She was Love. Then Transformation. Then a Demon. The sculpture never changed. Suddenly, life can flip its meaning. New perspective comes. Something changes. With Venus Retrograde in Scorpio. Maybe it’s stagnancy that now goes. A door to the spiritual that opens—one that before felt closed. A life that was never fully paid. A karma sensed, but never explicitly seen?

In these last letters, we have identified the need for a far more conscious relationship with Lucifer. We identified Status Envy as our generation’s curse. I, for one, would not wish to diminish for one second the impulses and insights that come from interaction on these platforms. When this incessant digital diet of dopamine and digital images seems so precarious; What price do we pay, and how can we value this life anew?

Luke 11:24–26, describes a spiritual “vacuum” that happens when a person is only seemingly “cleansed”, living in an outwardly conventional “good way”, and yet fails to fill their life with purpose for something more dynamically positive.

“When an impure spirit comes out of a person, it goes through arid places seeking rest and does not find it. Then it says, ‘I will return to the house I left.’ When it arrives, it finds the house unoccupied, swept clean and put in order. Then it goes and takes with it seven other spirits more wicked than itself, and they go in and live there. And the final condition of that person is worse than the first.”

Rudolf Steiner speaks of these “seven other spirits more wicked than itself (…) because the soul is now possessed by a far more systematic and hidden form of evil.”— Rudolf Steiner, From Jesus to Christ (Lecture VII, 1911)

The goddess of Venus is the ultimate Gatekeeper of these questions. With Venus in retrograde, in Scorpio, a secret, revealed by the house it transits in your birth chart, is gestating beneath conscious awareness in the soul. This secret is spiritual, whispering through these still months and carrying something important for your life’s purpose. This we may well have intuited.

But this will be the final Scorpio Venus Star Point of our lifetime. And my question is: do we yet understand the spiritual challenge of our time; Does the Venus Scorpio goddess yet speak in a way we can properly follow and comprehend?

If the current direction remains obscured, retrace the house transit in your chart. Compare the last 5 Venus retrograde Star Points and check for past reflections of the 8-year cycle.

The Shape of the Threshold

The image of the goddess Ishtar helps us work with Venus as the Scorpionic goddess of the spiritual threshold. Like a Gatekeper to the spiritual world.

I will ask you one question here, metaphorically, from Lucifer; and one from Ahriman.

I want to pose to you Lucifer’s question first, hidden in the folds of status anxiety and envy:

·      “Have you measured the parts of yourself that you need to unlock; the parts of you that refuse to acknowledge not only the challenges of thinking in the digital age; but action in it?”

And while this is fermenting, I would like to pose Ahriman’s question to you:

·      “Have you seen how your habitual intellectual musing hardens into a kind of socio-karmic prison, maintained by your identification of intellect as the only measure of life?”

Once we know the stakes Lucifer and Ahriman have pitched, we have to rise to greet the goddess and speak with her. The goddess, with her black, time-worn eyes. Look first to the beige stone image. You will see each aspect of thinking, feeling, and willing is duplicated symmetrically like a mirror. The thinking part, the owls, is the head that takes flight in the spiritual world; the lions are the elemental power that centers the I around the heart; and the measuring rods are the tasks of life the goddess holds until we are ready. This is the spiritual, karmic task for this life. They call them “measuring rods” that the goddess holds.

The Lesser Guardian of the Threshold

Now look to the superimposed image. The goddess as she once was painted: red and white. Ancient Venus mythology mirrors this Scorpionic journey into the underworld and her resurrection. During the descent, Inanna sheds jewelry, status, and every familiar symbol of identity In these 40 days of the retrograde, the goddess enters this Scorpio descent. We have a symbolic personal meeting with the Lesser Guardian of the Threshold.

Seen anthroposophically, this goddess, Venus in Scorpio retrograde, is our sentient body. We can reflect on Mary Magdalene as a source for how these seven layers are overcome:

• External Status: weighing emotion according to worldly visibility
• Voice Expression: weighing influence by the control of others
• Subjective Interpretation: weighing events in relation to an abstract self
• Charming Outer Life: weighing status by the use of polarity
• The Appearance of Dignity: weighing ideals by model pictures of goodness
• The Powerful Rhetoric: weighing power by cleverness
• Bodily Defense: The maintenance of comfort over transformative life force

They are less a contemplation on Mary Magdalene as a scarlet woman of “sin” traditionally as in the church. Rather, the prostitution needs to be seen esoterically. Astrally (the scarlet we note is the moral contradistinction to white we see in the Burnley Relief image of Ishtar/Venus):

With each layer we pass through, the seven chakras of the etheric body, nourished by this sentient part of the astral body, are released and transformed as the journey continues. By the end of October 2026, this process will be mirrored collectively. This means fully realizing a task for humanity—not just a subjective one, but a karmic life task. Each of the above can be replaced with a more natural, organic, and honest etheric counter force.

The shadow, the lower Guardian of the Threshold, is what normally runs your life choices. The traits in others that disturb you most are the very ones you need to own. Unconscious wounds are dark. Isolation, however it expresses itself, is there for us to dwell on these dynamics. These are often uncomfortable mysteries. Because suppressed karmic purpose turns toxic.

My question is this: Is there a poison we have all unconsciously eaten of in our society. A curse that renders the spiritual silent?

What would you call it if you had to essentialize it?

The Stagnation of Consciousness: The Geometry of Matthew 8

In Matthew 8, Christ comes down from the mountain—a profound picture of the spirit incarnating into dense earthly matter. Yet, as he enters the town, we see how the opposing spirits of life lame the consciousness of those who have grown sleepy to the spirit.

It’s worth reading the whole Matthew 8 chapter in connection with this work. Consider what any true impulse can do for any affliction of the I, astral body, etheric, or physical body.

• The physically sick, utterly depleted by the relentless friction of materialism.
• The etherically sick, denying their own hidden attachments to comfort and safety.
• The astrally sick, paralyzed and unable to claim their true life task.
• The sleeping “I”, lacking even the basic faculty to recognize the spiritual world.

This Venus Retrograde is our collective Matthew 8 moment. The descent into an underworld. It demands that we strip away the familiar patterns we use to justify our desires. In spiritual circles, these blockages manifest clearly. We see dynamic spiritual impulses reduced to a consumer village mentality—where people are too tethered to property, funds and social status to even know what a radical impulse for the world might require or look like. Yet Christ in Matthew 8 shows: spiritual power over all life

Jesus Calms the Storm (Matthew 8:26): “You of little faith,” Jesus replied, “why are you so afraid?” Then He got up and rebuked the winds and the sea, and it was perfectly calm.

This verse comes in the middle to help show that there is no affliction of the body, karma, or society that cannot be transformed, because, properly understood, Christ is exemplifying power even over the sentient body, the most visible of the bodies to the human senses.

And because of this: in Mathew 8, Christ shows the Centurion with the “greatest faith”; the most radical form of comprehension of this mystery, of healing at a distance, is by the power of the Word, precisely because the Centurion did not look to secure his own worthiness; he looked to his role, his task. He looked purely at what was needed to serve the life before him. It shows Christ may work into the very deepest aspects and makeup of matter, even the most hardened Romanized forms of social life. That one might think were sealed off to Christ’s power.

Holding Patterns of Fear & Hidden Life Tasks

Most karmic patterns are maintained by one form of Fear or another. Such fears can be debilitating to the karmic life task. They create various degrees of confusion. They maintain hypervigilance about how one is seen; worry about whether God and the spiritual may really provide for one’s material life; and defensiveness, as the desire to protect oneself from earthly matter. Silent social envy and status anxiety.

• Fear of Man;
• Fear of Circumstance;
• Fear of Contamination

And not to play those games is deemed “foolish”. Once the body as much as the social order, can be seen from outside with Christ, our lives are not bound to appease the dictates of convention. True creative life may then arise.

“If Lucifer is the True Christ, and Ahriman is the Karma of Lucifer; then Ahriman is the New Christ; Because Christ is the True Lord of Karma.” @Tom Mellet

A truth lies in this statement. It is helpful to all our economics newsletters here. Rudolf Steiner prophesied that in our time anthroposophy would become Ahrimanised. But this is often misinterpreted as meaning we should reject and defend against technology and media. But no, this would be to not really fathom what is being said esoterically.

Attributed to the Koberwitz agriculture course, Countess von Keyserlingk asked Rudolf Steiner the following in 1924:

“Humanity has gone very badly astray, hasn’t it?”

Steiner replied: “Yes, one can certainly say that.”

She then asked: “But what, then, is to become of humanity at the end of the century?” (meaning our time)

And according to the account that has been handed down, Steiner replied “in a tone of despair”: “I don’t know either — but Ahriman, too, is a part of Christ.”

“The Journey to Byzantium — The Palladium of the Victory” (Die Reisen ach Byzanz – Das Palladium des Seiges) Johanna von Keyserling (published post-mortem, often attributed to her estate or edited by M. von Miltitz).

The possibility of a new occult geometry – seeing an etheric counterspace hidden in a digital matrix – is what we are showing in these articles through bringing together economics with star work and biographical karma work. Matthew 8 reveals the geometry of karmic social life and its transformation. It maps a path from the depths of matter to Christ’s work within them.

Venus retrograde in Scorpio shines a light on this precise part of the Bible. It highlights how the four bodies reflect karmic dynamics and link to initiation. The whole chapter, Matthew 8, is a meditation not only on Scorpio but also on the social aesthetics of karmic work. In any dark night of the soul, or trial of karmic destiny, we should recall Job’s lesson alongside Matthew 8.

“And the Lord turned the captivity of Job, when he prayed for his friends: also the Lord gave Job twice as much as he had before.” (Job 42:10)

A Model of Biography: The 11th House Challenge

Rudolf Steiner heralded for us with the Mystery Dramas and his own personal karma a social task for anthroposophy. With Pluto in Aquarius until 2044, this generational, silent “Curse of Envy” will reveal its inverse hidden gift. The first stage is our personal, subjective life challenges that often conceal our true-life karma and trial of destiny.

Let me be transparent and model a process everyone can do by looking at the house placement of the Venus retrograde transit. Mine is in the 11th House, Aquarius, my relation to peers and the group and wider social impulses. You’ll see that, for me, anthroposophy is a manifestation of Uranus conjunct my Midheaven in the 11th house (traditionally ruled by Aquarius; in my natal chart, and from 1972 to 1984, in Libra), and it trines Venus in my 3rd House. So this sense of working within an anthroposophical community has always been my life task, so to speak. But it lay concealed within my more materialistic life path.

How did it lie there, unseen at first?

For over 14 years, I worked in a language school, working with all kinds of people from all over the world, including corporate banks, law firms, tech companies, artists, and pharmaceutical companies. A fully Aquarian social impulse, one might say. And, because I was there so long, I became somewhat senior in the company. And I slowly gained a kind of subcultural power, through my role teaching and training teachers: to the somewhat begrudging indifference of my managing superiors.

When and emotionally management introduced zero-hour contracts, they structured a system that favored transient staff over the more experienced educators. It was a silent economic exclusion designed to force senior teachers out. Thrust into this dynamic, I became a leader in an institutional civil war—the direct activation of my Uranus on the Midheaven.

And this is the challenge of the Venus Scorpio retrograde transit of the 11th House: to carry a socio-spiritual impulse in a Uranian and Scorpionic way—requires social tact.

But more deeply, it is courage to walk an uncompromising path; to model something new, where spiritual life and indeed moral earthly life is not hidden or made mute in conformity.

The Meditation of the Owls, Lions, and Rods

RS “The third portal that one must pass through is the Portal of the Sun. And there we must, when we reach this portal, undergo yet another experience. At the Portal of Death, we perceive a winged angel’s head; at the Portal of the Elements, we perceive a lion; at the Portal of the Sun, we must perceive a dragon, a fierce dragon. And this fierce dragon we must truly perceive. But now Lucifer and Ahriman together try to make it imperceptible to our spiritual vision.” Rudolf Steiner, Esoteric Development, GA 157, 2 March 1915, Berlin, The Three Decisions on the Path of Imaginative Cognition: Loneliness, Fear, Dread

When we seek to understand this threshold experience through meditation, we confront what Steiner described as the three decisions on the path of imaginative cognition:

Loneliness, Fear, and Dread.

The Ishtar relief was originally painted in stark white and red.

One may take this image as a kind of meditation on observing yourself spiritually.

Look to the body of red to the right. With an inner spiritual experience of “red”, it holds us awake and conscious, ready for meditation. And then we notice white, like an etheric blank canvas. We still our mood in Peace. Notice the balance of red and white. Appreciate it. Now, look at the two owls. They are not completely identical. Yet, they are symmetrical and linked to each other. They are still independent beings.

In meditation, I saw these two owls as my I in the spiritual world, “watching” my own thinking. This “watching” forms a duplicate copy, giving you an awareness of your existence as two separate beings of thinking. This experience brings Loneliness, because you are as if dead to the physical body—creating reality out of pure thinking while carrying your life and feeling just a breath away below you. As Steiner describes in the above lecture, Lucifer habitually hides in this experience of the winged head of thinking.

Our feeling life responds directly to such a thinking exercise. We watch that too. it generates Fear and Dread. It creates two responses in the ego, mirrored by the two lions at Ishtar’s feet.

Ahriman hides our subtle egoism—the prideful feeling that the spiritual world exists merely to serve our personal patterns of thinking and feeling. We rarely check how thoroughly we permeate the spiritual world with our own self-experience. Like a lion’s roar of dominance extending out all around.

To feel free, to experience it, I had to take a third standpoint, refusing to over-identify with either owl’s thinking, or either duplicate feeling stream exclusively, and let both content streams fully die by observing their isolation from the wider standpoint of myself, my I in the spiritual world beyond.

Finally, look now to the relief’s third duplicated image: the two measuring rods held firmly in Ishtar’s hands. This is the realm of the Will—the ultimate staging ground where Lucifer and Ahriman test the soul simultaneously.

When we return from the spiritual world to normal life, a veil of forgetfulness instantly falls over our experiences. We often trip over the threshold, misjudging what occurred in one of two ways: we either dismiss spiritual experiences as inconsequential, or we worship our experiences and insights by holding them up to ourselves as insights to repeat, consolidating them instead of moving out wider to gain another spiritual perspective and context, and to patiently wait.

Both such false paths invite an Ahrimanic hallucination—either tinged by self-doubt, claiming “I have seen nothing” when we actually we have known a wider context, or insisting “I am able to explain everything” when we cannot; and we are still clearly dealing with preliminaries of the reflexivity of the I; still not fully grasping the cognitive process of creativity. We end up taking one-off experiences as things to remember and care for, and so make them idols to ourselves. In his exemplary side lectures on the life of the soul, Steiner importantly describes the problem of “sham logic” that focuses exclusively on refining the cognitive process of the soul:

“Whoever has learned to move cognitively in the spirit often sees in the refutations of this knowledge its strongest evidence; for it becomes clear to him how in the soul, step by step, the refuter chokes down his fear of the spirit, and how in choking it he creates this sham logic.” Rudolf Steiner, On the Life of the Soul, GA 36, IV. The Human Soul in Courage and Fear

The threshold always seems impenetrable. Yet every time we enter the spiritual world through meditation, at some point we have to progress by consciously picturing that very feeling of impossibility. Reflexivity here means we must imaginatively create the very block itself in consciousness to overcome it. When you recognize this blocking mechanism as an activity of your own I, you break through.

How do these inner trials and tests of cognition manifest in life?

When I do these exercises, looking at my own biography and working imaginatively with these thoughts, I see the fallen, materialistic veil of my karmic task. This is one copy-duplicate. For me it was leading something like an insurrection at a corporate company. Now, when I try to comprehend and envisage the “true task,” I get a second duplicate. This was my 2018 lesson. The rejection of that role. But this is still not actively positive. The life body, the etheric, has to ripen for you to see the true dynamic karmic task. The Venus retrograde cycle takes 8 years to return.

If consciousness does not achieve reflexive self-knowledge, karma holds sway.

Socio-Spiritual Choreography

October 25 of 2026 shows an interesting example of Venus in the anaretic degree of Libra, the sign she rules. 29 degrees is where a sign’s lessons culminate.

Libra, ruled by Venus, is the sign where, macrocosmically, etheric light appears in karmic binds and links. Venus backs into Libra just after the midpoint of the 40-day, 2026 retrograde. She remains concealed in the Sun’s glare through the final days of October, then is reborn as the Morning Star. One part of spiritual awakening is seeing bodies and physical reality from the inside out; time becomes space to move in. The things said, the patterns established, and the unspoken methods by which two people create spiritual power between them can be read spiritually—not in our sensual way, but with moral color, sight, and sounds.

In Matthew 8, we could say the presence of Christ is found right there where a new life path is acknowledged.

When we speak of the initiation process going through Crisis, Delay, Silence, and Destruction, we are looking at the strength needed to walk the path with Christ in our times. The retrograde can change the way a new karmic life task reaches you.

With experience of the spiritual world, what is felt as “Safe” emerges in a new definition; perhaps as “Stuck”; and what was felt previously as “Unforeseeable” might be seen as a “Clear and New Way Forward”.

Consider this: After the crucifixion, Mary and Lazarus John continue their work in Ephesus. Mary Magdalene and Joseph of Arimathea go north to present-day France and Britain. Karma receives a new impulse. During this Venus retrograde, as the whole process mirrors the Crown of Thorns and the Crucifixion, a life plan may still be tied to a particular person or outcome, though the deeper wish and actual task can become clearer through this Venus retrograde journey.

Know your 8-year lesson emerging

There is a temptation to Ahrimanically squeeze lessons out of this Venus retrograde time; to make spiritual life clarify everything before any change is even felt. The Luciferic test is to, as always, pass by and not engage; to melt back into the usual responses. New insight comes from new reflection on any new content, then comes rest, then digestion, then new action.

See the duplicate copies of your thinking in meditation; let them be lame just as they are. See the doubles of your feelings. Let them be sick too. They are often empty and fake, masking true impulses. Let the death process remove them completely. Then see the life task you took on in biography and character. And whether it fits going forward.

Venus last traveled retrograde through this Scorpio–Libra territory during October and November 2018. The eight-year cycle is a chance to recognize the lesson the earlier chapter was trying to teach (reflected through the five Star Point dates of the last five Venus retrogrades – see previous letters). An old dynamic can return. And essentially, it will pose the two questions of Lucifer and Ahriman we viewed at the start.

“The farther we descend into the depths of our own life and allow our feelings to resound with our experiences of the outer world, the more we cut ourselves off from universal being. A true individuality will be the one who reaches up with his feelings to the farthest possible extent into the region of the ideal.“ — Rudolf Steiner, The Philosophy of Freedom (GA 4)

Is part of you still lost? Venus remains retrograde in Libra until November 13. Earlier feelings, connections, and decisions may look different in light of the wisdom you’ve gained since October began, especially when familiar dynamics return. Your response might surprise you. Let it. Venus stays in Libra until December 4. Venus’s return to Scorpio matters. This December, Scorpio will welcome back a Venus who has traveled through the underworld.

What new path in life does this way come?

Mercury goes retrograde on November 4. The lens above includes how the sentient body, through astronomical Venus, relates to Occult Mercury, and how the two flip. I have begun exploring their relation to the Resurrection Body more thoroughly in previous Patreon articles.

We have to wait for all these date stamps to complete and light up. And this is one of the greatest esoteric lessons: to learn awe and reverence for divine timing. The deepest occultism is love of the stars, combined with an occult understanding of the mysteries of the sense world, because only they can chart the paths into the depths of matter.

Scorpio is the sign of the initiation chamber; its dynamism, as a worldview, speaks of the most dangerous transformations: encountering death. Instead of an unconscious Lucifer and Ahriman, when we behold them and work with them spiritually, we see the sentient body and the sentient soul act as a door to the etheric world. These are not abstractions but when slowly understood, templates for all and anyone to make specific to themselves.

Our impulse here with anthroposophy does not disengage. Our generation’s task is the overcoming the Ahrimanic hypnosis of our times. The last two letters were about the silent curse of envy. Through these reflections, we are growing into something we might be much more enthusiastic about than that. We are imagining a way of life after our societal curse has lifted. Once we truly appreciate the stars, we see a beautiful etheric world full of order and harmony: that tells us something indelibly rich.

The goddess and the stars are silent only when we are passive. When we are active, we speak the karmic task we decide to carry creatively back to them.

A true taking hold of karma toward freedom; may create new coordinates. This is what lights up any time-limited experience of only darkness.

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Note to lead thumbnail Image: The Burnley Relief Ishtar association and the association of Lilith with owls in later Jewish literature such as the Songs of the Sage (1st century BCE) and Babylonian Talmud (5th century CE) is derived from a reference to a liliyth among a list of wilderness birds and animals in Isaiah (7th century BCE):

An interesting alternative ESV to verse 13:

Isaiah 34:13 Thorns shall grow over its strongholds, nettles and thistles in its fortresses. It shall be the haunt of jackals, an abode for ostriches. 14 And wild animals shall meet with hyenas; the wild goat shall cry to his fellow; indeed, there the night bird (lilit or lilith) settles and finds for herself a resting place. 15 There the owl nests and lays and hatches and gathers her young in her shadow; indeed, there the hawks are gathered, each one with her mate. (ESV)

Richard Cooper

Mysticism is ruled by Venus, the somatic feelings of the Spirit in the body, but it is also Art.

In the modern world, life regresses outwardly due to materialism. Its archetype is the Colosseum and the Gladiator on stage. Our social media world focuses on life’s spectacle. This is unprecedented in human history: selfies, videos, memes. Before the greatest spectacle of all time, in art history, in all learning, was Christ on the Cross. But inwardly now the spectacle is You. We don’t have battles to fight or lions to slay before the Roman elite. You have social media. This is the safely curated world that keeps the masses dull and herded. Our world is for us to live in envy of others. Through that envious gaze, hierarchies of power are established.

This is the first step of spiritually waking up. In the image (in the video I did: see Anthroposophicum Page), it shows you; Step 1. The Gaze of Envy. Everything we see through the sentient body is the gods’ will activity in the spiritual world. Step 2 is realizing you perform for yourself as much as for the spiritual world, and you unconsciously project yourself onto others. In a hypnotized society, you are constantly positioning yourself to be either safe or hidden: performing or exposed, from other people and from the spiritual world. You are scared to lose a life that is never really alive at all. Step 3, means realizing you can be free of the body and still live. To do this, you have to separate yourself from your body. This is the purpose of our studies, our meditations. The path of initiation into living in this spiritual world without dying, yet living, in Christ in this time is what we shall go deeper into here:

We were plugged in at an early age. All of us. Mums and dads too. They effectively sold a new world on the screen and through our ears. The 1980s, 90s, 2000s: our film heroes told us, with music and nice feelings, how to think and feel.

It started 100 years ago. The trauma of nuclear bombs, tortured and disfigured bodies, brothers, daughters, fathers, lost in the trenches of Europe or the jungles of Korea and Vietnam, is a visual one, a collective one. People need nicely dressed smiling faces, and glossy products, not so much to entertain but to anesthetize to trauma. The pop music and Hollywood said: Don’t worry – Sit back, eat crisps, drink beer, smoke. Apocalypse Now dressed up napalm as something beautifully orange, with Wagner in the background.

The lie is always: – Life starts somewhere on the screen. Or when you drift off into sleep on your sofa. Dream away. Rest in the arms of Ahriman. And collectively we did for the 1960s, 70s, 80s, 90s.

• ·      The Matrix: Portrays a hero who wakes up to the Matrix, so you don’t have to.
• ·      Lord of the Rings: Gives you epic fellowship and purpose, so you forget you don’t have them.
• ·      “Friends” (1990): Functions like adult school; everyone together trading witty insights over coffee, telling you people are generally good, that life is kind and harmless.
• ·      Star Wars: Offers control of the Force and noble good-against-evil battles for us to forget the Empire and our own freezing in carbonite.

Life is dangerous only when you forget context. The epic nature of spiritual reality is reduced. We forget.

Since childhood, we’ve been relentlessly programmed to shape our etheric bodies to fit the fallen ethers: electricity, electromagnetism, and now the rise of AI.

Ahrimanic beings. Often, they bought our souls early in life, and we disappeared. Like the children or knights in fairy tales, we vanished into the forest. Our twentieth-century history is different from what we think it was. It was a psychological war, and it didn’t end. The war for your mind. Ahrimanic beings. They are beings now, around us, in society, living in people as hosts, determining much of what we experience in our lives and shaping our thinking and purposes. In UFO culture, they speak of ‘abduction,’ ‘hypnosis,’ the ‘stealing of one’s life path,’ ‘energy manipulation,’ ‘experimentation below the level of consciousness,’ and ‘orchestration of dreams.’

And while these are all symptomatic of the Ahrimanic effect, they are being dressed up as popular otherworldly fiction and fact. Hollywood has primed us for this surface-level view, like seeing images and figures in smoke. Those who would mind-control hold up the mirror behind the media’s smoke, and we are dazzled.

Managed from behind the scenes, we are supposed to be confused: while Ahriman hides.

To reclaim the occult subject of Ahriman from those who would mystify it into spiritual materialism and endless, limited hangouts of the intelligence services. Michael and Ahriman have to be spoken of in a way relevant to our personal paths in life. Ahriman works with lies. Covertly. Michael works with truth. Overtly.

In popular culture, the Greys, Ahrimanic beings, share a group mind. What one being thinks, they all know. Like a shared cloud of telepathy. They share penetrative insights into another person’s unconscious, instinctive impulses. They put anything given jurisdiction to them into action through your feelings. This is the image of the human being as a puppet. At first, people are unaware that their behavior in life is being steered from the Ahrimanic realm. 

“Only if we clearly elaborate the Ahrimanic element and know the nature of the super-sensible influences which now arise as the counterpart, as it were, of Michael’s casting down of the Dragon. It is like a lifting up, out of Ahrimanic depths, of certain beings. And these beings find special points of attack in the human being if the latter yields to unbridled instinctive impulses and does not strive for clarity in relation to them.”

“Now, there exists today a method I might call it an anti-method, of concealing the instinctive element, by putting down a concept and pushing another over it, so that it is impossible to form a proper judgment concerning it.” Rudolf Steiner, The Mission of the Archangel Michael, GA 194. The Michael Deed and the Michael Influence as Counter-pole of the Ahrimanic Influence, 29 November 1919, Dornach

Jurisidiction?

In popular folklore, we know the adage, “the devil cannot enter your house without invitation.” Read the literature about “contact” with extraterrestrials, and you’ll find it is an affliction that often prompts a spiritual path to Christ as a means of healing: to uncover how we unwittingly, unconsciously welcomed Ahriman into our souls. This is one of the secrets those who understand the spiritual background of the twentieth century and into the twenty-first would have the public know little about in its esoteric depth: 

“One can grasp that just the announcement of the mystery of beholding Christ, of this new relationship with humanity into which Christ will enter, would arouse ill-will and resistance from some human beings. These would be members of certain brotherhoods who wished to exploit the event of the twentieth century, this event of the appearance of the etheric Christ, who wished to use it for their own purposes and not allow it to become general human knowledge.” Rudolf Steiner, The Reappearance of Christ in the Etheric, GA 178, 18 November, 1917, Dornach, 10. Individual Spirit Beings and the Undivided Foundation of the World I

What is the spiriutal trial of your life?

Now, another thing I want to bring in here is this: the question of time. Michael is no longer an Archangel, which means that the anthroposophical thinking path works with Michael as an Archai Spirit, a Spirit of Time. How do we feel and experience this? 

Look at the distinctions a person developing Michaelically will show against someone not doing this work, a more Ahrimanically influenced person. The latter have a very quick, instinctive ability to “see” into people. But they see only into people’s instincts. They can be very clever and perceptive, but only into people’s doubles: these beings are, by nature, meant to block higher spiritual views from the people involved. Now the other tendency is also there. The Luciferic-leaning soul. Not wanting the material comforts the Ahriman-driven person craves, but rather the ease of life that comes from following others, and absolving their own will.

Michael, as Time Spirit, shows you two things: Ahrimanically inspired people are too quick to dismiss others in their judgments. They do not wait long enough to know things spiritually, because they jump in and want to state facts now. Luciferically inclined souls are too slow. Their thinking dissipates and drifts, or simply vanishes, with little care for anything other than their own ease. Many people have a mixture. Too sentimental in self-regard and too critical in condemning others. Too indifferent to truth, or too quick to twist it.

Let me give a personal example of how this dynamic of time works.

In 2017, I had a car crash on Michaelmas Day, September 29. I drove a little frantically, around the city center on a Friday lunchtime, looking for a place to park. I drove over a stop sign and into an oncoming tram. In retrospect, I saw Michael imaginatively through the horizontal September sun. Physically, it blended me. Spiritually, it was symptomatic. As Rudolf Steiner points out, Michaelic karma can work through accidents because such times trigger a soul accounting of debts long since overdue.

Why? – Because there are two kinds of dream.

There are your true dreams of what you want and what you have to do according to your karma. This Ahriman will want to shroud. Lucifer will make you avoid them through your own “intelligence” poorly deployed. No time to think, and not knowing how to respond to life. I had accustomed myself to years of only seeming to work, busy out in the world, 95% action, 5% actual direction. 

Gabriel’s Silver Light to Michael’s Gold Light

Our inheritance from Gabriel, the archangel who ruled from 1510 to 1879, is a popular one, expressed in common culture. Talking of Ahriman and Lucifer has entered modern vernacular. It is Narcissism, and Gaslighting is its technique, its method: Steiner well describes it as an “anti-method.” Speaking in opposites.

But it is also so much more: the double bind; gossip, slander, the witch hunt, the outcasting. We are now, in the twenty-first century, faced with something similar to what Alexander encountered at the end of the last Michael Age. The question of decadent cultures and individual karma. This prevailing culture, founded by Gabriel, is can be known under the watchword of Gabriel as “the swift power of the word,” where people build mirrored relationships of projection with each other in their karma; and this connects people to a emnerging materialistic culture. Words, in this sense of Gabriel’s rulership, are used as curses, bindings, praise, slogans, discourse, political manifestos, and poetry: but all these come to shape the collective mind quite differently in Gabriel’s Age than in Michael’s. 

Rising from Despondency

Rudolf Steiner speaks of this Michael age (1879 to 2300) and its lesson to be learned from the previous Michael age, 601 BC to 247 BC. Prior to that last Michael age, there was widespread despondency in the places of the spiritual mysteries. At the end of that age, Alexander the Great was able to sweep away, with exact Michaelic thinking, expressed in battle stratgey, the lax, slovenly empires of Persia. But at its beginning, that age of Michael saw renewal of the mysteries of Asia, with Buddha in the 6th century BC. He completely personalizes the spiritual path.

In Greece, Heraclitus of Ephesus (535 BC to 475 BC) shows the breaking in to consciousness of the fire of the Michaelic Spirit, so sun-like spiritually: the sovereign, independent, and yet social I.

“Out of every one-hundred men, ten shouldn’t even be there, eighty are just targets, nine are the real fighters, and we are lucky to have them, for they make the battle. Ah, but the one, one is a warrior and he will bring the others back.”― Heraclitus

So we have like two streams before Alexander The Great completely refigures the landscape. Buddha and Heraclitus at the relative beginning of the last time period riules by Michael. Then, centrally, Plato (428 to 348 BC) and Socrates (469 to 369 BC) in Greece. Look at how they transform the spiritual mysteries into ways that can change human discourse and the potential dynamics of human thinking. Look at those two distinctions.

The Michaelic impulse completely reforms what existed before it. It sweeps away the karma laid during the preceding Gabriel rulership period. It is thoroughly permeated with the spirit and radically reworks earthly life, human relations, and human karma. The same as now. Michael (1879 AD to 2300 AD) changes karma in a way the Gabriel ages (1510 AD to 1879 AD) cannot.

“The rulership of Gabriel is characterised by the fact that his impulses enter strongly into the physical bodily nature of man. Michael, on the other hand, works intensely into the spiritual being of man. You can tell this from the very fact that he is the administrator of the Cosmic Intelligence. But Michael’s impulses are strong and powerful. Taking their start from the spiritual, they work through and through the human being. They work into the spiritual, thence into the soul-nature, and thence again into the bodily nature of man.”

“Now in the karmic connections of life, these super-earthly forces are constantly at work. Beings of the higher Hierarchies are working with man and upon him. It is thus that the karma of a man takes shape. And so it is with the Michael-forces. Working as they do upon the whole human being, they work also very strongly into his karma. Gabriel-forces work only very little—I do not say not at all—but very little into the essential karma of a human being. Michael-forces on the other hand work very strongly into his karma.” Rudolf Steiner, Karmic Relationships III, GA 237, 3 August 1924, Dornach, IX. Entry of the Michael Forces — Decisive Character of the Michael Impulses

Michael when fully committed to, changes what is rudderless, lost in time. This is a social art of karma, of bringing spiritual mysteries into life. As before, it is about overcoming the sense of demoralization in the existing conditions of the spiritual mysteries.

The relevance of Blake’s Annunciation to Zacharias by the Angel.

“The old priest Zacharias was just about to burn incense in the dimly lit Jewish temple in Jerusalem when suddenly none other than the archangel Gabriel appeared to him. His gesture towards heaven underlines the divine origin of his message. He informs the high priest that he and his wife Elizabeth, who remained childless until old age, will conceive a son. They are to name him “John” (Hebrew for “God is gracious”, John the Baptist). Zechariah looks a little puzzled. His censer now hangs down unmotivated. Only the cloud of smoke tells us that it has just been moved wildly. Zechariah asks for a sign, whereupon the angel imprisons him with muteness until the son is born. This is both a sign and a punishment for Zacharias having doubted the message.” William Blake – The Annunciation to Zacharias by the Angel by Alexandra Tuschka.

Zechariah was made mute by Gabriel. In anthroposophy, just as in the wider world. The materialism of past centuries has flowed into human bodies due to the age of Gabriel. People are suggestible. But look at the temptations that come to and from the elites. It is Satanism. It mirrors an outworn moon impulse of Gabriel. We live in a culture, ruled by a fallen occult practice. Mysteries of the Moon, outdated, decadent occult mysteries.

“Something essentially different is appealed to: Proletarians of all countries, unite! What does this mean? It means: Foster your antipathy against the other classes, foster, as individuals, what resembles hate, and unite; that means, love one another, unite your feelings of hate, look for the love of one class, search among you for the love of the members of one class out of hate. Love one another out of hate, on the basis of hate.—There you have put down two concepts of opposing poles.”

Rudolf Steiner, The Mission of the Archangel Michael, GA 194. The Michael Deed and the Michael Influence as Counter-pole of the Ahrimanic Influence, 29 November 1919, Dornach

Or let’s take a similar inverted case I knew. A few years back my superior in a company wanted to bring in a new co-worker as a trophy pin-up for the company. Creepy? Well, yes, but you can’t say that. Because, you are in the dragon’s lair. She remotely controls the employees below her, watching them play before her, and enjoys being referred to and deferred to. The new handsome American figurehead for the global enterprise gets raised up, and then, when the group of coworkers are given nothing to do, no responsibility, and assigned menial tasks, she sits back and says it’s a shame they have poor character. Poor lost souls, she reasons. Just like the pet dog she keeps. One is raised and others demoted. But the key to recognise here, is truth cannot be spoken. It has to remain mute.

These are the intrigues which Ahrimanic beings perform:

“And what do they want? They burrow, as it were, in the deepest stratum of consciousness in which the human being is still asleep today in his waking state. Man does not notice how these beings enter his soul and also his body. Here they suck in, with their power of attraction, everything that has remained Luciferic, that has not become Christ-permeated. This they can reach: this they can take possession of.” Rudolf Steiner, The Mission of the Archangel Michael, GA 194, 29 November 1919, Dornach, 5. The Michael Deed and the Michael Influence as Counter-pole of the Ahrimanic Influence.

Look a little deeper into such types and excuse the image, but you find spiritually thick dirty blood, with no etheric light, like the greens and dark browns of putrid water: They bristle at criticism because you catch them in the act! 

 “Few love to hear the sins they love to act.
 ’Twould braid yourself too near for me to tell it.”

Shakespeare, Pericles, Act 1, Scene 1.

And then the gray eminence behind the scenes – the owner – a character who says, “I have nothing to do with the “running” of the company. But yet, I own it. But I shall say nothing. I delegate that.” But in the gentlemen’s clubs – I shall share my amusing stories about how this is the way to run a company. It’s wise, cunning, efficient – simply good “management” of human behavior.

… And there is little to differentiate these two leading characters. There is no uniqueness of soul expression. The human I is absent.

Manichaean Mysteries of Evil

What can we learn from this as we go deeper into a commitment to anthroposophy and a more conscious relationship to Michael and Ahriman?

“All manner of karmic experiences come to the individual, each in his own way. The one will have this or that to undergo through the fact that he must tear himself loose from old connections and unite with those who are seeking to cultivate the message of Michael. There are some who feel this union with the mission of Michael as a kind of salvation. There are others who feel it in a different way, finding themselves in this position: ‘I am drawn to Michael on the one hand and to Ahrimanism on the other. I cannot choose. Through my life I stand in the midst of these things.’” Rudolf Steiner, Karmic Relationships III, GA 237, 1 August 1924, Dornach VIII. Ahriman’s Fight Against the Michael Principle — The Message of Michael

To sum up: In my last two jobs, I saw this explicitly. Men and women, professionally competent and secure. Both companies were half business, half public-facing institutions. Entrepreneurs, psychologists, doctors, men and women of high learning and science: training professionals. And yet each one, with their soul connection to themselves, was fearful of saying the wrong thing, on edge, anxious, hypervigilant. Hierarchy was highly esteemed, even when employees spent the whole day deriding it. Living behind these soul contradictions, each one acted as if hyper-alert, lacking peace. And yet our clients were individuals seeking healing. 

What ails thee?

On November 29th, 1919 (GA 194), Rudolf Steiner reflected on how we have lost our connection to grand, conscious, and epic cosmic missions. Today, humanity feels “forced to accept the omnipotence of natural necessity.” We are told that we are nothing but biological machines, subject only to material laws and economic pressures.

We must find the courage to perceive what is happening karmically in these settings dominated by Ahrimanic beings. This path will create daunting feelings because you are over the target. Such experiences give us invaluable lessons in witnessing darkness and evil and in carrying a light for humanity’s future. Lucifer wants you in a box sealed off from the spiritual, content with your simple projections on the walls around you. A coffin. Ahriman wants you buried in the beings of your instincts. A grave. Michael demands our conscious initiative. 

There is a far reaching Bible quote to meditate on with reagrds all we are saying here with regards karma, working socially with these mysteries, and establishing these new relations from heaven to earth. It is the passage where Peter is counselled by Christ as to how a true esoteric church is built and managed: First-century Jewish rabbis used “binding” (prohibiting or declaring unlawful: jurisdiction) and “loosing” (permitting or declaring lawful: recinding) as technical terms for making legal and moral decisions.

Mathew 16: 19 “I will give you the keys of the kingdom of heaven; whatever you bind on earth will be bound in heaven, and whatever you loose on earth will be loosed in heaven.”

Christ’s counsel is to not overlook any thing you experience with reagrds another person in life; but to seek to bring it to full consciousness. To change etherically you cannot stay around some places and groups. At least not the same way as before. You have to change relations to the places you are in. Because these are invariably karmic settings that ask you to trade your spiritual sovereignty for lower impulses. With MIchael we pay that invoice.

“To cow before something” means to be intimidated, frightened, or made submissive by someone or something.

When you “cow” before a person, a threat, or a challenge, you lose your courage and give in to fear. At this our Michaelmas, wake up your “I.” Refuse to cow, and let the sun become veiled. This is the true gold credited to your account by Michael.

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A “Boll o’ Meal Fraser” (often spelled “Bowl o’ Meal”) is a historical Scottish term for an “allegiance by affinity”—a person or family who joined Clan Fraser of Lovat not by blood, but by adopting the surname in exchange for protection, sustenance, or land. 

Richard Cooper

It’s going to be a true test – Seeing things you might find shocking. But we need it because we are at a crossroads. Increasingly, people will slip off the radar into a kind of hypnosis, while others wake up. This Venus Scorpio Retrograde is like drawing battle lines. AI-Teach or You. You or Art. Whether you are positive or negative in life. Not in the wishy-washy way. I mean in every aspect of your being. Is your living of karma, of destiny, of life, vibrant? Not cowering, disowning parts of yourself, forgetting bits and pieces of you. But are you honest before God, standing for all you are, with others, as equals? And finally, what do you create and why? Or, and this is the lesson of the Scorpion’s tail: are your waters stagnant, and are you only looking out for yourself, to wear a carefully crafted mask?

Venus is not just about “relationships” and romance, as so commonly bandied about. It is also Nature and Art. Our relationship with the earthly, with the senses, yes, but nature through those senses as a gift to unfold what we can only unfold here, on earth, in incarnation. Whether retrograde or moving forward after that, Scorpio has a sting in its thinking tail. Venus retrogrades pass by or transform you completely, to the degree that you walk a creative path.

In anthroposophical terms, it is learning to be conscious of Lucifer and Ahriman as blocks to spiritual awakening and walking a middle path. This is how we come to Michael now at this time of year. This is how we see the dragon. We feel and live in the warm afterglow of summer, while looking up to the stars and sincerely looking back at the karmic path down here in earthly life.

This year it has this distinctly Venus Scorpio flavor. That is, it will feel particularly intense. One symptom of which is sensing the golden afterglow of summer more intimately.

It speaks in a way only Scorpio knows how to, of initiation and transformation and speech and art: as homage to its co-rulers Pluto of the underworld and Mars*.

This is part of Rudolf Steiner’s gift as the initiate (*), the one who knew how to prepare us for these times, one hundred years ago. We come to know Michael at Michaelmas, as much as in our lives and karma, when we can hold at bay the two opposing spiritual forces of a truly future-oriented life. On one side, Lucifer, and on the other, Ahriman. Properly understood, rather than Vanity and materialism, they should be spiritualized love and selflessness.

If we respond positively and spiritually to the Venus Retrograde, we may walk this middle path, and the unconscious influence of the dragon may be shed as we become conscious of it. But of course, woe betide what is seen yet continues in perfidy. Because Venus is a truly social impulse. And Scorpio is a thoroughly penetrative spirit. So these are times when we can see the true roots and hidden places of what people think they carry hidden in the dark. Collectively, because everyone goes through the Venus transit retrograde and realizes their own failures of inner truth in the eyes of the spirit, you see, it has a collective effect. Now, if you’re wise, you see where the paths will lead for you and for others.

I painted a provocative spectacle back in 2012: A big woman with dark red plastic leg ins. Silvery-white hair with a pink-dyed stripe.

April 2012. Gold was at $1,700. In the aftermath of the 2008 global financial crisis, quantitative easing (QE) from central banks, and even the “2012 Mayan apocalypse” predictions had their effect; “hard money” enthusiasts were highly energized.

Was my – Deutsche Frau Ausserhalb der UBS Basel – “German Lady Outside the UBS Basel similarly “energized”?

Outside, on the street, she was standing with two crutches.

A German woman. Here for a visit, a day trip, to save on VAT, who knows.

I thought it was beautiful. The whole scene. Tragi-comic.

If you live in Basel, you know the difference instantly. The Swiss are affluent, self-contained, often healthier. The Germans who cross the border are different—less well off, often worn down. Victims of our society. Go to Germany, and I’m always reminded of the UK: boy racer techno cars, gangs, the smell of weed. Tattoo and barbershops.

You can romanticize and say the mountains form the Swiss, or you can cycnicize and say the money does.

Any war, market crash, or period of stress eventually ends. Jobs, inflation, interest rates, unemployment, civil unrest, and the whole economic system; when everything is stacked against you, at some point you realize that to deal with anxiety, you have to start looking scary things in the eye. So that’s the first thing. In these apocalyptic times, there is no Julie Andrews’ Switzerland, no USA, no safe haven, no underground bunker that is going to practically help you. Instead, you have to learn to watch, one by one, as the Von Trapp family singers get fewer. You have to chart a course by turning off the collective music. You can only do that by learning new ways of thinking and engaging enough to start learning not just economics, but a new social life by dynamizing your life perspective.

We are all economically active. Active throughout our lives. In a way we have to take back thinking authority from universities, media, think tanks and global institutions: firstly in the soul: I like to think these newsletters could become like intel for the little guys, a collective group of Davids against Goliath, where what we share here can grow into a force that changes perspectives.

1 Samuel (33-37) David’s training as a shepherd prepared him.

And Saul said to David, “You are not able to go against this Philistine to fight with him; for you are a youth, and he is a man of war from his youth.” But David said to Saul, “Your servant used to keep his father’s sheep, and when a lion or a bear came and took a lamb out of the flock, I went out after it and struck it, and delivered the lamb from its mouth; and when it arose against me, I caught it by its beard, and struck and killed it.”

What is “generosity,” and in relation to money in its deepest principle?

It is giving away as the sharing of your soul and spirit. The new life we enable by providing something for another that otherwise wouldn’t have been there. Broadly, we have called this “endowment.” In German, “Stiftung.” I will define it again here for us: “enabling new life for others through giving away money.”

The Fed has been hiding “money printing” behind Quantitative Easing for years now, back to 2008. Back then, we were aghast at QE 1, 2, 3. They are controlling the narrative more adroitly now: regardless of whether the Fed calls it “organic balance-sheet growth” or “RMPs”, or intervention to maintain stability, any systematic buying that expands the central bank’s balance sheet operates as a pseudo form of QE by pumping fresh liquidity back into the financial system.

Think of the roaring 20s parallel. It’s not an explicit re-run of 100 years ago. It’s more like a global expansion of those conditions, Germany to Europe, Israel and the USA as Britain and America; but now Asia, Africa, South America thrown into the mix that can only utterly skew parallels to the 20s Great Depression and the world wars.

So, we have to keep going and keep swimming with the facts as they arise.

During a recent cabinet meeting at Camp David, a press photograph caught a glimpse over the shoulder of U.S. Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent. Underlined on his notepad was a literal “To Do” list that read: “Buy Japanese Yen (JPY) $5-10 bil.” This then sends the markets into a frenzy. Now, just like in 2008, you can find dozens of macroeconomic specialists on YouTube explaining how and why the stock market is going to crash and how gold and silver will multiply their values by 10 or more.

⚠️ 1. The Trap of Never Ending Accumulation

In 2026: Gold has soared to historic highs around $4,587 per ounce (a massive 37%+ jump over the past year). Similarly, Silver has crossed the threshold to $69.61 per ounce, up over 82% from its previous cycle.

Vague confusion sets in like a fog.

Then the questions shift to real physical Gold and Silver, or to paper-based ETFs and Mining Stocks. Or Bitcoin, AI, and Robotics. But if this was you then over the 16-year period leading up to May 2026, your gold rose by approximately 278% while silver rose by approximately 318% in nominal U.S. dollar terms, and if you were smart enough to have cashed in this year  – what for?

A former acquaintance of mine, over the time I knew him, has been collecting silver and gold bars; leveraging them with plans for his future reich. He wasn’t 10% into gold as is sensible in an investment portfolio. He was 100% in. At the same time, he ran seminars where he would simply play YouTube videos and called it analysis.

Will he catch the market right and cash his winnings in?

Will he miss-time the next crash and correction and regret it for 20 years, anxiously watching the price. And what then: property, stocks, move to Argentina?

But none of this is the point. My argument here is for something very different. That the real driver of value in all this psychology is that you often treat your money, your life, and yourself as if you were dead. This is what makes a Goliath in the first place.

📈 2. Realities of the Current Market (And the Hoarding Illusion)

However many specialists advise the contrary, most people buy with the crowd at the top of the market and sell at the bottom, even when they know emotion should not overwhelm thinking. Swapping paper currency for gold bars or Bitcoin feels like escaping the matrix, but history shows that governments can change the rules. Gold confiscation. Or resetting it with a new basket of currencies as suggested before 2008 – at the last crisis – with SDRs (Special Drawing Rights).

“The world is going through the worst economic crisis in peacetime since the Great Depression. In around 150 countries, income per capita this year will be lower than in 2019. Many countries are less able to pay for vaccines or invest in their recovery – and are more indebted.

This is where a new SDR allocation comes in. It supplements countries’ reserves, using the collective strength of the Fund’s membership to make all 191 member countries a little stronger. It would provide liquidity support to many developing and low-income countries that are struggling, allowing them to pay for healthcare and support vulnerable people. All countries will benefit from a quick eradication of the virus. It is important to make sure they all have the financial resources to do that. IMF 7 Things You Need to Know About SDR Allocations. “

If we read carefully, this shows us something we all know intuitively well. Financial crises further agendas. Climate, Agenda 2020, 40. Carbon taxes. Vaccines and the Third World as pillars to keep such plans on track.

So, again, let’s learn to be cute: From modern emergency banking laws, to a total currency reset, if political turmoil hits or the digital grid fractures, your hidden gold or private crypto keys won’t easily buy you safety, health, or a plane ticket.

But there’s always the same question that triggers. What comes after the market crash and potential currency reset?

I once had a client who was Swiss pension fund executive preparing for his annual speech. He outlined something everyone in the pension industry kind of knew: pension funds were unsustainable. It’s like they’d all agreed to rearrange the chairs on the Titanic.

We are in fact surrounded by installed spokespeople demanding you save every penny for a far-off future. Advanced AI systems like Jump, FP Alpha, and Holistiplan are now standard tools firms use to scan tax records, and predict behavioral patterns (the feed tracks your every thinking whim).

These two quandaries about motivation and future orientation set up nicely; our first step through the veil: the need to undertake soul accounting.

Where have you become miserly not of money but of your very own soul? List the instances. Do an inventory. What joys do you shut down? What careful strategic position do you maintain to avoid meeting and learning new things? Look at yourself from outside with an uncompromising eye. What have you neglected to actually do, and more importantly, who have you neglected to be? When did you stop reaching out and being part of your own life as much as others’ lives, and where you have condemned others, what do you see of yourself mirrored in them? Where do you need to wake up to this emotional waste?

Now in your inventory of your soul, you’ll learn to see the two David and Goliath yous. The Good you – not before or after the crash or survival or battle you are protecting yourself from – but you free. And every time you buy the clothes, book the holidays, make the new connections you put off or disregard, you will learn to see the you and the others caring for their Goliaths.

These strikes at consciousness we have to do to ourselves: and they are about getting you out of your passive soul cage. We could even say there is a resentful version of you these global agendas would have you be.

⏱️ 3. Having a Spending rather than A Savings Plan

My acquaintance at £50,000 per ounce gold would say, “Hey, but I’m already rich, and will quite soon be getting even richer!” And sometimes I imagine a fantasy conversation with him at 92, where I ask him: “How much do you still need?” … Saving for the next incarnation? Where your feeling of safety is turned inside out, and you have to experience its opposite.

… But I guess at 92, he would still blankly say … time left for what?

As always, these letters are like a call, they start as a small seed, but we are learning to see the grain at the end of the deeds we do and don’t do.

Hebrews 7:7 And beyond all contradiction, the lesser is blessed by the greater.

Richard Cooper

What is it we see here? A sexual motive, a creative one, an elemental one? The Greeks and Romans did not see as we do. The coin is a Thracian Thasos silver stater, 510-490 BC. It depicts a naked satyr with a nymph. 20mm, 8.50g. Someone forged it. Not with a factory machine; not with tech and software. But with their hands, sweat, blood, fire, hammer, and tongs. The gaze is an I meeting another native I. The image still has power; and unlike our culture, its artist still knows how to make image and form organically powerful.

Where the Greeks had swords, conquests, armor, helms with crests, and communication with their gods, we have clicks, feeds, phones, images, documentaries, and shows. Do we realize how the natural world speaks, acts, and lives through us? What happens when we switch off, or when the sun breaks through the leaves, and the different greens entrance us; or when the smell of rain prompts us to prayer; or in crisis, when we feel that life, God, no longer adequately accounts for him or herself? Do we then still have the means to think, without falling into slumber? What’s left for the vital decisions of life: to act this way or not that? In countless ways, we pay for a vast array of new technologies and sciences. We have to learn by trial and error. We have to strike the iron of matter with concepts:

“Thinking is an element of such a completely dynamic nature that it is completely absurd to think that it needs any other activity to bring it into flux, or that it cannot itself set things in motion.” (…) “In thinking we have given to us that element which welds our separate individuality into one whole with the cosmos. Insofar as we feel and perceive (and also experience), we are separate individuals; insofar as we think, we are the all-one being that penetrates all.” Rudolf Steiner, The Philosophy of Spiritual Activity (RS explicitly asked that “Freedom” in English translation be changed to “Spiritual Activity”, GA 4, 3. Thinking in the Service of Knowledge

There are people who still maintain a human level in their interactions and behave on social media as they would in life. No matter what they post, whichever photo, or whatever they appear to do, you feel you know them, because you have sufficient strength of I not to be overwhelmed by the digital images and the being of the technology we know is simply like a window. Now there is also a whole spectrum of experience that comes through social media that shows the opposite inclination, where the context of social media is not held upright enough with the I, and the ego instead twists it. Ask yourself this, which happens so often on social media that we overlook it: How would it be if I were to meet a person in real life, in a park for example, and that person would immediately call you a name and run away and hide behind a tree?

Trolls don’t like bridges. In social media, the action of a “troll”; if we transpose it back into reality, gives us the impression that this is the behavior of a human child. A naughty boy. Or a wayward girl. But the term troll cleverly reminds us of elemental beings. Social media simply creates a new marketplace for valuing, devaluing, and pricing each other, much like bourgeois life used to assess the ladies and gentlemen promenading – but now with an added spiritual element. Or, consider this: when social media becomes spamming and unsolicited advances, we might picture a member of a gang of boys in a park, for example, seeking to intimidate people. Boys hanging around, seeking a cheap thrill from being rude or threatening passers-by. Or if it is an individual targeting us, are they actually wanting to speak to other human beings, but shy to engage in conversation, like emotionally eight years old, hiding behind their mother or father’s legs? 

We know these impressions from real life. These are just imaginative pictures of what many adults do on social media. Reality is slowly splitting, fragmenting; borders and thresholds are becoming porous; and this has been going on for more than a while.

When this place we write and display and perform upon is our marketplace to trade, to present ideas, and to awaken interest, does it unduly surprise us to call these economic considerations? 

In relation to money and economics, John Maynard Keynes’ brings our attention to the illusory aspect of any assertion that economics be a strict or disciplined science. Without understanding that economics is inextricably linked to social psychology and its esoteric drivers, we overlook what lies somewhat unconsciously in the soul, like a huge sea (which is why the Greek Poseidon, we can now intuit as a former reflection on Ahriman, shapeshifting and powerful). Keynes called the aspects of ourselves we need to learn to recognize in relation to economics our gut feelings or “animal spirits”, our motivations or drives that manifest socially. With words and gestures, written or symbolic, we signal where we are at in terms of a certain kind of energy; a relation to a wider economic sea of unconsciousness. 

“This means, unfortunately, not only that slumps and depressions are exaggerated in degree, but that economic prosperity is excessively dependent on a political and social atmosphere which is congenial to the average business man. (…) In estimating the prospects of investment, we must have regard, therefore, to the nerves and hysteria and even the digestions and reactions to the weather of those upon whose spontaneous activity it largely depends. (…) We are merely reminding ourselves that human decisions affecting the future, whether personal or political or economic, cannot depend on strict mathematical expectation, since the basis for making such calculations does not exist; and that it is our innate urge to activity which makes the wheels go round, our rational selves choosing between the alternatives as best we are able, calculating where we can, but often falling back for our motive on whim or sentiment or chance.” John Maynard Keynes (2012) [1936], The General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money, Snowball Publishing, p.161-3.

Rudolf Steiner spoke positively about economist John Maynard Keynes in 1920, specifically praising Keynes’s book The Economic Consequences of the Peace for its realistic critique of the Treaty of Versailles; which engineered the consequence that a second world war would arise out of the first. Not least, one senses between them, one in Germany one in Great Britain, a shared appreciation of the soul and its implications for the root of historical change in economics. The “sentiment,” Keynes speaks of, is also the shared sentiment that most people in public life of the time were not thinking of much at all: besides business as usual, and they were servants of materialism, or as Steiner famously stated, people of responsibility unable to exercise any responsible steering of humanity because they “sleepwalked” through world historical events. 

Perhaps the only two of their time to publicly and professionally attempt to draw the necessary media attention to a relation to the consequences of decadent relations to money?

Animal Spirits and Elemental Instincts

Most of the time, we use the name Ahriman, and we do so by habit. Ahriman and Angra Mainyu are the exact same figure. Angra Mainyu is the original name in the ancient Avestan language, while Ahriman is the later form of that same name in Middle Persian (Pahlavi). But taste the letters and read their meaning, and you will discover something. In the earliest Zoroastrian scriptures, like the Avesta, Angra Mainyu means destructive or evil mind. The name evolves into Ahriman through its use and pronunciation over time.