Lucifer and Ahriman relatable, everyday-life examples (1)
When discussing spiritual development, we all agree that improving morality is a prerequisite for esoteric knowledge. However, in practice, we are often tempted to believe we are the exception while criticising immorality in others. Weaponising spiritual knowledge to point the finger is the worst outcome of this temptation. Alternatively, if we genuinely choose to begin improving ourselves morally, we may not always know where to start. As a biography work practitioner specialising in the darker aspects of human nature, I have seen that few people, even long-time Anthroposophists, possess clear notions about Lucifer and Ahriman. They often cannot distinguish between Luciferic and Ahrimanic tendencies within their own souls, how these manifest in daily life, or how to address them. For this reason, I decided to offer some relatable examples in a series of upcoming posts to assist our community and anyone interested in esoteric development in taking even a small step towards self-knowledge.
For today’s example, let’s consider a situation most of us are familiar with or have experienced ourselves. Suppose a dear friend comes to us one day and shares something about themselves that we haven’t heard before — something they’ve been going through for a long time and they haven’t told anyone else. The only reason they’re sharing it now is that they are desperate. The specific details of the situation are not crucial; we can imagine scenarios such as an abusive spouse, a mortgage overdue, a forced evacuation, addiction, a calamity, a chronic painful disease, confrontation with poverty and death, or similar hardships. For our exercise, we need to portray a good friend revealing a long-standing suffering we had no idea they endured, and seeking our humanity by sharing their story.
I will give you an example of a common (predominantly) Luciferic reaction and a common (predominantly) Ahrimanic reaction that might occur in us when we hear the news. They are not extreme reactions; they are normal human responses that each of us has likely experienced. We have all done this in the course of our lives, either the first, the second, or both. However, on an esoteric path, one must confront these small immoralities within ourselves with awareness, as they might prevent passing the Guardian of the Threshold.
An example of a common Luciferic reaction to someone sharing a difficult situation is “Oh, you poor thing…” followed by an array of possible solutions to fix the issue: “Have you tried this, that and the other?”, or even worse, “You know what you should do?”. In psychology, this is called premature problem-solving, and it is recognised as a form of emotional invalidation.
Let’s analyse the reaction and understand why this is Luciferic. We start by asking: “If my friend, a person who stirs within me feelings of love and joy, who was there with me for better or worse, whom I know and trust, spends days and nights, months, and years in a situation, and they can’t find a solution for themselves, what is it in me that makes me believe I possess infinite wisdom and spiritual power to immediately eradicate my friend’s suffering by finding a solution so brilliant, yet so quick, that it enlightens my mind faster than thunder?” Once we put it this way, we immediately realise: It is Lucifer.
Lucifer, as an archetype, doesn’t comprehend suffering. He created his own paradise, where he abolished suffering and pain. For Lucifer, Christ’s deeds of becoming human, suffering, and dying crucified among criminals are completely puzzling. A Luciferic being will mock suffering, ignore it, or attempt to “fix” it. They will always seek comfort and happiness. Lucifer is simply cold and unempathetic when it comes to other people’s suffering. Therefore, just like that, in less than three seconds, a Luciferic being within us, the microcosmic representative of Lucifer, denies our friends’ suffering, along with the experience, potential wisdom, and spiritual gifts that come from it. It is simply “uncomfortable.”
Another thing that Lucifer excels at is teaching and preaching. For a long time, Lucifer has been humanity’s most luminous teacher. Lucifer possesses many extraordinary gifts, and one of them is his remarkable wisdom. Luciferic beings share, of course, their source’s wisdom, but they are also irritating when they offer it to others. A Luciferic being will immediately try to teach everyone, forcing them into a discipleship they didn’t sign up for. Luciferically inclined people are inspired, creative, and physically attractive, and they will always look for a stage, sometimes even when the theatre is closed. They immediately position themselves above everyone else, offer ideas and unsolicited advice, and take offence if others don’t follow it. “No one listens to me; if only people would listen to me. “… This is just the surface of an apparently innocent Luciferic reaction.
If you notice any of these reactions in yourself when someone is sharing their suffering, the first thing to start with in correcting it is to reconnect to your humanity, to your human vulnerability. Asking, “How can I help?” instead of giving insensitive advice is the first step. Second, listen and stay with the uncomfortable feelings your friend’s story stirred up in you. Later, when you are alone, you can recall a difficult moment in your life. How did the people around you react to your suffering? What did you need from them then, above everything? What was useful from what was offered to you?
Most of the time in these situations, people don’t need outsourced smart solutions. They need encouragement to find the courage to walk through the experience. They need support and compassion. “You are not alone in this, my friend. I am with you every step of the way. I got you.” In situations like this, we can become representatives of Christ instead of becoming representatives of Lucifer or Ahriman.
To the other pole, a common Ahrimanic reaction in our example is to slightly panic and fear at the hearing of the uncomfortable situation, followed by a quick mental calculation and evaluation of self-discomfort, with the result of telling our friend, even before they finish their story, a little lie: “You could have stayed with us for a few days, but unfortunately we are out of town/the children are sick/my in-laws are visiting.” This reaction occurs when the Ahrimanic beings of one’s Double mobilise in calculating and “pricing” what the friend’s situation or the mere narration of the situation means financially or just emotionally for us. We may not have been good at maths or economics in school, but the Ahrimanic beings in us are great economists and risk evaluators. In less than a second, the Ahrimanic Double has already calculated how much offering help would “cost” us in money and comfort and decided it’s not worth it; or they might assess that the whole situation is just a huge discomfort.
Ahriman, as an archetype, is the head of the World Bank. Of course, I mean this metaphorically, but here is the truth in it: Ahriman (Satan) is the one who tempted Christ in the desert to turn the stones (matter) into bread (life). We know from Rudolf Steiner’s comments on the Gospels that the entire scene refers to the use of money through which Ahriman infiltrated himself as an intermediary of life. As a high spiritual being newly descended to Earth, Christ didn’t know anything about it, and His surprise at what Ahriman was showing Him created a small debt for humanity to Ahriman. Only humans can reverse the process and unbind the life Ahriman has bound into materialism (stones) through money.
Returning to our example, stinginess as an Ahrimanic trait of the soul can’t be solved in one day, but there are solutions. I can offer you what I practice myself whenever I feel a certain “uneasiness” about offering money: When you are asked for donations and don’t feel like giving any, even if you clearly see the need, instead of creating excuses for yourself in your mind, just force yourself to give a small amount anyway. I know it’s hard, but just give something symbolic whenever you decide you won’t participate. Rule above yourself, and force your egotism a bit further. And when you want to offer a small donation to someone, and you are happy with the amount you decided to offer, force yourself to offer a bit more than you were initially comfortable offering.
This practice has miraculous forces. Initially, you feel you’ll cry for the money you gave away, but once they are out there, you won’t even notice them. What happens instead is that you liberate yourself, piece by piece, from the Ahrimanic prison of karmic debt, and it’s worth every penny. One day, you might even observe how all the money you offered just finds a mysterious way back to you: it will come back like lost animals when you don’t expect them. At the Christmas Conference, after defending the 12 schillings, Rudolf Steiner offered the image: one hand raised high to the ideal, and the other deep in the pocket.
Ahriman is the father of lies, although he doesn’t always lie. For an Ahrimanic being, what is important is to realise its purpose by all means. If telling the truth does it, Ahriman will tell the truth. He will, of course, mock a lot, but he will say it if nothing stands in his way. If twisting the truth helps, he will tell half-truths. But he can also create an infinity of beings of lie. We are surrounded by beings of lie; it’s the substance from which Maya is created. Every little insincerity we tell ourselves, or others, puts a heavy stone against our spiritual development.
As you can see, only in this last example are there three distinct types of Ahrimanic beings: beings of fear, of avarice and of lie.
The way to deal with Ahriman morally is having a good reason, the right thinking. First, it is essential not to make judgements and suppositions before the facts. In our example, the whole situation was triggered by a wrong supposition: “what if they ask for money/a place to stay, etc.”, or “what if the norms of friendship require me to step up as a friend, thus losing my comfort”. This wrong thought immediately triggered fear (fear of losing comfort, time, or resources, fear of the situation, an unconscious fear for one’s own survival, etc.), which led to an Ahrimanic mobilisation. We learn that a simple mistake in our thinking opens the door for an Ahrimanic army.
None of these reactions that hit close to home makes anyone a bad person. Not even a medieval Catholic Church would punish anyone for so little. But on the esoteric path, it is important to make such observations.
Let me know in the comments if this example was helpful and what you would like to read next.
The biographical exercise proposed below serves as preparation for the initial encounter with the Guardian of the Threshold as the Being of Reproach. It is spiritually inspired by this meeting, and if approached correctly, with complete honesty towards self-knowledge, it can also plant the seed of karmic transformation of difficult relationships and situations that occur in life. It represents the beginning of a future Manichean work.
The exercise does not require prior knowledge of Anthroposophy, as such knowledge is already contained in its content. However, without prior self-knowledge exercises, some admissions and recognitions regarding one’s morality can be challenging for beginners. As this exercise is designed to reveal moral imperfections and work with them towards self-knowledge and self-improvement, complete vulnerability, honesty, admission, and recognition are the required soul dispositions. Treating this exercise with superficiality may trigger adversity in one’s soul, so please read the entire content of the exercise carefully before beginning and decide if it is for you. Ensure you fully understand the task and its purpose before starting. It is crucial to undertake this exercise in a setting that allows complete privacy and tranquillity.
You will work with the reproaches, accusations, or condemnations that were addressed to you in life which marked your biography deeply, integrate them in your soul together with the accusers and reverse each of these experiences into its positive to the point where one can say: ‘Now I understand the lesson that lies beneath all these accusatory experiences and I acknowledge my accusers as my karmic agents and my teachers. I am a human being, I made mistakes, and I can see now that I played in other people’s lives the same role my accusers played in mine. I am grateful and I forgive.’ Gratefulness and forgiveness are the higher purposes of the exercise, along with the ability to recapitulate the soul process whenever such experiences occur again.
You will need a few sheets of A4 paper, coloured crayons, a pencil, a diary or journal, and the instructions below.
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Don’t get me wrong, The Odyssey is a nice-to-watch modern movie, but it’s not Homer’s Odyssey. It is its drunk and retarded stepbrother. But it is, at least, more exciting than the American forever movie themes, where every hero is an FBI or CIA agent, using extreme force, destruction and torture as an excuse to protect the great USA or an “innocent” US citizen. You must be, as I am, fed up with multimillion-dollar movie themes such as saving the black or female US president from Armageddon, meteorites, and the Russians. The Odyssey is, at least, a change of scenery. Oppenheimer, the last multimillion-dollar movie directed by Nolan, was “goodish,” but things were different. Creating an image of a well-documented historical moment that happened just around the corner of time doesn’t compare with trying to portray a myth. Not to mention that what he portrayed in Oppenheimer is imprinted in the collective memory as a worldwide tragedy, making it less likely to fade than any other. When a tragedy takes place, the shock and the fear imprint the memory into the body like a hot iron and become a trigger for future trauma. Maybe not all of us know what we did yesterday, but we all know for sure what we did on 9/11, even if we were far from America. Oppenheimer was easy, based on my assessment, because there are still people alive to remember Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
Nolan has always tried to instil his alternative reality in historical movies, even in Oppenheimer. The supposed scene with Einstein and Oppenheimer was hard to watch for a person who likes a historical movie to be accurate. This time, with The Odyssey, Nolan ventured into things that were not clear as day in collective memory. But, on the good side of his creativity, he had the chance to explore more of his alterations and alternative realities. On the bad side, superficial people can take them as true, not understanding that a bored millionaire just plays around. Humanity as a whole forgot completely how it was millennia back, and here was a good chance for Nolan to shine. But unfortunately, his overall interpretation of Homer’s work dwells between cruel materialism and childish silliness. The movie is beautiful, but the Gods are gone, facts are stretched and deliberately mixed up under Hollywood’s latest customs: to rewrite an alternative history for compliant idiots.
Because his work always revealed his greatness, people have asked themselves for centuries if Homer really existed. To this, Rudolf Steiner responded with “yes”, although many initiates, including Goethe, fell into the trap of believing he was not real. Not only was he a real person, but he was, in fact, Odysseus himself in an immediately previous incarnation. Steiner gives this indication to the participants of the cultic section, and the notes are included in the volume “Mystica Aerterna”. So the Iliad and the Odyssey can be interpreted by the spiritual science in a threefold manner: one, as a spiritually objective historical fact; two, as an objective process of Initiation; and three, as a personal karmic recall. So, the first opportunity Nolan missed here was to present Odysseus in relation to its narrator, Homer.
Maybe one of the most common criticisms of the movie is that in Nolan’s Odyssey, the Greek gods are almost forgotten. For reasons unknown to us, Nolan decided to keep them all out. He kept only Athena, maybe because in Homer’s Odyssey, she was actually the main character and not a supportive one. Nothing takes place in the Odyssey without Athena. It’s difficult to escape her. From the beginning, we see how Pallas Athena incorporates different people to address Telemachus. For instance, she most frequently incorporates Mentor. Today, the word “mentor” means “teacher,” but this was only after the Odyssey was adopted into culture by the Romans. Mentor was Telemachus’ teacher only when Athena incorporated him. There is an incredible instance in the Odyssey when Athena leaves Mentor, and Mentor addresses Telemachus alone, saying (I am paraphrasing), “Boy, the Gods must really love you”. Mentor was aware that he was visited at times and not always talking from himself. He then asks Athena to bless him and his family, maybe in the account that she used his body as a tool frequently.
We can ask, was Nolan right to dismiss the Gods in the Odyssey? How important were they really? We can understand this only with Rudolf Steiner’s help. In those times, life on Earth didn’t happen as it does today. The third hierarchy (Archai, Archangels and Angels) was very active in human life up to the physical. Nolan portrays Athena in the background of Odysseus’ soul, but this is not historically accurate. Today we are freer in relation to the third hierarchy than in Homer’s time. In the lectures from 15 and 16 April 1909, contained in the volume “Spiritual Hierarchies and their Reflection in the Physical World” (GA110), Rudolf Steiner talks about how the third hierarchy acted directly in the physical plane in different stages of humanity. In Lemurian times, Archai would frequently descend in a human physical body to influence Earth affairs and guide humanity, especially related to migration. In Atlantean times, Archangels would frequently descend in human physical and etheric bodies to teach different groups of people. The Atlantean Priests were all incorporated by different Archangels. This is how the Oracles were formed, in relation to the Archangels corresponding to the planets. When a human being incorporated by an Archangel died, his physical body dissolved, but his etheric body was preserved. Later, the 7 etheric bodies of the Oracles’ Priests previously incorporated by the 7 Archangels were given to the 7 Rishis. In our post-Atlantean epoch, Rudolf Steiner tells us that Archai and Archangels mostly withdrew from directly influencing the course of history, but not completely. They still intervene in such a way from time to time, including in our present time. For instance, Master Buddha was incorporated by an Archai. This is why Helena Blavatsky called him Mercury-Buddha. However, their action in the physical is less frequent than in older times.
In the post-Atlantean epoch, the epoch that starts after the biblical flood, Angels have taken up this activity. Rudolf Steiner tells us that all Gods in Greek and German mythologies are angels. To influence physical events, especially at the beginning of the post-Atlantean epoch, angels descended into the physical, etheric, and astral bodies of men. Athena, Hermes, and Zeus are not personal angels of different personalities, but angels whose mission was to direct different groups of people through their leaders. In the Odyssey, Athena also mentions Odysseus’ spirit once, which clarifies that she is not his own guiding spirit. Sometimes, as the Greek and German legends tell us, these historically ruling angels even got in conflict with one another. So when Athena incorporates different people at times to guide Odysseus and his activities, this is not without meaning. And here again, Nolan missed the opportunity to present this process with the help of special effects. He could have portrayed, for instance, Mentor changing his appearance with Athena. This would have given his favourite female actor, Zendaya, a much more meaningful role in the movie.
As anthroposophists, we know that in older times humanity still had natural clairvoyance. There was no question for any human being, wealthy or poor, smart or idiot, good or evil, whether the Gods or, in general, the Spiritual exist. They were perceivable with a natural clairvoyant sight that everyone had. In the same way, today we see clearly the physical plane (which was not so in all times; humanity had to conquer the physical plane gradually), humans of the past could perceive the angels and other spiritual beings astrally. In contrast to today, the physical sight was less developed back then. Old clairvoyance slowly became extinct as humanity gained consciousness. Homer’s Odyssey speaks of a transition period when humanity could still rely on the relics of the old clairvoyance. Humans were still guided directly by the Gods, but they started to have individual thoughts as well. This way, it was possible, for instance, to disobey a God. Back then, humans were like toddlers who learnt to say “no”. This is why Antinous, the most arrogant suitor of Penelope, sees that Athena is guiding Telemachus through Mentor, and despite the fact that he recognises Athena in Mentor, he still wants to kill Telemachus.
Another thing I would have wanted for the movie was Nolan to understand that Odysseus went through a spiritual Initiation and all milestones presented by Homer are equally important. For instance, Circe is the witch who makes parts of the soul appear in their true animalic form. Does it remind us of anything? Yes, it is a portrayal of the Lower Guardian. But the angel Hermes (Hermes represents the light of occult Mercury, Venus in our modern denomination, the true clairvoyant vision) helps Odysseus to preserve his human form when meeting Circe. Odysseus becomes Circe’s lover for one year, which in initiatic language means he is becoming the Lower Guardian’s disciple. Circe is the master of imaginative forms; she can transform anything into anything. This is the quality of the elementary world. Experiences in the elementary world, the meeting with the Lower Guardian, passing the Threshold of death, receiving the forgetfulness drink, birthing the new memory, the solar experience, the Midnight Hour of the worlds and returning to incarnation are all stages presented in Homer’s Odyssey.
Not only did Nolan skip initiatic phases in the movie, but he also mixed them up, chaotically misusing the Homeric symbolism. For instance, the lotus eating, which is the equivalent of receiving the forgetfulness drink, was presented in the movie in relation to Calypso. The Calypso phase, however, is a much later stage, when the dead between incarnations or, in this case, the Initiate, is at the Midnight Hour of the world and longs to come again in incarnation.
There are many things to be said about Homer’s Odyssey and very little about Nolan’s movie. It is a tragedy that such a destruction of art and spirit, like this movie proved to be, is, in fact, rewarded with millions of dollars over the shoulders of millions of children dying elsewhere in the world. Some of you will tell me: You are exaggerating, there is no connection between the two! And I must tell you: Ahriman cannot really turn the bread into stones. He has to drain life somewhere in the world to make his magic appear somewhere else. I’ve seen the movie; I paid for it. My money, whether I like it or not, supports Hollywood’s actors’ lavish existence, while destroying everything true and beautiful about this world in memory and representation. I helped Zendaya dress better for the Met Gala, where elites are lately recruited for political occultism. But on the good side, I came to look more carefully into Homer’s Odyssey and write this piece of thought for you all. May we always seek truth, beauty and good!
Through biography work, specialised in exploring and redressing the dark side of one’s being, we discovered the boundary where one’s karma interlinks with parts of the family’s karma. We discovered in our astral and etheric bodies one copy of each of two prominent, blood-related family members. These copies are imprints in us, and they affect not only how we are connected to them but also how we all interact with life. They represent parts of our Double that we have in common with our etheric streams, from both father and mother, or, in some circumstances, only one of the parents.
The astral copy is entangled in us in the Luciferic part of the Double. This copy is in strict correspondence with the person in our family with whom our soul (sympathies and antipathies) was formed, the one who most influenced our soul’s formation. The etheric copy is entangled with our Ahrimanic part of the Double, affecting mostly the temperament and thinking, sometimes abilities that are seen as talents. Surprisingly enough, once we create adequate images of both copies, they can also tell us something about two of our past incarnations on Earth. Once we see this, we are clear that what comes from our parents really belongs to us in the first place, and what appears as ‘hereditary’ is actually just the façade, the image of something deeper, to remind us of our past experiences on Earth. Therefore, these two copies of life are completely justified spiritually. They are part of us, shared with members of our family, waiting to be embellished and spiritualised by our consciousness.
But there is one more copy, one that is completely illegitimate and which must be spiritually dissolved through conscious work for one to find freedom. This copy is a distortion of the laws of karma, inflicted on us by the Asuric influence of our culture, and its main purpose is to carry materialism on Earth. All human beings of today have such a copy. This is a copy of the life events of one family member, which our I is pushed to experience again, even though the member has already experienced them. When a person lives their karma, and it reaches completion, it metamorphoses and is picked up by them in another incarnation. We noticed that specific life events are illegitimately pushed into another family member in the lower branch of the family tree, even though they had already been experienced by the first member. These illegitimate copies are formed in relation to blood-related parents, aunts and uncles, grandparents, and their siblings.
There are hard copies of materialism that cannot be absorbed into one karma, and they simply slip into another person’s karma. This copy is entangled with their own life script, and if not approached with consciousness, it diverts the experiences of their I, literally thwarting karma. The son or nephew will then no longer experience their own karma, but instead experience a duplicate of a (dead) family member’s karma. Dealing with the ‘copy of life’ is therefore an ability that everyone who wants to keep up with evolution should develop.
The purpose of our Zoom seminar is to teach how to identify and work with these copies of life to obtain clarity and freedom of destiny, honouring the family members in relation to whom they are formed. Experience and knowledge of Anthroposophy are not required. The process is guided step by step from the beginning, in full consciousness; it is tested and ethical, and it requires only willingness. It enables self-knowledge and provides creative methods of meditation and biographical work that make visible in daylight consciousness aspects that would otherwise occur only in Initiation.
In the Mystery Dramas, we can find a rich source of practical, genuine spiritual knowledge that is not portrayed as such anywhere else in Rudolf Steiner’s lectures or publishing activity. Although described differently in many lectures, for all the themes I chose for this article, the final piece of the puzzle is set in one’s mind only with the help of the Mystery Plays. I will share with you some of the most important things I have learnt from them so far that help me ‘digest’ my spiritual experiences and also cope with everyday life.
Imaginative Clothing and Imaginative Language
‘Benedictus: Thou know’st those pictures have no real being; Their content only strives to make its way Into the soul and takes pictorial form.’
(The Soul’s Awakening, Scene 11)
When we have authentic spiritual experiences, we are completely outside the physical body. That means the physical senses fall asleep and the world around us clouds itself, opening a new, objective world. This can happen in meditation, when we elevate, and the head chakra opens, revealing a new world previously inaccessible. This first world we encounter is referred to in Anthroposophy as the imaginative world, the elementary world or the lower astral. In Theosophy, it is called the Soul World. Elevating oneself directly from a meditative state, however, requires considerable practice, determination, and dedication, often spanning years or even multiple lives. It requires at most a practical and moral discipline, because what is immoral in oneself veils itself in gravitational forces that pull one back from entering this world. We know, from Rudolf Steiner, that this requires that the disciple loosens, through exercise, their etheric body and becomes more and more ‘split’: the physical body and a part of the etheric body remaining in the meditative room, and the astral body with the I and a part of the etheric body continuing the journey in the Spiritual. At first, the I-consciousness is in the etheric body. So, the first condition for the beginning of a genuine spiritual experience is to make oneself able to leave one’s body and the bodily senses behind. In the Mystery Dramas, this is the point where Johannes Thomasius’s journey begins, with imaginations in the elementary or imaginative world.
When we are in the imaginative world, whether we rise directly from meditation, as described above, or wake up fully conscious in a dream-state while we are still sleeping, we are first surrounded by our own beings —the elementary beings of our own soul. We know from Rudolf Steiner that what is kept inside us on Earth — our thoughts, feelings, passions, desires, etc. — in the imaginative world we find around us, creating our environment. In the spiritual world, even starting with the imaginative one, every process and being is of a thought-substance, including ourselves; therefore, everything takes an imaginative clothing. And here is when, in fact, the confusion starts. For instance, we can see in the imaginative world (or in our dreams, because dreams are made of the same thought-substance) specific people from our biography; however, this doesn’t necessarily mean we are meeting them there. The imaginative communication at this stage is unlikely to be about them. It might be, and it’s often the case that the living reality beyond the imaginative clothing is entirely ours.
Allow me to give you an example: If, in a dream-like state, I see my good friend, Helena, it doesn’t necessarily mean that the spiritual communication is about Helena. I can observe that, if I am diligent, my Luciferic double, for instance, also has some characteristics similar to my friend’s personality. So, what is presented in the elementary world under the image of my good friend Helena is, in fact, my Luciferic double. It is like that because parts of our soul have characteristics similar to specific people we know in real life, and there are karmic reasons behind this mystery, reasons best portrayed in Rudolf Steiner’s Mystery Dramas.
But it can also be that I meet, in fact, the real Helena. So, which Helena is it that I meet here? Is it my Luciferic double or my good friend from real life? The answer that Rudolf Steiner gives is that at this point of Initiation, one cannot know for sure. One must raise oneself to a higher state of Inspiration to objectify their perceptions. He also mentions in the various commentaries he offered about the plays that in the first two Mystery Dramas, everything that Johannes Thomasius lives is filled with (imaginative) illusions. He gives the temple in Scene 5 of The Portal of Initiation as an example of complete imaginative illusion; the temple doesn’t exist there at all. It is often like that, and it is important for the candidate to Initiation to encounter illusion and overcome it. We can observe that Johannes Thomasius, at the beginning of the journey, perceived parts of his own soul as figures of real-life friends. This is also a significant achievement, the capacity to dwell into another person’s soul. But it is not the only thing he perceived; he also encountered Capesius and Strader spiritually, clothed imaginatively as themselves but in a different form than they were on Earth. He saw Capesius younger than he was and Strader older. These, however, as Rudolf Steiner tells us in his commentaries, were the real souls of Capesius and Strader.
The most important thing we need to know about the imaginative world is that everything reveals itself not merely as one image or a symbol, but as an imaginative language. There are higher beings that cloak themselves completely from us; they hide their own beings, and what is received from them is only the communication. Take, for example, the audio calls in the physical: you don’t see the person who speaks, but you recognise them through specific characteristics, like the tone of their voice. The same in the imaginative world, a being can be identified only in the course of the imaginative communication by certain unique characteristics that are revealed in the interaction, but that doesn’t mean that one should mistake the communication with the being of the communicator.
I have always said in posts, articles and presentations that the most common mistake is made regarding the Guardian of the Threshold. Rudolf Steiner tells us that the Guardian of the Threshold hides himself completely, especially at the beginning of the Initiation, allowing only his communication to be revealed. For the Guardian to communicate with us, he must present everything as an imaginative transformation of his own being. Therefore, what we see imaginatively in the Guardian is the corpus of his communication. He talks in imaginations, and we perceive them as if they are his own being. These imaginations change, sometimes in the same experience, depending on the content of the communication. So, what we perceive as the magnified being of ourselves, or our Double, other times an Angel or an Archangel, Michael or Christ, or frowning people from our biography, even Lucifer and Ahriman at times, can, in fact, be the Guardian. The Guardian, the Archangel of the Gate who hid the spiritual world from us after the Original Sin and concealed his being with it, never reveals himself imaginatively but only communicates symbolically. His communication is not about him, but about us. If he wants to show us our double, he will portray the double before us; if he wants to speak about Christ, this is what we will see; if he speaks of Michael, we will see Michael. We learn to read about ourselves in the transformation of his own being, and we also learn about him in the thoughts, feelings and deeds he impels in us. Think of it like this: If I want to communicate to you in images but hide myself entirely in the communication, the only way is the imaginative transformation of my own being. We must overcome the materialistic mindset and never mistake his being with what he is communicating. The same precaution must be taken about everything we encounter imaginatively.
In the Mystery Dramas, we observe that the Guardian borrows Maria’s form as imaginative clothing twice. In Scene 2 of The Soul’s Awakening, Johannes finds himself longing for the passionate love he had with Maria before their Initiation. Here, the Guardian takes the guise of Maria, severely frowning at him as a spiritual reproach as soon as he allows himself to be carried away by nostalgia for a lost passion, thus letting Lucifer slide in. Johannes knows by now that this figure appearing before him as Maria is not Maria, but the Guardian. The Guardian must oppose Lucifer’s attempt in Johannes’ soul to win him back, as this would be a tremendous setback, considering that not long before Johannes had escaped from the prison Lucifer had held him in for at least five incarnations (including the current one).
‘(Maria appears as a thought of Johannes.)
Maria here before me! but how strange! She must not thus reveal herself to me! This stern cold spirit-face, this dignity That chills my earthly feelings— ’tis not thus Johannes will or can Maria see Draw nigh to him. ‘Tis not Maria—this— Whom by kind fate’s decree wise powers have sent.
(Maria disappears from Johannes’ vision.)’
(The Soul’s Awakening, Scene 2)
The same thing happens later to Strader. Since he is not so advanced as to understand the imaginative language, Benedictus, the Initiate, must teach Strader how to interpret the imaginations:
‘Strader: Thou didst speak gravely, and Maria spoke Right harshly to me also, when ye two Showed yourselves to me at my life’s abyss.
Benedictus:
Thou know’st those pictures have no real being; Their content only strives to make its way Into the soul and takes pictorial form.
Strader: Yet it was hard to hear these pictures say: ‘Where is thy light? Thou rayest darkness out, ’Midst light thou dost create the baffling gloom.’ So spake the spirit through Maria’s form.
Benedictus: Because in thine ascent thou hadst attained To higher levels on the spirit-path, The spirit, which had led thee to itself, Used darkness as a symbol to depict The state of knowledge which was thine before. This spirit chose to use Maria’s form Because thy soul itself so fashioned it. The spirit, my dear Strader, at this hour Works mightily within thee and will lead Thee with swift flight to lofty grades of soul.’
(The Soul’s Awakening, Scene 11)
Lucifer’s Prisons and Ahriman’s Spells
‘Capesius and father Felix both Conceal dark meanings in transparent words…’
(The Soul’s Awakening, Scene 3)
One of the most incredible teachings of the plays is the restless fight Lucifer and Ahriman wage over the human soul. We find out that during the night, in the depths of our unconsciousness, while we abandon ourselves to the hierarchies (so we think), Lucifer and Ahriman plot our imprisonment in their realms. They work directly through us, if our souls are unprepared and have no means to oppose, or through others close to us. Our dear ones are often tools for their daily deceit, sometimes even clairvoyant friends who teach us or others Anthroposophy, people who we believe at least in the beginning of our esoteric road to be above us, our teachers or spiritual older brothers, they too don’t even know that during sleep are set up by Lucifer or Ahriman to oppose the real spiritual work that would harm these cosmic beings. So, people —even those who appear to have the most potent spiritual allure, followers, books, spiritual initiatives and schools of Initiation —continue, unconsciously and without a clue, the plan of Lucifer and Ahriman in their daily lives. Not everything that appears highly spiritual in real life is equally so in the spiritual world.
What do these cosmic fallen beings want with people, anyway? Lucifer wants to create a planetary body composed entirely of fantasy imaginations. He wants a humanity that will live completely in a fantasy life on a fantasy planet. We already know from Rudolf Steiner that this is occultly called the Eighth Sphere, a cosmic body created by Lucifer and Ahriman out of the Old Moon’s substantiality they wrested away before Pralaya, and melded with the imaginative substance of the new mineral sphere. The Eight Sphere is thus a planet of densified imaginations, of nothing else than spectres and ghosts. Lucifer seduces and imprisons souls in his realm. The souls he sometimes seduces are, nevertheless, advanced from the clairvoyant point of view, but they have fallen in their Initiation process because they misused cosmic love (or occult knowledge, which is spiritually the same) and perverted it into passions or earthly indulgences in this incarnation or a previous one. These souls that are held by Lucifer by the collars of their passions and desires, no matter how spiritual or clairvoyant they appear in an incarnation, how many followers they have, etc., are still tributary to Lucifer until they manage to transform the egotistic love or passion into altruistic love and pure knowledge. This means that as long as they cannot redeem the burning passions, Lucifer will always have something on them.
Ahriman and his hordes want to conquer the physical world and fill it with regiments of humans without souls — egoless humans, ‘locusts’ (as they are called in the Apocalypse), pure automatons, empty physical and etheric bodies to be incorporated by his troops. Ahriman wants to densify the Earth until it becomes a mechanistic robotic hierarchical society, where human bodies will be bred to host his demons (see, for instance, The Matrix as the utmost Ahrimanic imagination; while you are there, in the famous imaginations of the 90s, you can also check in Star Trek: The Next Generation, the episodes where they present the Borg). Ahriman does not need human souls per se, but only their life forces, because his intelligent creations of death need to consume life.
Almost everyone in the plays falls into Lucifer or Ahriman’s traps, depending on their level of Initiation and their entire evolution, which extends over the incarnations and the periods in the Spiritual between death and birth. The problem here is that, when it comes to Lucifer and Ahriman, human beings are always at a disadvantage because Lucifer and Ahriman can see one’s soul in all their incarnations and the projected future as karmic consequence, whereas for human beings on the path of Initiation, this information only unveils slowly before one’s spiritual eyes. They have too much intel about us, long before we gain it for ourselves. They deceive, they lie, and they are allowed to use their macrocosmic powers to trap microcosmic humans in their realms. But there will always be there for us spiritual beings that guide our souls, Initiates, teachers of humanity, that we meet spiritually when the time is right and also, as the plays very well portray, friends more advanced on this road, karmically linked to us or appointed to us by the spiritual powers, which will help in times of need.
The most impressive thing in the plays must be Lucifer’s fight for Johannes’ soul and Ahriman’s for Strader’s, both of which lead to karmic derails and sudden deaths.
Lucifer’s Prisons
The karmic consequence of sexual desire at Initiation: Johannes gives love a bad name
To understand fully how far Lucifer goes with his plans, we must start with Johannes’ spiritual history as presented in the plays. Although Johannes Thomasius appears to be the first in the karmic group to wake up spiritually, and thus one would expect him to be the most advanced, he is actually the youngest soul from the cosmic point of view among the members of the karmic group and the only one who, in his earlier incarnations, did not receive Initiation. The other members of the group are old souls who received Initiation in times before the Mystery of Golgotha, except for Maria, whose failed initiation in Ancient Egypt needed to be repeated around the Mystery of Golgotha in the Hibernian Mysteries. Not only is Thomasius the least advanced in the group when analysed from a broader perspective, but on his path of Initiation, he encounters karmic debris in the Spiritual world that confuses him profoundly and prompts Benedictus, Maria, Theodora, and the Guardian to fight for his soul. These pieces of karmic debris, these unjustified copies of life, are not common aspects of the modern Initiation, Rudolf Steiner teaches us; they are very specific and unique because their existence in the spiritual world is unjustified. It would be wrong to think that everyone meets on the path of Initiation the same debris, derails, hindrances and Luciferic confusion that Johannes Thomasius meets. In other words, we see that Johannes Thomasius has unresolved karmic problems that are not merely abstract notions but realities that invade and suffocate the spiritual world, deeply affecting his and others’ lives.
The way Lucifer and Ahriman take hold of one’s soul depends on one’s predisposition and the vulnerabilities towards them that one carries from previous incarnations, which remain unresolved at the moment of their temptation. Lucifer takes hold of Thomasius through a defective quality of his love. We see in him a burning passion that has accompanied him since his incarnation in Ancient Egypt (around 2000 BC). He was then embodied as a female and fell in love with a neophyte-to-be (Maria, in the current incarnation). The Egyptian woman was not ready to give up the love she nurtured for the neophyte and decided to be around the Temple at the moment of the Initiation. Her burning thoughts towards the neophyte proved themselves poisonous in conjunction with the grave omission of the hierophant (Capesius). Here is what happened (I must warn the reader that this is not immediately obvious from the plays; one needs to represent things imaginatively and also link more scenes together): At the moment of the split of personality that occurred in the process of Initiation, the hierophant (Capesius) refused to think the thoughts that would guide the neophyte (Maria) in the Spiritual. He did it because he realised that the I will separate from the group-I in the near future and the old mysteries will soon decay. However, the split of personality during an Initiation is not exactly the moment the hierophant is allowed to change his mind about the Initiation, no matter how justified, and we see in the dramas that Capesius (back then the hierophant) encounters the consequences of that decision three incarnations later, when he becomes senile at the end of his life. Little did he know that there was, however, someone around the Temple who was firmly guiding thoughts toward the neophyte in the moment of Initiation. It was the lover the neophyte left, the Egyptian woman – Johannes in current incarnation. These thoughts took the place of the thoughts the hierophant refused to think. Therefore, a conjunction of dire circumstances, confusion, and egotistic decisions led to an unclean, passionate love being raised in the Spiritual through a ritual of Initiation. The karmic consequences of what happened in the Ancient Temple remain, especially for Johannes, Maria and Capesius. A part of it, the passion of the Egyptian woman – Johannes, takes the form of his Double, and the most problematic part of it, the passionate imaginations raised across the Threshold by the power of the old ritual, creates a shadowy ghost in the Spiritual, which Rudolf Steiner names ‘The Spirit of Johannes Thomasius’ Youth’.
Johannes Thomasius carried this burning passion into subsequent incarnations, which, in his case, are no fewer than five, presented in the dramas. His karma is linked to Maria’s, and although she is the one who was initiated first in their series of incarnations together (in a life that came immediately after Egypt, in Hibernian Mysteries), their evolution depends on each other because their connection is reciprocal.
‘Benedictus
[…] For Fate itself hath so united you, That ye together may unfold the powers Which needs must serve divine creative work. And as ye journey on the path of souls Wisdom will teach you that the loftiest tasks May be achieved for the weal of men When souls that gave each other spirit certainty Unite in faith to do salvation’s work. My spirit-guidance hath united you To realise each other: now do ye Unite yourselves to do the spirit’s work. […]’
(The Portal of Initiation, Scene 7)
Johannes is an artist, and the culture of 19th-century Vienna graciously covers up passionate, egotistic love, melding it with the culture. (The 21st-century Hollywood does the same; they taught us to be happy at the end, when the actors kiss.) To the exterior, he appears an elevated young spiritual man filled with ideals. He discovers Spiritual Science through Maria, his karmic love, and with whom he falls in love again when they meet in this life, abandoning the relationship he had at the time. The woman whom she abandoned for Maria couldn’t handle the breakup, and later she died. Officially, this is the first victim made by Lucifer through Johannes Thomasius’ Double.
Slowly but surely, Johannes approaches the Threshold, and over the course of the dramas, we see how Maria, spiritually awakened before him, guides him in his life and spiritual world. Then, the moment comes when the spiritual powers demand that Maria set Johannes free so he can rightfully attain his Initiation.
‘Benedictus
[…] Fate doth not decree That ye shall be no longer outward friends; But this it doth demand with strict decree— Johannes’ freedom in the spirit-realm.’
(The Soul’s Probation, Scene 2)
‘Maria: Bethink, Johannes, how the One Soul must— A personality apart from all— Evolve from out the womb of time. Love serves to knit together separate souls Not kill their individuality. The moment is upon us, when we twain Must test our souls, and find the spirit-path That each must follow for its separate good.’
(The Soul’s Probation, Scene 3)
Johannes doesn’t understand or accept his freedom because the knowledge he has gained so far is intrinsically linked with the natural force of love that acts in the will. He uses this force for spiritual knowledge, being unable to separate the sexual, instinctually creative force from the force of pure cognition. In the hollow created by Maria’s absence, Lucifer insinuates himself gracefully.
‘For Lucifer, since first the Earth began Hath ever sought for men who have acquired Wisdom divine through instincts that were false.’
(The Guardian of the Threshold, Scene 5)
Without Maria’s help this time, Johannes advances on his way to Initiation. He obtains access to contemplate yet another of his incarnations. In this incarnation, he is male and works as a miner for the Templars, but his friend, the monk (Maria in male incarnation), incites him to oppose them. He falls in love with a girl (Theodora in the current life) just to find out she is his sister. Their father (Capesius) had left them to serve the Templars, and soon their mother died. So, they were separated from a young age and knew nothing of each other. Thomasius, in that incarnation, had many reasons to hate the Templars (the older souls), for his father’s abandonment and for his lost incestuous love. He never forgave his father (Capesius) and still carried the instinctual love for his sister (Theodora), which he even brought into another incarnation.
Now, Lucifer understands very well the love of blood, which is nothing but self-love, pure egotism projected on another, and when he feels threatened that Maria and Benedictus can turn Johannes against his plans, he decides that it’s time to collect old debts. But this doesn’t happen without Johannes’ free will. In Scene 12 of The Soul’s Probation, Johannes decides to follow Lucifer willingly. It is tragic to see how Johannes is revolted by the difficulty of Spiritual Science, and by the path it opens, which brings suffering and restrains compared to what Lucifer promises. Johannes decides that he is not ready to give up the instinctual force of knowledge when approaching the Spiritual, which, on Earth, is the instinctual force of love that lies deep in his passionate nature. So, Johannes chooses Lucifer.
Lucifer keeps his promise and offers Johannes knowledge, just like he always did, so Johannes continues his journey in the Spiritual unpreoccupied to purify his sexual impulses, being unaware of the harm they bring. Now, Lucifer prompts his first big attack: he redirects the natural karmic force of love that Johannes had in the past for Maria to Theodora. The natural instinct that used to obey the karmic rules is now derailed by Lucifer, thus derailing Johannes’ karma, Theodora’s and everyone else linked to them.
Rudolf Steiner explains:
‘Johannes Thomasius now enters the objective spiritual world for the first time. This means that he is able to bring in with him all the possibilities of erring of which the soul is capable, especially his strange relationship to Theodora. Johannes enters the higher world, burdened with all the slag of his lower self, but even so, confronting the higher world. If I may use a shallow term for it, I would have to say that Johannes Thomasius falls occultly in love with Theodora.’ (GA147, 30.08.1913)
Thedora was in this life a born clairvoyant and a sensitive soul. She feels Johannes haunting her spiritually, burning her. His love for her was destructive, devouring, unjustified spiritually, outside the laws of karma. As a result, her physical body deteriorates, and she dies. Her death, however, doesn’t put an end to his spiritual stalking, because by now Johannes is in the objective spiritual world, fully clairvoyant himself. He also haunts clairvoyantly Theodora after death, deluded in his self-savouring state.
Only now do we understand the power of Lucifer’s deceit:
‘Capesius (spoken as in a trance): According to the strict decree of Fate Thomasius and Theodora ne’er Could meet in earthly passion in this life. ‘Twould be indeed opposed to cosmic laws If one desired to make the other feel Aught that was not on spirit only based. Within his heart Thomasius doth break The stern decree of mighty powers of Fate: That he must never harbour in his soul Thoughts that might bring to Theodora harm. For he doth feel what he ought not to feel And, through his disobedience he doth form E’en now the powers which can deliver o’er His future life unto the realms of dark. When Theodora had been forced to come To Lucifer, she learnt unconsciously That through the Light-bearer, Thomasius Was filled with sensual passion for herself. Maria, who had been by Fate’s decree Entrusted with Thomasius’ spirit-life, And Theodora, at the same time met Within that realm which fights against the gods— Maria from Thomasius had to part, And he through strength of this false love was forced To be in bondage unto Lucifer. What Theodora thus experienced Became consuming fire within her soul And working further caused her all this pain.’
(The Guardian of the Threshold, Scene 5)
Let’s recapitulate the actions of Lucifer so far: Lucifer knows what lies concealed in the will of men —the creative force of karma, which carries the imaginations of what needs to happen, including the relationships between people. He instigates these images and perverts them by instilling unjustified fantasies into the souls of those who sleep too deeply during the night, to nurture further his densified imaginations in the Eight Sphere. Then he derails karma, distracting them with urgent instinctual needs and burning fantasies. With the same instincts, the same perversion of the sexual energy, some people become clairvoyant, and others lose themselves in materialism and lust. But one thing is clear: when one’s karma is derailed, people die, because the divine plan cannot happen anymore in the current life.
So, we may ask ourselves: What inner strength did Johannes need to resist Lucifer in his case? He needed the most difficult thing to acquire when one starts developing spiritual abilities: humility. The greed for the spiritual – the need for things to be easy and to be offered without effort to the clairvoyant for his spiritual savouring – is not only unrealistic, but in itself a lust that Lucifer will use to destroy any progressive action. With the help of Lucifer, people become clairvoyant at the expense of other people’s lives. We must know the real cost when we indulge or appreciate the clairvoyance developed without exercising thinking. Clairvoyance of thinking is different from clairvoyance of the will; one is pure, the other is not.
Johannes managed to escape Lucifer’s prison only when he remembered karma and admitted that he was, in fact, in love with himself. The power of remembrance is something that often escapes us from Lucifer or Ahriman’s claws, because they both hide relevant memories from us to blackmail our morality.
Further understanding of the Luciferic influence in Johannes’ Initiation: Johannes’ Double, Spirit of Youth and the Other Philia
Let’s explore the notion of humility further. Our language has lost the word’s spiritual meaning. Greek, however, still carries the true spiritual sense of the word humility. Ταπεινοφροσύνη (tapeinophrosyne), the Greek word for humbleness, composed of tapeinós (low, humble) and phrēn (mind), implies a meekness of the mind. In contrast, the word in other languages doesn’t refer to the mind (thinking) specifically, but more to one’s character. But when we refer to humility in this context, we find it as a state of mind that must be cultivated through spiritual practice, which implies an exercised capacity to restrain the will in thinking – thought control. We can observe in the dramas that whenever someone thinks something, that reality is invoked and immediately appears. Johannes needed a work of the mind, and less overconfidence in his disordered habitual thinking. He needed to question his judgment deeply, as it still carried the pride that modernity breeds. The fact that he couldn’t do this brought yet another unjustified being into the objective Spiritual, the Other Philia.
Philia is the Greek concept of brotherly love or friendship. Esoterically, it is born from the ‘altruistic universal’. Philia is the name of the spiritual force of thinking, which is, at its origin, creative. It originates from the fiery Words of the Seraphim in the Holiest of the Holies, flows as potent thoughts through the light of the Cherubim, and forms through the powers of the Thrones. The Other Philia, in contrast, is merely a shadow in comparison. But the Other Philia offers another ‘way’ to higher knowledge, through another force derived from the cosmic love, imperfect and corruptible, especially to Lucifer, diluted but accessible. It is an intermediate way to perceive spiritually one’s higher self through habitual (instinctual) thinking when the disciple has not yet developed the power to behold the threefoldness of the higher self, Philia, Astrid and Luna.
In the comments about the Mystery Dramas in relation to Initiation (Secrets of the Threshold, GA147, especially lectures dated 29, 30 and 31.08.1913), Rudolf Steiner explains what I am merely paraphrasing in the following: Human beings live with their physical bodies in the physical world. When we extend ourselves, we leave our physical body behind and experience further in the etheric body, being surrounded by the elementary world. As we progress in our esoteric work and come to leave this second world, we come to what we know as the Threshold of the Spiritual. Here, sooner or later, we meet the Guardian of the Threshold. When we cross the Threshold, we live in our astral body, being surrounded by the objective spiritual world. In the objective spiritual, we meet for the first time the other self, the higher self, or our spiritual self. This higher self here, in this first spiritual world, is not experienced as one, but as a trinity which in the Mystery Dramas is Philia, Astrid, and Luna (or as we know them in the academic terminology of anthroposophy – thinking, feeling and will). It is a sign of pathology, Rudolf Steiner explains, not to experience yourself as a trinity here (which is like experiencing three different higher men that you have not met before), or to not recognise yourself in this trinity, or to be unable to maintain the trinity together. In the Mystery Dramas, we see that Johannes experiences his higher self primarily as a unity (through the Other Philia), while Capesius and Maria encounter only parts of the trinity (Capesius primarily through Philia, and Maria primarily through Astrid and Luna).
In the Class Lessons, the Guardian says:
‘O, see the Three They are One When you in earthly life The human imprint bear.’
(Class hour 7, GA270)
In a way, we can say that the elementary world (the world before the Threshold) is subjective-objective, because one mainly experiences parts of oneself, even if objectively, and the first spiritual world (the world beyond the Threshold) is objective, because one experiences everything objectively, as independent realities, even parts of themselves. Between the elementary world and the first objective spiritual world, there is the abyss of existence. When crossing this abyss into the objective spiritual world, all the rules that applied in the elementary world no longer apply. The disciple cannot perceive, think, feel or will in the same way that they used to in the elementary world.
I am repeating this from Rudolf Steiner because it is relevant to the distinction between the Double of Johannes Thomasius and his Spirit of Youth. The Double is the experience of the elementary world before crossing the Threshold, while the Spirit of Youth is an interesting and entirely different composite that Johannes Thomasius encounters only in the objective spiritual world. While the Double is somehow justified to be in the elementary world (I will explain further why I say ‘somehow justified’), the Spirit of Youth is a shadow being, and its presence in the objective spiritual world is completely illegitimate.
I will warn the reader that what I am about to say is based on my own experiences, which I have been trying to explain to myself for years now, with the help of Rudolf Steiner. This is not complete research, and it doesn’t have the pretentiousness of being spiritually exact, because I myself am a disciple of the Guardian, not yet in the objective spiritual world. I have been struggling all my Anthroposophic life with an incredible lack of feedback from my older brothers and sisters, mainly because most people didn’t reach any level in Initiation. There are many anthroposophical authors who explain Rudolf Steiner through Rudolf Steiner, but very few who came to genuine spiritual experiences through Anthroposophy alone (not old traditions, not old clairvoyance), which they explain afterwards with Rudolf Steiner. This is because Anthroposophy today is imbued with the karmic detractors of Michael, people who came to Anthroposophy karmically to destroy it. In a way, it is courageous to publish incomplete research just to open the conversation, but this is what I’m doing.
Let’s start with the concept of the Double and how it can be experienced. In theory, the Double is a composite being of unassimilated Luciferic and Ahrimanic parts of our soul, to which Ahriman gives a human etheric form. The Double can only be experienced in the elementary world. In ‘Secrets of the Threshold’ (GA147), lecture 7, and in more lectures from ‘Esoteric Lessons, vol. II’ (GA266/II, see for instance 23 or 26.08.1911), Rudolf Steiner tells us that parts of our etheric and astral bodies can separate from us once we step out of the physical body, due to their resemblance and attraction to their kind, Luciferic and Ahrimanic beings. For instance, ambition will follow a Luciferic being of ambition, lie will follow an Ahrimanic being and so on. These unassimilated parts of our souls are living beings; they are in our etheric and astral bodies, and when the spiritual rejects them, they tend to gather around the archetypes they belong to, Lucifer or Ahriman. Now here comes the tricky part: While the astral body can fragment itself easily, the etheric body tends to extend, not to fragment. But in special circumstances, Ahriman can totally detach parts of the etheric body that he finds lost in the elementary world and mould out of them an independent form. Now you can ask: ‘What are you saying, Alexandra? According to Anthroposophy, the Double is an experience that everyone spiritually healthy has in the elementary world. Why do you say it’s happening in special circumstances?’ And I say: Yes, but the independent form of the Double, completely detached, like in the case of Johannes Thomasius, is not an experience that everyone has. Not everyone finds their Double wandering in the elementary world. I want to offer the reader another perspective, in contrast to Johannes Thomasius’s experience in the Mystery Dramas: When one is in the elementary world, one may not experience one’s Double as an independent being; one can experience it through the Guardian of the Threshold (see the article on my blog where I explain this and the first chapter of this post). This is precisely how the experience is described in GA10, ‘How to Achieve Knowledge of the Higher Worlds’; the Guardian of the Threshold intermediates the experience of one’s Double through spiritual reflection. The Guardian clothes himself with parts of the Double and parts of an older karma. These parts can be experienced as projected into the being of the Guardian, who then becomes the Teacher.
This process is also suggested in the Mystery Dramas. In Scene 4 from The Soul’s Awakening, two realities stand side by side: the independent Double and the Guardian of the Threshold that reflects for Johannes Thomasius unassimilated parts of himself that Ahriman couldn’t detach yet, which are also, in theory, parts of the Double. And interestingly enough, Ahriman mocks the Guardian to delude Johannes, referring precisely to the parts that he couldn’t detach, and which are embodied now by the Guardian. He says:
‘Ahriman: Let not thyself be quite confused by him. He guards the threshold faithfully indeed E’en if to-day thou see’st him wear the clothes Which for thyself thou didst patch up before Within thy spirit from old odds and ends. Thou as an artist surely couldst produce Thy actors in a better style than this; But thou wilt make improvements by-and-bye, And e’en this clownish form can serve thy soul. It doth not have to spend much energy In showing thee that which it now still is. Pay close attention to the Guardian’s speech: Its tone is mournful and its pathos marked, Allow not this: for then he will disclose From whom to-day he borrows to excess.’
(The Soul’s Awakening, Scene 4)
But why did Johannes Thomasius have a detached part of himself as an independent being, walking and talking in the elementary world in the first place? The answer is simple: because his soul is coloured with the quality of desire, which is the influence of Lucifer from previous incarnations. In a way, we can say that these unassimilated parts of Johannes Thomasius become magnetised and they tend to unite with their kind through attraction. Once they detach, Ahriman grabs them and gives them form. But that doesn’t mean that the Double contains only Ahrimanic parts; it contains lost parts of the etheric body and sometimes also parts of the astral body, which are both Ahrimanic and Luciferic. The Double is a composite that Ahriman would like to keep for himself.
Now let’s move to the other composite, Johannes Thomasius’ Spirit of Youth. Rudolf Steiner tells us that while the etheric body doesn’t have naturally the tendency to fragment, this process is not unnatural for the astral body when we cross the Threshold in the objective spiritual world. Similarly to the process described above, here, parts of the astral body tend to connect with the archetypes to which they belong. But there is yet another experience: One here experiences karma that was not accessible previously, and much of this karma, gradually revealed to the disciple, lies unresolved in the depths of the being. When one’s inner being separates into one’s ordinary self and one’s other self, one becomes conscious of the unsolved karma, too. There is much karma that cannot be resolved in the current incarnation. Lucifer has access to the experience of unresolved karma, which lies in oneself only as potentiality, and he can isolate it. He can detach a part of the etheric body and fill it with unresolved karma, giving it another human form. In the Mystery Dramas, such a being is Johannes Thomasius’ Spirit of Youth.
I come now with another perspective from my personal experience, with the admission that I haven’t stepped into the objective spiritual yet. Normally, one could see the unresolved karma also with the help of the Guardian at the Threshold. One can experience a version of oneself if Initiation had not interfered in one’s life. One can see an image of an alternative self if one were not to be called in life to Initiation. In this case, karma would follow its normal course, cause and effect. One can experience this alternative self as a symbol of the life unlived that would have occurred in another timeline in which the spiritual path did not unfold. In this image, one may not have all the karmic details, though much can still be experienced, but one can, for sure, get an idea of how much things would differ. Still, this is not an experience of the causes (a typical and objective karmic experience), but of the karmic effects that cannot come to pass anymore. It might, however, happen that Lucifer wants to manipulate this image and create a temptation out of it: a temptation to return to normal life and leave Initiation. He can make this image very attractive and create a kind of longing, a regret, a form of nostalgia for this unlived life. This experience can be caustic for a candidate for Initiation if they are not prepared to confront Lucifer’s tricks. What Rudolf Steiner presents in the Mystery Plays is even more advanced, because Lucifer managed to isolate the experience of the life unlived and gave it an enchanted human form; it is experienced by Johannes Thomasius objectively as a haunting chimaera that contradicts the spiritual order.
In Johannes Thomasius, we see a candidate for Initiation who is far from being pure or prepared. Johannes Thomasius is, for me, a vivid example of how the Gods tolerate our shenanigans.
How Lucifer derails Capesius’ karma. How Rudolf Steiner built the character Capesius in relation to Karl Julius Schröer
‘Capesius and father Felix both Conceal dark meanings in transparent words…’
(The Soul’s Awakening, Scene 3)
So far in my exposition about Lucifer in relation to the Mystery Dramas, I have tried to show how he can derail someone’s life to the extent that they end up not doing their task on Earth and completely miss an incarnation. It is a common misconception in Anthroposophy that only the Asuras can thwart karma; in fact, Lucifer and Ahriman, as cosmic beings, are perfectly capable of doing so as well, with the exception that they do it within the spiritual laws, meaning ‘with approval’ from the Gods. It is true that if Lucifer or Ahriman derail karma in one incarnation, it can still be restored in the next one; in the case of the Asuric influence, this might no longer be possible. We can see that Lucifer, which fellow Anthroposophists consider the lowest evil, can do much more harm than expected when it comes to modern Christian Initiation. While there is an objective degradation of evil and, indeed, the order is that Lucifer is less evil than Ahriman, which is less than Asura, when it comes to one’s biography, their actions must be seen as specific, personal. Each life is individual, and it might be that for your biography, your incarnation now, Lucifer is much more problematic than any of the Asuras. For Johannes, Capesius and Felix Balde from the Mystery Dramas, it wasn’t the Asuras that caused them problems and derailment in their mission; it was Lucifer.
One thing we learn for sure from the Mystery Dramas, and I need to spell it out to anyone ready to listen: Stop jumping for the highest evil in your thinking priorities, or in your life! Lucifer and Ahriman are not to be disregarded. We must also pause and take responsibility for the compulsiveness to rush for the highest things in thinking. For instance, if one says Lucifer, another comes to mention Ahriman and Asuras because they are ‘more’ dangerous, destructive, powerful, etc.; when one says the Lower Guardian, another feels the need to note that there are two Guardians, one even ‘higher’ than the other. We can play like that only in abstract thinking. As soon as one begins to work with these realities, the illusory pride of intellectual thinking, the need to always jump to something new, more interesting, bigger, holier, more important, more dangerous, etc., dissolves. If one never takes a genuine interest in learning about these cosmic beings, the first thing that appears as an experience when one finally has one is a tremendous anxiety that can disrupt one’s entire incarnation. We know that behind one’s anxiety is a hidden feeling of hate for spiritual knowledge that each of us has by design. And this hate is nurtured when one dismisses the reality before them to jump for the next best thing.
Lucifer is the first evil to have access to human beings. The first temptation, the Original Sin, came from Lucifer; we must at least credit him for his experience in the matter. Please never underestimate Lucifer and Ahriman, as their cosmic karma, their cosmic punishment, is to fight over the human soul relentlessly.
‘Lucifer: I will fight!
Benedictus: And, by fighting, you will serve the gods.’
(The Soul’s Awakening, Scene 10)
As a biography worker, in my professional experience, working one’s morality towards the Luciferic beings of the soul is never straightforward, sometimes even much harder than in the case of Ahrimanic beings. Firstly, because what is Luciferic in one’s soul is not easy to identify as evil. And secondly, when it is finally correctly identified, one cannot simply propose oneself to be morally better and then follow through with the action. In the case of Luciferic beings, one needs to be very specific, as each Luciferic flaw has its own antidote. For instance, if you are envious of someone (which is a Luciferic corruption), you cannot just think, for instance, ‘how immoral for me to be envious’ and expect the Luciferic being of envy to go away. Thinking directly of envy or jealousy (although they are not the same thing, they have the same behaviour and antidote) only prompts Lucifer to throw the envy into the etheric body, into Ahriman’s realm, where it becomes a tendency to criticise. In the etheric body, envy is much more hidden than before, when it was in the astral body, and also, as a prisoner to Ahrimanic beings, much more poisonous. One doesn’t even recognise it as envy anymore; one thinks that they are entitled to criticise because of the need to tell ‘the truth’. They don’t see anymore the vindictiveness of wanting to destroy another, which is evident in envy. When it comes to envy, as a remedy, one can either allure it withart or bore it with Spiritual Science. If one is an artist, one can create a piece of art whenever one feels envy; in this case, the Luciferic being behind envy is given another scope. Luciferic beings of the soul love art, and they engage in it; they are also instrumental in this field.
It is my experience that studying Anthroposophy academically, with a pencil in your hand and a student notebook, is also a good remedy for envy. By the third lecture of any of Rudolf Steiner’s cycles, the being of envy gets bored, and it lowers the vindictiveness. But one needs to be careful, because it doesn’t work the same way when one reads mystical authors. Some esoteric writings stir up these instinctual forces, especially if the elemental beings that one encounters in the writing are related in nature to the Luciferic beings of one’s soul. This is just to give you an example of how specific we must become to confront and, at times, even negotiate with Lucifer in ourselves. It is not easy, but we must spiritualise these karmic elementals as they belong to us and are our responsibility. Spiritualising these elementals, these composites of the soul, means purifying the astral body, and by doing so, we are one step further in developing our Manas, which we are supposed to develop in the fifth epoch anyway.
I showed in the previous parts of this post, following, of course, our subject, the Mystery Dramas, that Lucifer’s main actions are derailment and imprisonment. In this part, I will try to shed more light on the process, focusing this time on Capesius.
Rudolf Steiner tells us that Capesius in the plays had his zenith incarnation in Ancient Egypt. This is presented in The Soul’s Awakening, Scenes 7 and 8. In general, old souls who, in Anthroposophy, came as Platonists had their peak incarnation before the Mystery of Golgotha. But who is the most Platonist among Platonists? Plato himself! In one of the last public lectures (GA238, 23.09.1924), Rudolf Steiner reveals that the model for his Capesius character in the Mystery Dramas was Professor Karl Julius Schröer (1825-1900), who, in his previous incarnation, was nun Hroswitha, who was the reincarnation of none other than Plato.
To understand what Rudolf Steiner took from the ‘real’ Capesius to create the character of the Mystery Dramas, I will summarise aspects of Professor Schröer’s cosmic biography. We already know that Plato was the Greek philosopher whose ideas were to be churned by humanity in its evolution for thousands of years. Plato was one of the most important figures who ever walked the Earth. But for Plato, ideas were not abstract as today; they were active spiritual beings (Amschaspands) around Ahura Mazda (the old Persian terminology for what we know in Anthroposophy today as Christ). This personality reincarnated again in the 10th century as nun Hrotsvitha Gandeshemensis. In this female incarnation, Plato’s individuality adopted Christianity in a pure Platonic manner. Through nun Hrotsvitha, the spiritual Platonic substance unites with Christianity and with the Middle European-Germanic spirit. This unification could only be achieved at the time in a female incarnation. After nun Hrotsvitha enters the Spiritual World, she participates spiritually in the grand unification of the Platonists, teachers at the School of Chartres, and the Aristotelians of the Michael School. The grand unification of Platonists and Aristotelians in the Michael School in the 13th century is experienced by this cosmic individuality in a peculiar way: the male incarnation as Plato enters into conflict with the female incarnation as Hrotsvitha, as both contributed to the cosmic individuality. This conflict of incarnations was maintained when the cosmic individuality reincarnated as Karl Julius Schröer. In this personality, what comes from previous incarnations as Plato is at times completely suffocated and recoils when confronted with the 19th-century intellectualism. Karl Julius Schröer has all the capacities one would need to revolutionise the world of ideas once again; however, his cosmic individuality becomes shy in the face of abstract intellectualism and refuses to penetrate it. If Karl Julius Schröer had the masculine courage that came from the incarnation as Plato to break the walls of 19th-century intellectualism, he would have penetrated directly into the spiritual world, and he would have been the one to bring Anthroposophy to Earth, not Rudolf Steiner.
Here we stand before a marvellous image: Plato reincarnated as Karl Julius Schröer teaching once again, the young Aristotle reincarnated as Rudolf Steiner at the Technical University in 19th-century Vienna, while the Archangel Anthroposophia was waiting to descend on Earth. This time, the student has surpassed the teacher, and he needs to take the spiritual task into his hands. Due to this incapacity of Professor Schröer, the spiritual individuality began to withdraw in the Spiritual World, and the professor became senile.
In the Mystery Dramas, we see that Rudolf Steiner borrowed for Capesius’ character the split of personality that occurred in the second part of his life and the difficulty of the ancient superior incarnation to manifest plentifully in modernity. This is the problem with many of the Initiates of the past: they cannot bring the fruits of the ancient wisdom into modernity, and they often pass as commoners. Of course, for the character Capesius, Rudolf Steiner creates different karmic conditions than he found in Professor Schröer. Capesius from the dramas is a hierophant in Ancient Egypt in the period when the old mysteries started to decay. He sees the corruption of the souls and the intriguing politics as consequences of the group-I’s dissolution. We know that the group-I dissolution, the individualisation of the I, appeared in humanity gradually and differently in the East and West, around the Mystery of Golgotha. After the coming of the Christ in a physical body, the human I (individuality, memory and consciousness) started to be individual. This is what an Initiate such as Capesius foresaw for humanity 2000 years before the Mystery of Golgotha. He understands that what belonged to the group-I, to fathers and grandfathers, to the stream of shared memory and consciousness, will soon belong to each individual separately as Christ was approaching the Earth. But he still manages to fulfil his duties in the Temple until one day, when he saw an unprepared neophyte (an earlier incarnation of Maria) coming to Initiation. No one said anything because, politically, it was good to have someone who belonged to the Temple advising the King. He did not share his concerns with the Grand Hierophant (an earlier incarnation of Benedictus) as it wasn’t customary for his position; he only shared his views with those below his level (Felicia and Felix Balde in a previous incarnation), who remained strict to the custom. A hierophant’s role in Initiation was to think the creative Word that would spiritually act in the neophyte’s thinking, guiding them. In the past, this was necessary, but today the entire Temple moves into one’s I, and all the acts that priests of the past fulfilled are now fulfilled by the candidate for Initiation alone, through his I. This was Christ’s gift for humanity, the independence of the I. At the moment of Initiation, the hierophant refrained from thinking the Word, and the Initiation failed. He experiences the consequences of his act in the incarnation as Capesius in the 19th century, where his personality splits in the second part of his life, leaving him outside the real world, just as he damaged the neophyte in the Egyptian incarnation by refusing his task.
In the next incarnation in the late 14th century, Capesius, a married man with two small children, leaves his family to join the Templars. The mother of the children (Johannes and Theodora in an earlier incarnation) dies, and the children are adopted separately. Later, they fall in love as young adults, unaware that they are brother and sister. Even after the truth is revealed to everyone, Capesius and Johannes remain estranged for that incarnation because of the animosity seeded by a priest (Maria in an earlier incarnation), who was sent to dissolve the order and confiscate its possessions. The historical setting of the scenes presented as karmic memories in The Guardian of the Threshold is Italy, 50 years after the death of Toma Aquinas (Benedictus) and 10 years after the Templars’ martyrdom. Here is one of the few places in the dramas where Rudolf Steiner inserts pieces of his personal spiritual biography as Toma Aquinas. It is also the only place where he portrays the difference between the older souls, the Platonists, the Magi (Capesius, Strader, Felicia and Felix Balde, Theodora, etc.) and the younger souls, the Aristotelians, the Shepherds (Maria, Johannes, and Benedictus himself). If we are good observers, we can see that Rudolf Steiner used parts of his cosmic biography to portray aspects of both Johannes and Benedictus’ characters.
In the 19th century, Capesius was a historian, and here we can find a big part of Professor Schröer’s outward personality. Some dialogues in the first drama are conceived by imagining how Professor Schröer would respond to matters of Spiritual Science. The timidity and fear to think through, to penetrate maya and get to the pure thought, is what Rudolf Steiner describes as specific to Schröer. Capesius restricted his thinking to superficial intellectualisation, too, refusing to think further, while opening his soul to Felicia’s fairy tales. Professor Schröer was scared by the spiritually potent philosophy of his time, while drawn to literary images of love, pure but somehow immature, that couldn’t grow beyond the soothing feeling. Because Schröer’s relationship with Goethe in the incarnation as Plato (Goethe, back then, was a young artist influenced by Plato; they hadn’t met in that incarnation, but Plato got interested in him in the afterlife), Professor Schröer perceived Goethe as a parent while taking care of his testamentary work, treating it from a father-to-son point of view, not as a scientist-to-scientist relationship. His overview of Goethe is sweetened by his parental feeling coming from another life. Rudolf Steiner borrows the karmic connection Professor Schröer had with Goethe for his characters Capesius and Johannes in the mystery plays, even constructing a karmic relationship as such – Capesius is Johannes’ estranged father from another incarnation. In the Mystery Dramas, it is Johannes’ development that drives Capesius further into Spiritual Science, making him want what Johannes has been striving for. And it is Johannes who wants to learn history from Capesius, becoming his student.
In the Class Lessons comments (GA270, 15.02.1924), Rudolf Steiner mentions three paths to Initiation, different for each individual: the mysteries of space, the mysteries of time, and the mysteries of the human heart. He briefly mentions them without describing them. These types don’t refer to sets of exercises that one can follow, but to spiritual seeds that one carries within oneself throughout one’s life or through incarnations and can further develop for the entire humanity. Once developed through multiple incarnations in an individual, a spiritual seed grows into a quality that can later become common to the whole of humanity. Through my study of Anthroposophy and personal experiences, I came to understand Initiation in the mysteries of time more deeply. The character Capesius falls into this description.
The Initiation into the mysteries of time prepares today the transformation of human memory in such a way that men will remember not only the period between birth and death but also the immediate previous incarnation, and this will be a natural trait. Many people in the world already remember their immediate past incarnation. Many of the transitional personalities that I’ve encountered who don’t yet have a spiritual training are carrying seeds associated with the mysteries of time. But there is only one Threshold, and the passing is the same in all cases. So, everyone needs to meet the Guardian of the Threshold, nevertheless. However, the first characteristic that differentiates these transitional people from the rest of those called for Initiation is that they need to develop abilities regarding spiritual recollection.
In the case of Capesius, we can observe some characteristics in his life. Firstly, his external profession carries the sign of time: he is a historian. There is always something in one’s biography that offers a hint in this direction, for instance, someone is a clockmaker or works in the time business industry, such as time-related salary software businesses. Transforming the temperament comes with a special gift regarding the seeds we are discussing; when it comes to the transitional characters that follow the mysteries of time, the temperament that needs transformation is the choleric one. Another specificity of these types is that they come to karmic memories before developing other spiritual abilities. Normally, one must pass the Threshold into the objective spiritual to have karmic memories, like Johannes Thomasius. But if one follows the Mysteries of Time, the first spiritual experiences are karmic, like in the case of Capesius, sometimes they pop up in them without spiritual exercise. The initiatory waking up is through karma recollection.
A consequence of this special life training is the karmic conditioning to succeed. While the candidates for Initiation following the mysteries of space and mysteries of the human heart can return from the Threshold to normal life, to their families, everyday life, live in nature, etc., these people do not have that luxury because, in their case, the anomalies that might occur at the Threshold will invariably trigger mental illness or death. When the abilities of recollection are awakened, there is no turning back from Initiation in that incarnation. The Ahrimanisation of thinking that comes from formal education and academic life can be very detrimental to these types, as shown in the character Capesius. Like Professor Schröer, Capesius needs effort and courage to break the chains of maya in thinking. Since Initiation approached him later in life, the stuckness of his thinking made things impossible. Therefore, when he approached the Threshold, the Guardian decided to split Capesius’ personality permanently for this life, preventing the Ahrimanic beings nurtured by his academic activity throughout his life from entering the spiritual world. As a consequence, Capesius from everyday life on Earth came into conflict with the spiritual, fully clairvoyant Capesius:
‘Felix Balde: These last few days I have most earnestly Held converse often with mine inmost self To try to clear my thoughts about this man. Gladly I’ll tell thee all I know myself. Capesius is living in true wise The life of spirit-pupilship, although From his behaviour it seems otherwise. He is already destined by his fate Much to accomplish in the spirit-life. And only can fulfil the duties high To which his soul hath been already called, If he prepares his spirit for them now. And yet it lay quite near his nature too, Instead of seeking light on spirit-paths, Unto false science to devote himself, Which can just now make blind so many souls. The solemn Guardian on the Threshold grim, Which marks the world of sense from spirit-worlds, Had duties of a most especial kind When to the gate Capesius found his way. To such an earnest seeker must the gate Needs open, but behind him shut at once. The means he used in former times to win Power for himself within the world of sense Could no more help him in the spirit-realms. He best prepares himself for service high Which he one day must render to mankind When he ignores our presence and our talk.’
(The Guardian of the Threshold, Scene 5)
This split only benefited Lucifer, who held the spiritual Capesius hostage until Maria and Benedictus fought for him, claiming him back from Lucifer’s claws (The Guardian of the Threshold, Scene 6). By doing this, Maria, the priest who once estranged a son from his father, repented spiritually, restoring karma. For a short period in the third drama, Capesius was more in touch with life after the split, under Benedictus’s guidance. But Lucifer and Ahriman never abandon the fight for the human soul, so Lucifer attacks once more, and his attack estranges Capesius for his entire incarnation.
Here is one example of how Lucifer acts, in a way that strikes two souls with one shot (The Soul’s Awakening, Scene 2): He tempts Joannes to live out the nostalgia for the egotistic love he had for Maria, even though Maria, by this moment, became his wife. He is nostalgic for the passion he once lived, the old love. This is the nostalgia for Lucifer, inflicted by Lucifer. He then makes Capesius witness this, giving him a clairvoyant spiritual perception into Johannes’ soul. When Capesius realises that his perception was accurate, as Johannes confirmed, he experiences pride for the newly acquired qualities of his clairvoyance, which can now penetrate other people’s spiritual reality, not only his own. He decides he no longer needs Benedictus, the teacher, because his clairvoyance has reached another level. He compares Benedictus’ complicated teachings with Felix Balde’s solitary clairvoyance, and he concludes that the latter is a model for him from now on because the quality of one’s clairvoyance can suffer when people decide to engage in life and live their karma. He renounces living his karma, choosing to remain outside of life. Thus, Capesius is derailed by Lucifer.
At the end of the list of things that I learned about Lucifer from the Mystery Dramas, I would like to mention the way Lucifer speaks through other people. Both Lucifer and Ahriman speak through others, opposing spiritual work or anything that could harm them. However, Lucifer and Ahriman talk differently, and their discourse can be correctly identified with exercise: Lucifer conceals his intentions, while Ahriman speaks as the double voice of the messenger that only the addressee hears. When Lucifer talks through others, the addressee can perceive more in that discourse. The communicator doesn’t lie in the words but in their intentions. There is a hidden agenda one perceives, something at stake, although it is never clear what. Lucifer sneaks behind the messenger and tries to manipulate the addressee. One cannot see the purpose of the manipulation; they can only perceive its quality.
In Scene 3 from The Soul’s Awakening, Strader’s work is opposed from all sides by Lucifer and Ahriman talking through other people. The most disappointing, however, is when he hears his friends, Capesius and Felix, talking about the futility of his endeavours, which was the spiritual mission Strader couldn’t accomplish. He perceives the Luciferic quality of their words, but he can’t perceive the purpose, the agenda. He is forced to say for the first time:
‘Capesius and father Felix both Conceal dark meanings in transparent words…’
(The Soul’s Awakening, Scene 3)
Ahriman’s double voice and Strader’s spiritual mission. How Rudolf Steiner built the character Strader.
Rudolf Steiner’s design for what we know today as the Strader machine
When observing how Lucifer and Ahriman communicate through others, we see that Lucifer often stays in the background like a shadow, with a manipulative, hidden agenda concealed in speech. When Lucifer’s influence is felt behind someone’s words, it gives the impression that part of the conversation is missing, as if we are not hearing the full story. This was precisely the reason Strader said:
‘Capesius and father Felix both Conceal dark meanings in transparent words…’
(The Soul’s Awakening, Scene 3)
Meanwhile, Ahriman speaks aloud in a mocking, defiant tone that only the listener perceives. He can double someone’s speech as a commanding voice heard in the background. Suddenly, a different door opens in communication, revealing another set of intentions and even other communicators: demonic beings opposing spiritual evolution. Since this ‘second voice’ is directed only at the listener, only they can hear it. I’m sure we’ve all experienced moments when someone spoke to us, and we perceived a second voice mocking or defying us behind their words, sometimes entirely independent of the actual words. If a friend observes the conversation and we ask about their impression, they might say the message was respectful, perhaps even friendly, and that the person was well-meaning. We might even be accused of imagining things.
Ahriman’s double discourse can insinuate itself subtly into everyone, and it is important to understand that, most of the time, the communicator is completely oblivious to it, and other witnesses may remain unaware as well. Ahriman’s scope is to oppose everything that has an evolutive spiritual aspect, a social initiative, a collaboration, or even karma between people properly fulfilling. An illustrative example of the process is portrayed in the Bible, when Ahriman concealed himself behind Peter’s words and prompted Christ to say, ‘Get behind Me, Satan’ (Matthew 16:23, Mark 8:33).
In popular culture, for instance, in The Lord of the Rings, we see Galadriel activating the second voice (her dark side) to persuade Frodo to give her the ring. This second voice is heard spiritually only by Frodo, while a different communication takes place physically with everyone else.
Dark lodges have always known this, and they use the spirit of language to distort everything into double-binding, deliberately creating the Ahrimanic effect of the second voice. They work through either the double meaning of words or through the semantic similarities that create double-binding. Wordplay is essential in magic discourse, but this can only be done by manipulating the spirit of language.
Let me give you some examples:
In Cathy O’Brien’s book, Trance-Formation of America, we learn that one of her escorts read aloud the ‘Service Entrance’ sign on a door with a specific accentuation to sound as ‘Serve us, en-trance’.
I recently saw the trailer for the upcoming Dune 3 movie, in which Timothée Chalamet sings the war song of Arrakis, repeating the fictional word ‘e-liz-nid’, which, in the secret language of the Dune universe, Chakobsa, means ‘destiny’. Through repetition and the song’s effects in the trailer, the invented word sounds like ‘LSD’. I wasn’t the only one to notice this; the internet reacted as well.
The far-right Romanian politician, Călin Georgescu, uses anagrams of words to create a magic effect in his discourses and artificial mental links. In the 2023 Christmas message, he associated the Vlachs with Valhalla, a historical inaccuracy he weirdly emphasised. However, it was never intended to be accurate; it was only intended to create a magical association, through the Romanian spirit of language, between the ancestors of Romanians and a supposedly holy war (Valhalla is the heaven of the warriors in Norse mythology). Another association he made recently was speculating on the formation of the Romanian word ‘apocalipsă’ (En: apocalypse). He claimed it is formed by ‘apucă lipsa’ (En, ‘apucă’ means ‘grab’ and ‘lipsă’ is ‘lack’ [of something]) with the possible magical suggestion ‘grab the void’ or even ‘grab the economic shortage’. Georgescu is widely criticised for his nonsensical delirium, but I haven’t heard anyone point out that this is a known form of mass manipulation taught in ceremonial magic lodges. And it gets even worse, as we can see in Rudolf Steiner’s Mystery Dramas: the more one mocks these things, the more one is affected in the night by a more profound and occult hypnosis.
Before studying the Mystery Dramas, I was unaware of the double voice. Without them, the processes described in the examples I gave above would not have been grounded in practical observation or a solid understanding. Scene 8 from The Guardian of the Threshold opened a new sense for me, enabling me to notice more such processes in life, literature, and popular culture. As we recreate the scene in our imagination, we see how souls who enter the spiritual world unconsciously at night are each tested by Ahriman, and those who are ‘ahrimanically inclined’, so to speak, are set up for his purposes in day consciousness. We see that Ahriman arranges it so that only Strader can hear him when it suits him and conceals himself to hide his own agenda, as he tries to allure him like a modern-day businessman. Strader is repulsed by how Ahriman searches the souls to see whether they can be useful to him, disregarding and mocking everyone. Ahriman’s approaches Strader in a manner that reminds us of the business slogan of the 20th century: ‘nothing personal, just business.’ Funnily enough, this expression originated in the 1920s, and it’s attributed to a notorious mafia accountant who rationalised the killings for his boss.
The Strader character is an esoteric mystery, unveiled only in artistic form as a ‘heads-up’ for the centuries to come. We know that at the end of the 19th century, Michael and his angels gained an important victory over Ahriman and his hordes. The Dark Age was over, and Michael began his solar reign for approximately 350 years in 1879. As a consequence, the possibility of recovering the cosmic intelligence that slipped away from Michael from the Mystery of Golgotha onwards gained real spiritual impetus. For the first time in history, the recovery of the fallen cosmic intelligence wrested by Ahriman and bound into technology could be achieved by certain personalities without mystical or religious help, solely through pure thinking. Through pure thoughts directed into technology, into devices, these personalities, chosen by the spirit in accordance with their karma, would have the possibility of unlocking the spirit bound there by Ahriman and giving it free to everyone. Thus, the energy used by machines was to be freed, spiritualised, no longer to be considered a limited resource, rationalised within a financial system.
‘Strader
[…]
It was my lot to make experiments In matters from such questions far removed; When suddenly there flashed across my mind A thought which showed me where the right path lay. Test followed close on test, until at last Such powers were gathered there in front of me, As in their full expression shall some day Through application purely technical Restore that freedom to humanity In which the soul may find development. No more shall men be forced to dream away Their whole existence plant-like, fashioning In narrow factory rooms unlovely things. Industrial powers will be so dispersed That every man shall have what he may need To keep him in his work, in his own home Arranged by him, as he may think it best.’
(Scene 1, The Guardian of the Threshold)
Rudolf Steiner has seen spiritually many such personalities whose soul structure would give them this possibility. He initially looked at Gideon Spicker (1840-1912) and created Strader’s biography for the Dramas after his biography. But Rudolf Steiner warned that his Strader character serves as an archetype; therefore, the personality of Gideon Spicker didn’t matter for the Strader character in the same way as the personality of Professor Schröer mattered for the Capesius character. In Strader’s character construction, the only thing that mattered was the common spiritual element in all personalities which have the mission to unbind the spirit from the machine and distribute it to the world. It is not a coincidence that what happened to Strader in the Mystery Dramas is very similar to what happened to Nikola Tesla in real life, and that, in a way, Strader is more Nikola Tesla than he is Gideon Spicker. But Nikola Tesla was not the only Strader in the last 150 years. The dark lodges of this world, filled with greedy industrialists, stole the work and ended the lives of many Strader characters who invented and patented one machine after another that, in greater or lesser degree, would achieve the same liberation of spiritualised life energy as the Strader machine was supposed to. According to the conspiracy theorist Steven Greer, the way to achieve free energy (zero-point energy) has already been discovered, but it is kept secret by the deep state from the ‘60s, which is exactly what Rudolf Steiner predicted would happen in the worst-case scenario he envisioned.
I need to make a refined remark here—something that truly challenged my beliefs and required me to reconnect with my unconventional thinking to understand it. Anthroposophists have discussed Strader for over a century, yet many remain unaware that personalities like Strader might completely reject spirituality and even despise Anthroposophy in its earthly form. Such a personality is often a scientist who either lacks access to the spirit through karmic relations or doesn’t fully grasp it, even when in contact with spiritual friends, as in Strader’s case. They access the spirit through Michael himself, in relation to mechanical devices. These individuals won’t find the spirit in spiritual forms, but behind machines at some point in their biography, and only if the spiritual world grants it. Accepting that Michael might select certain personalities for this unconventional purpose was the hardest thing for me to accept in relation to Strader’s character in the Mystery Dramas.
Let us delve further into the Strader character in the play and his importance to understand how the future of technology is created before our eyes. He is an engineer whose life diverged from the priesthood in his youth. Here, Rudolf Steiner hints at the shift in destiny when Michael’s reign began. He comes into contact with spiritualists but doesn’t truly grasp spiritual science. He understands natural science, but his mind cannot bridge the gap to the spiritual. His thinking is highly intellectual, yet his feelings are childlike. He only comprehends spirituality through outdated mystical images suitable for humanity before the consciousness soul epoch. He enjoys Felicia’s stories and is impressed by Theodora’s natural clairvoyance, indicating that his understanding of spirituality relies on naive imagery. As the years go by, Strader doesn’t progress much spiritually compared to the others. He continues his work as an engineer and inventor with more passion than before, and marries Theodora, the natural clairvoyant who, in the course of their marriage, loses her clairvoyance. In the seven years of marriage, through the power of love and the opening of the heart, Strader’s life changes dramatically: he discovers the spirit through rigorous thinking directed into machines, and his invention helps him progress spiritually in an unconventional way. Strader becomes more spiritual through his discovery and is now better able to understand the others in the karmic group.
‘Strader
[…]
And then flowed on these seven wondrous years. I learned to feel how e’en mechanic skill Which now I study, is enriched by souls Whose attitude t’ward spirit-life is right.’
(Scene 4, The Guardian of the Threshold)
The sudden death of Theodora gains him a guide and devoted, unwavering help in the spiritual world. The Spirit of Theodora becomes an unrelenting fighter against Ahriman for his spirit and a tremendous aid to the entire group. From the spirit, Theodora guides Strader to be more receptive to Benedictus’ teachings.
Strader’s first spiritual experience in his initiation takes place in Ahriman’s realm. Unlike Johannes Thomasius, who spends many years in the elementary world before his first fully awakened experience, Strader encounters Ahriman right from the start and must consciously oppose him. Through this experience and subsequent ones as a new disciple of the mystical alliance, guided spiritually by Theodora, he gains illumination. Interestingly, the alliance’s leader is not only an esotericist but also an industrialist who recognises the spiritual significance of Strader’s work with his invention. He supports it and plans to implement it in his business as a model for future industrial projects, enabling the spiritualised machine to leave the experimental stage and enter Earth’s realm in practice. (This contrasts with Nikola Tesla’s case, where his ‘industrialist’ stole and concealed his most important findings, leaving them hidden to this day.) Towards the end of his life, however, Strader’s work faced strong opposition from members of the mystical alliance, factory managers, and even his closest friends, Capesius, Felix, and Johannes. Some were led astray by Lucifer, others manipulated by Ahriman during the night, and some simply failed to grasp the spiritual importance of his machine.
Reading in the book of destiny that Strader’s life is coming to an end and knowing that this will not serve him well, Ahriman used an atheistic soul, such as that of Ferdinand Reinecke (the name ‘Reinecke’ means ‘little advisor/counsellor’ and is closely associated with the cunning fox figure in German literature), to deliver the final blow. Ferdinand Reinecke, as he appears in the plays, would never, in full consciousness, serve Ahriman or any spirit, since he denied their existence and hated spiritual preoccupations; yet it is exactly his atheism that made him more vulnerable to these influences in the spiritual world during sleep. If we look around, we see that the world is full of Ferdinands Reinecke, atheists by day, slaves in Ahriman’s realm by night.
In the short time Strader had left to live, Ahriman needed to mark three things to grasp Strader’s soul: 1. Ferdinand Reinecke to convince Strader that his work was futile, 2. Strader to lose self-confidence in his initiation and work, and 3. Strader to forget Theodora before his death. The first two conditions were met. Ferdinand Reinecke delivered his final argument, and Strader gave up trying. Moreover, Strader met spiritually the third beast (which Anthroposophists know from the Class mantras), his own adversarial force of thinking that made him doubt himself, his initiation and his spiritualised machine. But the relationship with Theodora was too strong, and this saved Strader and his work from Ahriman’s grasp. Thus, Strader entered the spiritual world untouched by Ahriman. Even if the work didn’t properly enter the world, it still remained at the end of the fourth drama as a possibility to be picked up by another Strader-like nature in the future.
This is where Rudolf Steiner left his unfinished plays. They were intended to be seven, but he stopped after the fourth. According to his own words, he stopped because the personality Rudolf Steiner followed spiritually for the Strader character had already crossed the threshold, and Rudolf Steiner himself couldn’t find enough interest in his earthly character anymore, which paled in comparison to his cosmic character (see GA238, 18.09.1924, where Rudolf Steiner presents Gideon Spicke’s previous incarnation). He left it to us to follow, with our inner eyes, how the spiritual impulse dedicated to the field of free energy was trying to incorporate itself into Strader-like personalities. Even if free energy had already been brought to Earth (by Nikola Tesla or another Strader-like figure) and kept from everyone in materialistic, avaricious hands, as many testimonies today suggest, I believe Michael did not give up on finding a Strader-like personality who would wrest back from the dark lodges and greedy industrialists what they had already stolen from him twice.
Rudolf Steiner, Secrets of the Threshold (GA147), especially lectures 6 & 7 (for the comments on the Double, Spirit of Johannes Thomasius’ Youth and Other Philia): https://rsarchive.org/Lectures/GA147/English/AP1987/
What’s happening in the world today seems designed to provoke systemic terror in every single soul. If someone is wealthy enough to disregard borders, tariffs, taxes, or wars, then the rise of AI or the predicted pandemics will surely strike closer to home. The way political discourse is thrown left and right, especially the toxic spit that comes from America to everyone’s head, pulls our consciousness back into a nightmare we already endured last century. The Western spectre and the Eastern nightmare that Rudolf Steiner talked about more than 100 years ago remain, but so does the Guardian of the Threshold. From an external perspective, it appears that humanity is once again heading mindlessly towards another far-right radicalisation, fuelled by a covert left. It is the dark lodges’ mockery of the Word given by Michael to people of our time: ‘May it inflame in the East what through the West takes form’. So, to mock it, they literally bomb the East with weapons fabricated in the West. This is how cynical Ahriman is. This time, compared to the last century, the events are in their negative colours, but we’ve seen this picture before; therefore, a question is legitimate: Why are we repeating the last century in its film negative?
As for me, I have always refrained from speaking publicly about my political views, especially after vowing to represent Anthroposophy in the world as a member of the First Class, even when specifically asked about the cancellation of the democratic vote in Romania last year and the rise of Călin Georgescu. To those friends who have asked privately: I have not ignored or forgotten your questions, but it simply was not the right time. There was, in truth, a significant moment: for the very first time in history, Vladimir Putin, the president of Russia, Donald Trump, the president of the USA, and their internet guy, Elon Musk, mentioned a Romanian politician by name!
Putting the jokes aside, today, unlike any other day, I will talk about politics. I will walk you through the political mindset I have developed through Anthroposophy and my life experiences so far, so you can understand not only the outcome of my political thinking but also the entire process of thinking. I hope some of the principles I have developed for myself on “how to think about a political event” help you, the reader, too. You are free; I am free; every Anthroposophist is free in Anthroposophy. The only place where none of us is free is our own karma.
Ah, almost forgot! Because this text could affect many people’s political beliefs on the left and the right, I might need to delete comments that express radical views or use pathos. Please don’t take it personally. Although I constructed this text in my head long before the release of the Epstein files, and it is much easier now to be taken seriously, I estimate that some readers must still be adjusting to hardcore truths they were not open to accepting about their favourite elites in the past. Seeing those files published makes things easier, but a lot is left out, especially regarding the black magic practices developed by members of the Deep State and what everything is about in the first place. The link between paedophilia or pedicide and black magic is not made explicit in the emails themselves; it is just tangential, and therefore, a lot of unhelpful speculations are made. I will try today, as much as possible, to share my insights and understanding of the matter as well.
The ring that rules them all
A history of far-left esotericism (or political esotericism)
Behind any overt political event lies a covert esoteric one that must be known to correctly understand the politicians’ direction and real intentions. Sympathies and antipathies don’t help and have proven their uselessness when it comes to politics. How many times didn’t the leaders you voted for and trusted disappoint you from afar? How many times hasn’t a nice, educated guy proven himself to be just a sociopath or a sexual offender? You see, politicians have always lied, and politics has always, throughout human history, been, overtly or covertly, driven by a small part of esotericism concerned with specific and somewhat egotistical outcomes. There was a time, however, when these outcomes were not egotistical. There have always been clairvoyants who could read the hierarchies’ spiritual intentions toward mankind and translate them into commands for human leaders. Back then, human leaders were initiated by the priests of the mysteries. Only the gestures and symbols of those times are maintained today when a leader is appointed. So, all leaders of the past, even the evilest ones, like Nero or Herod, wanted to know the intentions of the Gods before committing their acts of good or evil. They knew that although they were working against the official Gods, they were supported by the decadent Gods who encouraged their egotism.
We already know that most politicians of today are members of formal religious groups, lodges, or other occult organisations, and those who claim to be atheists or uninterested in religious and esoteric ideas are, in fact, just a few and usually left out of the big cake. Or they simply lie. Sure, you can fill administrative positions with the uninitiated or the unloyal, but the higher one gets, loyalty to esoteric lodges becomes a condition. There are also many young politicians who join an occult or religious group just for the political support of the members there. They don’t believe in the spiritual and think they are clever enough to fake it, but that doesn’t mean that the ritual they are exposed to doesn’t affect them. Deeds are deeds. Reality is that only ‘base consciousness’ (the term used by some masonic lodges in reference to common people who don’t know anything about the spiritual or their political intentions) are atheists. You heard me well: only base consciousness is atheistic, because when it comes to strong politicians, I can assure you they are not atheists; they very well know whom they serve. The rest of the politicians, especially those who want to stay in politics in the long run, participate in secret lodges, secret meetings and rituals, and this is not just symbolic. They do whatever it takes to maintain material power through spiritual means.
But what is far-left esotericism, and how did it occur? We know from Rudolf Steiner that human consciousness was not always as it is today, and in the old times, all human beings were, in fact, clairvoyant. Atheists are laughing, but they can’t explain why the Egyptian or Caldeean paintings depicted humans with animal heads, or why, for centuries, representations of human life differed so markedly from our Facebook photos. This is because humans of the past lacked the physical sight we have today, and clearly, they didn’t have the same preoccupations. It was not the physical plane they saw precisely; it was, in fact, the etheric and the astral planes. They could see on someone’s face not the physical traits but the moral virtues they had developed. They could see the Gods that they venerated; they could see and hear them. Their physical sight was blurry, and their consciousness dimmer, but they were no less knowledgeable. What they possessed instead was clairvoyance inherited from the Old Moon, the stage before our current Earth, which allowed them to perceive the spiritual world and the Gods even in day-consciousness on the physical Earth. This old atavistic clairvoyance decayed in time. Fewer and fewer people saw, and those who did were perverting its aim to its worst, using what they saw spiritually against those who no longer saw. Christ came on Earth when the last residue of the old clairvoyance was at its end. As we know from Anthroposophy, He lightened the I, the spiritual seed of eternal individuality, and gave a new impulse for human beings to rise in full consciousness, thus clairvoyantly, and see the Gods again.
“Hitherto hath no one beheld God with his eyes. The once-born Son, who was in the bosom of the Universal-Father, has become the leader in this beholding.” (John: 1, 18)
The new Christ Impulse began to grow and will continue to grow for millennia, while the old clairvoyance continued to degrade long after Christ, until it reached a dead line: the year 1250. After 1250, the gates of the Spiritual closed for the old clairvoyance. However, some could still perceive the world before the threshold, which we know as the lower astral or the elementary world. Nature could still be perceived with the old clairvoyance until the 16th century and even after. So until the 16th century, there was still a good use of the old clairvoyance in nature’s knowledge in the form of alchemy. However, the old clairvoyance after the year 1250 was no longer supported, so to speak, by the good Gods and its presence then, and moreover today, only indicates a moral decadence of those who have it and make use of it. Not so much a moral decadence occurred in this life, but one that, through the laws of reincarnation, passed into the current physical body from the wrongdoings of another life. Only through the practice of Anthroposophy can one correct the wrongdoings of another incarnation that, in this one, brought a dysfunctionality, giving rise to an atavistic form of clairvoyance from the relical depths of the physical body. What was old clairvoyance became, through the Christ Impulse, the power of the intellect, and this power will grow slowly until the sight of the spiritual will be recovered, this time fully empowered by the I-activity. Full consciousness in the Spiritual and continuity of memory between incarnations are capacities that humanity will develop in the future, but only through the Christ Impulse.
However, the transitional period in which the Christ Impulse germinated in the human soul lasted for centuries. Thus, until the middle of the 19th century, there was merely no occultist who could pass the Guardian of the Threshold with their old clairvoyance, or hardly any clairvoyance at all. There were mediums, but they couldn’t control what they saw. These people were not to be fully trusted because their clairvoyance often sprang from the immorality of a previous incarnation. The old clairvoyance sank deep into the subconscious, and the new clairvoyance rose only in a few, mostly hidden individuals, over the centuries from the Mystery of Golgotha until the 20th century.
The lodges still preserved much of the esoteric knowledge handed down through tradition. These people still knew there was a spiritual world, but they could no longer demonstrate it to the masses unless they trained them as they had been trained. Some esotericists were willing to popularise spiritual knowledge among the masses; some were not. So, in a way, they split around this issue, just as political parties had been split from the French Revolution onward over the ideas of hierarchy and horizontality (equality) in economic freedom. Left-side esotericists were those who wanted to just give away the spiritual knowledge to the masses, so that the materialism of the times could be counteracted. Right-side esotericists were the traditionalists who wanted to keep esoteric knowledge in closed groups, only for those prepared and proved worthy of God. Right-side esotericists wanted to preserve the mysteries as they were before Christ’s first coming because they believed humanity hadn’t yet assimilated the Christ impulse.
While the good esotericists, left and right, were concerned with whether the common people were ready to learn about the spiritual what was not given in small, diluted doses by the churches, another side of esotericism was interested only in material gain. These esotericists constituted a small part of the left, interested only in achieving, through esotericism, a certain political outcome. They wanted to popularise esotericism but only to a level of society where the political apparatus is, so that political actions and influence would be potentiated by the power of the spirit. They were interested in old magical practices that would act immediately in the physical and influence physical outcomes. Morality and sense didn’t matter anymore; what mattered was magic for the mere pleasure of it, material gain, power and influence.
An unknown reborn black magician: Marquis de Sade and his influence in modern black magic
Black magic has been present since primaeval times in humanity, yet from the 18th century it has gained a new malefic impulse that strongly influenced the far-left esotericism of the 19th and 20th centuries. However, this new malefic impulse didn’t come from the lodges. We know that there is an occult law stating that whenever a great initiate is incarnated on Earth, a dark one must be incarnated as well. Of course, the white initiate we are referring to for the 18th century is Count of Saint Germain, whom we know from Anthroposophy to be the reincarnation of Christian Rosenkreutz and Apostle John, the reborn of Christ’s Sophia, the risen Lazarus. It is my research that a black magician was also reincarnated at the same time as him. This black magician was not acting as a black magician in that life because he was mostly imprisoned and ignorant of social laws, but he gave materialism a decisive impulse of an absolute trait, an impulse to eradicate the existence of any moral or social obstacle working naturally in a human being, uniting the spiritual individuality with the beast from the Apocalypse. Marquis de Sade (1740-1814) instituted in his writings a form of radical bestiality, a supreme form of libertinism to be practised on others in order to transgress all levels of moral obstructions in oneself, which will allow one to gain new levels of pleasure on the account of another’s suffering. It was the old practice of black magic (deprave, denigrate and cut into living flesh), this time empowered by an instinctual form of knowledge united with the brain. Out of his own organism, covered with a thin intellectual layer coming from his Jesuitical education, Marquis de Sade, who fathered the word „sadism”, managed to establish for himself what he was prophesying later to the world in his grotesque manuscripts: the gradual unification of the 9th layer beast, which in occultism is known as Sorat and in the Bible as 666, with the amygdala in the human brain, which is known in psychology today as the lizard brain. The lizard brain (an old psychological terminology) is typically concerned with detecting threats and managing fear. The predominance of the lizard brain as a psychological trait reduces a human to a subhuman and even subanimal level.
In „The 120 Days of Sodom”, Marquis de Sade writes: „A violent commotion inflicted upon any kind of an adversary is answered by a violent thrill in our own nervous system; the effect of this vibration, arousing the animal spirits which flow within the nerves’ concavities, obliges them to exert pressure on the erector nerves and to produce in accordance with this perturbation what is termed a lubricious sensation”. These sensations, according to Sade’s philosophy, are to be carefully nurtured and refined through elaborately mechanistic torture and murder, but also aimed at overcoming the instinct of nausea to any abomination and any fear for one’s own life and self-preservation. The more sophisticated the crimes, the greater moral apathy one feels toward committing them and toward deriving pleasure from them, forcing one to seek the next desirable satisfaction. So, in Sade’s scenario, the ultimate outcome, the ultimate pleasure after all possible abominations, is, in fact, worldwide genocide.
Marquis de Sade’s books were written during his first 13 years in prison, between 1777 and 1790, right before the French Revolution. The first manuscript, “The 120 Days of Sodom”, was stolen from prison when the fortress was stormed by the revolutionaries, sold and hidden for 100 years by an aristocratic family in France. It was first published in 1904. To this day, it is known as „the most impure tale ever written”. Marquis de Sade’s books were published and banned in various countries, from the time of Napoleon Bonaparte to the ’90s of the 20th century. Even with all the sexual liberties and horror movies available today, people are still incredibly affected by his books because it stirs the worst demonic antisocial impulses ever known to men.
I don’t recommend watching Pier Paolo Pasolini’s movie inspired by it as there are incredibly powerful asuric forces coming from these imaginations. But I do recommend reading about the Marquis de Sade’s philosophy from those with a stronger stomach, in case access to its essence isn’t coming easily. I shared a link at the end of the article.
It is my belief (an obvious assumption, actually, given what is happening in the world today) that, after being stolen, the manuscript reached a lodge of “libertines” where it simply blended with the magical practices already there. It might also be that the Marquis de Sade was clairvoyantly recognised karmically by some esoterists of the time, and they had their eyes on him, which is why the manuscript was stolen in the first place. Even if the unfinished manuscript pretends an absolute atheism, everything written there follows a specific knowledge of numbers and of black magic carefully arranged rituals. This is what has always been the hypocrisy of atheism: one denies religion and deities completely, but one ritualises evil or absurdity. The simple matter that there are rituals in a practice implies that the atheism one prophecises is not absolute. Let’s be honest: Atheism is, in fact, covert and cowardly Satanism.
The Marquis de Sade influenced culture more than one might wish, but, most importantly, he fueled the far-left lodges and practitioners with an efficient form of black magic that ensures full control over someone’s mind, soul, and body. Aleister Crowley, the most influential black magician of the 20th century, developed the hidden grades of his practice following „The 120 Days of Sodom.” If all grades are fulfilled, based on his Thelema, the practitioner would unite with the 666 beast and become an organ, an enabler of the beast. This is the highest grade in black magic.
The psychology behind systematic sadism
How does systematic sadism work? Unbearable trauma and pain force the brain to dissociate, to compartmentalise the affected area that holds the memory of the trauma so that the rest of the organism can function normally. Our brain is a wonderfully constructed organ that can autonomously hide difficult memories from us so that our experiences on Earth do not stop for that incarnation. It’s like hiding harmful objects from a child. It is the brain’s natural defensive mechanism, a protective measure. The brain develops amnesic barriers where it isolates the traumatic experience. Now, the practitioners of the dark arts always knew about the incredible self-compartmentalisation of the brain, so they used it to programme the victims’ minds in a certain way. Through horrific systematic torture, one can develop multiple compartmentalised sections of the brain, which ultimately leads to what in psychology is known as dissociative identity disorder (in popular culture, multiple personality disorder). The dissociation can be so extreme that a person cannot even think for themselves anymore; they develop a mechanistic, robotic thinking.
People with dissociative identity disorder develop enhanced visual acuity and photographic memory. But here is where classical psychology stops, and Anthroposophy can help us further. We know from Rudolf Steiner that temporal memory, the one we depend on today, is the last memory we enhanced, and this only after the 8th and 7th centuries before Christ. Before temporal memory, we had a rhythmic memory, and before that, a localised memory. The localised memory, the first memory we developed as humans, was dependent on the surroundings. It was not an internalised memory. There were commemorative stones and all kinds of objects and drawings that triggered that memory. The localised memory was triggered not from inside, but from outside objects or places. We still have a relic of that ancient memory; we haven’t lost it. This is why whenever we see different objects or visit different sites, they stir memories, sometimes even karmic ones. The second memory was developed in the course of evolution through sound and repetition. Today, we have a relic of that memory in poetry and music. This is why whenever we hear a song we like, we remember the atmosphere of the soul and the surroundings from the last time we heard it. Temporal memory emerged in humanity only with the Greek colonisations. But this temporal memory will also evolve. In the immediate future, over the next few centuries, memory will be transformed into an imaginative higher state that will also include remembering the previous incarnation.
The ancient forms of memory, the localised and the rhythmic memory, are also in us, alongside the more recent temporal memory. A person who is subjected to systematic abuse breaks the timeline of the temporal memory; instead, the relics of localised and rhythmic memory surface. The memory is regressed to a photographic state. The practitioner of the dark arts knows how to code a secret into one’s compartmentalised brain through trauma. They simply use images and certain repetitions (music, riddles, etc.) during the abuse. If the shock or pain is strong enough, the brain will take its healthy action to block the memory of the event. This way, the subject won’t remember it, not even if they are subjected to torture. They will remember only in one circumstance, provided that one sees the objects or hears the riddle again. This horrific trick was known by the Jesuits for centuries and has been used by the political systems as mind control for delivering political secrets or activating assassins.
The Deep State
At the end of the 19th and beginning of the 20th centuries, the materialistic greed of some far-left esoterists, fueled by complex and sadistic sexual practices, came up with the idea of a New World Order, a plan for at least 100 years ahead. Of course, the idea of social engineering is nothing new. Both Freemasonry and the Catholic Church had it for centuries before. But the form it took back then was new. Since they have successfully used dissociation techniques on other people for mind control for centuries, why not fantasise about a worldwide mind control, a worldwide hypnosis, a global spell? Who and when came up with this idea, I don’t know. What I do know is that the term was first used by Woodrow Wilson after the Great War. His 14 points presented a fantasy, but most importantly, they represented a world of mockery and empty words that the lodges have imposed ever since. Ever since, people have been able to observe a worldwide elite above all governmental structures, above all nations and faiths, even above all churches, cults and esoteric groups: the Deep State. The Deep State is not a utopia; it is a reality and has been running the entire world for more than 100 years, provoking wars and cultural shocks, determining life and death and derailing people’s destinies.
At the beginning of the last century, Rudolf Steiner sought to highlight many similarities and peculiarities in the discourses of the elites worldwide. He described in detail how WWI was planned and implemented in secret by a handful of people. If one could read behind the written or spoken words, one could distinguish a common programme or an agenda, parts of speech that were using a set of spells or codes, a set of expressions that were always the same, independent of the speaker’s personality or even their nationality. This covert, unofficial organisation, popularly known today as the Illuminati (although this is not its real name and has nothing to do with the Illuminati group in 18th-century Bavaria; it’s just a nickname given by them to themselves), is also behind many of the conspiracy theories (I will explain in the second chapter of this article). It doesn’t comprise a single esoteric group, but it is infiltrated into all governments of the world, all political, economic, technological or cultural organisations, national or transnational, and all religious and esoteric groups. As Michaelites, we should not be naive and understand that the Anthroposophical Society worldwide is infiltrated too, even before WWII. The great schism in 1935 happened because Nazi sympathisers had been covertly appointed to the Anthroposophical Society on behalf of the New World Order group and had been overtly working as Anthroposophists for more than 10 years previous to the dramatic events. Today, names such as Roman Boos or Hermann Poppelbaum are known for contributing to the downfall of the Anthroposophic Society on behalf of the Nazis.
Although the New World Order people are not necessarily members of the same occult organisation and their meetings take place covertly, they are officially members of formal religious and esoteric groups. This is as far as they can use these organisations as a cover and submit them to the purpose. They need the neuroprogramming and the harmonics developed by the Jesuits for mind control, they need the occult symbolism from Freemasonry, they need the social network of the Odd Fellows, the submissive practices of The Family and so on. The traditional Catholic Church and Freemasonry are filled today with petty black magicians, wannabes, who work covertly among their colleagues to the extent that nothing good is to be found in these organisations anymore, with the exception of people’s hope. Newer organisations such as the Odd Fellows, Skull and Bones, O.T.O., the Family, etc., are completely built on far-left materialistic esotericism and black-magic techniques. How many of you, dear readers, know that two world wars were directed mainly from the heart of the Odd Fellows? On the panoply of proeminent members of the Odd Fellows website, we find: Warren Harding, US President 1921-1923, Franklin Roosevelt, US President 1933-1945, Eleanor Roosevelt, US First Lady 1933-1945, Harry S Truman, US President 1945-1953, Sir Stanley Baldwin, UK Prime Minister 1923-1937, Sir Winston Churchill, UK Prime Minister 1940-1945, 1951-1955, Gustav V, King of Sweden 1907-1950, Olaf V, King of Norway 1957-1991, Frances Ruth Roche, maternal grandmother of Princess Diana, and Charlie Chaplin (surprise, surprise). How many of you know about the more recent organisation known as The Family, which supports Donald Trump, and whose prominent member, Charlie Kirk, was assassinated recently? This organisation is practising the worst Jesuitism ever invented, as they simplified the Bible to show that Jesus had an inner circle of power (the apostles), and among the inner circle of power, there was even another one, a more secret circle of power constituted only with three trusties (James, John, and Peter). The grotesque form in which the Bible is interpreted politically is even worse than the one proposed by Nazism, and we can observe how sick and perverted the spirit becomes through men incapable of any devotion and veneration.
The case of Cathy O’Brien: a survivor of occult institutionalised mind-control
In 1995, Cathy O’Brien, a former CIA mind-controlled sex slave trafficked to numerous presidents, senators and drug lords ever since she was a child, published her whistleblowing on the Deep State with names, dates and places from 1966 to 1988. Cathy O’Brien has so far given the most detailed, knowledgeable, and pertinent information about mind control and the Deep State ever published. I can say for a fact that today, without Cathy O’Brien’s book, „Trance-formation of America: A true life story of a CIA mind-controlled slave”, one is handicapped in one’s political mindset, and unable to form true political representations about what is going on. In the absence of Cathy O’Brien’s story, one cannot make any sense of the newly released Epstein files and the entire web of practices and relationships behind them, either. So I strongly recommend, dear friends, that you look up Cathy O’Brien’s documentaries (links at the end of the article) as soon as you finish my article. The book is much more detailed but not easy to digest, just like any other communication that carries asuric inflictions. I do not recommend taking them for granted without careful consideration, because there is another, unpublished side to the story that I will try to present in the second chapter of the article. As a principle: in every political communication, coming from mainstream media or conspiracy theory, there is a lie or an omission. Without identifying the lie, people are trapped in a false mindset, struggling with truth and falsity. Struggling with truth and falsity while trapped in a false context is a higher level of imprisonment.
Cathy O’Brien’s story, like others, began long before she was born, immediately after WWII, with the import into the USA of 1600 Nazi scientists through what is known as Operation Paperclip, with the assistance of the Vatican and the Red Cross, under President Truman. Among many other scientific projects in the US, funded by patents acquired from the Nazis, there were secret mind control programmes continuing the inhumane work of Josef Mengele. Mengele himself is said to have worked for the US since 1951. The most notable CIA mind control programme is MK Ultra, initiated in 1953 and officially terminated in 1973. However, unofficially, it has never truly ended; it simply evolved under different names, utilising advanced technology. Today, the CIA admits that the main aims of MK Ultra in its 149 projects around the world included: mind-controlled assassinations, utilisation of biological warfare materials in covert operations, experimentation with biological weapons in populated areas, collaboration with former Nazi scientists under Operation Paperclip, drugs for mind control research, particularly LSD, created for this purpose, and the use of psychoactive drugs during “terminal” interrogations under a programme codenamed “Project Artichoke.” The scope of the Artichoke project is outlined in a memo dated January 1952: “Can we get control of an individual to the point where he will do our bidding against his will and even against fundamental laws of nature, such as self-preservation?”
There was, however, an MK Ultra programme still denied to this day, Project Monarch, about which Cathy O’Brien talks extensively. Project Monarch was a trauma-based mind-control programme whose purpose was to create sex slaves to deliver encoded messages to members of the Deep State. For this project, they recruited multigenerational incest abused children with an already dissociative identity disorder. These children were sold by their parents to the CIA and “programmed” neurologically through traumatic experiences, including perpetuated sadistic sexual abuse, deprivation of sleep and food, neurolinguistic programming through electroshocks, exposure to occult symbolism and satanic rituals, harmonics, soundwaves and drugs.
Cathy O’Brien was sold to the CIA at the age of 9 through the intermediation of Gerald Ford (33rd-degree Mason), the 38th president of the US, back then just a Republican. She was sadistically sexually abused and programmed with Jesuit mind control, using codes and passwords from the Bible, at her school church by two Jesuit priests and political figures, and was given to Robert C Byrd, a prominent US senator (member of the Odd Fellows), who became her “owner” in the program. She was forced to marry the country singer Alex Huston, who became her “handler”. From 9 until the age of 30, she was systematically trafficked to prominent figures, such as Dick Cheney, Ronald Reagan, George Bush Sr., Hilary Clinton, Pierre Trudeau, Miguel de la Madrid, etc. Her testimony shows that there are no political parties, faiths, or nationalities within the Deep State. There is only one profoundly occult and dark agenda, and there have been literally no presidents of the US in the last 150 years who were not enabling this agenda. People always give President Kennedy as an example, but the Kennedy family is one of the pillars of the Deep State. According to Cathy O’Brien, Marilyn Monroe was one of the earliest mind-controlled sex slaves in Project Monarch, the same project she was subjected to. It is not impossible that President Kennedy may have willingly participated in his own assassination as an act of ascendance. We know that these lodges, among other things, prepare the Ahrimanic immortality.
There is another aspect to consider here. Cathy O’Brien said that all mind-controlled sex slaves whose memories were compartmentalised were to be killed before the age of 30. Although she doesn’t know why, Anthroposophy can answer that: at the age of 30, the Christ principle begins to illuminate within the human being. The event that took place at the Baptism in the Jordan River, when the Christ Being descended and united with the Nathan Jesus, takes place in every human being at the age of 30. As a result, everything that is linked to the I, the continuity of memory, the force of it and consciousness are potentiated by the illuminating I. At the age of 30, the dissociated memory has the chance to recover through the potentiated power of Christ Sun illuminating in the human being. This is why these people are killed, because they have the chance to finally make sense of what is happening to them and fight back.
Cathy O’Brien has been ridiculed for three decades, even though no politician mentioned has ever pressed charges for slander and calumny, and people have had all this time to investigate the events she described. However, the release of the shocking Epstein files makes us reconsider her testimony and realise that we weren’t ready to face these truths before because it would have caused us trauma. Acknowledging Cathy O’Brien’s testimony means recognising that we are powerless against highly organised Satanists who possess the technology, resources, and means to subjugate each of us—physically, emotionally, and spiritually—at any moment. The paralysing fear that takes hold in each of us at the very thought prompts us to deny and ridicule: it can’t be true! Yet, the Epstein files show that every conspiracy theory we dismissed is true, at least to some extent. But remember, dear friends, when the truth about the Satanic practices I mentioned is officially acknowledged, the Deep State has already moved on to another phase of the plan, leaving behind insignificant, bloody, and dirty figures, much like a lizard discarding its tail. The alien-lizard association that appears in many conspiracy theories isn’t created by the conspiracy theorists themselves, but by the practitioners of black magic. In the second chapter of this letter, I will do my best to shed some light on it.
Today, there is no need for sex slaves to store messages in their dissociated minds. Secret messages can be encoded directly in someone’s DNA, according to Keith Melton, espionage expert and author, in the Netflix documentary “Spycraft”, episode “Covert Communications”.
The role of 21st-century nationalism in collective mind-control
Returning to nationalism and authoritarian regimes over the last few years is not only a sign of regression, but a powerful tool of mass mind-control through trauma, now enacted on a global scale. More damaging than the trauma itself is the fear of its recurrence; this is why the leaders of the New World Order support mind-controlled nationalists like Trump, Putin, or Netanyahu to sow chaos and havoc before advancing to the next stage of their plan. As soon as this happens, they, like always, will immediately get rid of them. Don’t forget, dear friends, the lizard leaves its tail. It may seem as though we are repeating the events of the last century, but in reality, our oppressors are re-creating the trauma. We have COVID-19 instead of the last century’s Spanish flu, we have Russian colours to the far-right nationalism (Russian Nazis), the Jews to be put in Nazi camps are replaced by “immigrants”, etc. The trauma of the last century is reignited through leaders who collectively, albeit unconsciously, evoke memories of Hitler, Stalin, or Mussolini and World War II. Fear is the most efficient mass hypnosis. The Deep State moved the CIA’s MK Ultra laboratories to the stage of the entire world.
Continued disinformation and dissonant communication in the press are also forms of mind control. This is what Donald Trump is constantly doing (see, for reference, Operation Mockingbird).
Truth and falsity in mainstream press and conspiracy theories
When analysing news, I typically consider, “Where is the lie or the omission in this communication?” While lying and omitting are distinct, the key question is pinpointing where Ahriman resides. I assume every news piece contains either a lie or an omission, and this is generally accurate. Finding Ahriman in a communication makes grasping the truth in a message easier.
I’ll begin with conspiracy theories. Should Anthroposophists find interest in conspiracy theories? Yes, they should. They ought to acquire knowledge and take an interest in everything produced by our culture, beyond personal sympathies and antipathies. Mainstream news should be kept alongside conspiracy theories in their awareness, as they are part of the current culture of this world. So, what exactly are conspiracy theories? Modern conspiracy theories suggest that there are media platforms where individuals present realities differently from those shown by official news outlets. They assume there’s another version of the story behind politicians’ usual lies in official propaganda. Many conspiracy theorists and their guests have spent years trying to analyse the occult facet of politics. However, without genuine esoteric knowledge and practice, most of these discussions have often been just silliness born out of deep fear.
You see, dear friends, these platforms that allow people to share what they have observed from the secrets hidden in dark lodges are often also controlled by the Deep State. How do you think a person like David Icke or Steven Greer appeared and remained prominent for so long? Just consider this: many people around them were running for their lives, mysteriously disappeared, or were murdered after revealing certain truths, yet the hosts themselves seemed to live long and healthy lives without issue. Steven Greer, for example, appeared very focused on his own mindfulness and bodybuilding, showing no signs of stress in the process. In his recent documentary, “The Lost Century and How to Reclaim It,” he calmly discusses scientists who were killed after trying to make progress in free energy, just days after speaking with him. And he was arrogant enough to suggest that they lost their lives because they ignored his warning! Don’t get me wrong, I believe everything Steven Greer has presented about a secret technology, a hundred years more advanced than what we have, secretly hidden to control the world’s resources. All of his claims over the past thirty years are well documented, both journalistically and scientifically. However, there is a lie in his discourse: his own true intentions.
Why do we have conspiracy theorists in the first place? We have them because the Deep State needed to gather in one place the information that had escaped their attention and wasn’t meant to be disclosed to the public. This way, they can be prepared to control the narrative as they see fit. I believe David Icke was on a secret service payroll, and this might also be true of Steven Greer.
We need to break down the wall between all types of free communication and open dialogue. We need to be more open to other people’s drama and stop protecting systems.
I spoke about Cathy O’Brien and her 30 years of imprisonment as a sexual slave for the Deep State. Do I believe what she says? Yes, every single word. This is mainly because I understand some of the esoteric concepts she presents from her photographic memory. Cathy O’Brien was exposed to much dark occultism that she cannot fully explain to herself. For instance, she was ridiculed by two “professors” who dismissed her claims when she said that in many encounters, people subjecting her to extreme abuse claimed they were “aliens, lizard-like” creatures, and that they were shapeshifting. You see, this information didn’t originate from conspiracy theorists, but from members of the Deep State themselves. Based on my current knowledge, I can explain this in two ways. A few years ago, I meditated on the Earth’s occult layers. I perceived these lizard-like creatures during meditation in the sixth layer, as parts of the soul devouring passions. These are parts of the soul so dense, so tainted, that they were completely objectified by Ahriman and forced into the layers of the Earth. It’s not only George Bush who has lizard-like creatures in his soul; it’s all of us, provided that we renounce our spirit and unite with animalistic passions in the sense proposed by the Marquis de Sade. The more we do this, the more a lizard-like being assumes the role of their spirit, of the I. This can be perceived clairvoyantly. Another situation is when someone is egoless. When a person is egoless, what can be perceived clairvoyantly is a locust-like being (Rudolf Steiner’s indication, I am not as skilled). So, the “shapeshifting” is not that someone transforms before our eyes, but that a clairvoyant person can shift from physical to clairvoyant sight. This shift can also happen when someone suffers a severe physical shock, such as electroshock or intense physical pain. At that moment, the etheric body is freed from the physical body, which may trigger an instant clairvoyant experience. Therefore, when someone electroshocks you to sexually assault you, you might perceive them as lizards because an immediate imagination of the passion that fuels the abuse, powered by terror, occurs.
But what concerns me more regarding Cathy O’Brien than the trivial dark magic employed by the Deep State members to conceal their horrific abuse is her husband, the supposed saviour. According to both of their confessions, Cathy was to be murdered by the Deep State because she was 29. Her later husband, the saviour, was involved in business dealings with Chinese Government officials at the time. He learned the Jesuit passcodes from a “friend” in the CIA, and he essentially “stole” Cathy and her daughter using the same passcodes all her abusers used to access secrets and carry out abuse. This story seems very suspicious. To me, her account now resembles that of Helena Blavatsky (see Rudolf Steiner GA 254, 11.10.1915).
Could it be that she escaped one occult imprisonment only to be placed into another by the very man she believes saved her?
So, the way I treat Cathy O’Brien’s conspiracy theory is this: I believe what she says about what happened to her completely. But I do need to keep in mind that she has all this time been in another occult imprisonment, this time with political lodges from the East. A good exercise would be to let a bit of your soul stay sceptical.
Moving to the mainstream media and the way they present events in the world today, we can observe a shift in discourse and political power after the pandemic toward the far right. But this time, the last century Nazis transformed into Russian Nazis. The pandemic was so traumatic and planned in the open by the members of the Deep State that it just fuelled the far-right political wing around the globe. People are voting for psychologically disturbed religious nationalists now, hoping that they will protect them from Satanists. But let’s not be fooled, this was too planned long before the pandemic. The entire 21st century was planned to repeat the last century for trauma reaction purposes: a pandemic, chaos and havoc in the first part of the century that will hide the event of Ahriman’s incorporation just as the last century’s chaos hid the Second Coming of Christ in the etheric realm, then false prosperity immediately after and total hypnosis and submissive materialism in the second part of the century. That’s the plan. Donald Trump, Benjamin Netanyahu, Vladimir Putin and their correspondents in each country, including the Romanian Călin Georgescu, are just psychologically disturbed, mind-controlled sociopaths whose role is just to seed chaos and terror that will hide the most important spiritual event of the century. After the world burns once again, we will blame them, we will be good again, and those who survive and their children will live in technological posterity – that’s the plan of the lodges.
We may observe how the nationalism of this century has simply replaced the Jews, black people, and the disabled who were targeted for extermination last century, with immigrants, meaning “everyone who is not us.” The hatred of the majority is fuelled by the media in a very dishonest manner, often by presenting an isolated crime, say, committed by a Romanian immigrant in Ireland, and exaggerating it until it becomes a justification to hate an entire nation. As a sociologist and a Romanian, I am personally aware of how dishonest the media can be. You see, the police have crime statistics and measure criminality by nationality or citizenship. Usually, the criminality rate of most immigrant nationalities measured independently is far lower than that of the majority population, despite how shocking this information might be for far-right voters. However, there are also nationalities with higher criminality rates than the majority, though this is rare. Even if one considers the criminality rate of all immigrants combined as a group (which is highly unethical and nonsensical), it would still be lower than that of the majority. But what nationalist-biased media does is highlight an isolated crime, the more horrific the better, committed by an immigrant, and then cover it for days, leading the public to associate the entire nationality, or even all immigrants, with that heinous act. Nationalism is stirred from the most antisocial, egotistical forces within humans and represents a regression in evolution because it should have been completely eradicated in the last century.
What matters most in distinguishing truth from falsity in communication is our own relationship with truth, our karma with truth. Rudolf Steiner emphasises this point precisely in GA173, The Karma of Untruthfulness. It is exactly one’s karma that determines whether one arrives at a historical truth.
Rudolf Steiner: “Whether a historian knows how to depict the right things or not depends on whether his karma leads him to the possibility of discovering the right things or not. Everything depends on this. For the right things are often not expressed in what he finds when he looks here or there; they are often revealed only to one who knows how to find the right places to look. Let me say this in another way: For one who is led by his karma to see the right things at the right moment, they are revealed at the point where something significant is expressed by a single phenomenon. Often a single phenomenon expresses something that throws light on decades, illuminating like a flash of lightning what is really happening.” (GA173, The Karma of Untruthfulness, vol. I, 09.12.1916)
Politics against real life. The case of Vladimir Putin.
Not everything we like in theory goes well in real life. Since politics is something that touches life at its base, everyone whom we trust to organise our social life, aka the politicians, must have a sound sense of the social reality they try to organise. This, however, has not happened for a long while in history. For instance, we can easily see that none of Karl Marx, Vladimir Lenin, Friedrich Engels or Leon Trotsky was a worker or knew anything about a worker’s life; in fact, all of them were aristocratically educated agitators and fantasists. They stood against the bourgeoisie from a bourgeois perspective and claimed to support the struggles of the working class, without knowing anything about it firsthand. We know, a century later (in some nations more than others), that the system they all tried to envision failed under utopia, at the cost of suffering for many nations for half a century.
Many people who are fed up with the compulsive and savage capitalistic materialism brought up by Americanism and the dark lodges generated from America, turn today to Vladimir Putin and Russia for hope. As Anthroposophists, we know that Russia, as a nation (and not only Russia, but all the Slavic cultures of today – peoples who write using the Cyrillic alphabet), is meant to develop first the Spirit Self in the sixth post-Atlantean epoch (3573 – 5733 A.D.). The question is, is Vladimir Putin the leader who will lead the Russian people closer to that purpose? To this question, we must answer no, unfortunately, not even in the slightest. Quite on the contrary, Vladimir Putin suppresses and suffocates the Russian spirit.
Vladimir Putin originates from a very poor working-class family in Russia. From childhood, Putin developed an affinity for power games and fantasised about being a Russian spy. Before finishing high school, he was approached by an actual spy who recommended that he study law. Shortly before finishing his studies, he was recruited by the KGB. In 1985, he was sent to Dresden, East Germany, where he worked with the Stasi, the East German secret police. When the wall of Berlin fell, Putin was not shy to use his gun against the furious population approaching the KGB building in Dresden. He burned documents and protected secret agents.
His political career started as an international consultant to the Mayor of Leningrad. He advanced rapidly through ties he built with the Russian mafia and, when he moved to Moscow, impressed President Boris Yeltsin, who appointed him as director of the FSB (the Federal Security Service, formerly the KGB). Putin covered up for Yeltsin’s corruption, alcoholism, and incompetence by humiliating or killing his accusers. In 1998, the General Prosecutor, who had opened a corruption investigation of President Yeltsin, was filmed in a hotel room with two prostitutes and forced to resign. In recognition of his loyalty, Yeltsin appointed Putin as Prime Minister in August 1999. As Prime Minister, Putin focused on the Chechen insurgency rather than the economic situation in his country. In September 1999, Putin planted bombs in four apartments in Moscow and two other cities and blamed them on the Chechen separatists. The 1999 apartment bombings killed more than 300 and injured nearly 1000 Russians. This political move may have inspired the Americans’ 9/11, which also happened in early September two years later. Next, he forced Yeltsin to step down, which he did at the end of 1999, and appointed him as interim president. From there, his path to political power was smooth.
Putin has maintained himself in power by literally killing all political adversaries. One of them was Alexander Litvinenko. He was an officer in the FSB who began investigating corruption in the system shortly after Putin’s appointment. Putin asked him to forget about it and help him kill Boris Berezovsky, a Russian oligarch, instead. Litvinenko not only refused to do it but also went public against Putin, announcing this at a press conference. Litvinenko was arrested several times but managed to flee to London in 2000. From there, he wrote a book, “Blowing up Russia: Terror from Within”, in which he accuses Putin of staging the 1999 apartment bombings in order to rise to power. But this is not what triggers his assassination by poisoning with polonium in 2006. His assassination was triggered by a short article in which he accused Vladimir Putin of paedophilia. In the article, there is a picture of Putin kissing a 4-year-old’s belly, and Litvinenko makes accusations that the reason why Putin was not immediately admitted into the foreign intelligence after graduation was that they knew he was a paedophile. He also says that when Putin became the director of the FSB, he found and destroyed all videos of him in compromising situations with underage boys. Three months after the article, Litvinenko was killed. Boris Berezovsky died in 2013 under suspicious conditions.
The assassination of Alexander Litvinenko for an article in which he didn’t present proofs but simply accused Vladimir Putin of paedophilia seems extreme and self-compromising. If Putin is indeed a paedophile, this would make him the perfect candidate for the Deep State. What if years after today we find out that Putin was appointed in Russia by the members of the Deep State to suppress for more than 30 years the creativity of the Russian people, which was supposed through cultural development to prepare the sixth epoch? It is unlikely to be a significant cultural development in Russia under Putin’s leadership. The Russian Spirit is simply suffocated under Putin.
I am telling you all this to give an example of a leader who has never had a social life per se and to make the point that he, and all others like him in all countries of the world, cannot enable cultural creativity or spiritual evolution through proper organisation of the social life. These war-machines, greedy dark paedophiles on the left or right, formed politicians from a young age, cannot be enabled by our sympathies to organise a social life they know nothing about. Their antisocial instincts and acts surpass their nation and humanity as a whole, uniting them directly with the Beast of the Apocalypse.
Three mistakes Michaelites make when forming and disseminating political ideas
There are three major mistakes Michaelites make when forming and disseminating their political ideas. These mistakes usually betray a lack of meditative practice in the Anthroposophical sense, as well as a complete denial of the spirit. The six basic exercises in Anthroposophy are completely denied or overlooked in each of these instances.
The inflexible one-sidedness
Number 1 is the inflexibility and one-sidedness on the political spectrum. Since politics touches the very foundation of life, some passion about the subject is to be expected. However, the Anthroposophist must strive for truth and impartiality every single time, even when a different view of life threatens their own survival.
Through karma, we form the political spectrum shortly before our first vote, after we turn 18. Astrally, the period coincides with our first return of the nodes, a portal for receiving more from our karmic “bank” to work with in this life, as well as for more possibilities for freedom. However, the possibilities for freedom are enacted only when one does the work of the spirit through consciousness. So, at 18, there is always someone around us who influences our political views. That person is brought around us by karma, as well as the political view we develop then. Sometimes, the view we develop then stays with us our entire lives without questioning its validity. So, you see, dear reader, what people usually think is a result of their free thinking, for instance, their political thinking, is most of the time karmic. The way one forms their lifetime political spectrum is through biography, through the persons or events that influence them immediately after reaching the age of 18. There is nothing free in one’s political view if this first view is not challenged afterwards in life. However, there is a possibility of achieving freedom when one deliberately or by circumstance challenges their own political one-sidedness and seeks to integrate the opposing side.
As Anthroposophists, we are called to seek impartiality over our sympathies and antipathies. There is nothing Anthroposophic in being pro-Russia or pro-Ukraine, pro-democrats or pro-Trump, pro-Israel or pro-Palestine. Michael is a spiritual cosmopolitan, and all Michaelites are homeless and nationless on Earth. To follow Michael and Christ means one must give up one’s selfish love for one’s nation, one’s passions, and one’s egotism, and embrace the general human. And let’s face it: Nationalism is just another cover for a self-love the size of a nation.
I know Anthroposophists who don’t want to read or listen to anything that is marked as “conspiracy theory”. They are proud to be democrats, and they dismiss it before even checking themselves into it. But I need to ask: What’s the fear? You see, I believe it is much more problematic the unfreedom that arises in the soul when confronted with dissonant information than the information itself. It doesn’t matter anymore if the subject of investigation is true or false if the researcher fears investigating it in the first place.
I know Anthroposophists who always look for something mystical, a form of magic without any type of thinking in their social life. They would believe every trick in an image or a video, everything about spirits, ghosts and elementals, but cannot read half a page of any writing. How does one call oneself an Anthroposophist with such laziness in thinking?
All these are examples of political one-sidedness that push us further from our Michaelic goal, as they expose serious moral problems.
Undermining the spiritual symptomatology of history
Number 2, when it comes to mistakes in our political thinking, is undermining the spiritual symptomatology of history. If we want to imitate Rudolf Steiner in his historical analyses, we can use the term “symptomatology of history” and act as if we know what it means. We can take events from today, identify a cause in the past, and consider how they might indicate the future. We can do that with our intellectual minds and with the internet easily. But this is not how Rudolf Steiner did when he talked about “symptomatology of history.” Rudolf Steiner penetrated deeply into the spiritual, clairvoyantly, and the only decent thing we can do is to humbly admit that we are not there yet.
One doesn’t need to imitate Rudolf Steiner like a child because they might embarrass themselves, especially when discussing history. A child may walk with a stick and believe they carry a gun. If we speak to others like Rudolf Steiner, and if people like us and respect us as Anthroposophists, that does not make us Rudolf Steiner. We must remember that Rudolf Steiner was an initiate with advanced access to the Akashic Records, which was previously given only to Masters. He was among the few who, through his development, were granted permission by the guardian beings overseeing humanity’s spiritual chronicle to witness parts of history previously entirely hidden from human access. This is how we have the Fifth Gospel in the first place. I firmly believe it is simply vanity and self-indulgence to imitate Rudolf Steiner when discussing history without having access to the spiritual history he possessed. However, we can observe how he approached it and humbly aspire to follow our teacher.
When discussing the symptomatology of history, Rudolf Steiner would examine the historical event and identify its spiritual cause, for which the physical event was merely a symptom. He would clairvoyantly search for the karmic knot, the nodal event in time that would set the entire development of the present event. Finding the nodal karmic event isn’t always something you can do online. Sometimes this event is so hidden in everyday life that no one except for the initiate who saw it in Akasha could even notice it. And even if a person knows about it, they probably completely disregard it. Rudolf Steiner gives as an example the case of Robert Hamerling, the Austrian poet. Robert Hamerling would not have developed his natural talents as a poet if he hadn’t, at a certain point in his life, been transferred to Trieste. Having lived in Trieste for 10 years on the Adriatic coast, he was able to travel to Venice, and thus the link between this life and his previous life could be made. But this link to his previous life, vital for his talent to unfold, could not have been made if he hadn’t been transferred to Trieste, and he was transferred there only because the headmaster of the Gymnasium had forgotten his application to Budapest under his desk. In Budapest, he wouldn’t have had the same destiny because no link to his previous incarnation could have been made. So, you see, the event of the headmaster forgetting his application to Budapest is a nodal event for Robert Hamerling fulfilling his destiny.
So, it’s important to know that in the absence of objective clairvoyance that could penetrate the world events, everything one states about the world’s history can be, at its best, an inspired opinion.
The sparrow effect
Number 3 is what I call “the sparrow effect,” and since it is not a coined term, I will do my best to explain it. During one of the earliest practical seminars on Anthroposophic meditation I attended, the facilitator—who is a good friend—asked us to observe the soul life of sparrows in the park. We could see how their entire soul life exceeded their size, filling them with dense astrality, until they could no longer contain it and jumped. Any sensory impression creates a dense ball of astrality that grows until the sparrow cannot hold it and leaps. Each small jump followed by a trill was like a concentrated astral reaction—like they were amazed or shocked by something, then completely forgot about it, only to be amazed or startled again by something else. They seemed to live their lives jumping from sensation to sensation, with moments of complete oblivion and disinterest in between. This is exactly how most people live their lives, too: from superficial soul reaction to superficial soul reaction, with interludes of total forgetfulness and disconnection. This pattern is easily observable in what one shares on social media: an outrageous news story, then a video of a cat, then a good vegan recipe, perhaps some prayers for Gaza, a share from a share from share from a copy-paste, and then sleep. I cannot be convinced that someone who frequently posts about war victims from the comfort of their Western home cares about anything beyond their own feelings and fears. A Michaelite should ask themselves, “How do I contribute to world history, other than sharing my instant sparrow feelings (fury, fear, shock, etc.) on social media?” Immediate reactions to every political ruse are not only childish but also hinder the development of an insightful understanding of world events. Being unable to hold a piece of news or an event in one’s soul without reacting instantly is also proof of destructive egotism.
Closing thoughts
Politics will not save anyone, at least not in its current form. We must take Rudolf Steiner’s words seriously and understand that no change in life or any new idea for organising social life can emerge if people don’t learn to cross the Threshold of the Spiritual. Therefore, our contribution to the world’s history cannot be merely voting, protesting, and spreading dense feelings on social media; our contribution must be our own evolution. If, during my life on Earth, I develop the human qualities necessary for the progressive evolution of humanity, after my death, they become a free gift available to souls approaching incarnation on Earth. Through subsequent incarnations, we transform the Earth. Sometimes, the hard way is better than succumbing to futility.
Ahriman is already here, and his full incorporation will take place soon. The havoc we see in the world is merely a distraction, with regrettable human casualties, meant to keep us from perceiving this event. Coming after the destruction that the chaos lords will bring, his reign will be welcome and long. People will not recognise Ahriman as Ahriman because, apparently, Trump, Putin, Netanyahu, and others like them were worse. This is the plan. But we need enough people to think outside the box, to rise above any mainstream media or conspiracy theory, any nationality or political spectrum, and take their own evolution into their own hands so that white magic can oppose spiritually the black magic long in progress in the world today. This, however, cannot be done by voting and protesting. Inner work is required.
We cannot do it without Christ, and there is no political plan Christ will ever take part in. As a Michaelite, we must declare strongly: I am with Christ.
I recognise you,
I AM
Alexandra Vasilache
PS: Bonus. Călin Georgescu, an opinion
I promised at the start of this letter to say something about my political views regarding Călin Georgescu, whose “injustice” stirred far-right leaders worldwide. If you’ve reached this point in the article, you probably already know what I want to say. I will begin by publicly confessing: I don’t vote; I haven’t voted since 2009. Since then, I have only gone to vote twice, to invalidate my vote due to suspicions of fraud. My political experience so far has shown me that voting in Romania is like buying expensive lottery tickets. Romania’s politics resemble France’s. We vote for a president. Previously, we voted for the parliament. As you know, for parliament, we vote in bulk – for the party or a list of names among which we only recognise one or two. Good people, we think, based on their ability to lie on TV. The president appoints the prime minister, who forms the government. Sometimes this is straightforward, sometimes more complicated. If the prime minister isn’t approved by the parliament, the president must choose a more suitable candidate – he is compelled by the parliament, remember, the people elected in bulk, whom we hardly know. There are incredible struggles and negotiations, and the risk of ending up in the executive with people you didn’t vote for, or have never heard of, is high. Politicians rarely, if ever, keep the promises made during their campaigns. Romania isn’t a country like Switzerland, where you can still vote on different initiatives in referendums. Here, referenda are exceedingly rare. You might think that, as a citizen, you have a voice, but you really don’t. With every vote for parliament or president, a sort of lottery begins, and each time, you, the citizen, are not the winner. I don’t delude myself. As an Anthroposophist, I understand that even behind the seemingly “free” vote lies the collective karma of the nation.
In summary, Georgescu has consistently displayed the profile of a political opportunist across all regimes in power and with all parties willing to offer him anything. He only recently shifted his rhetoric to a nationalist, anti-Western stance. Before 2015-2016, when he made a 180-degree turn in his discourse, he was neither nationalist nor opposed to the system. In fact, he was deeply involved in organisations founded by the Deep State.
Here are some facts from his professional biography: He completed his bachelor’s degree in agricultural engineering in communist Romania and was sent abroad to further specialise in the US and the UK. This naturally indicates a strong connection within the communist apparatus because, at that time, only a select few were permitted to leave the country, especially for studies. Unless you were “someone’s son or daughter” or willing to “do the Party a favour”, such permission was unlikely. It’s unknown whether Georgescu was or wasn’t an informant for the communist regime, as his files are no longer available, but suspicion remains that he was perhaps involved from a very young age. Immediately after the Revolution, the young Călin Georgescu gained prominence as an aspiring ecologist. He signed the Carta for Reform and Democracy on behalf of the Ecologist Movement, alongside the revolution’s victors. In 1992, he became an advisor to the Minister of Environment. In the same year, he was elected President of the Youth Ecologist Association (1990–1996), under which he managed various programmes funded internationally, such as the PHARE programmes provided by the European Union, USAID funding (the United States Agency for International Development), and sponsorships from Western governments, including George Soros’ Open Society Foundation. This organisation was among the first in Romania to receive funding from George Soros, and at that time, Călin Georgescu frequently appeared in the dedicated press alongside the sponsor, Open Society. From the Youth Ecologist, he progressed to another NGO, the National Centre for Sustainable Development (1997-2011), established under the aegis of the Romanian Academy. According to the Recorder, “The CNDD [the National Centre for Sustainable Development] was created to manage funds transferred to Romania by the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP), a UN agency assisting nations in reducing poverty and implementing long-term policies.” He served as the Executive Director of this NGO from 2000 to 2011. As Director, he developed and implemented projects funded by the European Union and the Romanian Government, including the National Strategy for Sustainable Development. From 2010 to 2012, he was the UN Special Rapporteur on the adverse effects of the illicit movement and dumping of toxic and dangerous products and waste on the enjoyment of human rights. Between 2013 and 2015, he presided over the European Support Centre for the Club of Rome in Switzerland. He was also the Executive Director of the private foundation, United Nations Global Sustainable Index Institute, based in Geneva and Vaduz (2015–2016).
This is just a summary of his very impressive CV before becoming a retrograde voice of the past. You will see that I skipped many of his executive positions in the Romanian Government on behalf of the Democratic Party. He was appointed to many other initiatives where he handled large amounts of funds from the European Union and the UN. The shift in his discourse appears around 2015-2016 and coincides with some trips to Moscow, according to the independent press agency RISE Project.
I first heard and saw Georgescu the day he won his first election tour. The first time I saw him, I said, “That’s a mason” because of the clear impression of a masonic-like ritual that can be perceived behind his physiognomy. I found out later that he joined the Romanian Freemasonry in the ‘90s but left it very soon after; however, the masonic-like ritual is strongly perceived around his being, so when he says he is not a mason, he either lies or he is indeed a part of an independent fraternity with a similar ritual, other than Freemasonry. His work for many years in the Club of Rome, let alone his presidency there, suggests that. There is another variant, which is the worst-case scenario: he is occultly imprisoned.
I will reiterate what I mentioned earlier: I believe that the nationalistic parties were financed by the Deep State as part of the New World Order plan. At this point, chaos and disorder must be unleashed upon the world so that the implementation of the second phase of the plan proceeds more smoothly. The rise and funding of backward nationalist movements worldwide are a consequence of this stage, following the script of the previous century.
Many people were surprised that Georgescu gained popular support via TikTok. However, this was not how he gained sympathy; he did so through magic discourse. He employs phrases in his speech that are known to influence the collective psyche magically. He activates embedded codes within the collective mind by using coined historical expressions that were used in political discourses at various events that marked history. He follows the rhetoric of Romanian Nazi General Ion Antonescu and Adolf Hitler. Furthermore, he mimics the biographical steps of Adolf Hitler. He is backed by a mercenary who has his own militia (similar to the former Wagner group in Russia), Horatiu Potra, much like Adolf Hitler was. Currently, Georgescu is under investigation by Romanian authorities for Nazi propaganda, and he appears unrepentant; the public still adores him.
***
Bibliography, arranged in the order mentioned in the text
Rudolf Steiner, The Occult Movement in the Nineteenth Century and its Relationship to World Culture (GA 254), lectures 1 and 2: https://rsarchive.org/Lectures/GA254/
Love and freedom are the ideals of human existence. But there are steps to be taken. The prerequisite to love is knowledge, and the first step to freedom is decision.
One can not pretend to love something one accepts by faith, authority, or mere sympathy in the fifth cultural epoch of the fifth human period. In the fifth epoch, one is asked to decide freely regarding one’s evolution. Yes, it is so, and it can not be otherwise or happen in another time of history. The time to decide is the epoch of the consciousness soul. Even the question of Christ, or a higher instance, or of the Spiritual in itself must be asked in one’s biography in the fifth epoch. The question is there, implanted in the biographies of the consciousness soul epoch.
For some people, the question of Christ comes earlier in life; in other cases, it comes later. Saying “yes” to Christ is not as easy as one thinks. In the fourth epoch, Christ said to His first disciples, “Follow Me,” but in the fifth epoch, this is a question: “Will you follow Me?”. Christ takes one’s true answer to eternity and awaits the undecided and deniers until the end of time. But one can not truly follow the Christ if they didn’t live with the question of Christ first, if they didn’t crucify themselves because a question that implies a decision is always a crucifixion. We pin the left and pin the right, and find ourselves immobile in between. And we must have as many crucifixions as possible at the right time, in the fifth epoch.
Humanity in the consciousness soul is like a human being in its 35-42 years of life. If we divide the duration of an epoch, 2160 years, to 7, to make an analogy to a human biography, we will have approximately 308 years and 6 months. This means that around 2029-2030, when Ray Kurzweil plans to have the Turing test to impose as a fact that machines have self-consciousness, we will approach as humanity the second lunar node. And we know what happens on the night of the lunar node: the astral aligns with the physical, and we have an openness to our past and future karma. But it might be that the robots will make the decisions people forget to make in their conscious souls.
Do you remember how your perception of life changed soon after 35? It was like someone finally opened the light in the basement. For the first time in life, things could have been seen with their true face, with their colours and clarity. For humanity, dear friends, if we keep the analogy, the light in the basement is Anthroposophia, the knowledge of the human being, or, even more correctly said, the knowledge of being human. This young spiritual being, human in its nature but spiritualised, is the ideal of man, the knowledge of our becoming. It lightens the way, the path to Christ as the ultimate goal of our becoming.
But the question of Anthroposophia will come sooner or later, too. Just because people are brought by life into Anthroposophy, it doesn’t mean the question of Anthroposophia has been answered. The true question of Anthroposophia is a question that demands decision and commitment, as well. People say: I have been studying Anthroposophy for 40 years. Sure, but did you answer the question, did you make your decision?
Anthroposophia is a spiritual being that can only be incorporated into the trinity of the human soul forces. She can not stay in line for people to “heal” their karma luciferically in sensuous sessions with their eyes closed and holding hands. The light is on. Why would you want to walk with your eyes closed when the light is on? Why do you prefer the night sensuousness instead of the clarity of daylight? Why would you choose the beings of the shadow and superstition instead of the pure and virgin Anthroposophia?
She can not be kept in the freezer of the intellect either.
With every day passing that Anthroposophists forget about Anthroposophia, Anthroposophia dries out. A new Anthroposophia today is reviving from the seed of the Christmas Conference of the last century. Anthroposophia is our fragile and holy selfhood. Last century’s Anthroposophists screwed up; we need to do better this time.
The last thing I want to say is related to the pops and gurus of the last century. Please, human adult, in the year 2024, do not accept others to conduct your life in the name of Anthroposophy! We see what these people did in the last century. They let Anthroposophia die in a pocket of their stiff costumes while dancing with their eyes closed in flower power movements. Do not accept regimentation or advice from people who failed. The first step to freedom is learning to say “No.” The more one is unanimously trusted by large groups, the farther away from them we should get.
Trust the spiritual beings that guide your spirit, and do not trust anyone who does not promote freedom.
The times we live in today are unique, as the Aristotelians and the Platonists come together in a grand collective incarnation, so to speak, for the first time on Earth. This process began around 1950, when Platonists started to reincarnate after their pause, and it is expected to be complete around the year 2050, by which time Aristotelians will also return after a brief break in the Spiritual realm. By 2050, we expect all anthroposophical personalities from the last century, including the lead Anthroposophists such as Rudolf Steiner, Marie Steiner, Ita Wegman, and Walter Johannes Stein, to be on Earth and take up their new mission. This process reflects the spiritual process that occurred in 1250 when the Platonists first joined Aristotelians in the Michael School in Spirit. After 2050, the Aristotelians of Aristotle and the Platonists of Alain de Lille will pass the Threshold of Death together, having created karmic connections, so there will be no more shifts between Aristotelians and Platonists in subsequent incarnations. This process means that both streams must learn from each other, that they must mutually enrich, or fructify, each other’s knowledge, which is brought as seeds from past incarnations.
We need to recall the significance of the year 1250 to understand what must happen until 2050. 1250 is the year when the entire atavistic inheritance stopped. At that time, no one could approach the spiritual world using the forces of the old clairvoyance coming from Lemuria, not even the initiates. That year, the spiritual world closed entirely for the old, natural or instinctive clairvoyance. Initiates could only remember the Spiritual from tradition and their past incarnations, but their clairvoyant capacities were no longer leading them to the Spirit. A new capacity was about to enter the world, and this capacity was formed by grasping the Christ impulse with the higher faculties of the soul. From the Mystery of Golgotha until the thirteenth century, the Christ impulse was absorbed unconsciously, thus subordinated to an unclean soul life (remember the savagery of the first Christians). After 1250, it was no longer possible to approach the higher spiritual world through atavism. As of today, with old atavistic clairvoyance, it is possible to remain in the elementary world and fall prey to all kinds of astral illusions, but it’s not possible to go higher. Occult imprisonment is also a phenomenon that occurs frequently in the deeper layers of this zone.
For the new capacities to take hold of humanity, there was a need for the Christ impulse to be elevated into modern thinking. Thus, the Gabriel subcultural epoch prepared the physical apparatus, while Michael prepared the content in his school from the 13th to the 19th century and poured it into what we have today as the entire organism of Anthroposophy. When I say ‘the entire organism of Anthroposophy,’ I mean not only the knowledge but also the personalities carrying it. Anthroposophy is a new way of consciously elevating one’s spirit into the higher worlds, holding the Christ impulse. Thus, people from Michael School have a special mission on Earth, which is intrinsically connected to the Spiritual Anthroposophy, the being of Anthroposophia.
We still have 25 years until 2050 to experience, live, and learn from each other, creating or breaking karmic connections to bring justice to our karma as Anthroposophists for future times. After 2050, it will become increasingly difficult, and this difficulty will be compounded by the fact that many of us will be preparing to leave the Earth or would have already left it. Moreover, the incorporation of Ahriman, which is gradually happening as we speak, will be completed by 2050. The next incarnation of the pupils in Michael School will be in Oriphiel time, when we will follow Master Christian Rosenkreuz and the Rosicrucians to fulfil their mission on Earth. In this 6th subcultural epoch of the 5th cultural epoch, the Rosicrucians led by the reincarnated Christian Rosenkreuz, will establish a teaching which will become the seed to separate the good race from the evil race in the 6th cultural epoch, as described in the Apocalypse of St. John. As I mentioned before, without giving details, the personality of the one who was Aristotle/Tomas D’Aquino/Rudolf Steiner is prepared for future times to be the righteous successor of Master Christian Rosenkreuz. So, we can only expect him to be incarnated with his master in these coming times. It depends on each of us whether we want to be a part of the historical events that will unfold in the 6th subcultural epoch. If we decide so, these preparations must start now. As preparation, we need an initiation into the mysteries of evil so we can break the foggy cloud with the two-sided sword given to us by Christ.
Although Rudolf Steiner spoke extensively about these things, it’s incredible how few Anthroposophists know them or have them in mind when directing through thinking everyday life. We are talking about mass hypnosis and the thick-clouded atavism that covers any attempt to penetrate the Spiritual today. This cloud has been maintained and nurtured in closed lodges for centuries, utilising sophisticated knowledge, technology, and entire economic, political, and cultural settings. Behind these systems, there are true occultists who oppose Michael School and will do whatever it takes to divert the entire lives of Anthroposophists and make them irrelevant. These occultists typically operate through established mechanisms; they don’t need to be physically present anywhere. Everything is done employing chaos magic.
Many of you may wonder if Rudolf Steiner is incarnated. He probably is, but it is an incredible childishness and lack of awareness to make public references or speculations about his present incarnation. Rudolf Steiner’s incarnation is and must remain hidden for the plan to work for the exact reasons described above, especially after what happened following his death. All those who claim to have indications about this are either completely off track with it or incredibly immature spiritually because Rudolf Steiner’s incarnation is and will remain hidden. When false information is given about an Anthroposophist’s incarnation, the present incarnation may become clouded.
I would like to differentiate here between a hidden incarnation and a clouded one, and to try to explain further what I mean. Most incarnations are hidden by the lofty divine powers so that karma can be fulfilled without interruption. In most cases, the subjects themselves don’t remember their previous incarnations. The remembrance of prior incarnations is a process that began in the last century and will unfold gradually in humanity. For now, the majority of people remain unaware of their past incarnations, often denying the existence of karma or having only a limited understanding of it. But that doesn’t mean that lodges don’t know when a personality is to be born. They will track that personality and cloud their entire destiny, so it doesn’t come to fulfilment. In the case of Kaspar Hauser, there was a physical kidnapping and murder. Modernity, however, allows these things to happen remotely, in a clouded way, through distraction from the purpose. Methods of distraction are often suggested through symbolism in political discourses, social media, books, movies, in a word: everywhere. Sometimes, they work through one’s fear of the material that binds one to a job or a materialist pattern of thinking and living. Many times, they work on relationships through the people one meets, especially by setting up living with a distracted person (partner, spouse), which is also a method to cloud one’s incarnation completely. (There is occult truth in the movie The Adjustment Bureau).
An incarnation is hidden by the divine powers to fulfil its karmic mission. But an incarnation can also be artificially clouded by powerful occultists in closed lodges to prevent one’s mission from happening.
One technique of clouding is to clone a historical event and channel the spiritual impulses of the lead personality. How is this done? Let’s suppose one wants to create a particular event in the world that will unfold specific consequences. First, they choose a similar historical event they wish to copy (or reverse). By means of software, they analyse the horoscope of the leading historical figure in the event (which they inverse, in case they want to inverse the effect). Then, they add the horoscope of the event (or its inversion). From this mixture, they decide the date and time a similar or opposed horoscope will occur. They will then copy on the desired date the actions that happened on the historical date. They will stage the entire drama of actions with actors who are aware or not of this plan. People who work in this manner do not care about casualties, and most of the time, this is not just symbolic theater. Many times, this involves revolts or assassinations.
It is my observation that, following Rudolf Steiner’s death, most of the Anthroposophical incarnations were clouded and unable to come to fruition. It is my belief that there is continuous magic targeting leading Anthroposophists, and people must be aware of the foreign influences. Therefore, a firm decision is important to be made by each of us today. People must sharpen their blades in thinking and learn to discriminate, to pierce and cut through the current fog not only of their thinking, but of their lives.
Courage, Michaelites! says the Master, may we hear it.
‘Greater love has no man than this than he gives up his life for his friends.’ (John, 15:13)
The path to Christ is through our Time Spirit, Michael. In a sense, like a great friend to Christ, Michael bows down through us to Christ. The unique aspect of Michael is his respect for the potential wisdom and love of human beings; he patiently waits for us to approach him, to pose questions to which we would love to know the spiritual answer. We might assume this does not need to be stated in Anthroposophy, but this article aims to portray a deeper understanding of what the Michaelic spirit means. People have become used to treating Spiritual Science as an emptied of life compendium, betraying less intensified intuitive thinking, and signalling more their experience or desire of the ‘virtue’ of spiritual sight.
A particular anthroposophical devotee in an excitable mood once asked Rudolf Steiner about the rise of new ‘clairvoyants’ and he replied briskly, ‘Any chewing cow has visions’, referring to the fact that in the digestive process of a cow, the astral body contemplates what the etheric body reflects from the physical process; thus, a cow has vivid imaginations in its digestive process. Rudolf Steiner speaks of ‘stomach or belly clairvoyance’, and the delusion coming from these old forms, as many are not objective imaginations or spiritual communications per se, but images from one’s digestive process, to which the ‘clairvoyant’ adds their own intellectual flair. ‘Clairvoyance’ is a term that has become abused lately: the distinction between a regression to old atavistic clairvoyance and the exact one, which arises out of intuitive thinking must be delineated clearly; it needs discretion as spiritual tact, even in anthroposophical circles where the content sounds like Rudolf Steiner. We see everywhere new age bookshelves, new manifestos, new projects for mankind given by aliens, by ascended masters; just because an author assures us of their spiritual authority, we should not be credulous in any of these situations.
Atavistic clairvoyant communications are not the only obstacle. The political spectre is the next significant impediment in getting to the new way of thinking, to the Etheric Christ as an experience of thinking. So, we have to ask, does a writer truly lead us to our own initiative, to our own Michaelic work in these times, as a true path Christ, or does the life spirit in their work feel jaded?
Rudolf Steiner tells us:
‘I just want to remind you how the people who attend political or other meetings today are actually just a flock of sheep that fall for the slogans thrown at them by the speakers and then follow them. In this respect, humanity today is terribly dependent. It is also dependent in that it simply absorbs what has been set. As a result, people gradually come to the point where they can no longer think in reality at all, but only seemingly think, because their thinking can no longer, I might say, be seen in the spiritual light.’
Rudolf Steiner, The Occult Truths of Old Myths and Legends, GA 211, 21 March 1922, Bern
A spectre is an elemental Ahrimanic being that hides in the etheric body. Its purpose is to cloud one’s thinking, colouring it with doubt and mistrust for the creative spirit that manifests in the world or through others while separating it from the living spiritual. Spectres are formed from the disharmony between human beings, such as bad laws, bad formal and informal institutions, thinking patterns, decontextualised holistic slogans inappropriate for individuality. It is the materialisation of one’s thinking. They are the beings of bias, of what splits the thinking in right or left, in white or black, good or bad or any other polarised positions.
A political spectre divides one’s thinking into political wings, left or right. The political spectres are mighty Ahrimanic beings, and if a person adopts one as a political position through mere sympathy and not unbiased thinking, it will not colour only the political views but life views too, and, most unfortunately, the spiritual views. While the politicians themselves are not so loyal to their wing, the political spectre always is, and it will take possession of one’s thinking in the most unexpected way. The political spectre is a tyrant, and it will always imply that anything coming from the preferred wing is good, and anything coming through the opposed wing is wrong. Like any Ahrimanic being, a political spectre is not concerned with the truth. However, it will manipulatively invoke ‘truth’ in arguments every single time, but with the purpose of materialisation of the thought itself by preserving the dead old view, the entire structure of the mechanisms and patterns of thinking of either the right or the left and blocking anything creative in one’s thinking and wants to leave the bias.
If one observes, for instance, the type of political debates an Anthroposophist shares on Facebook or what kind of political discourses they adopt, one can immediately form an opinion of what kind of anthroposophical events one prefers because the political spectre doesn’t stay in its lane, they simply expend to one’s everyday life. However, what is left or right politically is not necessarily the same spiritually, sometimes it is reversed. The political right spectre will be more inclined to participate to events closer to the left-hand esotericism, the public conferences. In contrast, the left political spectre will be more inclined to adopt esoterically the right-hand esotericism, the closed esoteric groups. As we know, left-hand esotericism believes in popularising esotericism, even in a watered-down manner. As representatives, we have the oriental teachings and everything that stands today as the new-age movement. The right-hand esotericism are the occult and closed lodges. They believe that esoteric knowledge should not be imparted to what they call ‘base consciousness’ or the masses. Here, we find the classical closed groups, Masonry, Jesuitism, Zionism etc. But we should be aware that not everyone in those lodges is right wing esoterically, some of them are left. As a cosmopolitan spiritual movement, classic Anthroposophy as given by Rudolf Steiner is neither right nor left. Still, we need to admit that 100 years after Rudolf Steiner’s death, Anthroposophy suffered many foreign influences, imported from left or right streams or different lodges, some of them poisonous and caustic to its spirit.
The political spectres act as predispositions of one’s soul and the most decayed of them will cloud the consciousness of Anthroposophists to recognise Ahriman as Ahriman. Two attitudes of the soul Anthroposophists must overcome to recognize the incarnation of Ahriman today: one is spiritual lust (derived from far-left hand esotericism) and the other is borrowed-pattern thinking, hypnotised or robotised thinking (derived from far-right hand esotericism). They represent the decayed Platonism and Aristotelianism, the egregore of the two streams.
Spiritual lust = decayed Platonism derived from the misuse of one’s will in Anthroposophy
Robotised thinking = decayed Aristotelianism derived from the deadening of the forces of one’s thinking with anthroposophical concepts
If we were to describe in vivid pictures how decayed Aristotelianism promotes robotised thinking, we need to imagine the 19th-century Blavatsky intellectual literature club mood. Here people care more about constructing anthroposophical ideas and less about the spirit behind them. They combine anthroposophical thoughts with such mastery that they become a tight net of wonderful knit forms. However, these forms will eventually suffocate any spiritual experience because their roots lie in the Ahrimanic mixture of ideas, already detached from the spirit behind them. You can easily recognise these people: they are eloquent, they like hearing themselves talk on stage, they like being invited and courted, they like being named with their academic title, although the academic title has no relevance in Michael School, and they will intimidate you with their knowledge. Any question the audience asks draws an entire anthroposophical compendium of concepts and notions that will magically arrange, like a kaleidoscope, to serve as an eloquent answer. But is this answer true? They suppose it is because they think the combinatory is perfect, that their logic is flawless. Behind this soul attitude lies the spirit of intellectual infatuation.
The other mood was something that we can see as a ‘flower-power’ soul mood. We call it ‘spiritual lust’, although Rudolf Steiner calls it ‘voluptuous bliss.’ It happens in Anthroposophy too, unfortunately, after the flower-power movement and because after Rudolf Steiner’s death, there was no guardian on Earth for the workshops offered in the name Anthroposophy. Distinct from the other group, this group is not so eloquent in knitting brilliant thoughts together, but they have experience in the elementary world: they see and teach how to perceive in Nature. This group gathers many natural clairvoyants, and all proposed exercises presume the participants will trust the person who guides the experience. For instance, one cannot check if they say that three gnomes are in the garden. Most seminars are constructed so the participants try to perceive and characterise something they don’t see. We are not questioning the goodwill of people, but what usually happens is that the participants want to perceive so much, that they induce themselves into all kinds of moods to do that. It’s like one tries to guess the present someone brought them, except this time one has no recompense because one cannot lie to oneself that one sees the present they never received. Developing suggested and unreal imaginations is how one gets closer to the eighth sphere.
We can protect ourselves from decayed Aristotelianism by practicing the esoteric exercises Rudolf Steiner gave without fear. We can protect ourselves from decayed Platonism by studying Anthroposophy systematically and carefully, without sympathy and antipathy. Exercises from Knowledge of the Higher Worlds (GA10) will prevent one from falling into decayed Aristotelianism, provided that one doesn’t apply robotised thinking when reading the exercises in the book. Likewise, Philosophy of Freedom (GA4) will prevent one from falling into mystical thinking and developing one’s passions with esotericism. But if one wants to work at the root of their bias, they must address the political spectre inwardly.
Rudolf Steiner’s creative word is full of living life spirit; it can be felt and seen in the after image, when one reads him. A phenomenological observation we may make is that much of the secondary literature since Rudolf Steiner’s death, the traditional combinatory of the anthroposophical concepts or the so-called ‘alternative’, self-professed ‘clairvoyance’ standing in contradistinction to it, now feels dated and of its time, the 1990s, 2000s and 2010s, and was the subject of the previous article. ‘Occult Science’ is a book that is only a partial rendition of all that might be comprehended and seen in the spirit. Rudolf Steiner emphasises that to do justice to all that is perceived in the spiritual world, one would have to write books like Occult Science continually to accommodate the incredible depth of knowledge of the spiritual world shown once one truly awakens spiritually. This has to be the goal of any spiritual researcher and aspirant for Initiation. It is a training for us in discretion in Anthroposophy, to practice spirit remembrance, to remember we are called to do the same, for that is why Rudolf Steiner gave Anthroposophy to the world that we may each follow and attain the same and so fructify life and human evolution.
Today, when we write about Anthroposophy, we can do it in two ways: either we rise beyond the threshold of death as Initiates and communicate directly from the objectivity of the spiritual facts, or we get through our striving in Anthroposophy glimpses of knowledge for which we need spiritual confirmation. When does one have a spiritual confirmation of a specific research/spiritual thought? It is when the thought (or hypothesis) is lived in the will as an act of knowledge and not merely as a thought. It becomes a spiritual fact, a spiritual deed. So, everything we say, even if we are merely repeating Rudolf Steiner’s words, is up to that point, just a hypothesis. Anthroposophic thoughts become facts or acts of knowledge when we come to live them not as dogmas or subjects of belief but as objective facts in our will. You may wonder, do we need clairvoyance for that? Many times, yes, but not always. Clairvoyance is not a condition for the act of knowledge to happen because intuition can be lived also directly, as a deed of grace, in the absence of imagination and inspiration, although it is different when a spiritual thought is lived clairvoyantly and super-consciously beyond the threshold of knowledge. But one should never mistake imagination and inspiration with intuition, which enlivening a thought in the will refers to as the last step.
In any scientific research, we have hypotheses, experiments, or, in this case, spiritual experience(s) and conclusions. When concluding, we need to decide whether our hypotheses were correct or wrong and generate a statement of knowledge. In spiritual research, the experience is always new, no matter how often repeated, because it doesn’t actually repeat but is lived anew. For instance, I go to work every day, but I don’t repeat the experiences of yesterday because life changes organically. Even if I go to work every day, I will have a new day. The same applies since a spiritual experience is experiencing life from the other side. If it is not just a memory image but an experience, it will each time be new.
When it occurs, the act of knowledge is final; it cannot be changed anymore or brought to another state. This is intuition. Scientific research is always like this: ‘This is where we got so far, based on our previous steps. But this final state will change when another researcher improves the theory.’ In spiritual research, when the act of knowledge occurs, it is final. One will say, ‘Now I know,’ which spiritually is the same with ‘I am.’
In intuition, ‘I know’ = ‘I am.’ Before the unification of the subject of knowledge with oneself, everything is just hypothesis in spiritual research.
The act of knowledge in this case doesn’t support itself on time or, better said, on the creative movement of time, but on the very essence of the I am. The I am in the will is also the only one that achieves a spiritual communication with Michael and Michael School. For clarification, we refer to Michael School as the spiritual schooling that started in the 15th century with a spiritual community founded around the discarnated spirits of Aristotle and Alexander immediately after they entered the spiritual in those incarnations (4th century BC), to which the Platonic spirits (Alain de Lille, Pietro de Compostella, Bernard of Chartres, and others) joined in the 13th century. Today, we refer to Michael School as a karmic spiritual community. Michael teaches his devoted servants directly from the 15th century and plans together the deeds on Earth, schooling that includes humans, elemental spirits and beings of the 3rd hierarchy. So, Michael School is not merely what the Anthroposophists refer to as the teachings of the First Class. These teachings are only a small part translated physically of what is taught in Michael School. In Michael School, the ‘I am’ is also used as a promise, a pledge, or a spiritual contract. Sometimes, ‘I am’ also means ‘I recognise you.’ This might seem strange, but it is so. Some languages still have this remembrance, for instance, the present continuous tense in English (to be + verb + -ing). It is engaging, recognising life with one’s entire existence. Being devoted to the truth requires no swinging between sympathy and antipathy, no politics, exoterically or in one’s soul.
‘The Anthroposophical Society rejects any kind of sectarian activity. Party politics it considers not to be within its task.’
Rudolf Steiner, the 4th statute of the Anthroposophical Society as stated at the Christmas Conference 1923/1924
At Easter 2025, some dramatic new astrological events are breaking into humanity’s lives and global experience. Neptune has moved into Aries, ending the old, and starting a new cycle of 165 years, and Saturn will move into Aries in May 2025. Pluto has ended a sixteen-year transit of Capricorn and will be in Aquarius until 2044. We must clarify the distinction between astrology in its popular form and Astrosophy as seen from the anthroposophical perspective:
‘Consider the human being. We divide him into certain members. In accordance with that memberment which arranges the whole nature and being of man rather from the etheric principle, we divide him, as you know, into physical body, etheric body, sentient body, which last we then bring into relation with sentient soul; after that we have intellectual or mind soul (which the Greeks call soul of force or power), and consciousness or spiritual soul. And then we come to spirit-self, life-spirit and spirit-man. And all these several members reveal themselves to us as forming together a single, relatively independent whole; taken all together, they compose man. But now, the way in which the members are put together to compose man, differs in each single human being. One person will have a little more power and strength in his ether body, and correspondingly less in his physical body; another a little more power in the consciousness soul; and so on. And right in the midst of all these members stands man in his very own individuality, which individuality goes through repeated earth lives and has the task of bringing under control this whole connection of various members, has the task of uniting them, on the principle of freedom, under one individual ordering.
And now let us see how that which comes to man from cosmic realms unites itself with these several members. The influence of the Sun, which works strongly on man as a whole, works strongest of all on the physical body. In connection with the etheric body we find that the strongest influences come from the Moon; in connection with the sentient body it is the influences of Mercury that work with special strength; and in the sentient soul we have the strongest influences of Venus. The strongest influences of Mars serve to help the development of the intellectual or mind soul, and of Jupiter the consciousness or spiritual soul, whilst Saturn brings its influences to bear especially on the spirit self. And the members that have not yet developed in man find their support in Uranus and Neptune—the vagrants, so to speak, among the planets, who attached themselves at a later time to our planetary system. In Uranus and Neptune therefore we shall expect to find planetary influences which, under normal conditions, exert no very strong influence upon the constellation at birth.
Spirit Man – Neptune
Life Spirit – Uranus
Spirit Self – Saturn
Spiritual Soul – Jupiter
Intellectual Soul – Mars
Sentient Soul – Venus
Sentient Body – Mercury
Ether Body – Moon
Physical Body – Sun
Rudolf Steiner, Curative Education, GA 317, 6 July 1924, Dornach
As Saturn transits into Aries, it begins a new cycle with fire to new beginnings. Traditionally Saturn is known as the discipline, the hard taskmaster in life, bringing karmic lessons to awaken to higher spiritual responsibility. The link from Saturn to the Spirit Self shows our need on the spiritual path to grow in consciousness and face trials of knowledge in our biographies. This is a deepening of knowledge and spiritual experience over the threshold we encounter through Jupiter. Neptune in Aries compliments this move, but we should reflect on Neptune’s temptation to dissolve into the fog of mysticism and mirror the collective mind. Neptune in Pisces (2012-2025/6), carried the time of COVID and its aftereffects. Neptune in Aries will show where individual initiative in personal and world history might come but will also raise the fanaticism of messianic cults and divisive polemics. As mankind has crossed the threshold to the spiritual world, those on a spiritual path start to accommodate the outer planets’ effect on their biography.
‘Astrologers still have an inkling of these things for they connect Uranus and Neptune only with those human qualities which transcend the personal, make a man a genius, go beyond the individual personal element—where he is concerned with things that no longer have to do with his personal development. All astrological statements are to this effect. Uranus and Neptune only come into play when a man becomes a genius or strives to transcend the human element, when his organization has the tendency to expand or decay too strongly.’
Rudolf Steiner, Course for Young Doctors – Easter Course, GA 316, 23 April 1924, Dornach
Our observation is that the planets later discovered affect people only through their spiritual connection to world history, with world karma. Being in connection with the world karma doesn’t refer only to the present incarnation, but more to our spiritual, Michaelic identity. Therefore, we must assume that the Michaelites will feel the influences of these planets at the individual level through their connection to the world karma.
So, we see Neptune and Uranus in a horoscope as challenges that must be made conscious for the spiritual aspirant and will mirror on the world stage. Discovered in 1930, Pluto fits with a subhuman, sub nature experience of the fallen ethers of light, sound and life, in the Inner Earth as a stage, so to speak, for how the spiritual student may awaken to their will and their creation of knowledge in life. This mirrors world history in the intensified challenges of the 1930s and the Return of Christ in the Etheric, 1933. The understanding of fallen light as electricity, fallen sound and chemical ether as electromagnetism, and fallen life as the third force linking atomic energy and the vacuum, as seen in CERN, needs to be investigated and intuitively understood concerning the nine layers of the inner earth. Uranus transits through Taurus and into Gemini as of July 2025. We would advise the reader to make notes on how to orient to these outer planets in these coming times, by reflecting on biography over the past two decades according to the outer planets. The last time Uranus transited Taurus into Gemini was in 1941 and transited through Gemini up to 1948, a mirroring of the time we shall enter in July 2025. All the changes to communications and all the deaths, leading from the atomic bombs of Hiroshima and Nagasaki up to the end of World War II and then the founding of the CIA, the United Nations and the transfer of science and technology over from Germany to the USA are covered in this period. Our task is to understand what the years 2019 to 2025 were preparing us for. With Uranus in Gemini, the changes in electromagnetism and the effects of radiation during the COVID years will speed things up for technology, artificial intelligence, medicine, and media, and change in the world for good and ill. The challenge of Ahriman is that we cannot keep up with the pace of change, but this is an illusion (for we can, if we take interest). The challenge of Lucifer is that we are lulled into a wish to remain stuck in our past, unable or unwilling to engage with life because it is all too complicated, overwhelming and requires that we ‘show up’ in life. It is essential, as Rudolf Steiner notes when talking of the outer planets, that we remain conscious of what is impelling us, insinuating us in our will, facilitated by Lucifer and Ahriman, to understand ourselves with a grounded understanding of consciousness on the spiritual path, of Saturn.
What can we expect from Uranus in Gemini (entering July 2025) coming on the back of Uranus in Taurus (2019-2025)?
‘The forces which enable the spiritual to stream down to earth with the aid of positive and negative magnetism come from Gemini; they are the midday forces. In ancient times it was known that cosmic influences were involved in this, and today even exoteric scientists are aware that in some or other way positive and negative magnetism lie behind Gemini in the Zodiac. The aim will be to paralyse all that could be gained through a revelation of the true duality in the cosmos—to paralyse it in a materialistic, egotistic way by means of the forces which stream in particularly from Gemini and can be placed entirely at the service of the human Double.’
Rudolf Steiner, The Wrong and Right Use of Esoteric Knowledge, GA 178, 25 Nevember 1917, Dornach
The Ahrimanic doppelgänger (the Ahrimanic double) is a being who enters the human body shortly before birth and leaves shortly before death. Part of the work we published was the need for an understanding amongst Anthroposophists of the meeting with the Guardian of the Threshold. This work brings an understanding of the Luciferic and Ahrimanic doubles. It is essential to begin to perceive one’s own doppelgänger and to start to see the links between the events of 2020, and the effects on the global scale mirrored and implicated in each person’s individual double. One of the phenomena we may witness in ourselves and others is how the effect of the pandemic leads to an accentuation and intensification of the double, through radiation as a cause of the technological development and technological ‘push’ during lockdowns, through the increased electromagnetic impact on the fields of the earth and around it. We may bring together some other observations, such as cloud seeding and weather modification, and reflect on the seemingly ‘new’, ‘strange’ phenomena of the northern lights reaching over Europe in 2024. We are called to question strange anomalies like this, in the media and our personal lives, karma and health, for example, to recognise that we are outwardly being shown electromagnetic connections between the individual and humanity.
‘I called to your attention last time that the impulse of the Mystery of Golgotha was to be eliminated from the world by introducing another impulse from the West, a kind of Antichrist; from the direction of the East, the Christ impulse, as it appears in the twentieth century, is to be paralyzed by directing the attention, the interest, away from Christ appearing in the etheric.
Those concerned with introducing the Antichrist instead of the Christ have endeavored to exploit what could work especially through the most materialistic forces, yet working spiritually with these materialistic forces. Above all they strive to exploit electricity and especially the earth’s magnetism to have influence over the entire earth. I have shown you how, in what I have called the human double, earthly forces arise. This mystery will be penetrated. It will be an American mystery to make use of the magnetism of the earth in its “doubleness,” to make use of the magnetism in North and South to send guiding forces that work spiritually across the earth. Look at the magnetic map of the earth and compare it with what I am now saying. Observe the course of the line where the magnetic needle swings to East and West and where it does not swing at all. (I can only give indications at this time.) From a certain celestial direction, spiritual beings are constantly at work. One need only put these spiritual beings at the service of earthly existence and, because these spiritual beings working in from the cosmos are able to transmit the mystery of the earth’s magnetism, one can penetrate the mystery of the earth’s magnetism and can bring about something very significant of a group-egotistical nature in relation to the three things, gold, health, and prolonging life. It will simply be a matter of mustering the doubtful courage for these things. This will certainly be done within certain circles!’
Rudolf Steiner, Secret Brotherhoods and the Mystery of the Human Double, GA 178, 25 November 1917, Dornach
Ray Kurzweil is an inventor, futurist, and transhumanist currently working as an advisor and technical director at Google since 2012. He started to announce ‘The Age of Spiritual Machines’ in 1998 (book published in 1999), and ‘Singularity’ in 2011, thus creating the timetable regarding the full merger of the human with artificial intelligence by 2045. We note: one hundred years after the two atomic bomb blasts.
According to Kurzweil (in the recent podcast at the end of the post), the main steps to Transhumanism are:
1. Passing the computers’ Turing test by 2029: Machines can be declared self-conscious during this phase.
2. Merging with a human neocortex starting 2030: During this phase, human memory will be gradually enhanced by Google downloading and nanotechnology.
3. Singularity by 2045: Singularity means that artificial intelligence will be fully merged with human intelligence and will have the autonomy to evolve as a new enhanced being. This being can elude illness and death, and, of course, reincarnation, thus achieving Ahrimanic immortality.
All these steps, and many in between, have been announced by Kurzweil since 1998 and implemented by Google and the other big tech companies as we speak, according to the plan already set (publicly) in 1998. Listen to his interviews or read his books. You will soon understand also that the whole recent pandemic was a preparation for testing the fast computation of RNA sequences needed to create an intelligent machine. For example, in 2011 he said they broke the sequences for HIV and SARS viruses. So, the whole thing was preparation for both points 1. and 2.
In a podcast interview from 2022, Kurzweil reveals, among many other interesting facts regarding transhumanism and the current status of achieving Singularity, that the Moderna vaccine, which was computed with Google and Amazon tools, was ready in only two days. So, we are witnessing in our time Rudolf Steiner’s warnings more than 100 years ago.
Perhaps most importantly, in a Michaelic spirit, we must wake up to the manifold deceptions being played upon the public mind. Just a cursory glance at latitudes of Hiroshima and Nagasaki of 1945, are enough to show a link between the 132nd meridian east and the 48th meridian and the 132nd west, forming a circle of electromagnetic charge, highlighting the need for what Rudolf Steiner described as an understanding of how secret societies have aims beneath the facts of history we are outwardly told. Electromagnetic frequencies guide the paths of birds in nature. It is thus indeed intuitively perceptible that the goal of the new vaccine technologies on a social scale is the influence and takeover of the human will, the direction of biography from outside subliminally, and this is no longer science fiction but is the stated aim and well-funded objective of much of the research into vaccines and media hypnosis and communications technology.
To highlight many concerns about the technological development taking over our lives, like a tsunami, we may reflect on how ChatGPT answers the questions of Anthroposophy. We shall notice that its answers challenge Anthroposophists to stop writing texts that an AI could write in seconds. It is a call for us to recognise the redundancy of the spirit of evangelism in Anthroposophy, and to answer what truly comes from our spiritual creativity. ChatGPT shows that Ahriman speaking through AI can provide nearly everything in terms of ‘expousing’ Anthroposophy. It acts like a mirror to consider the work taken from us, from our I, when what should have been done by our thinking is done by a demon at the click of a button. When one submits their thinking to the know-it-all machine is when the evolution is robbed from them.
None of this is easy if we neglect true interest and study of world events. But a true Michaelite has to hold and ask questions of their relation to Anthroposophy and world history. Only by doing so can we establish a working and conscious relationship to Michael as Time Spirit.
Moving forward, if anthroposophical thinking is to evolve, it requires a new orientation to many things socially, politically, and individually. To be a Michaelite while neglecting to notice or state vital concerns about Michael and Ahriman, phenomenologically, cannot exist side by side.
Any machination implemented in the world by the elites has a base in Ahrimanic imaginations. What is, in fact, an Ahrimanic imagination? It is an imagination that shows not a glimpse into the future, but a glimpse into the 7th layer of the Earth, the Reflector, which shows, among many other things, Ahriman’s intentions. It is an inspiration derived directly from Ahriman’s plans for the future. The 7th layer of the Earth is also a reversed Akashic Chronicle, as it doesn’t show the past, but the future, and not the future according to karma, but to Ahriman’s intentions. In the 7th layer, one can see a future that is not karmically derived from the past, it is an Ahrimanic intention; while in Akasha reading the past one can see the future as the laws of karma demand it. This is something known in the hidden lodges and occultism, in general. In Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings, for instance, Galadriel uses the Mirror to see Sauron’s intentions, but also to trick Frodo into giving her the ring.
Goethe portrayed something else interesting and true about Ahriman/Mephistopheles in Faust: no matter what machination he chooses to execute on the world’s stage through his servants, he must ask for consent. Mephistopheles asked God if he could tempt Faust. As part of evolution, Ahriman must address humans’ consciousness soul directly before going on with his plans, and he has done this, at least from the last century on, in books, movies and music videos. We know from Rudolf Steiner that two books by Nietzsche were written directly by Ahriman. In the 20th century beginning of the 21st, movies were the best opportunities to do this. Now, the possibilities are diverse, such as podcasts, games, VR videos, etc. Many movies we’ve seen in the past were just glimpses of what was realised in the years after.
Today, we live the times of Ahriman’s incarnation and things are entirely in the open. We see all kinds of Ahrimanic imaginations on Netflix (e.g. Black Mirror, imaginations coming directly from the 7th layer of the Earth), all meetings at the WEF are on YouTube, even the 2019 preparation of the COVID situation in 2020, the 2020 preparation of the war in Ukraine in 2022, the 2022 preparing of the dismantling of Ukraine after the war which is now in progress, etc. We were announced years before and we are still surprised by the reality. Why? Because everything he does in the open is occulted by symbols whose only visual mission is to dull consciousness. Sometimes, this is also done by means of music. For instance, reggaeton has the Arabic rhythm Ayoub (or Zar, as known in Upper Egypt) at its base, which is a ceremonial rhythm. Since he clouded human consciousness almost entirely, Ahriman doesn’t have to hide anymore. We can all see his true colors today, but only if we have the Michaelic courage to look and a heartfelt interest in the world around us.
Ahriman, however, has tricked us with the enormous amount of available communications, so it isn’t easy to see where and when he announced an important thing. So, one gets to the information today only through karma. Karma is the one the drives one to a specific piece of information. Therefore, very few make sense of the language the lodges use in these communications. It’s like reading hundreds of notes on a notice board. Chances are that you will never get to the one that interests you or will not understand it.
What keeps us away from the truth is the relationship with our own truth, our own morality. So, it is expected that some will fall, even Anthroposophists, because they will not get to the right information.
One of the phenomena we may witness in ourselves and others is how the effect of the pandemic leads to an accentuation and intensification of the double, through radiation, through the increased electromagnetic impact on the fields of the earth and around it. We may bring together some other observations, such as cloud seeding and weather modification, and reflect on the seemingly ‘new’, ‘strange’ phenomena of the northern lights reaching over Europe. Each of us had to choose how to respond not just to the events of the pandemic, but to bring all these subjects together. Perhaps most importantly, we have to, in a Michaelic spirit, start to wake up to the manifold deceptions being played upon the public mind, and create the knowledge we need to navigate new realities in our personal lives. There is a fantastic scene in ‘The Hobbit’, film based on Tolkien’s book, that relates to the challenge of Ahriman. The dwarves are going through Mirkwood, slowly descending into states of interpersonal conflict, hallucination, and squabbling due to the dark mood of the forest. At some point, Thorin Oakensheild tells the dwarf entourage, ‘Stop, quiet, we are being watched!’ They were being surveilled by spiders, who then wrapped them up in nets. Bilbo escapes to the treetops to see a vista of sunlight and butterflies above the trees. It is recommended for any spiritual student to watch this scene.
Geopolitical events compound each other, and the individual cannot keep up with them. Just before the end of COVID, the next event, the Ukraine war began, in February 2022, to be followed by Israel 2023. Yet we must accustom ourselves to a wider regard of historical events. The 100th anniversary of the Treaty of Versailles is when the pandemic started globally in 2020. This is an essential symptom for us to remember: The Treaty of Versailles is one of the key moments in the occultation of Michael’s rulership, and we have to call to consciousness what this hides from us.
How do we stand individually and karmically amongst all these considerations? The lecture from ‘Karmic Relationships Vol. 3’ describes something underlying all of these reflections.
‘(…)Through the entry of Michael’s dominion in the Michael age in which we live—with the penetration of Michael to earthly rulership, replacing the rulership of Gabriel—Michael himself is bringing the power which is to bring order again into the karma of those who have gone with him. Thus, we may say: What is it in the last resort that unites the Members of the Anthroposophical Society? It is that they are to bring order again into their karma. This unites them. And if any one of them notices in the course of his life that he is entering here or there into relationships that do not conform to his inmost impulse,—relationships, perhaps, diverging in one way or another from what we may call the true harmony in man as between good and evil,—if he has this on the one hand, while on the other hand he has constant impulse to press forward in the Anthroposophical life,—the fact is that such a man is striving back again to his real karma. He is striving once more to live and express the real karma. This cosmic ray pours through the Anthroposophical Movement, clearly perceptible to him who knows. It is the restoration of the truth in karma.’
Rudolf Steiner, Karmic Relationships III, GA 237, 8 August 1924, Dornach
There is a distinction between ‘real’ and ‘deceptive’ in life and it relates to how people are interlinked through anthroposophy and world history. As we discussed before regarding an ‘endowment’ for spiritual and anthroposophical creative work in the world, it brings us the Royal Social Art as a legacy Rudolf Steiner left us. Ahriman uses superficial slogans to guide world history in the media: such as ‘sustainability,’ ‘mental health’, ‘gender’ and ‘transgender’, ‘transparency’ and ‘streamlining’ and ‘optimisation’ of all things economic and all things psychological to serve a system ruled by him alone. As opposed to all this, we should represent creative artistic anthroposophical work in the world. We need to recognise that the unconscious materialism of the spirit working in the feeling life through Ahriman encourages us to rest content with superficial intellectual explanation of material and spiritual life. Consecutively, we construct a ‘sham’ of ideas as a justification to protect ourselves from what in our unconscious life actually trembles.
‘If one fills the soul with something that afterward proves to be like a dream in its illusory character, and one experiences the illusory in its true nature, then one becomes stronger in one’s own experience of self. In confronting a dream, one’s thinking corrects the belief one has in the dream’s reality while dreaming. Concerning the activity of fantasy, this correction is not needed because one did not have this belief. Concerning the meditative soul activity, to which one devotes oneself for spirit-knowledge, one cannot be satisfied with mere thought correction. One must correct by experiencing. One must first create the illusory thinking with one’s activity and then extinguish it by a different, equally strong, activity.
(…) The denial of the spiritual world is a desire to run away from one’s own soul. This, however, represents an impossibility. One must remain with oneself. And because one may run away but not escape from oneself, one takes care that in running one loses sight of oneself. It is the same with the entire human being in the soul realm, however, as it is with the eye with a cataract. The eye can then no longer see. It is darkened within itself.
(…)‘Thus one is ultimately led to the inner spiritual strength of the soul when one is willing to see the justification of spirit knowledge. And the way to such a knowledge can be had only through the strengthening of the soul. The meditative activity, preparing the soul for spirit knowledge, is a gradual conquest of the soul’s “fear of the void.” This void, however, is only a “void of nature,” in which the “fullness of the spirit” can manifest itself if one wishes to take hold of it.
Rudolf Steiner, On the Life of the Soul, GA 36, Lecture ‘The Human Soul in Courage and Fear’, no date or town, 1923
At Easter, we may take our orientation to this resurrection form illusion from the Gospel of John. On the path to awakening to the initiate’s consciousness of the Mystery of Golgotha, we are as Peter to Christ, seeking to understand, and evolve beyond what we formerly failed know and see. After the crucifixion, after Mary Magdalene arrives, Peter and John have arrived to behold the tomb empty, and we have here a depiction of the void of the missing body and three ways of beholding it: Mary sees two angels at the feet and the head. In contrast, John and Peter arrive as later companions. John and Mary, the ‘beloved’ with initiate’s consciousness and the disciple’s consciousness, of he or she who shall be ‘beloved’ once they have attained initiation.
Lazarus-John has been raised from the dead and initiated by Christ in the new way, out in life rather than in the sanctuaries of the mysteries. With the courage to ask Michael questions, to die in Christ to the illusory, we may learn to open up to the many mysteries of life surrounding us: living in our experience, in places where before we thought there was only darkness, we may find a new creativity in spirit knowledge. Here are mysteries of human friendship and the karma of a Michaelic spiritual community. Peter asks Christ of John, and Christ refers to John as he who shall ‘tarry until I come’: ‘what is that to thee?’ that is, until Christ returns in the etheric, how do we, and how we should relate to this experience and work with it. This is reference to our time, collectively for all humanity. Peter asks John to ask Christ about the identity of the betrayal (John 13:24), and then he asks again Christ but this time directly about John, with no intermediary (John 21:20), after the Risen Christ initiated him. Peter has now experienced his own initiation, so now, he asks of John’s destiny. John and Peter are like two pillars, before death, and after resurrection drawing a new collective initiation path from Peter to John. In this, we have a reminder of the path to initiation: it is an interrelationship between initiates to a community of disciples, for each is connected to the awakening of the other in different degrees according to karma. Peter and the disciples at the Sea of Galilee experience that the betrayal of life to the illusory through the act of Judas, now transforms, and what was formerly void is now full of spiritual life:
‘And he said unto them, Cast the net on the right side of the ship, and ye shall find. They cast therefore, and now they were not able to draw it for the multitude of fishes.’ (John 21:6).
I wanted to write something with the occasion of Rudolf Steiner’s 100 years commemoration and the Voice of Conscience stopped me by asking: “What could you possibly say that wasn’t said before in these 100 years? What newness can you bring with yourself, from your own creativity, efforts and processes of life”? I had to long reflect on this question as this is the most important question, and it currently challenges my entire life. “Are you able to “create”, to really create out of Anthroposophy?” Maybe one thing I could have said then that I haven’t heard before is regarding the relationship between the cosmic personality of Aristotle – Thomas D’Aquino – Rudolf Steiner and John – Christian Rozenkreutz – Saint Germain (Master CR). I would have said that this relation is in its own nature similar to the relation between the eternal personality of Jeshua ben Pandira and Master Buddha. This is really something to reflect on: the cosmic role of the one who was once Rudolf Steiner as a candidate to becoming a new Bodhisattva.
But the thoughts piercing my heart each time are the thoughts of the destruction of the Anthroposophical Society that went loose after Rudolf Steiner’s death. In a sense, when Rudolf Steiner left the Earth, he took Anthroposophia with him in the Spiritual World and the Anthroposophical Society in his grave.
At the beginning of the year, I read “Ita Wegman and Anthroposophy. A conversation with Emanuel Zeylmans” (2012) by Wolfgang Weirauch. In this book-interview, Zeylmans offers other details about Ita Wegman’s biography (“Who was Ita Wegman?” Vol. 1-4) and also about his own biography as the biographer of both Ita Wegman and his father, how he struggled to write the Ita Wegman biography, how he begged for the sources to different Anthroposophists keeping things in their homes under silence and protecting letters, journals, etc. I only borrowed the book and had to send it back shortly, so I do not have the exact quotations/references; therefore, you need to read the book yourself to get beyond my interpretations or failings in exact memory.
But there are some things that stayed with me from that book, to which I would like to add others regarding the tragic history of the Anthroposophical Society and to offer some reflections that I hope you can find new. One of the most incredible things Zeylmans observed is that he wrote his father’s (Willem Zeylmans van Emmichoven) biography in 3 months and Ita Wegman’s biography in 12 years. When I read that, my mind started to make a comparison between an old soul and a young soul, a complex biography full of riddles and a biography clear to one’s eyes. Yes, there are together in the Anthroposophical Society old souls and younger souls. Sometimes, it is impossible to differentiate between them, and the only thing actually helping is the observation that some events of life can be interpreted simply and others are hidden, occulted, and rather complex. Simplicity of life itself, simplicity in the sense of the possibility of interpreting one’s life events in a liniar manner (not simplicity of their soul or spirit), is a form of recognising younger souls. Older souls are complex in karmic events and exterior dramas, and younger souls are complex innerly, in personal dramas.
The second is related to the soap opera, according to which Marie Steiner and Ita Wegman reconciliated before their deaths, thus saving the karma of the Anthroposophical Society. Sergej Prokofieff himself suggested that in his early book, The Occult Meaning of Forgiveness, but to his defence I must say that when he wrote the book, the Goetheanum hadn’t opened for public many of the things that could only be opened after some important personalities passed the threshold. Yes, after the war, people sealed the spoken words with silence and hid the written words under the bed. Mysticism veiled the lives of old Anthroposophists. Both Ita Wegman and Marie Steiner had devoted people around them, people who venerated the Initiate and Teacher, Rudolf Steiner, and who couldn’t cope with his loss. These people who, due to their own spiritual insufficiencies, were not ready to find spiritual independence within Anthroposophy (to stand on their own feet, so to speak), turned to the members of the Council and projected all the devotion they gave in the past to Rudolf Steiner on these personalities who were not Initiates. Therefore, each one of the members of the Council ended up with masses of supporters, and when they went against each other, spiritual wars started. This breaking of the walls of the spiritual vase they were supposed to protect, the spiritual core of the Movement united with the Anthroposophical Society, the Council, allowed the infiltration of the Nazis into the Anthroposophical Society. Thus, from 1933 to 1935 and onwards, active Nazis were already put in the positions to destabilise the Anthroposophical Society and to be fair, they didn’t even have to do much because most of the work was already done by the hatred of each other.
It is only recently that people started to observe and call these things out. For instance, Peter Selg following Uwe Werner observed this in some of his books, such as “Spiritual Resistance. Ita Wegman 1933-1935”. From Peter Selg and Uwe Werner, we find out about the actions of Roman Boos. This man wrote, with Marie Steiner’s approval, an Arian biography of Rudolf Steiner, and his lectures focused on decontextualising Anthroposophy to fit the Nazi agenda were attended by the National Socialist Party’s chief justice. His “work” is one of the reasons why even today people outside Anthroposophy, without throughoutly studing Anthroposophy, think Rudolf Steiner was a Nazi although Rudolf Steiner died in 1925 and his Michaelic cosmopolitanism beats the cosmopolitanism of any of the most modern and democratic people of today. It was Roman Boos the one who wrote the longest letter against Ita Wegman and read it at the General Meeting in 1934, the famous General Meeting that was a preamble to the exclusion of the two members of the Council and the two national branches.
Roman Boos accused Ita Wegman and her circles of “anal mysticism” and “anal esotericism.” Here, I would like to point out something: When someone speaks, and moreover when they write, there is their normal voice that is reproduced again in the audience. But sometimes, like in Lord of the Rings, as well as in the Mystery Dramas, another voice can be heard, although not by everyone, of whom the speaker is unaware. This is the voice of Ahriman. Ahriman takes the discourse as the double voice. In this particular case, through the voice of the Nazi enthusiast Roman Boos, the double voice hinted at Rudolf Steiner’s hemorrhoidal disease before his death and at his doctor (many thanks to Richard Cooper for his diligent observation). Ahriman was mocking Rudolf Steiner’s death, and so many of his faithful disciples, including his life companion, didn’t recognise it.
Everything that happened in the Anthroposophical Society in 1933-1935 was working precisely after a Nazi agenda. The result was that the opponent nationalities and races were removed from the Anthroposophical Society, although always invoking other reasons. Emmichoven believed that the Memorandum that led to the expulsion was written by Ahriman himself. He had to observe, however, that this was done with the participation of the other three members of the Council.
Returning to the famous letters, the real story Emmichoven reports is this: After Marie Steiner published the call for forgiveness in 1943, a copy of the publication was handed to Ita Wegman with the suggestion that Marie Steiner hinted directly at her. In her heart, Ita Wegman wanted to believe that, in her lucid mind, however, the facts were just not there. So she was reluctant to write back in the beginning. In this time, because karma always has another agenda, she received a letter from a member who previously voted for her expulsion, now asking for her forgiveness. When receiving this letter, she decided to write back to Marie Steiner. Now, Emmichoven refrained in the official biography of Ita Wegman from also writing about Marie Steiner’s reaction to the letter. There, he only refers to Ita Wegman’s reaction to Marie Steiner’s article. However, in this interview, he says that according to witnesses, when receiving the letter, Marie Steiner had said nervously: “This Wegman never understood anything!” And when she received the news of Ita Wegman’s death shortly after, she was shocked.
The shocking death of one’s opponent in Anthroposophy is something karmic that deserves the highest attention. Previously to Marie Steiner – Ita Wegman saga, it happened to Walter Johannes Stein in relation to Carl Unger. Imagine this: One day, you storm against a man, your opponent, the next day he gets shot to death. Shocking, no? We must never suppose that one has sentenced the other to death occultly because this way, we create a fake causality between life events. But we can observe that if no real reconciliation intervenes in the time approved by karma, one of the two is simply “called up” by the higher Michaelic council. Also, we must not interpret the death that occurred as righteous, meaning that it doesn’t mean that this is proof that Ita Wegman or Carl Unger just because they died immediately were righteous. The reality is that when this happens, both parties trigger their death, and it is not important who dies first. They both had already jeopardised their higher mission on Earth whenever this happened. I could observe this in the last years with examples around me. Yes, we can trigger each other’s death by not solving the karma of our conflict. It happens when karma binds two people by hate, and it’s only solved when both of them unbind the old and form a new connection. As Michaelites, we are called to bring justice in our karma. When we fail to do this, we wander on Earth without actually living. It is my impression that this was Marie Steiner’s case after 1943, and Emmichoven thinks that she was removed from the Michaelic esoteric council.
And this, my friends, was Ahriman’s mockery to Rudolf Steiner’s death, the fact that the closest disciples and collaborators of the eternal individuality of Aristotle – Thomas D’Aquino – Rudolf Steiner, couldn’t do by the end of their lives what stays today at the core of a Michaelic life: restauring one’s karma by bringing justice to karmic relations.
