The following is the text of a talk I gave as part of the Anthroposophical Society in Sussex’s celebration of the St John Festival, held at Emerson College on Sunday 21st June 2026.
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, and when the Sun reaches its highest point in the sky. This is also the time when people around the world celebrate the birthday of John the Baptist. The festival of John the Baptist is held approximately six months before Christmas, since John, the Herald of Christ, was born about six months before Jesus.
In this talk, we will be looking together at the Mystery of John, a wisdom impulse which has been with us since before recorded history and which has continued to evolve right up into our present momentous times. Throughout it all, the John presence has accompanied us and is still with us today. Later on, I’d like to look at how that may be manifesting in our world right now.
The festival we are celebrating today is dedicated to one particular aspect of John, the life of John the Baptist. And I’m particularly struck by contrasts and similarities between the birth circumstances of John the Baptist and those of Jesus of Nazareth, as for example they were described in the first chapter of the Gospel of Luke.
John’s parents were both aged, certainly older than is usual for first-time parents. John’s mother was Elizabeth, who had been unable to have children; and his father was Zechariah, an elderly priest. Luke tells us that “they were both upright people in the sight of God, not failing to keep all the commandments and regulations of the Lord; but they had no children because Elizabeth was barren and they were both advanced in age.”
One day while Zechariah was performing his priestly duties within the temple, the angel Gabriel appeared to him and said: “Do not be afraid, Zechariah, because your request has been heard. Your wife Elizabeth will bear you a son and you shall give him the name John. You will have joy and great happiness and many will rejoice at his birth, as he will be great in the sight of the Lord.”
Zechariah was amazed by this, saying to the angel: “How can this be, as I myself am an old man and my wife is advanced in age?” But this was not well received by the angel, who said: “I am Gabriel who stand in the presence of God. I was sent out to speak to you and to bring you this good news. But see – now you will be silenced and not have the power to speak until this happens, because you did not believe my words – which will be fulfilled in their season.”
And that is what happened. Elizabeth did indeed become pregnant and Zechariah remained unable to speak until the birth of their child. Then in the sixth month of Elizabeth’s pregnancy, the angel Gabriel went to the town of Nazareth in Galilee and spoke with a young woman, Mary, who was promised in marriage to a man whose name was Joseph. He said: “Do not be afraid, Mary, because you have found favour with God – and see, you will conceive and bear a son to whom you should give the name Jesus. He will be great and will be called the Son of the Most High.” Unsurprisingly, Mary was perturbed by this and said to the angel: “How shall this be, seeing I know not a man?” She meant by this, of course, that she was still a virgin.
Unlike in the case of poor Zechariah, who had been punished for disbelieving the angel’s word, Gabriel reassured Mary by saying: “The Holy Spirit will come upon you and the power of the Highest will overshadow you. Therefore, the child who will be born will be called holy Son of God. And see, your cousin Elizabeth has also conceived a son in her old age and this is her sixth month, although she was considered barren; because nothing which he says will be impossible for God.”
A little while later, Mary, who was by now newly pregnant, visited her cousin Elizabeth in Judea, who had been pregnant for six months. When Mary greeted her, the unborn baby made tremendous movements in Elizabeth’s womb and Elizabeth said: “When the sound of your greeting came to my ears, the babe in my womb leaped for joy.” It was as though John in Elizabeth’s womb was overjoyed by proximity to the Jesus embryo within Mary.
Mary then stayed with Elizabeth and Zechariah for three months before returning home. Whether this was before or after the birth of John is not clear, but one would like to think that Mary was present at the birth in order to help her cousin. But Luke does make it clear that all the neighbours and family members expected the baby boy, in accordance with tradition, to be named Zechariah after his father. Elizabeth, however, said: “No – he must be called John.” And so they then asked the mute Zechariah about the name of his son. Zechariah called for a writing tablet and to everyone’s astonishment, wrote: “His name is John.” And Luke says: “Instantly, Zechariah’s mouth was opened and when his tongue was set free, he spoke in praise of God.”
From Luke’s account, one can begin to see the deep connections between John and Jesus and the divine forces already at work in them. But inevitably, questions arise. For example, was the birth of John also miraculous, arising in this case from divinely ordained ‘immaculate conception’ rather than normal sexual procreation? And what should we understand by the terms ‘immaculate conception’ and ‘virgin birth’ anyway? Rudolf Steiner spoke about the virgin birth, which he interpreted not as a physical, biological event, but as a profound spiritual, esoteric reality. He taught that it represents the purification of the human soul and the preparation of a specialized physical vessel for the incarnation of the Christ Being. The focus in anthroposophy is less on the apparent biological impossibility of virgin birth and more on the descent of the Divine Word, the Logos, into the purified vessel, representing a new type of birth into the human sphere.
More questions arise: did Joseph and Mary make love and conceive a child before Mary set off to visit her cousin; or did Zechariah and Elizabeth, aged though they both were, still maintain a sexual relationship, which led through divine grace to the conception of John? I don’t think so. Like much else in the Mystery of John, these are matters which are not easy to explain with our everyday understanding. They require us to open ourselves to new concepts of what might be possible. When discussing this with a dear friend in the Christian Community, she said that we are all born of the spirit and each of us has a star. For most of us, that star is an individuality, moving from life to life. For a few people, especially those who have a special destiny within a particular nation, such as Nelson Mandela in South Africa or Winston Churchill in this country, this star might also be the folk spirit of that nation. For Jesus of Nazareth, the star was the Holy Spirit, because his destiny was for the whole of mankind. And as the angel Gabriel told Mary, with God nothing shall be impossible.
Not only were Mary and Elizabeth cousins but Rudolf Steiner has set out the extraordinary spiritual relationship between Jesus and John. John was an old soul who carried the power and spirit of the prophet Elijah of the Old Testament, he who preached the Law of Moses. Steiner points out that: “We know from the Gospel itself that John the Baptist is to be regarded as the reborn Elijah.” This is confirmed in the Gospel of Luke (1.17) and is also found in the Gospel of Matthew (11.11-14) where Jesus says: “Certainly I say to you there has not risen up among those born of women anyone greater than John the Baptist (…) because all the prophets and the Law prophesied the coming of John – and if you are willing to receive him, he is Elijah who is about to come.”
With this spirit and power of Elijah as part of his soul lineage, John was well-equipped not only to preach about the old Law of Moses but also to renew old teachings so as to prepare a new path of human evolution. And Steiner indicates that John even carried the message of the Buddha, which had originally streamed forth through Elijah. In Lecture 6 of Rudolf Steiner’s lecture cycle (GA 114) on The Gospel of St Luke, he says: “From the mouth of John the Baptist we hear what the Buddha had to say six hundred years after he had lived in a physical body.”
And Steiner goes on to say: “There we have a real indication of the unity of religions! We must look for each religion at the right point in the evolution of humanity and seek for what is truly alive in it, not what is dead—for everything continues to develop.”
So we can begin to see that the St John festival commemorates not only the Baptist but also a powerful Being with a long history through all ages of influencing human evolution and of restating spiritual truths to meet the changing needs of humanity.
John baptised with water, the water which purifies and cleanses the psyche, the soul, with its accumulation of karma. He said that he was the forerunner of Christ, who would baptise with fire, the fire of divine love and with the Holy Spirit. And it was of course John the Baptist who facilitated the descent of the Christ into Jesus through his baptism at the river Jordan. Baptism at that time was not a gentle sprinkling of water on the baby’s head but was instead a full immersion under water for a period long enough to provoke a near-death experience in some of those undergoing it. For the person who was baptised, being submerged and held under water by John could result in a separation of the etheric from the physical body. Rudolf Steiner described it:
“The disciple was submerged in water, resulting in a certain separation of the etheric from the physical body; (…) Even in everyday existence it may happen that when a man is in danger of drowning, or sustains a violent shock, a tableau of his life hitherto appears before him. This is because something that otherwise takes place only after death, occurs momentarily: the etheric body is lifted out of the physical body and is freed from its power. This happened to most of those who were baptized by John, and in a very special way to (…) Jesus. His etheric body was drawn out—and during that moment the sublime Being we call the Christ descended into his body.” (GA 114, lecture 7)
Here Steiner makes a clear distinction between the Christ Being, a cosmic divinity from the spiritual Sun, and Jesus of Nazareth, a human being. The Christ Being had always existed in the highest spiritual spheres and had not previously been physically connected with the Earth’s evolution, though Steiner has said in various lectures there had been what he calls ‘ensoulment’ of the Christ in earlier stages of the Earth. But in this one stupendous event of two thousand years ago, the Christ Being descended to Earth and, at the baptism in the river Jordan, united with the physical body of Jesus of Nazareth. This incorporation lasted for three years, culminating in Christ’s death on the cross, which anthroposophy calls the “turning point of time”. Steiner’s spiritual research had led him into the conviction that this was the most significant and important event that has ever happened in the whole history of humanity.
Why had it been necessary for this to happen? In the times before the incorporation of Christ into the being of Jesus of Nazareth, human consciousness had been falling too deeply into material, physical reality, losing its connection to the spirit. Is that not similar to the situation in our own times? And as an aside, do you not sense that an equally significant change is on its way to meet our own overwhelming need? Back then, Christ brought the impulse of unconditional, all-pervasive cosmic love down to Earth, together with the force that allowed humanity to develop individual “I” or ego-consciousness, giving human beings the power of free will. Ever since the crucifixion on the hill of Golgotha, this Christ force of love has united with the Earth and is today present in the spiritual environment of every human being, regardless of religion or non-belief.
But contrary to the expectations of many Christians, Jesus Christ will not be returning in a physical body – because He is already here. Rudolf Steiner tells us that the incorporation of Christ into the human body of Jesus was a once and forever event and will not happen again. Instead, the Christ, since the 1930s, has been present in the etheric realm of the Earth, and people will increasingly be able to experience the living presence of Christ through a new kind of spiritual clairvoyance. In a gathering like this one, I think it possible, even likely, that there are several people who have already had a meeting with Christ in the etheric. I would love to hear at some stage from anyone who has had such an experience. Steiner compared this phenomenon to the vision of Paul on the road to Damascus. He stated that more people will naturally develop the inner faculties required to perceive Christ etherically without needing physical proof. This was possible from 1930 onwards and will remain so for the next three millennia, until about the year 5,000 A.D. by which time a sufficient number of people will no longer need the Gospels, because they will have met the Christ in their own souls. So for those of us, like me, who have not yet had this experience, we only have up to 3000 years and several lifetimes to wait!
When we celebrate the birth of John the Baptist at the Summer solstice, one of the things we are doing is recognising the beginning of the descent of Christ from the Sun to the Earth. After the Summer solstice, the Sun’s light begins to decrease and the days slowly become shorter, until we reach the shortest day at the Winter solstice. As a reflection of this process, John the Baptist says in the Gospel of John (3.30), speaking about Jesus Christ: “He must increase, but I must decrease.” As the Christ entered the 30-year old physical form of Jesus of Nazareth at the baptism in the Jordan, there were just three years to go before his crucifixion on Golgotha – but John the Baptist was not present to witness that event, because in the meantime (probably in the years 28-29 AD) he had been arrested and sentenced to death by beheading. John’s head was then served on a silver platter to Herod Antipas, ruler of Galilee under the Roman Empire.
And this is where the Mystery of John becomes deeper. There is a constant evolution in the Mystery of John in the direction of universal love. This was pointed out by Rudolf Steiner, in that extraordinarily moving final lecture that he was able to give on 28th September 1924 before being overwhelmed by the illness that was to lead to his death the following year.
Steiner’s illness prevented him from completing what he had intended to say in that lecture. As Marie Steiner put it, “He did not get as far as he had originally intended with the lecture. He gave us the first part of the Mystery of Lazarus; at the time he not only told me but later wrote on the cover of the first postscript: ‘Do not pass this on until I have given the second part.’ It was then wrested from him anyway, like so many things. Now he will no longer give us this second part. It will be left to our powers of understanding to distinguish the right thing between the secrets of incarnation and incorporation, the crossings of the lines of individuality.”
What Marie Steiner was referring to here were the evolutionary links, what one might call the lineage of John, which was traced by Rudolf Steiner from Elijah right back to Adam Kadmon (the primordial thought of God in terms of the human being) and then forward to John the Baptist; and after the death of John the Baptist it passed to Lazarus who, after he is raised from the dead by Christ, became John, ‘the disciple whom Christ loved,’ and subsequently John the Evangelist who wrote the Gospel of John, the three epistles and the Book of Revelation. Steiner then brings the story further forward, linking the John being to incarnations of the artist Raphael and the poet Novalis. These are difficult ideas to get our heads around, and to help with this, we should try to remember the words of Marie Steiner, just quoted: “It will be left to our powers of understanding to distinguish the right thing between the secrets of incarnation and incorporation, the crossings of the lines of individuality.”
This is part of the Mystery of John, which as we have seen, requires us to expand our understanding. But there is a universality about this mystery, recognised through many spiritual streams. We know, for example, that John the Baptist is revered within Islam, where he is known as Prophet Yahya ibn Zakariya, who heralded the coming of Isa (Jesus). John is also recognised as a prophet within the Baha’i faith and the Druze faith, as well as within Mandaeism, which is a baptismal faith practised in southern Iran and Iraq; for Mandaeans, he is considered the final and most vital prophet. Within more recent spiritual streams, such as White Eagle Lodge, John is a towering figure whose emblem is the white eagle; and in the Findhorn Foundation, their joint leader David Spangler wrote a book called Conversations with John, a being whom he also knew as Limitless Love and Truth.
We have seen that John is a powerful Being with a long history of influencing human evolution. How do we see the Mystery of John manifesting in our present time? I would like here to quote from a talk I gave at last year’s MysTech online conference, which was on the theme of ‘Facing the Incarnation of Ahriman’. It seems to me that in our time there are three processes going on simultaneously, which in my mind I associate with the evolving John and Michael impulses.
The first process is that we are coming to the end of the old path of development which, in the West at least, 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. 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 human 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.
The third process is about building these new ways of being human. 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 we are one – and that everyone and everything is dependent on everyone and everything else.
One could regard these three processes as symptomatic of a much bigger change in human evolution, a change which seems to me to be a result of the working together of the John and Michael impulses.
One might also say that nations, governments and individuals, who are still stuck on the old path of development, are now beginning to reap their karma, which after years of cruelty, injustice, selfishness and greed leads inevitably to their destruction. As Rudolf Steiner told us in a lecture given in Dornach on 19th November 1917, “it is humanity’s task in this period to come to grips with evil as an impulse in the evolution of the world”. And we have certainly had all-too-frequent opportunities in this present age to observe the operation of evil in our world: the last 150 years have been in many ways the worst period for human beings in the whole of history; and my own sense is that this will come to a culmination between the years 2030 to 2033.
But we can also see that, underneath all the chaos and confusion, the evolutionary John process is in operation. During our time it is not taking place through the actions and teachings of singular inspired leaders but instead it shows itself through countless acts of inspired collaboration, kindness and community building, involving millions of people. This reminds me of what the Bible calls, in one of the parables of Jesus, the separation of the sheep and the goats. This takes place through a mysterious process of grace, in which the souls of those who are attuned to what is seeking to be born are overshadowed and filled by angelic forces, whose mission it is to bring together the human souls who are united with Christ; while the more goatlike among us are oblivious to this and carry on with bombing, wars and torture, abuse, greed, selfishness, corruption and power games.
The effect of this renewed John impulse is seen in the myriad initiatives of many inspirational people who are manifesting newer and kinder ways of being for how we live on Earth together. We are fortunate to see several examples of this in our own locality, such as here on the Emerson campus with the creation of the Ashdown Garden School for children with learning disabilities; or again, the emphasis on biodynamics and care for the soil, plants and animals both here and in our neighbouring farms; or again, the Christ-filled loving care given to vulnerable people at Nutley Hall; or slightly further afield, the healthcare given to a severely deprived community in East Brighton by the Wellsbourne Healthcare initiative. As it happens, these are all inspired by anthroposophy but I don’t single them out because of that, but because they are part of that much wider phenomenon I’ve just described.
What lies behind this phenomenon is surely the same impulse that Rudolf Steiner referred to in his final lecture as the Michael Thought bearing the Christ-word to human beings. If you look carefully and closely, particularly beyond our normal news media, you will find many, many inspiring shoots of new growth. There are what one might call Michaelic and John-inspired initiatives and projects emerging all over the world, most of them not arising out of anthroposophy. Our new world is being born, quietly and without fanfare, but it is on its way. It will be messy and confusing for quite a while yet as those unable or unwilling to leave the old path will rage, fight and storm against what is coming – but the final outcome is assured.
I’d like to finish with a prayer:
May all those souls being forced out of incarnation by man’s inhumanity to man find true peace and healing in the spiritual world; may their persecutors find access within their hearts to the compassionate love of Christ; and may we all find the strength and courage to take up the renewed John and Michael impulses which are flooding in; so that, as a world community, we can love one another and all life on Earth as fully as possible.
And so be it; and so be it; and so be it.
Thank you for listening.
Category Archives: John of Patmos, Apostle John
The Mystery of John
Filed under Cosmic Christ, John of Patmos, Apostle John, John the Baptist,
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.
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