Author Archives: Jeremy Smith

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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.
September 20, 2021 · 6:48 pm

Covid-19 – where are we right now?

I’ve been wanting for some time to write a blog post on the theme of ‘Michael and the Cosmic Intelligence’ but whenever I try to do so, another egregious example of government Covid-19 stupidity or tyranny arises to deflect me. So it is at present, with almost daily examples of things that indicate how far and how fast our notions of society and stability and civilisation are falling, and it seems important to give them some attention. 

But to set the scene, with thanks to Annael Poet-Artist of the Judith von Halle and Anthroposophy Facebook group, here is a quotation from the great Bulgarian master, Beinsa Douno, also known as Peter Deunov (1864 – 1944), who brought us Paneurythmy among many other treasures. This excerpt comes from a talk with his followers during the 1920s, and it seems highly relevant to our situation now:

The “end of the world” manifests itself through the cleansing of the old humanity, so that a new humanity can come in that place. This cleansing and the end of the century has been carried out for a period of 45 years. This period began in 1900 and will end in 1945. You are all eyewitnesses to what happened during this period.

From 1945 will begin another period, which will also last 45 years until 1990. Such times come and such power comes, that whoever opposes it will lay his bones on the ground. A great dictatorship ensues, allowed to clear the stagnant mud. When a water is turbid, it must take a long time for the running water to clear. Turbid water will flow during this period. Some of you will not wait for the end of this period and will leave, but others will surely wait for it so as to testify the words of the Lord.

After this period there will be a short break until 1999, which will be the most spiritually favourable for the White Brotherhood. And then a new period will come, with an even more terrible dictatorship than the one that is to come. It will also last 45 years. It is also spoken of in the Revelation of John, ch. 21, v. 8: “But the fearful, and unbelieving, and the abominable, and murderers, and whoremongers, and sorcerers, and idolaters, and all liars, shall have their part in the lake which burneth with fire and brimstone: which is the second death. 

Making due allowance for the archaic language, this sounds right to me; and it means that the manifestations of the Ahrimanic incarnation of which Rudolf Steiner so often spoke are happening all around and will be with us until about the year 2045.  Steiner described the ‘disorder’ in the planetary system caused by Ahrimanic powers, among others, and the resulting catastrophes. He relied entirely on humanity to take on the task of counteracting such powers, out of a sense of responsibility and in freedom (“…Only through strong human spirituality can a balance be generated to the disorder that will be contrived”: GA 346) 

How are we doing with that challenge right now? Here are a few random examples from around the world of what is going on:

In early August, Italy banned the unvaccinated from most forms of social life, then most forms of travel and now most forms of work. The unvaccinated have already been banned since 6 August from most indoor public places such as bars, restaurants and gyms, plus many outdoor ones such as football stadiums and the Colosseum. And since 1 September they are banned from planes, ferries, inter-regional trains and coaches, plus universities (staff and students) and schools (staff only). The vaccine has been compulsory for health workers since April.  More or less the only activities the unvaccinated are allowed to do outside their homes are shopping and going to mass.

In the US, Pfizer-BioNTech and Moderna launched their COVID-19 vaccine trials for children as young as 6 months old in March and expect to share results as soon as this month. I find this extraordinarily evil – to inject babies with these mRNA vaccines is almost beyond belief. Johnson & Johnson, meanwhile, is collecting data about their COVID-19 vaccine in ages 12 to 17 and hopes to start studying ages 2 to 11 soon. In this Land of the Free, the Biden administration has said most federal employees must be fully vaccinated against COVID-19 no later than 22nd November as it drafts rules to require large employers to have their workers inoculated or tested weekly. And last week Biden signed an executive order requiring federal employees who work in the Executive Branch to be fully vaccinated. In more shocking news from America, some American parents are lying about their children’s age to get under-12s vaccinated.

In the UK, the Scottish Parliament has voted in favour of vaccine passport implementation for nightclubs and other crowded venues. Negative tests will not be accepted; the Scottish government intention is to boost vaccine uptake. In both Wales and England, the governments have made it mandatory for care home workers to be vaccinated. Clubbers in Wales will have to show a vaccine passport to enter nightclubs and attend large events. From October people in Wales will also need a NHS Covid Pass to prove they have been double jabbed or show a negative lateral flow test result. In England, Boris Johnson’s government has flip-flopped wildly on the introduction of vaccine passports for visits to nightclubs and large events before ruling it out for the time being (more on the situation in England below).

Here is an excellent and really chilling account of how the Covid vaccine passports are being implemented in Lithuania: https://txti.es/covid-pass/images (Hat-tip – Robin Hall).

In Switzerland, since Monday 13th September, people must show a Covid certificate, issued to those who have been vaccinated, tested or recovered from the coronavirus (but not to those who are healthy) to access indoor spaces such as restaurants, bars, gyms and museums, because of a fourth wave that is putting pressure on hospitals. Almost 53 per cent of the population have been twice jabbed; now plans are in motion to extend vaccines to the 12-plus age group.

Thousands of health workers across France have been suspended without pay for refusing to take a Covid-19 vaccine ahead of a deadline of September 15th, Health Minister Olivier Veran has said. It comes just two days after doctors and health workers staged mass protests against mandatory vaccination measures which many view as being an attack on their civil liberties. France’s national public health agency estimated last week that roughly 12 percent of hospital staff and around six percent of doctors in private practices have yet to be vaccinated, leading the ministry to ban 3000 people from their jobs.

Australia is especially gung-ho in removing basic civil liberties. Apart from all the other violations of previously accepted rights, there is the Howard Springs quarantine facility in Darwin for Australians returning from overseas, who must go into mandatory supervised quarantine. In other words, the Australian government is forcing Aussies, who have already paid a fortune to airlines to get back home after having been kept out of the country during lockdown, into an internment camp where, among other sanctions, the inmates are not fed if they breach minor rules.

According to Reuters, there are similar situations in Greece, Indonesia, Fiji, Hungary, Kazakhstan, the Netherlands, Malta, Russia, Saudi Arabia, Sri Lanka, Turkey, Turkmenistan and many other countries. This removal of basic liberties seems to be a worldwide phenomenon.

Here in England, Boris Johnson’s government is determined to prove that it can be just as tough and draconian as anywhere else in the world. I have written previously about how the law requiring care home workers to be vaccinated is affecting me and my colleagues. It’s a strange paradox of the situation that as a care worker I can’t even put a plaster (BandAid) on the grazed knee of one of our residents without getting his consent – but the government has completely over-ridden my rights to have a say in which medical interventions I receive and compels me to have an experimental vaccine which has not yet completed all its trials. 

This is especially sinister as despite much censorship, there is now plenty of evidence that there are serious levels of Covid vaccine damage recorded under the Yellow Card Scheme run by our watchdog, the Medicines and Healthcare products Regulatory Agency (MHRA). It currently shows 1,632 deaths and 360,000 injuries since December 1, 2020, far more than any vaccine in the past.

Some care homes may be forced to close as their staff leave their jobs rather than submit to coercion to have the jabs. Many staff are now leaving to work in Amazon warehouses, where they are paid more than they get in the care sector and where they are being wooed with £1,000 ‘golden handshakes’. There is already a shortage of 120,000 care staff in England, so this new law will be turning a bad situation into an impossible one by (at the government’s own estimate) forcing 40,000 to 70,000 staff to leave. There are already reports of some care home residents not being reached by carers until late morning because of staff shortages and some care home companies are asking the families of residents to come in as volunteers to make up for the shortfall.  To add insult to injury, the government has told local authorities to redeploy library staff into care homes, as though anyone, whatever their background, can come in and take over from a skilled care worker.

And this is really strange – why is a government, which is supposedly Conservative and all in favour of family values, saying that 12 year-olds can go against their parents’ wishes and have the jabs without their parents’ permission? This is the State, in a move reminiscent of Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World, asserting that it can decide what is best for a child by taking away the rights of parents. If you are a parent of a child at school in the UK, there is a letter here from the organisation Lawyers for Liberty which you can download and send to the Head Teacher warning them of possible legal consequences if they facilitate the vaccination of your child without your consent.

All I wish to add now is that I have joined a crowdfunding campaign to bring a judicial review of the statutory instrument requiring workers to be vaccinated by 15th November or be sacked, which according to the statement of claim put in by the solicitors Jackson Osborne, is incompatible with three pieces of primary legislation which should take legal precedence.

What is really going on? We can see several characteristics of what is happening to people across the world right now:

  • A huge increase in stress levels
  • A loss of faith or confidence in governments and public institutions of all kinds
  • Personal rancour and divisions between families, friends and colleagues
  • A collapse of the systems on which we all rely (the latest being the possibility of food shortages and energy supply failures during the winter)
  • The gradual disappearance of all our old certainties

For anthroposophists, these phenomena indicate that what is happening is Ahrimanic, clear signs of the impending incarnation of the being that Christ called the ‘ruler of this world’. If Peter Deunov was right, we are going to be enduring these times for another quarter of a century.

Anthroposophists are not always the most psychologically self-aware of people, however; and although Steiner said that Ahriman is an actual being whose incarnation was unstoppable, we should also consider that human beings are threefold in nature and each of us has our own ‘inner Ahriman’ and ‘inner Lucifer’ whose efforts draw us away from the state of balance represented by the Christ impulse. In its effects, Covid-19 is surely forcing us to be aware of the shadow sides of our human nature and the consequent flaws in how we structure our societies. It is a combination of fear and the desire to exercise power that is driving these governmental responses to the pandemic and it is fear that is keeping so many of us in thrall to government diktat. But what about our own part in what is happening?

The writer Paul Kingsnorth, describing a family holiday in Ireland, summed up our situation in a nutshell:

“On this occasion we were in a small town – a nice little place, full of holidaying people like us. There were pubs and restaurants open, and the streets were full of tables and chairs (one of the unexpected benefits of the pandemic has been that Ireland has discovered outdoor dining). There were shops and markets. There were people in vans, like us, and other people hiring boats and other people eating and drinking. There were leaflets in the tourist information centre advertising country house tours and chocolate makers and cycling trips.” 

“It was a nice little place, and all of a sudden I saw it for what it was. I saw what was happening here, and by extension everywhere, and within me and all of us. I saw that everything around me was dedicated solely to the immediate gratification of the senses. 

There it was, all of a sudden, right in my face. Eating. Drinking. Buying colourful things. Boats, vans, bikes, beer, steak, new clothes, second hand clothes, burgers, chocolate bars, old castles, stately homes, cappuccinos, pirate adventure parks, golf courses, spas, tea rooms, pubs. Food, drink, fun, entertainment, games, probably some sex somewhere in the mix. All of it came together suddenly into a kind of package of sensory overload and I saw that this was what we were, what we had become without really thinking or planning it.” 

“Stimulating the senses, then reacting to the stimulus: this was what our society was all about. Feeding the pleasure centres, spending and spending to keep it all coming at us. It was a nice little place. A small, unremarkable town that became, just for a second, the centre of the whole world.”

Kingsnorth is describing what you might call the Amazon Prime nature of our times (I want it and I want it now) that is leading us towards the collapse of human societies and systems around the world. It is unsustainable and if left unchecked, it will kill us all.

Is it too late to do anything about this? Is there an antidote? 

As an anthroposophist, I hope that more and more people can discover what it truly is to be a human being; ie that we are beings with one foot in the material world and another in the spiritual world, that spiritual world to which we return between incarnations and which is our real home. Here on Earth, we have the privilege and the challenge of free will, something which allows us to experience both the good and the bad sides of our natures over many lives and through this process to grow and evolve in freedom through our own decisions. A future stage of our development, many, many years ahead, will be to evolve to what Steiner called the ‘spirit self’, the ability to do what we know, where knowing and doing are one, which is the state of consciousness of the angels. 

In a way, we should be grateful to the Ahrimanic beings who, in this spiritual evolutionary process play an essential part. Not only are they instrumental in the forming of the human being’s constitution in all its beauty and darkness, but they also play an important role in bringing us face-to-face with the consequences of our actions and decisions and hence also the forming of our destiny and karma, of which Covid-19 is currently making us so painfully aware. 

This brings me back to my original intention of writing about the Archangel Michael, who Steiner tells us is the time spirit of our age, which is the age of the Consciousness Soul. During this time, humanity has been left free to a great extent. It depends on us and our own efforts if we are to make the connection with Michael, who unlike the adversarial beings who live in our blood and nervous systems, has to wait for us to turn to him in freedom. Michael wishes to work with human beings to safeguard the direction of our future evolution and avert the future planned for us by the adversarial powers.  It seems appropriate to end this piece with a prayer from Ita Wegman:

“May a sufficient number of people become conscious of the active power that Michael is among humankind. May all those who have the strength and courage, not only to bring the Michael-thought to manifestation in their souls but to make it living in their deeds, become true followers of Michael and bring about his aims, and thus lead humankind over the great crisis with which it is now confronted.” 

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July 26, 2021 · 4:59 pm

Freefall to tyranny

We’re living now in a time of freefall towards tyranny. If you’ve been paying attention to what is happening, you will be aware that we are not only facing a future of ecological collapse, but also one in which advanced technologies of control and manipulation are playing havoc with our cultures and leading to the breakdown of the social structures and values which have underpinned our world in the recent past. Why is this happening and who is behind it?

Let us imagine for a moment that you are one of the global overlords, a controller of the algorithms, someone who takes an elite versus the little people world view. You look around the world and you see the results of unrestrained consumer capitalism and human greed; you see a gigantic mess and the imminent breakdown of climate systems, massive pollution, alternate floods and droughts leading to starvation and huge waves of migration and all the other phenomena with which we are so depressingly familiar. This is serious, it is starting to impinge on your own lifestyle. Something has to be done and ideally, it also has to make you a lot of money; but there’s a problem – there are too many people in the world and too much freedom and democracy are getting in the way of the necessary measures. The little people love their cars and flying abroad for international holidays – they are never going to vote for policies that might curtail their freedoms. Drastic change is therefore needed, and the best way to motivate the little people to change their ways is through fear.

Fear has always been the means that tyrants have used so that they can exercise power over their populations. It was of course used effectively by Adolf Hitler in driving the German people towards war in 1939. It was explained by Hermann Goering in an interview with Gustave Gilbert, an American psychologist, during the Nuremburg tribunal:

“Why, of course, the people don’t want war,” Goering shrugged. “Why would some poor slob on a farm want to risk his life in a war when the best that he can get out of it is to come back to his farm in one piece. Naturally, the common people don’t want war; neither in Russia nor in England nor in America, nor for that matter in Germany. That is understood.

But, after all, it is the leaders of the country who determine the policy and it is always a simple matter to drag the people along, whether it is a democracy or a fascist dictatorship or a Parliament or a Communist dictatorship.” (…)

“There is one difference,” [Gilbert] pointed out. “In a democracy the people have some say in the matter through their elected representatives, and in the United States only Congress can declare wars.”

“Oh, that is all well and good, [replied Goering] but, voice or no voice, the people can always be brought to the bidding of the leaders. That is easy. All you have to do is tell them they are being attacked and denounce the pacifists for lack of patriotism and exposing the country to danger. It works the same way in any country.”

It works the same way in any country. It has worked that way throughout our history. It worked for George W. Bush, Donald Rumsfeld, Tony Blair et al in driving the USA and the UK to war with Iraq and the subsequent ‘war on terror’. It is working that way now. Dr Thomas Hardtmuth, in his book What Covid-19 can teach us,1 has said the following:

“Intriguingly, the institutions who are now managing the global pandemic are the same ones who were previously active in the campaign against terrorism and the threat of biological weapons. The Center of Health Security at the John Hopkins University, which has played such a leading role in the corona crisis, was previously called the Center for Civilian Biodefence Studies. It was essentially a military institution which in the years since 9/11 has kept alive the images of fear about the terrorist threat from bioweapons, smallpox and other killer viruses.”

“During regular international conferences attended by high-ranking representatives from government, economic interests, pharmaceutical companies and the military, this organisation ran exercises in minute detail to manage terror scenarios with millions of deaths. One such crisis simulation, called Event 201, took place on 18th October 2019 in a New York luxury hotel. This time it was not a terrorist attack but the threat posed by a deadly coronavirus mutant that was simulated. A crisis management programme was designed, the individual measures of which bore a remarkable resemblance to those introduced in real life three months later.” 

What Dr Hardtmuth has not mentioned in his book is that Event 201 was funded and organised by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, which has also given funds to ten of the vaccine-producing companies as well as John Hopkins University, the World Health Organisation, Dr Anthony Fauci, Professor Chris Whitty, Imperial College London and many of the other prominent players in this pandemic. Nor does he mention that, as has just emerged, a patent filing for the coronavirus was taken out with the US Patent Office in 2018 by the Pirbright Institute, with funding from Bill and Melinda Gates, the Wellcome Trust and the European Commission.

In connection with this Event 201 simulation exercise, Dr Hardtmuth also quotes from a book Chronicle of an Announced Crisis by Paul Schreyer:

“The significant thing about this exercise as well as the subsequent real-life situation was a conflation of fear, mass deaths, national emergency, over-extension of the state, restrictions on freedom, vaccines, pharmaceutical regulation and media strategy. More directly stated, a health emergency leads to a global demand for vaccines which in turn requires that corporations play a more active international policy-making role in order to finance, produce and distribute them and that the inevitable resistance from the population is met with PR strategies and the media. That is what the exercise was about – and that is what is happening today.”

Dr Hardtmuth concludes: “It is clear to any observant person that the numbers are being manipulated and everything is being done here to maintain fear and panic at the highest possible level.” 

At the start of the pandemic, I could scarcely have imagined that so many of my fellow citizens in the West were going to be taken in. As former Lord Chief Justice, Jonathan Sumption put it last November: “The British public has not even begun to understand the seriousness of what is happening in our country, many – perhaps most – of them don’t care or won’t care until it’s too late. They instinctively feel that the ends justify the means, the motto of every totalitarian regime that has ever existed.” 

But I’ve decided that it’s not only acceptable to take a different path from all those people who have either bought into or are unwilling to challenge the tyranny that surrounds us, it’s essential. I’ve already written about my personal experience – the British government is continuing with its plans to make it illegal for people, including me, to work in care homes unless we have had both jabs. They did this by passing a Statutory Instrument (just before the House of Commons broke up for its holidays) to amend the Health & Social Care Act of 2008, so that it would not receive any further scrutiny in the House of Lords before it became law. This is a prime example of state tyranny, removing as it does the human right of individuals not to be coerced into taking medication which has not yet completed its trials. This is a pattern that is being repeated across the world.

One notable feature of our freefall to tyranny has been the corruption of science through the suppression of dissent; stories are now legion of doctors and scientists being silenced, losing their jobs and being vilified in public by some colleagues if they raise any questions. 

Another feature has been the corruption of the news media so that any voices raising doubts about government policy are censored. The BBC is now notorious for its failures to report anything contrary to the government’s agenda and both the BBC and The Guardian have been taking money from the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. According to a tweet on July 20th from the journalist James Delingpole, “Boris Johnson has privately admitted to all the MSM (mainstream media) editors that he’s not in charge, that he’s just obeying orders. Their silence is at least as inexcusable as Boris’s compliance.”

Is this true or even probable? I’ve no way of knowing. But I’m very aware of the censorship and non-reporting of anything that might cast doubt on the wisdom of vaccinating every single person. It also begs an intriguing question: who is issuing orders to Johnson?

I’m not going to speculate on that in this post, except to say that the wilder shores of conspiracy theory are beginning to look increasingly plausible. But there is another factor which should be mentioned: I have written here and here about the transhumanist agenda that’s at the core of so many of the changes we are facing. I have also touched on the deeply disturbing Chinese model of ‘social credit’. We are now facing the Western version of ‘social credit’, which will be delivered by way of vaccine passports.

The Belarussian tribute act that is today’s British government denied it for months. Michael Gove said there were no plans for them. Backbenchers professed that the idea was unethical, unthinkable and unenforceable. The vaccines minister, Nadhim Zahawi, said the public could hold him to his promise that vaccine passports were never going to become a reality.

Yet in a rather predictable turn of events, Boris Johnson has this week announced that all over-18s will need to demonstrate that they have received both doses of a vaccine in order to enter nightclubs, venues and other large gatherings. From now on, ‘proof of a negative test will no longer be enough.’ And as a worker in a care home, I will have to have a vaccine passport so as to be able to demonstrate to the Care Quality Commission inspectors that I have had both jabs, to which they will soon add the need to demonstrate that I have had an annual flu jab, which will then doubtless be followed by insistence on regular Covid booster jabs.

But why should anyone need a vaccine passport? We were previously told that if you’ve had your two jabs, you’re protected. You don’t need to know anyone else’s immune status. But as our new secretary of state for health, Sajid Javid has just discovered, you can still catch Covid-19 even if you’ve had both jabs. So what is the point of the vaccines? Javid’s story for now is that he got a milder version because he was vaccinated, so we should still get the jabs. But vaccine passports protect nobody.

What these passports will do, however, is give huge power to our overlords, the masters of the algorithms. Anyone who controls the vax passport database and any algorithm governing what it permits and denies, has absolute control over every aspect of your life. Do you want to visit a sports stadium, or a museum or a theatre? Invalid vax pass, no entry. Now imagine the rules are tightened up, as they will be as soon as the basic concept has been established: no entry to a supermarket or shops or pubs or restaurants, no entry to buses or trains or planes. Your life will be so circumscribed that it will in effect become impossible to exist without a vax pass. 

This is not my imagination: this has been planned for over years by our global overlords, the ones who issue orders to Boris Johnson and other national leaders. It is now being delivered. It’s already happening in Israel and it’s coming here soon. France is currently rushing a vaccination passport law through the French National Assembly. Without this vax pass, you will not be able to get into restaurants, trains, workplaces, art galleries, museums and cinemas. Other European countries, including Italy, Greece and Austria are bringing in similar Covid certification following the announcement from French President Emmanuel Macron. It’s a little remarked feature of the president’s crackdown on the vaccine hesitant that the one group he will depend on to enforce his new law has been specifically excluded from complying with it. Firefighters, nurses and teachers, and soon, children over 12, are all to be subject to mandatory jabs. But not, curiously, the police.

How much vaccine coercion will Boris Johnson use? Given his track record to date, it’s highly likely we will be coerced to be vaccinated, either by government diktat or more likely, by government forcing businesses to do its dirty work for them. Either that or you’ll be rapidly marginalised from society. And once you’ve been vaccinated, the limited freedoms allowed you can be withdrawn at any moment.

Such attitudes of course radiate out into wider society and cause dissension between ordinary people. Here are just two examples of these polarised attitudes of which I’ve become aware in my own locality: one, comes from someone who has a mother in a care home. This person does not want to have the jabs and has not only been told that as a result she won’t be able to visit her mother but that unless she has both jabs her mother will no longer be able to stay in the care home! The second comes from someone who runs a kindergarten – she has been told by some parents that if she herself has the jabs, then their children will be removed from the kindergarten. Tyranny runs in both directions…

What we are currently experiencing with this artificially contrived corona crisis is a new way of imposing a totalitarian system, a standardised and uniform world governance, under the guise of health provision. We are all being played. The UK and other governments are clearly using threats of various kinds to test out, first on groups of particularly vulnerable workers such as care home staff, just how far they can go with other groups in terms of totalitarian rule. It won’t stop with care workers and it won’t be confined to Covid-19 vaccines. Once governments are able to impose mandatory vaccinations on whole populations, our lives and our bodies will never again be our own. 

Will we accept it? You are all next on the list.

1. What Covid-19 Can Teach Us by Dr Thomas Hardtmuth, with a foreword by Dr Michaela Gloeckler, former head of the Medical Section at the Goetheanum. Translation of the original German text into English by Bernard Jarman. Published by InterActions.

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July 11, 2021 · 8:21 pm

The Second Coming

Turning and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.

Surely some revelation is at hand;
Surely the Second Coming is at hand.
The Second Coming! Hardly are those words out
When a vast image out of Spiritus Mundi
Troubles my sight: somewhere in sands of the desert
A shape with lion body and the head of a man,
A gaze blank and pitiless as the sun,
Is moving its slow thighs, while all about it
Reel shadows of the indignant desert birds.
The darkness drops again; but now I know
That twenty centuries of stony sleep
Were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle,
And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,
Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?

Great poets are able to encapsulate the truth of their times in poetic images. W.B.Yeats in his poem, The Second Coming, has done this for the 20th and 21st centuries. Written during the 1918-1919 flu pandemic, Yeats might just as well have been writing today, since he describes our time and our appalling dilemma as we await the incarnation of the “rough beast, its hour come round at last.” Instead of the second coming of Christ, Yeats discerns something far worse heading towards us. (An analysis of the poem can be found here.)

Anthroposophists will of course have their own understanding of what Yeats may have sensed was on its way. According to Rudolf Steiner, during our time huge efforts will be made “to lead people away from the Christ who has passed through the Mystery of Golgotha, and to assign to another being dominion over the earth. This is a very real battle, not an affair of abstract concepts; a real battle which is concerned with setting another being in place of the Christ-Being for the rest of the fifth post-Atlantean epoch, for the sixth epoch and for the seventh. (…) And it will be essential for people to learn to distinguish between the true Christ, who will not this time appear in the flesh, and this other being who is marked off by the fact that he has never been embodied on the earth.”

It seems clear that, if humanity is to escape the fate which has been so carefully planned for it, then many more of us must develop an awareness that we are spiritual beings currently living in physical bodies. Traditionally, it has been the role of the churches to remind us of our spiritual origins. But as we all know, churchgoing is less and less a part of the culture of our times and most people regard Christianity as irrelevant or mere unscientific superstition.

In this connection, I was startled but not surprised to read that, according to the 2011 UK Census, between 2001 and 2011 the number of Christians born in Britain fell by 5.3 million – about 10,000 a week. (Lord knows what the recent 2021 Census will reveal.) With a continued rate of decline at this level, the number of UK-born Christians would reduce to zero by 2067.

The British Social Attitudes Survey (BSAS) indicates that Anglicanism is declining faster than any other major denomination. With the current rate of decline, it would be set to disappear from Britain by 2033 – just twelve years away.

So it would seem that Christianity in the UK is in a kind of terminal death spiral. I’ve no reason to think that the situation is any different in other Western countries. Why has this decline happened? And why does it matter so much?

To understand how we got to this state of affairs, we need to go back to the early centuries of the Christian religion. As the Christian teaching spread through Europe and Asia Minor in the centuries after the crucifixion, it became mixed up with many local religions and cults and took over many of their rites and festivals and some of their beliefs. The greatest confusion was over what people believed concerning Jesus – who he was, how far he was human being and how far he was God.

Eventually so many diverse doctrines were held by so many different groups all over the Roman Empire that the leaders of the Church called a series of councils to standardise Christian belief. In 325 CE at the First Council of Nicaea, the doctrine of the divinity of Jesus was established – extraordinary as it may seem, this was determined by majority vote. This decision had the effect of separating the Church from the teaching of the Ancient Wisdom concerning the Cosmic Christ and also led to much distortion and misunderstanding of the teaching of Jesus and the apostles. 

We could add that this process was continued by the 8th Ecumenical Council of Constantinople in the year 869 which, as Rudolf Steiner has pointed out, abolished the idea of the “trichotomy” of the human being (ie the reality that each of us consists of body, soul and spirit) and reduced us to beings of body and soul only, thus introducing a further very serious distortion into the teachings of the churches and laying the foundation for our present predicament. 

There is a fascinating passage in the final chapter of St John’s gospel, after the occurrence of the miraculous draught of fishes, when St Peter asked Jesus what was to be the future work of St John the beloved, the author of the Book of Revelation. Jesus replied: “If I will that he tarry till I come, what is that to thee? Follow thou me.” My sense of this is that here Jesus was in effect telling Peter to get on with his task of building the Church and not to bother about John, whose work would continue sub rosa until the Second Coming, when it would start to assume more and more importance.

The role of Peter was to “feed my sheep”, to shepherd the people by presenting to them a version of Christianity that would meet their needs but would not be beyond their capacity to understand at that stage of their development. This was to be the purpose of the Church of St Peter – to bring the message of loving one’s brother as oneself and to set humanity on course for the next stage of its journey.

John’s role, by contrast, was to maintain the idea of the Christ as a cosmic Being, the Christ who experienced for three years what it was to be a human in the physical body prepared for him by the master initiate, Jesus. This was to be done through small, secret communities until the second coming of Christ. According to Rudolf Steiner, this second coming was not to be expected as a physical incarnation but was due to happen from 1933 onwards, in the etheric body of the Earth. Before anthroposophy, which brought these teachings much more into public consciousness, the few people who were able to understand such concepts remained in small and hidden Rosicrucian groups under the guidance of St John.

But even today the churches have not felt able to acknowledge, let alone share and communicate the perspective of St John, which is surely the only one which nowadays can reach out to the unspoken spiritual needs of so many people. In Matthew 7:9, Christ Jesus says: “Or what man is there of you, whom if his son ask bread, will he give him a stone?”

Yet by denying the people the knowledge of the Cosmic Christ, the churches are in effect giving us stones rather than the spiritual bread we crave – the times are crying out for the message of St John rather than the simplicities of St Peter. We are living at a time when even the Archbishop of Canterbury – an intelligent and humane man who is also the senior bishop and principal leader of the Church of England, the symbolic head of the worldwide Anglican Communion – does not, for example, understand why Easter has to be a moveable feast. 

This is significant, because if the head of the worldwide Anglican communion does not have a sense of the spiritual realities behind Christianity, then he has no access to the true wisdom which could revitalise his Church and regenerate our culture.

There are some priests, such as the late Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, who have a greater instinct for cosmic Christianity and who have tried to reconcile science with spirituality; but unfortunately for Teilhard and the church, Rome banned his books, ordered him not to attend international congresses and forbade him to write or teach on philosophical subjects. 

The failure of the churches to bring us spiritual nourishment for our times has meant the absolute triumph of the power of money, which now rules the world. Our gods today are people like Jeff Bezos and Elon Musk, who recognising that they and their kind have trashed our home planet, are now doing all they can to set up Mars as the future location for human beings.

But human beings need to believe in a transcendent reality, in a truth greater than themselves. It doesn’t have to be Christian, it could be Buddhist or Hindu or Muslim or something else. If there is no higher meaning to human life, then the famous phrase of Nietszche: “Nothing is true and everything is permitted” comes into common consciousness, with the results we see all around us. G. K. Chesterton put it slightly differently: “When men choose not to believe in God, they do not thereafter believe in nothing, they then become capable of believing in anything.”

Paul Kingsnorth expressed our situation like this: “When a culture kills its sovereign, the throne will not remain empty for long. Dethrone Christ if you like – dethrone any representative of any sacred order on Earth. But when you do, you will understand that the sovereign, however imperfect his rule, may have been the only thing standing between you and the barbarians massing outside – and inside – your gates.”

Is there an antidote to this poisonous mix of consumer capitalism, nihilism and money worship that is destroying us, our planet and our culture? The old Christendom is not coming back – and nor should it. But as Joan Hodgson in her book Why on Earth has written: “As the influence of the Aquarian Age grows stronger, the mystical Christianity of St John will gradually replace the outworn orthodoxy of the church of Peter. It will lead humanity to ‘an upper room’ – a higher state of consciousness or comprehension – where true communion with the Cosmic Christ will come to all who earnestly seek. It will lead the seeker to the Holy Grail which brings healing for all sorrow and pain. As understanding of this true communion becomes universal, the light of the Cosmic Christ shining through men’s hearts and lives will glorify the earth itself. This is the promised second coming of Christ, foreshadowed in the gospels.”

During this pandemic we have seen how easy it is for populations to be ruled by fear and group-think imposed from above. It seems to me that this has been a rehearsal for, and a demonstration of what is likely to happen when the false Christ, the Anti-Christ, appears in the guise of the great deliverer who will save us from all our troubles.  Most people will be taken in by the impostor and, what is more, they will turn on those of us who have a different view. 

What is to be done in such dire circumstances? Perhaps the climate crisis can be a blessing in disguise, which is forcing us to look after Earth, our home. It might also encourage us to practice kindness and compassion towards all beings and things. If you have a garden, however small, or even a window box and some pots, try to care for a patch of earth and living, growing things. The temple of nature helps us to reconnect with a greater intelligence which is holding everything in a coherence beyond our understanding. It is there you will be able to commune with the Cosmic Christ, who is within the etheric body of the earth and is waiting for human beings to find their way to him.

In Yeats’ poem, I take the falcon to be a symbol of humanity, going further and further away from home until we can no longer hear Christ the falconer, who despite our waywardness is waiting patiently for us here on Earth. 

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June 27, 2021 · 5:02 pm

“An overdose of freedom is lethal to a state.”

An interesting interview caught my eye in the Financial Times of 19/20th June. It was with Vladislav Surkov, who is the architect of the corrupt democracy that has kept Vladimir Putin in power for 21 years. Surkov is a consummate Kremlin backroom operator who became Putin’s chief ideologist and closest political confidant, carrying out a similar role for Putin as Dominic Cummings did for Boris Johnson or Steve Bannon for Donald Trump. In the same way that Cummings and Bannon were eventually thrown overboard by their political masters, so Surkov has just been ‘let go’ by Putin.

Surkov was a founding father of Putinism and helped to create Russia’s ‘sovereign democracy’, an ostensibly open system with a closed outcome. Elections are called, candidates campaign, votes are cast, ballots are counted and the same man wins, every single time. Its core idea is that the stability of the state is much more important than the freedom of the individual. This leads to the creation of fake opposition parties, rigid control of the media and impossible barriers to entry for political figures not approved of by Putin.

Surkov claims that Putin has not abolished democracy but has married it with the monarchical archetype of Russian governance. “This archetype is working. It is not going anywhere…it has enough freedom and enough order. An overdose of freedom is lethal to a state. Anything that is medicine can be poison. It is all about the dosage.”

This stands of course in complete opposition to ideas of societal freedoms that up until recently were espoused by most governments in the west. Whether these ideas can still hold in the current climate of pandemic-induced fear and panic is now debatable. One can imagine that governments in the west and the kind of people who meet at Davos are questioning whether our ideas of individual freedom and liberty can be sustained during a time of climate change and the Covid-19 pandemic, particularly when autocratic regimes such as the governments in China and Russia are claiming that their cultures are superior to ours when dealing with current world crises. 

Could it be that our governing elites have in effect seized the opportunity of the pandemic to introduce an experiment to see how far they can go in imposing Chinese or Russian-style social controls on their populations? Have they reached Surkov’s conclusion that “an overdose of freedom is lethal to a state”?

I wonder whether the battle for our freedoms has already been lost. The extraordinary passivity displayed by my fellow citizens in the face of lockdown restrictions and curtailments of liberty, which have been aided by a covert culture of censorship and self-censorship from the media and professional institutions, has been quite unprecedented in my adult experience, which spans the last half-century. 

One can only hope that the recent exposure of Matt Hancock as not only a “totally f………  hopeless” secretary of state for health (Boris Johnson’s verdict on Hancock, as quoted by Dominic Cummings in a statement to MPs) but also a nauseating hypocrite, who was filmed groping an aide in his private office while telling everyone else that they can’t even hug their dying relatives, will by his actions have done enough to make even the most passive Brits rise up in revolt against our political masters, who preach one thing for the little people (and set the police on us or threaten us with prosecution for supposed infringements of their rules), while doing quite other things themselves. It would seem so, as Hancock has now been forced to resign, despite Boris Johnson saying that “the matter was closed.” 

One of the most powerful comments I have seen on this came from Rachel Taylor, a hospital doctor in Oxford, who tweeted: “It’s not the infidelity, it’s the sacrifices every decent person made because Matt Hancock told them to do so. You do realise we had to tell distraught family members they couldn’t see their dying loved ones in hospital? Over and over again. I can never forgive his hypocrisy.”

Sajid Javid has now been appointed as Hancock’s successor so we shall soon see whether he intends to continue with the government’s Covid restrictions. At present the government’s public case for continuing these restrictions does not stand up to any logical or evidential test. Nor does it take into account the full extent of the negative impact on people’s lives in order (it is claimed) to save the lives of a tiny number of people, many of whom might die anyway from pre-existing conditions and complicating factors, for which Covid might be the final catalyst. In other words, although Covid appears on the death certificate, it may not have been the actual cause of death. This is not a justifiable reason for removing the civil liberties of the entire population, and never could be. There must be a more moderate, middle way of dealing with this situation. 

Here are two personal examples of how our freedoms are being eroded: my wife, who is a French national, needed urgently to go to France to see her 89-year-old recently widowed mother. After having to pay £60 for a PCR test taken two days in advance of her flight, she was able to help her mother for a week before returning and being put under quarantine (not unlike house arrest) and then was subjected to three more tests during the 10 days, at a further cost of £299, and being phoned each day to check that she had not absconded. The profiteering by these private testing companies (and how did they get their contracts?) adds injury to insult, especially as the PCR test in France, taken two days before departure, was completely free.

My own experience is potentially more serious: I am now being threatened by the government with the loss of my job unless I have two Covid vaccinations within 16 weeks of new legislation to be introduced in October. I should explain that, at the farm where I work, we have a small residential care home for three adults with learning disabilities. The care home is regulated by the Care Quality Commission, and I am its registered manager. The CQC has rated our care home as ‘Good’ in all five of its inspection categories and I believe that our model of care, which provides a family-style setting on a working farm, is recognised as offering an exceptional quality of life for our residents. 

In accord with their families’ wishes, our three residents have each had both jabs of the Oxford Astra Zeneca vaccine, and so can be considered safe. They also have one PCR test each week. Our staff have three tests a week (1 PCR test and 2 lateral flow device tests), so we know that we, too, are free from infection and that our residents are safe. My strong personal conviction is that I do not wish to have the experimental Covid jabs on offer (from Pfizer-BioNTech and Oxford Astra Zeneca) until there is more data and all four phases of the vaccine trials have been completed (we are currently in Phase 3). This conviction of mine is only reinforced by the hitherto-suppressed stories that are beginning to emerge of unexplained deaths and serious illnesses following the Covid-19 vaccinations (examples here and here).

I also believe that to insist I have the vaccine or lose my job is to go against the principle of ‘informed consent’ prior to vaccination which is enshrined in UK law and international human rights law. These vaccines were introduced under emergency conditions to deal with the pandemic. It would normally take 10 to 15 years to develop a vaccine from inception to licencing, yet the Covid-19 vaccines data was collected over two months. I cannot be informed properly about possible adverse consequences of these vaccines until all 4 phases of these trials have been completed. To threaten me with the loss of my job before all the trial data is available is fundamentally unjust, and unworthy of a free country. 

For any government minister to change my terms and conditions of employment and thus require me to have the vaccination or face the sack is not to get my informed consent but to obtain consent by coercion. And this from the government which decided to send elderly NHS patients back to the care homes without testing them for Covid-19 “so as not to overwhelm the NHS” and thus condemned many tens of thousands of other care home residents to death. 

Although most political leaders and those powerful people who consider themselves ‘masters of the universe’ haven’t yet got the true message of our times, I wish to finish on a more uplifting note and quote instead the ‘masters of wisdom’, as channelled by a dear friend, Annie Davison. I commend these thoughts to any politician who is tempted to tell the rest of us to “Do as I say, not as I do.”

“The most important thing for us right now is to know and recognise that all humanity is spiritual in origin. Therefore, all humanity is equal in the eyes of universal understanding. Throughout its history, humanity has been unable to perceive equality. Until now, life has been about fight and flight, about dominance and servility. About reaching for the stars no matter whom you tread on along the way.”

“But over these last years, more and more people have recognised that there is more to their inner world than this mighty, greedy, trampling attitude that has evolved to its zenith. Slowly but surely, they have understood, worked hard, and moved through the history mankind has created – life after life, death after death.”

“They have reached the knowledge that life itself can be spiritualised and that if you treat your life gently, with intention, with respect, then you can treat others gently with respect. Life itself, on earth, is where life can be lived within a spiritualised worldview.” (…)

“It is as simple as that. All beings are equal.”

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June 5, 2021 · 10:48 pm

Suffer the little children

When I have asked anthroposophical doctors about vaccinations and Covid-19, I find there is an extreme reluctance to make any public statements. No doubt this is because the whole subject of vaccination and some of what Rudolf Steiner had to say about it is so controversial that these doctors have a great fear of what may be heaped upon their heads by the orthodox medical bodies, were they to be so unwise as to put these heads above the parapet. And yet, the cautious, almost anodyne statements put out by the Medical Section at the Goetheanum hardly reflect the gravity of the Covid-19 crisis, surely the major public health issue of our time. In these worthy and rather bland responses, one misses the emphasis that Rudolf Steiner gave to “the courage to heal.”

I, of course, am not a medical doctor and have no reputation to lose. Nor am I an epidemiologist, virologist or immunologist so I am completely without relevant knowledge or expertise. I am, however, a human being who tries to pay attention to what is going on in the world and who is disturbed by many aspects of what I see. Right now, I am very concerned by proposals that younger and younger children should be vaccinated against Covid-19. 

The UK regulator has just approved the use of the Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine in children aged 12-15, saying it is safe and effective in this age group and the benefits outweigh any risks. The Medicines and Healthcare products Regulations Agency (MHRA) said it had carried out a “rigorous review” of the vaccine in adolescents. The UK’s vaccines committee will now decide whether children should get the jab.

China has just approved Covid-19 vaccinations for children as young as three years old.

And in the USA they are now giving Covid-19 vaccines to children as young as 6 months’ old…

Am I the only one who thinks that this is completely mad? Does it make any sense whatsoever to give children a brand-new vaccine with no long-term safety data for a disease that barely affects them?  The people doing this do not even have the pretence that it is for children’s own safety. It is because adults caught up in our safety-at-all costs culture think it is morally acceptable to give children a medicine, which may cause them harm – so as to protect other adults, most of whom have been vaccinated already. 

Actually, I know I am not the only one who thinks that this is both mad and ethically very dubious. A long and distinguished list of doctors, professors of medicine, paediatricians etc has recently signed an open letter to the chief executive of the MHRA, which begins as follows:

“We wish to notify you of our grave concerns regarding all proposals to administer COVID-19 vaccines to children. Recently leaked Government documents suggested that a COVID-19 vaccine rollout in children over 12 years old is already planned for September 2021, and the possibility of children as young as 5 years old being vaccinated in the summer in a worst-case scenario.”

“We have been deeply disturbed to hear several Government and SAGE representatives calling in the media for the COVID-19 vaccine rollout to be “turning to children as fast as we can”. Teaching materials circulated to London schools contain emotionally loaded questions and inaccuracies. In addition, there has been disturbing language used by teaching union leaders, implying that coercion of children to accept the COVID-19 vaccines through peer pressure in schools was to be encouraged, despite the fact that coercion to accept a medical treatment is against UK and International Laws and Declarations. Rhetoric such as this is irresponsible and unethical, and encourages the public to demand the vaccination of minors with a product still at the research stage and about which no medium- or long-term effects are known, against a disease which presents no material risk to them.”

I urge you to read the whole of this very important and significant letter.

As I’ve said before, I am not an anti-vaxxer but I am against stupidity and tyrannical group-think. On a related matter, just take a look at the NHS schedule of vaccinations and when to have them – it really is quite extraordinary. Babies up to the age of 16 weeks are recommended to have no less than 8 vaccinations; and children aged between 1 year and 15 years old should have a further 10 vaccinations. Who really thinks this is a good idea, to overload young immune systems with so many vaccinations and re-vaccinations? 

Which brings me to what Rudolf Steiner had to say in his lecture on October 7th 1917. He might have been talking about our situation today.

“Let us not be deceived: we are facing a movement which has very definite aims. Just as at the Council of Constantinople the Spirit was abolished, that is to say, the dogma was established that man consists of body and soul only and to speak of spirit is heretical, attempts of a different character will be made to abolish the soul, man’s life of soul. And the time will come, perhaps in a future by no means far distant, (…) when it will be said: if a man thinks at all of spirit and soul, that is a pathological symptom: those individuals who speak only of the body, they alone are healthy. It will be regarded as a symptom of illness if a human being develops in such a way that he can conceive of the existence of a spirit or a soul. Such people will be considered to be ill. And – of this you may be sure – the corresponding medicament will be discovered and used. On that past occasion the spirit was abolished. The soul will be abolished by means of a medicament yet to be discovered. A “healthy outlook” will lead to the discovery of a vaccine which will be injected into the human organism in earliest infancy, if possible immediately after birth, to ensure that this human body never has the idea that a soul and a spirit exist.”

“This indicates the sheer contradiction between two conceptions of life. The adherents of one will have to reflect how to develop concepts and ideas able to keep pace with reality, with the reality of spirit and soul. The others, the followers of the modern materialists, will seek for the vaccine said to make the body “healthy”, that is to say, affects its constitution in such a way that man no longer speaks of such twaddle as soul and spirit but speaks, from a sound attitude, of forces working in machines and in chemistry and producing planets and suns in the cosmic nebula. This attitude of mind will be induced by bodily procedures. Materialistic doctors will be entrusted with the task of driving souls out of human beings.”

(Rudolf Steiner, “The Crumbling of the Earth and the Souls and Bodies of Man” given in Dornach October 7, 1917.) 

There are three accounts in the Gospels of Christ Jesus’s attitude when his disciples tried to prevent parents bringing their little children to him. Here is the one from Luke, 18:15-17, in the King James version:

“And they brought unto him also infants, that he would touch them: but when his disciples saw it, they rebuked them. But Jesus called them unto him, and said, Suffer little children to come unto me, and forbid them not: for of such is the kingdom of God. Verily I say unto you, Whosoever shall not receive the kingdom of God as a little child shall in no wise enter therein.” 

“Whosoever shall not receive the kingdom of God as a little child shall in no wise enter therein.” But if the faculty of receiving the kingdom of God has been taken away from you by umpteen vaccines – what then?

If I were a doctor injecting experimental vaccines into very young children, not for reasons to do with their own medical needs but to try to reduce upward medical transmission from schools to older adults, then I would be wary of another of Christ’s sayings, this time from Matthew 18:6

“But whoso shall offend one of these little ones which believe in me, it were better for him that a millstone were hanged about his neck, and that he were drowned in the depth of the sea.”

Steiner indicated what is really behind this, and all the other dark phenomena of our time:

“All these methods (…) have finally one single purpose — to lead people away from the Christ who has passed through the Mystery of Golgotha, and to assign to another being dominion over the earth. This is a very real battle, not an affair of abstract concepts; a real battle which is concerned with setting another being in place of the Christ-Being for the rest of the fifth post-Atlantean epoch, for the sixth epoch and for the seventh. (…) And it will be essential for people to learn to distinguish between the true Christ, who will not this time appear in the flesh, and this other being who is marked off by the fact that he has never been embodied on the earth.”

If that is too extraordinary a notion for anyone but anthroposophists to take on board, let us finish with another quotation from the letter sent by doctors and scientists to the head of the MHRA. After setting out a detailed list of both short-term and long-term safety concerns, they say this:

“There is important wisdom in the Hippocratic Oath which states, “First do no harm”. All medical interventions carry a risk of harm, so we have a duty to act with caution and proportionality. This is particularly the case when considering mass intervention in a healthy population, in which situation there must be firm evidence of benefits far greater than harms. The current, available evidence clearly shows that the risk versus benefit calculation does NOT support administering rushed and experimental COVID-19 vaccines to children, who have virtually no risk from COVID-19, yet face known and unknown risks from the vaccines. The Declaration of the Rights of the Child states that, ‘the child, by reason of his physical and mental immaturity, needs special safeguards and care,
including appropriate legal protection’. As adults we have a duty of care to protect children from unnecessary and foreseeable harm.” 

“We conclude that it is irresponsible, unethical and indeed, unnecessary, to include children under 18 years in the national COVID-19 vaccine rollout. Clinical trials in children also pose huge ethical dilemmas, in light of the lack of potential benefit to trial participants and the unknown risks. The end of the current Phase 3 trials should be awaited as well as several years of safety data in adults, to rule out, or quantify, all potential adverse effects.”

“We call upon our governments and the regulators not to repeat mistakes from history, and to reject the calls to vaccinate children against COVID-19. Extreme caution has been exercised over many aspects of the pandemic, but surely now is the most important time to exercise true caution – we must not be the generation of adults that, through unnecessary haste and fear, risks the health of children.” 

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May 16, 2021 · 10:05 pm

Four times twelve human beings

In the poignant last address given by Rudolf Steiner, on September 28th 1924 (Michaelmas Eve), before he retired to the sick bed in his studio where he was to die six months later, he used a mysterious phrase which has often puzzled me:

“If, in the near future, in four times twelve human beings, the Michael Thought becomes fully alive — four times twelve human beings, that is, who are recognised not by themselves but by the Leadership of the Goetheanum in Dornach — if in four times twelve such human beings, leaders arise having the mood of soul that belongs to the Michael festival, then we can look up to the light that through the Michael stream and the Michael activity will be shed abroad in the future among mankind.”

Steiner was speaking here in the context of his message that sincere anthroposophists have the strange destiny “that they are not able to come to terms with the world: they cannot quite master it, and yet at the same time they have to approach the world and enter into it with full earnestness”; that their “karma will be to harder to experience than it is for other men” but that nevertheless, they “are to prepare the work that shall be accomplished at the end of the century, and that shall lead mankind past the great crisis in which it is involved.”

This also relates to Steiner’s message to anthroposophists given during the 3rd August 1924 lecture on the Entry of the Michael Forces:

“I have indicated how those individuals who are fully engaged in the anthroposophical movement will return at the end of the century, and that others will join them, because it will be decided at that time whether earth civilisation will be redeemed, or lost.”

So Steiner was telling his audience that they would be reincarnating much more quickly than usual and that when they did so they would be joining forces with others to counteract the crisis caused by the manifestations of ahrimanically-inspired materialism. But what did Steiner mean by the phrase “four times twelve human beings”? Does it imply that forty-eight special people would be needed? Or is it some kind of reference that can only be understood by those steeped in mystical numerology? As I say, I have puzzled over what this could possibly mean and now humbly offer a suggestion for others to consider.

The Four-fold Human Being

Steiner gives us a picture of the human being as consisting of four ‘bodies’ – a physical body, an etheric body, an astral body, and the ‘I’ or ego. Each of us knows that we have a physical body but the other three bodies may be unfamiliar concepts for some people. The etheric body is essentially an energy body that contains and forms the physical. It is this etheric body which maintains the physical body’s form until death. The astral body (Soul) provides us with awareness and self-awareness, our emotions and our feelings and intentions. The ‘I’, ego or Self is like our higher soul, the immortal and inalienable core of each individual human being, which goes with us from one incarnation to the next. There are another three bodies in potential – the spirit self, the life spirit and spirit man – which are to come to full development in later stages of human evolution. But at our present stage, we are four-fold beings functioning through our threefold constitution of body, soul and spirit, with the ‘I’ as a higher part of the soul component. (Yes, I too find this horribly confusing!)

The Twelve Senses

Most of us recognise that humans have five senses (touch, sight, hearing, smell and taste), while others say that we have a sixth sense or intuitive faculty which can, for instance, come to our aid at times of danger.

Steiner, however, observed that the human organism is divided into three systems: nerve-sense, rhythmic and metabolic and that these groupings took in not five or six but twelve senses. These twelve senses are organised as follows:

  • the physical body: the senses of touch, of life, of movement, of balance
  • the external world: smell, taste, sight, temperature
  • the immaterial, spiritual world: hearing, speech, thought, ego

It is important for us to develop and use as many of our senses as possible because each sense reveals another aspect of our sensory reality. Sensory perception also forms the basis of our relationship to our self, our surroundings, and the people we meet. In order to observe well, we have to use our senses frequently and to the full. If we are able to do this, our health and vitality will benefit, which in turn enables us to make better observations. In other words, we will become fuller human beings.

It occurred to me that, by “four times twelve human beings”, Steiner may have simply meant that people can become whole, fully realised human beings through anthroposophy – four-fold human beings consciously in touch with their twelve senses. If anyone knows a different explanation, I’d be pleased to hear about it in the comments below this post.

I’m glad that Steiner, in the quotation above from his lecture of 3rd August 1924, also used the phrase: “…and that others will join them”, meaning that it won’t be anthroposophists on their own who will make the difference but that anthroposophists will become part of a much larger, looser and informal coalition of people of goodwill who can see what is really going on and who in their myriad different ways will peacefully resist the onslaught and hold on to true human values.

It is surely possible that, despite the many failures of the Anthroposophical Society since Steiner’s death in 1925, students of the Michaelic school whether they are in the Society or, more likely, outside of it, are today quietly getting on with their efforts, undaunted by the apparently overwhelming odds we are facing.

Some of these people may well have been anthroposophists at the time of Rudolf Steiner. In a lecture given on 16th September 1924, Steiner said this:

“(…) I would wish to kindle in your hearts something of the flames that we require, so that already now within the Anthroposophical Movement we may absorb the spiritual life strongly enough to appear again properly prepared. For in that great epoch after shortened life in spiritual worlds we shall work again on earth — in the epoch when for the salvation of the earth the spiritual Powers are reckoning on their most important members, in their most important features, on what Anthroposophists can do.”

“I think the vision of this perspective of the future may stir the hearts of Anthroposophists to call forth within themselves the feelings which will carry them in a right way, with energy and strength of action and with the beauty of enthusiasm, through the present earthly life; for then this earthly life will be a preparation for the work at the end of the century when Anthroposophy will be called upon to play its part.”

I have recently been reading a book called The Michael Prophecy and the Years 2012-2033, written by Steffen Hartmann and published by Temple Lodge. Among many interesting ideas, Hartmann quotes Anton Kimpfler who has suggested that the beginning of the present era should be dated from the Mystery of Golgotha – that is to say our present time should properly be considered as having begun in AD 33. Intriguingly, he points out that Steiner wrote on the cover of his Calendar of the Soul of 1912: “1879, after the birth of the ‘I’ “. (33 years earlier.) Kimpfler says that Rudolf Steiner believed that AD 33 should be the beginning of the new era. If that is the case, then our current year should not be considered as being 2021 but is really 1988 – so we have not yet reached the end of the 20th century. We therefore have another twelve years until the end of the century, which takes us to 2033 in our normal reckoning. 

It seems likely that these next twelve years will be decisive in resolving “whether earth civilisation will be redeemed or lost,” a battle in which each of us needs to play a part and the importance of which cannot be overstated. And while Steiner’s generation of anthroposophists may already all have reincarnated, there is still time for many more people to realise that they are four times twelve human beings and to accompany the further unfolding of the Christ power on earth.

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April 17, 2021 · 4:42 pm

Covid-19, world morality and the culture of safety at any cost

Although I wasn’t a Waldorf pupil, my primary school was child-centred enough not to interfere with my unconscious assumption that “the whole world is moral”, to use Rudolf Steiner’s words.  For whatever reason, I was able to grow up as a child in the 1950s believing that those who had charge over our lives, such as parents, teachers, MPs and ministers, policemen, doctors and other public servants were, on the whole, good people working for the benefit and general welfare of others. Looking back to a time when I was younger and less disillusioned, I think I had a fairly positive view of the role of government and officialdom.

In the ninth lecture of Study of Man, Steiner says: “When human beings leave the world of spirit and soul and clothe themselves in a body, what do they actually want? They want to realise in the physical world the previous things they experienced in the spirit. Human beings before the change of teeth are, in a manner of speaking, still wholly focused on the past. Human beings are still filled with the devotion which they develop in the spiritual world. (…) This basic mood is actually a very lovely one. It is one which proceeds from the assumption, the unconscious assumption: the whole world is moral.”

Although we all know that this is not how the world actually is, it is vital for the future development of the child that in their early years their unconscious assumption that the world is beautiful, good and true should not be destroyed. I’ve been reflecting on all of this during the Covid-19 crisis, when the actions of government ministers have been causing me more and more disquiet. For one of my generation and political views, it has been a dispiriting experience to find myself tending to agree with Ronald Reagan that “the nine most terrifying words in the English language are ‘I’m from the government and I’m here to help’ “. 

I’m also disappointed to see the readiness with which most people have gone along with every new restriction, imposition and removal of an established civil liberty by the government. There are two sides to this, of course. During this crisis, we have seen some of the very best of human nature. I’m a care home manager and when I took our residents to get their jabs at a medical centre in Crowborough, there was a long but good-natured queue of people waiting patiently in line. There were friendly and helpful volunteers shepherding the queue, and the doctors and nurses inside the clinic were just lovely with our residents, who were understandably nervous beforehand, by reassuring them and administering the injection so that none of them felt a thing. All in all, this was the British at their best and it occurred to me that there must have been a simiIar national spirit in people during the Second World War. 

On the other side, I don’t think one has to be paranoid to start wondering whether there is another agenda behind all of this. By now it is clear that all the vaccinations, mask-wearing, social distancing and staying at home are not that effective in protecting us from Covid-19 and therefore most of the restrictions will have to stay in place. Scientists are saying that while vaccines are having a major impact by cutting illness and deaths, they are not effective enough to allow a return to normal social mixing without the risk of “a big epidemic”. Professor Chris Whitty, England’s chief medical officer, said on 5th April: “I don’t think there’s any surprise that it [Covid] is still with us now, nor is it going to magically disappear over the next few months. This virus will be with us for the foreseeable future. We will have significant problems with Covid for the foreseeable future, and I don’t think we should pretend otherwise.” 

And on Tuesday 13th April, Boris Johnson told Sky News: “The (Covid) numbers are down – of infections and hospitalisations and deaths. But it is very, very important for everybody to understand that the reduction in these numbers – in hospitalisations and in deaths and infections – has not been achieved by the vaccination programme (my emphasis). People don’t, I think, appreciate that it’s the lockdown that has been overwhelmingly important in delivering this improvement in the pandemic and in the figures that we’re seeing”. 

So, why is Boris all of a sudden playing down the role of vaccination in dealing with Covid?  If it’s the case that, even though you have had your jabs, it will not make much difference – what are they for? You still have to wear a mask in public and practice ‘social distancing’ and for months to come, you may not be able to travel abroad, or even go very far within the UK. We don’t know whether the jabs will reduce transmissibility of the virus or whether they will protect you against new variants – but we do know that it is likely you will now have to have additional jabs at regular intervals.  Pfizer’s chief has just said that people will probably require a yearly Covid booster shot. Oxford Biomedica, which is manufacturing the Astra Zeneca jab in this country, is expecting to earn over £50 million pounds this year from the jab. 

Back in December 2020, I wrote a piece about Coercion and the Covid-19 Vaccines, in which I argued that we were about to see the beginnings of a campaign that would threaten to make life so difficult for anyone who didn’t agree to be vaccinated that it amounted to making it compulsory. Events since have not proved me wrong.

There was a time, before he became prime minister, when Boris Johnson presented himself as a believer in civil liberties. This is what he wrote in his Daily Telegraph column in 2004, when the then Labour government was thinking of introducing ID cards: 

“If I am ever asked, on the streets of London, or in any other venue, public or private, to produce my ID card as evidence that I am who I say I am, when I have done nothing wrong and when I am simply ambling along and breathing God’s fresh air like any other freeborn Englishman, then I will take that card out of my wallet and physically eat it in the presence of whatever emanation of the state has demanded that I produce it (…) and add, in the words of Barry Goldwater, that extremism in the defence of liberty is no vice, and that I really don’t know what I dislike most about these cards. There is the cost; (…) There is the loss of liberty, and the creepy reality that the state will use these cards – doubtless with the best possible intentions – to store all manner of detail about us, our habits, what benefits we may claim, and so on.”

What a difference political power and a pandemic can make to basic principles! But it’s been obvious for a long time to anyone who has observed Boris Johnson’s career and general behaviour that he has no basic principles, other than to do in all circumstances whatever will lead to his personal advantage. 

Now in 2021 the government, of which he is prime minister, is proposing not only vaccine passports (ID cards by another name) but also a “UK Health Security Agency”. The idea behind it is that to control the circulation of viruses, the government needs to control what people are allowed to do. Our rights to freedom of assembly, of protest, to send our children to school, to go abroad, to visit the pub etc are now seen by the government as privileges which they can remove or restore as they see fit. One idea apparently being seriously considered in Whitehall is that each of us will have to send in our temperature every day using the NHS app.

I have some skin in this game, as the Americans say. The government is planning to legislate to make it illegal to work in a care home if you have not had the vaccination – but I want to wait for further analysis about possible side effects from these experimental vaccines before deciding whether or not to have one. 

Critics will scoff at my use of the term ‘experimental’ and point to the NHS statement: “The vaccines approved for use in the UK have met strict standards of safety, quality and effectiveness set out by the independent Medicines and Healthcare products Regulatory Agency (MHRA). Any coronavirus vaccine that is approved must go through all the clinical trials and safety checks all other licensed medicines go through. The MHRA follows international standards of safety.” 

According to the scientific technical writer, Mark Pickles: “There are many things wrong with this NHS statement. It is misleading at best. The medicines are not licensed. The medicines are not approved (certainly not according to the FDA in America, who in granting ‘emergency authorisation’ for three vaccines tell us ‘There is no US Food and Drug Administration approved vaccine to prevent Covid-19’, and the clinical trials are still in progress. We are now in the long-term trials, or Phase 3 of four phases, following which the medicine is assessed and either licensed or revoked.” 

What’s more, “every letter of authorisation from the FDA to Janssen BioTech, to Moderna TX and to Pfizer Inc for the Covid-19 vaccines describes each product as: ‘an investigational vaccine not licensed for any indication.’ “ 

The medical term ‘investigational’ as used by the health authorities is defined in the Merriam Webster dictionary as follows: 

“Investigational [medical]: relating to or being a drug or medical procedure that is not approved for general use but is under investigation in clinical trials regarding its safety and efficacy.” 

To my mind, ‘investigational’ means that these vaccines are still experimental. This also means that everyone who has had one of these vaccines has been unwittingly taking part in the biggest trial ever known in the history of medicine – and it’s worth remembering that all of the companies making these vaccines have been granted blanket immunity by government from litigation arising from unforeseen side effects.

This creeping authoritarianism is to my mind quite sinister. Professor Neil Ferguson of Imperial College, London, whose inaccurate projections about the pandemic (forecasts of 250,000 deaths in the UK and 1.2 million in the US) have been relied on by several governments to shape their response, made some interesting comments during an interview with Tom Whipple of The Times: 

“I think people’s sense of what is possible in terms of control changed quite dramatically between January and March (2020),” Professor Ferguson says. When SAGE (the UK government’s Scientific and Advisory Group) observed the ‘innovative intervention’ out of China, of locking entire communities down and not permitting them to leave their homes, they initially presumed it would not be an available option in a liberal Western democracy. ‘It’s a communist one-party state, we said. We couldn’t get away with it in Europe, we thought… and then Italy did it. And we realised we could.’ ” 

It seems from Ferguson’s comments that the UK government is taking lessons in social control from the Chinese Communist Party and applying them to a so-far docile population at home, with success beyond their expectations. But is it just paranoia on my part to draw the conclusion that Boris Johnson and his bunch of political pygmies are simply the servants seeking to enforce a larger agenda emerging from those who regard themselves as our global masters?

Here it is instructive to listen to Edward Snowden. Wikipedia tells us that Snowden is the “former computer intelligence consultant who copied and leaked highly classified information from the National Security Agency (NSA) in 2013 when he was a Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) employee and subcontractor. His disclosures revealed numerous global surveillance programs, many run by the NSA and the Five Eyes Intelligence Alliance with the cooperation of telecommunication companies and European governments, and prompted a cultural discussion about national security and individual privacy.”

I have a great deal of respect for Snowden, his bravery and his sense of outrage at the immorality of many covert government operations. I think that Rudolf Steiner would also have applauded Snowden for revealing to us the brutal reality and lies behind so much government rhetoric. I urge you to listen to him in this short YouTube video, where he is speaking about coronavirus and the effect on our freedoms, and in which he suggests that the pandemic is being used to put in place controls on populations throughout the world – and that governments will find these controls very useful and want to make them permanent.

In the end, it comes down to a question of trust. We all know about Boris Johnson’s track record with truth, so I suspect that most of us will not be reassured when we hear him declare his confidence in the AstraZeneca or any other vaccine. These are fearfully complex questions that only an epidemiologist or virologist can pronounce on with any authority, so some of us will want to turn instead to scientists for reassurance. But can we trust the scientists and doctors, many of whom derive their funding from the giant pharmaceutical corporations? I don’t think so, which is why I want to see two or three years more data from the ongoing clinical trials before I decide whether to have the jab. In the meantime, I and my care home colleagues are having three tests a week to show that we are free from infection. It is fundamentally immoral for any government to seek to coerce me through the threat of unemployment, loss of the right to travel etc, into a premature decision on the matter of vaccination.

I am saddened to have lost my childhood assumption that the world is beautiful, good and true because, in my heart of hearts, I think that this is how the world is one day meant to be. At this time, however, as we become more and more aware of the impending incarnation of the being whom Christ called “the Ruler of this World”, it is clearly unrealistic to suppose that governments, leaders and the rest of us are not going to be unconsciously or otherwise influenced in myriad negative ways by what is coming towards us. Our only option is to become as aware, as far as possible, of the reality behind world phenomena; and in Rudolf Steiner’s words, “it is humanity’s task in this period to come to grips with evil as an impulse in the evolution of the world”. 

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February 7, 2021 · 10:01 pm

Sergei Prokofieff, Judith von Halle and the Representative of Humanity

After my recent blog posting on Coronavirus and the Indwelling Divinity of the Human Being, I received an email from an anthroposophist, someone for whom I have considerable respect:

“I read your blog with interest (…).  Thank you, it was stimulating food for thought. However, I’m afraid I don’t set great store by Judith von Halle’s sensational claims. I appreciate that you have obviously found them helpful, and I don’t want to undermine that, but from past experience and from Sergei Prokofieff’s analysis of her seership, I am very cautious. I think the pandemic is more about preparing humanity for the incarnation of Ahriman, the hallmarks are very much of ahrimanic nature. That’s not to say that other beings don’t also have an effect, but does Judith von Halle offer any substantiation of her claims? It’s a very strong statement that individual karma is being thwarted, for instance. When seers dislike being questioned, I become suspicious. She is welcome to offer opinions, but when they are dressed up as facts, I am wary. But it’s good that you write blogs and get people to think more widely.”

Another correspondent wrote to tell me how she attends a regular study group and after reading the blog post, “last week I mentioned Judith Von Halle and was jumped on by each of the others! Sometimes I feel that many people wouldn’t recognise Christ if he walked through their front door!!! “ 

What these messages show me is that there are many anthroposophists who revere the late Sergei Prokofieff (16 January 1954 – 26 July 2014), who regard him as a star in the anthroposophical firmament and a worthy successor to Rudolf Steiner. They have listened to his criticisms of Judith von Halle and have downplayed her significance accordingly. I don’t share this view but I realise that there are many people who won’t agree with me; if serious anthroposophists such as Peter Selg hold Prokofieff in high regard, then who am I to say that they are wrong?  I would, nevertheless, like to explain my views on both Prokofieff and JvH.

Sergei O. Prokofieff

Only once did I see Prokofieff in the flesh, and that was when he gave a lecture at Rudolf Steiner House in London. His buttoned-up appearance reminded me of Virginia Woolf’s jokey description of the repressed and reserved T.S Eliot, as “wearing his four-piece suit.” My doubts increased as he was speaking, because he seemed to me to be distorting Steiner’s teachings and drawing from them quite unjustified conclusions. Several other people with whom I spoke afterwards had similar reservations.

Later on, as I acquired copies of some of his books and began to read what he had written, my doubts increased further. I have now given almost all of these books away to Prokofieff enthusiasts, as I did not find them helpful.

Since it was clear to me that Prokofieff was introducing a Luciferic distortion of Steiner’s teachings, I became intrigued as to why he was regarded so highly by many anthroposophists, culminating in 2001 with his being invited to join the Vorstand (Executive Group) at the global centre for anthroposophy at the Goetheanum in Dornach, Switzerland.

I then came across a very important critique of Prokofieff’s work. This is Sergei O. Prokofieff: Myth and Reality by the late Irina Gordienko. This book crystallised for me all the reservations I had felt about Prokofieff’s work. I won’t say any more about it here, because an excellent review of the book has been provided by Kim Graae Munch on his website and I would urge anyone who is interested to read it:

https://kimgraaemunch.wordpress.com/various/irena-gordienkos-on-sergei-o-prokofieff/

In his memorial address for Prokofieff given on 29 July 2014, Peter Selg described him as “this most inwardly faithful pupil of Rudolf Steiner and protector of his new revelation of Christ.” It is abundantly clear from Prokofieff’s writings and actions that he idolised Rudolf Steiner and that he wanted to be just like his eminent teacher. Like Steiner, Prokofieff was a prolific writer and lecturer dealing with profound esoteric matters. But I take leave to doubt whether Prokofieff was a high initiate in the same mould as Steiner himself.

In his remarks at the memorial gathering, Selg clearly did not feel it appropriate to make any reference to the controversies surrounding Prokofieff’s interpretations of Steiner’s teachings, nor his attacks on Judith von Halle. He did manage, however, to imply that Prokofieff was not always an easy colleague, recalling that: “In 2001 he was finally called to Dornach to join the Executive Council at the Goetheanum. Looking back on his life in personal conversations, he expressed repeatedly that he should have been called to the Executive Council by 1994 at the very latest so he could work intensely in Dornach for the ‘payment of the debt owed’ to Rudolf Steiner and for the culmination.” (The ‘culmination’ refers to Steiner’s expectation that anthroposophy would be transformed in such a way that it would enter significantly into the global scene of the 21st century as a world-changing creative power.)

Prokofieff also was “increasingly troubled by the relationship to Rudolf Steiner within the Anthroposophical Society and in Dornach, and he published a book concerning this relationship in 2006. Selg adds that Prokofieff also “felt himself to be increasingly isolated. He knew and accepted that an experience of ‘cosmic loneliness’ was part of modern initiation, but he often had to ask himself where his colleagues in the battle for the culmination were to be found. It pained him that his relationship to Rudolf Steiner—and the reasons he insisted on its significance—were often misunderstood; its inner spiritual dimension was not seen and what he taught and authentically lived remained uncomprehended.” Shortly before his death, Prokofieff told Selg “that he had things to tell the spiritual world and Rudolf Steiner, especially about the conduct of anthroposophy on the earth.” 

Clearly, everyone but Prokofieff was out-of-step. No-one can doubt Prokofieff’s devotion to Steiner and anthroposophy and his single-minded pursuit of what he felt was a sacrificial path of martyrdom. But I can’t help wondering what Rudolf Steiner will have said to his disciple when they met in the spiritual world after Prokofieff’s death.

So why am I resurrecting this fairly ancient history? It is because Prokofieff’s attacks on Judith von Halle are still influencing many anthroposophists, such as my correspondent cited above. Anyone who is new to these controversies can find out more by following this link and this to items appearing in Southern Cross Review in 2013:

Judith von Halle

I would like to say something now about my own feelings concerning Judith von Halle. Up until fairly recently, I had stayed away from the controversies surrounding her and the attacks mounted on her by Prokofieff and others such as T.H. Meyer and Mieke Mossmuller. Then I read a book called The Representative of Humanity – Between Lucifer and Ahriman by Judith von Halle and the late John Wilkes, about the unfinished wooden sculpture by Rudolf Steiner and Edith Maryon, which is today exhibited at the Goetheanum.

As I read this book, I was seized by an absolute certainty of knowing that Judith von Halle in her previous life had been Edith Maryon. How can one explain these things? I just knew.

This book is a sacred text. In the chapters, written alternately by John Wilkes and Judith von Halle, one is given not only the history of the first Goetheanum as a mystery temple and the central place in it of the wooden model, but also a beautifully clear and simple exposition of what it is to be a human being and an outline of the evolutionary journey on which we are all embarked. If you are looking for a concise and clear explanation of anthroposophy, I don’t think you can do better than to read this book. The photos and illustrations of the first Goetheanum and the artwork inside it are very moving and make one realise what a unique treasure was lost when the arsonist did his work on New Year’s Eve 1922.

It is an extraordinary thing that, just a few days earlier, on 26th December 1922, Rudolf Steiner gave to Edith Maryon a mantric verse that would seem to be a kind of preparation to deal with the shock of what would occur on the last day of the year:

The 9.5 metre high Representative of Humanity wooden model at the Goetheanum.

When human beings discovered the way the world

Dispersed endlessly in atoms

They accepted an understanding of the death of nature:

They should now strive to find in spirit what will overcome

The dead remains, and they will direct their understanding

To world becoming.

By giving Edith Maryon this verse, Steiner was showing to her that in the artistic realm one should not cling to the material aspect, because if one had done the work with the right attitude, one would have created something that is imperishable at the angelic level, a lasting spiritual work of art that will then have eternal existence.

John Wilkes was the founder of the Foundation for Water at Emerson College in the UK, where he did much of the mathematical research that led to the creation of flow forms for revitalising water. But he also was instrumental in the saving and restoration of the wax, plasticine and clay models that had been prepared by Steiner and Maryon for the Representative of Humanity, which had been thrown out (some were even wantonly destroyed, including a bust of Rudolf Steiner) when Edith Maryon’s studio was being cleared out in the 1950s. A little while ago I spoke with John Wilkes’ widow, Alfhild, who, although being understandably reluctant to discuss such a sensitive subject, confirmed that my intuition about Judith von Halle’s previous life was also shared by JvH herself. Interestingly, Alfhild also suggested that JvH, in some of her spiritual research, did not always get things invariably correct, which is a theme that Prokofieff, Meyer et al might agree with.

It is, nevertheless, for her spiritual research that Judith von Halle should be celebrated today. She is able to do work that only a very few anthroposophists are capable of doing, ie genuine spiritual scientific research. I know of only a few such people doing distinguished work in their own fields, for example Susan Raven (nature spirits), Ralf Roessner (bees, the light root) and Iain Trousdell (John Wilkes’ successor at the Foundation for Water). There must be others that I’m unaware of, but they are all precious and we should cherish them.

Von Halle herself has said this about her work:

“I am often criticised—it is the main criticism—that my lectures and books only contain the description of the perceptions, of unreflected-upon visions. But that is not the case. The work of investigating the spiritual world, that is my real activity, and it was also the case before the stigmatisation. Together with the stigmata really came experience of the events in the life of Christ and its historical circumstances, but perceptions of concrete historical situations from other times have also been possible for me since then, such as from the time of the Templars or events from other times and their circumstances. That was an amazing experience. However, what was important was that based on these historical events it was possible for me to spiritually investigate, that is to find out by means of spiritual science why just these historical events happened and their esoteric meaning in the overall cosmic plan. And it should be clear to every anthroposophist that such things cannot be found out through mere perception, but only by working for knowledge of them. And that is the kind of work, namely spiritual research, which I also did previously. It is very important that this be understood, because the same error in judgment of my spiritual activity is repeated again and again in public, at least by those people who judge without having been correctly informed about my work by reading my books. Therefore in every introduction to my [Christological] books I write about this – but it is unfortunately often ignored.”

Asked about how she does her spiritual research, JvH said this (and also gave a clue about herself which I followed up): “An indication of what happens in this respect on a higher plane can be found in Rudolf Steiner’s Class lessons for the members of the Free University for Spiritual Science, especially what he says at the beginning of the 11th lesson”.

This is what Rudolf Steiner said in Dornach on 2nd May 1924, at the beginning of the 11th Lesson:

“My dear Friends! You were probably all deeply affected this morning by the news that Miss Maryon has departed from the physical plane, even though this was an event long expected, coming as it has after a very grave illness lasting for over a year.” (Edith Maryon died from tuberculosis.)

“Tomorrow, when all the members of the Anthroposophical Society are present, I shall tell you what I have to say about Miss Maryon’s departure from the physical plane. For today, let me just mention that the First Class has lost a truly devoted pupil, for Miss Maryon was foremost among those who, with devoted work and inner fervour, have been deeply attached to what it has been giving. Despite her severe illness, she not only participated in the esoteric work being developed here but also practised the exercises given, letting them work on her and living with them with exceptional inwardness.”

“In her case this was all founded on the fact that she was actually already an esoteric pupil when she came to us. She belonged to an esoteric school working in quite a different direction before she made the transition to the Anthroposophical Society, and she very rapidly made the complete transition from that esoteric school into Anthroposophy. For her the esoteric element was what really mattered; she lived very intensely within it during the years she was with us on the physical plane, and will now continue to do so, having departed from the physical plane, though most certainly not from Anthroposophy.”

(…) “My dear friends, in esoteric life the essential thing is that a person should at least see and contemplate the ways and means whereby real knowledge in spiritual things comes about. As to how far the one or other among us will progress in following these pathways – this, admittedly, will depend on his karma. It will depend on the conditions he brings with him from former lives on earth.”

Rudolf Steiner sculpting the figure of Christ for the Representative of Humanity group.

The karmic connections between Rudolf Steiner and Edith Maryon lay across many ages and intensified during their work together on the Representative of Humanity. During the winter of 1916, as recounted by Steiner in his funeral address for Edith Maryon, she had saved him from death or serious injury when he almost fell from the scaffolding in the high ceilinged studio built the previous year to accommodate the 9.5 metre high model of the sculpture: “It was fairly near the start of our sculptural activities at the Goetheanum in Dornach when I had to work in the outer studio, that is in the large front studio, up on the scaffolding next to the figure of Christ in our model. That was the moment when, because of a gap in the scaffolding, I ran the risk of falling off, and I would definitely have fallen with my whole body onto a post with a sharp point if Edith Maryon had not caught hold of me.”

For reason of these deep karmic connections between Steiner and Edith Maryon, I am inclined to think that in her current incarnation as Judith von Halle, the I of her being is in close touch with the great Christian initiate who was Rudolf Steiner. I therefore give high credence to her spiritual research and insights and less credence to the criticisms from people such as Prokofieff, Thomas Meyer and Mieke Mossmuller. I speak as I find, and I find their thoughts overly head-centred and intellectual. I wish they could find their way to the kind of heart-centred thinking towards which all anthroposophists should aspire. Like my second correspondent cited above: “Sometimes I feel that many people wouldn’t recognise Christ if he walked through their front door.”

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December 11, 2020 · 10:49 pm

Walking my anthroposophical talk

In a lecture given on 30th January 1924, Rudolf Steiner spoke of the qualities needed in the people who wished to become members of the First Class of the School of Spiritual Science. Among other comments, he said this:

(…) “it is necessary that everyone who wishes to belong to the Class should ask himself (sic) whether he really intends to be one of those who from the outset will not only stand for the anthroposophical cause before the world but will be a courageous representative of it in every way.”

Steiner recognised that, if you were not only to call yourself an anthroposophist but also to let other people know that you are, it requires courage. Why is this? It is surely because to identify yourself as having belief in a larger reality than that which most people subscribe to, is to invite others to heap scorn, and even hatred, upon you; you have made yourself different from the commonsensical view of the majority in the West and thus you are an offence to their idea of what is true and obvious to all right-thinking people.

But despite this, we are all human beings, struggling with life as best we can, and sharing many more things than those which separate us. So how, while staying true to our beliefs, can we connect with one another in ways which respect our differences?

For making connections with others is at the heart of it. As Justus Wittich, a member of the Vorstand (Executive Committee) at the Goetheanum, wrote in the January 2020 issue of Anthroposophy Worldwide: “The Anthroposophical Society could become a global association of people who stand up individually and courageously for human dignity and for shaping the world out of spiritual insights. The motto we have chosen for this year’s Annual Conference from Rudolf Steiner’s Letters to Members reflects this: ‘Connecting with the world willingly out of love’. “

Yes, I completely support that aspiration, although I wish the Goetheanum could go a bit further in actively putting before the public eye spiritual research about contemporary issues such as Covid-19. If it could make a connection with the wider public, then it might stand a chance of becoming that global association mentioned by Justus Wittich. But here is our dilemma: how, in this age of atheist materialism and disbelief and disparagement of anything that smacks of spirituality, can the anthroposophical movement find its relevance and connect with other points of view? 

As a blogger on anthroposophical themes, I come up against this dilemma quite frequently, because some other people simply have no way of understanding or even tolerating what I am trying to convey about the potential relevance of anthroposophy to all human lives. Here, for example, is a Tweet I received after my recent post on Coercion and the Covid-19 Vaccines: 

Dunning-Kruger compliant drivel excused by #Steiner #anthroposphy barmpottery. Riddled with the usual oft-debunked #antivaxxer tropes. See http://docbastard.net/2019/03/busting-vaccine-myths.html… to counter the scare-mongering on aluminium, formaldehyde, thimerosal (mercury) etc. Oh, and they’re not untested

I didn’t know what the reference to Dunning-Kruger meant so I looked it up: apparently it is a type of cognitive bias in which people believe that they are smarter and more capable than they really are. Essentially, low ability people do not possess the skills needed to recognise their own incompetence. Well, thank you, kind sir.

I also had a look at the docbastard website but don’t recommend you do the same, unless you are unoffended by frequent use of the ‘F’ word and violent, aggressive, sneering language. All I would say is that I don’t think the guy who wrote this is likely to achieve a meeting of minds with low ability people like me.

More representative of different views from my own, as well as better exemplars of civilised discourse, are those such as the Financial Times journalist, to whom I sent a link to my previous post after seeing an article in his newspaper about what he calls ‘Vaccine Hesitancy’. He was kind enough to reply:

“Mr Smith, 

Thanks for writing. I think we have different ideas of freedom. For me freedom is the freedom to go into an office or a restaurant or get into a plane without having to fear that there’s a high risk that someone else in it will give me a dangerous disease, which probably wouldn’t kill me at my age but could severely damage my organs or just give me the worst flu of my life. If you don’t want to be vaccinated, fine. I don’t think the UK govt or any other in the west will force you to. But you shouldn’t expect the freedom to then go around infecting everyone else. I should remind you that childhood vaccinations are compulsory in large numbers of countries and have been so a long time. 

Sorry to disagree, keep well.”

His comment really brings home to me, as if I didn’t know it before, that this whole issue of vaccination presents all of us with a genuine moral dilemma:

  • Should I have the jab as my contribution to the common good and herd immunity?
  • Although I don’t want to have it, do I still go ahead as a kind of sacrifice to the altar of the collective?
  • Or do I decide to stay true to my belief, refuse the jab and be perceived as selfish by others?

I replied as follows:

“Thank you for your reply – I appreciate your taking the time to do this.

I’m not sure that we do have different ideas of freedom, as I, too, would like to be able to enter an office, restaurant or plane without feeling in danger. But even after you have had the jab, you will still be wearing a mask and maintaining social distancing, as the Deputy Chief Medical Officer in England, Jonathan Van-Tam, has indicated in this short YouTube clip:

Second, no-one yet knows whether the jab will give you immunity and if it does, for how long that lasts. Nor do we yet know whether, if you are an asymptomatic spreader, it will prevent you from infecting others.

Third, I don’t expect the freedom to go around infecting everyone else. I am the manager of a small residential care home for adults with learning disabilities and I have to be ultra-cautious; I swab-test myself and colleagues every week and our residents every month; we use PPE and we are scrupulous about hand washing, infection control etc. As workers in a care home, we will be high on the priority list for the new Pfizer vaccine – but neither I nor my colleagues want to have it.

My wife, who is a reflexologist with several GPs and surgeons as clients, tells me that these NHS staff don’t want to have it, either – why do you think these professional medical staff are also reluctant?

Now it may well be that my blog post was not a balanced account, as I was writing it in the white heat of indignation – but if I were to add anything, it would be to say that there are far cheaper and safer ways to protect oneself against Covid-19, ways that can’t be patented and profited from and could be mass-adopted if the government were to advocate them. But that would have made it far longer and probably wouldn’t have made it any less contentious.

Thank you, and all good wishes.”

Reflecting on these exchanges, I am very aware of the gulf that lies between my views and the views of so many other people, as typified by that journalist. If he had taken a look at other posts on this blog, he might well conclude that he was reading examples of the mystical ‘barmpottery’, of which my Twitter correspondent accused me. 

Is there anything else I could say to people who have quite different perspectives from my own, that might help to create more understanding between us? I might say that I would like to know exactly what is being injected into my bloodstream and how it has been created; I could say that the record of Big Pharma over the years has not inspired me with trust in their integrity or moral judgments; I could add that none of the politicians who are exhorting us to have the jab seem to be taking into account what human actions might have created the pandemic in the first place.  I might ask: can we not all see that instead of going back to how the world was before Covid-19, it was that kind of mindset that has brought it towards us? Is that the way we wish to live our lives? Is that what human beings are? 

If I were to say such things, they might get us into a reasonable dialogue; but if I were then to introduce some more esoteric concepts from anthroposophy, for example about what a human being really is, the other person would most likely start to shake their head and write me off as insane.

Even someone as sympathetic to anthroposophy as is Hans van Willenswaard, who brings a Buddhist perspective to his comments on this blog, has questions about the effectiveness of anthroposophy in the world:

“The question, which also now can be applied to the numerous COVID-19 dilemmas, is whether ‘the esoteric’ spiritual science, is more effective in preventing/solving war and crisis than exoteric activism?
What are the lessons we could learn from the failed top-down political threefolding campaign shortly after World War I; and from the ultimate destruction of the First Goetheanum by fire, even though it had survived the war thanks to its position in ‘neutral’ Switzerland?
Can anthroposophy be effective vis-a-vis the COVID-19 crisis (+ climate emergency; + economic downturn; + painful inequality; + technocratic authoritarianism and + social/cultural divisions) if we are not better able to integrate the esoteric with the exoteric and shape the movement beyond the anthroposophic ‘silo’?

My answers to these questions, in the same order in which Hans asked them, are as follows:

1. Does ‘exoteric activism’ actually prevent or solve wars? For example, did Woodrow Wilson’s League of Nations, set up after the 1914-18 war, prevent the 1939-45 war? Obviously not. Has the United Nations prevented any wars since 1945? I can’t think of any. Can anyone point to examples of exoteric activism which have averted war? Probably not, although one could argue that organisations like Greenpeace, Friends of the Earth, Medecins Sans Frontieres etc have been effective in galvanising public opinion for change – but it’s not fair to contrast this with spiritual science, whose role is entirely different from that of activist organisations.

2. Spiritual impulses, important though it may be that they are brought forward at a particular time, do not necessarily find fertile ground for their reception. This was true for threefolding and perhaps it was generally true for anthroposophy as well, given that Steiner’s ambitions for anthroposophy have to this day not been realised. Does this mean that these impulses should not have been introduced to the world? Absolutely not, because the results, although fewer than Steiner might have wanted, have been nevertheless totally worthwhile and are still capable of engendering new possibilities and worthwhile initiatives into the world – and we don’t know what these seeds sown in the last century might yet bring forth in the future.

3. Because the insights of spiritual science are not yet shared by a critical mass of human beings, humanity continues to create difficult karma for itself; and as with the Covid-19 vaccines, it chases after ‘solutions’ that miss the point and perpetuate in different ways the mistakes that led to the original crisis. What I’m not clear about is whether the ‘critical mass’ that will make the difference could be (a) a small number of people acting as a kind of homeopathic dose within the body of humanity; or (b) whether it really is a question of vast numbers of people being brought to a point of total crisis before real change can happen. I fear that (b) is the more likely option, but I hope I’m wrong – and in any case I choose to be in (a).

To bring this discussion back to the personal, how can I stand in the world as an anthroposophical blogger and communicate as such with other people without it ending up in complete deadlock and misunderstanding?

Here, I think, we cannot do without Rudolf Steiner’s concept of the Twelve World Views, as expressed in his book The Philosophy of Freedom. Steiner contends that truth is expressed in twelve different ways, each one of which has its own justification – which in turn means that someone with whom you have a serious disagreement may just be looking at a different and perhaps equally valid part of the truth. There is an excellent exposition of this here. Do please have a look and try to identify which is your own predominant world view. 

So, if my truth and your truth are both facets of a much larger truth, and if we can both acknowledge that that is a possibility, we ought to be able to find ways to avoid falling-out over who is right and who is wrong. This is surely one of the greatest challenges facing human evolution, because people who are convinced that they are right and everyone else is wrong will continue to perpetuate division – and are ultimately capable of going to war to impose their truth on others.

We are currently in the grip of a pandemic which has put fear into millions of people. Responsibility for dealing with this is being given over to forces beyond our control. If we can but realise it, we have the opportunity at this time to make significant changes through our own resolve and will forces. As an anthroposophist, I believe that I was born into this world so that I could be in physical incarnation at this time of trial, because it is only here on Earth that certain things can be achieved. What is it that I need to do at this time? Surely it is to develop, out of my own free will, a renewed capacity for love – love for myself, love for others and for all creation. Love that can be shared with others and that can bring healing to this Earth, at all levels of existence.

As Rudolf Steiner put it in his lecture “Love and Its Meaning in the World”:

“Our egoism gains nothing from deeds of love — but the world (gains) all the more. Occultism says: Love is for the world what the sun is for external life. No soul could thrive if love departed from the world. Love is the “moral” sun of the world. Would it not be absurd if a man who delights in the flowers growing in a meadow were to wish that the sun would vanish from the world? Translated into terms of the moral life, this means: Our deep concern must be that an impulse for sound, healthy development shall find its way into the affairs of humanity. To disseminate love over the earth in the greatest measure possible, to promote love on the earth — that and that alone is wisdom.”

Can I find that wisdom and live my words?

If I and others who have similar views are not able to rise to this occasion, this enormous opportunity for a better future direction, then surely we will continue to experience, with everyone else, each of the coming crises resulting from the shared karma of humanity.

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December 1, 2020 · 7:49 pm

Coercion and the Covid-19 Vaccines

Are you keen to be among the first people to try out one of the new Covid-19 vaccines? Or would you prefer to wait and see how these vaccines affect the ‘early adopters’ before deciding? 

Well, you may not be allowed the choice to hang back. We are seeing the beginnings of a campaign that will threaten to make life so difficult for anyone who doesn’t agree to be vaccinated that it amounts to making it compulsory.

The signs are all about us: Quantas (the Australian national airline) warned this week that it expects to allow only passengers who can prove they have been vaccinated onto international flights. 

In the USA, the New York State Bar Association passed a resolution urging the state to consider enforcing mandatory COVID-19 vaccination. The group’s task force on COVID-19 said people should be made to have the vaccine, even if they object for “religious, philosophical or personal reasons.”

Meanwhile in England, Matt Hancock (Secretary of State for Health) has refused to rule out making a coronavirus vaccine mandatory, suggesting ministers could make it a requirement if initial take-up is lower than expected. The Health Secretary said the Government was not “proposing” a legal requirement for people to be vaccinated because some would be unable to have a jab due to medical reasons – but he added he has “learnt not to rule things out”. 

Professor Julian Savulescu, whom I have had cause to mention here before in connection with his advocacy of eugenics, has described an algorithm for justified mandatory vaccination. He says that penalties or costs could be imposed on people who refuse the vaccine, including withholding of benefits, imposition of fines, provision of community service or loss of freedoms. He also argues that people “should be paid to do the right thing”, eg parents should be paid for getting their children to be immunised or workers should be paid for having the jab. This doesn’t strike me as a very ethically sound proposition from the holder of the Uehiro Chair in Practical Ethics at the University of Oxford.

Fresh from culling 17 million mink, on Tuesday 17 November the Danish government finished considering a new law giving itself extended powers to respond to epidemics. Parts of this law propose that:

  • People infected with dangerous diseases can be forcibly given medical examination, hospitalised, treated and placed in isolation.
  • The Danish Health Authority would be able to define groups of people who must be vaccinated in order to contain and eliminate a dangerous disease.
  • People who refuse the above can – in some situations – be coerced through physical detainment, with police allowed to assist.

While here in the UK, according to an article by Rosalind English on the UK Human Rights Blog: 

“In July 2020 a group of philosophy and law academics presented written evidence to Parliament proposing that individuals should undergo vaccination as a condition of release from pandemic-related restrictions on liberty, including on movement and association. The authors of the report base this proposal on two “parity arguments”:

a. If Covid-19 ‘lockdown’ measures are compatible with human rights law, then it is arguable that compulsory vaccination is too (lockdown parity argument);
b. If compulsory medical treatment under mental health law for personal and public protection purposes is compatible with human rights law, then it is arguable that compulsory vaccination is too (mental health parity argument).

They contend that there is “an arguable case” for the compatibility of compulsory vaccination with human rights law.”

Well, one can always rely on academics and philosophers to find arguments in support of tyranny; but in England, medical treatment without consent, including vaccination, is prohibited by the criminal law on assault, which could even be construed as grievous bodily harm if the consequences of the treatment are serious.

So, knowing this, it seems likely that the government will be instead relying on pressure exerted by all those organisations with whom we normally interact, such as shops, pubs, restaurants, health centres, airlines, sporting venues, theatres, etc, to act for them by disrupting the lives of anyone who has doubts about being vaccinated. 

As John Gapper in the Financial Times of 28/29th November put it in an article headlined ‘Those who are inoculated deserve more freedom’:

“…governments that do not make vaccination compulsory themselves will be tacitly relying on companies and organisations to do it for them. It will force the latter to make unpopular decisions but they should be allowed, even encouraged, to protect customers and employees from harm.” 

Gapper speculates that: “Offices and public venues may scan mobile phone apps that link the proof of vaccination or a negative test to digital identities before letting people in. National passports are only needed occasionally for travel, but ‘immunity passports’ could intrude into everyday lives.”

It’s therefore clear that in the near future, if we want to enter shops, drink in a pub or have a meal in a restaurant, attend a sporting event, see a play or concert, go to work in an office, visit a doctor or hospital, travel abroad via ship or plane or even just get on a train or bus, then we will have to have the jab – or normal life cannot be carried on. 

This now seems to be deliberate government strategy. Nadhim Zahawi, who on 28th November was appointed by Boris Johnson as Minister for Covid-19 Vaccine Deployment at the Department of Health & Social Care, confirmed in a radio interview on 30th November that it will become virtually impossible to lead a normal life if you don’t have the vaccination. He warned that many businesses were likely to require proof of the jabs once they become available, in the same way they now ask customers to check-in using QR codes. He admitted ministers were looking at so-called ‘immunity passports’ on the NHS Covid-19 app as a way to provide evidence of vaccination. Asked if that meant people who did not have a vaccination would be severely restricted in what they could do, the minister said: ‘I think people have to make a decision.”

Yet despite the threats of punitive action, governments around the world are clearly worried that not many people will want to get vaccinated. Simon Kuper in the FT Magazine reports that between 43 and 50 per cent of the French populace say that they will probably or certainly refuse the vaccine. And here in the UK, a survey by market research company Kantar at the end of November found that 75 per cent of people in the UK were “likely” to accept a jab. But only 42 per cent said they would definitely do so, and “the hesitancy is growing”.

To try to counter such scepticism, the government and the NHS in England are drawing up expensive PR campaigns. According to The Guardian:

NHS bosses plan to enlist celebrities and “influencers” with big social media followings in a major campaign to persuade people to have a Covid vaccine amid fears of low take-up.

Ministers and NHS England are drawing up a list of “very sensible” famous faces in the hope that their advice to get immunised would be widely trusted, the Guardian has learned. 

Health chiefs are particularly worried about the number of people who are still undecided, and about vaccine scepticism among NHS staff. “There will be a big national campaign [to drive take-up,” said one source with knowledge of the plans. “NHS England are looking for famous faces, people who are known and loved. It could be celebrities who are very sensible and have done sensible stuff during the pandemic.”

This issue has a personal resonance for me, as I am one of those people who does not want to have the jab. There are many reasons why but here are just a few of them:

  • When I was 21 and wanted to visit the USA, it was mandatory to have a smallpox injection. It was fairly brutal to receive and was far from perfect; I had side effects serious enough to keep me off work for a week and I still have a small round scar from it on my upper arm. On the plus side, smallpox as a disease has now been eliminated around the world.
  • The smallpox vaccine had been around for many years but the new Covid-19 vaccines are being rushed out without the normal routine of tests. Leaving aside the dispiriting spectacle of crony capitalists rushing to make fat profits from vaccination, as well as Judith von Halle’s eminently sensible observation that “Humanity’s way of thinking has become so corrupt that it can no longer even realise how absurd it is that production of medicines is subject to financial interests,” we should note that Big Pharma has been given blanket immunity by health policymakers around the world. In order to get drug manufacturers to invest in research and development, it seems necessary to allow them complete freedom from accountability – so that they can’t be sued when people are hurt by their vaccines. This is a dream come true for drug company executives – billions of dollars are being funnelled their way, prototype vaccines are being pushed past administrative red tape and over licensing hurdles and clinical trials are being fast-tracked – but when one of these vaccines arrives, remember that if anything goes wrong, you will not be able to sue for any side effect, known or unknown.
  • Dozens of new prototypes for vaccines are being trialled and among these are some which use techniques that have never been tried before. I don’t pretend to understand what Messenger RNA is, for example, but Bill Gates, (who has invested $10 billion dollars in global vaccines over the past two decades and has said that he expects to get a 20-fold return on his money), thinks mRNA as being produced by Moderna will be a winner “because it’s much faster to manufacture” and “you essentially turn your body into its own vaccine manufacturing unit.” There is a catch, though, Gates added. “We don’t know for sure yet if RNA is a viable platform for vaccines. Since Covid would be the first RNA vaccine out of the gate, we have to prove both that the platform itself works and that it creates immunity. It’s a bit like building your computer system and your first piece of software at the same time.” 1 Oh dear – anyone who has memories of Bill Gates’ early Microsoft operating systems such as MS-DOS will not be reassured by that analogy.
  • We have no idea for how long these vaccines will provide immunity. I was ill last February with what I suspect was Covid-19 but at that time there was no test I could get hold of to determine it. By the time I was able to get an antigen test kit eight months’ later, I had no antibodies and the test was negative. Anecdotal and speculative, I know, but it made me think that any immunity I might have had after the illness will have lasted no more than six or seven months. Will the vaccine do any better – or will you need to have an injection every six months?
  • I’m worried about what these vaccines might contain and whether we will ever know the full list of ingredients. We do know that they are much more than just a virus in a saline solution with the worst bits of it taken out. They contain ‘adjuvants’ (an adjuvant is a pharmacological or immunological agent that improves the immune response of a vaccine). Adjuvants are added to a vaccine to boost the immune response to produce more antibodies and longer-lasting immunity, thus minimising the dose of antigen needed. That sounds sensible, until you realise that these immune system stimulants include adjuvants like aluminium; preservatives like thimerosal (which contains mercury) and formaldehyde; antibiotics like neomycin and a wide range of ‘excipient’ ingredients (ie that bulk up or stabilise the active ingredient). These excipients can include DNA from whatever cells have been used to amplify the virus in manufacturing production – and in some vaccines these have been cultured from aborted human foetuses, or dogs, monkeys, insects and more. 2
  • It’s known that at least six Covid vaccines, including two leading candidates from Moderna and Oxford University, are manufactured using human embryonic kidney cells (HEK-293 cells) drawn from a baby aborted in 1972 and since multiplied millions of times over. Johnson & Johnson’s Covid vaccine is being developed with their patented Per.C6 cells, retinal cells taken from the eyes of a baby aborted at 18 weeks.3 How do you like the idea of that being injected into your arm?

Vaccines are not yet mandatory in the UK, and the government’s own guidelines on vaccinations say individuals “must be given enough information to enable them to make a decision before they can give consent.” The information I have so far discovered has enabled me to decide that I do not want to give consent. How about you?

1. The Vaccine Race, Explained. www.gatesnotes.com April 30, 2020

2. US Centers for Disease Control, Vaccine Excipient Summary, February 2020

3. Vaccine, 2001; 19:2716-21

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