Author Archives: Jeremy Smith

About Jeremy Smith

I’m currently organising a programme of talks and workshops on a part-time freelance basis for Emerson College in Forest Row, East Sussex in the UK. I’ve worked in various branches of education since 1986, in both employed and self-employed roles. Before that, I was the arts and entertainments officer for one of the London boroughs and before that I trained as an actor at the Mountview Theatre School. I’ve had an interest in the work of Rudolf Steiner for many years and have spent several years as the education facilitator in a Steiner school. I’ve also been the trustee of another Steiner school, have worked as a member of the executive group of the Steiner Waldorf Schools Fellowship and have been a lay inspector for Ofsted inspections of Steiner schools. Biodynamic agriculture, another of Steiner’s initiatives, is a huge interest of mine and I’m a shareholder of the Tablehurst & Plaw Hatch Farms Co-op in Forest Row, East Sussex. I’m also an executive director of Tablehurst Farm and have a part-time role as registered manager for the farm's care home.

December 31, 2015 · 11:45 am

A Happy Number-Crunching New Year!

WordPress, the company which hosts this blog as well as many thousands of others, has recently sent out data about activity on anthropopper during 2015.It began like this:

“The concert hall at the Sydney Opera House holds 2,700 people. This blog was viewed about 20,000 times in 2015. If it were a concert at Sydney Opera House, it would take about 7 sold-out performances for that many people to see it….The busiest day of the year was August 8^th, with 1,541 views. The most popular post that day was Marilyn Monroe and Rudolf Steiner.”

Ah yes, Marilyn and Rudi. That has certainly been the most popular post, not only in 2015 but in 2014 as well. Checking the stats for that post, on one day in September 2014 it received 2,001 views. I reckon that since it was first put up in September 15^th 2014, it has received more than 16,000 views from around the world.

Clearly the key to blogging success for those of us with recherché subject matter is to find a way to link our topic with another one of much vaster public interest. (Now, how can I follow on from Marilyn and Rudi? Rudi and Princess Di? Rudi and Elvis? There must be some sort of link I can find! Rudolf Steiner and cats doing funny things, perhaps?)

What was truly astonishing, though, was the information about where these visitors came from. They came from 109 countries in all! And there are only around 190 countries in the whole world. Most visitors of course came from the USA, UK and Australia, but there were also surprisingly sizeable visitor numbers from Scandinavia, Europe, the Indian sub-continent, China, Russia, South America, and South Africa.

Now for many bloggers I’ve no doubt that these numbers will seem miniscule by comparison with their own sites; but nevertheless I thought all of this was quite impressive and encouraging for a blog which is dealing with subjects that are decidedly of esoteric rather than mainstream interest. If I had set out to write a book on anthroposophy, I doubt if 1,000 people would have seen it. But in this age of the internet, a blog about aspects of anthroposophy has received over 33,000 views from 20,000 visitors in just eighteen months. Many thanks, dear readers and followers, for your interest so far and very best wishes for 2016!

By the way, here is a link to a blog post by Ha Vinh Tho, who summarises neatly some of the dilemmas facing anthroposophy at the present time. I’m sure that these themes will be featuring on the anthropopper blog as well during 2016.

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Tagged as Anthroposophy, Ha Vinh Tho, Marilyn Monroe, Rudolf Steiner

December 26, 2015 · 11:59 pm

Epiphany on the Farm with the Three Kings

On New Year’s Eve, the anthropopper will be joining colleagues at Plaw Hatch Community Farm in Sussex to prepare a very special biodynamic preparation. The Three Kings Preparation is one of a whole group of preparations created by Hugo Erbe (1885-1965) as a result of his lifelong work as a biodynamic farmer in Germany. He experienced a very close connection to the elemental world and sought ways of encouraging their beneficial influences.

Hugo Erbe, who devised the Three Kings biodynamic preparation (photo courtesy of Considera.org)

Following the nuclear bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1945, Hugo Erbe observed a massive disruption and flight of beneficial elemental beings from his farmland. He experienced this deep wound to the living sheath of the earth as a process whereby the elementals were being demonised. To help heal the damage done to the earth’s organism and bring the elementals back into equilibrium he developed a preparation made from the gifts of the Three Kings, or Magi.

The Three Kings brought offerings of Gold, Frankincense and Myrrh to the Jesus child. These three offerings are full of meaning, as you might expect of gifts chosen by initiates. Gold is the symbol of wisdom and of intelligence. Frankincense is a universal symbol for spiritual intuition and sacramental offering. And Myrrh is the symbol of dying, of death, the sacrifice of the earthly in order that the higher may come to life.

Myrrh, gold and frankincense, the three active ingredients of the Three Kings preparation (photo courtesy of Avena Botanicals)

Rudolf Steiner gave significant insights about these substances from his own spiritual research. He pointed out that the gifts of the three Magi were meant to strengthen the development of the Jesus child in three ways. The first help was from gold for the growth of the physical body, connected to the sun forces. The second, frankincense, was for the development of a harmonious soul life. For this, the incense form was supposed to be paramount. Thirdly, myrrh was to enhance the spiritual development. Myrrh oil was used by the Egyptians, for example, for embalming and for those processes that have to do directly with the passage of consciousness into a higher spiritual world.

The three ingredients have to be pounded with mortar and pestle before being mixed and stirred with warm rainwater (photo courtesy of Avena Botanicals)

Most significantly, Rudolf Steiner pointed out that the resin of the frankincense tree not only protects the plant, but also enables the plant to reconnect itself to the world of the stars from which its growing impulses come. When introduced into the human body, it strengthens milk production in the mother and when passing from the mother’s milk into the infant, it then helps to optimise the development of the young brain. In adults it optimises mental functioning.

The three kings might be said to represent the three higher forces of man: Wisdom, Beauty and Strength. As long as man lives in his lower nature, these three forces are in him disordered and chaotic. But when man has so purified himself that the three forces work together in perfect harmony, and he can freely use them, then the way into the realm of the spiritual lies open before him.

Balthasar, Melchior and Caspar (the Three Kings or Magi) from a Roman mosaic in Ravenna (photo courtesy of the Daily Telegraph)

Ancient mystery wisdom has always held these three substances as symbols of awareness for the spiritual events taking place behind the outer physical phenomena. When prepared in the right way these three holy substances can also serve as gifts to the earth and to the elemental world. The preparation is always prepared on New Year’s Eve and then spread on 6^th January, the Festival of the Three Kings.

I will join the Plaw Hatch farm team on 6^th January to spread the preparation around the boundaries of the farm. The idea is to walk the boundaries with a bucket in one hand and a brush in the other, dipping the brush and every few steps flicking the preparation in an outward direction, away from the farm boundary, where it falls in a fine spray. This is done so as to invite elemental life forces to manifest within the farm for the coming year and to help and guide us for the coming growing season. It is a kind of offering to the earth and the elemental kingdom and a way of giving thanks for what the universe provides. Some may scoff and call it nonsensical. All I can say is that it seems to me a natural extension of the old farming adage that believed: “the best fertiliser is the farmer’s boot”. I have always understood this to mean that, by walking the land with consciousness and intent, the farmer is somehow aligning himself with all the forces that work together to ensure good outcomes for the farm, the crops and the animals.

Finally, there’s a quotation from Rudolf Steiner that I would like to share with you, because during dark times, when it is so easy to despair, we should remind ourselves of what people of good will working together can achieve:

“Human communities are the mysterious locations that higher spiritual entities move and sink into so as to work through individual human beings, just as the human soul works by means of the limbs in the body…This is the secret of the advancement of future humanity – to work out of communities.”

(GA 54, Berlin, 23^rd November 1905 – Brotherhood and the Fight for Survival)

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Tagged as biodynamics, Hugo Erbe, Rudolf Steiner, Three Kings biodynamic preparation

December 13, 2015 · 3:21 pm

Guest Post:Leadership & Organisational Structure in Steiner Waldorf Schools

This is the first guest post to appear on the anthropopper’s blog!

It’s from Bernard Thomson in Australia, who is particularly interested in the question of leadership and management in Steiner Waldorf schools. The anthropopper is also interested in this issue and has previously written on the topic, here and here. It was these posts that prompted Bernard to visit me when he came to England recently and, although we have differing views, I invited him to write a post setting out his thoughts. We both hope that this will start a discussion on an issue of vital importance to the development of Steiner Waldorf education.

But first, here is Bernard writing about himself:

“I grew up in the Midlands and attended Elmfield Rudolf Steiner School. In 1973 I went to Germany to complete my education returning to the UK in 1978. I studied philosophy of science and economics at the LSE followed by a year at the Centre for Social Development at Emerson. In 1987 I moved to New Zealand and in 2003 arrived in Australia where I became a business manager at a Steiner school south of Adelaide. After 12 years I began to work as a freelance consultant initially specialising in leadership and governance in Steiner schools. My career and work experience has been predominantly in social welfare organisations, both Steiner based and ‘mainstream,’ with an ongoing interest in social and organisational development.”

Leadership & Organisational Structure in Steiner Waldorf Schools

by Bernard Thomson

The issue of leadership and organisational structure in Waldorf schools is not new. Indeed one could argue that it began in the early years of the first school in Stuttgart and in one way or another has continued ever since. And this should be no surprise since organisations are living systems which defy any permanent structural solutions.

However this topic is pressing and engages many of us concerned with Waldorf education and its capacity to survive and thrive in an ever changing social, political and economic environment. To date the argument has often been between assertions as to what Steiner said or meant about school leadership and the pragmatic response to perceived and, indeed, evident failures in organisational governance and leadership. Steiner did say there shall be no headmaster and he did say that every teacher was to act in full personal responsibility without recourse to the comfort of receiving directions from an overarching authority*

In this contribution I will not debate the pros and cons of College versus Principal structure as I believe this misses the real question.

I take as my starting point that a school organism, like any other social organisation, needs a structure together with process leadership to guide its performance. And it requires such a structure and leadership that best supports its purpose and function. Unlike a production industry where the purpose is an efficient process to deliver goods to willing customers, a school is in the people business; its product is what goes on between human beings namely teachers, students and parents. The human relationships are the fabric which supports the pedagogical practice. The latter cannot exist without the former and the efficacy of educational practice is directly related to the health of the human relationships.

In the production industry, which can be considered as a system of inputs, process and outputs, we might conclude that it can be optimised through specifications which precisely control as many factors as possible. Frederick W. Taylor gave his name to the first so-called scientific management system which sought to do just that. Centralised control from the top appears to be the logical answer to co-ordinating a diversity of inputs and processes. However this authoritarian structure is being challenged because it fails to take account of human (f)actors whose motivation and hence productivity is directly affected by the workplace environment and culture. Indeed there is an increasing number of organisations which are being reimagined as living entities in which ecological systems thinking replaces the mechanistic logic of direct and control, cause and effect. The human subsystem (according to Lievegoed’s phases of organisational development) is, I believe, what is here being developed as part of a move towards the third phase of integration. This accords with my understanding of consciousness soul activity where we do not seek nor expect answers to the challenges we face to be available in a model or formula. Instead the ongoing engagement with other thinking human beings forms the basis for our decision-making processes. And this is the same for both production industry and human services.

This means abandoning certainty (or the illusion of it!) and becoming comfortable with the unknown, the ambiguous, in other words, the creative process. A recent book by Fredric Laloux, “Reinventing organisations” describes various approaches to this challenge, in a range of diverse industries. What they share in common is the removal of central control in favour of distributed authority in which accountability is achieved through clearly defined processes, a system for effectively disseminating information for maximum transparency.

The widespread shift in Waldorf schools across the globe to a more top down or principal leadership structure is mostly justified by the failure of a collective approach to school management. There are many examples of this failure, with which I am also personally familiar. The apparent solution, however, is also producing many failures if these are to be determined on the basis of school performance as judged by staff and parents. Indeed, in Australia at least, there has been a continual turnover of school leaders (variously called administrators, heads of school, directors, principals, etc.) where the common denominator is an authority structure in which the school board or council appoints the school leader with full authority to manage the day-to-day operations of the school. Accountability is one way, and that is up.

Now there are also good examples of leadership performance that build collective strength and support a strong collegial culture within the school. Thus we invariably conclude that it is not the structure but the people that make the difference, and this is true. So are we faced with either a collective approach which may work if there is a high level of individual and social competence, or a single authority which may also work if the “right” person is in charge? Is there nothing more to it than to simply hope or pray that we can get the right people in the right places? And who chooses the right people?

As I mentioned above we are in the people business in which human relationships are key. We are also in the human development business in which role modelling has a powerful influence and we don’t need Steiner to tell us that the character of the teacher, or indeed of all adults, is central in supporting healthy development in young people. So we can confirm Steiner’s vision that the school must be led by a culture of learning and human development, which he called a republican teachers’ academy.

I believe in the notion that you start working in a way that is congruent with the aim. If it is true that for the students, “Our highest endeavour must be to develop individuals who are able out of their own initiative to impart purpose and direction to their lives”⁽¹⁾, then we found teacher practice on personal initiative and self-responsibility. The supporting school organism supports and strengthens this by creating a culture of personal initiative and self-responsibility. The leadership culture embodies this.

In his 1990 book “The Fifth Discipline” Peter Senge introduced the concept of the Learning Organisation which has 5 key features which include personal mastery, building a shared vision and team learning. I suggest that in the Learning Organisation we find a close similarity with Steiner’s vision of how a College of Teachers and Waldorf School management is to be understood.

Steiner’s vision for school leadership and governance recognised the fact that the cultural/ social mission of Waldorf education requires a new form for human learning and collaboration. This insight is now finding resonance in a growing understanding of organisations as social organisms. The “Newtonian” mechanistic model is being replaced by a living systems approach (see “Leadership and the New Science” by Margaret Wheatley).

Organisms have an ecology which connects all the elements together in a living dynamic. They are not run or managed in the conventional sense, but may be said to operate and self-regulate according to a guiding motif. The guiding motif acts as a point of self-reference. In an animal organism we speak of the unique animal instinct which guides behaviour; in the human social organism we must speak of the mission or spiritual ideal. It is just this that Steiner said must replace the headmaster by becoming the focus for the College work. As self-responsible adults participating in a self-regulating school organism we move with our experiences from the periphery to the centre and take out to the periphery our newfound intentions. The task of leadership is to facilitate the collective learning which informs the mission and to guide the processes which transform the mission into individual resolve.

Social understanding and discernment is of course necessary for leadership. Leader-guides must be selected who have the maturity and social skill to advance leadership throughout the school. The school processes must be transparent and accountable and include practical methods for review and evaluation. But the old form where adults make themselves subservient to an “outside” authority which “knows best” has to be left behind.

This process requires a new understanding of leadership as something akin to an alchemical process in which everyone participates. The idea of an “external” reference point or standard against which to guide practice will be seen as always provisional and temporary and must ultimately be abandoned in favour of self-referencing also known as self-governance.

* Address by Rudolf Steiner 20 August 1919 on the evening prior to the lecture course translated as “Study of Man” (also known as “The Foundations of Human Experience”)

⁽¹⁾Marie Steiner

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Tagged as School leadership and management, Steiner Waldorf schools

December 1, 2015 · 7:30 pm

“A right good evening, the best of cheer…”

Throughout the Advent period and up until the end of the Autumn term, teachers and other staff in Steiner Waldorf schools around the world are to be found busy in rehearsals for one or more of three Christmas plays, which they perform as a kind of gift to the pupils, their families and friends over the holiday period.

These plays – the Paradise Play, the Shepherds’ Play and the Three Kings’ Play – are known as the Oberufer Christmas Plays, after an island in the Upper Danube where these plays were first noted down and collected by Karl Julius Schroer.

Karl Julius Schröer (1825 – 1900), who collected the Oberufer Christmas Plays and brought them to the attention of Rudolf Steiner.

For Rudolf Steiner, who grew up in the rural Austro-Hungarian villages during the latter part of the 19th century, Christmas was still a time which was not primarily about consumerism, but was instead a festival when love, philanthropy and what you might call “right living” was given a fresh impetus in human hearts. As Christmas approached, these villages were suffused by a mood Steiner later described as a kind of magical breath that filled the homes and streets with joyful, hopeful anticipation. Even the poorest peasant householder would dedicate a corner of their dwelling to a nativity scene made from figures they had carved themselves from wood.

As a boy, Steiner would see these nativity scenes when visiting his neighbours. It’s easy for us to forget that he was born into the rural working-class and this was the milieu in which he grew up. As an adult, he expressed his empathy with poor working people as a natural result of having grown up among them. The villagers of Steiner’s childhood not only decorated their homes with nativity scenes but they also took part in traditional seasonal pageants. On Christmas Eve they would re-enact the biblical stories of Adam and Eve and the expulsion from Paradise; and on Christmas Day the story of the Shepherds as told in the Gospel of St Luke. Despite their simple settings, props and costumes, the villagers took these plays very seriously, with preparations beginning at the end of the harvest season and with rehearsals taking place by lantern and candlelight. The actors were men and boys only, including those playing the roles of Mary and the angel. Those taking part in the plays had to observe certain rules and uphold high moral standards.

Steiner tells us that from his own observations of knowing the people involved, there were what he calls “utterly good-for-nothing fellows who would not dare to be dissolute as the days shortened. At Christmas time those who were invariably the most quarrelsome, quarrelled less and those who quarrelled only now and then stopped quarrelling altogether. A real power was active in souls at that time of the year and these feelings abounded everywhere during the weeks immediately before the Holy Night.” Steiner went on to say that “anyone who has lived among village people knows what the first rule of conduct signifies. The first rule was that during the whole period of preparation none of the actors might visit a brothel.” (I trust that the Waldorf teachers today are showing similar restraint. 🙂 ) A second rule was that no-one was allowed to sing bawdy songs or get drunk and the boys taking part were expected to be God-fearing and be capable of absorbing into their character the essence of the Christmas mood. The actors were also obliged to learn how to speak in strict rhythm and rehearse every movement and gesture in minute detail.

So when in later life Steiner was introduced to the Oberufer Christmas plays by his university professor Karl Julius Schroer, he immediately recognised what he described as the same “warm, magical breath of the Christmas mood” that he remembered from the village plays of his childhood. Schroer had collected these three plays in the local dialect from the island community of Oberufer in the Danube, where they had been performed for hundreds of years.

A photo of trainee teachers at Antioch University performing the Paradise Play.

A photo of trainee teachers at Antioch University in New Hampshire performing the Paradise Play.

I think we can be fairly sure that Steiner further adapted Schroer’s texts of these plays. First, he separated the Shepherds’ Play from the King’s Play, which over the course of the centuries had been intermingled. Secondly, he recreated lost passages such as the part of the Tree-singer in the Paradise Play and the Shepherds’ supper scene. Thirdly, he corrected corrupt and meaningless passages. And finally, he adapted the language of the plays to a kind of Austrian folk dialect, which of course as an Austrian he was able to do. We may also assume that Steiner brought out and strengthened the ancient wisdom inherent in the plays. We know that he gave much time and attention to the rehearsal and production of the plays at Dornach, and he provided a spoken introduction to every performance whenever he could.

A production of The Shepherds’ Play from the Waldorf School of the Peninsula, Los Altos, California.

In common with some other traditions of Waldorf education that could benefit from a little updating, it seems likely that performances of the Oberufer plays have changed not one jot in the one hundred-odd years since they were first produced. As someone who trained as an actor before becoming involved with Waldorf education, I sometimes found that there was more than a touch of The Art of Coarse Acting about these school productions – and I suspect for many of the older pupils, these performances are received not so much as a gift from the teachers but more as a kind of reassuring but boring annual ritual that they have to sit through.

A production of the Three Kings’ Play from Highland Hall School, Northridge, California.

Despite the forgotten lines, the all-purpose mediaeval costumes, the Mummerset accents and the naff productions, I nevertheless found there to be a special, intangible quality about acting in these plays. It may sound fanciful but I experienced this as a blessing, a sense of grace. I found this particularly to be the case when playing Balthasar in the Three Kings’ play, but also when playing God in the Paradise play (typecasting, some might say). 🙂 Of course, those playing the Devil or Herod might have quite a different experience! There is certainly plenty of scope for gifted directors, designers and actors to make something really good in an artistic sense from these plays but all too often in the schools, there is usually no time to do anything different than has been done for umpteen years before.

There is real wisdom in each of these plays and the text repays careful study and attention. Take the Paradise Play, for example, and the final speech that God makes just after Adam and Eve have been cast out of Paradise and after he has rebuked Satan for beguiling Adam and Eve into tasting the fruit of the Tree of Knowledge. It’s both powerful and thought-provoking:

“See now this Adam, such wealth he has won

Like to a god he is become

Knowledge he has of Evil and Good

He can lift up his hand on high

Whereby he liveth eternally”

I was playing the part, so I had to try to make sense of these lines. They reminded me of an earlier scene in the play, just after God has created Adam, and is showing him the Earth for the first time. God says to Adam:

“The earth with hills and mountains steep

I give thee – fishes of the deep and

Birds of Air, that by this hand I made,

I give to thy command.

Share thou with me my domination

And be the lord of all creation.”

God has invited Adam to become a co-creator, the steward of the Earth, although a steward who is so far lacking in the wisdom to run things properly.

So what do those last two lines mean, when God says that Adam “can lift up his hand on high, Whereby he liveth eternally”? Through acquiring premature knowledge of good and evil, before he was evolutionarily ready to take this on, Adam has become like a god. The image of Adam lifting his hand on high (and surely it’s his right hand he lifts) reminded me of a king with orb and sceptre. Picture a king with a sceptre in his right hand, which is used for directing and willing and with the orb in his left hand, which is used for receiving and holding – so Adam has become like a God or a co-creator with God and who now must learn to use his power with wisdom, which implies that there will be all kinds of painful lessons to be learned as mistakes are made along the way. And isn’t that a perfect image of humankind today, as we grapple with cloning and nuclear energy and genetic modification and all kinds of new technologies? We have the godlike powers but we are still trying to learn the godlike wisdom to use them properly.

What are the plays about? We could perhaps say that the Paradise Play is to do with the forces of Will, depicting as it does the beginning of Humankind.

We might say that the Shepherds’ Play is about Feeling and the light that gives warmth to simple shepherds’ hearts. It’s about empathy, the wisdom of the heart, the caring for one another that the birth of Jesus will reinforce and strengthen throughout the world.

And we could say that the Three Kings’ Play is about Thinking – and indeed it seems to me the play most closely aligned to anthroposophy, because the Three Kings are a kind of image of the seeking after of higher spiritual knowledge or the truths of esoteric Christianity.

I will be writing more about the Three Kings’ Play nearer the time of Epiphany, which is when it is supposed to be performed. But in the meantime, if you get an opportunity to go to one or more of these plays at a Waldorf school or elsewhere, why not give them a try and see what you think? And as the Angel says to the audience: “A right good evening, the best of cheer, The Lord of Heaven grant each one here…”

A Happy Advent Season to you all!

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November 23, 2015 · 2:18 pm

Ahriman versus the Archbishop of Canterbury

When the anthropopper was a boy at school in the 1950s, each day we had what was called an “assembly” in the school hall. It was in fact a short, non-denominational Christian religious service in which we sang a hymn, said a prayer and listened to an address by the head master or another teacher, and then went on to routine announcements about what was happening in the school. There were always a few children of other faiths, who stayed outside the hall for the religious part of the assembly.

School assemblies in the UK were provided for in the 1944 Education Act. Schools in England, Wales, and Northern Ireland were required (and still are to this day) to provide daily acts of collective worship. In Scotland, some form of religious observance is required. If the school is a faith school, these acts must be in line with the specific religion. In non-religious schools, the acts need to be broadly Christian in character without favouring any particular Christian denomination.

However, a recent report by the University of Leicester says that the duty of British schools to arrange daily acts of collective worship should be scrapped. The study, for the Arts and Humanities Research Council, says such acts, which must be Christian in nature, could discriminate against other religions. It adds there is no clear rationale for the duty, and that parents are often unaware they can withdraw their children from religious assemblies. The report also highlights how in 2004, the Chief Inspector of Schools for England drew Parliament’s attention to the fact that 76% of secondary schools were breaking the law by failing to provide daily acts of worship.

The statutory duty to provide an act of collective worship or religious observance in schools has been controversial for decades. Atheists and secular humanist have never liked it and there is disagreement about the appropriateness of such acts in an increasingly multicultural UK.

The Department for Education said the daily act of collective worship encourages children to reflect on belief, and helps shape fundamental British values of tolerance, respect and understanding for others. A spokesman said: “It is for schools to tailor their provision to suit the needs of their pupils, and parents can withdraw their children from all or any part of collective worship.”

The situation in the UK in 2015 is clearly very different from how it was seventy years ago and there are children of many other faiths and none in our schools whose needs should be respected and represented in school assemblies. But the fact remains that the culture in the UK has been formed over many hundreds of years on the basis of Christian values and traditions and in the anthropopper’s view, it is useful for children of any faith or none to have some idea about where this culture came from. It gives each of us a context in which we can frame our own views and decide what we choose to believe.

Fewer and fewer people today seem to share this view, however, and it is clear that to express any form of interest in, let alone belief, in spiritual values is to commit some kind of social faux pas. I was talking to a priest the other day and she told me that during a conversation while she was having her hair cut, she was asked what her work was. When she said “minister of religion”, everyone in the hairdresser’s shop went quiet, in some kind of embarrassed silence. “It was,” she said, “as though people thought I was going to judge them, when that is the very last thing on my mind.”

And now it appears that we have reached a point where even a sixty-second advert from the Church of England, based on the Lord’s Prayer, is deemed too embarrassing and divisive to be shown in cinemas. This is due to a decision by the Digital Cinema Media agency (DCM), which handles advertising for cinemas in the major chains.

DCM won’t accept ads with religious content in cinemas lest they offend “those of differing faiths and of no faith”. So it seems that, unlike a feature film which may contain scenes of rape, torture, sadism, massacre and all kinds of horrors, it’s too upsetting for cinemagoers to view one minute of the Archbishop of Canterbury and others saying the Lord’s Prayer.

Despite its potentially shocking nature, the church’s advert was passed uncut by the British Board of Film Classification and given a “U” certificate, as well as receiving clearance from the Cinema Advertising Authority.

You can watch the advert on YouTube and decide for yourself. I looked at it and thought it was rather good; the words of the Lord’s Prayer are said and sung by people at work in factories and fields, by schoolchildren, body builders, police officers and a black gospel choir. I imagine that atheists, rationalists, skeptics and those of other faiths are robust enough not to be too traumatised by it.

The decision by DCM should perhaps not be unexpected in the Age of the Consciousness Soul, during which according to Owen Barfield, “…man experiences isolation, loneliness, materialism, loss of faith in the spiritual world, above all, uncertainty. The soul has to make up its mind and to act in a positive way on its own unsupported initiative. And it finds great difficulty in doing so. For it is too much in the dark to be able to see any clear reason why it should, and it no longer feels the old (instinctive) promptings of the spirit within”.

But this may also be the age of the incarnation of Ahriman, which Rudolf Steiner said was likely to happen at the beginning of the 21^st century. Whether Ahriman is in bodily form or not, he is clearly working well and confusing us in the West with moral relativism. I can’t help but think, however, that his followers in the East would also have found the advert offensive but, unlike DCM, would have no truck with any such namby-pamby protection of cinemagoers’ sensitivities. Instead, the representatives of IS, Isil, Islamic State, Daesh or whatever name we are currently supposed to use, would go straight to the cinema to spray with bullets anyone who was decadent enough to watch the advert or the feature film. No doubt DCM was trying to avoid provoking them.

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Tagged as Age of the Consciousness Soul, Ahriman, Archbishop of Canterbury, Church of England advert, Digital Cinema Media agency

November 15, 2015 · 11:11 am

Staudi: or The Curate’s Egg

The anthropopper notes with interest that in his recent posts on this blog, he seems to have inadvertently adopted a Threefold Posting Order. The first three posts were on the topic of Angels and then the next two were about Demons. Well, here is one last post about Peter Staudenmaier to complete the threefolding aspect; after which I hope to be able to concentrate on more wholesome topics.

Bishop: “I’m afraid you’ve got a bad egg, Mr Jones”; The curate replies, desperate not to offend his eminent host and ultimate employer: “Oh no, my Lord, I assure you! Parts of it are excellent!”

Gerald du Maurier’s celebrated cartoon, which appeared in Punch in November 1895, gave rise to the phrase ‘a curate’s egg’, meaning something that is mostly or partly bad, but partly good. A modern-day version of this cartoon might have the caption:

Staudenmaier: “I’m afraid I’m a bad egg, Mr Mellett.” Mellett wipes a brown substance off his nose and replies, desperate not to offend his lord and master: “Oh no, my Lord, I assure you! Parts of you are excellent!”

According to Wikipedia, “in its original context, the term ‘a curate’s egg’refers to something that is obviously and essentially bad, but is euphemistically described as nonetheless having good features credited with undue redeeming power. Its modern usage varies. Some authorities define it as something that is an indeterminate mix of good and bad and others say it implies a preponderance of bad qualities.”

Isn’t that last sentence a perfect description of Peter Staudenmaier, self-appointed scourge of Steiner and anthroposophy and intellectual guru to the Waldorf Critics’ Yahoo group?

Staudenmaier, for those who have not yet made his online acquaintance, is the professor of modern German history at Marquette University in Milwaukee. His research explores the work of Rudolf Steiner; his dissertation was “Between Occultism and Fascism: Anthroposophy and the Politics of Race and Nation in Germany and Italy, 1900-1945.”

Like a polecat, which despite its stink and habit of biting all and sundry indiscriminately, can nevertheless occasionally be useful for chasing rabbits out of their burrows, the egregious Staudi sometimes has a use; and even the anthropopper has expressed gratitude to him for revealing a slice of history about which the Society has, rather disgracefully in my view, kept quiet. Here, for example, is a link to a review by Staudi of a book by Ansgar Martins. This shadow side of anthroposophy really should be known by all anthroposophists. As “Wooffles” commented on my last but one post, “In the last decade or so, anthroposophists, or at least some anthroposophists, have gotten much better at engaging with historical context, and it is doubtful that this would have taken place without the persistence of not-particularly-sympathetic scholars like Staudenmaier and Zander.” That’s quite a fair point, although the phrase “not particularly sympathetic scholar” when applied to Staudi’s attitude to Steiner must qualify as understatement of the year.

But, to return to my original metaphor, a bad egg is hard to like and Staudi’s overweening arrogance and contempt for others does nothing to endear him to any readers other than the fawning sycophants and melletts on the WC Yahoo list. It’s an interesting question why, unlike say with Martins or Zander, Staudi arouses such animosity in so many people. Is it for the reason Staudi himself gives?

“Any outside scholar who studies anthroposophy encounters strong opposition from parts of the anthroposophist movement. A large part of the reason why I continued researching anthroposophy’s history had to do with this sort of opposition; I initially thought the article I was asked to write back in 1999 would be a one-time piece, and then I’d return to other topics. But the article provoked such an indignant response among anthroposophists that I went back to the sources to see if I had missed something, and the further I dug into this history the more I found. Anthroposophists routinely claim that scholars who examine their movement have distorted Steiner’s ideas and misrepresented his teachings and falsified his true message and so forth; this is a common reaction among esoteric groups, who often believe they have special access to higher forms of knowledge and react strongly against scholarly standards of critical inquiry. The same sort of opposition I face is even more intense in the case of my German colleague Helmut Zander, the foremost historian of anthroposophy. Many of Steiner’s followers simply don’t like seeing their movement and worldview subjected to external scrutiny.”

Well, that sounds reasonable enough, doesn’t it? The picture he conjures up is not implausible: anthroposophists, who may be well-meaning but unaware of some significant episodes in the history of their movement, react angrily to information which doesn’t correspond to how they feel about anthroposophy.

But unfortunately for the good professor’s chances of constructive dialogue with such anthroposophists, he doesn’t leave matters there and cannot resist being condescending, dismissive and supercilious with anyone who questions him.

Staudi was brought irresistibly to mind when I read the following passage in John Stewart Collis’ wonderful account of farming life during the 1940s, The Worm Forgives the Plough:

“There is an interesting remark which I have often heard here and elsewhere, not uncommon anywhere when some boss or foreman is mentioned. ‘The trouble is,’ they say, ‘ ‘e’s so ignorant.’ By this they do not mean that he lacks knowledge. They mean that he lacks manners. It is a significant remark. For what is manners? Manners is psychology. It is the understanding of the simple psychological needs of other people. It is homage to the strikingly simple fact that people like you to address them amiably; to show appreciation, and to say thank you at intervals. If a man does not know this and act upon it he is called ignorant by labourers under him. That is their philosophy of education.”

By this definition, Staudi is remarkably ignorant. One wouldn’t really have expected this in someone who has been an active participant in the anarchist, green and cooperative movements in the United States and Germany for many years. One would have thought that a person of those sympathies might have acquired some emotional intelligence during that time. Not so, it seems.

But Staudi is not only ignorant in the sense of being unable to resist insulting and abusing people who in other circumstances would be perfectly willing to have a civilised exchange of views with him; he is actually ignorant in an even more fundamental sense, and this is in his complete lack of understanding of Rudolf Steiner. To understand Rudolf Steiner it is not enough to have a good brain; you need to have a good heart, too, and to be able to apply the intelligence of the heart to initiatic language that is often difficult to comprehend with our everyday understanding. Where Steiner is concerned, poor Staudi has a tin ear; he is to the elucidation of Rudolf Steiner what Florence Foster Jenkins was to operatic recitals.

Someone whose scholarly work in the same subject area demonstrates understanding on every page (in shining contrast to Staudi’s effusions) is Dr Adrian Anderson of Melbourne, Australia. I thoroughly recommend Anderson’s e-booklet, Opponents and Critics: Criticisms of Steiner and anthroposophy, to anthroposophists and critics alike. It will take you about half an hour to read but it is well worth the time and effort. Dr Anderson addresses Staudi’s criticisms of Steiner and does not shrink away from the darker episodes of anthroposophical history. Some of what he writes will no doubt be difficult reading for anthroposophists, as well as for members of the Christian Community; but unlike Staudi’s tone-deaf tin ear, Dr Anderson has perfect pitch when evaluating Steiner’s use of language, and the problems that Steiner’s language can pose for anthroposophy and modern readers today.

Staudi is having none of this, of course, and gets his rebuttal in first, alerted by one of his toadies on the WC Yahoo group:

“Thanks to Eric for pointing this out… The new booklet is a standard anthroposophist apologia for Steiner’s racial teachings. It features the usual elements, including some entertaining misunderstandings of Steiner’s texts. One of the more striking examples is the booklet’s defense of Steiner’s 1923 complaint against the presence of black people in Europe, in particular his denunciation of the stationing of French colonial troops on German soil in the aftermath of World War One. Anderson thinks Steiner was actually referring to the African slave trade! It is hard to imagine a more thoroughgoing incomprehension of the passage in question.

The sections on Nazism are a good deal worse. Anderson believes that historians have recently “discovered” that “some German anthroposophists from the early 20th century were involved in Nazism” (golly, imagine that). The notion that this is some sort of discovery — or even especially remarkable — speaks volumes about the level of naivete and historical ignorance among all too many anthroposophists today.”

This is such an inadequate, not to say shameless, response to what is a substantial and considered piece of work that it almost beggars belief that Staudi can write in such misleading terms. Here we have all the standard Staudi tactics of scattering mud and abuse, misrepresentation of arguments, condescension and contemptful dismissal, which he employs to avoid engaging with the actual substance of the text written by Dr Anderson. Anderson demonstrates real understanding and insight in his essay and yet Staudi can’t bring himself to address any of it.

Why is this? Why is it that Staudi is so full of unremitting malevolence towards Steiner? And here I’ve recently come across an intriguing possibility: could it be that Staudi has never forgiven Steiner for criticising another Staudenmaier?

On 22nd September 1923, Steiner gave a lecture in Dornach on “The Logic and Illogic of Dreams” (GA225) and in it he referred at some length to a book called Magic as an Experimental Science by one Ludwig Staudenmaier, in which the author recounts his experiences of mediumship through channeled writing, his denial of the spirit as the source of his writing and his belief that the unconscious was responsible for it but was always lying to him. Steiner is quite amusing about what he considers to be the errors in Staudenmaier’s understanding of his experiences and the cumulative effect of these comments must have been somewhat devastating for Ludwig.

Can this have affected our present day Staudi’s attitude to Steiner? Was Ludwig related to Peter? Perhaps Turncoat Tom Mellett, Staudi’s devoted gofer, could ask on our behalf when he’s next kneeling before the Apprentice Demon.

42 Comments

Filed under Anthroposophy, Staudenmaier, Waldorf critics

Tagged as Anthroposophy, Rudolf Steiner, Waldorf critics

November 6, 2015 · 11:33 am

The History Man – a polemical story

The anthropopper was taken aback, not to say disappointed, that the good Herr Doktor Professor Peter Staudenmaier thinks that I cannot tell the difference between his polemical and his scholarly writings:

“And a whole lot of Steiner fans, alas, have no idea how to make basic sense of different kinds of texts. Like a lot of other anthroposophists, Smith is simply confused about how academics work, indeed about what sort of article he thought he was reading in the first place. This sort of confusion is widespread among Steiner’s followers. That is a big part of how they manage to mistake an essay like “Anthroposophy and Ecofascism” for an academic treatise.”

Although some might be tempted to say that in Staudi’s case there is no essential difference between the two – because if he’s writing, he’s lying – that would be unfair and I reject such an outrageous slur on a respected academic.

Wikipedia tells us that: “Polemics are usually addressed to important issues in religion, philosophy, politics, or science… typically motivated by strong emotions, such as hatred…”

Well, Staudi certainly brings hatred to his polemics – he clearly hates Steiner, anthroposophy, Waldorf schools and biodynamics. Would it be unreasonable to assume that he brings the same feelings to his academic writings, although taking a certain amount of care to appear more even-handed?

But the anthropopper is always keen to learn, and so has given himself a little exercise in polemics by writing the opening of a story that draws upon the techniques of the master. It is called:

The History Man

Staudenmaier was feeling trapped. Here he was, in his 50s and desperate to leave his mundane teaching job in an undistinguished university (ranked only 157^th in the Forbes listings). What was worse, he was stuck in an ugly rustbelt town with a declining population right in the middle of what one of his students had called “bumfuck nowhere”. Everything about the place, the job and the students was beginning to get to him. Only the other day, a student had published the following about Marquette on a “Rate My Uni” website:

“You can get the same education at a state school for a much lower price… The campus area leaves a lot to be desired. The air literally stinks much of the time. Milwaukee’s weather is windy, damp, overcast, and cold. Drinking and basketball are the two primary sources of entertainment. There are a lot of nouveau rich (sic) kids who think they are the shit. There are many other students who went to Marquette b/c they thought they were too good for State U, but possess average intellects and often below average social skills. In retrospect, I wish I had gone elsewhere.”

Another student had written: “Marquette is a brand-name, that is all. Our facilities aren’t particularly nice with exception to some of the specific programs like law, dental or engineering or the like. Our gym is old, the cafeteria food is limited, and especially in comparison to the nearby state school, student resources are pitiful. Anyone not affiliated with Marquette will be treated as such. Basketball players are known to get preferential treatment (especially when it comes to work load, and financial disbursement). Marquette University shows little to no mercy when it comes to school payments resulting in many students (even good students) removing themselves based on the inability to pay semesters upfront.”

Even worse, another student had written: “This area is so filthy and disgusting, with Negroes always panhandling and demanding money from you, if they dont (sic) rob you at gunpoint which I was, other students were beaten and robbed or raped, and we have police reports and news articles to show. FU Jesuits!!! The area is full of crime and is unsafe, which the university wants to cover up. Go look it up yourself.”

And one particular student comment had come dangerously close to himself: “From top to bottom, I simply think Marquette University is a bit of a joke, from faculty, to public safety, to office of residence life, and to students. In terms of academics here at Marquette, I’m not very impressed. It’s sad when I’ve taken a total of 16 classes and have only had two teachers that I can say were solid teachers. I even took a history course this summer at a local community college and am willing to admit that he was better than any PHD professor that Marquette has to offer.”

And now the local newspaper had picked up on a recent scandal:

‘ “Be the difference” is the motto of Marquette University, the generally not-very-newsworthy Jesuit university in Milwaukee. Marquette is in the news now for reasons that it cannot be very happy about.”

“First a teaching assistant at the Catholic institution, Cheryl Abbate, a doctoral student in philosophy, was caught on tape earlier this year giving a very un-Catholic answer to a student who wanted to write about his objections to same-sex marriage in a course titled, “Theory of Ethics.” The student complained to an associate dean and to the chairman of the Philosophy Department, neither of whom saw a cause for concern. The student then played the recording to a Marquette professor of political science, John McAdams, who after listening to the recording, blogged on November 9 about the incident, making some pointed criticisms of Abbate’s refusal to countenance the expression of opinions counter to her own. The story began to attract significant public attention, including an article on Inside Higher Ed, November 20, which reprised the story and gave links to accounts supporting McAdams’s views and others attacking him.”

This was all too embarrassing and Staudenmaier knew he had to get out before the last of his options closed down around him. He was pretty sure his supervisor had noted the following typical comment from a student on the “Rate My Professor” website:

“In Staudenmaier’s class all you do is READ. READ READ READ. The books he chooses are SOOO dry and completely uninteresting that it is almost impossible to pick them up. He was very animated but VERY REPETITIVE. Personally, if you want an easy history requirement class, don’t take him.”

How could he get out from this hellhole and find a job in one of the Big Ten universities before it was too late? Staudenmaier‘s private assessment of himself was that by rights he should be widely known for his groundbreaking research and radical views, and like the celebrated economist Paul Krugman, be invited to contribute polemical op-ed pieces to the New York Times. But he was also clear that this was never going to happen while he was stuck here in this run-down mid-west town known only for beer and motorcycles. He had to find a way to establish some sort of high profile academic reputation (and hence a potential escape route) by choosing a niche area for research where his supervisors were unlikely to know the territory and thus wouldn’t pull him up for any liberties he might take with sources and selective quotations. And then it came to him in a flash – anthroposophy and Rudolf Steiner! Yes, that was it… (to be continued)

The anthropopper should add that all the italicised quotations in this story are genuine, although his use of them and the context in which they are placed may bear only a tangential relationship to the truth – which by a strange coincidence is how he experiences Staudi’s own polemical writings.

Greetings to all, as Staudi might say.

21 Comments

Filed under Anthroposophy, Rudolf Steiner, Waldorf critics

Tagged as Marquette University, staudenmaier, Waldorf critics

October 27, 2015 · 10:14 pm

The New Screwtape: Letter to an Apprentice Demon

Millions of readers have enjoyed The Screwtape Letters, written by C. S. Lewis and first published in 1942. In these letters, Lewis provides a devil’s eye view of how to undermine human beings and their faith in the spiritual world by promoting doubt and disinterest. The book consists of a series of letters from Screwtape, a senior demon in the Lowerarchy of Hell to his nephew, Wormwood, a junior and rather incompetent demonic apprentice, to whom he acts as mentor. In Screwtape’s advice, individual self-interest and greed are seen as the greatest good, and neither demon is capable of comprehending God’s love for human beings or acknowledging human virtue.

C S Lewis gave little away in the preface about how he managed to get hold of these letters:

“I have no intention of explaining how the correspondence which I now offer to the public fell into my hands. … The sort of script which is used in this book can be very easily obtained by anyone who has once learned the knack; but ill-disposed or excitable people who might make a bad use of it shall not learn it from me.”

Happily, and just in time for Halloween, the anthropopper has “learned the knack” and has discovered that Screwtape is still active in mentoring junior tempters. In particular, a cache of undated letters from Screwtape to an apprentice demon referred to only as “Staudi” has recently come into my hands. Further research will be needed to establish the identity of this servant of the Dark Lord. I reproduce one of these letters below.

A mysterious carving, believed to represent “Uncle” Screwtape.

“My dear Staudi,

Congratulations on your appointment to an assistant professorship at the university! Not one of our more distinguished seats of learning, to be sure – but it does have the inestimable advantage of being a Jesuit university. The Jesuits are indeed among the strongest allies of Our Father Below and you will find that the intellectual atmosphere and ethos there are remarkably conducive to your work. They share with us an opposition to the dreadful renewed Mystery impulses that Our Enemy RS and his anthroposophical acolytes are seeking to foster in the human spirit.

RS has caused us a great deal of trouble over the years by revealing all sorts of hitherto secret knowledge that can only hinder our task. If ever human beings really came to understand what they are and what their future evolution will be, as described by the Enemy, then it will be all over with Our Father’s cause. It is therefore very important for us that the exoteric Church continues to demand belief and to impose creeds. On the other hand, it suits us just as well if the atheists and materialists hold the intellectual high ground and engender scorn for the spiritual in the minds of their followers. Either position is convenient for our purposes; and both are much better options than allowing our Enemy to point the way in freedom to a true esoteric knowledge of Christ and the future of humanity. Ideally, what we want in human beings is Doubt in the Spirit, Hatred of the Spirit and Fear of the Spirit.

“Our Father Below”

So your task as an historian is to confer the mantle of academic credibility upon our efforts to consign RS and all his works to oblivion. You are to do this by so diminishing him in the eyes of the world that only a very few delusional people will want to pay any attention to what he has said and written.

Your weapons should of course include what we at the Training College call the Three Rs: Racism, Ridicule and Right-Wingery. Let us look at each of these in turn, and examine how you may deploy them for optimal effect.

The accusation of Racism made against any human being is one of the most effective ways today to kill off any real discussion of their views. In the 21^st century it has the same effect on most people as did the sound of the leper’s bell in mediaeval times – they run as fast as possible in the opposite direction. You are to use the word purely as an incantation; if you like, purely for its selling power. By calling RS a racist (and you could add in “anti-semite” for good measure), you will set up in people’s minds the idea that not only should they have nothing to do with any of his endeavours but that it is perfectly respectable to abuse and condemn anything associated with him and his works. They will do this without shame and indeed, with a positive glow of self-approval for being so “right-on”. Now, you and I may know that this is all nonsense and that Our Enemy RS had the most nauseating universal love for all human vermin; but as all our apprentices learn, a lie can be half way around the world before the truth has got its boots on.

In your academic writings, you could try scattering around phrases such as “RS’s racially stratified pseudo-religion” and his “blatantly racist doctrine which anticipated important elements of the Nazi worldview by several decades” in the certain knowledge that these entirely false accusations will scare off thousands of potential followers. Manage to do this really well and you will achieve a situation in which most people, if they have heard of RS at all, will know only one thing about him – and that is that he was some kind of racist. However, a word of advice: try to do this with some subtlety and do not over-egg the pudding. Anything the anthroposophists say in defence of RS can of course be dismissed as special pleading, or better yet, you might say that anthroposophists “lack the sort of critical social consciousness that can counteract their flagrantly recessive core beliefs.”

Ridicule is also a very useful tool; and because of the excellent efforts put in over many years by our cultural zeitgeist operatives, it is now intellectually infra dig for most human beings in the West to express any interest, let alone belief, in matters relating to the spirit. Our Enemy’s pernicious views on so-called “spiritual science” have already put him beyond the intellectual pale, so your work has been half-completed for you already. The kind of people you should be seeking to influence here are the opinion formers and the chattering classes – rich, smart, superficially intellectual and brightly sceptical about everything in the world. They have an ingrained habit of belittling anything that has a whiff of the spiritual about it and they will enjoy pouring scorn on RS and his followers. What we are looking for is a similar outcome to what has already been achieved in ridiculing homeopathy. Your goal should be to give some journalists the idea that not only is anthroposophy ludicrous but that there is also a scandal just below the surface awaiting their investigative attention; for example, you could imply that Waldorf schools are run by a racist cult seeking secretly to indoctrinate our children with their weird beliefs. You can make much hay with this!

You can also make good use of those few sad renegades and turncoats, who were once upon a time active within the RS camp but who, for whatever reason, Hell be praised, have now decided to cast their lot with Our Father Below. These people tend to be active in social media and internet forums and so should you be; your aim should be to become like some kind of intellectual guru and arbiter of thought for them. They will come running to you with little snippets of tittle-tattle, seeking your approval and endorsement; you should encourage this.

The third powerful weapon in your armoury is Right-Wingery, and accusations thereof. You may begin this in quite a subtle, insinuating sort of way, eg: “RS was by his own account ‘enthusiastically active’ in pan-German nationalist movements in Vienna at the end of the nineteenth century.” You could continue with: “During his Vienna period RS fell under the sway of Nietzsche, the outstanding anti-democratic thinker of the era, whose elitism made a powerful impression.” This will help to build a picture of Our Enemy as a right-wing reactionary and elitist. You might then wish to add something like: “RS had high praise for ‘German militarism’ and continued to rail against France, French culture and the French language in rhetoric which matched that of Mein Kampf.” You see what I’ve done there? The implication is that RS’s views led straight on to those of Hitler. The fact that none of this is even slightly justifiable in factual terms is neither here nor there. Of course, this is not academic scholarship we are concerned with, but agit-prop.

So everything is clearly going well and you have made a good start. By the way, have you noted that your new university’s most distinguished alumnus is – Senator Joseph McCarthy! Yes, McCarthy, one of Our Father’s more significant political operatives in the 1950s, he of the anti-communist witch hunts in the USA and the notorious “Are you now or have you ever been…” hounding of some of the most distinguished people of his time. McCarthy is a useful example for you to follow and you should study his methods with care.

Senator Joseph McCarthy, “one of our more significant political operatives.”

Ultimately, of course, even that brilliant servant of Our Father Below over-reached himself – his tactics and inability to substantiate his claims led him to be censured by the United States Senate and he died in disgrace at the age of only 48. Try not to share a similar fate; you should be careful not to be caught out making demagogic, reckless and unsubstantiated accusations – instead, let some of our useful idiots on the internet forums do the heavy lifting for you.

My dear Staudi, your career is before you. Hell expects and demands that it should be one of unbroken success. If it is not, you know what awaits you.

Your affectionate friend,

Screwtape”

57 Comments

Filed under Anthroposophy, Rudolf Steiner, Waldorf critics

Tagged as Ahriman, C S Lewis, Screwtape Letters, Senator Joseph McCarthy

October 19, 2015 · 5:41 pm

First Harvest of the Light Root at Emerson College

Those of you who have read my blog post, “Rudolf Steiner and the Chinese Yam”, will already be familiar with the story of this extraordinary root and its ability to incorporate within its physical substance large quantities of the light ether, of which most of our foods are nearly or completely lacking (you can read more about the ethers in the post linked to above). This is the vegetable that Rudolf Steiner said should eventually come to replace the potato as a mass staple food crop.

In April 2015, Ralf Roessner, the German author of the book The Light Root mentioned in that post, came to give a talk to a large and enthusiastic audience at Emerson College in Forest Row, East Sussex (UK). Not only did Ralf talk about the light root but he also brought some samples of the root for planting in the newly refurbished biodynamic garden at the college. There is an account and a short video about this event on the Emerson College website here.

It has to be said that growing the light root is not quite as straightforward as planting potatoes. Nik Marten and his colleagues in the BD garden at Emerson took out a deep trench surrounded with wooden boards which they filled with river sand, chosen for its fine, rounded crystals (ie not sharp sand, which can damage the roots). They then added a layer of good loamy soil and compost. The rootlets brought by Ralf were then gently pressed into the surface and biodynamic preparations applied to the soil. A wooden construction about 8’ high was then put up just to one side of the trench to hold a series of vertical strings, up which the leafy stems of the light root plants could entwine themselves. As the top growth climbs the strings, the root surges downwards into the depths of the river sand. Paradoxically, it needs the darkness and depth in order to develop and preserve the light ether qualities.

The light root stems growing up the strings of the wooden framework.

Six months later and Ralf returned to Emerson College to show us how to harvest and store the resulting crop. It was a damp and cold autumn day, with occasional showers – a typical October day in England! A group of about 15 people gathered in the BD garden and Ralf described some of the features that make the light root such an interesting plant. The roots with the light ether qualities grow only on male plants and if female plants grow with them, they will rapidly hybridise and produce all sorts of other yams, which may be perfectly good vegetables but do not hold the light ether. Ralf described how he had gone around the world seeking out samples of the yam, but only in the original growing area in China had he been able to source the right kind of plant.

The group gathers around Ralf Roessner (in hat) to hear more about the light root.

Ralf then began to cut the leafy stems about six inches from the ground and as he began, several little mice began to scurry up and down the trench where they had obviously been living underground. This was a worrying sign – Ralf said that he had just come back from the Czech Republic, where the light root crop at a Camphill centre had been entirely eaten by mice. Despite this, the rest of the stems were cut and group members then began to lever up the wooden boards surrounding the trench so as to make it easier to harvest the roots.

Ralf Roessner begins to cut the top growth stems away from the roots prior to harvesting.

Ralf and group members then began to remove carefully the soil from around each of the tufts left after the cutting-down of the top growth. After a while, we got down to the layer of river sand. Careful work with trowels and hands to remove the sand and keep it separate from the soil then began – the sand can be used year-after-year but should not be mixed with the soil. Gradually we could see the form of the roots emerging as the sand was cleared but this was delicate work – the roots can easily be broken if roughly harvested. Strangely, the roots begin to harden up, rather than soften further, in the days after the harvest.

Group members carefully scraping soil and sand away to reveal the light roots.

It was a thrill to see the first root emerge and to see that it was of good size – Ralf said that it was of very good quality. Thus encouraged, work proceeded to bring up the rest of the roots. Some of the roots had indeed been eaten by mice but only a very few – and those that had not been eaten were all of a good size and quality. Even to the eyes of a non-clairvoyant like myself, there is a radiance about the roots that is quite noticeable. The roots were laid in trays and, at Ralf’s suggestion, some of the cut leaves and stems were laid on top of the trays, which helps the roots to adjust to their new situation and to remain in good condition.

Ralf Roessner holding the first light root to be harvested at Emerson College.

The roots should be stored either in a clamp (ie straw is laid on the ground, the roots are put onto the straw, another layer of straw is added on top, and then the whole structure is covered with earth), although Ralf said that this method was vulnerable to attacks by mice; or in an earth cellar; or kept in the dark between 5-15 degrees Centigrade in river sand that is drier than that used in the trench. The roots should then last in good condition through until the next summer.

The light root requires special treatment after harvesting, too. It should not be washed, as water washes away the light ether very quickly. The roots come very clean out of the sand and a rub with a cloth is sufficient to bring them to sparkling condition. Nor should the roots be processed or cooked in machines using alternating current electricity, as this also destroys the light ether. It is best to have the light root raw in salads; or cooked in soups and sauces, where the liquid in which they are cooked is consumed by the eaters; or sliced with a knife and fried in a pan. Not all treatments are deleterious to the light ether, though – Ralf has observed that light root pounded in a mortar and pestle absorbs more and more of the light ether and this process can continue for hours. In an experiment he set up, the increase of light ether went on for up to 36 hours!

Radiant roots – some of Emerson College’s first harvest of the light root.

At lunch that day, Ralf came round with some slices of raw light root for us to try with our meals. There is a mucilaginous quality to the cut root, which is crisp like a water chestnut and it has quite a bland taste, which of course is an advantage for a crop that may one day become a staple food like the potato. I have also sampled some sautéed light root and it was delicious – I would be quite happy to eat it instead of chips!

In a question and answer session after lunch, I asked Ralf whether, given the fairly demanding cultivation requirements and the need for great care in processing the roots after harvest, if he had any indications of when it might be possible for the light root to begin to assume the role of a staple food crop. He said that his sense of it was that it would be about three hundred years into the future and that his role, and the role of a few others in various countries, was to keep alive the knowledge of the plant and how to cultivate it until the world was ready to take it up. He also said that in future times the light root would be cultivated in a different way – in water – and that he was already experimenting with ways of doing this.

This was a fascinating and inspiring day, which provided (literally) much food for thought. Thanks are due to Nik Marten and his colleagues in Emerson’s biodynamic garden, to Michael Williams and Heidi Herrman for their excellent translating skills and of course to Ralf Roessner for bringing his knowledge, light root samples and huge enthusiasm to Emerson College.

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Filed under Anthroposophy, Biodynamics, Chinese yam, Emerson College, Light Root, Ralf Roessner, Rudolf Steiner

Tagged as Emerson College, light root, Ralf Roessner

October 10, 2015 · 12:43 pm

Rudolf Steiner and Angels – The Potential Fall of Humans and their Angels

Part 3 of 3

Ahriman and Lucifer, the fallen angels
Interestingly, Steiner does not make a straight distinction between Good on the one hand and Evil on the other. Instead he has two poles of Evil, which he calls Lucifer and Ahriman.

Steiner saw Lucifer and Ahriman as not only forces or tendencies which affect humankind and draw us towards evil but also as actual beings. Unlike the Christ, these forces can take up their abode in our astral bodies, the seat of our desires and emotions and thus exercise a strong influence on us from within.

The head of Lucifer – a carving by Rudolf Steiner

Lucifer encourages the tendency in human beings towards expansiveness, inflation, egotism, sensuality, passion, and ungrounded spirituality; Lucifer is the being who tells us that we are like the gods, knowing both good and evil, whereas Ahriman tells us that there is no God and that material reality is the only reality. Ahriman represents tendencies towards contraction, reduction, splitting, materialism, over-intellectualisation, lying, and a denial of spiritual realities; this leads to the idea that we are physical beings only. Both of these beings also play a helpful role and are in fact indispensable for human life, as the first awakens us to our freedom, while the second helps provide us with the capacity for speech and thinking. 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. However, because Ahriman can work through the seat of our desires but Christ can only work through our I or individuality, this means that the struggle is not an equal one. Our individuality has to so develop itself that it can in time learn to recognise and resist the many temptations offered by Lucifer and Ahriman. Steiner and the English sculptor Edith Maryon produced a monumental wooden carving called “Representative of Man”, which you can see in the Goetheanum at Dornach. It depicts the Christ providing the active place of balance between the opposing forces of Lucifer above and Ahriman below.

The monumental wooden statue, “Representative of Man”, carved by Rudolf Steiner and Edith Maryon.

Lucifer appeals above all to our pride and ambition, making us think that we have no limitations. Yet he is also the being who set us out on our evolutionary path to freedom. But Lucifer does not want us to be truly conscious, nor to acquire an egohood independent of himself.

In our present age, Ahriman is a greater threat to us than Lucifer. He is infinitely clever and is helping us to develop our technological civilisation. He wishes us to advance at breakneck speed, long before our individuality and moral nature are ready for such advances. He wishes to foreshorten our development so that we can never reach our true goal but only a false goal of enjoyment and endless material possessions. The scientist, the technologist and the inventor are Ahriman’s natural prey but all of us can fall victim to his temptations. Wherever there is egoism and love of power, entry is made easy for him.

While we may know of Ahriman from Persian mythology, Rudolf Steiner spoke of him as an actual, living spiritual entity. He is a being who fell behind during the Ancient Sun planetary stage. This being, he said, works to embed people firmly into physicality, encouraging dull, materialistic attitudes and a philistine, dry intellect. Steiner, in rare prophetic mode, talked about an actual incarnation of Ahriman on the earth and the potential consequences. Just as Christ incarnated in a physical body, so would Ahriman incarnate in the Western world – before ‘a part’ of the third millennium had passed. Steiner places this incarnation in the context of a ‘cosmic triad’ – Lucifer, Christ and Ahriman. Lucifer had his incarnation as the Yellow Emperor who reigned in China in the third millennium BC. Ahriman will incarnate as a counterpoint to the physical incarnation of Lucifer in the East, with the incarnation of Jesus Christ in Palestine two thousand years ago as the balancing point between the two.

The Head of Ahriman, carved in wood by Rudolf Steiner.

It seems possible to me that today we are living in the time of Ahriman’s incarnation. Ahriman is the Lord of Death and his will is to materialise human thinking into dead thinking to such an extent that the soul becomes fettered to the physical body and to an ever materialised earth, effectively cutting human beings off from their spiritual home – as an Ahrimanic form of immortality. This is nothing less than a spiritual death.

His incarnation on the physical plane will intensify his influence and many of us will fall into his clutches unknowingly, because his effects work in the unconscious aspect of the human being. It will work in the human thinking through the etheric body, where the human being is not conscious.

Though it is the wish of the “good” angels that we should reach our goal, it is not pre-destined that Ahriman will be defeated, because the goal can only be reached in freedom, by us choosing to get there out of our own free will. It’s therefore clear that the possibility cannot be ruled out that humankind will succumb finally to Ahriman and other opposing forces who are gaining in strength all the time, as we see around us every day in the news and in our daily lives.

There is one even more malign aspect of Evil spoken about by Steiner and that is Sorath, the Sun Demon, who is served by both Lucifer and Ahriman. I will say nothing more about Sorath here.

Rudolf Steiner in his studio, working on the statue “Representative of Man”.

Michael
Rudolf Steiner often spoke about the great battle that occurred in the spiritual world between the spirits who are followers of Michael the Guardian of the Cosmic Intelligence, and certain ahrimanic powers. According to him the latest battle commenced around 1840 and was lost by the ahrimanic powers in the autumn of 1879. I referred in Part 1 to the Archangel Michael but strictly speaking since 1879 he should be considered as one of the archai.

We know that in 1879 these ahrimanic powers, or spirits of darkness were cast down into the physical world and a picture of this can be found in the Revelation of St John – the Angel holding the key to the bottomless pit in which he is said to imprison the dragon. Perhaps the tragic history of the 20th century is not so much the result of human folly but rather of these powers being shut out of the spiritual world and thus rampaging through the physical world, influencing the likes of Mao, Stalin, Hitler and Pol Pot and their many other human agents. On present form, the 21st century is shaping up to be even worse than the previous one.

The foremost of the archai is known to us as Michael. It was his task to go on to become the guardian or administrator, one might say, of the Cosmic Intelligence. He is known in anthroposophy as the son of the Divine Sophia who is the foremost being of the hierarchy of the Spirits of Wisdom, the Kyriotetes, and whose task it is to gather up, regulate and harmonise the Cosmic
Intelligence.

What is this Cosmic Intelligence? There are many ways of describing the Cosmic Intelligence. One such way is that it is a gathering up of all the ‘conversations’ had by the hierarchies amongst themselves; their interrelationships regarding their knowledge and understanding pertaining to the being of Christ, the second logos who descended to earth and died at Golgotha. One could also call it the essence of the Holy Spirit because the Holy Spirit is the mediating substance.

Rudolf Steiner tells us that at around the time of the Mystery of Golgotha, Michael began sacrificing his ‘rulership’ of the Cosmic Intelligence to human beings. And it is the third hierarchy, which is the closest to humanity insofar as it shares various soul and bodily sheaths with human beings, that has the task of helping us to take up the Cosmic Intelligence in the way intended by Michael.

But we humans have the unique privilege of freewill, so we have a choice. To quote Steiner: “Two things are possible for humankind and through this possibility our freedom is guaranteed: to turn to Christ consciously … or to wish to feel our severance from spirit existence and thus fall in the direction taken by the ahrimanic powers. Humanity has been in this situation since the beginning of the fifteenth century.”

Since 1879 Michael has taken over the spiritual guidance of human affairs. He does what he has to do in such a way that he does not thereby wield an influence over human beings; but humans may follow him in freedom, in order with the Christ-power to find the way out of that sphere of Ahriman which they were obliged to enter.

The classical image of Michael depicts him in battle with a dragon and shows him standing on the dragon and spearing it in the mouth. One way of interpreting this might be to say that what Michael is doing is showing us how to penetrate the dragon of materialism with spiritual vision and insight, so that the spirit coiled up in matter can be released.

Sir Jacob Epstein’s bronze statue for Coventry Cathedral of Michael.

But Michael also sees how the danger of humanity succumbing to the ahrimanic powers grows greater and greater. He knows that as regards himself he will always have Ahriman under his feet; but will that always be the case with human beings?

Michael sees the greatest event in the Earth’s history taking place. He sees Christ’s descent to the Earth, so as to be here with us when the Cosmic Intelligence is handed over to human beings. Through Christ’s great sacrifice, He is now living in the same sphere in which Ahriman also lives. Humans are now able to choose between Christ and Ahriman. Should humans wish to, we will be able to find the Christ-way in the evolution of humanity. But Michael cannot force humans to do anything – it is because the Cosmic intelligence has come entirely into the sphere of the human individuality that compulsion from the spiritual world has ceased.

And herein lies our great danger. Ahrimanic spirits seek to smother human beings’ awareness of their own spirituality. They want to teach people that they are really only a perfectly developed animal. Ahriman, says Steiner, is in truth the great teacher of materialistic Darwinism. He also teaches all the technological and practical activity in Earth evolution where nothing is considered valid unless it can be perceived by the senses. His desire for us is that we should have widespread technology, plenty of material goods, entertainment media, all sorts of toys and gadgets, the aim being to kill and obscure any awareness we may have that we are an image of the godhead. This is the aim ahrimanic spirits are seeking to achieve by sophisticated scientific means in our age.

What if Ahriman succeeds? You may recall from Part 2 that Steiner said that the angels had particular work to do in inserting three impulses into our astral bodies. You remember these three impulses:

1. That no human being should be able to enjoy the peace of happiness himself if others around him were unhappy
2. That human beings should be able to perceive the divine principle operating in every other human being
3. That human beings should be able to gain irrefutable insight into the reality of the spiritual world.

The angels do this by working within our astral bodies when we are asleep at night. Steiner was speaking in 1918, but he said that if human beings are not willing to turn to life in the spirit before the beginning of the third millennium, ie in our present time, then the angels would need to work in a different way; that is by withdrawing all their work from the astral body and taking it into the etheric body. But then, Steiner says, the human being would have no part in it, as it would have to be done when humans are asleep, as of course when we are asleep we leave behind our physical and etheric bodies in the bed and take our astral body and individuality into the spiritual world.

And he says that, if this happens, the inevitable effect on human evolution would be threefold:
First, something would be engendered in human bodies which human beings could not discover in freedom.
Second, danger would threaten from certain instinctive perceptions connected with the mystery of birth and conception and with sexual life as a whole.
Third, humanity will get to know specific powers which enable them to unleash some degree of mental control over machines, a development that will take the whole of technology along disastrous channels, a state of affairs, however, that will serve human egotism extremely well and please many people.

Now, I don’t know about you, but that sounds to me like things that are already happening. Let’s take the second point, about the effect on our sexuality. It’s unusual for Steiner to say very much about sex but here he is clear. He says that the effect on human evolution would be that certain instincts belonging to the sexual life and to sexual nature would not come to conscious awareness in a useful way but instead would become harmful. These instincts would not be mere aberrations but would enter into the social life, configuring it. Something would enter into people’s blood as a consequence of sexual life that would above all make people go against brotherliness on Earth rather than develop brotherliness and this would be a matter of instinct.

And Steiner hints at something even worse – he says that danger will come from certain angels who themselves would undergo a change, which he says “is something I cannot speak about, for it belongs to the higher secrets of initiation which may not yet be disclosed.”

But nearly one hundred years later, I think we can say something about this, and to me what may be happening now is very frightening.

Let us go back to the War in Heaven, which started in about 1840 and was completed in 1879 with the victory of Michael over the ahrimanic beings, who were cleared out of heaven and thrust into the abyss. Now what does that mean, to be cast out of heaven and into the abyss? Where have they gone?

There is a link between our blood and the etheric body and our angels usually work in our blood and in our heart. By 1840 a number of abnormal backward angels, (these are angels with the ‘potential’ to be archangels but who have not yet reached that stage) wanted to leave the blood in order to enter into the nerves, the brain, where the normal archangels were taking up their domain. This created an obstruction, a hindrance to the flow of spiritual wisdom that was seeking to enter into the astral body. Now a battle ensued between Michael and these retarded angels, the angels of darkness. To cut a long story short, these ahrimanic angels were cast out of the nervous system into the realm of the blood again – into the abyss – by 1879. They were thrust down into the etheric body by way of the blood, which is closely connected to intellectuality and human thought. Here, in the realm of intellectual thinking, they found relief for their pain.

These beings connected to Ahriman have inspired more and more intellectualism and materialism than there has ever been before, because they thrive on it; and by way of the intellect’s relationship to the realm of Ahriman they have connected the intellect with the sub-earthly ethers, ie the realm of electricity, magnetism and atomic forces. Whether we know it or not, our etheric bodies interpenetrate these ethers all the time.

Let us recall that Michael had to surrender the Cosmic Intelligence so
that the human ego could remember it again, but this time in a free and personal way and through inner work to reconnect this intelligence with Christ.

But these spirits of darkness living in the human being and in the earth do not want this to happen: as followers of Ahriman, the antagonist of Christ, they are doing their level best to prevent us from rising up. They want to drag us down to the level of the electrical, the mechanical and atomistic – the realm of Sorath the Sun Demon – and they are making great strides forward.

As already mentioned, the angels have the task in our times of shaping images in our astral bodies at night. Our angels can only create those pictures at night, if by day we have thought, lived and spoken with integrity and morality. Only then can our angels connect us with the archangels and archai.

Steiner says: “In fact it actually depends on human beings themselves – on their attitude, on the whole way their world of feeling is disposed to the spiritual world – whether their angels accompany them when they leave their physical and etheric bodies in sleep or not…. If a person leaves his physical and etheric body in a materialistic mood, his angel would be denying his realm, his affiliation to the archangels, the archai and the exusiai if he were to accompany the human being. “

This distances us from our normal angels and draws us closer and closer to the ahrimanic angels and their offspring – the ahrimanic elemental beings. Our reproductive and sexual life is administered by the normal angels working in our blood. But for those human beings who cannot rise above materialism, not only will the dark angels take over the task of the spirits of light, but their angels, instead of rising to other tasks may, due to the influence of these dark spirits, fall even deeper than the etheric body.

What does this mean? Rudolf Steiner warns us: “We should not allow the ahrimanic powers to gain the upper hand, as it were, and we should not fall in love with them…” If this were to happen human beings would thereby, “unite spiritual progress with material progress.” This is what Rudolf Steiner called “Prostitution with Matter.”

The union of angel and man in the etheric nature of the human being, where live not only the forces of life and death, dying and becoming, but also all the unconscious desires associated with the sexual life, the life of the sensual, results in the angel ‘falling in love with matter’ through the human being, which leads to an angel’s downfall which one could call, a supra-human fall. The result
is that something thereby enters the material world that does not belong there.

Just as those human beings who today bind their egos to their physical bodies and the sub-earthly ethers, will in future times not be able to exist in a spiritualised world that has no ‘physicality’, so too do the angels of such people fall into the temptation of binding their spirit self (which sets into motion their etheric bodies), to the physical body of human beings, and not to their own etheric bodies creating not only an estrangement from spiritual worlds but also a unification of their spirit, the angel’s consciousness, with the physical world – an unlawful binding of spirit to matter by way of the human being which ultimately will prevent their future development from taking place.

When the human being falls, the right conditions are created for the human being’s angel also to fall. This corresponds to the Second Fall in the Book of Revelation, where angels fall into the realm of the physical body and ‘possess’ their human beings so that together these and the backward angels and elemental spirits that belong to them, become the hosts of Ahriman and ultimately the followers of the Sun Demon, Sorath.

So is it possible that right now the ahrimanic beings are seeking not only to reverse human evolution but also to reverse angelic evolution? If this is indeed happening, it will have huge ramifications on the future of humanity and the world.

What might this lead to? First, Rudolf Steiner warned us that, instead of a greater sense of brotherhood, the most evil sexual instincts would enter into the blood. This is surely what we are seeing today. This disconnection from the moral life signifies a separation from the angelic hierarchies and a binding to the ahrimanic mineral realm, causing an animalisation of the human being. This in turn leads to a form of unconsciousness of the feelings of others and a kind of anti-brotherhood sentiment, because the karmic ties that bind human beings are, in such cases, completely severed. Isil or the Islamic State seems to me to be a direct manifestation of this phenomenon.

Second, instead of humans having a vision of the Christ in other human beings, there will be an unconsciousness of Christ. In our time, the goal of many human beings is a sensual form of happiness without morality, and material welfare unconnected with goodness. To this end certain drugs (antidepressants, prescription drugs, alcohol, recreational drugs) have been created to dull the mind and numb the feelings and to prevent any discomfort at immoral behavior. Other drugs create the right conditions in the etheric body that will lead to an animalisation of the physical body, eg steroids, sports vitamins, food additives, mercury-based vaccines, GM foods etc. Selflessness in the etheric body is turned to its opposite – a heightened form of egoism. This estrangement from the moral world order leads us away from the Cosmic Christ and draws us closer to Sorath, his antagonist.

Is there anything we can do about this? Well, first of all, we can pray. Prayer is the most important deterrent against the forces of evil in the world today. One person working within the light is able to offset a thousand working against it. Each one of us is asked daily to send our light to the spiritual hierarchies. Due to the escalating attacks, the angelic world needs more of our light energy to help alleviate the mounting stress and to assist in the affairs of humankind. Our prayer, whether directed or in general, is the essential ingredient for the angels working on our behalf – but we have to ask for their help first. Owing to our free will, they cannot intervene until we ask. So let us determine to ask, remembering for example that Rudolf Steiner said the Lord’s Prayer every day at 3.00pm.

Second, we can try to wake up to what is going on, and to keep ourselves informed. Some of what I have been writing above has been inspired by a book called Anthroposophical Leading Thoughts or as it is sometimes known, the Michael Letters or the Michael Mystery. These leading thoughts were written by Steiner and started to appear in 1924 and continued up until his death in March 1925. I find it incredibly moving that Steiner as he was dying continued to the last to get down on paper these thoughts, which are both very profound and very clear, much clearer than he sometimes comes across in the transcripts of his lectures. It is as though he was burning himself up to the very last ounce of his physical substance, in his efforts to help us to understand the seriousness of the times we live in. And for anyone who is a member of the School of Spiritual Science, you will recall that it was Steiner’s intention that there should be three classes of the school, but he was only able to complete the lessons of the First Class before he became too ill to continue. It is my belief that the contents of the Second Class and possibly the Third Class, too, are in these Michael letters.

And third, we need to ask the angels for the gifts mentioned in the College Imagination, that is: Unity, Courage, Wisdom and the Light which is Love for one another.

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Filed under Angels, Anthroposophy, Rudolf Steiner, School of Spiritual Science

Tagged as Ahriman, Angels, Archai, Archangels, Lucifer, Michael, Representative of Man, Rudolf Steiner, Sorath

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