long will these evil times last? Here is a quotation from the great Bulgarian master, Beinsa Douno, also known as Peter Deunov (1864 – 1944), who was a contemporary of Steiner – they had a high regard for one another. This excerpt comes from a talk with his followers during the 1920s, and it still seems highly relevant to our situation now:
“The ‘end of the world’ manifests itself through the cleansing of the old humanity, so that a new humanity can come in that place. This cleansing (…) has been carried out for a period of 45 years. This period began in 1900 and will end in 1945. You are all eyewitnesses to what happened during this period.”
“From 1945 will begin another period, which will also last 45 years until 1990. Such times come and such power comes, that whoever opposes it will lay his bones on the ground. A great dictatorship ensues (…) “
“After this period there will be a short break until 1999 (…). And then a new period will come, with an even more terrible dictatorship (…). It will also last 45 years.”
That takes us to the year 2044. So, if Peter Deunov is correct, we can expect around another twenty years where these Ahrimanic phenomena will intensify and worsen, years which will perhaps include the actual incarnation.
Steiner did not specify what exactly Ahriman would do on earth, and what sort of person he might be in the flesh. But in a lecture given in Bern on 4th November 1919, he said that during his incarnation, Ahriman would seek “to utterly mislead and corrupt humanity on earth.” He also said in 1922: “And what is it that these Ahrimanic beings are seeking to bring about? They set themselves the task of keeping man on the Earth by every possible means. You know from the book Occult Science that the Earth will one day pass over into the Jupiter condition. That is what these beings want to prevent. They want to prevent man from developing in a regular way together with the Earth and then passing over into the Jupiter condition in a normal way. They want to preserve the Earth as Earth and mankind for the Earth. Hence these beings work unceasingly and with great intensity to achieve their purpose.”
But Steiner also says repeatedly in the lectures that this incarnation could not and should not be averted. It has to happen and, in the right conditions, might even benefit human evolution. The really important thing is that people should be sufficiently awake to recognise Ahriman for what he is. Only if Ahriman were to go unrecognised would this event be wholly calamitous for the evolution of the earth and humanity.
There’s no doubt that Ahriman has an easier task than one could wish. He finds it easy to persuade humans to give up their future to him, because Ahriman can work through the seat of human desires – our pride, greed, laziness, lust or wish for power – but Christ can only reach us through our ‘I’ or higher self and this means that the struggle is not an equal one. Our ‘I’ has so to develop that it can in time learn to recognise and resist the many temptations offered by Lucifer and Ahriman. These two adversarial forces work as allies at the present time, even though they appeal to different instincts in us. The way to deal with these two poles of Evil is to seek the point of balance between them, which is represented by Christ.
One has to recognise, however, that the behaviour over centuries of some Christians, some churches and some supposedly Christian nations has combined to make the name ‘Jesus Christ’ distasteful to many people today. This is another area where Ahriman has been working effectively.
To quote from the very useful AnthroWiki website, “Jesus Christ is the name for the unique and singular earthly embodiment of the Christ in the body of Jesus of Nazareth. According to Steiner’s research, this incarnation began with the baptism in the Jordan River, which occurred around the 30th year of Jesus’ life, and was completed with his death on Golgotha”.
“Through the Mystery of Golgotha, the Christ Power, which originally worked from the Sun, united with the Earth. This is a spiritual fact that stands above all denominational religious confessions and is also not bound to the name ‘Christ’ that is in common use among us”. As Steiner emphasised: ‘Never will he who recognises the Christ-being insist that the name of the Christ remain.’ ” In other words, we shouldn’t get upset if other people use a different term for the universal fact of Christ. And Steiner has made the stupendous statement that “the ‘I’ in human beings is microcosmically the same as Christ is macrocosmically for the world.”
Just lately I have been reading Travels on the Northern Path of Initiation by the anthroposophical writer and seer, Are Thoresen, in which he offers an intriguing update on Steiner’s descriptions of Ahriman’s incarnation. Thoresen is in supersensible contact with the Nordic angelic being Vidar, whom he describes as continuing the work of Michael as an Archangel, and who is the outer and shining aura of Christ himself. Thoresen asked Vidar about the future incarnation of Ahriman. To quote from the book:
“Vidar’s answer was clear and simple, and as I slowly pondered this it made more and more sense. He said that Ahriman was already in the process of incarnating, at this very time, but he is incarnating in all of us, with the help – or by being given cover by – the asuric beings. It is extremely important to understand this.” Are Thoresen is one of the speakers who will be taking part in this conference so I’m hoping that he will be saying more about all of this during this weekend. (No, he spoke instead about ways of entering the spiritual worlds.)
And whether you agree with Steiner or Thoresen or even with neither of them, one real challenge of these times is how to get through them without succumbing to despair. For me, the pain consists in seeing what is happening and realising that the vast majority of our fellow human beings, although they know that we are living in a very troubled world, are oblivious to what is really going on. And what is really going on, to borrow the title of a book by Bernard Lievegoed, is The Battle for the Soul. According to Lievegoed, because the human spirit is unassailable, the opposing powers therefore direct their efforts against the soul. The human soul is the real battlefield of the war between the powers of good and evil. What the Ahrimanic powers are attempting is to obscure the human soul or even to destroy it, so that the human ‘I’ is unable to gain the experience it needs on Earth for its healthy evolution.
Ahriman is also working very hard to ensure that we humans are unaware of the second coming of Christ, which according to Rudolf Steiner will not be a physical incarnation this time around. That was done once and for all 2000 years ago and will not be repeated. Steiner says that since about 1933, the Christ has been available to human beings in the etheric field and that more and more of us will be able to have the experience of an encounter with Christ. We know how Ahriman dealt with this threat in 1933, by assisting the rise of Hitler to power in Germany, thus creating more assaults on the human soul that diverted us from awareness of what was happening in the etheric realm. By keeping the eyes of most of humanity fixed firmly on the material world, and completely unaware of any other reality, Ahriman has kept knowledge of the second coming from our souls.
Why is it that we have come to this particular crisis in our time? After all, humans have been killing one another and behaving with utter selfishness and greed for centuries. What has made the difference now? Why has there been this intensification, a kind of industrialisation, of the scale of evil on this Earth? And how can we wake up to what is really going on and begin to counteract “the evil that is making its way into human evolution”?
This relates to what Steiner called “the war in heaven” that took place over the period 1840 to 1879 between the Archangel Michael and the dark angels. Since that time, when Michael cast out these dark forces from heaven and into the earth, these adversarial powers have been working within the blood and nervous systems of human beings in an attempt to reverse both human and angelic evolution. It is no coincidence that since the fall to earth of these dark angels, humanity is being forced to endure what I have already called the most terrible one hundred and fifty years in the whole of human history.
But we should also bear in mind that at this time, in this 21st century, all signs point towards the emergence of a new world amidst the old, dying world. That new world originates not from outside our selves but from the inner life of us humans. It is derived from the divine core that lives and works inside every individual human soul. This means that the development of every individual on earth is of the utmost importance.
And what looks right now as though the triumph of Ahriman is a foregone conclusion, may not be quite as strong and solid as it appears, because as we know from the past, despite many victories in battle along the way, in the end Ahriman always loses the war. I suspect he will lose this time as well because there is a resilience in human life and the natural world which, when allied with the love of Christ and our innate capacities for empathy, compassion and kindness, give certainty that truth and real human values will outlast and survive the worst that can be done to us, or that we can do to ourselves.
But in the meantime, how can we counter Ahriman and find the strength and resilience to live through these terrible times? We can hope that increasing numbers of people will discover what it truly is to be a human being; that is to say, we humans are beings with one foot in the material world and another in the spiritual world; that spiritual world to which we return between earthly lives and which is our real home. Here on Earth, we have something which is not available to us in the spiritual world – and that is the privilege and the challenge of free will, something which allows us to experience both the good and the bad sides of our natures over many lives and through this process to grow and evolve in freedom through our own decisions.
In a way, we should be grateful to the Ahrimanic beings who, in this spiritual evolutionary process play an essential part. Not only are they instrumental in the forming of the human being’s constitution in all its beauty and darkness, but they also play an important role in bringing us face-to-face with the consequences of our actions and decisions and hence also the forming of our destiny and karma.
It is all too easy to feel that the struggle is hopeless. Whenever I am feeling overwhelmed by the sheer scale of the challenges facing all of life on Earth, the following words from Judith von Halle can give me new courage:
“The consistent psychical-spiritual work of an individual, or of a few individuals, can have an enormous influence on the physical and spiritual conditions of the world! When someone asks: What can I as one person do to influence world events? – the answer is: everything! If people could only see with physical eyes the effect on the macrocosmic context that the decision and its implementation to consistently practise only one meditation by a single person, then probably no one would hesitate to undertake such an exercise themselves. For the possibilities are enormous! Allow me to give you this as the greatest consolation, as the strongest ray of hope in the present situation. The individual person holds the world’s fate in his hands. This is the gift of the Christ, who sees the individual I as a deity, who treats it as a deity. (…) Spiritual life must become a reality in our hearts and therefore in our higher consciousness. We must develop a feeling in our souls for the true, the beautiful and the good that resides in this spiritual life.”
And I also feel it important to concentrate on those areas of life where one can make a difference, rather than wasting time and emotion on problems which are way beyond one’s capacity to influence. Each of us is now being called upon to do all that we can to help in the evolution and progress of human life. In the face of the current massive onslaught which is seeking to re-define what it means to be a human being, any project which concentrates on true human needs and values is a worthwhile antidote to the poison of our times. People are trying to help in their own myriad ways: artists through their creative work, teachers and parents through educating and bringing up children, activists through changing policies and laws, and any of us through our encounters in daily life. If we can be people of initiative, rather than passive sponges soaking up whatever is done to us, humanity will survive the incarnation of Ahriman.
We should remember a saying of St Francis that: “All the darkness in the world cannot extinguish the light of a single candle.” A few people working with and for the light can counteract the negative workings of thousands of others. If you can get together regularly with one or two other people to pray for humanity and all life on the Earth, then the effect of this will be much greater than you can possibly imagine.
In a lecture given at Dornach on 1st November 1919, Rudolf Steiner said the following: “To the extent to which people can be roused into conducting their affairs not for material ends alone but also so as to incorporate a free and independent spiritual life alongside economic life, as an integral part of the social organism — to that same extent Ahriman’s incarnation will be awaited with an attitude worthy of humanity.”
I’m going to finish with a prayer by Paul King, who is a translator for Temple Lodge Publishing and also a member of the meditation group which meets in our house:
Light of the world,
Great Sun-Spirit of the Earth!
May Your light enlighten our heads,
May Your love warm our hearts,
May Your peace pacify our strife!
Thank you for listening and I look forward very much to the rest of this conference!
Author Archives: Jeremy Smith
Facing the Incarnation of Ahriman “with an attitude worthy of humanity”
Filed under Ahriman, Anthroposophy, Archangel Michael, Cryonics, Evil, Judith von Halle, Lucifer, Ray Kurzweil, Sorat
Facing the Incarnation of Ahriman – the 2025 MysTech Conference August 7th to 10th
There are 17 exceptional speakers taking part, including Adriana Koulias, Bastiaan Baan, Benjamin Cherry, Harrie Salman, Inessa Burdich and Are Thoresen. The conference programme and details of all the speakers and their themes can be found here:
https://mystech.org/conference-2025/#register
MysTech is a non-profit organisation dedicated to driving positive change for our future by steering the role that technology will play in society and human evolution in the light of spiritual science.
The text of my talk will be available on the Anthropopper blog from August 11th onwards.
Filed under Uncategorized
Trump: the triumph of Ahriman?
Like many people, I was rendered angry and depressed by the results of the US presidential election on 5thNovember 2024.
Angry, because Donald Trump has once again, as he has throughout his life, escaped just retribution for his crimes and abhorrent behaviour. It seems that Trump was quite right when he boasted in 2016 at a campaign stop at Dordt College in Sioux Center, Iowa that: “”I could stand in the middle of Fifth Avenue and shoot somebody, and I wouldn’t lose any voters, OK? It’s, like, incredible.”
Depressed, because the return of Trump as President indicates that a majority of Americans voted for him despite knowing everything about his character. This not only says something disturbing about American society and the polarised consciousness of its voters; but this second Trump presidency is also likely to lead to detrimental consequences in many ways, especially for the climate and all life on Earth. It fits into a pattern of worldwide phenomena showing that we are now well into the process of the Ahrimanic incarnation foretold by Rudolf Steiner. (If you are unfamiliar with this idea, I have written more about it here.)
Do I think that Trump is the incarnation of Ahriman? No, I don’t – I wrote about this back in 2016 and that analysis still seems to me accurate. But I do think it likely that the election result will hasten the decline of the US as a superpower, with knock-on effects for Europe and accelerating decline for the West and liberal values, which for good or ill have shaped the world during my lifetime. There is a persuasive argument to this effect in an article by the historian Alfred McCoy in the online Southern Cross Review. The worldwide rise in populism and nationalism, wars of aggression and the cult of the strong leader who can overcome the deficiencies of democracy, are not going to lead to positive outcomes for any of us or the Earth. I was struck by a reported comment last week in Paris from Richard Moore, who heads the UK foreign intelligence service MI6, that during his “37 years in the intelligence profession, I’ve never seen the world in a more dangerous state.”
One of the things I have noticed in all the commentary there has been about the reasons for the election of Donald Trump is how inadequate this analysis has been in explaining what has happened, however distinguished the intellectual capacity of the commentator and however penetrating their psychological grasp of Trump’s narcissism and American popular opinion. The common factor underlying this inadequacy is the absence of any sense of the spiritual reality behind what is happening. If you are an atheistic member of the commentariat and think that the spiritual world is a delusion, that the material world is all there is, and that human beings have but the one life, then you have no access to an essential understanding of the root cause of what is unfolding right now. This spiritual short-sightedness lies behind the failure to apprehend the grimmer facets of our present situation.
So how should we understand the impending incarnation of Ahriman? Rudolf Steiner predicted that Ahriman would incarnate in the flesh in the first part of the third millennium, which is the beginning of the millennium in which we are now living. The details of how, when and in whom this incarnation would happen have of course been the subject of much speculation since Steiner spoke about this over 100 years ago.
Just lately I have been reading Travels on the Northern Path of Initiation* by the anthroposophical writer and seer, Are Thoresen, in which he offers an intriguing update on Steiner’s descriptions. Thoresen is in supersensible contact with the Nordic being Vidar, whom he describes as continuing the work of Michael as an Archangel, since Michael’s elevation to the rank of an Archai. Vidar is described in Nordic mythology as the one god to survive the great battle of Ragnarök (Twilight of the Gods) and is the outer and shining aura of Christ himself. Thoresen asked Vidar about the future incarnation of Ahriman:
“Vidar’s answer was clear and simple, and as I slowly pondered this it made more and more sense. He said that Ahriman was already in the process of incarnating, at this very time, but he is incarnating in all of us, with the help – or by being given cover by – the asuric beings. It is extremely important to understand this.”
Who are these asuric beings and why does knowing something about them help us to make sense of what is currently happening in the world?
In a lecture on 1st November 1906, Steiner described them as “satanic gods of hindrances who began their work in the Atlantean epoch but who are now starting to work in the 5th post-Atlantean epoch (ie our present age). They’re the worst of the three forces hindering humankind and they mainly work into sexual life in the physical body. The many sexual aberrations today are to be ascribed to this strong influx.” And in another lecture from 29th January 1907, Steiner said that: “Asuras are spirits of the very greatest egoism who remained behind during Saturn evolution. They want to condense matter and compress it ever more so that it can’t be spiritualized and brought back to its original condition. They’re the dregs of the planetary evolution that goes from Saturn to Vulcan. The asuras inhabit the moon and from there they work on the humans whom they want to drag down into the eighth sphere and thereby tear away from progressive evolution and its goal — the Christ.”
Now I’m aware that, to many people, this will all sound abstruse and fanciful. But if I describe some practical effects of the activities of these entities on human beings in the world today, let us see if any of it accords with your own perceptions. Are Thoresen suggests that since the year 2019 and the Covid pandemic, the asuras have gained much more access to human beings through the opening of what he calls the first elemental realm. (This refers to what Steiner has described as the crossing of the threshold between the physical and elemental worlds, which he says will happen unconsciously and inevitably for every human being towards the end of the 20th century and thereafter. Much of Steiner’s work was to help us prepare to cross the threshold consciously, by building a bridge between the spiritual and the earthly, thus allowing the unfolding of our soul capacities and awakening the consciousness with which to engage and transform our outer lives. Making this journey consciously is much safer than crossing the threshold unconsciously, which Steiner likened to putting your head into an ant’s nest.)
I am indebted here to the Australian writer and spiritual teacher, Lisa Romero, and her book The Inner Work Path,** for the following descriptions of what may happen to people who cross the threshold to the elemental world unprepared. She describes how there are seven realms or spheres of the true spiritual world and the capacities and preparedness that each of us brings determines which of these spheres we may encounter. For most of us, it is the first three elemental spheres that we are most likely to experience. Beyond the three elemental spheres lies the outer etheric realm, where the Christ has been visible since around 1933 to those who are able to reach him. As we evolve, more and more of us will be able to meet Christ during the next 2000 years.
“For those unprepared, the first crossing to the moon sphere could leave them feeling that life is just an illusion, that they have been caught in maya, living a lie. They can end up feeling despondent and unable to continue as a useful member of society. For those who cross unprepared into the second sphere, it can leave them with the feeling that they are puppets, that nothing they do really matters, and that there is no free will. This can leave the soul incapacitated in relation to earthly life, or even destructive toward others. If seekers cross the threshold unprepared and enter the third sphere, they may feel that they just want to leave this world, escape the wheel of life and death. They may see that if they clear up their personal karma, they can escape the karmic cycle of dying and returning to earth. This may then lead to a life of working simply to liberate the individual self.”
Does any of this sound familiar? Do you know anyone, particularly young people, who may resonate with these descriptions?
Thoresen says that: “…I have also observed that these (asuric) beings were able to give the ‘carrier’ of the entity some degree of clairvoyance, but that this clairvoyance was always false. Usually, the adversarial entities give information that was ninety per cent true and ten per cent false. This makes the carrier believe in themselves, and thus to connect with the adversarial beings and forces for eternity.”
(…) “I had not understood why these asuric beings could provide such clairvoyance, but now, after pondering Vidar’s answer, I understood perfectly. Ahriman is in the process of incarnating NOW. Ahriman is incarnating in ALL people – also myself – and especially spiritual people, with the help of the asuric elementals. In this way, he incarnates, hides himself and also initiates a ‘school’ of magic, leading to clairvoyance – a clairvoyance that is personal and that nobody can agree on.”
It is these adversarial forces that create the things that attack humankind in unseen warfare aimed at all levels of our being. Nearly all of us are totally unaware that this is our situation. The effects of this assault can be seen in many of the disturbing phenomena affecting human society in our time. But by a strange paradox, the elemental beings in the three elemental spheres are the foundation of the material universe. Without them, the material world would not exist. Material creation is thus the outer face or expression of the elemental beings, who although partly adversarial are also necessary for our human development towards freedom.
Our sole protection is the Christ and we need to develop the techniques that will counterbalance these phenomena. Are Thoresen says that: “To be able to work into and with the elemental world in all its three realms, to introduce morality and the Christ-force in the material/elemental world, we have to be able to observe the elemental world. That is why it is so important today to be able to cross the threshold (to the spiritual world), and also to be able to activate one or more of our spiritual sense organs.”
Finding the Christ-point of balance between the adversarial forces is key to our survival as humankind. Thoresen describes how in all the adversarial forces, in all technological devices and even in all human abilities, there can be found a Middle point, the Christ force. By finding this, we can redeem the luciferic, ahrimanic and possibly even the asuric elements in all these, and consequently material reality itself. I don’t want to go into more detail here of how this may be done, so I would refer you to Thoresen’s books for further information.
In Downhill All the Way, the fourth volume of Leonard Woolf’s five-volume autobiography, he writes about how horrible it was to listen on the wireless to the speeches of Hitler, “the savage and insane ravings of a vindictive underdog who suddenly saw himself to be all-powerful. We were in Rodmell during the late summer of 1939, and I used to listen to those ranting, raving speeches. One afternoon I was planting in the orchard under an apple tree iris reticulata, those lovely violet flowers which, like the daffodils, ‘come before the swallow dares and takes the winds of March with beauty’. Suddenly I heard Virginia’s voice calling to me from the sitting-room window: ‘Hitler is making a speech’. I shouted back: ‘I shan’t come. I’m planting iris and they will be flowering long after he is dead.’ Last March, 21 years after Hitler committed suicide in the bunker, a few of those violet flowers still flowered under the apple tree in the orchard.”
So, after the election result was in and taking my cue from Leonard Woolf, I went out into the garden to plant bulbs under an apple tree, which was all I could think to do in human solidarity with the values of truth, justice and kindness. May they flower for many years, long after Trump and all those leaders under the influence of Ahriman have gone to reap their karma. May human beings find the Christ force living in our hearts. May the Earth be protected from all those seeking to destroy it!
* Published 2021 by Temple Lodge Press, ISBN 978-1-912230-83-9
** Published 2014 by SteinerBooks, ISBN 978-1-62148-059-4
Filed under Ahriman, Donald Trump
A gigantic task for anthroposophists
This is a slightly edited version of an address I gave at the Midsummer Festival organised by the Anthroposophical Society in Sussex at Emerson College on Sunday 23rd June 2024.
We are now at the Summer Solstice, that time of the year when in the Northern Hemisphere we have our longest day and shortest night. In his Calendar of the Soul, Rudolf Steiner wrote a verse, (No. 12) for this time. Here it is, in a translation by Daisy Aldan, the Pulitzer-nominated poet and acclaimed translator and teacher, who in the late 1960s or early 1970s was invited by Francis Edmunds to teach Creative Writing here at Emerson:
The beauteous lustre of the world
Compels me from the depth of soul
That I release to cosmic flight
The godly forces of my own life:
To leave myself below,
And trusting, seek myself
In cosmic light and cosmic warmth.
And at this Midsummer Festival of John the Baptist, the forerunner and proclaimer of Christ, it is worth remembering that John loved Nature and was able to excarnate into it so that he could communicate with the nature spirits and the angelic realm. It was because of this that he was able to meet Uriel, the archangel whom Steiner tells us is most associated with this time of year, and to foretell the coming of Christ. Part of his work in baptising people was to give some of them the ability to excarnate as well. All of us excarnate just a little bit at the height of Summer when we go on our holidays, and we all find that thinking is a little more difficult when the sun shines and Nature is at its most glorious. We don’t really come back properly into ourselves until Michaelmas at the end of September!
But Midsummer is also the time of year when we can extend our celebration of John the Baptist so as to encompass Lazarus-John who was raised from the dead and became the disciple whom Christ loved, the Apostle John, the only one of the disciples who stood at the foot of the Cross and who was entrusted by Jesus with looking after his mother Mary after the crucifixion, and who later on was exiled by the Romans to the island of Patmos, where he wrote the Book of Revelation. I don’t know how one can explain all of this in rational terms, except to say that there is a John mystery unfolding, which Rudolf Steiner referred to in his last lecture, in which he linked the beings of Elijah, Lazarus-John, Raphael and Novalis.1
Because of what Christ the Sun Being brought to humanity and the Earth by taking on physical incarnation, and because of his own karma, the Apostle John was enabled to become a fully-realised human being; that is to say, through the help of the Christ-principle he was able to transform both his astral body, and his etheric body, and so was able to look into Heaven and Earth and tell us in the Book of Revelation what would come to be. Thus the Johns whose festival we celebrate today stand before us as exemplars of what will be possible for all human beings as we advance towards the next stage of Earth evolution, the Jupiter epoch, which is many thousands of years into the future.
But what of our present and near future?
In a lecture given in Dornach on 19th November 1917, Rudolf Steiner told us the true challenge of our present age. He said that “it is humanity’s task in this period to come to grips with evil as an impulse in the evolution of the world”.2
That is our task and clearly we don’t have to look very far to find multiple examples of evil throughout the world, in terms of war, genocide, famine, disease, and so on. I’d like to focus here on one particular aspect of the evil coming up to face us and that is the challenge to our humanness posed by artificial intelligence and biotechnologies. I’ve spoken at Emerson College before about Ray Kurzweil, Google’s former futurologist, a leading computer scientist and inventor. His prediction, made in his book The Singularity is Near 3, is that we human beings will become more godlike as we become more machine-like and as machines develop more god-like powers. Kurzweil says that we humans are nothing special in the animal kingdom: we have no immortal soul, there is no essential human self and our thoughts and emotions are the product of electrochemical impulses which can in the future be modelled by algorithms. Our future lies in the hands of technologists, people who are experts in biotechnology, artificial intelligence, cognitive and computer science. Their work will produce new tools that will become parts of our bodies. We will have bionic hands, feet and eyes, while nanorobots will move through our bloodstream looking out for disease and repairing the damage of age and injury. We shall have wearable and implanted devices to expand our senses and alter our moods, while biological tools will enter our cells, remodel our genes and give us new and better flesh, blood and neurons.
By a strange coincidence, Kurzweil’s sequel book, The Singularity Is Nearer – When We Merge with AI, is scheduled to be released in just two days’ time, on June 25, 2024.
Kurzweil describes his law of accelerating returns which predicts an exponential increase in technologies like computers, genetics, nanotechnology, robotics and artificial intelligence. Once the Singularity has been reached, Kurzweil says that machine intelligence will be infinitely more powerful than all human intelligence combined. The Singularity is also the point at which the intelligence of machines and humans would merge; Kurzweil predicts this date: “I set the date for the Singularity—representing a profound and disruptive transformation in human capability—as 2045.” Just over 20 years away. Kurzweil says: “Some people find this frightening. But [The Singularity] is going to be beautiful and will expand our consciousness in ways we can barely imagine, like a person who is deaf hearing the most exquisite symphony for the first time.”
Rudolf Steiner foresaw all of this, as far back as 1910. This is what he said in Lecture 12 of the series ‘The Reappearance of Christ in the Etheric’:4
(…) “the will is there to harness human energy to mechanical energy. These things should not be treated by fighting against them. That is a completely false view. These things will not fail to appear; they will come. What we are concerned with is whether, in the course of world history, they are entrusted to people who are familiar in a selfless way with the great aims of earthly evolution and who structure these things for the health of human beings or whether they are enacted by groups of human beings who exploit these things in an egotistical or in a group-egotistical sense. That is what matters. It is not a question of the what in this case; the what is sure to come. It is a question of the how, how one tackles these situations. The what lies simply in the meaning of earthly evolution. The welding together of the human nature with the mechanical nature will be a problem of great significance for the remainder of earthly evolution”.
I’m not saying that Kurzweil is evil but I do suggest that at a time when we are expecting the incarnation of Ahriman, his work lends itself well to Ahriman’s purposes. And do we believe, as Steiner had hoped, that all these changes will be entrusted to people who are familiar in a selfless way with the great aims of earthly evolution and who will structure these things for the health of human beings? Or is it more likely that greed, lust for power and conquest are going to be the motivating forces? I think we have to accept that Ahriman is currently enjoying great success: many of our fellow citizens do not seem to have the faintest idea about the true nature of their humanness. As people choose to retreat into virtual worlds on their screens rather than engage in real life, the harmony and positivity of the soul suffer accordingly. There is a great loss of reality, while common sense and the ability to make sound judgments are diminishing.
If Ray Kurzweil is right about what he calls the Singularity, that time when human and machine intelligence will merge, by 2045 millions of human beings will be embodied with their entire constitution in the bodiless experience of virtual reality. Not like today’s primitive virtual headsets and virtual games, but full daily immersion in bodiless virtual reality. For the people living in this reality from early childhood as their ‘natural’ reality, death will not really make a difference. They will die and remain in the same virtual Ahrimanic sphere of influence and experience.
And this is, of course, part of Ahriman’s goal, that people will no longer experience any real difference between life in the physical world and life after death. The result is that when they enter the spiritual world after death, they are unable to orientate themselves and Ahriman can use them to unconsciously influence those of us still in incarnation. This is because it is only to the extent that one has already touched the spirit during the physical world that one can see, know and experience the life after death in the spiritual world. If you are immersed in virtual reality for most of your earthly life, you will certainly not feel that death makes any difference, because the virtual life will simulate the life outside the body so perfectly. Many people will remain bound after death to life on earth, not even realising that they are dead. The difference is, however, that after death they will be part of the sub-human and sub-natural Ahrimanic world – and this leads to the death of the soul, following the death of the body.
Rudolf Steiner was speaking about these things just over 100 years ago and, of course, a great deal has changed since then. We are told by some modern anthroposophical seers that the spiritual realm has changed even more in the last 100 years than things have here in the physical world. For example, Yeshayahu Ben-Aharon in his book The Time Is At Hand, 5 says this:
“The twenty-first century is the second, middle century of the three centuries of the present age of Michael, and it is the most decisive one. If humanity again misses the goal of Michael, it will be hardly possible to recuperate from it, and human evolution will be derailed for a long time. The present age of Michael can therefore rightly be called ‘the Apocalypse age of Michael.’ The most important goal of Michael in his present age is that the new revelation of the etheric Christ will be fully grasped, because the resurrection of humanity depends on this.”
Are Thoresen, a remarkable anthroposophical seer and healer, is similarly pessimistic about our prospects. In his book Experiences from the Threshold 6, he says the following:
“In my opinion, we have but one possibility to save our culture, and that is to understand and accept that there is a spiritual world. If not, we will destroy ourselves in materialism. The only way to really ‘believe’ in a spiritual world is to experience it for ourselves, which an increasing amount of people want to do.”
Are Thoresen, who was recently here at Emerson as a workshop leader, says that the only way for us to experience the spiritual world is to open our spiritual sense organs and pass the threshold, and he gives techniques for how he himself has done this in his books (though I have to say I find them very hard to understand). He also says that the Nordic archangel, Vidar, has replaced Michael as the guardian of the threshold, following Michael’s transition to becoming one of the Archai. These are deep waters, which I don’t propose to go into during this talk, except to quote from Rudolf Steiner, who in a lecture given in Oslo on 17thJune 1910, 7 said:
“Whoever recognises Vidar in all his significance and feels him in his soul will understand that in the twentieth century the capacity to behold the Christ can again be given to man: Vidar, who is close to all of us in northern and central Europe, will again stand before him. He was held secret in the Mysteries and occult schools as the god who will receive his task only in the future.”
Has Vidar now received his task? According to Are Thoresen, the path of knowledge to a higher consciousness by way of the School of Michael is a very difficult one. Again, I’m not going to explore this further here, except to quote from Are Thoresen’s book, Meeting Michael 8, in which he says:
“So I ask the question: might this Michael path be too ‘difficult’ for many people today? Is Michael still accessible to all? Maybe another path needs to be available, based on Vidar’s teaching? This is the same Vidar who was entrusted by Michael as an Archangel, and who perhaps also offers a safe and straight path to the living Christ.”
One could be feeling quite gloomy about all of this and sensing that Ahriman is winning all the battles. But I’m inclined, perhaps against all reason, to be optimistic about our future as human beings, and it seems to me that our present situation represents a gigantic task for anthroposophy. What is this task? It is to find a way to talk to other people about what it really means to be a human being. One of Steiner’s main preoccupations was to inform all of us about our true situation as human beings in the world – what it means to be a human being. This he wanted to do by creating an understanding of the fact that we are spiritual beings currently in physical bodies, that the whole universe is suffused with soul and spirit, that human thoughts are connected with cosmic thoughts, human souls with cosmic souls, human spirits with cosmic spirits, with the creative spirituality of the universe. It is only by awakening people to the full reality of their humanness that Ahriman’s plans can be hindered sufficiently to make a worthwhile difference.
And this is of course a difficult task, to find a way to reach people and the language with which to do it, that won’t alienate them and make them regard us as members of a cult. How many of us here who are anthroposophists have family and friends who regard our anthroposophy as something eccentric, unlikely or downright unbelievable? I know that I do. And I know that I have not yet found a way to convey my beliefs that can meet where the other person is coming from. One recent personal example of this came when I sent to a friend a link to an article I’d written on my blog about ‘Assisted Dying and the Spiritual Consequences of Suicide’. In it, I spoke about the experiences of a clairvoyant and an anthroposophical doctor in observing the consequences of assisted dying and referred to the effect that suicide, which is the real name for assisted dying, has on the etheric body. My friend replied as follows: “Thank you for sending this… a lot to consider in this seemingly radical approach.” And what I took from this polite reply was that my friend was unconvinced so far and regarded the concepts in that article as eccentric.
This is of course part of the dilemma faced by anthroposophists in this age of the consciousness soul, who live in societies in which many people not only do not have the concepts that would allow them to understand the issues at stake but who would also regard the wider spiritual viewpoint with disdain. Rudolf Steiner himself was well aware of this problem of finding the right language to convey anthroposophical ideas to non-anthroposophists. In 1923, in a lecture given at Stuttgart, he said the following:
“Last summer I gave a course of lectures at Oxford on the educational methods of the Waldorf School. An article appeared in an English journal that, though I cannot quote it verbatim, made the following point. It began by saying that a person who attended the lectures at the Oxford educational meetings without prior awareness of who Dr. Steiner was and that he had some connection with anthroposophy would not have noticed that a representative of anthroposophy was speaking. Such a person would simply have thought him to be a man speaking about pedagogy from a different angle than the listener’s own.
I was exceedingly delighted by this characterization because it showed that there are people who notice something that is always my goal, namely, to speak in a way that is not instantly recognized as anthroposophical. Of course, the content is anthroposophical, but it cannot be properly absorbed unless it is objective. The anthroposophical standpoint should lead, not to onesidedness, but, on the contrary, to presenting things in such a way that each least detail can be judged on its own merits and its truth be freely recognized.” 9
And it’s perhaps relevant here to say that Rudolf Steiner would have liked his books to be re-written every fifteen years so as to keep them current. Language idioms and methods of communication change over time and what was right a century ago is probably not going to be as useful today. Many young people nowadays simply do not read very much, unless something is on a phone screen, so it could be that even updating Steiner’s books would make little difference to widen their opportunities to hear about anthroposophy. Perhaps podcasts and YouTube videos are part of the way forward, but they will only stand a chance of being effective if we can first find a way to engage the interest of viewers and listeners without using anthroposophical jargon.
I referred earlier to Are Thoresen’s point that the only way for people to believe in a spiritual world is to experience it for themselves, and he says that an increasing number of people want to do this. Although my own path has so far largely been based on faith rather than direct experience, I’m sure he’s right about that and one can see signs of this hunger and thirst for genuine experience here at Emerson, with some of the courses and workshops which run here, though several of them are not, it has to be said, based on anthroposophy. There is anecdotal evidence, too, from therapists that many of their clients, whether as a result of trauma, bereavement, lucid dreams or intuitions, are seeking something universal, some truth beyond what they can find on their screens.
In this connection, we’re told by Steiner that many human beings are going unconsciously and unprepared through the threshold. This is what he said in a lecture called ‘The Crossing of the Threshold and the Social Organism’ given in Dornach on 12th September 1919: 10
“What the individual human being experiences consciously when he strives to attain clairvoyance in the spiritual world, namely, the crossing of the threshold, must be experienced unconsciously by the whole of mankind, during our fifth post-Atlantean epoch. Humanity has no choice in regard to this; it must experience this unconsciously—not the individual human being, but HUMANITY, and the individual human being together with humanity.”
And I remember that Steiner says elsewhere that to cross the threshold unprepared is like sticking one’s head in an ants’ nest! This is an amazing lecture and in it Steiner gives indications that are relevant to my theme here of how to reach out to people in language they can relate to. He says:
“We may say: every kind of pessimism is wrong. But this does not imply that every kind of optimism is right. Right and justified is, however, the APPEAL TO THE WILL. It is not at all a question of whether something takes place in this or in that way, but that we should WILL things in accordance with the direction of human evolution. We should realise over and over again that the old time has come to an end and that we must close our accounts with it. A real understanding of the present can only be gained if we rightly close our accounts with the old time. For the NEW time can only be taken into account from a SPIRITUAL standpoint! We should not delude ourselves that we can carry over into the new time the things which we have cherished in the past. In our external life, we must begin to turn to the new thoughts, which are now beginning to be active.”
This appeal to the will and the realisation, surely very general in today’s society, that the old ways of doing things have come to an end, and that the new time can only begin with a spiritual standpoint, may be the way to reach people in our time when it is obvious that so many things have to change if humanity is to survive. This is also the challenge for us as anthroposophists, to find new ways to meet and engage with people without speaking jargon or even referring to Steiner as the initiate and teacher who has all the answers. If we fall into that trap, we will end up speaking only to ourselves.
While acknowledging that Ahriman is feeling triumphant at this time, I’d like to draw to a close on a more optimistic note with a story related by Steiner. Steiner says he saw the image of Ahriman sitting in a cave under the earth. Ahriman works. He writes things down, counting and counting, calculating and calculating. He tries to build up a whole world out of a new mathematics (and of course AI algorithms are part of the new mathematics). There, Steiner says, Michael stands beside Ahriman waiting. For Michael knows that he will make the final addition. Michael with his sword, will make the sum. The moment has not yet come. Michael is waiting, standing by the side, waiting. He can do this when people on earth are there fighting and going with him. But he can’t do it without us! And that is the really important point – in this present age of the consciousness soul, Michael can only act if we help him to do it. If we do, he will in turn help us to find much more positive outcomes from the extreme technologies that are threatening our existence today.
And finally, I wonder how many of you saw the marvellous production of Mary Poppins the Musical by classes 9 and 11 at Michael Hall School this week? There are all sorts of life lessons that can be found in the Mary Poppins story, and I’m sure that all of the children in that production will have learned all kinds of things and derived huge benefits from getting up on stage to entertain us so wonderfully. But perhaps what is not so well known is that Pamela Travers, the author of the Mary Poppins books, was a student of Gurdjieff and devotee of Sufism, and she was able to build into her books all kinds of simple messages based on sound spiritual principles and life lessons she herself had learned. She was able to do this without using any jargon from Gurdjieff or the Sufis but simply by reminding us of what in essence is a spiritual standpoint in the relationships between human beings – encompassing kindness, decency, selflessness, the need to enjoy what we do, recognition of who we really are and trying to be practically perfect in every way! A wonderful example of how to reach out through art to people of all kinds. I hope that we anthroposophists might soon find comparable and accessible ways to reach the hearts of others by expressing universal truths about what it means to be human.
Thank you for listening.
1 From Rudolf Steiner’s Last Address, (GA 238), given on 28th September 1924 in Dornach.
2 From Lecture 10, ‘The Reappearance of Christ in the Etheric’ (GA 178) – Individual Spirit Beings and the Undivided Foundation of the World: Part 2, given in Dornach on 18th November 1917.
3 The Singularity Is Near, published in 2005 by Viking Books. ISBN 978-0-670-03384-3
4 From Lecture 12 of the series ‘The Reappearance of Christ in the Etheric’, (GA 178).
5 The Time Is At Hand, published in 2024 by Temple Lodge Publishing Ltd. ISBN 978-1-915776-12-9
6 Experiences from the Threshold, first published in English in 2019 by Temple Lodge Publishing Ltd. ISBN 978-1-912230-33-4
7 From Lecture 11, ‘The Mission of Folk Souls’ (GA 121), given in Oslo (then called Christiania) on 17th June 1910.
8 Meeting Michael, first published in English in 2024 by Temple Lodge Publishing Ltd. ISBN 978-1-915776-14-3
9 From Lecture VII, ‘Awakening to Community’, given on 28th February 1923 in Stuttgart.
10 From ‘The Crossing of the Threshold and the Social Organism’, (GA 193) given in Dornach on 12thSeptember 1919.
“See that ye be not troubled.”
As I get older, I think quite often about extinction, not only my own but also the fate of wider humanity and life on Earth. I’m now 72 years old so if one imagines life to be divided into sections of 21 years, then given a reasonable life expectancy of 84 years, I am now approaching the second half of the fourth quarter of my life. My mother and father died at the ages of 85 and 89 respectively, so perhaps I may get a little more time than 84 years, depending on heredity and as Hamlet put it, the thousand natural shocks that flesh is heir to. But in any case, it’s clear that my death is not that many years away. This is a natural time to reflect on what one has experienced, to try to make sense of the state of the world and to prepare for what is to come.
As an anthroposophist, with a view of what it is to be a human being, including the cycle of incarnation and excarnation which each of us goes through over many lifetimes, I have no fear of my next death, although I hope not to have a violent end or a painful or protracted illness leading up to it. But it’s surely not unreasonable to be fearful of the forces lining up against life on Earth, including an increasingly unstable climate, nuclear war, mass extinction of species, and unregulated artificial general intelligence which is shaping up to be our equivalent of the asteroid that finished off the dinosaurs.
These forces lead many people to conclude that, although Planet Earth may come through the onslaught, it’s entirely possible that humankind will not; and even, that it doesn’t really matter. Nature will survive and that is the bigger picture. Articles such as these from the BBC Science Focus website and Scientific American assume that humans will join the 99% of other species which have become extinct over the history of the Earth.
Scientists who, in the main, tend to be rationalists and atheists, have only a limited view of what it is to be a human being and so they underplay the importance of humanity and our role on Earth. They believe that human beings evolved accidentally from some protoplasm in the primeval mud; if you were to say to them that matter in itself has no living quality and it is the presence of spirit that gives life to matter, they would regard you as an imbecile. They cannot see, or perhaps they prefer not to recognise, that there is order in the cosmos and on the Earth and that it is vanishingly unlikely that all of this is the result of accidental processes. What they do see is the utter irrationality of human beings and their leaders, who in our present time are bringing all of us and our beautiful home planet Earth to catastrophe. In the face of such folly, humans can be dispensed with, and the planet will get on perfectly well without us.
Anthroposophists on the other hand tend to be much more positive about the role of human beings on Earth. I’ve just been reading an interesting article by Dan McKanan, who is the Ralph Waldo Emerson Senior Lecturer in Divinity at Harvard Divinity School. One passage struck me:
“There is much less despair in the anthroposophical milieu than in other communities of environmentalists. One reason for this is that they don’t see humanity in itself as an environmental problem. They truly believe that human activity, if rightly directed, can make the world a better place for other creatures. Another reason is that they are radical believers in evolution. They don’t think the environmental goal is to remake some past Eden; rather, it is to help every individual and every species continue on its path of development, in relationship with everything else. Perhaps the most important factor, though, is that seeing the best in everything and remaining open to new ideas are integral to the spiritual practice of anthroposophy. They are, in fact, two of the “basic exercises” that Rudolf Steiner recommended all of his students to practice on a daily basis. Not every person connected to an anthroposophical initiative practises these, but enough do that they set a positive tone for everyone else. Since I spend most of my time in academic and leftist contexts, both of which can foster an ultracritical ethos, I treasure the opportunity to spend time with people for whom affirmation and appreciation are core spiritual disciplines.”
Whether or not the Earth needs humans is essentially a spiritual question. We know that every kingdom of nature embodies spirit, up to its own degree. For example, plants embody the etheric, although the conscious aspects of this are not incarnated but remain in higher worlds; and this is so, too, with the other kingdoms. Human beings, however, are the only ones in which Spirit/I or Ego incarnates on Earth and this is a wondrous miracle in itself – think of the magnitude of evolution that this took.
If humans were to be wiped out, so are further evolutionary possibilities for both Earth and humankind. It would exclude the possibility of that spirit coming to the Earth to develop even higher qualities, eg Spirit Self and the continuing evolutionary development of humans into completely spiritualised human beings. Nature, with all her astounding beauty and majesty, is not enough, and evolution would have to start again. Christ came to the Earth so that this Spirit/I or Ego in humans would find the path of upward evolution – would be Christianised, either consciously, or for many people, unconsciously. What would the Earth be if human beings die out? Nature would remain, of course, but with Spirit still locked up, coiled within matter, unable to express its destiny.
Nature is lifted up by human beings, as she cannot do this for herself, not even when assisted by the best intentions of the environmentalists. Only spiritually aware human beings can do this, with the abilities of Christ given to us to make it possible. Two examples out of many of how we can help the travails of the Earth: participation in the Act of Consecration of Man, one of the seven sacraments of the Christian Community, which can be experienced by those with clairvoyant abilities as sending deep healing right into the heart of the Earth; and the use of the biodynamic preparations by farmers and growers, which are of huge benefit to the soil and to the elemental world. But what if we were not there…?
If we were not there, the true purpose of human beings and the Earth in their evolution together could not happen in the way that has been envisaged by the community of cosmic intelligences. So therefore, despite the ongoing assault on humanity from the Asuric, Ahrimanic and Soratic forces, I don’t believe that these oppositional powers will finally prevail.
On a personal level, at the time of the Cuban missile crisis in 1962 when I was 11 years old, and at the height of the standoff between Khrushchev and Kennedy, I remember riding my bike through our local park and thinking that in a few hours’ time, I and everything I could see around me might be vapourised. All of my generation has lived with this fear throughout our lives; and each succeeding generation has had additional fears to worry about since then. A 2021 poll by the University of Bath of 10,000 16 to 25-year-olds around the world found that 56 per cent of them agreed with the statement that humanity is doomed.
This is the direct result of the work of the oppositional powers, whose influence on human beings has made the last century and a half the most terrible in all history. Anthroposophists believe that this is part and parcel of what it is to live in this age of the Consciousness Soul, when most humans are unaware of the reality of the spiritual world and have no conscious access to sources of comfort or reassurance at this time of deep trial in human evolution. They are therefore unaware of the unique role that human beings are called upon to perform in the joint evolution of the Earth and humankind.
As I contemplate my own mortality and the fading away of many certainties in daily life formerly taken for granted, I try to maintain equanimity in the face of all the horror that is happening in the world. It’s very worthwhile to read Matthew Chapter 24 in the Bible to gain perspective on these times. Verse 6 is particularly notable for this extraordinary statement: “And ye shall hear of wars and rumours of wars: see that ye be not troubled: for all these things must come to pass, but the end is not yet.”
Filed under Anthroposophy
Anthroposophy and the Battle for the Soul – a talk for Easter
This is the text of a talk I gave at Emerson College on Easter Sunday, 9th April 2023, as part of the Easter Festival organised by the Anthroposophical Society in Sussex (ASiS).
A little while ago, Eva Davies and I were having a conversation about the role today of a local society like ASiS and asking ourselves, if it’s not too absurd a question, what on earth can a handful of people like us do in the face of the overwhelming onslaught of evil throughout the world?
As there are some of us here who are fairly new to anthroposophy, it should be explained that the founder of anthroposophy, Rudolf Steiner, possessed exceptional faculties of clairvoyant consciousness. For him, unlike for most of us, the heavenly world of higher beings was completely open; and he was able to use his faculties to extend scientific research beyond the existing parameters of natural science, so as to investigate the non-physical, spiritual realities of life. Steiner’s viewpoint, which could be described as esoteric or cosmic Christianity, went beyond the teachings of the Catholic and Protestant Churches but was nevertheless fundamentally Christian and he was able through his researches to describe the crucifixion and resurrection of Christ as the central point of human evolution.
Interestingly, Steiner does not make a straight distinction between Good on the one hand and Evil on the other. Instead, he identifies two poles of Evil, which he calls Lucifer and Ahriman. Between these two poles, Christ holds the balance in the middle. Steiner saw Lucifer and Ahriman as not only forces or tendencies which affect humankind and draw us towards evil; but he also saw them as actual beings, who have had or are about to have physical incarnations. Lucifer’s incarnation was in China, in about 2500 BC. The incarnation of Christ was 2000 years ago, as we know. Ahriman’s incarnation is due about now, which is why we’re having such difficult times.
Steiner has told us that the incarnation of Ahriman is due “before even a part of the third of millennium after Christ will have passed” and cannot be averted. It will happen. He has also told us: it can bring good over the long term insofar as we wake up to the spirit through resistance against Ahriman’s materialistic impulses. But if Ahriman is not recognised, his influence will be harmful. Steiner also said at a meeting with young people in Breslau (which was then in Germany and is now Wroclaw in Poland), that Ahriman will do everything in his power to advance the moment of his incarnation as much as he can. Steiner then mentions the year 1998, which for anyone interested in numerology is 666 multiplied by 3. I’m intrigued to note that it was about then, actually in 1999, that Vladimir Putin came to power.
We are undoubtedly living in the precursor years of Ahriman’s incarnation, even if not yet during the actual incarnation. The signs are all around us and like me, you will probably have your own list of Ahrimanic phenomena in our times. There are so many to choose from, ranging from the apparently trivial to the alarmingly serious and it is difficult to keep up with all the negative developments that are happening throughout the world. Thank goodness there are also many positive developments which seem to arise in response to the Ahrimanic symptoms.
For me, Covid has been one of the most significant of the Ahrimanic phenomena. Covid is a viral disease, which means that it is mineral in nature and does not have its own life processes, and therefore needs a host organism so it can reproduce itself. But it also has astonishing intelligence, for example in the resistance it can develop to medicines, or in the way it can mutate, partly in response to vaccinations. But I can’t help asking, where does this astonishing intelligence live? In what being does this intelligence reside?
Second, the Covid pandemic produced fear, much of it stoked by deliberate government policy, as well as anxiety and division between people, even within families. It also led governments to dismantle existing civil liberties with an ease that they had not expected to find in Western democracies. It became impossible to have a fruitful exchange of views between different standpoints and we saw instead heightened emotions, rejection and hatred of other people’s opinions. This process was driven even further by our news outlets and social media, who censored the views of anyone, even distinguished professors of medicine, whose expert opinion did not fit the official line. Some of you may remember what happened to the Great Barrington Declaration, which was rubbished by the WHO. Again, one must ask: whose interests are being served by this fracturing of social cohesion?
And of course, Russia’s illegal and brutal war in Ukraine is another prime symptom of the Ahrimanic assault on humanity. At first, it was almost impossible to believe that such a thing could be happening, that in the 21st century one European nation could invade another to seize its territory and kill and terrorise its people. And yet it has happened and is continuing, with no sign of an end to these horrors. Vladimir Putin has turned Russia into a rogue state, a mafia-led kleptocracy, a pariah among nations and all the more terrible because it possesses over 6000 nuclear weapons. The Russian Army, in directing its assault on the ordinary citizens of Ukraine, has become a byword for corruption and brutality, inhumanity and incompetence. Russia, in the words of one Russian journalist who dares to oppose Putin’s war, will wash in the shame of these actions for decades to come. And now we are beginning to see a growing alliance between Russia and China, two autocracies finding common cause in opposition to the Western democracies and bringing with them the possibility of World War III over Taiwan.
What times we are living through! And of course there are so many other symptoms we could notice, whether it’s artificial intelligence and the gradual merging of humans and machines, about which even Elon Musk has called for a 6-month pause to assess the dangers; climate breakdown; the subversion of truth and morality in the post-Truth society; GMO and gene editing, about which the latest UK Government law, the so-called Genetic Technology (Precision Breeding) Act 2023 received Royal Assent on 23rd March. Poor King Charles! I can’t believe he was happy to sign that into law.
Here, I think, it is relevant to quote what Rudolf Steiner had to say in the Karmic Relations lecture given in Dornach on 4th August, 1924:
“For the anthroposophist this proverb must hold good. He must say to himself: ‘Now that I have become an anthroposophist through my karma, the impulses which have been able to draw me to Anthroposophy require me to be attentive and alert.’”
Yes: we must be attentive and alert; and Steiner has also said that: “The important thing is that humanity should not sleep through Ahriman’s appearance.” This brings me back to the question I asked earlier: what should be the role of a local society like ASiS and what can a handful of anthroposophists do in the face of developing evil throughout the world? Eva Davies and I, during the conversation which prompted these thoughts, came to the conclusion that one of the most useful things we can do is really to be attentive and alert to any and every manifestation of Ahrimanic impulses in the world – to really see what is going on and come to a view on where these diverse phenomena are leading us. We won’t be able to change them – but by seeing them for what they are, we remove part of their power over us. But it’s quite astonishing how insidious and subtle these Ahrimanic influences are, and the ability they have to manifest in the most unexpected places; and I’d like to share with you just two, rather startling and shocking examples that I’ve noticed.
And because today is Easter Day, I’ll begin with a threat to Easter from a most unexpected source. Easter is of course a ‘moveable feast’, meaning that it is a festival whose date changes each year. To state it as simply as possible, Easter falls on the first Sunday after the first Full Moon after the Spring Equinox on 21stMarch. It can be as early as 22nd March, as it was in 1761 and 1818, but will not be again until 2285. It can be as late as 25th April but that hasn’t happened since 1943 and won’t recur until 2038. The commonest date for Easter Sunday is 19th April though the full cycle of Easter dates only repeats after 5,700,000 years.
Now all this is of course very untidy and much annoys bureaucrats, atheists and planners, all of whom would like to have fixed public holiday dates – but such people are wholly ignorant of the fact that on the true Easter Sunday intensified cosmic energies flow into the earth.
To back up that statement, I’m going to refer to some remarkable experiments done by Lili Kolisko (1889 – 1976), who did investigative scientific work into etheric formative forces, following indications given by Rudolf Steiner. She had shown that it was possible to get an image of the life-force of a plant by making a highly potentised solution of the plant essence through very great dilution, and then adding a solution of certain minerals which represent planetary forces – Silver Nitrate, Iron Sulphate or Gold Chloride. A piece of litmus paper is placed upright in a saucer with the solution and the liquid, rising to a certain height, shows the most striking colours and shapes which reveal the invisible etheric forces working in the plant. The technique is known as capillary dynamolysis.
In 1943, by which time Mrs Kolisko was living in the UK and carrying out daily experiments with capillary dynamolysis, Easter fell shortly after the equinox on 28th March. The church authorities in England had ruled that the Easter Full Moon should be considered to be a month later and that the festival should be celebrated on 25th April. The Astronomer Royal, however, disagreed and maintained that the earlier date was correct. Mrs Kolisko set out through her experiments to see which of them was right. Every day she repeated her experiments and a certain pattern showed itself again and again, until on Sunday 28th March a resplendent form of shape and colour appeared, quite different from the others. So the Astronomer Royal was correct and the church authorities got it wrong – on their preferred Sunday of 25th April there was no difference from the pattern of any other day.
A similar strengthening of the etheric forces was revealed on the true Whitsuntide, which is also a moveable feast because it is always on the seventh Sunday after Easter. So to anyone looking at the photos of these experiments, there can be no doubt whatever that a remarkable inpouring of spiritual power takes place on the true Easter Sunday and at Whitsun. It indicates that both Easter and Whitsun are cosmic events. These photos can be seen in a monograph by Lili Kolisko, called Spirit in Matter – just google for it and you will find it.
Wouldn’t it be wonderful for the Ahrimanic forces if they could somehow undermine the cosmic power of Easter Day? Well, they have found a way to do this and I’m sorry to say that it involves the Archbishop of Canterbury, Justin Welby.
In 2016, Archbishop Justin announced how, after more than a thousand years of Easter being a moveable feast, he had hopes of reaching agreement with the other churches to settle upon a fixed date for Easter. He said he would “love” to see Easter become a fixed date by the time he retires.
Mr Welby said that he will consult with other authorities including Pope Francis and the Coptic Pope to negotiate a change to the date. It is very unlikely that any change will be made without the full assent of all those authorities. So with the active help of the Archbishop of Canterbury and possibly the leaders of other churches as well, Easter is likely to become a fixed date in the calendar and thus an event of cosmic significance, which is the occasion for a huge influx of spiritual power that affects all life on Earth, will be diminished to no more than an ordinary day. It would prevent humans from participating in this cosmic event, which as Rudolf Steiner told Ita Wegman offers a moment of revelation in which Christ may be experienced. What a great result for Ahriman, made even more satisfying by the fact that it is the leaders of the Christian churches who will have brought it about!
But even the undermining of Easter as a cosmic event might be considered less important than what Ahriman appears to be working on in connection with reincarnation. Those of you who are sports fans will probably not like what I’m about to say. Just over 100 years ago, Rudolf Steiner warned in a lecture given on 9th July 1918 (GA181) about high initiates in Anglo-American circles (by this he means secret brotherhoods of oppositional powers) who have a programme to undermine gradually the normal process of reincarnation. This is what Steiner had to say:
“They cultivate especially the powers of perception belonging to the body which strengthen the subjection of man to the body, through the incoming of forces not belonging entirely to the body but binding it to the earth. (…) A strong physical sense of relationship between the human body and the earthly elements is to be acquired. This strong feeling of relationship between the creature in the physical body and the earth exists to-day in certain species of apes, which have it as their soul-life. In them it can be studied physiologically and zoologically. What is present there can be gradually formed into a “system of instruction for human beings”; all that has to be done is to develop the coarse side of relationship with nature into a system of bodily education. (In saying this I am neither railing nor criticising; I am merely stating facts.) Thus it will be possible to bring about a sort of practical Darwinism, intensifying the relation of man to what binds him to the earth in a certain sense, to “monkeyfy” him. That is the practical side. It will be pursued through the intensive cultivation — ostensibly instinctive but in fact carefully directed — of sports and such-like things. This fetters the soul, drawing it into a sense of kinship with the earthly, with the earth itself, and so a spiritual ideal such as I have described is set up. By this means the continuing alternation of spiritual life and physical life will be overcome, and by degrees the ideal will be realised of living in future periods of earth-evolution as a kind of “phantom”; of dwelling on earth in this guise.” In other words, a kind of ghost, unable to move on to the heavenly world after death.
Steiner was not an enthusiast for sport and there are many quotations demonstrating this. Here is just one: “The excessive pursuit of sport is Darwinism in practice. Theoretical Darwinism is to assert that man comes from the animals. Sport is practical Darwinism, it proclaims an ethic which leads man back again.” (Study of Man, Lecture 13)
Returning to Steiner’s 1918 lecture (GA181), he went on to say that: “The Anglo-American people (and I think by this phrase he means the secret brotherhoods referred to earlier) strives for this strange ideal: no longer to return into earthly bodies, but to have an ever-increasing influence on the earth through the medium of living souls, whilst they themselves become more and more earthbound as disembodied souls. A very interesting point is that this ideal can be appropriately followed only by the male population, and hence, in spite of all political endeavours, an increasing difference between men and women will arise in Anglo-American civilization. Anglo-American spiritual life will in essence descend to future ages through women; while that which lives in male bodies will strive towards such an ideal as I have described. This will set the pattern of the future Anglo-American race.”
Now because what Steiner has to say here is so startling, let us try to be clear about his meaning. He is saying that the over-emphasis on sports, games, athletics and so on are among the forces of hindrance in modern civilisation. This is because the concentration on physical prowess and skill fetters the soul, in his phrase, drawing it too closely to kinship with the earth, so that after death, instead of making the normal transition to the spiritual world and to eventual reincarnation, the soul stays not just disembodied but also earthbound – it is unable to move on to the heavenly world. And these disembodied souls who remain close to the earth then have the ability to influence living souls on earth with the Ahrimanic illusion that the only reality lies in materialism. That is a truly startling observation, which he followed up by saying that it is male bodies who will be most affected by this and therefore Anglo-American spiritual life will in essence descend to future ages through women. My assumption about this statement is that in Steiner’s day, the audiences at football and other sports were overwhelmingly male; and the women therefore were less likely to succumb to the unseen soul influences present at those events. And perhaps we might also say that the devotion required to be a mother (and protect the next generation) and the channelling of spiritual forces in childbirth predisposes women to a higher attunement to wellbeing and family harmony – hence women have an increased likelihood of possessing loving heart forces naturally resistant to Ahrimanic impulses.
But Steiner was of course speaking over 100 years ago and the situation regarding women and sport has been transformed since then. We now have enthusiasm throughout the world, not just in the Anglo-American countries, for women and girls’ football. The FIFA Women’s World Cup was first held in China in 1991 and 176 national teams now participate internationally. Here in the UK, the England women’s team is praised for being more successful than the men’s team and players have recently been awarded MBEs and OBEs. The sport is poised to grow and grow, with women and girls being encouraged to take part at all levels of the game. Even in the Middle East and North Africa, countries such as Morocco, Tunisia, Egypt, Algeria, Palestine, Turkey, Jordan, Iran, Lebanon, Syria and Israel have had large-scale competitions and national teams – and since 2020, countries that have traditionally been seen as extreme like Saudi Arabia, Oman, Qatar, Somalia, Mauritania and Sudan have begun to develop women’s football in order to raise their international profiles and to distance themselves from their conservative pasts.
Steiner was warning not of the elimination of the knowledge of reincarnation but the gradual elimination of reincarnation itself. One has to ask: Is the worldwide growth of women’s football just one indication among many that Ahriman is working far more effectively for this end than even Steiner himself had supposed? And what is it that these Ahrimanic beings are seeking to bring about? According to Steiner: “They set themselves the task of keeping man on the Earth by every possible means. You know from the book Occult Science that the Earth will one day pass over into the Jupiter condition. That is what these beings want to prevent. They want to prevent man from developing in a regular way together with the Earth and then passing over into the Jupiter condition in a normal way. They want to preserve the Earth as Earth and mankind for the Earth. Hence these beings work unceasingly and with great intensity to achieve their purpose.” (1922-12-03-GA219)
Now, I am not a fan of sport – I’d much rather read a book or listen to music or do some gardening – so perhaps I can be accused of bias; and when I discussed Steiner’s ideas recently with a well-known anthroposophist and sports fan in this village, he thought what I was saying was nonsense – so I am under no illusion that what I’ve just said will gain any acceptance even in our own circles, let alone in the wider world. But Steiner did not criticise modern sport and athletics because he wasn’t interested in them, but because of the effects he could perceive them having on us. He saw much of sport as being unhelpful in what he considered to be really important, ie that we should realise that we are not just creatures of flesh and blood but that we are actually spiritual beings who are currently having human experiences within our physical bodies. You are of course free to assert that Steiner was wrong about sport and its effects – but then I think you have to explain how and why Steiner was wrong.
There’s no doubt that Ahriman has an easier task than one could wish. He finds it easy to persuade humans to give up their future to him, because Ahriman can work through the seat of our desires – our pride, greed, laziness, lust or wish for power – but Christ can only work through our I or individuality and this means that the struggle is not an equal one. Our individuality has so to develop itself that it can in time learn to recognise and resist the many temptations offered by Lucifer and Ahriman. The two forces work in harmony at the present time, even though they appeal to different instincts in us. The way to deal with these two poles of Evil is to seek the balance in the middle, which is represented by Christ.
And I also have to acknowledge that, although Steiner talks about the “regular” way in which Earth and humanity evolve together and the “normal” way in which the Earth will pass one day into the Jupiter condition, how many of our fellow humans actually believe these things? By the time after many aeons when the Jupiter condition occurs, humans will no longer be in physical bodies. I’m fairly sure that most humans may not like the sound of this and would much prefer to stay with what they know, which is what Ahriman is offering them, ie to keep humankind earthbound and in physical bodies. Better the Devil you know, especially when he offers you such a wide range of sports and entertainments…
And whether you agree with Steiner or not, the real challenge of these times is how to get through them without succumbing to despair. For me, the pain consists of seeing what is happening and realising that the vast majority of our fellow human beings, although they know that we are living in a troubled world, are oblivious to what is really going on. And what I think is really going on, to borrow the title of a book by Bernard Lievegoed, is The Battle for the Soul. According to Lievegoed, because the human spirit is unassailable, the opposing powers therefore direct their efforts against the soul. The human soul is the real battlefield of the war between the powers of good and evil. What the Ahrimanic powers are attempting is to obscure the human soul or even to destroy it, so that the human ‘I’ is unable to gain experience through it.
Ahriman is also working very hard to ensure that we humans are unaware of the second coming of Christ, which according to Rudolf Steiner will not be a physical incarnation this time around. That was done once and for all 2000 years ago and will not be repeated. Steiner says that since about 1933, the Christ has been available to human beings in the etheric field and that more and more of us will be able to have the experience of an encounter with Christ. We know how Ahriman dealt with this threat in 1933, by bringing Hitler to power in Germany, thus creating more assaults on the human soul that diverted us from awareness of what was happening in the etheric realm. By keeping the eyes of most of humanity fixed firmly on the material world, and completely unaware of any other reality, Ahriman has kept knowledge of the second coming from our souls.
In 1916, Rudolf Steiner said that at the beginning of the 21st century, evil will appear in a form which at that time could not be described. His audience in 1916, even though they were enduring the horrors of the First World War, would not have been able to understand or take in a detailed description of the evils which we ourselves are having to live through at this time. As I mentioned during the Michaelmas address last September, the ecological crisis and the multiple other crises confronting humanity are at root just one crisis, that of our human consciousness. The state of the outer world is a direct reflection of the state of the human soul.
But before we sink into despair, let us remind ourselves of the larger context. The Earth is the location for human evolution, even though in our real natures, human beings are not earthly creatures, but are instead of spiritual and cosmic origin. The human body is a sheath, a container for soul and spirit. We had to sink into earth-bound materialism in order to understand what freedom means and to make a positive choice for freedom. But now, during this age of the Consciousness Soul, we are learning that lesson and are awakening in earthly existence to the full power of the ego, the ‘I’, and as a result we are gradually turning once again towards the cosmos.
We are at that stage now, with humankind once again on an upward journey towards our true nature. It is of course that upward trajectory which the Ahrimanic powers are seeking to divert, through various schemes to keep human beings fettered to the Earth and the prevailing materialist consciousness. Here I’d like to quote from a 1929 essay by Ita Wegman called ‘The Mystery of the Earth’, which also brings us back to Easter:
“The purpose of earthly evolution lies in this turning-back of man to the cosmos. Out of his own power the human being could never achieve this. For he could not have brought about a complete reversal in the direction which evolution took. So a cosmic impulse had to be inserted into the course of earthly and human evolution. This happened when a cosmic being, the sublime Sun Being Himself, the Christ, descended to the Earth and through His death on the cross united himself with everything terrestrial, thus transforming the Earth in its innermost essence.”
And this is a quotation from Rudolf Steiner’s Lecture VIII from The Principle of Spiritual Economy:
“… when the Mystery of Golgotha happened, human beings received the ability to muster from within the strength necessary to elevate themselves and lead themselves upward into the spiritual worlds. The Christ descended much deeper than had those previous leaders of the world and of mankind: not only did He bring heavenly forces into the earthly body, but also He spiritualized this earthly body in such a way that it now became possible for human beings to find the way back into the spiritual world with the help of these very forces.” ~Rudolf Steiner GA 109 https://rsarchive.org/Lectures/19090411p02.html
So let us try to remember that we are now on the upward path back to realising our true nature as spiritual beings who are currently having human experiences within physical bodies, despite all that Ahriman can do to deceive us. Let us do our best to be alert and attentive to all the tricks, wiles and illusions being practised on us with the aim of diverting us from our path, because by observing and identifying what is really going on, we are doing as much as we can at this time to ensure that Ahriman fails in his attempts.
It is anthroposophy which can make us aware of these larger truths and provide us with the protection we need to come through this Battle for the Soul with our essential humanity still intact. I’d like to finish this address with a verse from Rudolf Steiner, which is almost like an answer to the question Eva Davies and I had asked ourselves about the role of anthroposophists at this time. It is called ‘To the Berlin Friends’ and he wrote it in November 1923 but every word of it could have been written to describe our situation today.
Mankind is now forgetful
Of the Divine inner realm,
But it is our will to bring it
Into the clear light of consciousness,
And then bear above rubble and ashes
The divine flames in the heart of man.
Lightning-bolts may therefore shatter
Our houses in the world of sense;
We are building houses of the soul
From what is iron-firm.
Light-weaving of knowledge.
And downfall of the outer
Shall become ascent
Of innermost soul-being.
Suffering draws near
From the powers of material force;
Hope rays forth its light,
Even when darkness surrounds us;
And it will one day
Well up in our memory,
When after the darkness
We can again live in the light.
Filed under Ahriman, Anthroposophy, Archbishop of Canterbury, Easter, Evil, Justin Welby
Michaelmas – the Festival of Fearlessness
This is the text of an address given as part of the Anthroposophical Society in Sussex’s Michaelmas Festival, held at Emerson College in the UK on Sunday 25th September 2022.
I’m sure we can all agree that Anthroposophy is not always easy to understand; and one of the concepts that I personally have struggled to get to grips with is that of what Steiner calls the cosmic intelligence. According to Rudolf Steiner, the archangel Michael, the great Sun Spirit whose Festival we are celebrating today, was the regent of this cosmic intelligence.
As far as I can tell, what Steiner means by the cosmic intelligence is the revelation of divine thinking in this world and beyond; what he would call the world-thinking of the spiritual hierarchies that gives rise to world-thought, and which is the original source of our own thinking, our earthly-human intelligence. In other words, there is a divine ordering of everything that reveals itself through the whole cosmos. The spiritual hierarchies shape this world thinking in their interactions and in their relationships with one another. And it was the task of Michael to send this cosmic intelligence into the souls of human beings and it was the task of human beings to order life on Earth in accordance with it, as far as we are able to understand it.
Shakespeare put this very well, when he had Hamlet say to Horatio: “There is a divinity that shapes our ends, rough-hew them how we will.” I like that image, which comes from carpentry or building, in which the shape of the divine idea survives, despite the imperfect attempts of human beings to hack it about with crude tools.
After the crucifixion of Christ, that pivotal event of world history which Steiner calls the turning point of time and the Mystery of Golgotha, Michael gradually gave up his role as regent of the cosmic intelligence. This is another idea that I find difficult: Steiner says that in those early times when a human being became aware of thoughts, that is, intelligent content, within himself, then he did not regard these thoughts as his own, but as the thoughts revealed to him through the power of the gods. I’m referring here, of course, to what Steiner called ‘living thinking’ rather than the more mundane kind of thoughts, like “What do I fancy for dinner tonight?”. Living thoughts are those which fire you up to do something or understand something, and which require you to exercise your will to bring them about. But responsibility for this living thinking, this divinely inspired thought content, gradually fell away from Michael over many centuries and came over to us human beings. This process of the descent of intelligence from the Sun to the Earth was largely completed, so Steiner tells us, between the 9th and 14th centuries AD. From that time on, people began to develop their own intelligence, and intelligence took up residence in the souls of human beings – so instead of us having the sense that the Gods had imparted their living thoughts to us, we began to feel that these thoughts were created out of our own selves. It’s not so, of course – it is a materialist illusion that we originate living thinking out of ourselves. What actually happens is that through our human thinking we bring into our consciousness the thoughts which are already part of the world because the spiritual hierarchies have already thought them into existence.
As I say, I find this concept quite difficult to understand – but what I can understand is that Michael, just like us human beings, is in an evolutionary process. He does not stand still but he evolves and progresses. Through the crucifixion of Christ, Michael himself went through a huge transformation. From Golgotha onwards, Michael became the ‘countenance of Christ’ or the face of Christ, the one who stands before Christ, the source of our spiritual freedom. We already know that through the event of Golgotha came the possibility for every human being on earth to become a free bearer of the I, that immortal part of us which goes with us from incarnation to incarnation. After Golgotha, what had previously only occurred through initiation in ancient cultures was now possible for each and every one of us. But what also occurred was that with freedom, human beings became apparently separate from the cosmic intelligence and were able to pursue not only their good ideas and benevolent intentions but also the shadow side of their desires and to follow false modes of thinking. I don’t think it’s too extravagant a statement to say that it is this freedom to follow false paths which has brought us to our present existential crisis, in which it appears that the Earth is destined to become an overheated wasteland and human beings are persuaded to live their lives in electronically generated worlds of illusion. The ecological crisis and the multiple other crises confronting humanity are at root just one crisis, that of our human consciousness. The state of the outer world is a direct reflection of the state of the human soul.
Many of us seem to have forgotten or never to have known, that the Earth, not some other planet, is the setting for the evolution of humanity and the natural kingdoms associated with it. Instead, some of our most prominent public figures are chasing entirely illusory goals, that could only come from being totally divorced from Nature and spiritual reality. There’s the American inventor, Ray Kurzweil, for example, who is Google’s leading futurologist, who has invested $200,000 with a cryonics company so that he can be frozen in liquid nitrogen as soon as he dies, in the weird belief that science in the future may be able to bring his dead body back to life. If he studied Rudolf Steiner instead, he would know that he is already immortal! And then there’s Elon Musk, who is currently throwing a network of 42,000 satellites around the world, and who believes the Earth will eventually become uninhabitable (partly due to his efforts, no doubt) so he thinks we must now make preparations to leave Earth and find another planet to live on; and to Elon Musk, Mars seems to be the best option. People who think like this, who have a vision of turning the Earth into a vast electrical machine and creating a technologically enhanced humanity that will eventually abandon this planet altogether, are clearly not in touch with Michael or the cosmic intelligence. One can imagine that their thinking is influenced by another being altogether, who works through inducing fear and whose incarnation is supposed to be imminent.
And we are all fearful now, aren’t we? Wherever we look in the world, people everywhere are living in fear. We’re fearful on both personal and planetary levels. Can we survive on an overheating planet, with pandemics, food shortages, floods and droughts, mass migration, deranged dictators, wars and the possibility of nuclear annihilation? Where do we turn? Here in the UK, our faith is failing in all the public institutions we used to look to for support to get us through crises, whether it’s the NHS, the police, government, the armed services, Post Office, or the Church.
And on a personal level, we worry whether will we have enough money to heat our homes and put food on the table. We ask ourselves whether it is fair to bring children into a world like this. These kinds of fear are what one might expect as preparations to soften us up for the incarnation of Ahriman, which Steiner tells us is due before the first third of this millennium is over. We also know that whoever emerges from all of this as a kind of solution to world problems will be the Antichrist, yet nevertheless this person will be greeted by most people as a saviour – and those of us who take leave to doubt it will be reviled and hated for it.
How did we get into such a situation? Steiner has described how what he called the “War in Heaven” took place between 1841 and 1879. This battle was waged between angels of the higher hierarchies and some of the spirits of darkness, and it ended with these spirits of darkness being cast down from the spiritual world to the earth. This made the heavens free of these beings but had the unfortunate effect of making the earth full of them. This has led on to what is surely the most terrible period in the whole of human history in terms of war, famine, genocide, climate catastrophe, unimaginable cruelties and multiple other causes of human misery.
Why did this happen? According to Steiner, these spirits of darkness wanted to be able to prevent the spiritual wisdom, which was due to be revealed from the 20th century onwards, from flowing into human souls. Only by the removal of these hindering beings from the spiritual realm could our human hearts and minds begin to open to receive from the angels the spiritual knowledge for which we are destined – but the corollary of this was that the opposing spirits of darkness are now here on earth and in fact living within the feeling, will and mind impulses of each one of us, where they make it their business to spread confusion and to prevent human understanding of spiritual truths.
It was the Archangel Michael who won the War in Heaven and I have sometimes felt that Michael has placed an appalling burden on humanity by casting down the spirits of darkness to find their new dwelling-place within human beings; but in my wiser moments, I can see that this has in fact been a necessary but very difficult chapter in the evolution of human freedom.
And I can also see that, by handing over his role as administrator of the cosmic intelligence to human beings, Michael is creating another very difficult situation for us – but he is doing this in order to progress human evolution towards our ultimate goal of becoming the Tenth Hierarchy. Our destiny, way into the future and after aeons of evolution, is to become what Steiner calls the Tenth Hierarchy of angels and, as the Spirit of Freedom and Love, to imbue the cosmos with completely new qualities. But on the way to that goal, because we are free but not necessarily wise, the failings of our lower human nature such as selfishness and greed inevitably come to the fore and our thinking and actions are therefore wrested away from our own best interests.
According to Rudolf Steiner, the goal of the Earth’s evolution is to become the Cosmos of Love, for its spiritual mission is to bring love into the world. For this it needs the human being, who here on Earth develops his independent I. For the bearer of love can only be a being that is able to give itself away of its own free will. The prerequisites for this were created by the incarnation of the Christ on Earth and the Mystery of Golgotha.
Steiner made statements about Michael from the early years of his activity – in 1907, for example, he once called participants of an esoteric school “the pupils of Michael”. But it wasn’t until July 1924, just nine months before he died, that Rudolf Steiner described the way in which such pupils were instructed centuries before in the heavenly realms. In particular, he described how in between what in our earthly time reckoning we would call the 15th and 18th centuries, Michael taught a huge number of unborn human souls and even the heavenly hierarchies. What Michael was teaching in this school was how in ancient cultures people were initiated into how to direct life on earth in the right ways.
This is the fundamental question which Michael addressed in his heavenly school. It is also the question of our time and for the future– how can human beings direct life on earth in the right ways? If you read Rudolf Steiner’s descriptions of the Michael school in the heavenly realms, it may make it possible for a spiritual memory to awaken, something like a faint realisation that we, too, were present at this Michael school in the world of spirit.
And if as anthroposophists we were indeed pupils in the heavenly Michael school, we can fill our I that is pre-destined for freedom with the great ideal of a new, renewed culture. We can do this because we will have a real spiritual knowing that what Michael teaches us is true. This gives us both the courage and the will to deal with all the fearful manifestations of evil that this age is forcing in upon us and it can also help us direct our deeds on earth so as to serve our fellow human beings and all life.
Steiner said: “Michael is a strange being (…) who does not actually reveal anything unless one brings something to him out of active spiritual work from the Earth. Michael is a silent spirit. Michael is a closed spirit within himself. (…) Michael is actually most concerned with what people create out of the spiritual. He lives in the consequences of what people have created. But Michael is not only a closed, silent spirit, Michael, by approaching man, does so with a clear rejection of much that man still lives in on Earth today.”
It’s also clear that it is now up to all of us – we cannot expect Michael or the spiritual hierarchies to intervene to save us. Because the reality is that it is human beings themselves who have taken over the cosmic intelligence and who now have to work out how to get ourselves out of the mess we have made of the world. But we are not powerless, quite the contrary. My wife Sophia recently reminded me of something that the late Nick Thomas, the former general secretary of the Anthroposophical Society in Great Britain, had told us. Nick said that in the Old Mysteries, the phrase “As Above, So Below” was operational, meaning that the hierarchies directed their intentions to human beings on Earth. But now, he said, in the New Mysteries mankind is in the driving seat and the phrase has become “As Below, So Above”. If we pray and act for peace, if we direct our will with the intention of seeing a planet of peace and harmony, then the hierarchies are constrained to respond positively and meet us halfway. What then emerges upwards from the earth is destined to become a wholly positive reality. This is a kind of new spiritual power that can be implemented by each of us as individuals and within groups.
We are living in unprecedented times but despite this I’m not at all pessimistic about the future. There are many, many individuals and organisations around the world who are responding positively and creatively to the challenges of our times. Whether they realise it or not, all these individuals and organisations are imbued with the Michaelic impulse. We also see this here in Forest Row, for example, which is the home of several of these initiatives that are full of future, to use a phrase from Ita Wegman. Here we are in Emerson College, which if it is able to fulfil its destiny will be an important component of an emerging global learning community where people around the world can find, share and generate connection, culture, ideas, practices, resources, wellbeing, healing and meaning, which will in turn lead us to a future worthy of human beings.
Steiner described how we should celebrate the Michaelmas Festival with fearlessness– and this, I think, is very relevant to our situation today. This is what he said:
“Human beings must learn to celebrate the Michaelmas festival by making it a festival of fearlessness, a festival of inner initiative and inner strength (…) and selfless self-awareness. Experience how in this autumn Michaelmas festival all that is to grow in you which is to develop against comfort, against timidity, but towards inner initiative, towards the free, strong, brave will in the human being, (…), a festival which renews the whole inner human being. That is what the Michael Festival must become if it is to be worthily used.”
We are of course in a Michael Age, which runs from 1879 to around 2300 AD. The special significance of the Michael Age for us is that Michael is ascending from the Archangelic rank to the rank of Archai, a so-called Zeitgeist or Spirit of the Age who can thereby stimulate a spiritual deepening of all humanity that transcends all peoples and will help in that quest to renew the whole inner human being. Steiner tells us that each of the most highly evolved archangels or Time Spirits has a regency or developmental period lasting from about 300 to 350 years’ duration. The previous age up until 1879 was that of Gabriel and the one after the present age of Michael will be that of Oriphiel. Oriphiel is also called by Rudolf Steiner the Angel of Wrath, who purifies humanity with a strong hand. He was the leading Archangel at the time of the Mystery of Golgotha and he will again be the leading Archangel after the Michael-time has completed.
Steiner says, and no doubt he is speaking here of anthroposophists and other people of goodwill: “Whoever today, under Michael’s rule, feels the urge to participate in the spiritual life, is called to serve the Archangel Michael and to learn under him, so that he may one day be mature enough to serve the terrible Oriphiel in the right way. (…) In four to six hundred years, the small group of people who are being prepared today will serve God Oriphiel, so that humanity may be saved.”
Almost one hundred years ago, on September 28th 1924 Rudolf Steiner had to end his lecturing activity because of his increasing physical illness and exhaustion. He concluded the final lecture of his life, with a verse dedicated to the archangel Michael, the guardian spirit of anthroposophy. Here is the last stanza of that verse, which is addressed to all anthroposophists:
“You, the pupils of spirit knowledge,
Take up Michael’s wise direction,
Take up the word of love of the will of worlds
Actively into your souls’ high aims.”
This was a direct instruction to us. “Take up the word of love of the will of worlds Actively into your soul’s high aims.” Steiner then spent part of the remaining six months of his life revealing astonishingly profound and diverse insights about anthroposophy and Michael. Despite his illness, Steiner wrote down these insights, in a series of weekly essays which he continued without interruption until his death, and which we can read today in the book ‘Anthroposophical Leading Thoughts’. For those of you who are members of the First Class of the School of Spiritual Science, you will know that Steiner’s death prevented him from bringing the content of the Second and Third Classes. My sense is that the content of the Second Class and maybe some of the Third Class, can be found in these Anthroposophical Leading Thoughts.
Steiner described and here he is obviously referring to himself, “Those persons who can see the supersensible world bordering next upon the visible world, perceive Michael and those belonging to him engaged in what they would like to do for humanity. Such persons see how — through the picture of Michael in Ahriman’s sphere — man is to be led in freedom away from Ahriman to Christ.” Perhaps the most significant phrase in that sentence are the two words “in freedom”. It is the free choice of each one of us to decide which path to follow.
When my courage falters, and I am overwhelmed by the state of the world, I try to remember those words, which are surely a solemn promise to all of us: Man is to be led in freedom away from Ahriman to Christ.
Thank you for listening.
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My failures as an anthroposophist
I started this blog in 2014 and have been writing an average of around one post a month on anthroposophical and other related themes ever since. My original purpose in writing was partly to help my own understanding of anthroposophy, through having to research and study particular topics, and partly to share my discoveries with people around the world, because I’m convinced that anthroposophy as a path for spiritual awakening and development is vital for all our futures.
Just lately, however, I have started to feel that in some respects I have failed as an anthroposophist and in this post I will set down why I think this is so. Of course, it has been good to share through this blog some of Steiner’s ideas that I’ve found really helpful; and in my personal and working lives it has also been good to be involved with biodynamic farms, anthroposophical trusts and educational bodies; but I’ve come to realise that the essential core of anthroposophy is really about studying and working with exercises to gain access to higher forms of knowledge and insight, so as to deepen ourselves as human beings. My approach up until now has been both an intellectual and an emotional path but this has not enabled me to develop the capacities for ‘living thinking’, nor to open up any latent abilities for spiritual insights (though I do have moments of intuition).
I have always had a blockage when it comes to meditation and feel that I lack the basic ability to do this, despite having tried hard on various occasions with various teachers and writers about meditation over the years. This inability to meditate is a serious stumbling block on the path to spiritual development, which means that I fall at the first hurdle and have no access to working with the mantras of the First Class or the exercises in Knowledge of the Higher Worlds. This also means that the experiences and images Steiner describes when preparing to ‘cross the threshold’ between the physical/sense world and the non-visible worlds beyond are for me a closed book. Nor do I find The Philosophy of Freedom an easy work to engage with, though this is the book that Steiner said could be used like his Occult Science or Theosophy to produce an understanding of anthroposophy.
After years of reading Steiner’s lectures and books and writing about them on this blog, I feel that I can hold my own in conversations about most topics of anthroposophy, but I cannot claim to have developed any spiritual abilities whatsoever – no clairvoyance, no guidance from spiritual sources, no encounters with elementals or awareness of angels (apart from one encounter many years ago when I was in deep despair). So I remain stuck in what is primarily an intellectual worldview of anthroposophy but am making no progress in what should be the core, which is the development of new spiritual capacities.
If I were seeking excuses for my inadequacy, I might point out that many anthroposophists are in a similar position and that generally we are paying far too little attention to what Rudolf Steiner had to say about the importance of this schooling for ‘initiation’ and the meditation it demands. Study groups, in my limited experience at least, tend to concentrate on reading and discussing lecture cycles or books, which can be enjoyable and useful things to do – but shouldn’t we also be holding meditation groups or groups to discuss and share spiritual experiences? In such groups we could learn to work together, to be socially active and to get feedback from one another in our task of capacity building.
Steiner’s view was that: “Humanity must become a partaker of the spirit in order to carry its revelations into the physical world. Human beings must transform the earth by implanting in it what they have ascertained in the spiritual world. That is their task. It is only because the physical world is dependent upon the spiritual, and because human beings can work upon the earth, in a true sense, only if they are participators in those worlds in which the creative forces lie concealed – only for those reasons should they have the desire to ascend to the higher worlds. No one approaching esoteric training with these sentiments and resolved not to deviate for a moment from these prescribed directions (ie in Knowledge of the Higher Worlds, from which this quotation is taken), will have the slightest danger to fear. No one should allow the prospect of these dangers to keep them from esoteric training; it should rather act as a strong challenge to one and all, to acquire those faculties which every true esoteric student must have.”
If that is our task, I now need to begin anew. I probably need to find a good teacher, or teachers, and groups to belong to where I can find help to discipline myself to do the exercises – again and again and again. As I now consider myself unqualified to write about some of these core aspects of anthroposophy, I will not be writing any more posts on this blog unless they are clearly from the perspective of a learner. I will keep the blog available on the web for the time being as it has many worthwhile topics on it and I know many people in many countries around the world have found it useful. Thanks to those of you who have shared this journey with me so far – I hope one day to be able to write again, from a place of authentic experience.
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Maintaining human values in the time of Covid-19
Several of my recent blog posts have tried to express what I feel about the net that is slowly but surely enmeshing us all as we proceed into the 21st century. The dominant themes are clear enough by now – the ongoing war on culture and shared values, climate breakdown, the lack of international solidarity, the subversion of truth and morality, the deliberate inculcation of fear and division, a pandemic which has prompted governments around the world to dismantle existing civil liberties, GMO and gene editing, artificial intelligence, the merging of humans and machines and – gradually emerging from the shadows – the ongoing project by the ‘Ruler of This World’ to build a hyper-real replacement for life itself. Whatever it is, we can see it rising, and we will see it closer and more clearly during these next few years, in all its malevolent manifestations.
The divisions caused by Covid-19 are making the arguments about Brexit seem like a vicarage tea party. The unvaccinated, for example, are fast becoming a global underclass, with a two-tier society opening up between what you might call the jabbed and the jabbed-nots. Let us also not forget the arrogance and greed of the elites, who as it appears from this article are plotting to leave the rest of us behind.
I cannot fight this any longer – force majeure is in operation. I have to live in the world as it is and I have to share the karma of humanity. For example, this means that I have had to bow to government diktat and to have the first Covid jab, or lose my job. I will have the second jab before the government deadline of 11th November. I am trying to regard this as a sacrifice on the altar of the collective. But what I really feel is that this has been a bitter demonstration of my powerlessness in the face of manifest injustice. This is epitomised for me by the fact that, as a worker in a care home for adults with learning disabilities, I must get the consent of a resident or their family before I am able to administer a paracetamol for a headache; but I am not allowed any say and have no right to consent or refuse when the government demands that I take into my body an experimental vaccine that has not yet completed its trials. This absolute principle of consent, which must be applied with complete rigour not only to vulnerable people such as those with learning disabilities but anyone in the normal course of medical treatment, does not now apply to me or other care workers because in our case the government has changed the law. Our only choice is to have the jabs or lose our jobs. The health minister in England, Sajid Javid, is said to be now thinking seriously about sacking 106,000 staff in the NHS (including doctors) who are refusing the Covid vaccines.
All this has shocked me out of my naïve assumption that those of us who live in the countries of the West are somehow freer than the populations of China or Russia. This is a lie, which is fed to us during our education and through all the media – but it is a lie, nonetheless. The objective reality is that wherever we live, we are subject to tyrannies of various kinds, and although the degrees of tyranny may vary, in our lives within physical bodies the fact remains that we are unfree. This can never apply, thank goodness, to the non-material aspects of our being.
But I feel that I have paid enough time and attention to these negative phenomena. If we focus too hard on Ahriman, he and his minions will focus on us. “No man can concentrate his attention upon evil, or even upon the idea of evil, and remain unaffected,” wrote Aldous Huxley in The Devils of Loudun. “To be more against the devil than for God is exceedingly dangerous. Every crusader is apt to go mad.” Wise counsel indeed, and I am trying to take it to heart. In that same book, Huxley also said:
“Possession is more often secular than supernatural. Men are possessed by their thoughts of a hated person, a hated class, race or nation. At the present time the destinies of the world are in the hands of self-made demoniacs – of men who are possessed by, and who manifest, the evil they have chosen to see in others. They do not believe in devils; but they have tried their hardest to be possessed – have tried and been triumphantly successful.”
These possessed souls are eating us alive but it is surely not inevitable that all of us will become prey. What looks right now as though its triumph is a foregone conclusion may not be as strong and solid as it appears, because as we know from the past, despite many victories in battle along the way, in the end Ahriman always loses the war. He will lose this time as well because there is a resilience in human life and the natural world which, when allied with our knowledge of the absolute and total love of Christ for each one of us, gives certainty that truth and real human values will outlast and survive the worst that can be done to us, or that we can do to ourselves.
Rudolf Steiner had a deep confidence in humanity and human beings, a belief that some of us have from time to time struggled to share, given all the disappointments we are currently experiencing. Steiner knew, however, that freedom is fundamental to genuine human evolution as “willed by the gods” and this means that, in their free actions, human beings are going to make many grievous errors.
So in this post I want to look at ways of moving beyond our present situation: how to reclaim our humanity, redeem Ahriman, and begin to sow the seeds of some kind of human-scale world again. In particular, I want to focus on the initiatives that each of us can take in our daily lives, that when allied with countless other small initiatives across the world, will turn the tide in favour of humanity and real human values.
Here, I think, it is relevant to quote what Rudolf Steiner had to say in the Karmic Relations lecture given in Dornach on 4th August, 1924:
“All this makes it necessary for the anthroposophist to pay heed to one condition of his karma — a condition that is sure to be present in him to a high degree. Much can be said, — and we shall still have to say many things — about the reasons why one or another character or temperament is drawn to Anthroposophy (…). But all these impulses, which bring the individuals to Anthroposophy, have one counterpart, which the Spirit of the World has made more strong in them than in others. All the many possibilities that are there with respect to the most manifold things in life, demand initiative from the anthroposophist — inner initiative of soul. We must become aware of this. For the anthroposophist this proverb must hold good. He must say to himself: ‘Now that I have become an anthroposophist through my karma, the impulses which have been able to draw me to Anthroposophy require me to be attentive and alert. For somehow or somewhere, more or less deeply in my soul, there will emerge the necessity for me to find inner initiative, — initiative of soul which will enable me to undertake something or to make some judgment or decision out of my own inmost being.’ Verily, this is written in the karma of every single anthroposophist: ‘Be a person of initiative, and beware lest through hindrances of your own body, or hindrances that otherwise come in your way, you do not find the centre of your being, where is the source of your initiative. Observe that in your life all joy and sorrow, all happiness and pain will depend on the finding or not finding of your own individual initiative.’ This should stand written as though in golden letters, constantly before the soul of the anthroposophist. Initiative lies in his karma, and much of what meets him in this life will depend on the extent to which he can become willingly and actively conscious of it.”
This is a wonderful lecture and there is so much in it that is well worth reading. I am struck by the emphasis Steiner gives to the additional difficulty that anthroposophists have in finding their way in the world; and also to the pain they feel when trying to connect with others who have no access to anything other than the material realm. All my experience cries ‘Yes’ to these words. So given the dire state of the world and given the additional hindrances that anthroposophists face, what can we do to find the centres of our being, the sources of initiative which are key to making life worth living?
Each person must of course answer this for themselves. My own answer includes concentrating on those areas of life where one can make a difference, rather than wasting time and emotion on problems which are way beyond my capacity to influence. Is there something in one’s life which holds a promise for a better future, a seed which has been planted for worthwhile human developments and which can support real human needs? As one small example, long-time readers may recall this article in which I wrote about Pixton Third Age, an initiative to provide a co-housing scheme for older people at Emerson College. After years of hard work and effort, this project has at last received planning consent and by the end of March 2022 we should know whether we have enough people interested to make it a success. If all goes according to plan, the building conversion work will begin in Autumn 2022 and the first residents will be able to move in at Spring 2024.
Each of us is now being called upon to do all that we can to help in the evolution and progress of human life. In the face of the current massive onslaught which is seeking to re-define what it means to be a human being, any project which concentrates on true human needs and values is a worthwhile antidote to the poison of our times. People are trying to help in their own myriad ways: artists through their creative work, teachers and parents through educating and bringing up children, activists through changing policies and laws, and any of us through our encounters in daily life. If we can be people of initiative, rather than passive sponges soaking up whatever is done to us, humanity will survive the incarnation of Ahriman.
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anthropopper 