Category Archives: Sorat

November 14, 2020 · 9:52 pm

Coronavirus and the indwelling divinity within each human being

During these challenging times, I have been reflecting on what an anthroposophical approach to this Covid-19 pandemic might be. There are so many theories, anthroposophical and otherwise, that we are being invited to take in and consider. Perhaps you, like me, receive links to more pandemic-related videos and websites than it is possible to view – that is, if you wish to have any time at all away from the screen and maintain some semblance of a normal life.

All I personally feel able to do is to watch and observe and try to reach some conclusions about what is going on. One of these conclusions is that nearly all of us, including most doctors, scientists, politicians, academics and pundits of all kinds, know next to nothing about Covid-19. All the information coming to us from official channels is confusing, constantly changing and often contradictory. This is a very disconcerting experience for those of us who would like something solid to hang onto. The writer Paul Kingsnorth has expressed this dilemma very well:

“I would like to say that I know what to do about all this, or what to learn. I would like to teach it to you so that you may learn too. I would like to be a prophet in a time when prophets are so sorely needed.

Unfortunately, I am not qualified for this role. I don’t know anything at all, and I am learning, painfully, that this was my lesson all along.

I don’t know anything at all.

My society does not know anything at all.

All the things I was brought up to label as learning: my A-levels, my Oxford University degrees, all the books I have read and written, all the arguments I learned how to formulate, all the ideas I learned how to frame, the concepts I learned how to enunciate. All this head-work, all these modern European ways of seeing, understanding, controlling, managing, directing the world:

Nope.

None of that was it.”

So what has this pandemic got to teach our globalised Western civilisation? What can we learn from all of this?  Nothing, because we are not equipped to learn the actual lesson that is being taught. 

We cannot learn the lesson, because our head-centred, materialist culture does not believe in the existence of the realm from where it is coming, which is the non-material world.

During a previous piece about coronavirus, I gave quite a bit of emphasis to the positive sides of lockdown – the improvement in air quality, the reduced road and air traffic noise, the benefits for nature and wildlife, the enhanced sense of a community caring for its weaker members and a hope that, as there were so many of us who did not want to return to ‘normal’,  that governments might take notice and stop talking about economic growth as if nothing else mattered. These hopes have not endured, of course.

I also raised the possibility that I was being naïve and that all of us were being played by forces very far from benign towards human beings, citing the speed with which our civil liberties have been removed, the many restrictions being placed on social and family life and the damage being done to our economic circumstances. With each month that passes, it becomes clearer that this more pessimistic view is increasingly valid and that humanity has entered a very dark period.  

One answer to Paul Kingsnorth’s call for real knowledge about the virus is to be found in The Coronavirus Pandemic – Anthroposophical Perspectives by Judith von Halle. Translated from the German original by Frank Thomas Smith and published by Temple Lodge, this is one of the few commentaries from an anthroposophical point of view that I have found to be really useful. Despite von Halle’s disclaimer of scientific knowledge or her modest description of her writings as “motivating fragments for free consideration”, what she writes has, for me at least, a flavour of genuine anthroposophical spiritual research. She wrote this for an anthroposophical audience, in response to questions earlier this year from members of the Lazarus-John Branch of the Free Association for Anthroposophy, so at times it uses language and ideas with which general readers may not be familiar. I have tried therefore to include hyperlinks to sources of further information wherever this could be helpful, or else have provided short explanations in italics.

In such a brief post I cannot do justice to the full range of her insights but will only mention here what are for me some of the most important points she makes. Apart from all the human anguish and inconvenience triggered by coronavirus, the spiritual causes behind it are extremely disturbing. If the present pandemic is not to be the first in a series of catastrophes, humanity is called upon to make some big changes to the way we conduct our lives. Von Halle suggests that because Covid-19 is a pandemic, it means that we are in the grip of a situation where the karma of humanity as a whole applies – and this has happened in such a way that planned individual karma is thwarted. In such cases, she says, after the death of an affected person whose individual karmic threads have been severed by the karma of humanity, it is not easy for the hierarchies of angels to weave these threads back together again. This is therefore a full-frontal attack on the I-hood of the individual (the Self, the bearer of the Christ principle or the indwelling divinity in the human being, which we take with us from incarnation to incarnation) and from this she concludes that the spiritual power active in the pandemic is Sorat, the Anti-Christ, “the mightiest spiritual enemy which humanity must face on its path to development” and that the “virus is only a rippling wave compared to what humanity must still undergo in the near future”.

In connection with this last point, von Halle says that:

“Today we experience the attack – caused by us as the organism of humanity (ie humanity as a whole) – on the air-element and the physical organ associated with it, the lungs, through our corrupted, not life-giving thinking (this is a reference to the concept of ‘living thinking’, which you can read more about in Chapter 8 of Steiner’s ‘Philosophy of Freedom’). But if in the future, in the age of the consciousness soul, humanity has sunk so low that it is just as degenerate in its feeling as in its thinking, an attack on the heart will follow. Then it will be a case of absence of compassion, which is connected, among other things, with the suffering of animals.”

Von Halle also says that “it is not only the individual due to his personal biography, but also humanity as such that has developed a disposition for illness by this virus in that it has promoted and cherished materialism in its thinking for the past 150 years”. 

This is where human beings are called upon to transform their thinking:

“The greatest difficulty facing human beings is that they do not want to acknowledge the I, that is, the reality of their spiritual origin and purpose – the reality of their selves as a community of entities of purely spiritual nature, who at the present time have taken on materially physical sheaths. Only when this insight exists will life on earth for humanity – an existence that can truly be called life – be able to continue”.

Unless we can come to a clear awareness and understanding that the invisible spheres of life are as important as the physical in making us fully human, then the result will be estrangement from spiritual life, both on Earth and after death. The consequence of this estrangement and isolation is that an element which should remain in the spiritual life degenerates, is driven out and begins to manifest in the physical world as pathogens and illnesses which appear in a living organism and multiply parasitically within it. Von Halle then says:

“A different world, which is not included in the divine development plan for humanity, arises through this parasitical isolation. If human beings recognise their I and its importance, its tasks and possibilities, moral individualisation begins – the self-desired maturity from a creature to a new god (Von Halle is here referring to Rudolf Steiner’s statement that human beings are destined through their evolution over aeons to become the next order of angels, the Tenth Hierarchy). If human beings do not recognise their I and its importance, its tasks and possibilities, an amoral special existence begins, a self-degeneration from divine creature to a new – never before existing and also not in a higher sense envisaged – sub-sensory creature. Then human beings consummate this splitting from the whole and suck out all that they can of the living world that had been bestowed upon them, thus furthering their degeneration”.

This is a truly alarming insight: that humankind, through its thoughtless denial of its true nature and its embrace of atheistic materialism, is in danger of being driven by malign spiritual forces into a sub-human state of existence.

Judith von Halle also has some very interesting things to say about viruses:

“As viruses are not made up of cells and have no metabolism of their own, but only a blueprint of their reproduction, which they can actualise within the cell of a so-called ‘host’, they are not living beings like bacteria (many of which, by the way, play an indispensable role in the human digestion process, which is not the case with viruses). Moreover, viruses maintain themselves by the principle of errors that occur during their copying process and which often result in optimal situations – for them. Thereby they stand in diametric opposition to the basic divine order, namely the principles of truth, beauty and goodness, which are fundamental to humanity’s creative power. The cause of cell death in the human body is what optimises viral existence (Programmed cell death is an integral part of host defence against invading intracellular pathogens). This alone directs our attention to the spiritual nature of a virus. 

(…) An infection with the virus steers the I-slumbering person’s attention back to the purely material-physical processes, and it reaffirms his or her already biased materialistic worldview. It impacts a spiritual (sub-sensory-spiritual) impulse on the physical in the human soul. (…) The spiritual intention of viruses, as spirit bearers (or non-spirit bearers) (…) is to cause maximum harm in that they come into contact with the spirit of the human being at the level of devachan – albeit at its amoral mirror-image plane – but with the spirit not used by that person. (Here the author is referring to parts of the human spirit which are taken over by the Asuras and are thus not available to the individual human being.) Thus they are a plague of the consciousness soul age. Virus epidemics affect the karma of humanity insofar as the individual spirit is not brought to bear within an individual human being, and as a result, in what is meant to be the age of spiritual awakening, the person relapses into group-soul attitudes, which increase the physical potency of viruses.”

Will the new Covid-19 vaccines help? 

“That vaccination cannot offer lasting protection is indicated by the impulse to mutate that was induced by vaccination. Spiritually considered, vaccination campaigns, however beneficial they may be at first, cannot remedy humanity’s karmic adjustment caused by a viral epidemic. At best, a postponement of humanity’s karmic adjustment takes place. If the spiritual causes of the plague are not remedied but instead comprehensive vaccinations are administered, a more drastic consequence or compensation must be reckoned with in future. This is not an appeal against vaccinations. It is only meant to indicate that vaccination campaigns alone are not a solution, but at most a stop-gap, because without the removal of the spiritual causes for the infectious illnesses, they contribute to the eruption of other more powerful epidemics.”

It’s now clear to me that Covid-19 is just one aspect of a multi-faceted attack on human beings and all life on Earth that we are living through. Climate change, war, the sixth great extinction of species, genocide, materialism, racism, human degradation, pollution, terrorism, the polarisation of society, the undermining of democracy, fake news and ‘post-truth’ – these are all facets of attacks from the same enemy. The aim of Sorat and his helpers, the Asuras, has always been to destroy the human I (the Self, the bearer of the Christ principle or the indwelling divinity in the human being) and to destroy the earth itself, which the I needs for the future development of the human soul. This is the true scale of the battle in which humanity is now engaged. 

Foreseeing all of this, Rudolf Steiner said: 

“Mankind will begin to recover when, through work in the life of the spirit, people come to know and to see in its true light the fact that the fifth post-Atlantean epoch (ie the age we are currently living in, which runs from 15th Century CE to 4th Millennium CE) is intended to create a materialistic state of being out of the general stream of human evolution. But all the more, then, must a spiritual state of being be set in opposition to this materialism. 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. Just as in the fourth epoch (ie the Graeco-Roman age) the struggle was to come to terms with birth and death, so now we have to come to terms with evil.” 

What help is available to us in this great struggle? Von Halle suggests several things:

  • “Reducing one’s exposure to news about the coronavirus pandemic to the minimum that is necessary to avoid ignorance of what is going on in the world. (Rudolf Steiner, alongside his spiritual research, always made sure that he was thoroughly informed about outer events and opinions.)”
  • “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.”
  • Speaking the Foundation Stone verse in nature. “Speaking the truth, this truth of cosmic wisdom is today (one could say, unfortunately) a shattering relief – for oneself, for one’s fellow humans, the divine spiritual world and, above all, for the physical world.”

Von Halle also recommends the Michael verse ‘Victorious Spirit’, “which shows us the essence of the true spirit of our time and, through its character, not only makes us aware of our contemporary tasks in everyday practical life, but can also give us the necessary will to fulfil them.”

Victorious spirit

Flame away the impotence 

Of timid souls.

Burn up self-interest

Kindle compassion,

So that selflessness,

As the life-stream of humanity,

Reigns as source

Of spiritual rebirth.1

(1 From Rudolf Steiner, Mantric Sayings, Meditations 1903-25, GA 268)

After having read this book, I am left with several thoughts and questions. First, how can one not be totally overwhelmed and horrified by the scale of the assault on human beings, especially when most of us are completely unaware of what is going on and have not even the basic concepts to begin to understand what is happening? Does it matter that there are so many people who will greet with derision what is written here, or have no comprehension of and no interest in what has been described? I take comfort from what von Halle says above about the massive difference one or two people can make when they work with prayer or meditation. And I also take comfort from the fact that there are so many good people doing good things for one another at this time, all of which I believe will weigh in the balance on the side of humanity.

Second, what can one do against such apparently insuperable odds? All that I personally can do is to write my blog; to look after people with learning disabilities at the care home where I work; to care for those close to me; to cherish my garden as a meditative space; to be part of my local community – for as I’ve noted before, it is human solidarity and caring for one another that will bring us through this crisis. Sorat is beyond all comparison the greatest enemy that humanity has ever had; but it is also true that having an enemy helps one to define oneself (and indeed, one’s Self). And Sorat and the Asuras have no response, no possible counterattack, that can defeat the love of Christ as expressed through simple human caring and selflessness.

Third, why is this happening? Here, I believe, we touch upon a great mystery of human evolution, ie the role of evil in human development. I have written more about this elsewhere on this blog, in case anyone is interested to take a look.

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August 7, 2016 · 1:58 pm

Thoughts from Nice

The anthropopper is enjoying a few days off in France right now, house-sitting for his in-laws. They live in a hill village between Nice and Vence, with views over the Baie des Anges. Sitting here besides the pool, under the shade of an old olive tree, in the warmth of what the poet Apollinaire called “la paix solaire”, I watch a solitary eagle rising and circling on the thermal currents in the cloudless azure sky. The only sounds are the endless chirping of the cicadas and the chime of the clock on the church bell tower marking the hours. Occasionally, a gentle breeze sends a subtle waft of scent in my direction from the climbing jasmine at the corner of the house. An idyllic scene indeed, an earthly paradise.

And yet if I walk to the other end of the pool and look out towards the south-east, just beyond the valley of the Var river, I can see in the distance the artificial promontory into the sea on which sits the runway of Nice Airport, where our plane had landed three days before. Outside the airport, the palm tree and flower-lined Promenade des Anglais runs alongside the sea into the centre of Nice; and it was there, just a fortnight before we arrived, that a hired truck came to a halt outside the Hotel Negresco, unable to proceed further in its murderous rampage because of the quantity of mashed and mangled human bodies choking its running gear.

My wife met someone who knew one of the victims; all that had been found of her, the sole identifying feature, was one of her hands. Apart from the 84 people who were murdered, there are many others who have lost limbs and who will bear the physical and mental scars for the remainder of their lives. Some of the members of the emergency services who had had to deal with the aftermath are themselves suffering post-traumatic stress disorder, after seeing sights that no-one should ever have to witness. After the attacks in Paris, Nice and the even more recent murder in Normandy of an elderly priest celebrating Mass, France itself is in a state of shock and disbelief. La belle France, la douce France, how can it have come to this?

To try to gain some small insight into what is really going on right now, those of us who are anthroposophists will turn to what Rudolf Steiner had to say about the nature of evil. From his spiritual perception, Steiner was able to describe the various forces of evil in our time, as well as their main opponent, the Archangel Michael. In our materialistic and sceptical times, many people will find it difficult to take seriously the concept of spirits of darkness and beings of light; and yet for some of us, it is only when we take these concepts as worthy of serious consideration that we can begin to make some sort of sense of this battle of cosmic dimensions in which we are all involved.

Those of you who are familiar with anthroposophy or who have been reading this blog for some time, will be aware of Steiner’s concept of the two poles of evil, which he calls Lucifer and Ahriman, and which I have written about here. But there are other hierarchies of evil I have previously hesitated to mention because I find them too horrifying and disturbing; yet since it seems to me that what is happening now bears the unmistakeable stamp of these hierarchies, I shall have to face my own fears and go into the area of what St John in the Book of Revelation called “the two-horned Beast.” This two-horned Beast is the antithesis of the Being of Christ, and is designated by the mystical number 666. Rudolf Steiner interprets this number as signifying the name of the Sun Demon, Sorat, the adversary of Christ. It is Sorat’s goal to destroy both the human ‘I’ (the Self or ego) and the earth. 666 is also the number of those human beings who “out of their own cunning free-will have become black magicians by placing spiritual forces in the service of their own egotism.” (GA 104a, 21/05/09)

I am convinced that what we are seeing in the phenomenon of Isis, Daesh, Islamic State or whatever one calls it, is inextricably tied up with the workings of black magic. It is only when what Steiner calls the ABC of black magic is being practiced that humans actually set out along that route which will bring them to Sorat:

“The ABC consists in the pupil of a black magician being taught to destroy life quite consciously, and in doing so to cause as much pain as possible and to feel a certain satisfaction in it…The beginning in black magic is to cut and stab into living flesh … This draws the pupil closer and closer to the being described as the two-horned Beast.” (GA 104, 29/06/08) Steiner also says that: “in certain schools of black magic the followers are taught the horrible and diabolical practice of gashing living animals with a knife at the precise part of the body which will generate this or that force in the wielder of the knife.” (GA 94, 02/06/06).

My suspicion is that IS followers no longer bother to practice on animals but instead go straight to work on their human victims. They are even getting children to learn how to behead their hostages.

Steiner continues: “In no way can one so readily assimilate destructive astral forces as by killing. Every killing of a being possessing an astral body evokes an intensification of the most brutal egotism. It signifies a growing increase of power. In schools of black magic, therefore, instruction is first given as to how one cuts into animals.” (ibid.)

So murder, sex and the infliction of pain (we should note that these are also major preoccupations of our Western entertainment culture) are the essential prerequisites for black magic to unfold. The black magician gains sensual pleasure in cruelty; the urge to kill creates a void around themselves in the astral world in which their egotistic desires can unfold. This void in the astral world is created by acquiring power through seizing the life force of another living being, by deliberately killing or destroying it. The first rule of black magic is: Life must be conquered. (GA 94, 02/06/06)

It is in this context that we should look at the actions of the adherents of Islamic State. We should note first of all that many of the people who get caught up in it are very far from the ideal of the good Muslim. The driver of the Nice truck, a 31-year old Tunisian man, was known to police because of allegations of threats, violence and thefts over the last six years, and he had been given a suspended six-month prison sentence earlier this year after being convicted of violence with a weapon. The man’s father, who lives in Tunisia, has revealed that his son showed signs of mental health issues — having had multiple nervous breakdowns and volatile behavior. The man was also said to have had sex with both men and women, beaten his wife, taken alcohol and used drugs. Similarly, at least two of the men involved in the Paris attack at Le Bataclan music venue were people who smoked drugs, drank alcohol and had convictions for petty crime. So these were people who one could say did not have much of a stake in society and were vulnerable to manipulation by more powerfully-minded individuals.

Hitherto-suppressed reports are now starting to emerge from police who were involved in the aftermath of the attack on Le Bataclan in Paris. These police reports found evidence of torture on the bodies of some of the 89 victims. This includes the gouging-out of eyes, the cutting-off of testicles and stuffing them in the mouth of the victim, and the stabbing of female genitals. If these reports are true, they indicate that black magical practices of inflicting maximum pain, horror and humiliation while killing were being used.

While the Islamic State group is losing territory in its self-styled caliphate, it is tightening its grip on the estimated 3,000 Yazidi women and girls held as sex slaves. These women were captured in August 2014 after IS overran Sinjar in northwestern Iraq. In a fusion of ancient barbaric practices and modern technology, IS sells the women like packaged goods on smart phone apps and shares databases that contain their photographs and the names of their “owners” to prevent their escape through IS checkpoints. In June this year, 19 Yazidi women who refused to have sex with IS fighters were burnt to death in iron cages in Mosul. For those that remain, multiple rape and beatings are the reality, these being techniques of black magical practice through which the oppressors can assimilate their victims’ astral energies. IS has actually issued a “rape handbook” to its fighters, with fifteen rules of how rapes may or may not be carried out on “infidel women”.

Steiner says that: “The black magician draws the most powerful forces out of the morass of sensuality. The purpose of sexual rites is to introduce such magic into these circles.” (GA 93a, 17/10/05)

The favoured IS method of beheading its victims (as seen in the UK with the attempted beheading of Fusilier Lee Rigby) or throat-slitting (as done with Fr Jacques Hamel in Normandy) are also standard black magical practices. Fr Hamel is reported to have said: “Va-t-en, Satan!” (Begone, Satan!) to his attacker. This is an exact naming of the force that was possessing his attacker, and by making it clear that he recognised what it was he was facing, the priest was helping to defuse the worst of the effects.

Those people who would seek to turn opinion against Muslims in the wake of such Islamic State atrocities should recall Steiner’s statement that after Christ’s crucifixion in what he calls the “Mystery of Golgotha” which blunted Sorat’s aim 2000 years ago, a second wave of attack came from Soratian forces in the 7th century AD through the Persian academy of Gondi-Shapur but this attack was largely thwarted by the creation of another counterforce – the religion of Islam. According to Steiner:

“Through the appearance of Mohammed and his visionary religious teaching, there was a deadening of the influence that was meant to go out from Gondi-Shapur. Above all, in those regions where it was wished to spread the Gnostic wisdom of Gondi-Shapur, Mohammed took the ground from under its feet…Here you can see the wisdom in world history; we come to know the truth about Mohammedanism only when, in addition to other things, we know that Mohammedanism was destined to deaden the Gnostic wisdom of Gondi-Shapur, to take from it the strong ahrimanically seductive force which would otherwise have been exercised upon mankind.” (GA 184, 12/10/18)

Furthermore, it was only though the convergence of Christianity and Islam during the period from the mid-sixth century to the thirteenth century that it was possible for our modern culture to come into being. In the monasteries of mediaeval Western Europe, Arabian concepts of philosophy and science started to influence Christian clerics.

So for us to turn against Muslims in the wake of IS atrocities is not only unjust and counter-productive, it also fails to recognise how the advent of Islam saved our own societies in the West all those centuries ago. To get through our present crises, fear and hatred are precisely the wrong answers. Instead, France, Germany, Britain and the rest will have to learn how to cherish and better integrate our Muslim citizens.

That is not to deny, however, that some current Islamic beliefs are in serious and urgent need of overhaul, particularly notions regarding paradise. A recent opinion piece by Kamel Daoud in the International New York Times contended that some Muslims, including those drawn to Islamic State, are giving up on any idea of improving life on Earth through independence, egalitarianism, development, wealth creation or justice. Their dreams have been destroyed by the authoritarian regimes, corruption and political failures in the Arab world, and the marginalisation of Muslims within Western societies. In their place, paradise is the new country dreamed of by the poor, the unemployed and the jihadists. Its main selling point is women, who are promised in vast numbers as a reward for the righteous. The women of paradise, the houris, are beautiful, submissive, languorous virgins.

This rather begs the question of what the Islamic paradise offers to women. If men can have dozens of virgins, what do the women get? It seems that the woman’s heavenly reward is to be her husband’s happy wife throughout eternity, the two of them destined to enjoy perpetual conjugal felicity (though presumably the husband is still taking full advantage of the houris).

But it cannot be ignored that this fantasy of eternal bliss requires that, before you can get to heaven, you first have to die. If you don’t have much else going for you here on earth, or if you are angry with the manifold injustices you see around you, then the prospect of a glorious death and entry into paradise may be tempting.

It does, however, take much more than a desire for paradise to turn a human being into the kind of creature that can force children into becoming soldiers who kill and behead hostages; that can throw homosexuals from rooftops; that can enslave and rape Yazidi women and girls in the belief that they are less than human; that can torture and behead its victims, bury them alive or burn them to death inside cages. For this, it takes black magicians who are able to create powerful egregora or thought forms, which can then take over the consciousness of those whose souls have become susceptible. Let us recognise what we are truly dealing with here: Rudolf Steiner speaks of human beings possessed by Sorat to such a degree that one could have every reason to doubt whether they are really members of the human race.

It was only in the twentieth century that humankind was first subjected to the Soratian attacks without the luciferic and ahrimanic masks that were previously used to lead human beings astray in preparation. We saw this with the decisions of politicans and generals in the First World War that led to 17 million deaths and 20 million wounded; we saw it in the rise to power of Adolf Hitler in 1933 (the year when Steiner said more and more individuals would start to become aware of Christ in the etheric body of the earth), and whose racial extermination policies would lead to the death of 6 million Jews and an overall death toll during the Second World War of between 50 to 80 million; we saw it in the rulership of Joseph Stalin in the Soviet Union, who was responsible for the deaths of 20 million of his fellow citizens; or of Mao-Tse-Tung, who between 1958 and 1962 was responsible for the deaths of 45 million people, who were worked, starved or beaten to death; or of Pol Pot whose Khmer Rouge were said to be responsible for the deaths of 2 million Cambodians. We saw it again in the massacre of up to 1 million Tutsis in Rwanda by Hutus in 1994, and in the war in Bosnia-Herzegovina and the ethnic cleansing and genocide that took place there. These examples from the last century could be multiplied and the present century is shaping up to be just as bad.

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 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) and to destroy the earth itself, which the ‘I’ needs for the future development of the human soul. Climate change, war, the sixth great extinction, genocide, materialism, racism, and human degradation – these are all facets of attacks from the same enemy. This is the true scale of the battle with which we are now engaged.

About this, 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.” In my next post, I will try to look at this in more detail.

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