The MysTech online conference on the theme of ‘Facing the Incarnation of Ahriman’ was held from 7th to 10th August 2025. Organised by Andrew Linnell and his colleagues, it offered an impressive range of talks by some excellent speakers. I was not able to listen to all sixteen speakers, but I did manage to hear presentations from: Inessa Burdich, Harrie Salman, Bastiaan Baan, Benjamin Cherry, Adriana Koulias, Doug Smith, Florian Sydow, Robert McKay, Are Thoresen and Andrew Linnell. The text of my own talk is given below.
In a lecture given in Dornach on 18th November 1917, Rudolf Steiner said: “What people in our epoch must learn is the need to wage a fully conscious fight against the evil that is making its way into human evolution.”
The epoch to which Steiner was referring is our present stage of human development which he called the Age of the Consciousness Soul, or the fifth post-Atlantean epoch. This has been with us since the early 15th century and it will last for around 2,200 years, ending approximately in the year 3600 of our present era. Steiner tells us that, since the beginning of this Age, the propensity for evil lies in the subconscious of every person, and that there is no crime, however dreadful, that each one of us, as people of this epoch, does not have the potential to commit. Paradoxically, confronting this reality is the only way that we can solve the riddle of evil, which is the most important task of our age.
The existence of evil is also, of course, a powerful reason why many people say they do not believe in God, for how can a god of love who is omnipotent, omniscient and omnipresent allow evil phenomena to exist? Yet initiates tell us that God has two aspects, which when understood and viewed correctly, enable us to see the purpose of evil. Evil can be seen as the unevolved and undeveloped aspect of life, the force which tests us and absorbs and removes that which is unwanted.
So this is the scale of the challenge each of us is facing in this very difficult period in human physical existence. Anthroposophists characterise our present time as one in which we shall see the actual incarnation of the great dark archangel, Ahriman. Ahriman could be defined as the power which prevents man in his physical-sense world existence from perceiving the spiritual-soul beings lying behind the surface of our physical world – but Ahriman is also an actual being, whose incarnation in physical form is imminent. This will be the last of three unique incarnations of which Steiner spoke – the first was the incarnation of Lucifer in about 3000 BCE (believed by many to have been as the Yellow Emperor in China, he of the terracotta army); the second was the incarnation of Christ in Palestine two thousand years ago; and the third will be the incarnation of Ahriman, which to quote Steiner will take place “before only a part of the third millennium of the post-Christian era has elapsed”, probably in the USA. Each of these incarnations is prepared for many years, indeed centuries, in advance, and we can see quite clearly already the kind of evil influences that the future Ahrimanic incarnation is bringing to bear upon our human societies.
In my view, the past one hundred and fifty years has been the most terrible period in the whole of human history and the evil is worsening and intensifying as we approach the actual incarnation. Some of the notable characteristics of what is happening across the world right now include:
A huge increase in personal stress levels
A loss of faith or confidence in governments and public institutions of all kinds, both nationally and internationally
Rancour and divisions between families, friends and colleagues, with irreconcilable positions taken on issues of the day
A collapse of the systems on which we all rely, including the international rules-based order
The gradual disappearance of many of the old certainties on which society is based.
For anthroposophists, these social phenomena indicate that what is happening is Ahrimanic, clear signs of the impending incarnation of the being that Christ called the ‘ruler of this world’. Wherever we look, we see many examples which are indicative of this and perhaps even of the actual incarnation itself. The signs are all around us, and you don’t need me to list them. We are all aware of the ever-increasing range of threats which confront humanity and the entire web of life.
For me, the Covid pandemic has been one of the most significant of the Ahrimanic phenomena. Covid is a viral disease, which means that it is mineral in nature and does not have its own life processes and therefore needs a host organism so it can reproduce itself. But it also has astonishing intelligence, for example in the resistance it can develop to medicines, or in the way it can mutate, partly in response to vaccinations. But I can’t help asking, where does this astonishing intelligence live? In what being does this intelligence reside?
Second, the Covid pandemic produced fear, much of it stoked by deliberate government policy, as well as anxiety and division between people, even within families. It also led governments to dismantle existing civil liberties with an ease that they had not expected to find in Western democracies. It became impossible to have a fruitful exchange of views between those taking different standpoints and we saw instead heightened emotions, rejection and hatred of other people’s opinions. This process was driven even further by our news outlets and social media, who censored the views of anyone, even distinguished professors of medicine, whose expert opinion did not fit the official line. Again, one must ask: whose interests are being served by this fracturing of social cohesion?
Such attitudes have also radiated out into wider society, causing dissension between ordinary people. We see it internationally and we see it also in our national lives, with both the USA and the UK having more divided societies than ever before. And during Covid we also began to see discord and division growing in our localities. Here are just two examples of these polarised attitudes from the time of Covid, from my own local community: the first one was told to me by a woman who has a mother in a care home. This woman did not want to have the jabs and was told that as a result not only would she not be able to visit her mother but that unless she had both jabs her mother would no longer be able to stay in the care home! The second comes from someone who runs a kindergarten, who at the height of the pandemic was told by some parents that if she herself had the jabs, then they would remove their children from the kindergarten. Tyranny runs in both directions… Such unkindness and the breaking-down of relationships are characteristic of the impending incarnation.
When contemplating a theme as weighty as the incarnation of Ahriman, it is helpful to have in our minds a picture of ourselves as human beings and our current evolutionary progress. For we are undoubtedly at a significant point of change and our evolution can go either in the way intended by the spiritual hierarchies or else in the direction wished for and worked towards by Ahriman and his helpers. The issue is still in the balance and the outcome depends on each one of us.
Anthroposophy teaches us that we human beings are engaged on a path of development that leads us to ever higher levels of consciousness and existence. And it’s clear today that we are at a critical point along that path. What we are now being called upon to do is to connect and work with our higher spiritual self, which everyone of us has and which Steiner calls the ‘I ‘or higher ego: the image of God, our true nature, which is within each of us.
It is particularly confusing for us at this time that there are three processes going on simultaneously, some of which are cause for despair and others which are as, Ita Wegman said in another context, “full of future”.
The first process is that we are coming to the end of the old path of development, which brought widespread prosperity and progress; but which also increasingly led us to materialism, selfishness, greed and disconnection from the environment and the spiritual world, and hence to the multiple crises facing us. It is the breaking-down of this first process which we tend to see reflected in our news media. That is also the aspect which Ahriman and his helpers want us to focus on because it induces great fear in us. This old developmental stage made us become who we are today: independent personalities with an ‘I‘ and self-consciousness. But now that humanity has accomplished this developmental stage, the old path is breaking up and is slowly coming to an end amidst chaos and confusion, which increases the fear and uncertainty felt by so many people.
The second process is that a new way of being is seeking to be born, as the old is breaking down all around us. This is occurring as people ask themselves questions on their life paths, search for answers, go through processes of change and, as a result, perceive, think, and do things differently. This new kind of consciousness, arising as it does from inner transformation, is happening everywhere and can be recognised worldwide. It is leading to the emergence of a new culture in which people connect to their feelings, think about what they believe, make conscious choices, know what values they stand for, and consciously interact and cooperate with other people and with nature. It is those who can ride the wave of this change who are creating the new culture.
The third process is about building new ways of being. Instead of an attitude of competition and rivalry, opposing and fighting each other, people are increasingly seeking connection and cooperation. Instead of blindly obeying an authority outside our self, we would rather trust our own authority, our own inner knowing. This is accompanied by a shift of perception from separateness to wholeness – the recognition that we are connected to the greater whole in all aspects of life and reality, our humanity, the earth, the cosmos, everything that lives. There is an increasing realisation that everything is dependent on everything else.
One way of looking at this might be to say that humanity has lived in a state of adolescence for two thousand years. Now it is time for us to grow up, become true adults and work for unity and understanding throughout the world. We have progressed in our intelligence and our mastery of scientific discoveries but our capacities for wisdom and love have not progressed to the same extent. We have uncovered the workings of the laws that govern Nature without being sufficiently attuned to the Cosmic Law as it is reflected in Nature; and have thus brought ourselves ever closer to destruction.
In this MysTech conference we are considering the role of Ahriman but we should also consider other adversary forces. Steiner spoke about another spiritual entity, an opposing principle to the Lamb of Christ, that he calls the ‘Sun Demon’ or ‘Sorat’. It is this being, the adversary of the Lamb, who is literally the anti-Christ. It is an open question for me as to how much Sorat, and his demonic helpers, the Asuras, have been behind the work of Ahriman during the last century and a half. Whereas Ahriman’s aim is to lead us into an ever-intensifying form of brain-bound, earth-bound materialistic thinking, and Lucifer’s is to tempt us into disembodied fantasy and to believing that we are gods, the aim of Sorat the Antichrist, the Sun Demon, is to destroy the human ‘I’ (the Self, the bearer of the Christ principle or the indwelling divinity in the human being), to drag us towards the so-called Eighth Sphere and to destroy the Earth itself, which our ‘I’ needs for the future development of the human soul. Yes, we and the Earth need each other for our evolutionary paths. Climate change, war, the sixth great extinction, genocide, materialism, racism, and transhumanism – these are all facets of attacks from the same enemy. This is the true scale of the battle with which we are now engaged.
A quick explanation about the expression just used, the Eighth Sphere. Anthroposophy teaches us that humankind in its total evolution from the very beginning to the end of time must pass through seven planetary spheres, which correspond to our seven bodies, which are members or aspects of our being. We are currently in the Fourth Sphere, which is our dear planet Earth and which corresponds to our ‘I’ or higher ego, the individuality which we take with us from incarnation to incarnation. Over aeons we have already lived through the first three spheres which are: Saturn, which corresponds to the physical body; the Sun, which corresponds to the etheric body; and the Moon which corresponds with the astral body. There are three further bodies which we have within ourselves as potential for future development, that is to say Spirit Self, Life Spirit and Spirit Man. (You can read more about these seven bodies or members of the human constitution in Steiner’s book Outline of Esoteric Science.) The adversarial forces are working together to try to divert us from our natural evolutionary progress through the seven planetary spheres, and to take us instead into the Eighth Sphere. If they are successful in this, it means that we would be unable to progress with evolution, nor have the possibility of the encounter with Christ, but instead we would be thrown back to a lower level. Both Ahriman and the Asuras work from the Eighth Sphere. This is the realm which the religions call Hell.
Steiner says that in their will to evil and in their fullness of power, the Asuras surpass both the Luciferic and the Ahrimanic beings:
“The Asuras – the evil ones – are beings who are again one degree higher in their will to evil than the ahrimanic beings and two degrees higher than the luciferic ones.“
“These are the beings who strive towards the Eighth Sphere. They want to compress matter more and more, so that it cannot be spiritualised again, i.e. returned to its original state. They want to drag human beings down into the Eighth Sphere and thus snatch us away from progressive development and its goal – the Christ.“
And alongside this, we are also facing the challenges brought to us by transhumanism. Many scientists, technologists and engineers are working on the development of these concepts, which in a nutshell are designed to transcend human limitations through technological interventions within the human body. Targeted genetic, neurotechnological, prosthetic and pharmacological interventions are meant to optimize our bodies, feelings and brain and broaden them so that biologically programmed human limitations, such as sickness, ageing and death can be overcome and ultimately left behind. Andrew Linnell, our conference organiser, and several other of our speakers, specialise in these matters and I am hoping they will have more to say about them during this weekend. (They did!)
A prominent figure in all of this is Ray Kurzweil, Google’s former futurologist, who is a leading computer scientist and inventor. His prediction, made in his book The Singularity is Near, is that we human beings will become more godlike as we become more machine-like and as machines develop more god-like powers. Kurzweil says that we humans are nothing special in the animal kingdom: we have no immortal soul, there is no essential human self and our thoughts and emotions are the product of electrochemical impulses which can in the future be modelled by algorithms. Our future lies in the hands of technologists, people who are experts in biotechnology, artificial intelligence, cognitive and computer science. Their work will produce new tools that will become parts of our bodies. We will have bionic hands, feet and eyes, while nanorobots will move through our bloodstream looking out for disease and repairing the damage of age and injury. We shall have wearable and implanted devices to expand our senses and alter our moods, while biological tools will enter our cells, remodel our genes and give us new and better flesh, blood and neurons.
it is clear that Kurzweil, who is a highly intelligent man, is nevertheless one of the Useful Idiots preparing the way for Ahriman. As part-evidence for my statement that Kurzweil is an idiot, it should be noted that he has joined the Alcor Life Extension Foundation, a cryonics company. In the event of his death, Kurzweil plans for his corpse to be perfused with cryoprotectants, vitrified in liquid nitrogen, and stored at an Alcor facility in the hope that future medical technology will be able to repair his tissues and revive him. If only he had studied Steiner, he’d know that his consciousness is already immortal and he could have saved himself $200,000!
But it does seem quite possible that those of us alive today are likely to be the last generation of pure human beings that the world will know. Within a single generation the transhumanists intend that we will become a hybrid species of biological and synthetic bodies. Ray Kurzweil says: “Some people find this frightening. But [The Singularity] is going to be beautiful and will expand our consciousness in ways we can barely imagine, like a person who is deaf hearing the most exquisite symphony for the first time.” But it’s surely also possible that these developments will limit our ability to think, to love, to adapt to the conditions of the emerging world in a healthy way. Behind all this is Ahriman, who wants us to lose our capacity for emotion, empathy, intimacy and forgiveness – the very qualities that we value and cherish in our humanness.
The historian of humankind, Yuval Noah Harari, also points to a near future in which “people will no longer regard themselves as autonomous beings who follow their own wishes according to their life, but rather as a collection of biochemical mechanisms that are constantly monitored and directed by a network of electronic algorithms”. He says that “Humans, giraffes, viruses are all algorithms. They differ from computers in so far as they are biochemical algorithms which have evolved at the caprice of natural selection over millennia.” “The individual authentic self is no more real than the immortal Christian soul, Santa Claus or the Easter bunny.” As a not entirely humorous aside, my wife has a fear that in the future those of us who refuse to be microchipped or to accept technological improvements to our bodies will be forced by the rest of society to live in nature reserves where we can be visited and observed as quaint throwbacks by the medically enhanced ‘normal’ people, as a kind of millennium seedbank of the human genome.
Do all these phenomena mean that Ahriman has already incarnated? Rudolf Steiner predicted that Ahriman would incarnate in the flesh in the first part of the third millennium in which we are now living. The details of how, when and in whom this incarnation would happen have of course been the subject of much speculation since Steiner spoke about this over one hundred years ago. Steiner also said at a meeting with young people in Breslau that Ahriman will do everything in his power to advance the moment of his incarnation as much as he can. Steiner then mentions the year 1998, which for anyone interested in numerology is 666 multiplied by 3.
My own view is that, rather in the way that the incarnation of Jesus Christ was preceded for around 500 years by all kinds of what might be called precursor indications, the various phenomena we are seeing now are also indications of what is heading our way. At present, I don’t see any convincing candidates for the role of Ahriman, despite strong competition among current world leaders, so even if Ahriman is now here in a physical body, he has not yet assumed the prominence we might expect.
For how long will these evil times last? Here is a quotation from the great Bulgarian master, Beinsa Douno, also known as Peter Deunov (1864 – 1944), who was a contemporary of Steiner – they had a high regard for one another. This excerpt comes from a talk with his followers during the 1920s, and it still seems highly relevant to our situation now:
“The ‘end of the world’ manifests itself through the cleansing of the old humanity, so that a new humanity can come in that place. This cleansing (…) has been carried out for a period of 45 years. This period began in 1900 and will end in 1945. You are all eyewitnesses to what happened during this period.”
“From 1945 will begin another period, which will also last 45 years until 1990. Such times come and such power comes, that whoever opposes it will lay his bones on the ground. A great dictatorship ensues (…) “
“After this period there will be a short break until 1999 (…). And then a new period will come, with an even more terrible dictatorship (…). It will also last 45 years.”
That takes us to the year 2044. So, if Peter Deunov is correct, we can expect around another twenty years where these Ahrimanic phenomena will intensify and worsen, years which will perhaps include the actual incarnation.
Steiner did not specify what exactly Ahriman would do on earth, and what sort of person he might be in the flesh. But in a lecture given in Bern on 4th November 1919, he said that during his incarnation, Ahriman would seek “to utterly mislead and corrupt humanity on earth.” He also said in 1922: “And what is it that these Ahrimanic beings are seeking to bring about? They set themselves the task of keeping man on the Earth by every possible means. You know from the book Occult Science that the Earth will one day pass over into the Jupiter condition. That is what these beings want to prevent. They want to prevent man from developing in a regular way together with the Earth and then passing over into the Jupiter condition in a normal way. They want to preserve the Earth as Earth and mankind for the Earth. Hence these beings work unceasingly and with great intensity to achieve their purpose.”
But Steiner also says repeatedly in the lectures that this incarnation could not and should not be averted. It has to happen and, in the right conditions, might even benefit human evolution. The really important thing is that people should be sufficiently awake to recognise Ahriman for what he is. Only if Ahriman were to go unrecognised would this event be wholly calamitous for the evolution of the earth and humanity.
There’s no doubt that Ahriman has an easier task than one could wish. He finds it easy to persuade humans to give up their future to him, because Ahriman can work through the seat of human desires – our pride, greed, laziness, lust or wish for power – but Christ can only reach us through our ‘I’ or higher self and this means that the struggle is not an equal one. Our ‘I’ has so to develop that it can in time learn to recognise and resist the many temptations offered by Lucifer and Ahriman. These two adversarial forces work as allies at the present time, even though they appeal to different instincts in us. The way to deal with these two poles of Evil is to seek the point of balance between them, which is represented by Christ.
One has to recognise, however, that the behaviour over centuries of some Christians, some churches and some supposedly Christian nations has combined to make the name ‘Jesus Christ’ distasteful to many people today. This is another area where Ahriman has been working effectively.
To quote from the very useful AnthroWiki website, “Jesus Christ is the name for the unique and singular earthly embodiment of the Christ in the body of Jesus of Nazareth. According to Steiner’s research, this incarnation began with the baptism in the Jordan River, which occurred around the 30th year of Jesus’ life, and was completed with his death on Golgotha”.
“Through the Mystery of Golgotha, the Christ Power, which originally worked from the Sun, united with the Earth. This is a spiritual fact that stands above all denominational religious confessions and is also not bound to the name ‘Christ’ that is in common use among us”. As Steiner emphasised: ‘Never will he who recognises the Christ-being insist that the name of the Christ remain.’ ” In other words, we shouldn’t get upset if other people use a different term for the universal fact of Christ. And Steiner has made the stupendous statement that “the ‘I’ in human beings is microcosmically the same as Christ is macrocosmically for the world.”
Just lately I have been reading Travels on the Northern Path of Initiation by the anthroposophical writer and seer, Are Thoresen, in which he offers an intriguing update on Steiner’s descriptions of Ahriman’s incarnation. Thoresen is in supersensible contact with the Nordic angelic being Vidar, whom he describes as continuing the work of Michael as an Archangel, and who is the outer and shining aura of Christ himself. Thoresen asked Vidar about the future incarnation of Ahriman. To quote from the book:
“Vidar’s answer was clear and simple, and as I slowly pondered this it made more and more sense. He said that Ahriman was already in the process of incarnating, at this very time, but he is incarnating in all of us, with the help – or by being given cover by – the asuric beings. It is extremely important to understand this.” Are Thoresen is one of the speakers who will be taking part in this conference so I’m hoping that he will be saying more about all of this during this weekend. (No, he spoke instead about ways of entering the spiritual worlds.)
And whether you agree with Steiner or Thoresen or even with neither of them, one real challenge of these times is how to get through them without succumbing to despair. For me, the pain consists in seeing what is happening and realising that the vast majority of our fellow human beings, although they know that we are living in a very troubled world, are oblivious to what is really going on. And what is really going on, to borrow the title of a book by Bernard Lievegoed, is The Battle for the Soul. According to Lievegoed, because the human spirit is unassailable, the opposing powers therefore direct their efforts against the soul. The human soul is the real battlefield of the war between the powers of good and evil. What the Ahrimanic powers are attempting is to obscure the human soul or even to destroy it, so that the human ‘I’ is unable to gain the experience it needs on Earth for its healthy evolution.
Ahriman is also working very hard to ensure that we humans are unaware of the second coming of Christ, which according to Rudolf Steiner will not be a physical incarnation this time around. That was done once and for all 2000 years ago and will not be repeated. Steiner says that since about 1933, the Christ has been available to human beings in the etheric field and that more and more of us will be able to have the experience of an encounter with Christ. We know how Ahriman dealt with this threat in 1933, by assisting the rise of Hitler to power in Germany, thus creating more assaults on the human soul that diverted us from awareness of what was happening in the etheric realm. By keeping the eyes of most of humanity fixed firmly on the material world, and completely unaware of any other reality, Ahriman has kept knowledge of the second coming from our souls.
Why is it that we have come to this particular crisis in our time? After all, humans have been killing one another and behaving with utter selfishness and greed for centuries. What has made the difference now? Why has there been this intensification, a kind of industrialisation, of the scale of evil on this Earth? And how can we wake up to what is really going on and begin to counteract “the evil that is making its way into human evolution”?
This relates to what Steiner called “the war in heaven” that took place over the period 1840 to 1879 between the Archangel Michael and the dark angels. Since that time, when Michael cast out these dark forces from heaven and into the earth, these adversarial powers have been working within the blood and nervous systems of human beings in an attempt to reverse both human and angelic evolution. It is no coincidence that since the fall to earth of these dark angels, humanity is being forced to endure what I have already called the most terrible one hundred and fifty years in the whole of human history.
But we should also bear in mind that at this time, in this 21st century, all signs point towards the emergence of a new world amidst the old, dying world. That new world originates not from outside our selves but from the inner life of us humans. It is derived from the divine core that lives and works inside every individual human soul. This means that the development of every individual on earth is of the utmost importance.
And what looks right now as though the triumph of Ahriman is a foregone conclusion, may not be quite as strong and solid as it appears, because as we know from the past, despite many victories in battle along the way, in the end Ahriman always loses the war. I suspect he will lose this time as well because there is a resilience in human life and the natural world which, when allied with the love of Christ and our innate capacities for empathy, compassion and kindness, give certainty that truth and real human values will outlast and survive the worst that can be done to us, or that we can do to ourselves.
But in the meantime, how can we counter Ahriman and find the strength and resilience to live through these terrible times? We can hope that increasing numbers of people will discover what it truly is to be a human being; that is to say, we humans are beings with one foot in the material world and another in the spiritual world; that spiritual world to which we return between earthly lives and which is our real home. Here on Earth, we have something which is not available to us in the spiritual world – and that is the privilege and the challenge of free will, something which allows us to experience both the good and the bad sides of our natures over many lives and through this process to grow and evolve in freedom through our own decisions.
In a way, we should be grateful to the Ahrimanic beings who, in this spiritual evolutionary process play an essential part. Not only are they instrumental in the forming of the human being’s constitution in all its beauty and darkness, but they also play an important role in bringing us face-to-face with the consequences of our actions and decisions and hence also the forming of our destiny and karma.
It is all too easy to feel that the struggle is hopeless. Whenever I am feeling overwhelmed by the sheer scale of the challenges facing all of life on Earth, the following words from Judith von Halle can give me new courage:
“The consistent psychical-spiritual work of an individual, or of a few individuals, can have an enormous influence on the physical and spiritual conditions of the world! When someone asks: What can I as one person do to influence world events? – the answer is: everything! If people could only see with physical eyes the effect on the macrocosmic context that the decision and its implementation to consistently practise only one meditation by a single person, then probably no one would hesitate to undertake such an exercise themselves. For the possibilities are enormous! Allow me to give you this as the greatest consolation, as the strongest ray of hope in the present situation. The individual person holds the world’s fate in his hands. This is the gift of the Christ, who sees the individual I as a deity, who treats it as a deity. (…) Spiritual life must become a reality in our hearts and therefore in our higher consciousness. We must develop a feeling in our souls for the true, the beautiful and the good that resides in this spiritual life.”
And I also feel it important to concentrate on those areas of life where one can make a difference, rather than wasting time and emotion on problems which are way beyond one’s capacity to influence. Each of us is now being called upon to do all that we can to help in the evolution and progress of human life. In the face of the current massive onslaught which is seeking to re-define what it means to be a human being, any project which concentrates on true human needs and values is a worthwhile antidote to the poison of our times. People are trying to help in their own myriad ways: artists through their creative work, teachers and parents through educating and bringing up children, activists through changing policies and laws, and any of us through our encounters in daily life. If we can be people of initiative, rather than passive sponges soaking up whatever is done to us, humanity will survive the incarnation of Ahriman.
We should remember a saying of St Francis that: “All the darkness in the world cannot extinguish the light of a single candle.” A few people working with and for the light can counteract the negative workings of thousands of others. If you can get together regularly with one or two other people to pray for humanity and all life on the Earth, then the effect of this will be much greater than you can possibly imagine.
In a lecture given at Dornach on 1st November 1919, Rudolf Steiner said the following: “To the extent to which people can be roused into conducting their affairs not for material ends alone but also so as to incorporate a free and independent spiritual life alongside economic life, as an integral part of the social organism — to that same extent Ahriman’s incarnation will be awaited with an attitude worthy of humanity.”
I’m going to finish with a prayer by Paul King, who is a translator for Temple Lodge Publishing and also a member of the meditation group which meets in our house:
Light of the world,
Great Sun-Spirit of the Earth!
May Your light enlighten our heads,
May Your love warm our hearts,
May Your peace pacify our strife!
Thank you for listening and I look forward very much to the rest of this conference!
Category Archives: Ahriman
Facing the Incarnation of Ahriman “with an attitude worthy of humanity”
Filed under Ahriman, Anthroposophy, Archangel Michael, Cryonics, Evil, Judith von Halle, Lucifer, Ray Kurzweil, Sorat
Trump: the triumph of Ahriman?
Like many people, I was rendered angry and depressed by the results of the US presidential election on 5thNovember 2024.
Angry, because Donald Trump has once again, as he has throughout his life, escaped just retribution for his crimes and abhorrent behaviour. It seems that Trump was quite right when he boasted in 2016 at a campaign stop at Dordt College in Sioux Center, Iowa that: “”I could stand in the middle of Fifth Avenue and shoot somebody, and I wouldn’t lose any voters, OK? It’s, like, incredible.”
Depressed, because the return of Trump as President indicates that a majority of Americans voted for him despite knowing everything about his character. This not only says something disturbing about American society and the polarised consciousness of its voters; but this second Trump presidency is also likely to lead to detrimental consequences in many ways, especially for the climate and all life on Earth. It fits into a pattern of worldwide phenomena showing that we are now well into the process of the Ahrimanic incarnation foretold by Rudolf Steiner. (If you are unfamiliar with this idea, I have written more about it here.)
Do I think that Trump is the incarnation of Ahriman? No, I don’t – I wrote about this back in 2016 and that analysis still seems to me accurate. But I do think it likely that the election result will hasten the decline of the US as a superpower, with knock-on effects for Europe and accelerating decline for the West and liberal values, which for good or ill have shaped the world during my lifetime. There is a persuasive argument to this effect in an article by the historian Alfred McCoy in the online Southern Cross Review. The worldwide rise in populism and nationalism, wars of aggression and the cult of the strong leader who can overcome the deficiencies of democracy, are not going to lead to positive outcomes for any of us or the Earth. I was struck by a reported comment last week in Paris from Richard Moore, who heads the UK foreign intelligence service MI6, that during his “37 years in the intelligence profession, I’ve never seen the world in a more dangerous state.”
One of the things I have noticed in all the commentary there has been about the reasons for the election of Donald Trump is how inadequate this analysis has been in explaining what has happened, however distinguished the intellectual capacity of the commentator and however penetrating their psychological grasp of Trump’s narcissism and American popular opinion. The common factor underlying this inadequacy is the absence of any sense of the spiritual reality behind what is happening. If you are an atheistic member of the commentariat and think that the spiritual world is a delusion, that the material world is all there is, and that human beings have but the one life, then you have no access to an essential understanding of the root cause of what is unfolding right now. This spiritual short-sightedness lies behind the failure to apprehend the grimmer facets of our present situation.
So how should we understand the impending incarnation of Ahriman? Rudolf Steiner predicted that Ahriman would incarnate in the flesh in the first part of the third millennium, which is the beginning of the millennium in which we are now living. The details of how, when and in whom this incarnation would happen have of course been the subject of much speculation since Steiner spoke about this over 100 years ago.
Just lately I have been reading Travels on the Northern Path of Initiation* by the anthroposophical writer and seer, Are Thoresen, in which he offers an intriguing update on Steiner’s descriptions. Thoresen is in supersensible contact with the Nordic being Vidar, whom he describes as continuing the work of Michael as an Archangel, since Michael’s elevation to the rank of an Archai. Vidar is described in Nordic mythology as the one god to survive the great battle of Ragnarök (Twilight of the Gods) and is the outer and shining aura of Christ himself. Thoresen asked Vidar about the future incarnation of Ahriman:
“Vidar’s answer was clear and simple, and as I slowly pondered this it made more and more sense. He said that Ahriman was already in the process of incarnating, at this very time, but he is incarnating in all of us, with the help – or by being given cover by – the asuric beings. It is extremely important to understand this.”
Who are these asuric beings and why does knowing something about them help us to make sense of what is currently happening in the world?
In a lecture on 1st November 1906, Steiner described them as “satanic gods of hindrances who began their work in the Atlantean epoch but who are now starting to work in the 5th post-Atlantean epoch (ie our present age). They’re the worst of the three forces hindering humankind and they mainly work into sexual life in the physical body. The many sexual aberrations today are to be ascribed to this strong influx.” And in another lecture from 29th January 1907, Steiner said that: “Asuras are spirits of the very greatest egoism who remained behind during Saturn evolution. They want to condense matter and compress it ever more so that it can’t be spiritualized and brought back to its original condition. They’re the dregs of the planetary evolution that goes from Saturn to Vulcan. The asuras inhabit the moon and from there they work on the humans whom they want to drag down into the eighth sphere and thereby tear away from progressive evolution and its goal — the Christ.”
Now I’m aware that, to many people, this will all sound abstruse and fanciful. But if I describe some practical effects of the activities of these entities on human beings in the world today, let us see if any of it accords with your own perceptions. Are Thoresen suggests that since the year 2019 and the Covid pandemic, the asuras have gained much more access to human beings through the opening of what he calls the first elemental realm. (This refers to what Steiner has described as the crossing of the threshold between the physical and elemental worlds, which he says will happen unconsciously and inevitably for every human being towards the end of the 20th century and thereafter. Much of Steiner’s work was to help us prepare to cross the threshold consciously, by building a bridge between the spiritual and the earthly, thus allowing the unfolding of our soul capacities and awakening the consciousness with which to engage and transform our outer lives. Making this journey consciously is much safer than crossing the threshold unconsciously, which Steiner likened to putting your head into an ant’s nest.)
I am indebted here to the Australian writer and spiritual teacher, Lisa Romero, and her book The Inner Work Path,** for the following descriptions of what may happen to people who cross the threshold to the elemental world unprepared. She describes how there are seven realms or spheres of the true spiritual world and the capacities and preparedness that each of us brings determines which of these spheres we may encounter. For most of us, it is the first three elemental spheres that we are most likely to experience. Beyond the three elemental spheres lies the outer etheric realm, where the Christ has been visible since around 1933 to those who are able to reach him. As we evolve, more and more of us will be able to meet Christ during the next 2000 years.
“For those unprepared, the first crossing to the moon sphere could leave them feeling that life is just an illusion, that they have been caught in maya, living a lie. They can end up feeling despondent and unable to continue as a useful member of society. For those who cross unprepared into the second sphere, it can leave them with the feeling that they are puppets, that nothing they do really matters, and that there is no free will. This can leave the soul incapacitated in relation to earthly life, or even destructive toward others. If seekers cross the threshold unprepared and enter the third sphere, they may feel that they just want to leave this world, escape the wheel of life and death. They may see that if they clear up their personal karma, they can escape the karmic cycle of dying and returning to earth. This may then lead to a life of working simply to liberate the individual self.”
Does any of this sound familiar? Do you know anyone, particularly young people, who may resonate with these descriptions?
Thoresen says that: “…I have also observed that these (asuric) beings were able to give the ‘carrier’ of the entity some degree of clairvoyance, but that this clairvoyance was always false. Usually, the adversarial entities give information that was ninety per cent true and ten per cent false. This makes the carrier believe in themselves, and thus to connect with the adversarial beings and forces for eternity.”
(…) “I had not understood why these asuric beings could provide such clairvoyance, but now, after pondering Vidar’s answer, I understood perfectly. Ahriman is in the process of incarnating NOW. Ahriman is incarnating in ALL people – also myself – and especially spiritual people, with the help of the asuric elementals. In this way, he incarnates, hides himself and also initiates a ‘school’ of magic, leading to clairvoyance – a clairvoyance that is personal and that nobody can agree on.”
It is these adversarial forces that create the things that attack humankind in unseen warfare aimed at all levels of our being. Nearly all of us are totally unaware that this is our situation. The effects of this assault can be seen in many of the disturbing phenomena affecting human society in our time. But by a strange paradox, the elemental beings in the three elemental spheres are the foundation of the material universe. Without them, the material world would not exist. Material creation is thus the outer face or expression of the elemental beings, who although partly adversarial are also necessary for our human development towards freedom.
Our sole protection is the Christ and we need to develop the techniques that will counterbalance these phenomena. Are Thoresen says that: “To be able to work into and with the elemental world in all its three realms, to introduce morality and the Christ-force in the material/elemental world, we have to be able to observe the elemental world. That is why it is so important today to be able to cross the threshold (to the spiritual world), and also to be able to activate one or more of our spiritual sense organs.”
Finding the Christ-point of balance between the adversarial forces is key to our survival as humankind. Thoresen describes how in all the adversarial forces, in all technological devices and even in all human abilities, there can be found a Middle point, the Christ force. By finding this, we can redeem the luciferic, ahrimanic and possibly even the asuric elements in all these, and consequently material reality itself. I don’t want to go into more detail here of how this may be done, so I would refer you to Thoresen’s books for further information.
In Downhill All the Way, the fourth volume of Leonard Woolf’s five-volume autobiography, he writes about how horrible it was to listen on the wireless to the speeches of Hitler, “the savage and insane ravings of a vindictive underdog who suddenly saw himself to be all-powerful. We were in Rodmell during the late summer of 1939, and I used to listen to those ranting, raving speeches. One afternoon I was planting in the orchard under an apple tree iris reticulata, those lovely violet flowers which, like the daffodils, ‘come before the swallow dares and takes the winds of March with beauty’. Suddenly I heard Virginia’s voice calling to me from the sitting-room window: ‘Hitler is making a speech’. I shouted back: ‘I shan’t come. I’m planting iris and they will be flowering long after he is dead.’ Last March, 21 years after Hitler committed suicide in the bunker, a few of those violet flowers still flowered under the apple tree in the orchard.”
So, after the election result was in and taking my cue from Leonard Woolf, I went out into the garden to plant bulbs under an apple tree, which was all I could think to do in human solidarity with the values of truth, justice and kindness. May they flower for many years, long after Trump and all those leaders under the influence of Ahriman have gone to reap their karma. May human beings find the Christ force living in our hearts. May the Earth be protected from all those seeking to destroy it!
* Published 2021 by Temple Lodge Press, ISBN 978-1-912230-83-9
** Published 2014 by SteinerBooks, ISBN 978-1-62148-059-4
Filed under Ahriman, Donald Trump
A gigantic task for anthroposophists
This is a slightly edited version of an address I gave at the Midsummer Festival organised by the Anthroposophical Society in Sussex at Emerson College on Sunday 23rd June 2024.
We are now at the Summer Solstice, that time of the year when in the Northern Hemisphere we have our longest day and shortest night. In his Calendar of the Soul, Rudolf Steiner wrote a verse, (No. 12) for this time. Here it is, in a translation by Daisy Aldan, the Pulitzer-nominated poet and acclaimed translator and teacher, who in the late 1960s or early 1970s was invited by Francis Edmunds to teach Creative Writing here at Emerson:
The beauteous lustre of the world
Compels me from the depth of soul
That I release to cosmic flight
The godly forces of my own life:
To leave myself below,
And trusting, seek myself
In cosmic light and cosmic warmth.
And at this Midsummer Festival of John the Baptist, the forerunner and proclaimer of Christ, it is worth remembering that John loved Nature and was able to excarnate into it so that he could communicate with the nature spirits and the angelic realm. It was because of this that he was able to meet Uriel, the archangel whom Steiner tells us is most associated with this time of year, and to foretell the coming of Christ. Part of his work in baptising people was to give some of them the ability to excarnate as well. All of us excarnate just a little bit at the height of Summer when we go on our holidays, and we all find that thinking is a little more difficult when the sun shines and Nature is at its most glorious. We don’t really come back properly into ourselves until Michaelmas at the end of September!
But Midsummer is also the time of year when we can extend our celebration of John the Baptist so as to encompass Lazarus-John who was raised from the dead and became the disciple whom Christ loved, the Apostle John, the only one of the disciples who stood at the foot of the Cross and who was entrusted by Jesus with looking after his mother Mary after the crucifixion, and who later on was exiled by the Romans to the island of Patmos, where he wrote the Book of Revelation. I don’t know how one can explain all of this in rational terms, except to say that there is a John mystery unfolding, which Rudolf Steiner referred to in his last lecture, in which he linked the beings of Elijah, Lazarus-John, Raphael and Novalis.1
Because of what Christ the Sun Being brought to humanity and the Earth by taking on physical incarnation, and because of his own karma, the Apostle John was enabled to become a fully-realised human being; that is to say, through the help of the Christ-principle he was able to transform both his astral body, and his etheric body, and so was able to look into Heaven and Earth and tell us in the Book of Revelation what would come to be. Thus the Johns whose festival we celebrate today stand before us as exemplars of what will be possible for all human beings as we advance towards the next stage of Earth evolution, the Jupiter epoch, which is many thousands of years into the future.
But what of our present and near future?
In a lecture given in Dornach on 19th November 1917, Rudolf Steiner told us the true challenge of our present age. He said that “it is humanity’s task in this period to come to grips with evil as an impulse in the evolution of the world”.2
That is our task and clearly we don’t have to look very far to find multiple examples of evil throughout the world, in terms of war, genocide, famine, disease, and so on. I’d like to focus here on one particular aspect of the evil coming up to face us and that is the challenge to our humanness posed by artificial intelligence and biotechnologies. I’ve spoken at Emerson College before about Ray Kurzweil, Google’s former futurologist, a leading computer scientist and inventor. His prediction, made in his book The Singularity is Near 3, is that we human beings will become more godlike as we become more machine-like and as machines develop more god-like powers. Kurzweil says that we humans are nothing special in the animal kingdom: we have no immortal soul, there is no essential human self and our thoughts and emotions are the product of electrochemical impulses which can in the future be modelled by algorithms. Our future lies in the hands of technologists, people who are experts in biotechnology, artificial intelligence, cognitive and computer science. Their work will produce new tools that will become parts of our bodies. We will have bionic hands, feet and eyes, while nanorobots will move through our bloodstream looking out for disease and repairing the damage of age and injury. We shall have wearable and implanted devices to expand our senses and alter our moods, while biological tools will enter our cells, remodel our genes and give us new and better flesh, blood and neurons.
By a strange coincidence, Kurzweil’s sequel book, The Singularity Is Nearer – When We Merge with AI, is scheduled to be released in just two days’ time, on June 25, 2024.
Kurzweil describes his law of accelerating returns which predicts an exponential increase in technologies like computers, genetics, nanotechnology, robotics and artificial intelligence. Once the Singularity has been reached, Kurzweil says that machine intelligence will be infinitely more powerful than all human intelligence combined. The Singularity is also the point at which the intelligence of machines and humans would merge; Kurzweil predicts this date: “I set the date for the Singularity—representing a profound and disruptive transformation in human capability—as 2045.” Just over 20 years away. Kurzweil says: “Some people find this frightening. But [The Singularity] is going to be beautiful and will expand our consciousness in ways we can barely imagine, like a person who is deaf hearing the most exquisite symphony for the first time.”
Rudolf Steiner foresaw all of this, as far back as 1910. This is what he said in Lecture 12 of the series ‘The Reappearance of Christ in the Etheric’:4
(…) “the will is there to harness human energy to mechanical energy. These things should not be treated by fighting against them. That is a completely false view. These things will not fail to appear; they will come. What we are concerned with is whether, in the course of world history, they are entrusted to people who are familiar in a selfless way with the great aims of earthly evolution and who structure these things for the health of human beings or whether they are enacted by groups of human beings who exploit these things in an egotistical or in a group-egotistical sense. That is what matters. It is not a question of the what in this case; the what is sure to come. It is a question of the how, how one tackles these situations. The what lies simply in the meaning of earthly evolution. The welding together of the human nature with the mechanical nature will be a problem of great significance for the remainder of earthly evolution”.
I’m not saying that Kurzweil is evil but I do suggest that at a time when we are expecting the incarnation of Ahriman, his work lends itself well to Ahriman’s purposes. And do we believe, as Steiner had hoped, that all these changes will be entrusted to people who are familiar in a selfless way with the great aims of earthly evolution and who will structure these things for the health of human beings? Or is it more likely that greed, lust for power and conquest are going to be the motivating forces? I think we have to accept that Ahriman is currently enjoying great success: many of our fellow citizens do not seem to have the faintest idea about the true nature of their humanness. As people choose to retreat into virtual worlds on their screens rather than engage in real life, the harmony and positivity of the soul suffer accordingly. There is a great loss of reality, while common sense and the ability to make sound judgments are diminishing.
If Ray Kurzweil is right about what he calls the Singularity, that time when human and machine intelligence will merge, by 2045 millions of human beings will be embodied with their entire constitution in the bodiless experience of virtual reality. Not like today’s primitive virtual headsets and virtual games, but full daily immersion in bodiless virtual reality. For the people living in this reality from early childhood as their ‘natural’ reality, death will not really make a difference. They will die and remain in the same virtual Ahrimanic sphere of influence and experience.
And this is, of course, part of Ahriman’s goal, that people will no longer experience any real difference between life in the physical world and life after death. The result is that when they enter the spiritual world after death, they are unable to orientate themselves and Ahriman can use them to unconsciously influence those of us still in incarnation. This is because it is only to the extent that one has already touched the spirit during the physical world that one can see, know and experience the life after death in the spiritual world. If you are immersed in virtual reality for most of your earthly life, you will certainly not feel that death makes any difference, because the virtual life will simulate the life outside the body so perfectly. Many people will remain bound after death to life on earth, not even realising that they are dead. The difference is, however, that after death they will be part of the sub-human and sub-natural Ahrimanic world – and this leads to the death of the soul, following the death of the body.
Rudolf Steiner was speaking about these things just over 100 years ago and, of course, a great deal has changed since then. We are told by some modern anthroposophical seers that the spiritual realm has changed even more in the last 100 years than things have here in the physical world. For example, Yeshayahu Ben-Aharon in his book The Time Is At Hand, 5 says this:
“The twenty-first century is the second, middle century of the three centuries of the present age of Michael, and it is the most decisive one. If humanity again misses the goal of Michael, it will be hardly possible to recuperate from it, and human evolution will be derailed for a long time. The present age of Michael can therefore rightly be called ‘the Apocalypse age of Michael.’ The most important goal of Michael in his present age is that the new revelation of the etheric Christ will be fully grasped, because the resurrection of humanity depends on this.”
Are Thoresen, a remarkable anthroposophical seer and healer, is similarly pessimistic about our prospects. In his book Experiences from the Threshold 6, he says the following:
“In my opinion, we have but one possibility to save our culture, and that is to understand and accept that there is a spiritual world. If not, we will destroy ourselves in materialism. The only way to really ‘believe’ in a spiritual world is to experience it for ourselves, which an increasing amount of people want to do.”
Are Thoresen, who was recently here at Emerson as a workshop leader, says that the only way for us to experience the spiritual world is to open our spiritual sense organs and pass the threshold, and he gives techniques for how he himself has done this in his books (though I have to say I find them very hard to understand). He also says that the Nordic archangel, Vidar, has replaced Michael as the guardian of the threshold, following Michael’s transition to becoming one of the Archai. These are deep waters, which I don’t propose to go into during this talk, except to quote from Rudolf Steiner, who in a lecture given in Oslo on 17thJune 1910, 7 said:
“Whoever recognises Vidar in all his significance and feels him in his soul will understand that in the twentieth century the capacity to behold the Christ can again be given to man: Vidar, who is close to all of us in northern and central Europe, will again stand before him. He was held secret in the Mysteries and occult schools as the god who will receive his task only in the future.”
Has Vidar now received his task? According to Are Thoresen, the path of knowledge to a higher consciousness by way of the School of Michael is a very difficult one. Again, I’m not going to explore this further here, except to quote from Are Thoresen’s book, Meeting Michael 8, in which he says:
“So I ask the question: might this Michael path be too ‘difficult’ for many people today? Is Michael still accessible to all? Maybe another path needs to be available, based on Vidar’s teaching? This is the same Vidar who was entrusted by Michael as an Archangel, and who perhaps also offers a safe and straight path to the living Christ.”
One could be feeling quite gloomy about all of this and sensing that Ahriman is winning all the battles. But I’m inclined, perhaps against all reason, to be optimistic about our future as human beings, and it seems to me that our present situation represents a gigantic task for anthroposophy. What is this task? It is to find a way to talk to other people about what it really means to be a human being. One of Steiner’s main preoccupations was to inform all of us about our true situation as human beings in the world – what it means to be a human being. This he wanted to do by creating an understanding of the fact that we are spiritual beings currently in physical bodies, that the whole universe is suffused with soul and spirit, that human thoughts are connected with cosmic thoughts, human souls with cosmic souls, human spirits with cosmic spirits, with the creative spirituality of the universe. It is only by awakening people to the full reality of their humanness that Ahriman’s plans can be hindered sufficiently to make a worthwhile difference.
And this is of course a difficult task, to find a way to reach people and the language with which to do it, that won’t alienate them and make them regard us as members of a cult. How many of us here who are anthroposophists have family and friends who regard our anthroposophy as something eccentric, unlikely or downright unbelievable? I know that I do. And I know that I have not yet found a way to convey my beliefs that can meet where the other person is coming from. One recent personal example of this came when I sent to a friend a link to an article I’d written on my blog about ‘Assisted Dying and the Spiritual Consequences of Suicide’. In it, I spoke about the experiences of a clairvoyant and an anthroposophical doctor in observing the consequences of assisted dying and referred to the effect that suicide, which is the real name for assisted dying, has on the etheric body. My friend replied as follows: “Thank you for sending this… a lot to consider in this seemingly radical approach.” And what I took from this polite reply was that my friend was unconvinced so far and regarded the concepts in that article as eccentric.
This is of course part of the dilemma faced by anthroposophists in this age of the consciousness soul, who live in societies in which many people not only do not have the concepts that would allow them to understand the issues at stake but who would also regard the wider spiritual viewpoint with disdain. Rudolf Steiner himself was well aware of this problem of finding the right language to convey anthroposophical ideas to non-anthroposophists. In 1923, in a lecture given at Stuttgart, he said the following:
“Last summer I gave a course of lectures at Oxford on the educational methods of the Waldorf School. An article appeared in an English journal that, though I cannot quote it verbatim, made the following point. It began by saying that a person who attended the lectures at the Oxford educational meetings without prior awareness of who Dr. Steiner was and that he had some connection with anthroposophy would not have noticed that a representative of anthroposophy was speaking. Such a person would simply have thought him to be a man speaking about pedagogy from a different angle than the listener’s own.
I was exceedingly delighted by this characterization because it showed that there are people who notice something that is always my goal, namely, to speak in a way that is not instantly recognized as anthroposophical. Of course, the content is anthroposophical, but it cannot be properly absorbed unless it is objective. The anthroposophical standpoint should lead, not to onesidedness, but, on the contrary, to presenting things in such a way that each least detail can be judged on its own merits and its truth be freely recognized.” 9
And it’s perhaps relevant here to say that Rudolf Steiner would have liked his books to be re-written every fifteen years so as to keep them current. Language idioms and methods of communication change over time and what was right a century ago is probably not going to be as useful today. Many young people nowadays simply do not read very much, unless something is on a phone screen, so it could be that even updating Steiner’s books would make little difference to widen their opportunities to hear about anthroposophy. Perhaps podcasts and YouTube videos are part of the way forward, but they will only stand a chance of being effective if we can first find a way to engage the interest of viewers and listeners without using anthroposophical jargon.
I referred earlier to Are Thoresen’s point that the only way for people to believe in a spiritual world is to experience it for themselves, and he says that an increasing number of people want to do this. Although my own path has so far largely been based on faith rather than direct experience, I’m sure he’s right about that and one can see signs of this hunger and thirst for genuine experience here at Emerson, with some of the courses and workshops which run here, though several of them are not, it has to be said, based on anthroposophy. There is anecdotal evidence, too, from therapists that many of their clients, whether as a result of trauma, bereavement, lucid dreams or intuitions, are seeking something universal, some truth beyond what they can find on their screens.
In this connection, we’re told by Steiner that many human beings are going unconsciously and unprepared through the threshold. This is what he said in a lecture called ‘The Crossing of the Threshold and the Social Organism’ given in Dornach on 12th September 1919: 10
“What the individual human being experiences consciously when he strives to attain clairvoyance in the spiritual world, namely, the crossing of the threshold, must be experienced unconsciously by the whole of mankind, during our fifth post-Atlantean epoch. Humanity has no choice in regard to this; it must experience this unconsciously—not the individual human being, but HUMANITY, and the individual human being together with humanity.”
And I remember that Steiner says elsewhere that to cross the threshold unprepared is like sticking one’s head in an ants’ nest! This is an amazing lecture and in it Steiner gives indications that are relevant to my theme here of how to reach out to people in language they can relate to. He says:
“We may say: every kind of pessimism is wrong. But this does not imply that every kind of optimism is right. Right and justified is, however, the APPEAL TO THE WILL. It is not at all a question of whether something takes place in this or in that way, but that we should WILL things in accordance with the direction of human evolution. We should realise over and over again that the old time has come to an end and that we must close our accounts with it. A real understanding of the present can only be gained if we rightly close our accounts with the old time. For the NEW time can only be taken into account from a SPIRITUAL standpoint! We should not delude ourselves that we can carry over into the new time the things which we have cherished in the past. In our external life, we must begin to turn to the new thoughts, which are now beginning to be active.”
This appeal to the will and the realisation, surely very general in today’s society, that the old ways of doing things have come to an end, and that the new time can only begin with a spiritual standpoint, may be the way to reach people in our time when it is obvious that so many things have to change if humanity is to survive. This is also the challenge for us as anthroposophists, to find new ways to meet and engage with people without speaking jargon or even referring to Steiner as the initiate and teacher who has all the answers. If we fall into that trap, we will end up speaking only to ourselves.
While acknowledging that Ahriman is feeling triumphant at this time, I’d like to draw to a close on a more optimistic note with a story related by Steiner. Steiner says he saw the image of Ahriman sitting in a cave under the earth. Ahriman works. He writes things down, counting and counting, calculating and calculating. He tries to build up a whole world out of a new mathematics (and of course AI algorithms are part of the new mathematics). There, Steiner says, Michael stands beside Ahriman waiting. For Michael knows that he will make the final addition. Michael with his sword, will make the sum. The moment has not yet come. Michael is waiting, standing by the side, waiting. He can do this when people on earth are there fighting and going with him. But he can’t do it without us! And that is the really important point – in this present age of the consciousness soul, Michael can only act if we help him to do it. If we do, he will in turn help us to find much more positive outcomes from the extreme technologies that are threatening our existence today.
And finally, I wonder how many of you saw the marvellous production of Mary Poppins the Musical by classes 9 and 11 at Michael Hall School this week? There are all sorts of life lessons that can be found in the Mary Poppins story, and I’m sure that all of the children in that production will have learned all kinds of things and derived huge benefits from getting up on stage to entertain us so wonderfully. But perhaps what is not so well known is that Pamela Travers, the author of the Mary Poppins books, was a student of Gurdjieff and devotee of Sufism, and she was able to build into her books all kinds of simple messages based on sound spiritual principles and life lessons she herself had learned. She was able to do this without using any jargon from Gurdjieff or the Sufis but simply by reminding us of what in essence is a spiritual standpoint in the relationships between human beings – encompassing kindness, decency, selflessness, the need to enjoy what we do, recognition of who we really are and trying to be practically perfect in every way! A wonderful example of how to reach out through art to people of all kinds. I hope that we anthroposophists might soon find comparable and accessible ways to reach the hearts of others by expressing universal truths about what it means to be human.
Thank you for listening.
1 From Rudolf Steiner’s Last Address, (GA 238), given on 28th September 1924 in Dornach.
2 From Lecture 10, ‘The Reappearance of Christ in the Etheric’ (GA 178) – Individual Spirit Beings and the Undivided Foundation of the World: Part 2, given in Dornach on 18th November 1917.
3 The Singularity Is Near, published in 2005 by Viking Books. ISBN 978-0-670-03384-3
4 From Lecture 12 of the series ‘The Reappearance of Christ in the Etheric’, (GA 178).
5 The Time Is At Hand, published in 2024 by Temple Lodge Publishing Ltd. ISBN 978-1-915776-12-9
6 Experiences from the Threshold, first published in English in 2019 by Temple Lodge Publishing Ltd. ISBN 978-1-912230-33-4
7 From Lecture 11, ‘The Mission of Folk Souls’ (GA 121), given in Oslo (then called Christiania) on 17th June 1910.
8 Meeting Michael, first published in English in 2024 by Temple Lodge Publishing Ltd. ISBN 978-1-915776-14-3
9 From Lecture VII, ‘Awakening to Community’, given on 28th February 1923 in Stuttgart.
10 From ‘The Crossing of the Threshold and the Social Organism’, (GA 193) given in Dornach on 12thSeptember 1919.
Anthroposophy and the Battle for the Soul – a talk for Easter
This is the text of a talk I gave at Emerson College on Easter Sunday, 9th April 2023, as part of the Easter Festival organised by the Anthroposophical Society in Sussex (ASiS).
A little while ago, Eva Davies and I were having a conversation about the role today of a local society like ASiS and asking ourselves, if it’s not too absurd a question, what on earth can a handful of people like us do in the face of the overwhelming onslaught of evil throughout the world?
As there are some of us here who are fairly new to anthroposophy, it should be explained that the founder of anthroposophy, Rudolf Steiner, possessed exceptional faculties of clairvoyant consciousness. For him, unlike for most of us, the heavenly world of higher beings was completely open; and he was able to use his faculties to extend scientific research beyond the existing parameters of natural science, so as to investigate the non-physical, spiritual realities of life. Steiner’s viewpoint, which could be described as esoteric or cosmic Christianity, went beyond the teachings of the Catholic and Protestant Churches but was nevertheless fundamentally Christian and he was able through his researches to describe the crucifixion and resurrection of Christ as the central point of human evolution.
Interestingly, Steiner does not make a straight distinction between Good on the one hand and Evil on the other. Instead, he identifies two poles of Evil, which he calls Lucifer and Ahriman. Between these two poles, Christ holds the balance in the middle. Steiner saw Lucifer and Ahriman as not only forces or tendencies which affect humankind and draw us towards evil; but he also saw them as actual beings, who have had or are about to have physical incarnations. Lucifer’s incarnation was in China, in about 2500 BC. The incarnation of Christ was 2000 years ago, as we know. Ahriman’s incarnation is due about now, which is why we’re having such difficult times.
Steiner has told us that the incarnation of Ahriman is due “before even a part of the third of millennium after Christ will have passed” and cannot be averted. It will happen. He has also told us: it can bring good over the long term insofar as we wake up to the spirit through resistance against Ahriman’s materialistic impulses. But if Ahriman is not recognised, his influence will be harmful. Steiner also said at a meeting with young people in Breslau (which was then in Germany and is now Wroclaw in Poland), that Ahriman will do everything in his power to advance the moment of his incarnation as much as he can. Steiner then mentions the year 1998, which for anyone interested in numerology is 666 multiplied by 3. I’m intrigued to note that it was about then, actually in 1999, that Vladimir Putin came to power.
We are undoubtedly living in the precursor years of Ahriman’s incarnation, even if not yet during the actual incarnation. The signs are all around us and like me, you will probably have your own list of Ahrimanic phenomena in our times. There are so many to choose from, ranging from the apparently trivial to the alarmingly serious and it is difficult to keep up with all the negative developments that are happening throughout the world. Thank goodness there are also many positive developments which seem to arise in response to the Ahrimanic symptoms.
For me, Covid has been one of the most significant of the Ahrimanic phenomena. Covid is a viral disease, which means that it is mineral in nature and does not have its own life processes, and therefore needs a host organism so it can reproduce itself. But it also has astonishing intelligence, for example in the resistance it can develop to medicines, or in the way it can mutate, partly in response to vaccinations. But I can’t help asking, where does this astonishing intelligence live? In what being does this intelligence reside?
Second, the Covid pandemic produced fear, much of it stoked by deliberate government policy, as well as anxiety and division between people, even within families. It also led governments to dismantle existing civil liberties with an ease that they had not expected to find in Western democracies. It became impossible to have a fruitful exchange of views between different standpoints and we saw instead heightened emotions, rejection and hatred of other people’s opinions. This process was driven even further by our news outlets and social media, who censored the views of anyone, even distinguished professors of medicine, whose expert opinion did not fit the official line. Some of you may remember what happened to the Great Barrington Declaration, which was rubbished by the WHO. Again, one must ask: whose interests are being served by this fracturing of social cohesion?
And of course, Russia’s illegal and brutal war in Ukraine is another prime symptom of the Ahrimanic assault on humanity. At first, it was almost impossible to believe that such a thing could be happening, that in the 21st century one European nation could invade another to seize its territory and kill and terrorise its people. And yet it has happened and is continuing, with no sign of an end to these horrors. Vladimir Putin has turned Russia into a rogue state, a mafia-led kleptocracy, a pariah among nations and all the more terrible because it possesses over 6000 nuclear weapons. The Russian Army, in directing its assault on the ordinary citizens of Ukraine, has become a byword for corruption and brutality, inhumanity and incompetence. Russia, in the words of one Russian journalist who dares to oppose Putin’s war, will wash in the shame of these actions for decades to come. And now we are beginning to see a growing alliance between Russia and China, two autocracies finding common cause in opposition to the Western democracies and bringing with them the possibility of World War III over Taiwan.
What times we are living through! And of course there are so many other symptoms we could notice, whether it’s artificial intelligence and the gradual merging of humans and machines, about which even Elon Musk has called for a 6-month pause to assess the dangers; climate breakdown; the subversion of truth and morality in the post-Truth society; GMO and gene editing, about which the latest UK Government law, the so-called Genetic Technology (Precision Breeding) Act 2023 received Royal Assent on 23rd March. Poor King Charles! I can’t believe he was happy to sign that into law.
Here, I think, it is relevant to quote what Rudolf Steiner had to say in the Karmic Relations lecture given in Dornach on 4th August, 1924:
“For the anthroposophist this proverb must hold good. He must say to himself: ‘Now that I have become an anthroposophist through my karma, the impulses which have been able to draw me to Anthroposophy require me to be attentive and alert.’”
Yes: we must be attentive and alert; and Steiner has also said that: “The important thing is that humanity should not sleep through Ahriman’s appearance.” This brings me back to the question I asked earlier: what should be the role of a local society like ASiS and what can a handful of anthroposophists do in the face of developing evil throughout the world? Eva Davies and I, during the conversation which prompted these thoughts, came to the conclusion that one of the most useful things we can do is really to be attentive and alert to any and every manifestation of Ahrimanic impulses in the world – to really see what is going on and come to a view on where these diverse phenomena are leading us. We won’t be able to change them – but by seeing them for what they are, we remove part of their power over us. But it’s quite astonishing how insidious and subtle these Ahrimanic influences are, and the ability they have to manifest in the most unexpected places; and I’d like to share with you just two, rather startling and shocking examples that I’ve noticed.
And because today is Easter Day, I’ll begin with a threat to Easter from a most unexpected source. Easter is of course a ‘moveable feast’, meaning that it is a festival whose date changes each year. To state it as simply as possible, Easter falls on the first Sunday after the first Full Moon after the Spring Equinox on 21stMarch. It can be as early as 22nd March, as it was in 1761 and 1818, but will not be again until 2285. It can be as late as 25th April but that hasn’t happened since 1943 and won’t recur until 2038. The commonest date for Easter Sunday is 19th April though the full cycle of Easter dates only repeats after 5,700,000 years.
Now all this is of course very untidy and much annoys bureaucrats, atheists and planners, all of whom would like to have fixed public holiday dates – but such people are wholly ignorant of the fact that on the true Easter Sunday intensified cosmic energies flow into the earth.
To back up that statement, I’m going to refer to some remarkable experiments done by Lili Kolisko (1889 – 1976), who did investigative scientific work into etheric formative forces, following indications given by Rudolf Steiner. She had shown that it was possible to get an image of the life-force of a plant by making a highly potentised solution of the plant essence through very great dilution, and then adding a solution of certain minerals which represent planetary forces – Silver Nitrate, Iron Sulphate or Gold Chloride. A piece of litmus paper is placed upright in a saucer with the solution and the liquid, rising to a certain height, shows the most striking colours and shapes which reveal the invisible etheric forces working in the plant. The technique is known as capillary dynamolysis.
In 1943, by which time Mrs Kolisko was living in the UK and carrying out daily experiments with capillary dynamolysis, Easter fell shortly after the equinox on 28th March. The church authorities in England had ruled that the Easter Full Moon should be considered to be a month later and that the festival should be celebrated on 25th April. The Astronomer Royal, however, disagreed and maintained that the earlier date was correct. Mrs Kolisko set out through her experiments to see which of them was right. Every day she repeated her experiments and a certain pattern showed itself again and again, until on Sunday 28th March a resplendent form of shape and colour appeared, quite different from the others. So the Astronomer Royal was correct and the church authorities got it wrong – on their preferred Sunday of 25th April there was no difference from the pattern of any other day.
A similar strengthening of the etheric forces was revealed on the true Whitsuntide, which is also a moveable feast because it is always on the seventh Sunday after Easter. So to anyone looking at the photos of these experiments, there can be no doubt whatever that a remarkable inpouring of spiritual power takes place on the true Easter Sunday and at Whitsun. It indicates that both Easter and Whitsun are cosmic events. These photos can be seen in a monograph by Lili Kolisko, called Spirit in Matter – just google for it and you will find it.
Wouldn’t it be wonderful for the Ahrimanic forces if they could somehow undermine the cosmic power of Easter Day? Well, they have found a way to do this and I’m sorry to say that it involves the Archbishop of Canterbury, Justin Welby.
In 2016, Archbishop Justin announced how, after more than a thousand years of Easter being a moveable feast, he had hopes of reaching agreement with the other churches to settle upon a fixed date for Easter. He said he would “love” to see Easter become a fixed date by the time he retires.
Mr Welby said that he will consult with other authorities including Pope Francis and the Coptic Pope to negotiate a change to the date. It is very unlikely that any change will be made without the full assent of all those authorities. So with the active help of the Archbishop of Canterbury and possibly the leaders of other churches as well, Easter is likely to become a fixed date in the calendar and thus an event of cosmic significance, which is the occasion for a huge influx of spiritual power that affects all life on Earth, will be diminished to no more than an ordinary day. It would prevent humans from participating in this cosmic event, which as Rudolf Steiner told Ita Wegman offers a moment of revelation in which Christ may be experienced. What a great result for Ahriman, made even more satisfying by the fact that it is the leaders of the Christian churches who will have brought it about!
But even the undermining of Easter as a cosmic event might be considered less important than what Ahriman appears to be working on in connection with reincarnation. Those of you who are sports fans will probably not like what I’m about to say. Just over 100 years ago, Rudolf Steiner warned in a lecture given on 9th July 1918 (GA181) about high initiates in Anglo-American circles (by this he means secret brotherhoods of oppositional powers) who have a programme to undermine gradually the normal process of reincarnation. This is what Steiner had to say:
“They cultivate especially the powers of perception belonging to the body which strengthen the subjection of man to the body, through the incoming of forces not belonging entirely to the body but binding it to the earth. (…) A strong physical sense of relationship between the human body and the earthly elements is to be acquired. This strong feeling of relationship between the creature in the physical body and the earth exists to-day in certain species of apes, which have it as their soul-life. In them it can be studied physiologically and zoologically. What is present there can be gradually formed into a “system of instruction for human beings”; all that has to be done is to develop the coarse side of relationship with nature into a system of bodily education. (In saying this I am neither railing nor criticising; I am merely stating facts.) Thus it will be possible to bring about a sort of practical Darwinism, intensifying the relation of man to what binds him to the earth in a certain sense, to “monkeyfy” him. That is the practical side. It will be pursued through the intensive cultivation — ostensibly instinctive but in fact carefully directed — of sports and such-like things. This fetters the soul, drawing it into a sense of kinship with the earthly, with the earth itself, and so a spiritual ideal such as I have described is set up. By this means the continuing alternation of spiritual life and physical life will be overcome, and by degrees the ideal will be realised of living in future periods of earth-evolution as a kind of “phantom”; of dwelling on earth in this guise.” In other words, a kind of ghost, unable to move on to the heavenly world after death.
Steiner was not an enthusiast for sport and there are many quotations demonstrating this. Here is just one: “The excessive pursuit of sport is Darwinism in practice. Theoretical Darwinism is to assert that man comes from the animals. Sport is practical Darwinism, it proclaims an ethic which leads man back again.” (Study of Man, Lecture 13)
Returning to Steiner’s 1918 lecture (GA181), he went on to say that: “The Anglo-American people (and I think by this phrase he means the secret brotherhoods referred to earlier) strives for this strange ideal: no longer to return into earthly bodies, but to have an ever-increasing influence on the earth through the medium of living souls, whilst they themselves become more and more earthbound as disembodied souls. A very interesting point is that this ideal can be appropriately followed only by the male population, and hence, in spite of all political endeavours, an increasing difference between men and women will arise in Anglo-American civilization. Anglo-American spiritual life will in essence descend to future ages through women; while that which lives in male bodies will strive towards such an ideal as I have described. This will set the pattern of the future Anglo-American race.”
Now because what Steiner has to say here is so startling, let us try to be clear about his meaning. He is saying that the over-emphasis on sports, games, athletics and so on are among the forces of hindrance in modern civilisation. This is because the concentration on physical prowess and skill fetters the soul, in his phrase, drawing it too closely to kinship with the earth, so that after death, instead of making the normal transition to the spiritual world and to eventual reincarnation, the soul stays not just disembodied but also earthbound – it is unable to move on to the heavenly world. And these disembodied souls who remain close to the earth then have the ability to influence living souls on earth with the Ahrimanic illusion that the only reality lies in materialism. That is a truly startling observation, which he followed up by saying that it is male bodies who will be most affected by this and therefore Anglo-American spiritual life will in essence descend to future ages through women. My assumption about this statement is that in Steiner’s day, the audiences at football and other sports were overwhelmingly male; and the women therefore were less likely to succumb to the unseen soul influences present at those events. And perhaps we might also say that the devotion required to be a mother (and protect the next generation) and the channelling of spiritual forces in childbirth predisposes women to a higher attunement to wellbeing and family harmony – hence women have an increased likelihood of possessing loving heart forces naturally resistant to Ahrimanic impulses.
But Steiner was of course speaking over 100 years ago and the situation regarding women and sport has been transformed since then. We now have enthusiasm throughout the world, not just in the Anglo-American countries, for women and girls’ football. The FIFA Women’s World Cup was first held in China in 1991 and 176 national teams now participate internationally. Here in the UK, the England women’s team is praised for being more successful than the men’s team and players have recently been awarded MBEs and OBEs. The sport is poised to grow and grow, with women and girls being encouraged to take part at all levels of the game. Even in the Middle East and North Africa, countries such as Morocco, Tunisia, Egypt, Algeria, Palestine, Turkey, Jordan, Iran, Lebanon, Syria and Israel have had large-scale competitions and national teams – and since 2020, countries that have traditionally been seen as extreme like Saudi Arabia, Oman, Qatar, Somalia, Mauritania and Sudan have begun to develop women’s football in order to raise their international profiles and to distance themselves from their conservative pasts.
Steiner was warning not of the elimination of the knowledge of reincarnation but the gradual elimination of reincarnation itself. One has to ask: Is the worldwide growth of women’s football just one indication among many that Ahriman is working far more effectively for this end than even Steiner himself had supposed? And what is it that these Ahrimanic beings are seeking to bring about? According to Steiner: “They set themselves the task of keeping man on the Earth by every possible means. You know from the book Occult Science that the Earth will one day pass over into the Jupiter condition. That is what these beings want to prevent. They want to prevent man from developing in a regular way together with the Earth and then passing over into the Jupiter condition in a normal way. They want to preserve the Earth as Earth and mankind for the Earth. Hence these beings work unceasingly and with great intensity to achieve their purpose.” (1922-12-03-GA219)
Now, I am not a fan of sport – I’d much rather read a book or listen to music or do some gardening – so perhaps I can be accused of bias; and when I discussed Steiner’s ideas recently with a well-known anthroposophist and sports fan in this village, he thought what I was saying was nonsense – so I am under no illusion that what I’ve just said will gain any acceptance even in our own circles, let alone in the wider world. But Steiner did not criticise modern sport and athletics because he wasn’t interested in them, but because of the effects he could perceive them having on us. He saw much of sport as being unhelpful in what he considered to be really important, ie that we should realise that we are not just creatures of flesh and blood but that we are actually spiritual beings who are currently having human experiences within our physical bodies. You are of course free to assert that Steiner was wrong about sport and its effects – but then I think you have to explain how and why Steiner was wrong.
There’s no doubt that Ahriman has an easier task than one could wish. He finds it easy to persuade humans to give up their future to him, because Ahriman can work through the seat of our desires – our pride, greed, laziness, lust or wish for power – but Christ can only work through our I or individuality and this means that the struggle is not an equal one. Our individuality has so to develop itself that it can in time learn to recognise and resist the many temptations offered by Lucifer and Ahriman. The two forces work in harmony at the present time, even though they appeal to different instincts in us. The way to deal with these two poles of Evil is to seek the balance in the middle, which is represented by Christ.
And I also have to acknowledge that, although Steiner talks about the “regular” way in which Earth and humanity evolve together and the “normal” way in which the Earth will pass one day into the Jupiter condition, how many of our fellow humans actually believe these things? By the time after many aeons when the Jupiter condition occurs, humans will no longer be in physical bodies. I’m fairly sure that most humans may not like the sound of this and would much prefer to stay with what they know, which is what Ahriman is offering them, ie to keep humankind earthbound and in physical bodies. Better the Devil you know, especially when he offers you such a wide range of sports and entertainments…
And whether you agree with Steiner or not, the real challenge of these times is how to get through them without succumbing to despair. For me, the pain consists of seeing what is happening and realising that the vast majority of our fellow human beings, although they know that we are living in a troubled world, are oblivious to what is really going on. And what I think is really going on, to borrow the title of a book by Bernard Lievegoed, is The Battle for the Soul. According to Lievegoed, because the human spirit is unassailable, the opposing powers therefore direct their efforts against the soul. The human soul is the real battlefield of the war between the powers of good and evil. What the Ahrimanic powers are attempting is to obscure the human soul or even to destroy it, so that the human ‘I’ is unable to gain experience through it.
Ahriman is also working very hard to ensure that we humans are unaware of the second coming of Christ, which according to Rudolf Steiner will not be a physical incarnation this time around. That was done once and for all 2000 years ago and will not be repeated. Steiner says that since about 1933, the Christ has been available to human beings in the etheric field and that more and more of us will be able to have the experience of an encounter with Christ. We know how Ahriman dealt with this threat in 1933, by bringing Hitler to power in Germany, thus creating more assaults on the human soul that diverted us from awareness of what was happening in the etheric realm. By keeping the eyes of most of humanity fixed firmly on the material world, and completely unaware of any other reality, Ahriman has kept knowledge of the second coming from our souls.
In 1916, Rudolf Steiner said that at the beginning of the 21st century, evil will appear in a form which at that time could not be described. His audience in 1916, even though they were enduring the horrors of the First World War, would not have been able to understand or take in a detailed description of the evils which we ourselves are having to live through at this time. As I mentioned during the Michaelmas address last September, the ecological crisis and the multiple other crises confronting humanity are at root just one crisis, that of our human consciousness. The state of the outer world is a direct reflection of the state of the human soul.
But before we sink into despair, let us remind ourselves of the larger context. The Earth is the location for human evolution, even though in our real natures, human beings are not earthly creatures, but are instead of spiritual and cosmic origin. The human body is a sheath, a container for soul and spirit. We had to sink into earth-bound materialism in order to understand what freedom means and to make a positive choice for freedom. But now, during this age of the Consciousness Soul, we are learning that lesson and are awakening in earthly existence to the full power of the ego, the ‘I’, and as a result we are gradually turning once again towards the cosmos.
We are at that stage now, with humankind once again on an upward journey towards our true nature. It is of course that upward trajectory which the Ahrimanic powers are seeking to divert, through various schemes to keep human beings fettered to the Earth and the prevailing materialist consciousness. Here I’d like to quote from a 1929 essay by Ita Wegman called ‘The Mystery of the Earth’, which also brings us back to Easter:
“The purpose of earthly evolution lies in this turning-back of man to the cosmos. Out of his own power the human being could never achieve this. For he could not have brought about a complete reversal in the direction which evolution took. So a cosmic impulse had to be inserted into the course of earthly and human evolution. This happened when a cosmic being, the sublime Sun Being Himself, the Christ, descended to the Earth and through His death on the cross united himself with everything terrestrial, thus transforming the Earth in its innermost essence.”
And this is a quotation from Rudolf Steiner’s Lecture VIII from The Principle of Spiritual Economy:
“… when the Mystery of Golgotha happened, human beings received the ability to muster from within the strength necessary to elevate themselves and lead themselves upward into the spiritual worlds. The Christ descended much deeper than had those previous leaders of the world and of mankind: not only did He bring heavenly forces into the earthly body, but also He spiritualized this earthly body in such a way that it now became possible for human beings to find the way back into the spiritual world with the help of these very forces.” ~Rudolf Steiner GA 109 https://rsarchive.org/Lectures/19090411p02.html
So let us try to remember that we are now on the upward path back to realising our true nature as spiritual beings who are currently having human experiences within physical bodies, despite all that Ahriman can do to deceive us. Let us do our best to be alert and attentive to all the tricks, wiles and illusions being practised on us with the aim of diverting us from our path, because by observing and identifying what is really going on, we are doing as much as we can at this time to ensure that Ahriman fails in his attempts.
It is anthroposophy which can make us aware of these larger truths and provide us with the protection we need to come through this Battle for the Soul with our essential humanity still intact. I’d like to finish this address with a verse from Rudolf Steiner, which is almost like an answer to the question Eva Davies and I had asked ourselves about the role of anthroposophists at this time. It is called ‘To the Berlin Friends’ and he wrote it in November 1923 but every word of it could have been written to describe our situation today.
Mankind is now forgetful
Of the Divine inner realm,
But it is our will to bring it
Into the clear light of consciousness,
And then bear above rubble and ashes
The divine flames in the heart of man.
Lightning-bolts may therefore shatter
Our houses in the world of sense;
We are building houses of the soul
From what is iron-firm.
Light-weaving of knowledge.
And downfall of the outer
Shall become ascent
Of innermost soul-being.
Suffering draws near
From the powers of material force;
Hope rays forth its light,
Even when darkness surrounds us;
And it will one day
Well up in our memory,
When after the darkness
We can again live in the light.
Filed under Ahriman, Anthroposophy, Archbishop of Canterbury, Easter, Evil, Justin Welby
Being human is an Easter experience
Some months ago, I was asked by the committee of the Anthroposophical Society in Sussex to give an address on a theme of my choice at our Easter Festival, which was to be held at Emerson College on Easter Day, 12th April 2020. I was honoured and enthused by this request and decided to give a talk on the theme of ‘Anthroposophy as an Easter experience.’
The inspiration for this theme came from a remark by Rudolf Steiner during a lecture he gave on April 22nd 1924: “Anthroposophy in all its working, is an Easter experience, an experience of resurrection bound up with the experience of the grave.” Steiner was speaking in the context of the deliberate destruction by arson of the first Goetheanum on New Year’s Eve 1922, an event which he was able to relate to the similar destruction of the Temple at Ephesus in the year 356 BC by the arsonist Herostratus.
The Goetheanum had been intended as a modern mystery temple; its burning had been for Steiner a kind of crucifixion. Steiner now called for a renewal of the Mysteries, saying that: “The Anthroposophical Society must consciously cultivate this renewal. The Society was, after all, witness to an event that, like the burning of the Temple at Ephesus, can be turned to good historical account. In both cases a grievous wrong was perpetrated. However, what is a terrible wrong on one level can turn out to be useful for human freedom on another level. Such harrowing events can indeed call forth a true step forward in human evolution.”
Steiner also recognised that the destiny of human beings is to achieve freedom, “which meant that the Mysteries’ powerful influence had to diminish and for a time leave human beings more or less to their own devices.” This, of course, in the age of the Consciousness Soul, is where we are today, with many people pulled this way and that because they have no foundational philosophical base on which to gauge their response to world phenomena.
All of this was to have been the context for my talk, which cannot now take place owing to the Covid-19 pandemic which has closed down Emerson College and many of the other aspects of our normal, everyday life. I would also have talked about some of the anthroposophical enterprises which have experienced significant difficulties in recent times, particularly the Steiner schools. I had even found a quotation from Steiner, to the effect that whatever good intention we start off with, it is inevitable that the way of the world will eventually turn it into its opposite. It comes from Lecture 4 in the cycle ‘The Fall of the Spirits of Darkness’, given in Dornach on 6thOctober 1917:
“ ‘Surely’, people will say, ‘it must be a good thing to be more and more perfect?’ And ‘What better ideal can there be but to have a programme that will make us more and more perfect?’ But this is not in accord with the law of reality. It is right, and good, to be more and more perfect, or at least aim to be so, but when people are actually seeking to be perfect in a particular direction, this search for perfection will after a time change into what in reality is imperfection. A change occurs through which the desire for perfection becomes a weakness. Benevolence will after a time become prejudicial behaviour. And however good the right may be that you want to bring to realisation — it will turn into a wrong in the course of time. The reality is that there are no absolutes in this world. You work towards something that is good, and the way of the world will turn it into something bad. We therefore must seek ever-new ways, look for new forms over and over again. This is what really matters.”
But to have confined my remarks to the original theme of this talk would at the time of this pandemic have seemed not only beside the point but even frivolous, given the scale of what human beings are currently facing. It is not only anthroposophy which is having an Easter experience but humanity as a whole.
Each one of us is familiar in these apocalyptic times with what Steiner called ‘the experience of the grave’ . For many areas here in the UK, 2019 ended and 2020 continued with day after day of heavy rain and disastrous flooding. The rain never seemed to stop. On the other side of the world, Australia suffered huge bush fires which were then followed by floods. Climate change, which is affecting all parts of the world, is having a marked effect on weather patterns. Pollution is poisoning our land, seas and rivers and much of nature, including us. Migration and the associated resurgence of nationalism encouraged by populist politicians is undermining our sense of shared humanity and common goals. We know that the Sixth Great Extinction of species is underway, and this and so many other human-made problems are casting long shadows over all life on Earth. And just to add to the Biblical scenes of apocalypse, in Africa we are even seeing a vast plague of locusts, the worst there has been for nearly a century. Now the Covid-19 pandemic has joined these other phenomena to reinforce our sense of all-consuming crisis. For me this is epitomised by the “social distancing” that we are being exhorted to practise – literally to keep our distance one from another.
In Judith von Halle’s book Illness and Healing, she suggests that in this present age of the Consciousness Soul, many modern illnesses are in fact illnesses of the organism of humanity, ie the totality of all human beings. These illnesses arise from the collective effect of the actions, thoughts and feelings of each one of us and express themselves through human beings in the form of pandemics; but they also manifest in the Earth as extreme weather events, earthquakes, volcanic eruptions and so on.
This will, no doubt, strike many people as just fanciful – but as Steiner observed in another context, “Present day materialism will find it very hard to admit that the spirit creates everything material. It is, however, the tragedy of materialism that it understands the nature of matter least of all…”
But could it be, as ‘Midnight Rambler’ recently suggested on this blog, that the current pandemic may have a potentially positive outcome? His view was that, if we can grasp it, this global event could be an example of metanoia – a John the Baptist moment for a re-evaluation of how we want to live and how we want society to function. He also said: “Is everyone noticing how Natura is breathing more easily now that the world is slowing down?”
Let us hope so – we should never waste a good crisis; and unlike the Member of Parliament I heard on the radio the other week, I do not want to “get back to normal as soon as possible” after this crisis is over; because if we do go straight back to how life was before, we will soon have to suffer even more pandemics, extreme weather events, societal breakdowns etc., until we finally learn the lesson.
The lesson we need to learn is actually quite a simple one: how can we meet real human needs and care for each other and all life on Earth through our work? If we are to experience the resurrection as well as the grave, it is human solidarity, which is love expressed in practical action, which will get us through this present crisis and take us on to a better future. We are seeing this now, in the countless deeds of selfless work on behalf of the sick by hospital and health workers; and we see it, too, in the myriad acts of kindness offered towards the elderly and vulnerable by their neighbours.
At my own local level here in Forest Row, I’m often reminded of these simple truths; at Tablehurst Farm, for example, where I work at the farm’s care home, a small residential home for three adults with learning disabilities. I’m reminded of this, too, by the farm’s work in producing biodynamic and organic food for local people while demonstrating strong community values. The farm has recently started home deliveries for the elderly and those who are self-isolating (a service which I’ve just taken advantage of, as my wife Sophia and I are recovering from symptoms of the virus and so unable to leave home). Will this epidemic help society to make these kinds of initiatives part of the new normal, so that we don’t have to go back to what we had before?
Even better, might this experience make it possible for us humans to realise we can change our habits and our expectations without too much pain? Could those of us in the West learn to do with less so that the rest of the world can have a little more? Can we prolong this welcome mini-break that the Earth has had from our polluting activities? It’s been wonderful to see evidence of reduced air pollution across major cities and I’m sure we’re all enjoying the diminution in aircraft and traffic noise. Could this be maintained into the future? Probably not, unless we can persuade governments that we do not want to resume the relentless emphasis on economic growth, even though it’s obvious that this is the only way for us to achieve the reduction in carbon emissions necessary if the twin crises of climate change and species extinction are to be averted. If change is what we want, then we all need to let our politicians know it, loud and clear.
I’ve been veering towards the positive so far on what this pandemic might mean for us; but there is also a possibility that I am being naïve and that we are all being ‘played’ by forces that are very far from benign towards human beings. One of the many disturbing features of this crisis is the astonishing speed with which our civil liberties have been taken away from us. At Easter time, amid all the other restrictions being placed on us, it is very strange that Covid-19 is making it impossible for churches to be open and for services to be held; and therefore “where two or more are gathered together in my Name, there I am present among them” is also rendered impossible. Sophia, who is a French national, tells me that in France people are now only allowed out of their homes if they are on their own – and only for one hour at a time and they can only go one kilometre from their home. This pandemic has created the circumstances in which all the aspects of a totalitarian dictatorship can be justified by governments and accepted meekly by most of us, not only in France but also in the UK and across the world.
Who would wish to bring about such a situation? Anthroposophists will of course have a ready candidate in mind, the infinitely clever being whom Jesus Christ called the Ruler of this World and whom Steiner called Ahriman. It would be very much in the interests of Ahriman, whose incarnation may be imminent, to close down Easter and to force every person on the planet to submit themselves to government diktat for reasons that are apparently benign and claimed to be for the greater good.
What can we do as a form of gentle resistance to this closing-down of Easter and normal life? This Good Friday morning Sophia and I lit a candle and read through the Gospel of John, from the account of the last supper in the Upper Room through to the events of the Crucifixion; this was an incredibly powerful and moving experience for both of us. We will continue to read the rest of the story in the coming days. Outside, the sun was shining, the plants are burgeoning and there was a very strong sense of the Christ-filled elementals celebrating in the garden.
If I could have given my talk at Emerson College on Easter Day, Sunday 12th April, I would have begun with the great Easter poem by the Elizabethan poet Edmund Spenser. This is Sonnet 68 from the ‘Amoretti’ sequence of 89 sonnets, first published in 1595, which Spenser wrote for his fiancée, Elizabeth Boyle. Now it seems an appropriate way to end this piece:
Most glorious Lord of life, that on this day,
Didst make thy triumph over death and sin:
And having harrow’d hell, didst bring away
Captivity thence captive, us to win:
This joyous day, dear Lord, with joy begin,
And grant that we for whom thou diddest die,
Being with thy dear blood clean wash’d from sin,
May live for ever in felicity.
And that thy love we weighing worthily,
May likewise love thee for the same again:
And for thy sake, that all life dear didst buy,
With love may one another entertain.
So let us love, dear love, like as we ought,
Love is the lesson which the Lord us taught.
Filed under Ahriman, Covid-19 pandemic, Easter
Under the Gaze of Uriel
The following is the text of an address given as part of the Midsummer Festival organised by the Anthroposophical Society in Sussex, held on Sunday 23rd June 2019 at Emerson College.
We are now at the Summer Solstice and the St John’s Festival, that time of the year when in the Northern Hemisphere we have our longest day and shortest night. Rudolf Steiner, in a lecture given on 12thOctober 1923, said that the great archangel most associated with this time of year is Uriel: and that Uriel directs his countenance and clear piercing gaze down towards the Earth and perceives disturbing shapes which continually gather and dissolve, gather and dissolve again. These shapes, Steiner says, are “human errors upon which Uriel directs his earnest gaze. Here during the height of summer, the imperfections of mankind are searchingly surveyed and contrasted with the morality implicit in the natural world. Now we see how at midsummer human errors are woven into the regular crystals which are formed in the normal course of Nature. On the other hand, all that is human virtue and human excellence rises up with silver-gleaming lines and is seen as the clouds that envelop Uriel”.
Uriel directing his gaze at human errors. (Photo via Wikimedia)
So Midsummer is a time when, under the gaze of Uriel, the spiritual world looks with especial closeness at our human actions and motivations. This is a good time of year for us to do the same and look closely at what we humans are doing in the world.
Almost 60 years ago, someone who was inspired by anthroposophy wrote a book which woke up the world to the dangers of the unregulated use of pesticides. Rachel Carson wrote Silent Spring, which was published in 1962. Her book has been rightly acknowledged as one of the all-time great pieces of science writing, detailing the scale of the damage being done by human-applied chemicals to the environment and all its denizens. It had a huge impact and led to awareness and legislation at least in part controlling the damage caused by pesticides such as DDT.
Rachel Carson (photo via BBC)
In a letter written in 1958 to a friend, soon after she began the research that would lead to her book, Rachel Carson spoke about how difficult it had been for her to believe what was happening. She said:
“Some of the thoughts that came were so unattractive to me that I rejected them completely, for the old ideas die hard, especially when they are emotionally as well as intellectually dear to one…that the stream of life would flow on through time in whatever course that God had appointed for it …And to suppose that, however the physical environment might mould Life, that Life could never assume the power to change drastically – or even destroy – the physical world. These beliefs have almost been part of me for as long as I have thought about such things. To have them even vaguely threatened was so shocking that, as I have said, I shut my mind – refused to acknowledge what I couldn’t help seeing.”
Today, sixty years on, we are witnessing even greater threats to the web of life on Earth and it is perhaps even more difficult for us than it was for Carson to acknowledge and take on board the scale of the challenges now facing all of life. This is the first time in our history, for example, that through the activities of humankind, the entire global climate is shifting to what may be our permanent disadvantage; and we are also in the middle of what scientists are calling the Sixth Great Extinction of species, again caused by our activities.
But if that isn’t enough, there are still other challenges coming up fast to confront us. It was last year, just shortly after Midsummer, that during the annual conference of the Anthroposophical Society in Great Britain, we were shocked by the message that Nicanor Perlas brought about the threats posed by the advent of artificial intelligence. Nicanor has written a book about this, which no doubt many of you will have read, and it has a stark and scary title. His book is called Humanity’s Last Stand and in it he estimates that humanity has about 20 years to find ways in which artificial super intelligence, (ASI) can be aligned with human values; if we are not able to do this, we are likely to be totally overwhelmed by materialistic technology. If Uriel is casting his gaze on the leading advocates for ASI, he will be observing people who believe that humans are nothing more than complex biological machines.
Nicanor Perlas (photo via Right Livelihood Award)
If you believe human beings are nothing more than complex biological machines, then you open up your fellow humans to some disturbing outcomes; we can see, for example what is happening in China right now, where with the power of AI the governing Communist Party is developing extensive new tools for a comprehensive method of political and social control. They have given this a harmless sounding name – they are calling it “social credit.” But what it means is a total surveillance society, in which nothing you can do is hidden from the authorities. If the Chinese state gives you a poor social credit score, then your life becomes very severely constrained. You may be prevented from graduating, or travelling on some train lines, or buying an airline ticket, or buying a property, taking out a loan or even filling your car with fuel.
Now of course, no Western government would dare go so far as they are going in China, though no doubt some of them would like to. The irony of this is that the Chinese social-credit system is based explicitly on a familiar, Western model: the credit score, which we all know about. Data brokers trace the timely manner in which we pay our debts, giving us a score that’s used by lenders and mortgage providers. We also have social-style scores, and anyone who has shopped online with eBay has a rating on shipping times and communication, while Uber drivers and passengers both rate each other; if your score falls too far, you’re out of luck.
The Chinese genius, if you can call it that, was to take credit scoring as a tool of social discipline to its logical conclusion. They have extended their control across the entire range of interactions any member of modern society is more or less compelled to pursue by the very style and structure of contemporary life.
But of course there are many other phenomena of our time that are truly disturbing; there are so many shapes of human error for Uriel to gaze upon – but this evening I would like to focus on just one of them, which is the move to merge humankind with machines and technology.
Rudolf Steiner, of course, foresaw all of this, as far back as 1910. This is what he said in Lecture 12 of the series ‘The Reappearance of Christ in the Etheric’:
(…) “the will is there to harness human energy to mechanical energy. These things should not be treated by fighting against them. That is a completely false view. These things will not fail to appear; they will come. What we are concerned with is whether, in the course of world history, they are entrusted to people who are familiar in a selfless way with the great aims of earthly evolution and who structure these things for the health of human beings or whether they are enacted by groups of human beings who exploit these things in an egotistical or in a group-egotistical sense. That is what matters. It is not a question of the what in this case; the what is sure to come. It is a question of the how, how one tackles these situations. The what lies simply in the meaning of earthly evolution. The welding together of the human nature with the mechanical nature will be a problem of great significance for the remainder of earthly evolution”.
That’s quite a statement, isn’t it? “The welding together of the human nature with the mechanical nature will be a problem of great significance for the remainder of earthly evolution”. And in our time it’s being led not by people who structure these things for the health of human beings but by those whom Steiner describes as exploiting these things in an egotistical or group-egotistical sense.
How are they doing this? It is being presented to us not as a threat to our essential humanity but as a kind of species transformation through medical science and technology. The promise is that we will become new kinds of human beings as our bodies, minds and relationships with the environment and with mechanical devices become altered in fundamental ways.
The prediction by futurologists such as Google’s Ray Kurzweil is that we human beings will become more god-like as we become more machine-like and as machines develop more god-like powers. Kurzweil says that we humans are nothing special in the animal kingdom: we have no immortal soul, there is no essential human self and our thoughts and emotions are the product of electrochemical impulses which can in the future be modelled by algorithms. Our future lies in the hands of technical experts – in biotechnology, artificial intelligence, cognitive and computer science. New tools will become parts of our bodies. We will have bionic hands, feet and eyes, while nanorobots will move through our bloodstream looking out for disease and repairing the damage of age and injury. We shall have wearable and implanted devices to expand our senses and alter our moods, while biological tools will enter our cells, remodel our genes and give us new and better flesh, blood and neurons. Does that sound wonderful to you, or terrifying?
Ray Kurzweil (photo via Wikipedia)
Another futurologist, Yuval Noah Harari, says it is a fact that the “last days of Homo sapiens are fast approaching, and that our species will be replaced “by completely different beings who possess not only different physiques, but also very different cognitive and emotional worlds”. Ordinary human beings will become surplus to requirements, as wars will be waged by drones and work will be done by robots: “Some economists predict that sooner or later, unenhanced humans will be completely useless”. Algorithms embedded in silicon and metal will replace algorithms embedded in flesh, which as Harari points out, is what biology and computer science tells us is all we really are anyway. Things have apparently gone so far that some in Silicon Valley already refer to human beings as ‘meat puppets’.
But things are going still further: Harari says that human beings will cease to be free agents, that their autonomy will be taken over by algorithms – written at first by human beings but ultimately by algorithm-writing machines. As this happens, liberal society will disintegrate as we will no longer be able to sustain belief in the uniqueness of the free human being as the basis of liberal social order. He says that: “We – or our heirs – will probably require a brand-new package of religious beliefs and political institutions.”
Yuval Noah Harari (photo via Wikipedia)
This new religion will be called Dataism. It will be accompanied by the dissolution of the boundaries between humans, animals, machines and social systems, all of which will be seen as algorithmic information processing systems. The concepts of ‘right’ and ‘wrong’ will be replaced by the primacy of the free flow of information. The “cosmic data-processing system” will be what God once was: “It will be everywhere and will control everything, and humans are destined to merge into it.”
Rudolf Steiner has told us what is the true challenge of our age: he says “it is humanity’s task in this period to come to grips with evil as an impulse in the evolution of the world”. The task for the fifth post-Atlantean period, he says, is a particularly difficult one:
“As you see, a great many temptations face humanity. When the powers of evil gradually appear, it is natural that man is more likely under the circumstances to give in to this evil in all realms, rather than taking up the struggle to allow what appears to him as evil to be put in the service of the good in world evolution. Yet this must happen: the evil must to a certain degree be placed at the service of the good in world evolution”.
And it does seem as though we are indeed at a new point in world and human evolution. In this connection I remember a quotation from the late visionary poet and playwright Christopher Fry, who in his play, A Sleep of Prisoners, has one of the characters say the following:
The human heart can go the lengths of God.
Dark and cold we may be, but this is no winter now.
The frozen misery of centuries breaks, cracks, begins to move.
The thunder is the thunder of the floes, the thaw, the flood,
the upstart Spring.
Thank God our time is now, when wrong comes up,
to face us everywhere
Never to leave us till we take the longest stride of soul
men ever took.
Affairs are now soul size,
The enterprise is exploration unto God.
So that is what we are about in this age – we have chosen to be here at this time when human beings are making a massive evolutionary shift. This is a terrifying but also really exciting time to be here on Earth; and adopting a Luddite approach to emerging technology is not the required response. Steiner tells us:
“It would be the worst possible mistake to say that we should resist what technology has brought into modern life, that we should protect ourselves from Ahriman by cutting ourselves off from modern life. In a certain sense this would be spiritual cowardice. The real remedy for this is not to let the forces of the modern soul weaken and cut themselves off from modern life, but to make the forces of the soul strong so that they can stand up to modern life. A courageous approach to modern life is necessitated by world karma, and that is why true spiritual science possesses the characteristic of requiring an effort of the soul, a really hard effort”.
Alongside courage and hard effort, we also need hope, what Steiner in one of his verses refers to as “all-sustaining hope”. So here are a few reasons why, despite everything, I’m still hopeful and optimistic.
On a personal level, I’m encouraged by listening to the speakers who come here to give talks at Emerson; we have had some wonderful speakers who are alerting us to what is going on in the world and who are giving us real pointers to the future. I was particularly impressed recently by a representative of the Youth Section from Dornach, and the work that that Section is doing on a research project into young people’s attitudes towards spirituality across 23 different countries. I’m also blessed to work on these Emerson talks with some fine young colleagues. And in Liz Attwell’s inspirational talk 2 weeks ago, we heard of her intuition that it is the young people of today who are birthing a new Christ impulse. She also said that many of the dark things we are experiencing are just the inevitable flotsam and jetsam thrown up by this new impulse – and I’m sure she’s right.
Because of all this and so much more I am conscious of how lucky we are to live here and to know that Emerson College, Tablehurst and Plaw Hatch farms, Michael Hall School, Peredur, Tobias and Nutley Hall are all here. We live in an island of sanity amongst the surrounding seas of illusion and although we have some adjustments to make so that we can look the modern world square in the face (what is happening to the Waldorf schools is a case in point here), we are nevertheless strong and resolute.
And beyond our locality, I see all sorts of hopeful developments happening. Just this week, for example, we heard that an American billionaire has given £150 million to the University of Oxford to fund a new centre to look into the ethics of artificial intelligence. His name is Stephen Schwarzman and he said: “I think the scientists agree that they want AI introduced in an ethical way, because they don’t want to experience the downsides. I think this is one of the major issues of our age, because AI is going to come, it’s really unstoppable. It’s not just AI, it’s robotics and all other kinds of computer science innovations”. That echoes what Steiner said back in 1910. And on 12th June the UK government committed us to zero net emissions by 2050, which is definite progress – and there are now 18 out of 28 EU countries which have also pledged to go carbon-neutral by 2050.
I am also amused by and take pity on the idiocies of our atheistic futurologists. Ray Kurzweil, for example, that incredibly clever man and chief futurologist of Google, is also, rather endearingly, an idiot. He believes in cryonics, which for those of you who don’t know about it, is a technique of freezing dead bodies in the hope that science in the future may find a way to bring the corpses back to life. Ray Kurzweil has booked himself a place for when he dies with a leading American cryonics company, which charges $200,000 to deep-freeze a full body or, if you’re a cheapskate, $80,000 for just a head. The process involves getting to the patient as soon as possible after clinical death has been pronounced and then cooling the body over the next few days to bring it down to -196C using nitrogen gas. Your corpse is then placed in a shiny steel capsule with a bullet-proof viewing window and stays there until the day when science has sufficiently advanced to bring you back to life. I am not making this up – this is genuinely what cryonics is about; and Ray Kurzweil has signed up for this. The poor man doesn’t realise that he is already immortal! If he’d just read Steiner and informed himself about what a human being really is, he could have saved himself $200,000!
I comfort myself with the thought that in the final analysis, Ahriman and his minions will always lose. They always lose because they lack the capacity to love or understand those who can love. Nicanor Perlas in his book repeats a story that Bernard Lievegoed says was given by Steiner in a letter to a widow. In this letter, Steiner says he saw the image of Ahriman sitting in a cave under the earth. He works. He writes things down, counting and counting, calculating and calculating. He tries to build up a whole world out of a new mathematics (and of course AI algorithms are part of the new mathematics). There, Steiner says, Michael stands beside him waiting. For Michael knows that he will make the final addition. Michael with his sword, will make the sum. The moment has not yet come. Michael is waiting, standing by the side, waiting. He can do this when people on earth are there fighting and going with him. With Uriel, we weigh up and understand; with Michael, we act without fear on the basis of that understanding. And that is the really important point – in this present age of the consciousness soul, Michael can only act if we help him to do it. But if we do, he will in turn help us to find much more positive outcomes from the extreme technologies that are threatening our existence today. So it really is up to all of us to play our part in this huge battle.
And finally, I would like to leave you with this verse of Steiner’s:
“We must eradicate from the soul all fear and terror of what comes towards Man out of the future. We must acquire serenity in all feelings and sensations about the future.
We must look forward with absolute equanimity to everything that may come. And we must think only that whatever comes is given to us by a world-directive full of wisdom.
It is part of what we must learn in this age, namely, to live out of pure trust, without any security in existence – trust in the ever-present help of the spiritual world.
Truly, nothing else will do if our courage is not to fail us. And let us seek the awakening from within ourselves Every morning and every evening”.
Filed under Ahriman, Artificial Intelligence, Cryonics, Evil, Futurology, Rudolf Steiner, Spiritual Science, Uriel
Difficult days for Steiner Waldorf schools in England
These are dark and difficult times for Steiner Waldorf schools in England, so much so in fact that I fear for their survival.
I refer to England, rather than the rest of the UK, because it is the Department for Education (DfE) in England that oversees Ofsted which is responsible for inspecting a range of educational institutions, including state schools and some independent schools within England, and which is currently concentrating its efforts on giving Steiner schools as hard a time as possible. In Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland the situation is different and the Ofsted equivalents in those countries do not appear to have it as their mission to close down Steiner schools.
It was of course the disastrous failings at the now-closed Kings Langley school that provided the main impetus for this campaign against Steiner schools. As Tom Hart Shea, a former head teacher who commented on my “Death of a Steiner school” post observed, “I fear the knock-on effects of this saga for other Steiner Schools. By this I mean it would be irresponsible for the DfE not to look for similar failings in other College-run Steiner Schools”.
So it has proved, except that Ofsted is not just inspecting the independent Steiner schools to within an inch of their lives but is also coming down very heavily on the state-funded Steiner academy schools.
The Kings Langley failures led to a wide range of highly critical articles about Steiner education in the national media. On 24th June 2018, the Daily Telegraph published an article with the headline: “ ‘Rotten to the core’ flagship Steiner school to close, as it emerges concerned parents were sent gagging letters”. The article, by the newspaper’s education editor, Camilla Turner, went on to say:
“A flagship Steiner school is to close amid fears over child safety, after it emerged that parents who tried to raise the alarm about safeguarding lapses had been sent gagging letters.
The Rudolf Steiner School Kings Langley (RSSKL) has told parents that it will shut down at the end of this term, following a string of damning Ofsted reports.
Steiner schools, which are favoured by liberally-minded middle-class parents, base their curriculum – which emphasises creativity and imagination – on the spiritual philosophy of Rudolf Steiner.
Parents have accused the school of attempting to “cover up” the full extent of its failings by trying to intimidate those who sought to voice their unease about the goings-on at the school”.
Camilla Turner returned to the theme in another Telegraph article on 20th October 2018, this time with the Steiner Academy Exeter in her sights:
“Ministers have been urged to order fresh inspections of all the Steiner schools in the country, as a second school is threatened with closure amid ‘serious’ concerns about child safety.
The Steiner Academy Exeter was warned by the government this week that it could have its funding cut off, after Ofsted discovered severe safeguarding and governance lapses.
Following the inspection, the regional schools’ commissioner took the unusual step of instructing it to close immediately while the issues were addressed, so it can ensure a ‘safe environment’ for its pupils. It re-opened a week later”.
On 6thDecember 2018, Sally Weale, an education correspondent for The Guardian, also wrote about the Steiner Academy Exeter under the headline:
“ ‘Inadequate’ Steiner school to be taken over by academy chain”. She went on to report:
“A state-funded Steiner school in Devon is to be transferred to a multi-academy trust after the schools watchdog said it was inadequate.
Ofsted inspectors raised serious concerns about safeguarding and lack of support for children with special educational needs and disabilities (Send) at the Steiner Academy Exeter, which opened in September 2013.
The academy is one of a small number of Steiner schools set up as a result of the government’s controversial free school policy and paid for by public funds. Other Steiner schools in the UK are privately funded”.
Sally Weale followed this up with another Guardian article on 17th January 2019:
“The future of state-funded Steiner education has been thrown into doubt after a series of snap Ofsted inspections found that three of the four such schools set up under the Conservatives’ free schools programme were inadequate.
The four have been inspected in recent weeks – alongside private Steiner schools, a number of which have also been found to be inadequate – following an intervention by the education secretary, Damian Hinds, over concerns about safeguarding.
Ofsted reports for the Frome and Bristol Steiner academies are due to be published later this week and have been shared with parents. Copies seen by The Guardian reveal inspectors’ concerns about a wide range of issues including safeguarding, bullying and lack of support for children with special educational needs and disabilities.
The Frome report accuses leaders and governors of failing to provide pupils with a safe and effective education, due to a lack of understanding about the current statutory requirements”.
Humanists UK, which has for some years been campaigning against Steiner schools, tried to claim the credit for Ofsted’s actions:
“Humanists UK is calling for the urgent closure of three Steiner schools which were rated inadequate by the education inspectorate Ofsted after the schools failed to prove they could keep pupils safe. The inspections are the culmination of a long-running campaign by Humanists UK to expose the dangers of the Steiner school sector. (…)
Humanists UK has long standing concerns about Steiner schools and has consistently campaigned against state funding for these institutions. In 2014 it won an Information Tribunal case against the government, forcing it to publicly release briefings about serious problems with Steiner schools including the bullying of students and teaching racism.
Other concerns raised by Humanists UK included the presence of pseudoscience on the curriculum (including scepticism of evolution and vaccinations and support for homeopathy), homeopathy being given to pupils by the schools’ ‘anthroposophical doctors’, and the fact that a number of private and at least one state Steiner school have opted out of providing vaccinations.
The Guardian also reports that the School Inspection Service (SIS), which Humanists UK has long campaigned to see shut down on the basis of concerns about its efficacy, has now been closed. Ofsted has hitherto not inspected Steiner schools routinely as that has been the SIS’s responsibility. The SIS was set up by the Exclusive Brethren and also inspects Brethren schools, and Humanists UK had concerns about the quality and impartiality of its inspections. Humanists UK is seeking to clarify its reported closure with Ofsted”.
It is ironic, to say the least, that Humanists UK have been so keen to close down schools offering a thoroughly humanistic (though not atheistic) education. But their last point about the closure of the School Inspection Service (SIS) appears to be true, although I can find no mention of it on the SIS website. I am sad about this closure, because as I wrote in my Death of a Steiner school post, the ex-HMIs (Her Majesty’s Inspectors) of SIS were the best inspectors I have come across. They were headed up by Jane Cooper, who was formerly a highly respected Principal Inspector for Ofsted. SIS also inspected the Cognita Schools group, which was set up by the late Chris Woodhead, himself a former Chief Inspector of Ofsted. So I think we can be quite certain that SIS really knew their business. As I suspected, it seems likely that they have become the victims of a turf war with Ofsted.
The Guardian returned to the attack on 18th January with an article by their columnist Zoe Williams, headed: “These Steiner ‘failures’ are really a failure of the free school agenda”. Ms Williams had spotted an opportunity to have a go at the former Education Secretary, Michael Gove, who had been responsible for a huge expansion of the government’s free schools programme, under which four publicly-funded Steiner academies had been created:
“Ofsted inspectors have found three of the UK’s four Steiner state schools “inadequate”, in reports that will be published this week. Their core concerns are believed to be safeguarding, bullying and a lack of support for children with special educational needs. A number of private Steiner schools have also been deemed inadequate.
In a brilliant primer written in 2014, when free schools were still a jewel in the crown of the coalition government, the BBC journalist Chris Cook described the core controversies that might be thrown up by Steiner schools. At that point, and to this day, these are mainly private schools. In a way, the handful that opened on the state’s dollar were the apotheosis of Michael Gove’s promise to parents: if you want to replicate a private education, even at its very wackiest, and you have the energy, you have our blessing.
The headline contention was the very pronounced racism of Rudolf Steiner, who thought black people lived an “instinctual life”, and white people an “intellectual life”. Somehow, though, this was passed over rather mildly as an unfortunate tang of times past, nothing to do with his educational writing, according to the Steiner Waldorf Schools Fellowship (SWSF) – just as a pro-choice campaigner today might shrug off the hardcore eugenicism of Marie Stopes.
Yet the two are not analogous, since Steiner’s white supremacism is a thread running through the rest of the creed, a mulch of reincarnation and homeopathy. One piquant detail of the BBC’s investigation was that four white teachers at a private school, on a diversity training day, when asked their ethnicity, “ticked every box” on the basis that they had only ended up white having passed through every inferior race in their reincarnation journey”.
Ah yes, racism and white supremacism. It is impossible to have any kind of public discussion about Steiner Waldorf education without these accusations being thrown at the schools, however much the schools may emphasise that they do not agree with Steiner’s racial theories. Here, for example, is a statement from the website of the Steiner Academy Hereford:
“Steiner Education is opposed to all forms of discrimination against any person or group of people on the grounds of race, gender, faith, disability, age and sexual orientation and is committed to promoting equality of opportunity and reflecting the diversity of the children, staff and parents served by Steiner schools. The following is taken from Steiner’s book, “The Universal Human”.
‘ … the anthroposophical movement [ . . .], must cast aside the division into races. It must seek to unite people of all races and nations, and to bridge the divisions and differences between various groups of people. The old point of view of race has a physical character, but what will prevail in the future will have a more spiritual character.’
Nevertheless, even though Steiner’s ideas are based on a profound respect for the equality, individuality and shared humanity of all people, regardless of race or ethnic origin, his works do contain a number of statements on race that are inappropriate in a modern context.
Steiner education thrives on every continent, in every culture and within a wide range of ethnic contexts. For example, during the period of the apartheid regime in South Africa, the only school catering for mixed races was a Steiner Waldorf school and today there are schools following Steiner’s indications on education in diverse cultures and communities, including: Israel, Egypt, Kenya, Sierra Leone, Taiwan, Japan, Brazil or Hawaii, over 60 countries in all”.
Schools can say this sort of thing until they are blue in the face but it will make no difference to the critics, who have found the accusations of racism provide an excellent stick with which to beat the schools out of existence.
Zoe Williams’ article produced a backlash from parents and supporters of Steiner schools in The Guardian’s Schools’ section letters page, including this rather clumsy defence from a governor of the Steiner Academy Bristol:
“I am dismayed by Zoe Williams’ caricature of Steiner education and her willingness to cite state-funded Steiner schools as an argument against free schools. Her description is based entirely on a piece written by Chris Cook in 2014, who conceded he had not looked at state-funded Steiner academies. He concentrated on the esoteric spiritual science of anthroposophy. But this has no place in the Steiner Academy Bristol. We teach all major world religions (certainly not anthroposophy!).
As for Steiner’s ugly racism, we completely dissociate ourselves from such attitudes. Ours is a multi-ethnic, multi-religion school with a sharply focused curriculum that seeks to develop the head, the heart and the soul in a rounded way. Where we do think Steiner was right was in recognising the need for age-appropriate learning that develops the whole child”.
One conclusion I drew in my Death of a Steiner school post appears to have been wrong. When I said that “my main hope for the future of Steiner Waldorf education in the UK now resides with the publicly-funded Steiner academy schools at Hereford, Exeter, Frome and Bristol”, I was reckoning without the zeal of Ofsted’s witchfinders. I said that “because the Steiner academy schools receive public funding, they are held much more accountable by government – but because they are now part of the maintained sector, they are seen as a valid part of the pluralistic education system in England in a way that the independent schools never managed to achieve. Not the least of RSSKL’s disasters is that it makes it far less likely that any government will wish to allow any more publicly-funded Steiner academy schools to be created”.
Well, that last sentence is certainly correct. But I had not expected that three out of the four publicly-funded Steiner academy schools would have received such bad Ofsted reports. The Steiner Academy Exeter was forced to close for a week and has now been taken over by a multi-academy trust (MAT) and the principal, the highly respected Alan Swindell, has left the school and twelve trustees have resigned. This is very likely to mean that Steiner Waldorf education in Exeter will now be in name only. The Steiner Academy Frome, after previous ‘Good’ verdicts from Ofsted, has now been rated ‘Inadequate’ in every single area of inspection and the principal, the excellent Trevor Mepham, has left the school. The Steiner Academy Bristol has also received a damning Ofsted report, which has provoked the school into planning to take Ofsted to court after it was, like Frome, rated as ‘Inadequate’ under each area of inspection and consequently was put into ‘special measures’.
A similar reign of terror is being visited on the independent Steiner schools, with several which had previously been rated as ‘Good’ or even ‘Outstanding’, hurriedly being inspected and told that they are ‘Inadequate’.
What is going on? I suspect that something like the following has happened: a celebrity parent at Kings Langley wrote to the DfE, along with about 30 other parents, to complain about the school’s inadequate handling of their complaints about safeguarding. The celebrity parent’s letter will have been put onto the desk of the Education Minister, Damian Hinds, together with a dossier of hostile press cuttings about Steiner Waldorf education. Hinds will have said to his permanent secretary: “Get Spielman on the line (Amanda Spielman, Ofsted’s chief inspector) and tell her to put some stick about with these weird Steiner bastards. Make sure she closes down a few of their schools pour encourager les autres. And make sure I don’t get any more letters like this on my desk.”
Now some people may say: What is the problem here? All the schools need to do is to adhere to Ofsted guidelines, particularly on safeguarding, and they will be passed as ‘Good’ or even ‘Outstanding’. Schools need to be more professional in their approach and they need to get this right.
What this ignores, however, is the probability that the schools are now being faced with a highly politicised war of attrition in which the government is determined to close down some Steiner schools so as to avoid embarrassing headlines in the future. In the past, when schools were under the control of local education authorities, Secretaries of State for Education could blame the town halls and civic centres for any lapses in school standards. As Zoe Williams has noticed, the free schools programme means that the responsibility for school failures now ends up on the desk of the Minister.
And now there’s a truly chilling development from Ofsted: Steiner Waldorf education is now to be accused of thought crimes. Amanda Spielman was reported in Schools Week as having written to Damian Hinds, the education secretary, on Thursday after snap inspections of nine Steiner schools – state and private – found six were “inadequate” and three “requires improvement”. Spielman wrote that senior leaders at one school “blamed pupils with SEND for all the problems”, while others witnessed “inappropriate physical handling” of pupils. Some parents who complained were “intimidated”. Spielman has now demanded an investigation into whether the Steiner philosophy is contributing to the failures.
Apart from the aftermath of the Kings Langley closure, why are Steiner schools in such a pickle at the moment? These days I’m pretty much removed from the whole business, since I left Kings Langley in 2014, but my feeling is that the Steiner schools’ movement in the UK, because of its historical allegiance to schools self-administering through a College of Teachers, has not been able to develop a cadre of school leaders able to cope with the latter-day demands of Ofsted and particularly the Safeguarding aspect of school regulation. How many of them will come through this period unscathed I can’t say – but I’m glad my own daughter was able to have a Steiner education, at a time when History of Art was still available as an A-level (Gove removed this as a subject). It has stood her very well in her subsequent university and career path and I hope that, despite the current Ofsted reign of terror, other children will also be able to benefit from Steiner Waldorf education for many years to come.
Critics who laud Ofsted for moving against Steiner schools should be careful of what they wish for. The main beneficiaries of this confected angst about Steiner schools and safeguarding are the manufacturers and sellers of 6’ high perimeter fencing materials, in which schools are forced by Ofsted to turn their schools into fortresses against the world. What children learn from this is that the world is a dangerous place and adults are scary people, not to be trusted. It also leads to the absurd and offensive situation in which kindergarten parents wanting to collect their child from school have to sign in at the school office, wear a lanyard, be escorted across the grounds by a member of staff to the kindergarten and then be escorted back to the school office where they have to sign out and return their lanyard. If that’s the kind of school that Humanists UK are agitating for, then all I can say is that it’s not my idea of a humane or humanist education.
As I’m an unashamed and unabashed anthroposophist, and despite any embarrassment this might cause to school governors wishing to repudiate everything about Steiner except his educational teachings, I will finish with a quotation from Rudolf Steiner which I commend to all Steiner school teachers who are seeing their best efforts crumbling to dust at the moment:
“However good the right may be that you want to bring to realisation – it will turn into a wrong in the course of time. Benevolence will after a time become prejudicial behaviour. And however good the right may be that you want to bring to realisation — it will turn into a wrong in the course of time. The reality is that there are no absolutes in this world. You work towards something that is good, and the way of the world will turn it into something bad. We therefore must seek ever new ways, look for new forms over and over again. This is what really matters.
The swing of the pendulum governs all such human efforts. Nothing is more harmful than belief in absolute ideals, for they are at odds with the true course of world evolution. (…)
It is (Ahriman) who will and must be the bearer of our future civilisation. This is a harsh truth, but it is important. It is intimately bound up with the fact that destructive powers will have to enter into the future progress of civilisation. Above all — (…) — destructive powers will have to enter into the whole field of education, and especially the education of children, unless the matter is taken in hand with wisdom. Because of the general trend of civilisation, and the customary practices and emotions of people, destructive powers will also enter more and more into the whole social sphere. They will above all bring more and more destruction into the actual relationships between people”.
Filed under Ahriman, Free Schools, Humanism, Kings Langley, Ofsted, Steiner Waldorf schools, Waldorf critics
Don’t be evil
I don’t suppose that Rudolf Steiner’s lectures incorporate the use of the word “fun” very often. The words “serious” and “earnest” are much more common. So I was struck by the following passage in which he did use that word – but not in a cheerful context (this is Steiner, after all). Here is the passage, from Lecture Three of the series entitled The Influences of Lucifer and Ahriman:
“The fact that — to use a colloquialism — people in the future are not going to get much fun out of developments on the physical plane will bring home to them that further evolution must proceed from spiritual forces.”
Steiner’s view was that the time when human progress was possible through purely physical means is now over. Human progress will be possible in the future but only through development on a higher level than that of the processes of the physical plane. Speaking just after the First World War, he went on to say: “This can be understood only by surveying a lengthy period of evolution and applying what is discovered to experiences that will become more and more general in the future. The trend of forces that will manifest in the well-nigh rhythmical onset of war and destruction — processes of which the present catastrophe (ie the First World War) is but the beginning — will become only too evident. It is childish to believe that anything connected with this war can bring about a permanent era of peace for humanity on the physical plane. That will not be so. What must come about on the earth is spiritual development…”
In the one hundred years since he spoke, Steiner has certainly been proved right about the impossibility of a permanent era of peace for humanity – this century has been the most terrible in the history of the world. What else did he foresee?
“Just as once in the East there was a Lucifer incarnation, and then, at the midpoint, as it were, of world evolution, the incarnation of Christ, so in the West there will be an incarnation of Ahriman. …This ahrimanic incarnation cannot be averted; it is inevitable, for humanity must confront Ahriman face to face. He will be the individuality by whom it will be made clear what indescribable cleverness can be developed if they call to their help all that earthly forces can do to enhance cleverness and ingenuity. In the catastrophes that will befall humanity in the near future, people will become extremely inventive… Humanity has no knowledge of these things as yet; but not only will they be striven for, they will be the inevitable outcome of catastrophes looming in the near future. And certain secret societies — where preparations are already in train — will apply these things in such a way that the necessary conditions can be established for an actual incarnation of Ahriman on the earth. This incarnation cannot be averted, for people must realise during the time of the earth’s existence just how much can proceed from purely material processes! We must learn to bring under our control those spiritual or unspiritual currents which are leading to Ahriman.”
Yeshayahu Ben Aharon (photo via antroposofy en apocalypse blog)
When is this incarmation likely to occur? Tempting though it is to point to many of today’s phenomena as indicators that the incarnation has already happened, my current sense is that things are going to get quite a bit worse yet before Ahriman himself appears in physical form. I recently read an article called Empty Hearts and Technological Singularity by Yeshayahu Ben Aharon (available for download to subscribers to the Academia website) in which he describes the coming merger of the human being with infinitely intelligent machines, as predicted by Ray Kurzweil, Google’s senior futurist.
“In esoteric terms, this means that the human’s free etheric body from the head to the heart will be totally taken over by ahrimanic, infinitely brilliant, wise and powerful intelligences. I would recommend Kurzweil’s book, The Singularity is Near, to every body interested in the coming future, as an introduction to open your mind and eyes to see where we are going from the ahrimanic point of view. I call this the building of the kindergarten of Ahriman, in preparation for his school that he will build in the 23rd century in America. He will build a school that will work with the etheric forces taken from the rest of the body as well: the head, the heart and the whole thing. This is Ahriman’s kindergarten, the forerunner of his mature school.
The singularity people promise a new kind of immortality. Human beings will be identified with Infinite Intelligence through super computers and so on, and they will experience a sort of immortality for their earthly consciousness, an indefinite life. Your whole soul life, including everything you were thinking and remembering, which you already invested externally in the infinite virtual reality, will be preserved forever. Even if you die physically, it will be preserved and it will continue to evolve and develop through Infinite Intelligence. The idea is that people will not die physically or at least live hundreds of years, since the new technology will overcome the illnesses that medicine could not conquer. But after long years, if they still die at all, all their life will remain as a virtual personality in a tech reality, continuing as it were, a second life. But this will really become the primary life, the life of this individuality as his avatar in virtual reality. If you don’t know this world very well, it will be hard for you to create a picture of it. Look into it; the children already know all about it, they are born into the Matrix, as their parents merge them with the internet immediately. This is the ahrimanic side, because everything is accomplished through Infinite Intelligence, working through virtual reality. In the future, a huge intelligent machine will have been merged into the human body, and humans and infinitely smart, powerful, and all-knowing and all entertaining AI (Artificial Intelligence) will become one and the same…”
It is worth reading the Wikipedia entry about Ray Kurzweil, including his transhumanism (ie the belief that human beings may eventually be able to transform themselves through technology into different beings with abilities so greatly expanded from the natural condition as to merit the label of “post-human beings”) and his predictions for the future. Along with Yuval Noah Harari, whom I wrote about here, it is clear that Kurzweil, this highly intelligent man, is nevertheless one of the Useful Idiots preparing the way for Ahriman.
Ray Kurzweil (photo via Wikipedia)
As part-evidence for my statement that Kurzweil is an idiot, it should be noted that he has joined the Alcor Life Extension Foundation, a cryonics company. In the event of his declared death, Kurzweil plans to be perfused with cryoprotectants, vitrified in liquid nitrogen, and stored at an Alcor facility in the hope that future medical technology will be able to repair his tissues and revive him. I have written more about the absurd belief and practices of cryonics and Alcor here.
It should also be noted that Kurzweil was personally hired by Google co-founder Larry Page. “Don’t be evil” was the motto of Google’s corporate code of conduct, first introduced around 2000. In Google’s IPO (initial public offering of shares) in 2004, a letter from Google’s founders included the following: “Don’t be evil. We believe strongly that in the long term, we will be better served—as shareholders and in all other ways—by a company that does good things for the world even if we forgo some short term gains.”
However, surprise, surprise – following Google’s corporate restructuring in October 2015, the motto was dropped and replaced in the new corporate code of conduct by the phrase “Do the right thing”. So is AI the right thing for human beings? Is that the way we should be going?
Elon Musk (photo via Wikipedia)
If the world won’t listen to Rudolf Steiner or to anthroposophists, perhaps they will pay more attention to a billionaire entrepreneur: Elon Musk has warned that AI is more dangerous than the threat posed by dictator Kim Jong-un’s regime in North Korea. Mr Musk, chief executive of Tesla and SpaceX, took to Twitter to say: “If you’re not concerned about AI safety, you should be. Vastly more risk than North Korea.”
He posted the comment along with an image of the anti-gambling addiction poster with the slogan: “In the end the machines will win.” Mr Musk added: “Nobody likes being regulated, but everything (cars, planes, food, drugs, etc) that’s a danger to the public is regulated. AI should be too.
Mr Musk has warned in the past that AI should be better regulated since it poses an “existential threat” to human civilisation. He has also compared developers creating AI to people summoning demons they cannot control. Exactly so.
Filed under Ahriman, Artificial Intelligence, Rudolf Steiner
I have seen the future…
Lincoln Steffens is hardly a household name these days, though perhaps he should be. Born in 1866, which makes him a near-contemporary of Rudolf Steiner, he was a highly influential American journalist during the early years of the 20th century. He knew and interviewed most of the famous people of his time, and was a campaigning and muckraking journalist, whose investigations of corruption in Wall Street helped lead to the creation of the Federal Reserve System.
But Steffens had his blind spots, and the most egregious of these was his embrace of Lenin and the Soviet Union. It was Steffens who reported his first impressions of the Soviet Union with the notorious phrase, “I have seen the future, and it works.”
Lincoln Steffens (photo via New York Times)
The anthropopper has now come across the Lincoln Steffens de nos jours, and he is an historian called Yuval Noah Harari. He has written a book called Homo Deus: A Brief History of Tomorrow and it is my contention that Harari is doing for the coming incarnation of Ahriman what Steffens did for Lenin – in other words, in the term invented to describe people who blindly supported the likes of Lenin and Stalin while they committed atrocity after atrocity, he is a useful idiot.
Not that the world at large seems to regard Harari in this light – his book, first published in 2014, has become an international bestseller, endorsed by Barack Obama and considered by Bill Gates and Mark Zuckerberg as essential reading. All the most glittering prizes of contemporary fame have been showered on him – TED talks, public lectures, a dedicated YouTube channel, an online course as well as speeches to the futurologists at Google and the Singularity University in Silicon Valley.
Yuval Noah Harari (photo via Wikipedia)
In Harari’s book, you can see how in our current time the Ahrimanic and the Luciferic influences are working together to deceive human beings about their true nature and their true future. Humans, says Harari, have done great things already and unimaginably greater things are going to be done. Our lifespan, for example, the Biblical three score years and ten, will double to one hundred and fifty as we humans become masters of our own fate and shapers of the natural circumstances of our own existence. The gods once made sport of us, but the future will “upgrade humans into gods, and turn Homo sapiens into Homo deus.”
According to Harari, scientific and technological innovations issuing from the minds of a visionary technical elite will be writing the story of our future: “History is often shaped by small groups of forward-looking innovators rather than by the backward-looking masses.” (You can see how this might appeal to people like Gates and Zuckerberg.) If humankind of the future is still assailed by new strains of disease or with viruses resistant to all antibiotics, it won’t be because of inadequate science and research, but because of a failure of political will or inadequate resources.
So medicine, if the political classes allow it to get on with its job, is part of the good news. Climate change, environmental collapse and mass extinctions are, of course, part of the bad news; but “we could lessen the danger by slowing the pace of progress and growth”, and as for nuclear weapons, they have compelled the superpowers “to find alternative and peaceful ways to resolve conflicts.” Harari’s vision for the future, however, is not species annihilation but species transformation through science and technology. We will become new kinds of human beings as our bodies, minds and relationships with the environment and with mechanical devices become altered in fundamental ways.
Harari’s prediction is that we human beings will become more god-like as we become more machine-like and as the capacity of machines becomes more god-like. We are nothing special in the animal kingdom, we have no immortal soul, there is no essential human self and our thoughts and emotions are the product of electrochemical impulses which can in the future be modelled by algorithms. Our future lies in the hands of technical experts – in biotechnology, artificial intelligence, cognitive and computer science. New tools will become parts of our bodies. We will have bionic hands, feet and eyes, while nanorobots will move through our bloodstream looking out for disease and repairing the damage of age and injury. We shall have wearable and implanted devices to expand our senses and alter our moods, while biological tools will enter our cells, remodel our genes and give us new and better flesh, blood and neurons.
Harari says it is a fact that the “last days of Homo sapiens are fast approaching, and that our species will be replaced “by completely different beings who possess not only different physiques, but also very different cognitive and emotional worlds.” Ordinary human beings will become surplus to requirements, as wars will be waged by drones and work will be done by robots: “Some economists predict that sooner or later, unenhanced humans will be completely useless.” Algorithms embedded in silicon and metal will replace algorithms embedded in flesh, which as Harari points out, is what biology and computer science tells us is all we really are anyway. Things have apparently gone so far that some in Silicon Valley already refer to human beings as “meat puppets.”
Things are going still further: Harari says that human beings will cease to be free agents, that their autonomy will be taken over by algorithms – written at first by human beings but ultimately by algorithm-writing machines. As this happens, liberal society will disintegrate as we will no longer be able to sustain belief in the uniqueness of the free human being as the basis of liberal social order. “We – or our heirs – will probably require a brand new package of religious beliefs and political institutions.”
This new religion will be called Dataism. It will be accompanied by the dissolution of the boundaries between animals, machines and social systems, all of which will be seen as algorithmic information processing systems. The concepts of ‘right’ and ‘wrong’ will be replaced by the primacy of the free flow of information. The “cosmic data-processing system” will be what God once was: “It will be everywhere and will control everything, and humans are destined to merge into it.”
One can see how all of this appeals very much to the would-be masters of the universe, such as Jeff Bezos (Amazon), Mark Zuckerberg (Facebook), Bill Gates (Microsoft), Tim Cook (Apple) and all those who believe that human beings are just commodities to be manipulated by those who control the algorithms. It reinforces their sense that they have got it right and that they are the leaders of evolution.
I think enough has now been said to indicate that Harari is completely under the influence of Ahriman and Lucifer. What is disturbing is that his vision is so obviously already well under way, as we move inexorably towards the time of the incarnation of Ahriman. I’ve written before about Rudolf Steiner’s warnings concerning the forthcoming unique incarnation of Ahriman, of which Harari’s book is an obvious precursor:
“Just as there was an incarnation of Lucifer in the flesh and an incarnation of Christ in the flesh, so, before only a part of the third millennium of the post-Christian era has elapsed, there will be, in the West, an actual incarnation of Ahriman: Ahriman in the flesh. Humanity on earth cannot escape this incarnation of Ahriman. It will come inevitably. But what matters is that people shall find the right vantage point from which to confront it.”
Steiner’s advice was that, although we cannot avoid this incarnation, the best thing we can do is to wake up from our complacent materialistic sleep and observe what is happening all around us:
“Whenever preparation is being made for incarnations of this character, we must be alert to certain indicative trends in evolution. A being like Ahriman, who will incarnate in the West in time to come, prepares for this incarnation in advance. With a view to his incarnation on the earth, Ahriman guides certain forces in evolution in such a way that they may be of the greatest possible advantage to him. And evil would result were people to live on in a state of drowsy unawareness, unable to recognise certain phenomena in life as preparations for Ahriman’s incarnation in the flesh. The right stand can be taken only by recognising in one or another series of events the preparation that is being made by Ahriman for his earthly existence. And the time has now come for individual human beings to know what tendencies and events around them are machinations of Ahriman, helping him to prepare for his approaching incarnation.
It would undoubtedly be of the greatest benefit to Ahriman if he could succeed in preventing the vast majority of people from perceiving what would make for their true well-being, if the vast majority of people were to regard these preparations for the Ahriman incarnation as progressive and good for evolution. If Ahriman were able to slink into a humanity unaware of his coming, that would gladden him most of all. It is for this reason that the occurrences and trends in which Ahriman is working for his future incarnation must be brought to light.”
I suppose we owe a debt of gratitude to Harari for showing so clearly what the incarnation of Ahriman will have in store for us, unless we wake up to what is happening and start to work towards some different outcomes. Outcomes are not necessarily independent of the prediction; and if enough people believe that certain things can happen or will happen, they may devote resources and technology to making them happen. So let us try to focus on what the real, intended future for human beings ought to be.
In doing this, we shouldn’t underestimate the difficulty of changing course, nor should we ignore the role of our present model of capitalism, which will prevent us from hitting the brakes and steering the car away from Harari’s predicted future. We already have a situation in which Jeff Bezos is ‘worth’ $85 billion, whereas an Amazon delivery driver is just a disposable part in a machine, a component to be thrown away without a moment’s thought as soon as he can’t perform to the standards demanded by the algorithm.
Let us leave the final word to Rudolf Steiner:
“To the extent to which people can be roused into conducting their affairs not for material ends alone and into regarding a free and independent spiritual life, equally with economic life, as an integral part of the social organism — to that same extent Ahriman’s incarnation will be awaited with an attitude worthy of humanity.”
Filed under Ahriman, Futurology, Lucifer
anthropopper 