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 21^st-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 with art 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 19^th-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 19^th-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 19^th 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 14^th 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.

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.

I recognise you

I AM

Alexandra Vasilache

Main bibliography:

Rudolf Steiner, Four Mystery Plays (GA 14): https://rsarchive.org/Books/GA014/English/APC1925/GA014_index.html

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/

Rudolf Steiner, Three Lectures on the Mystery Dramas (from GA125): https://rsarchive.org/Lectures/GA125/English/AP1983/ThrMys_index.html

Rudolf Steiner, Karmic Relations vol IV (GA238) lectures 18.09.1924 (for the karma of the ‘real’ Strader) and 23.09.1924 (for the karma of the ‘real’ Capesius): https://rsarchive.org/Lectures/GA238/English/APC1957/19240918b01.html https://rsarchive.org/Lectures/GA238/English/APC1957/19240923p01.html

By Richard Cooper and Alexandra Vasilache

‘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 (4^th century BC), to which the Platonic spirits (Alain de Lille, Pietro de Compostella, Bernard of Chartres, and others) joined in the 13^th century. Today, we refer to Michael School as a karmic spiritual community. Michael teaches his devoted servants directly from the 15^th century and plans together the deeds on Earth, schooling that includes humans, elemental spirits and beings of the 3^rd 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 4^th 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 132^nd meridian east and the 48^th meridian and the 132^nd 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 7^th 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 7^th 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).

Richard Cooper and Alexandra Vasilache

By Alexandra Vasilache and Richard Cooper

Preliminary considerations

For the third part of our considerations (see Part I and Part II), we will concentrate on the personal and cultural difficulties when penetrating the Spiritual and some processes that intervene in esoteric development before coming to a relationship with the Lower Guardian of the Threshold. The reader will notice that what is described is not merely a repetition from Rudolf Steiner but a result of personal working with these processes. Most of what will be analysed below comes as a need to warn one about the influences of adversarial forces in society and everyday life, influences that will target the candidate for Initiation without being noticed. Not only does the lack of practice, persistence and consistency in the study of Anthroposophy result in not getting anywhere close to Initiation, but also the ways in which society models our thinking, feeling and will come into play, especially what we might designate “the screen industry”. We are used to caring for our food and our other material concerns far more than for what we take in through other senses. Through screens, largely unconscious to the spiritual effect of Hollywood, our devices of communication, the very media and popular artistic and cultural content we naively consume, we are bound, in a spiritual sense, to the materialistic culture we are surrounded by. We are not used to considering that art representation, music and films can be poisonous, too. This is what materialism refers to in the first place. Hindrances are not only derived from one’s karma as personal human defects, but so too, they are constantly culturally infused in today’s society through radio, television and the internet, so they are less overtly obvious but nevertheless covertly obstruct one’s participation in esoteric life and become implicit to the process of the candidate’s approaching the Guardian and the Gate of Death.

To begin with the third part, we would like to remind the reader of some important things stated in the previous parts. At the first gate, the Gate of Death, stands what we’ve learned from Rudolf Steiner to identify as the Lower Guardian of the Threshold. Although in the earliest work, Rudolf Steiner didn’t differentiate between the Double and the being of the Guardian, he did describe things from two different perspectives that people are not used to considering: the differentiation between objective and subjective, between what is independent of experience and what is experienced; in other words, between the object of experience and the person that experiences. When we read the description of the Initiation Rudolf Steiner gave us, we must always verify the point of view of the communication. Asking the question, “Is this what the pupil experiences, or is it what stands objectively as such in the Spiritual?” is significant in understanding the teaching in this matter. The reason for such differentiation is that until they pass the lower astral, which is the same as what Rudolf Steiner identifies in other lectures as the elementary world, all spiritual experiences are subjective. Although they are objective from the point of view that they are experienced totally outside the body, so untouched by the senses, they are still subjective because in the lower astral (the elementary world or the Threshold region), what is experienced usually is the outpouring of the own self in the elements. It is safe to say that the experience of the Threshold, even if it is experienced outside the body, is not completely objective but subjectively objective, meaning that the candidate of Initiation objectively experiences themselves. As we shall explore here, this difficult process of self-knowledge has to be won again and again through various trials of life and karma on the one hand and changes to the inner life of meditation and orientation to the truths of Anthroposophy on the other. So, we have two aspects to guide us here: the life of experience, and our learning from it, our process of self-development in the light of these mysteries, and spiritual development, which become two sides of the same experience of renewed spiritual life.

Having this in mind, we will notice that when he speaks about what one experiences, Rudolf Steiner, indeed, doesn’t necessarily differentiate between the Double and the Guardian, at least in the earliest work. However, when presenting things from the objective point of view, in the Mystery Dramas, for instance, he clearly presents the Guardian and the Double as distinct beings with separate roles. We have shown previously that we have a confirmation about the Archangelic nature of the being of the Guardian in Rudolf Steiner’s lectures and also about his work as a high spiritual being in the service of Michael in the lectures and mantras of the First Class. 

That is why, in the beginning, students of Anthroposophy can be under the impression that the Guardian and the Double are one and the same being. But we must add the earthly knowledge of Anthroposophy to our experience and understand that the Guardian is the Archangel of the gate of the senses known only by his function (the Guardian), who stands there ever since Lemuria, and the other is a composite of Luciferic and Ahrimanic beings one accumulates in consecutive incarnations as a karmic debt of residual beings that we commonly know as karma. 

When beginning to digest the experience of the Guardian, we found Sergej Prokofieff’s dedicated chapter in Die Erste Klasse der Michael-Schule und ihre christologischen Grundlagen (2009), a volume of lectures for the First Class, to be the only writing from the secondary Anthroposophy to come the closest to our experiences and knowledge from Rudolf Steiner. However, we would like to dissociate from how he presents things there, in which we believe a terrible mistake was slipped, a mistake that unfortunately can be found as a trademark in his entire work and has been taken over and perpetuated by other authors, too. Here is how we would describe it: When one steps out of the physical body consciously, one encounters conditions of spatiality different from the physical that allow spiritual beings and realities to immerse into one another, to penetrate each other. Permeability is a condition of the astral plane, just as impermeability is a condition of the physical plane. It is not uncommon to experience beings merged into one another, even very opposite beings. It is how our Double is constituted in the first place. However, it is our strong belief that one should totally avoid this process in physical writing and here is where we believe Sergej Prokofieff failed: he continued the process of permeability in the physical description of the experience. In the physical description, in the writing itself, we can be exact, providing that we have the intuitive knowledge of the process and we correctly identified the beings we are talking about. The risk of not doing that is, in this case, speculation with pieces of half-knowledge. We should use our Mars quality and strive for naming things correctly and if we are unsure of what we experienced, we can wait until it becomes clear as day. Therefore, we do not agree with how he describes the Guardian and the Threshold processes in that chapter. A person who meditates daily on the First Class, thus who develops a relationship with the Guardian before having experiences out of the body, will experience the Guardian not as the Double but as neutralising the Double even if they only stepped out of their physical body. It is not that when one steps out of the physical body, one can meet only the Double and the Guardian is hidden. No, it is not so. One can see one’s Double and hear the Guardian; the Guardian is not hidden from a First Class student in experience. It is true that in some experiences, the Guardian remains hidden, but even so, it is still a Guardian experience. The Guardian is the one who enables the experience in the first place as the spirit of self-knowledge. When reading Sergej Prokofieff’s description and authors alike, there is a need for a better clarification of the notions and processes.

But more problematic is the description of the Guardian. He says there, if we need to resume the dedicated chapter, that in his superhuman part/aspect, the Lower Guardian is an Archangelic being, in his human part/aspect, he is a creation of man, and in his subhuman part/aspect, he is the Double (see chapter 5 in Sergej O. Prokofieff, Die Erste Klasse der Michael-Schule und ihre christologischen Grundlagen, Philosophisch-Anthroposophischer Verlag am Goetheanum, 2009). To clarify, Prokofieff here takes the concept of human and even that of subhuman and adds them as aspects of a spiritual hierarchical being. We should be diligent and exact in our thinking. Any spiritual being is not human; they don’t have a human aspect. All spiritual beings are “super” to the human in these terms, in other words, more than human, of another category of being. Any thrusting back of the Guardian to the candidate of Initiation where they see their lower aspects in the doppelgänger could then be described as “subhuman”. In reality, none of these are aspects of the Guardian but of the human who experiences them! The Guardian’s being is sovereign from one’s experience of him. To this type of spiritual communication, we must reply that it is simply speculative and, unfortunately, untrue. They are not aspects of the Guardian but of the experience of Initiation, independent of the being of the Guardian.

The Guardian and the Voice of Conscience, the reborn Bat-Kol

When we speak about Initiation, we naturally think also about moral development. One step in knowledge, three steps in moral development – the golden rule of Initiation. As we consciously approach the Gate of Death, we count on our conscience to guide our deeds in thinking, feeling, and will. Conscience, as we know it today, as God’s voice that speaks inside ourselves, appeared relatively recently in humanity, in a time that, according to Rudolf Steiner, could be placed between Aeschylus and Euripides. We can choose the year 450 BC as a reference. Before this time, human beings had no conscience of their own; in fact, they didn’t even have an inner moral sense. It was the Master that we know as Buddha, who came to incarnation in the sixth century before Christ, the first human being who carried as a seed everything humankind needed to develop in terms of morality until the end of evolution on Earth. His eightfold path is a practical way to act in life sovereignly, guided by the hierarchies that speak in moral laws. But what Master Buddha carried was much more than we have as conscience today. Master Buddha did not have an internalised Voice of Conscience; it spoke to him through revelation. However, we need to keep in mind that the entire moral development that will eventually overcome karma in the sixth root race was seeded by Master Buddha in the sixth century before Christ.

The Voice of Conscience was gradually internalised in human beings, starting from North-Western Europe. In the past, the knowledge of good and evil came through revelation only to Masters and Initiates, who would then instil this knowledge as a suggestion to common people. For instance, the Jewish people of the past knew the Voice of Conscience as the Voice of God or Voice of Revelation, Bat-Kol (translated as ‘daughter of voice’). When doing something wrong, the common man of the past would see with the old atavistic clairvoyance something that the Greeks named the Furies, who would torment and damn one with the karmic consequences of the deed. Coming closer to the Mystery of Golgotha, the old clairvoyance was fading, and the great Bat-Kol could not be heard anymore, not even by the greatest Initiates, as she prepared for a new birth in human beings. Rudolf Steiner tells us (GA148) that Bat-Kol was heard in a transformed way by the Nathanic Jesus in the pagan temple at the age of 24, the second Jupiterian cycle in human biography.

The human translation of the Cosmic Word was given by Rudolf Steiner publicly when placing the Foundation Stone of the First Goetheanum on September 20, 1913. Immediately after, he started lecturing about the Fifth Gospel (GA148). It is important for this subject to understand Bat-Kol’s words and how God’s voice passed from external revelation to internal inspiration through Christ:

AUM, Amen!

Evils rule,

Witnesses of the dissolving Selfhood,

Self-guilt carried by others,

Experienced in the daily bread,

In which heaven’s will does not prevail,

For man deserted from your kingdom

And forgot Your Names,

You, Fathers in the heavens.

The historical situation of humanity before Christ and the falling to its doom without Him is contained in these cosmic words. Before Christ, human beings didn’t have an individuality of their own, an individual I. When we think about the I, we first think about consciousness and memory. Both consciousness and memory individualised in human beings gradually and separately. Consciousness individualised more in the people of North-Western Europe and less in the East. Memory was initially linked with the bloodline. The memory of the past belonged to the entire etheric stream, and it would go on through generations. The son could access his father’s and grandfather’s memory. Each line of memory had a specific name, such as Adam, Noah, Abraham, etc. When a line of memory ended, a new name was given. A big part of humanity, even in the time Christ came to Earth, was still sustained by the group-I. In fact, when the Mystery of Golgotha took place, very few people on Earth were individualised, meaning to have an individual I and not share the I of the group. One of the most advanced, fully individualised men was John the Baptist. After his beheading, John the Baptist could work as the group-I of the apostles, who were not yet fully individualised. Individuation was thus a gradual historical process. Without Christ, the process of individuation would have been impossible.

Now let’s remember what the Nathanic Jesus experiences in the pagan Temple as the Voice of Bat-Kol. The Voice sees the individuation process in time (memory) and space (consciousness) as the ‘dissolving selfhood’. The process of ‘dissolving and solving’, which Rudolf Steiner referred to as the ‘salt’ process (GA220, 13.01.1923) in the human being, was known in alchemy by its Latin name, solve et coagula, a principle according to which a substance must be broken down before it can be built up into something new. When he talks about consciousness in Anthroposophical Leading Thoughts (GA26, number 11), Rudolf Steiner says:

 “The Self-consciousness which is summed up in the ‘I’ or ‘Ego’ emerges out of the sea of consciousness. Consciousness arises when the forces of the physical and etheric bodies disintegrate these bodies, and thus make way for the Spiritual to enter into man. For through this disintegration is provided the ground on which the life of consciousness can develop. If, however, the organism is not to be destroyed, the disintegration must be followed by a reconstruction. Thus, when for an experience in consciousness a process of disintegration has taken place, that which has been demolished will be built up again exactly. The experience of Self-consciousness lies in the perception of this upbuilding process. The same process can be observed with inner vision. We then feel how the Conscious is led over into the Self-conscious by man’s creating out of himself an after-image of the merely Conscious. The latter has its image in the emptiness, as it were, produced within the organism by the disintegration. It has passed into Self-consciousness when the emptiness has been filled up again from within. The Being, capable of this ‘fulfilment,’ is experienced as ‘I.’”

So, in the process of individuation, the group-I was dissolved, and all experiences made by the group-I were recreated again gradually in the human being as individual I. What Bat-Kol was gravely stating was the consequence of this process in terms of karma. When we refer to the experiences of the I, we naturally speak about karma. An aspect of what we know as karma represents the elementals formed in our experiences that follow the I from incarnation to incarnation. Many of these beings are Luciferic, Ahrimanic, and composites of the two, as we have extensively described in the first part. Of course, karma is not only that, but Lucifer and Ahriman, as the representatives of our microcosmic beings that constitute our Doubles, are subordinated to our karmic laws. This is why Bat-Kol calls them the “witnesses of the dissolving selfhood”.

The karma of the past belonged to the entire etheric stream; it was one of the reasons why people preferred marriages in the same bloodline. A son could carry his ancestor’s sins, thus Luciferic and Ahrimanic beings that karmically belong to his ancestor’s sins. When the selfhood (the group-I) was dissolving as collective and reconstructed as individual I, thus individuating, many of these Luciferic and Ahrimanic beings got free, so to speak, so they could go to the other humans not yet individualised. Bat-Kol also sees that in the process of individuation, human beings lose the connection with the Spiritual. So, on one hand, they were about to become personally empowered with an I, but on the other hand, they forgot about the Spiritual and fell prey to Lucifer and Ahriman. Therefore, the process of individuation would have had no meaning without Christ; it was a dead-end. Bat-Kol herself was tormented by the revealing cosmic words because the words were herself, her own being. The cosmic word was taken over by the Nathan Jesus in the experience of the Pagan temple and restored later by Christ, who gave a new Impulse to the entire human evolution. The redemption of Bat-Kol’s spoken truth is what we know today as the Lord’s Prayer. Bat-Kol works in every human being today as the Christified Voice of Conscience, as the Voice only follows Christ. 

It is important to understand this: the Voice of Conscience as a spiritual being only follows Christ. Sometimes, the voice of the Guardian can be confused with the Voice of Conscience in experiences outside the body, especially when other souls are involved. It doesn’t harm anyone if the conscience is followed, but for our spiritual scientific precision, here is the difference between the two:

Behind the veil of senses, we find the Guardian of the Threshold. He follows Michael, the regent of our time.

Behind our inner world of feelings, we find the Voice of Conscience. She only follows Christ.

We can see there are two veils. One behind the senses, and one behind the life of the soul. The second veil also guards the relationship between each other as human beings, as the Voice of Conscience is behind the life of the soul. Every impulse of will from thinking, feeling and will directed to another soul has behind the Voice of Conscience who follows Christ as the Lord of our Karma. Thus, one may say that between a human being and another, there is another type of Threshold. At this Threshold stands Christ, as the Lord of Karma and His messenger is the Voice of Conscience. People on the path of Initiation must start being sensitive to the Voice of Conscience, as their entire occult development depends on whether they recognise, understand and obey it.

When the human being goes beyond the life of the soul manifested in the forces of thinking, feeling and will but they don’t go behind the senses, they can hear the Voice of Conscience, who is the daughter of the Word (of Christ). However, when man reaches this border not in everyday life but in Initiation, going behind it clairvoyantly and consciously, they must have reached the other veil first behind the senses, and if they are on the right Michaelic path, there they meet the Guardian. In Initiation, the Voice of Conscience works closely with the Guardian of the Threshold. 

The Double of Initiation and the Legion

Students of Initiation, after meeting the Guardian, must encounter yet another double of themselves, which is a composite developed during the process of Initiation. Before, they only met the Double of the incarnating experiences. Now, they meet other beings that constitute a composite from the residues of one or more former initiations. So, frequently, this composite doesn’t refer to this life alone, but it is activated or resurrected again in the process of initiation if one went through an Initiation in one’s past incarnations. This Double is only perceived by mirroring in social aspects. As soon as one becomes a candidate for Initiation, it creates a deformed opaque mirror for others to reflect in, triggering all kinds of projections. This Double is a refractor for spiritual light, a dead aspect, a spectre-being, and is usually problematic because others can perceive their own Double projected onto this Double like in a mirror. However, people are not used to saying: ‘What I see here deformed is my own being’, so immediately they attribute the self-reflection to the mirror itself. The student of Initiation, however, has the responsibility of this mirror and the responsibility of dissolving it with consciousness. This is how we become the Guardians of others by protecting them from themselves. The more one looks at this cold, dead being and understands what it creates in other fellow humans, the more one learns to exercise compassion and love for all human beings around them. Transforming this being is an important step in the Initiation.

The consequences of not developing oneself morally while on the path of Initiation are devastating not only for the human in charge but also for the fellow men linked karmically to them and the Spiritual world, especially their own angel. To overcome some damaging effects, today, Michael works in human karma with progressive Luciferic beings, collectively named the Legion. The beings of the Legion are not easily seen; they work behind the veil covered by the Voice of Conscience.

Rudolf Steiner taught in his early esoteric lessons (contained in the notes from Esoteric Lessons vol. 2, GA266II, lessons from 02.01 to 23.09.1911, particularly see 26.08.1911) that if a person is a zealous meditator but has not developed their I and subsequently their morality, parts of the astral body can detach from the physical and etheric and become prey to different astral beings. Consequently, a fragmenting of consciousness takes place, although the astral parts remain connected. Thus, all kinds of astral beings attracted by sympathy can possess different parts of the astral body and fragment the astral body due to a lack or diminished state of consciousness. This way, an esotericist can become “possessed” to a much higher degree than a person who doesn’t practice meditation.

Regarding the Legion, in other esoteric lessons from the same volume (see Stuttgart, 02.01.1911 or Munich, 19.11.1911), Rudolf Steiner identifies them with four Luciferic hoards named Samael, Azael, Azazel, Mechazael. They have specific tasks for those in esoteric training, but only for those in esoteric training. Normally, if a person thinks, feels or wills something morally wrong, the consequences of their actions in thinking, feeling and will are inscribed in their karma and occur later in their current life or another life. The four Luciferic hoards, however, are engaged by the Michaelic beings to trigger the karmic effect shortly after it happened, thus helping the esotericist see and correct their actions. But this often has a harmful effect on the physical body. So, let’s meet the Legion:

Samael and his hoards are beings with aspects of salamanders. They are the first ones to bring to our consciousness the presence of the Double. Samael corrects in those on the path of Initiation feelings of hate, egotism, jealousy or fury working in the warmth ether. In normal circumstances, if one experiences those feelings during the day, the destructive sensation of warmth generated by these feelings in the etheric body would be directed into the physical body in the blood. Samael’s role is to redirect these sensations and change the karmic outcome. Due to Samael’s rescue action, the student will experience feverish warmth during the night instead. The presence of this fever corrects the karmic effect of the destructive warmth they engaged through their feelings.

Azazel has the aspect of a human head with raven wings. He and his hoards correct the karmic effects of lies, falsity, lack of veracity, exaggeration, and denaturation by bringing them to consciousness. He picks up the effects of falsity on one’s astral body, which otherwise would go through the light ether to the nervous system. The result of their rescue action is a sensation of being squeezed by thousands of hands and pinched in the neck with pliers, thus feeling suffocated.

If lies and exaggeration cover one’s feelings of hate, a combined action of Samael and Azazel takes place. From experience, one may feel immediately nauseated during the day and experience the fierce look of the Guardian during the night. Nausea, however, is an effect that starts immediately; it doesn’t wait for the night. One can immediately feel nauseated by one’s own unjustified feelings towards others. There is yet another thing that we’ve learned from auto-observation: the injustice of the feeling of hate generates a state of insomnia through the night with a sort of imaginative haunting. The Guardian takes the maximised face of the hated person and haunts the disciple in that insomniac state. If such a figure appears in the night in the background of an uncomfortable insomnia, one must know that it is the Guardian wearing the face of one’s hate.

Azael appears in the vision as a lion. He and his hoards correct the indifference to life in general, obtuseness to life and Spirit and one-sidedness. Those who approach Anthroposophy only intellectually, without a desire to meditate or develop those forces in themselves, or those who approach spiritual science with prejudice, caring only about petty mysticisms with lower elementals, hearing about miracles without engaging in a vigorous study, thus one-sided, are in danger to damaging their I which has effects on their astral body, then on their etheric body through the chemical ether further to the entire glandular system. At the counteracting effect of Azael, the student feels a sensation of drowning when waking up in the morning, like being taken over by a flood.

A very special case of denaturation we need to speak about is decontextualization. Decontextualization is a powerful Ahrimanic technique, and redemption requires the actions of both Azazel and Azael together. Ahriman creates false life or thinking contexts where he throws two opposite sides together, then sits back and enjoys their fight: pro-vaccination vs against vaccination, Palestine vs Israel, Ukraine vs Russia, etc. In truth, Ahriman owns the entire context, and it is the context’s falsity that makes any argument or thought false within it. In decontextualization, we have both falsity through the context and one-sidedness through the false and forced decision. No one can be right in a false context; the entire perspective must be changed in order to escape Ahriman’s claws. This also happens in human biography when one feels forced to choose between two evils, and it is ultimately the source of dissatisfaction, anxiety, and depression. Ahriman throws one into a situation where one is asked to choose between two sides of a fake coin, but both decisions imply compromising something essential to one’s spiritual development, usually morality. And if one’s morality cannot be bent, he infuses the most sophisticated discourse of fear to obtain what he wants. His ultimate purpose is to derail one from the path of knowledge because Ahriman hates nothing more than people wanting to evolve beyond the material. However, what the Ahrimanic double cannot stand at all is death.

Mechazael appears to the vision as a bull. He and his hoards correct the savouring of spiritual beatitude instead of engaging in one’s karma. Sometimes, students on the esoteric tend to forget about the real world and end up disregarding it, thus disregarding their own karma, too. In our experience, what usually happens is that the more the disciple advances on the path of Initiation, the freer they become. Partial freedom is one’s worst enemy because, in that state, one may decide not to participate to material life anymore. One may find material life repugnant compared to spiritual life, for instance, the corporative job, the materialistic sciences, and even one’s family members. Avoiding the daily duties by making up a spiritual pretext affects the life ether. Mechazael counteracts this effect, and as a result, the student might feel bound and trapped in their physical body, pressed like in a vice. The beneficial action of Mechazael creates a feeling of uneasiness in the body, and, by this, the disciple is pushed to go out in the world and live their karma.

 To come to understand historically these beings and how they turned from Lucifer to help humanity, we must call to mind a passage from the Bible, Mark 5:1-20 – A Demon-Possessed Man Healed:

5 Then they came to the other side of the sea, to the country of the Gadarenes. 

² And when He had come out of the boat, immediately there met Him out of the tombs a man with an unclean spirit, 

³ who had his dwelling among the tombs; and no one could bind him, not even with chains, 

⁴ because he had often been bound with shackles and chains. And the chains had been pulled apart by him, and the shackles broken in pieces; neither could anyone tame him. 

⁵ And always, night and day, he was in the mountains and in the tombs, crying out and cutting himself with stones.

⁶ When he saw Jesus from afar, he ran and worshiped Him. 

⁷ And he cried out with a loud voice and said, “What have I to do with You, Jesus, Son of the Most High God? I implore You by God that You do not torment me.”

⁸ For He said to him, “Come out of the man, unclean spirit!” 

⁹ Then He asked him, “What is your name?” And he answered, saying, “My name is Legion; for we are many.” 

¹⁰ Also he begged Him earnestly that He would not send them out of the area.

¹¹ Now a large herd of swine was feeding there near the mountains. 

¹² So all the demons begged Him, saying, “Send us to the swine, that we may enter them.” 

¹³ And at once Jesus gave them permission. Then the unclean spirits went out and entered the swine (there were about two thousand); and the herd ran violently down the steep place into the sea, and drowned in the sea.

¹⁴ So those who fed the swine fled, and they told it in the city and in the country. And they went out to see what it was that had happened. 

¹⁵ Then they came to Jesus, and saw the one who had been demon-possessed and had the legion, sitting and clothed and in his right mind. And they were afraid. 

¹⁶ And those who saw it told them how it happened to him who had been demon-possessed, and about the swine. 

¹⁷ Then they began to plead with Him to depart from their region.

¹⁸ And when He got into the boat, he who had been demon-possessed begged Him that he might be with Him. 

¹⁹ However, Jesus did not permit him, but said to him, “Go home to your friends, and tell them what great things the Lord has done for you, and how He has had compassion on you.” 

²⁰ And he departed and began to proclaim in Decapolis all that Jesus had done for him; and all marvelled.

In order to understand the biblical scene and how Christ restores the demonised, we need to make some preliminary considerations. We must remember that every deed Christ did during His three years on Earth, for the first time and maybe the last in the history of humanity, was in perfect synchronicity of all planes: physical, etheric, astral and spiritual. This is important because we know that the four planes have different rhythms to adjust to one another. If something happens at the level of the I (Spirit), the astral needs 7 times more time to readjust, the etheric 4 x 7 times, and the physical 10 x 4 x 7 times. But when Christ was on Earth, everything was synchronised in time. Therefore, every deed of Christ was inscribed in all four planes at once, under their specific laws. Christ could establish order in the different rhythms and thus became the Lord of Time or Karma. For human beings, time is karma because when time acts in the human being, it is under the moral law of karma. However, Christ-consciousness burns what is remanent in human karma.

Let’s look at the composition of Mark 5:1-20. A man coming from the tombs means a man who was in an Initiation process, and something wrong happened. The initiations of the past were taking place in tombs. Based on the above, he was possessed due to some effects of his initiation by the Luciferic hoards. The hoards ask Christ not to send them out of the area, meaning to let them evolve with men, not to be outcasted out of the evolution. We remember that Lucifer and Ahriman need to evolve with men for their redemption. In order to not become outcasts, they needed to promise Christ they would do something for the human being. The pigs symbolise the astral parts that accumulate in time as residues and are killed at another time – karma. So, what happened was that Christ gave the Legion the task of killing the pigs, the astral parts that usually remain corrupted between incarnations, in exchange for their survival as spiritual beings. As a consequence, the pigs are killed instantly, which signifies that karma is burned much faster for the esotericist.

We see that the Legion (Samael, Azael, Azazel and Mechazael) has already committed to Christ in exchange for their spiritual survival, and today they help Michael with the karma of Michaelites (Anthroposophists). They have turned from Lucifer, and more and more Luciferic and Ahrimanic beings will do that progressively, and this will be what we know as the redemption of Lucifer and Ahriman.

The student of the Guardian must correct their actions in thinking, feeling and will, thus changing their karma; otherwise, they will bear accelerated consequences that transform into physical illness by the good action of the Legion. The Luciferic beings of the Legion can evolve only if they act like Angels, taking care of some of our residues that appear in the process of death (Initiation). Helping the Michaelites with their evolution also helps them in their cosmic destiny.

The Asuras, the anti-I and the 8th sphere

Asuras are spirits of the greatest egotism that decayed on the Old Saturn. They are the dregs of the planetary evolution from Saturn to Vulcan. They were Archai at the stage of humans on the Old Saturn, and they should have developed the I as we must do by the end of the Earth’s evolution. Instead, they developed a reversed I. We must refer to Asuras as spirits that are opposed the evolution, thus completely outside human evolution.

Because they were supposed to be Archai, Spirits of Time, they became demons of time, and they can detour karma. The actions of the Asuras started to be more visible in the 9th century when a derangement in human karma occurred. The planetary archangels rebelled against Michael as the administrator of Cosmic Intelligence. In this rebellion, some angels have fallen and continue falling prey to materialism. Consequently, many human beings were not directed properly in their karma from the 9th century until now, so for several incarnations. Therefore, different disruptive karmic situations occurred. People who were supposed to meet didn’t; instead, other connections were formed. The Asuras intensified their activity in the last century, being visible as Egregores, especially around the political personalities that ordered mass destruction crimes, and their actions are continually increasing.

Michael’s reign is about repairing karma and getting it back on its normal course. The process of karma burning is more difficult for Michaelites because, many times, this requires breaking up with other people, getting out of stuck situations, or giving up parts of oneself. In doing so, the Michaelites will encounter the spirits named Asuras, who work less personally and more at the level of communities and society through the means of sexual decadence, occult hypnosis and materialism.

Asuras are related to the fire conditions of the Old Saturn, conditions of destruction that today can be found only in the most intimate processes of decayed human sexuality. This fire is without light, while Christ’s is a holy fire with light. So, the Asura fire contains an enormous force of destruction, and when this fire finds itself an expression in the physical reality, it becomes radioactivity. But please note that radioactivity in itself is not the Asuras but the effect of their presence as it carries the fire of the Old Saturn in today’s physical conditions.

The Asuras are terrible beings that cannot be beheld by sight. What one can perceive about them even clairvoyantly is the form of their presence, which is, in a way, a mark, an effect. To make this better understood, allow us a comparison to the physical world: Let’s say that one has a cat and leaves the house. When they come back, the flower pot is down. One knows it was the cat, although it may stay hidden somewhere. Similarly, one can perceive the presence of an Asura, and this is by recognising the spiritual effect. We might say it is less an experience of ignorance or darkness of things that we do not know but rather of absolute absence, the disquiet that is not a normal sense of nothingness but a more sinister feeling directed against our soul and material reality. 

Asuras can incorporate one or more human beings through their Ahrimanic ego-form. They are destructive for the I and cannot incorporate human beings in the absence of an Ahrimanic ego-form. Usually, it is not one human being but a corpus. For instance, Oppenheimer and the whole of Project Manhattan incorporated an Asura; Hitler and his inner circle incorporated an Asura. Bill Gates, Elon Musk, Mark Zuckerberg, and others (they must be 12) incorporate an Asura, too, and so on. The work of the Asura leads to complete and irreversible destruction. Here, the atomic bomb is the best example of the type of destruction we are talking about because many are still under the impression that the big tech companies led by geniuses in IT still have a progressive spiritual goal.

If one is to experience an Asuric being intuitively, one would say this: “I call myself I. Yet, there are many Is around me, multiplicated to infinite, copies of my own I, and I don’t know which I is myself. Therefore, I want to kill them all, so I can identify myself.” A person possessed by an Asura cannot experience themselves as individuality because they experience an infinite split of their inner core. Instead, they continuously experience a threat from all other individualities around. They can only identify themselves for a short period and this is in the process of destroying other people’s individuality. On the other hand, where the I is hardly felt any more, the individual becomes increasingly preoccupied with themselves; then, habitually, they may become increasingly anxious and materialistic due to this tendency. Finally, the experience tending in the physical body to addiction or obsession and blocking of life can lead to the influx of the influence of the 8th sphere, to which we shall later turn. In this process, we see the three resistant powers of Lucifer, Ahriman and the Asuras mounting a strategic project to rest authority away from the individual I. For the candidate for Initiation, to see this process in themselves in retrospect, or to see others succumb to this is part of the awakening to some of the deepest challenges of the spiritual in modern times.

Lucifer was at work in the Lemurian epoch; he can be included in the Earth’s evolution, as he worked as a liberator and gave us enthusiasm for wisdom. The Satanic gods of hindrances, Ahriman, began their work in the Atlantean epoch. Asuras started to work in the post-Atlantean epoch. They only work into the sexual life of the physical body. The many sexual aberrations today are to be ascribed to this strong influx. However, the sexual life of the physical body can be externalised in thought-forms that have a powerful aura of egotistic desire, extreme possession, and power of annihilation, e.g. one president of a country desires the extinction of a nation. These thought-forms can incorporate an Asura. Everything working in a society that derives from aberrant sexual thought-forms that are maintained through ceremonial or simply decayed sexual activities is the action of an Asura. We must note here that there are those in secret societies and those engaged in materialistic science who are aware of these things because this secret grants great power if the occult is put to use for special interests in society to profit from the incredible super-intelligence and power of these beings to wreak havoc in society and to lead to the disintegration and the dulling of the minds of the people.

We will take as an example the recent case of P. Diddy.  He established an entertainment industry based on sexual abuse, sexual mafia bounding, trafficking, racketeering and influence.  However, what was sexual is no longer sexual, as it gains another significance of social destruction, not only for the participants to sexual acts against their will but also for those who listen to his music, even if involuntarily, from a distant radio. This is because, behind his music, there is a thought-form of the most egotistic and lowest animalistic desire that incorporates Asuras. Think of it like this, if you will: All music videos and lyrics of this particular producer are suffocated by images from his “freak-off” parties. They cannot keep it under cover because they are not creative people. A creative person will project in the etheric the forces of their creativity, which will grow organically further and inspire other creative people, bringing wonders to the world. A dull person, drained sexually and abused, can only project images from their immediate physical reality. Therefore, everything projected by these people (many of them not even having a proper form of language yet) is then inspired by the rest of the world via radio waves and projected further. We all live in the atmosphere of these things whether we like it or not, whether we listen to this kind of music or not. If we like these songs and videos, we take them into ourselves; if we reject them, we project them back. These chimaeras are there as long as they are nurtured.

The Asuras creep into the consciousness soul and therewith into the I, for the I lights up in the consciousness soul. The Asuras will generate evil with a far mightier force than was wielded by the Satanic powers in the Atlantean epoch or by the Luciferic Spirits in the Lemurian epoch. The Asuras inhabit the Moon, and from there, they work on the men whom they want to drag down into the 8th sphere and thereby tear away from progressive evolution and its goal – the Christ. All those who strive towards the 8th sphere will eventually live on a moon created from the debris of the actual Earth, when the Earth will step on the next planetary existence.

The 8th sphere is an occult sphere around our actual planet and our actual moon, made entirely by densified mineral imaginations instilled by Lucifer and Ahriman in the substantiality of the Old Moon wrested away by them before the Spiritual Earth transitioned to the 4th stage as Earth. The two of them have an agreement: every human being one of them conquers will be split in such a way that Lucifer gains the soul, and Ahriman takes the physical and the etheric. Ahriman makes no use of the human soul, he only needs the etheric, life sheath to be incorporated by one of his troops. His aim is to create a mechanised society on Earth occupied entirely by egoless humans/automatons with a centralised administration. Lucifer’s aim is to take the souls of these humans and estrange them from the evolution of the Earth completely, so they lose their desire to reincarnate, thus making them immortal and lethargic in a world created only of densified fantasies. Asuras’ aim is to destroy humanity and its evolution completely.

To achieve the transfer in the 8th sphere, Lucifer, Ahriman, and Asura use initiates in their mysteries. Through special murdering techniques, Ahriman’s initiates terrorise a sacrificial soul before being killed in such a way that they lose the desire for reincarnation, leaving the physical and etheric sheaths empty for Ahrimanic automatons to incorporate. Due to the karmic relationship that is established between the murderer and the victim, the Ahrimanic Initiate ensures themselves a place in the 8th sphere, too. Lucifer’s work is softer, apparently; he simply creates worlds of densified imaginations, and his Initiates succumb in delight and lethargic but egotistic peace. The Asuras provide the temptation toward ceremonial black magic and the lust for destruction. The tragedy is that everything touched by the 8th sphere is spiritually lost forever, meaning an actual spiritual death.

Practical considerations regarding the three beasts and Guardian’s trials

After meeting the Guardian and acknowledging him, the following lessons refer to seeing and experiencing the counter images of the second veil created before our inner world, behind which we find the Voice of Conscience. We meet now for the first time the demons of our thinking, feeling and will, counter images that have in the fifth cultural epoch a specific form, a caricatured and, in many ways, reversed form of the eagle, lion and bull.

We can experience in this process, as outlined and depicted in the First Class, the three beats of the Threshold. These three emerge and come to our attention as we engage in the process of distinguishing our inner experiences on the path of Initiation. On the one side, we have the Guardian, who shows us three beasts, on the other, we have our actions, deeds, feelings and thoughts we are developing through Conscience in relation to others and the world. The two are linked, for the extent to which we follow our Conscience determines what we meet in and of ourselves in the experience facilitated by the Guardian. The description of what Steiner calls the “grimaces” the contortions on the face of the Guardian, are linked, as described previously, to the experiences we have in life with others linked to our karma. It is an illusion, as many of these experiences are, to think that we can progress on the path of Initiation without engaging in karma and the discomfort of coming to act in spiritual responsibility. So, we have to accept and diligently prove to ourselves how our whole being is mirrored in the gestures of the Guardian.

As we endeavour to show, some real experiences on this path will be helpful to reflect on. We may look at these through the lens of the three beasts, doubt of the spirit (in thinking), mockery of the spirit (in feeling) and fear of the spirit (in the will), and their embodiment of the threefold need for courage for knowledge, fire for knowledge and the creative will of knowledge, and we may formulate for some orientation here the challenges of the Ahrimanic and Luciferic powers and so too, of the Asuric powers added as a necessity of our times.

Firstly, Rudolf Steiner often pointed out that Jesuitism was directly related to materialism derived from the biggest demon of our time, fear of the spirit. The Jesuitic spirit, although more refined today and not restrictive to Jesuits, makes use of extreme body training to achieve complete control over the body functions and gain spiritual power, including pain use, starvation and many others; spiritual power over others, individuals or groups, to gain complete control, from suggestions and intrigues to implanted imaginations in dream states; surveillance of everyone and everything; planning of the entire humankind years and hundreds of years ahead, with political implications, fertility and race control, including creating and funding wars to provoke race mobility and desired mixtures; and spreading of superstition and legends (including conspiracy theories) or financing different resistance movement (even apparently opposed to their own goals) to control their preferred view in society. This is technically called religious and cultural engineering.

In many ways, the culture we have been brought up in since birth is a culture of hypnosis, and part of our task as candidates for Initiation is to understand what this means for our whole outlook on life. So, we shall first turn to this deepest aspect of the Threshold. Let’s follow an example from a film of significance, an art film particularly relevant to our study here, to highlight something we should consider in relation to all these matters we are outlining. The film is The Banshees of Innisfree (2022), with Colin Farrell and Brendan Gleeson, a film released about Ireland 100 years after the burning of the First Goetheanum). In Jesuitism, fear of the spirit and hypnosis are aspects of phenomena that become more pronounced through the twentieth century, with the influx into culture and human society of the influence of the Asuric spirits. Their resultant effects can be seen in the rise of popular arts with emphasis on sexuality, which, when we talk of the Asuras in Anthroposophy, is what often gets focused on, but more essentially, the link has to be seen between this and the implementation of hypnosis by occult means. Hypnosis, in its blackest aspect, is a process whereby we may be estranged from our will and karma.

The film depicts a fictional island in Ireland, separate from the mainland. It is an analogy of the human being in incarnation separated from the spiritual world. There is a fivefold group of characters that are supposed to represent the five members of the human being; however, in this movie, all of them are lamed by society, doomed, to the extent that they become caricatural, animalistic and regressive. One is an artist renowned and popular in the community; second is the archetypal Irish “nice guy”, but a bit dull, who is bound to others and a dear to him donkey; third, is the nice guy’s sister, an aspiring artist who eventually leaves the island; fourth is a young man of unrealised talent, a victim of sexual abuse, and son the fifth, a policeman as representative of the Irish Garda. All five represent the counter images of the five constitutive parts of man – physical, etheric, astral, I and Spirit Self – and their failure to accomplish their mission. The fifth character is the key to the command of this system, and we may link him with the Spirit Self. The failed artist is the I, the nice guy is the physical body, the sister is the etheric body and the abused is the astral body. Only with a fully awakened I do we come to and eventually pass the Threshold. But this path is shrouded by our culture, as the movie portrays it excellently.

One of the keys is to understand how the Jesuit spirit, as outlined in the first two lectures of Jesus to Christ (GA131), is how Jesuit spiritual training causes the student to project the Spirit outward onto others, whose qualities of soul and character it deems then as Luciferic, because the conscious knowledge of Lucifer, has been suppressed or denied. The student feels unworthy, damned and will then see true spiritual experience in themselves and in demonised others as something heretical to be driven out and persecuted. Such a Jesuitically inspired person so trained or influenced will become quite driven to develop will and intellectual thinking, but will slowly lose all access to the middle, to the etheric and the feeling life. Then Ahriman can intensify the blocking of change, to accentuate the self-centred intellectual trait of character and its reflection in the life path and karma, accentuating the neglect of the view of the doppelgängers and the approach to experience of the Guardian. This is the cause of many contradictions and aberrations of those thinking they are studying Anthroposophy but unwittingly rather coming under the influence of Jesuitism because our society and culture are influenced by this spirit to a marked degree. The esoteric student, on the other hand, has to intensify their understanding of Lucifer, and Ahriman through diligent thinking, meditation and study precisely of how and where this Jesuit tendency may have taken unconscious root. In contrast to the Jesuit, the Anthroposophist has to follow the path with Lucifer in full consciousness, learning to school their intellect toward active intuitive thinking. The two paths of Jesuitism and Anthroposophy, as we can see, are diametrically opposed. We, as Anthroposophists, strive to meet the needs of what we might call the needs of the Father, where Christ and the Father are One, by schooling our esoteric understanding and transforming our lives through changes in character and will, in Conscience and Love, rather than the ambition, egotism and vanity that the resistant powers might conjure before us. These are two very different kinds of energy.

In daily life, our egoism in this sense may draw us unconsciously to see the other human being or society and life itself in a utilitarian way. The Other is there for our comfort, our profit, indulgence and our bodily satisfaction. Of course, we see here how, mostly unconsciously, in our will, we are hypnotised into, at its worst, a binding of others to us to satisfy lower demands and needs. We do not need to look far into the world of the twentieth century to see this, and also to our personal lives. We cannot be shy in these times of stating these things. The abuses of children in the Catholic Church and dubious occult lodges are continually in the headlines and commonly commented upon, in a way that was far more undeveloped 100 years ago.

Now, in this process of reflection, we should understand that sexuality has its other side, which is asceticism, and yet both sides are an expression in its most physical shrouded form of that which is actually of the creative artistic principle in man. This, we might call to add to the First-Class distinctions above as the creative will of knowledge. The raising to consciousness of this creative principle, Steiner refers to it as the path from sexuality to spiritualised love, for what we normally call “love” is usually “eroticism” because the desire is to feel love as a sensual feeling in the body. But the more advanced student of Initiation has come to know love as spiritualised love for humanity, and only then may they see the “true love”, spiritualised for another human being, for it mirrors love for humanity as a whole, and this is part of the unfolding of Initiation (see GA145, 27.03.1913).   

In the film, the character Dominic has been sexually abused by his father. Siobhán instinctively rejects his approach of love toward her, and then he dies. What we see here is the problem in a Jesuitic spirit-dominated society that enthusiasm for the spirit (creative will of knowledge) gets programmed, hypnotised into the body to become accepted as “natural”. It is symptomatic that Siobhán wants to leave the island because she wants a spiritual experience, yet no real creative collaboration is possible on the island system. The two other protagonists, Pádraic and Colm, the physical body and the I, are engaged in an ongoing feud that destroys both of them.

But what are the needs of the Father, the needs of creative life in the deepest aspects of the human being, their limbs, their will? We know from the Bible “I and the Father are One”. It is the Voice of Conscience that can show us the needs of the Father as that which we should do in life and on our spiritual path. However, the problem we are highlighting here is the inversion of the creative will of knowledge. In fact, if the exposition we are outlining here is correctly understood, then we see that it is not the needs of ourselves as egoists, as will for the desires of this world, but a certain self-overcoming to move our whole being toward love with an act of Will for that which our conscience shows us.

The following statement helps us understand how our life of will is being inverted and how Lucifer plays in the difficulties in recognising this:

Meeting the needs of the Other instead of meeting the needs of the Father, where the Other is also ourselves. (Lucifer)

The example above and from our biographies may show us where we attempt to seek a world outside ourselves or an Other who will magically fulfil our needs instead of developing ourselves, how we wish to mould in our image, so to speak, or to project an Other we passively submit to. This is, in fact, a process whereby we remain unconscious of Lucifer. True unity, as seen in courtly love and the stories of chivalry in the Holy Grail sagas of Parzival, shows a process of mirroring and karma, for a whole group of people karmically bound to the Initiation process are facilitators of this process. This can be seen in the Mystery Dramas, where the group incarnates successively through time, from Egypt to the Templars and into our modern times. Relationships of love facilitate the process of Initiation. We see this, in the Mystery Dramas, where Maria and Johannes show the core archetype of finally becoming two pillars in the temple. Great maturity is needed in this subject, which is why Rudolf Steiner withheld much about the male-female dynamics, by which all kinds of distortions arise when people have not crossed the Threshold. One of the most ancient secrets is that marriage (not the institution but the unity) is a means by which the Spirit may flow out through spiritualised creativity and into the earth. Continually, we see acts of sacrifice from one to another until finally, the protagonists for Initiation are fully conscious of what they project onto the other, and then they may finally arise sovereign in their creativity.

This brings us to a second level, which is a deeper lying challenge:

Neglecting the view of the Other (Ignorance) and expressing Ahriman’s views. “I will not be my brother’s Guardian!”

The first level is overcome when we strive from fear to courage. Our will has to be raised to start asking some penetrating personal questions. The second is overcome when we see that what we take for our “normal” so-called enthusiasms are, in fact, dictated to us by Ahriman in the night, or unconsciously in our feeling life through the day. Ignorance means not wanting to look past our egoism into concern and interest for the world. We have become a weakling in our feeling life, distrustful that we don’t seem to find a way of being sovereign and at peace in the world. Our feeling life has to be schooled through enthusiasm for the process of self-knowledge. And this is something we, as rule, sorely lack in education, upbringing and adult life. The Guardian shows us where we are lacking. The grimaces and distortions we see in the Guardian’s form are the passivity and avoidance of truly working to understand through empathy those we live with and the world we live in.

The retort we often hear in relationships is the loneliness, the crisis, the coldness of feeling “not seen” for who we believe we truly are. And many of the other insights psychology is so good at bringing before us (especially in this regard with the modern affliction of covert and overt narcissism, for example). Yet we should remember the foregoing that before Initiation, the Other is also our Self. We do not truly see ourselves. This is only possible when we stop projecting. And we only stop that when the Guardian shows us the inclinations of our soul in its form, body and face. It is a painful process of self-discovery, awakening and knowledge, which is why so few attempt it and fall back into the sensual mysticism of the body or intellectualism hovering over it.

This leads us back again to the third level, that of the thinking. Here, as depicted in the Class Lessons, we should rise from doubt to spiritual knowledge. The beast here has a glassy eye. Intellectualism clouds the view of the Other and ourselves in two ways: our feeling life primed by mysticism is how we fall back into the self-other dialectic, which sets the stage for the mirroring process. And when the will is then inverted in the spirit Jesuitism, knowledge as self-knowledge is replaced with the wish to coerce or enforce our will on another. 

Enforcing, Coercing the will of the Other (their self-expression) while hypnotising, making mute the voice of Christ / the I. (Asuras)

It is an experience of the Threshold to feel helpless, forlorn, and unable to speak the creative word. Anyone who has been abused or coerced by others and has experienced this inwardly in the path of Initiation will be able to behold, the following image of Christ: We stand passive as blows are inflicted upon us. We stand head bowed as if frozen, commanded to stand as Christ, with hands behind our back. We stand motionless under the inquisitive gaze of Pilate, and we have to endure accusations. Criticism to which we feel is unjust, hurtful words that we feel compelled to endure are impossible to endure without the corresponding Christ experience of knowing we are to be led to our death. This is indeed part of the process of Initiation, whereby, although it is not our primary focus here, events of the time of Golgotha can come to be experienced in our very souls. Numerous examples could of course be given, these that follow are but a few for us here to dwell upon in relation to our subject matter.

When Steiner describes the Nathan Jesus’ Bat-Kol experience, in the Fifth Gospel (GA148) we may come to deeply empathise with this experience of what Christ went through there, that we are, in a sense, on a very lonely individual path, to learn to die to our former selves; and in this process of Initiation, of coming closer, and of meeting Christ in our lives and karma, this means we too may really have that experience of seeing a life once known drift from us, just like the Nathan Jesus had to experience the people who desert the temple, for Jesus to find himself alone at the altar at dawn. As Steiner points out, many today who come to Anthroposophy have had previous experience in the mysteries or connected to them, and they now seek new impulses for their lives and future karma through Anthroposophy. When we consider the Legion story previously mentioned and the danger for humanity as described by the Bat-Kol in this respect, it reminds us of yet another deep-lying connection between the spiritual path today and the time of Christ, and we may draw this in relation to modern times. Christ has to be found for one’s soul not to be totally overtaken by the powers of Lucifer and Ahriman. The Legion possessed hangs around the tombs in a state of limbo without having progressed in their Initiation, the inaction resulting from a failed initiation. The hypnosis of the materialistic times we live in provides the conditions for this laming of life of the spiritual student. Reconciliatory assistance from the spiritual has to be invoked for the candidate to progress and not face a wasted life of not finding their karma. The student becomes increasingly sensitive and interested in the Gospels, for they speak to very real lived experiences encountered on the spiritual path.

Working with the Voice of Conscience to pass the Guardian’s trials

It is only Christ and experience over the Threshold that can heal the many emotional wounds of life that we accumulate. We are placed in double binds by Ahriman through others, and we are called to raise Self Consciousness by Lucifer, but it is our confrontation with Asuric powers that tests if we are ripe to behold how we ourselves coerce and try to enforce our will on the world.

This can be done in two polarised opposite ways, actively and passively. Actively we may fall outwardly into the hardened material influence of the 8th sphere. Credulity, naivety and superstition are the doors through which we are carried away and see how our I is prepared to be led away, losing itself piece by piece. Dramas in our inner life are unfolded before us, feelings are linked up quickly and with great cunning, and unless we have called to mind the inner work of Guardian, Conscience, Christ and the Father and understood them correctly, the three beasts inseminate fear, weakness and doubt in our spiritual path. The disciple sees how much they have developed and how little they have advanced in their spiritual path to date. Should we progress, this experience can be a battle of the Higher Self with the Lower Self. Any doubt in our abilities is magnified. As a result, stories and visions are sent to test us. All this process is displayed in experience, the trials and tribulations of seeking what is right in given karmic moments of biography. When the test comes, it can be any life situation, a relationship, work, health, or a new situation. No matter the form, it will test the karmic projections and failings of the would-be initiate.

We may then take the former threefold depiction and add to it to again to help us navigate. It is Ahriman in this world who inspires fear of spirit and encourages us unconsciously to feel entitled to life and love by just being what we are. He says: “Be yourself and seek to be loved for what you are! You don’t need Initiation.” So, the answer to Ahriman has to be: No, I shall not be just myself, in entitlement for love, but I shall see love as an act of Will, a self-overcoming, and I shall choose to love actively and not forthrightly seek to be loved passively. Here, conscience steps in. Are we honest with ourselves about what we are “becoming”, and can we correctly behold the self we already are? The past, memory, and identity formed by it are shown to us by the Guardian, but it is Christ who calls us to raise ourselves courageously beyond the Threshold. The Guardian shows us constantly what we are becoming through what we have done by listening to the Voice of Conscience. When it comes to our future course of action, our Idealism for the spiritual world needs action as much as Realism needs the unvarnished truth.

Death in everyday life and atonement

Idolisation is part of the process that brought the First Class to the world. Rudolf Steiner and Ita Wegman battled the idols created by materialism in the spiritual world. A similar battle comes for the Initiate-to-be on this path. The Guardian shows us the idols that have formed through our lives in the admixture of Lucifer and Ahriman, in the doubles of our astral and etheric bodies. We have become bound to certain images of ourselves. But if we look closely, we can find that this enthusiasm instilled into us is often hollow, indeed the process of initiation involves a slow hollowing out, a death process where certain parts of us are slowly lost, to be reborn potentially, but also to face us with “the karmic test of our lives” (Class Lesson 13, mantra 3). Will we be able to raise ourselves to the view of the Spirit, or remain thrust back into lower life by the Guardian? Often, the student won’t want to admit this, as the task seems so big and daunting. What the student has to do is push through this to truly experience the feeling of Shame and the need for Atonement to redress their karma.

To actively seek our karma is to start to appreciate the higher laws of destiny, and to become people of initiative in life. Indeed, this requires maturity of Spirit, for we see that the higher mysteries are shaped by deep laws of karma. The Guardian lets us through the Threshold only when all our impulses of the I (karmic necessities) have been acknowledged truly – in full consciousness and not in inverse form.

We have to see that this is where the waking up from cultural hypnosis is of utmost importance. It is, therefore, a call for the values and ideals of fidelity and faithfulness for karma and destiny in relationships of spiritual work and not the promiscuous indulgence of modern times where we see the Asuric challenge to spiritual development. All this is, of course, inverted in modern times. Today, we are encouraged to install applications like Tinder to find love; we are encouraged to find “a match” for our selfish needs that can be listed on a piece of paper. As Anthroposophists, we can remember how Lucifer tempted Johannes in the Mystery Dramas to redirect his love for Maria to Theodora, his sister in a former incarnation, thus prolonging a spiritual incest. This spiritual injustice led to Theodora’s death and jeopardised the spiritual development of everyone involved. We are encouraged by the opposed powers to divert our karma in “utilitarian”, purely materialistic and spiritually meaningless partnerships. If we don’t search our souls with honesty, we are simply distracted in life.

We can look, therefore, to past relationships as much as we can look to past work situations, so to professional and personal life, as manifestations of karma that have to be worked through. Part of the process of meeting the Guardian is that what has already been overcome is shown to us in mirrored form as something undeveloped. As we saw in the description of Samael, the doppelgänger can speak out of what has already been overcome. We are approaching here, in this ongoing conversation with the Guardian, things that are normally encountered only after death. Because the Luciferic double and the Ahrimanic double are mixed into our bodies, shaping our astral and etheric, our inclinations of soul and habit life, for example should one be a teacher, on meeting the Guardian, one sees a distorted image of the Self before this soul development, an image of someone needing to work on their presentation and leadership skills, a counterimage of a successful teacher. This can be very disorienting when one naively thinks this is some kind of depression, when one unconsciously is thrust back from the Guardian. The real crisis, however, is one of life path and destiny, for the meeting is really for the student to question more thoroughly the karmic path in life, to ask, in this respect, where these skills of leadership, guidance, teaching already developed shall best be served to the world in the new life to come. The past is incorporated by the Ahrimanic double. As we should in Part 1, the form of the Ahrimanic double reflected in the Guardian refers to everything that came to pass and was overcome in the human being.

We see that the meeting with the Guardian has far reaching consequences for the whole future karmic life unfolding and that the after-death state plays into this. A whole new being is coming to view before us with new inclinations in life.

The mirroring process that we experience in others through the Guardian is one whereby we also start to really behold the suffering we have unconsciously caused others. Again, there is no way to avoid this because this is part of the waking-up process over the Threshold. Our whole constitution and disposition to date, structured by Lucifer and Ahriman through the doppelgänger, is looking to be healed and to grow in new directions. The light of Christ is felt in certain moments of inspiration to be permeating them. This means that Karma is also lighting up. What was formerly dark, blind to us, is now showing us important aspects of our self and others. Here we are experiencing in our lives the feelings we have caused others to have endured in their lives. Biography work is essential here, for we start to actually experience the face of others shown through the Guardian, and we find ourselves in situations where we have to endure the inner knowledge that we are experiencing what we once put others through in our states before the Threshold experience in this life before Initiation. Where we might not have given a second thought before to the consequences of our whole character, now certain aspects of our character are shown to us, and we experience the inverse of them in our awareness of the inner soul lives of others.

We may take another example from professional life. We may have reached a certain level of success in our profession, and we thought we had been upstanding, diligent and morally true in this outer life. Yet, on reaching the Threshold, we see that indeed we were, but a new dimension is added: the path to our position in life has been achieved by our effect on others. The things we might have done to sustain our path up the ladder of life, so to speak, are shown to us in their true nature, and we may then have to endure seeing the potential future karmic consequence of things we have done. Again, we may take an example of a leadership process which could be transferred to any business or family setting. We see how we might have undermined this or that person. Not wholeheartedly bad or vindictive were the actions, we thought, but they were significant in their effect nonetheless. Then, on meeting the Guardian, we see that this experience is something we shall have to endure karmically as if redirected back to us, and we see the faces of those we hurt in this, the previous life stage. How we can endure all this when it happens through family, relationships and professional life has to be a question we ask here. The key is to recognise the soul quality that asks to be redressed. In this case, we see that we are called to be responsible, more so than previously. This then prompts deeper reflections: we should think more about our future karma and especially how we need to heal and move on from karmic connections that are, even now, effective on the soul in the present day, even when the events are long past. This is most uncomfortable, but it is unavoidable and cathartic, for we have to learn to move on, to heal, and to achieve what is called in the First Class, Repentance and Atonement.

The Archangel Phanuel is the archangel of repentance. She is leading the students of Initiation. We may sense her presence the more these experiences come to light in our lives. It is like a key experience to which our whole journey to the Threshold and over is leading us, a metanoia, a turning of life. To face Christ is what Conscience asks of us. But, as we have seen, it is a complex and potentially harrowing experience. We are reminded of Paul on the Road to Damascus. True experience here is well-recognisable. The former life has to be slowly or more quickly, depending on our progress, coming to a crisis point. The former life dies often rather suddenly, and henceforth, Initiation means a whole new set of values and experiences starts to dawn. Many days can be as a year might have felt before. What starts to happen is that the bodies start to loosen, with dramatic consequences for the outer life of events, requiring a new sense of patience until all the facts are in order to appreciate the full extent of what we are going through.

Overcoming Lucifer and Ahriman

Part of the process when we have overcome these traits of character in ourselves before the Threshold is that on meeting the Guardian, we are shown their inverse. Can the soul of the candidate trust a new process of development in an unknown territory?  

The question of speed, timing and spiritual law here comes into play. Different speeds of life are encountered in this unfolding story of our lives. With Lucifer we are often too slow in thinking because the emphasis is on the reminiscences of difficulties of the past projected into the future as prophecy that block us. On the other hand, with Ahriman, the speed of change can be disconcerting, and we are overwhelmed and bamboozled. Change has been achieved to a certain extent when we meet the Guardian, but upon meeting him, far-reaching changes to the whole being will start to take place, like a quickening. Notably, a new sense of time starts to unfold. As the remnants of old lives are grown out of, so too are soul qualities, which are newly developed, and karma is rewritten. This has to be done with a certain amount of Equanimity.

Ahriman would like nothing less than that any new initiative of will would be stopped or blocked. Life crises in karma come when Lucifer and Ahriman remain unconscious to us so that we may awaken to their influence. There is a great learning experience here. Again, it is twofold, and in summary of the foregoing, we must assess what our soul needs to find inspiration and stimulation to move forward in life creatively. All this thinking and creative inner work of imagination and psychological self-exploration, Ahriman shall seek to block by using the parts of us that remain self-centred rather than world-centred.

Rudolf Steiner tells us that the forces of egotism act as magnetic forces which draw one down to one’s personal aspects. The Guardian teaches the expansion of one’s egotism to the entire world, the road from egotism to altruism.

“For all the magnetic forces which draw him [the candidate of Initiation] down to what is personal now exercise their strongest influence; and only if he progressed to the point at which the frosty solitude has become so instructive that he is really able to make the world’s interests his own, does he pass the Guardian of the Threshold; and then only does he feel himself united with the Paradise-Imagination, and become one with it. He then feels himself within it. The experience is like a coming into a right relationship with the world-interests, so that he can confess: ‘Now only may I allow my own interests to assert themselves, for they have become the interests of the world.’” (GA145, 27.03.1913)

Lucifer and Ahriman together swarm the soul with ideas of how and why the habitual etheric life should remain just as it is.

The shapes and gestures of Lucifer and Ahriman

It is a good practice to start to develop a kind of inner beholding of the beings Lucifer and Ahriman. We can of course take note of the Representative of Man sculpture by Rudolf Steiner which was saved from the fire of the First Goetheanum and this is helpful to help us fire up the inner imagination so to speak. But something far more profitable for our ongoing work is to be able to reflect on our thinking processes in all these reflections and learn to work up a living relationship to the two beings.

Lucifer can be felt as a great warmth in the soul, red, and in moments where we particularly feel that rush of our self-belief, we may recognise a force in our bodies, a force to move our intellect, a dynamic energy in thinking. This is not a bad thing, and we need to think with such intensity. However, we should watch how gestures change as we express our thoughts. Should we forget or overlook the self-centred orientation of our thinking, should we lose the check of outer reality, then we have the head bowed inward in the contemplation of self alone. On the other hand, should our thinking inflate and become euphoric, carried away with our own insights, we have the great expansive hand gestures, in Lucifer’s case, wing gestures. Lucifer, seen like this, is proud, haughty and very grandiose, very prone to anger or self-doubt if challenged, and we, through him, seek approval from others for the greatness of our seemingly genius ideas. The indignant attitude that they should not be validated enough comes to the fore. We can watch this gesture outwardly of ourselves and others. Or we can see it simply in the retrospective of certain thinking processes we engage in.

We may do the same with Ahriman. Part of the added benefit of engaging in such work to learn to behold the two is that we may then study how they work together. We may behold Ahriman in the crunching gesture of the hand, the hammering gesture of the will to chop up reality and intellectual life with thinking. Again, this is no bad thing in itself, it is part of the nature of thinking, but the impulse to then use clever intellectual insight to control, to take apart, to pin down, all this shows a contorted face, a gnarly-ness, characteristic of Ahriman. The nose is pointy, the eyes focused, somewhat pinched in expression, like someone analysing intensely the fineness of a material object. Socially, if we push too hard, inspired by Lucifer with our ideas, if we hammer, so to speak, our ideas too rampantly upon others, we see the problems that arise in our self-expression for those we might wish to work with. Having social skills means we don’t fully let this reign in our interactions, but watching for the afterimage is a good exercise. We can learn to be precise to see Lucifer and Ahriman with these imaginative pictures of the two beings and then detect them in our inner thinking processes.

One helpful watchword for the work of Ahriman is his “whirling” in the feeling life. One helpful watchword for Lucifer is his “swarming” sense of intoxication with ourselves in the thinking life. Over against the warmth of Lucifer is the coldness of Ahriman. We, as spiritual students, have to have a command of when and how we employ this coldness and warmth. As we progress, certain symptoms in daily life can be redressed once we have become better acquainted with Lucifer and Ahriman. Life in the night outside the body can slowly lighten up to the extent that we do this work through the day. The profit for us spiritually when we learn to imagine here in the day these beings, as with other impressions of the world around us and our soul lives, is that in the night, these exercises can transform and spiritual beings can work into them, and this is part of an ongoing path of awakening across the Threshold in meditation and in sleep.

Bibliography

Chapter Preliminary considerations

1. The Guardian of the Threshold Part 1 &  Part 2, by Alexandra Vasilache 2024 (alexandravasilache.blog)
2. Sergej O. Prokofieff, Prima Clasă a Școlii lui Michael și fundamentele sale christologice, cap. 5 Păzitorul pragului în orele de Clasă, Univers Enciclopedic Gold, București, 2013 (translation from Die Erste Klasse der Michael-Schule und ihre christologischen Grundlagen. Dornach, 2009)
3. Rudolf Steiner, Esoteric Lessons for the First Class (GA270)

Chapter The Guardian and the Voice of Conscience, the reborn Bat-Kol

1. Rudolf Steiner, The Christ Impulse and the Development of the Ego-Consciousness (GA116), especially lecture 02.05.1910
2. Rudolf Steiner, The East in the Light of the West (GA113), especially lecture 25.08.1909
3. Rudolf Steiner, Fifth Gospel (GA148), especially lectures 06.10.1913, 04.11.1913, 18.11.1913, 22.11.1913, and 08.12.1913
4. Rudolf Steiner, The Gospel of Matthew (GA123), lecture 06.09.1910
5. Rudolf Steiner, The Gospel of John (GA103), lecture 22.05.1908
6. Rudolf Steiner, lecture Salt, Mercury, Sulphur (GA220, 13.01.1923)
7. Rudolf Steiner, Anthroposophical Leading Thoughts (GA26), no. 11

Chapter The Double of Initiation and the Legion

1. Rudolf Steiner, Esoteric Lessons vol. 2 (GA266II), lessons from 02.01.1911 to 23.09.1911, particularly see 02.01.1911, 26.08.1911 and 26.11.1911
2. Bible, Mark 5: 1-20
3. Rudolf Steiner, The Being of Man and His Future Evolution (GA107), lecture 12.01.1909

Chapter The Asuras, the anti-I and the 8th sphere

1. Rudolf Steiner, Esoteric Lessons vol. 1 (GA266I), notes from 11.01.1907 and 29.01.1907
2. Rudolf Steiner, The Temple Legend (GA93), lecture 23.05.1904 and 10.06.1904
3. Rudolf Steiner, Foundations of Esotericism (GA93a), lectures 07.10.1905, especially 17.10.1905
4. Rudolf Steiner, The Being of Man and His Future Evolution (GA107), lectures 01.01.1909 and 22.03.1909
5. Rudolf Steiner, Theosophy and Rosicrucianism (GA100), lecture 24.06.1907
6. Rudolf Steiner, Theosophy and Rosicrucianism (GA99), lecture 02.06.1907
7. Rudolf Steiner, Karmic Relationships vol. 3 (GA237), lecture 08.08.1924
8. Rudolf Steiner, Inner Impulses of Evolution (GA171), especially lectures 18.09.1916, 23.09.1916 and 24.09.1916
9. Rudolf Steiner, The Occult Movement in the 19^th Century (GA254), especially lectures 18.10.1915 and 19.10.19015

Chapter Practical considerations regarding the three beasts and Guardian’s trials

1. Rudolf Steiner, Esoteric Lessons for the First Class (GA270), lessons 1 and 2
2. The movie The Banshees of Innisfree (2022)
3. Rudolf Steiner, From Jesus to Christ (GA131), lectures 05.10.1911 and 06.10.1911
4. Rudolf Steiner, Mystery Dramas (GA14), the 2^nd drama, The Soul’s Probation and the 4^th drama, The Soul’s Awakening

Chapter Death in everyday life and atonement

1. Rudolf Steiner, Esoteric Lessons for the First Class (GA270), lesson 13
2. Rudolf Steiner, Mystery Dramas (GA14), the 3^rd drama, The Guardian of the Threshold
3. Rudolf Steiner, The Effect of Occult Development Upon the Self and the Sheaths of Man (GA145), lecture 27.03.1913

Chapter Overcoming Lucifer and Ahriman

1. Rudolf Steiner, The Effect of Occult Development Upon the Self and the Sheaths of Man (GA145), lecture 27.03.1913

Alexandra Vasilache and Richard Cooper

The Nathan Jesus and the Guardian of the Threshold – archetypal experiences at the Gate of Death

In the first part, I concentrated on describing the nature of the lower Guardian of the Threshold by gathering specific guidelines from Rudolf Steiner that help one form a healthy image of this being before the experience. Additionally, I have explained in detail how one can prepare oneself for this meeting through Anthroposophic exercises and biography work. In our striving to understand more about the being of the Guardian, we must remember two important things: firstly, that the Guardian is not oneself but an Archangel that triggers the most intimate experience of oneself; secondly, that the Guardian is not the Double, but he often clothes himself in experience as the Double. This must be very clearly understood and carried into the spiritual memory. By doing so, the disciple of Anthroposophia knows that the being that stays in front of them beyond the senses when they are ready to meet him in whatever form he takes is a lofty being and the only one to decide their righteous entrance to the spiritual realm. It is only possible if one undergoes the specific exercises Rudolf Steiner indicated in GA10, Knowledge of the Higher Worlds, and extended throughout his entire work. 

The following description of the Guardian offered by Rudolf Steiner helps me summarize best the main ideas offered in the first part, upon which I will build the second part of my considerations:

“Here we stand at the boundary between the life of the senses and spiritual life, confronted not by a system of concepts but by a reality that only works super-sensibly, and as concretely and livingly as a human being. This is the Guardian of the Threshold. He is there as a concrete and real being. When we learn to know him, we know he belongs to those beings who, to a certain extent, have taken part in life since primeval times on earth, but who have not gone through what one experiences as a being of soul. This is the being who, in the mystery play, The Guardian of the Threshold, is meant to be expressed dramatically in the words:

Thou knowest well, who has been Guardian

 Of this realm’s threshold since the world began,

 What beings need to cross the threshold o’er

 Who to thy time and to thy kind belong…

This “to thy time and to thy kind” is something that proceeds indeed, from the very essence of the matter. Of other times and other kinds are the men, the beings, who since primeval times have in a certain sense separated themselves from the path of humanity on earth, and in each of these we meet a being of whom we may say, “I have a being before me who experiences and lives through a great deal in the world, but he does not concern himself with all the love and grief and pain that can be experienced on earth, nor yet with the failings and immorality there. He neither knows nor wishes to know anything of what has taken place up to now in the depths of man’s nature.” Christian tradition expresses this in the words: “When confronted by the mystery of man’s becoming, such beings veiled their faces.” A whole world is expressed in this contrast between such beings and human beings.

Now a feeling arises as immediately as does the feeling we have on meeting a fair-haired man, that “he has fair hair.” There comes this feeling: In passing through various earthly culture, I have naturally acquired faults, but I must get back again to my original state; I must retrace my steps on earth, and this being can show me the way just because he does not possess my faults. One has before one a being who stands there majestically as an actual reproach, but at the same time spurring one on toward all that one is not. The being shows one this most vividly, and one can feel one’s own being completely filled with the knowledge of what he is and what he is not. There one stands before this living reproach. This being belongs to the rank of archangels. The meeting actually takes place, and has the effect of suddenly revealing to us what we have become as earthly man in sensory existence. This is direct self-knowledge in the truest and broadest sense. You see yourself as you are; you also see yourself as you ought to become!

But it is not always fit for man to see himself thus. Today I have only spoken of the world of concept and idea that has to be discarded. But much else must be laid aside. When we reach the Guardian of the Threshold, we must really lay aside all that we know of ourselves, but we must still retain something to carry on with us. That is the chief thing. This knowledge that we have to leave everything behind at the threshold is an inner experience in itself to which one must have attained, and the preparation for this stage of clairvoyance must consist in schooling ourselves to bear what would otherwise be full of terror and fear. With proper schooling we need not speak of danger because such a schooling does away with danger. Powers of endurance must be attained through due preparation; they are the fundamental force necessary for all further experience. In ordinary life man is not capable of enduring all that he must endure when standing before the Guardian of the Threshold.

The Guardian of the Threshold is there for a strange purpose. If it is not to be misunderstood, it has to be judged from the standpoint of the super-sensible world. In man, the activities of the super-sensible world are always at work, though he knows nothing of this. Whenever we think and feel and will, it always necessitates a certain activity of the, astral body and connection with the astral world. But man knows nothing of this; if he knew what his bodies really were he would not be able to bear it and would be stunned by it. So that when man meets this being without sufficient preparation, everything must be veiled from him, including the being. The being must draw a veil over the super-sensible world. He must do this for the protection of man who, while within the world of the senses, could not endure the sight. In this we really see a concept that, in the world of the senses, can only be judged morally, as the most direct ordering of nature. The protection of man from sight of the super-sensible world is the function of the Guardian of the Threshold. He must hold man back until he has completed the necessary preparation.” (GA138, 27.08.1912)

In this second part, in relation to the Guardian of the Threshold, I would like to refer to Rudolf Steiner’s most vulnerable and intimate communications, whose correct understanding bears tremendous importance for the entire fifth epoch and the right preparation of the sixth one. Rudolf Steiner brought these living communications from the Akasha Chronicle, and he had hoped that they would form in those who receive them a living corpus of knowledge known as “The Fifth Gospel”. The Fifth Gospel, as Rudolf Steiner tells us, was “the power which the Christ had become after the Mystery of Golgotha”, the resurrection power, and it was awakened in Christ Jesus’ disciples as a force of their hearts and minds at the first Pentecost, which acted in them as unaltered and direct cosmic love (see GA148, 03.10.1913). It is a living clairvoyant consciousness – a living being, a being of fiery clairvoyant consciousness, a being of cosmic love. This type of living clairvoyant consciousness could only work in the disciples back then as the power of their souls. However, this living clairvoyant consciousness that blossomed in the first disciples of the fourth epoch at the first Pentecost can blossom in each of those who revive it in their soul in the fifth epoch by the imaginative gates Rudolf Steiner carefully prepared in the series of lectures with the same name, The Fifth Gospel (GA148). We are now, in the fifth epoch, ready to behold also consciously what the first disciples lived as an active force of love. We are ready, but efforts must be made. Therefore, as disciples of Anthroposophia, we must understand the individuality of Rudolf Steiner not only as our beloved Teacher but also as the first true evangelist of the fifth epoch.
 
So, these living cosmic Christ-memories from the Akasha living record carry the Christ resurrection force and can form in us the Fifth Gospel, which will act in each of us as resurrected life. It will help us prepare the future of humankind in the same way it helped the first disciples of the fourth epoch at the first Pentecost prepare the fifth epoch. What does it mean, the reader might ask, that whoever revives and unfolds in them the Christ impulse through these living Christ-memories will afterwards teach in the world as the early disciples did? No, it doesn’t mean that, although it might not exclude it. It means that once a new living clairvoyant consciousness is developed and carried in such a way, it will gradually become natural for the new generations. It becomes a universal good, like inheriting something from one’s parents.

“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 following considerations will focus on the three meetings that the Nathan Jesus had on his way to the Jordan. In order to follow my reflections, the reader should be well-acquainted with the content of The Fifth Gospel (GA148), especially the lectures from Munich, 08.12.1913 and 10.12.1913. Unfortunately, these lectures are often translated separately into English, likely due to publishers disregarding their value, believing that Rudolf Steiner was merely repeating himself. However, this is a materialistic view, symptomatic of our times, as the words of an initiate like Rudolf Steiner carry resurrected life forces, and his different descriptions of the same subject are as valuable as the information in itself. My observation when working not merely intellectually but imaginatively with Anthroposophic texts is that they open different gates to knowledge. I favoured these two lectures in particular because their description helps us form an objective image of the appearance, being and deeds of the Guardian of the Threshold, humanly and godly archetypal, as it stands in the eternal Akasha Record. From the beginning, I would like to notify the reader that everything I put in quotation marks and italics is Rudolf Steiner’s words/expressions as they are translated into English; everything else is my understanding and paraphrasing.

Rudolf Steiner tells us that after the discussion with his mother, the Nathan Jesus emptied gradually as the I of Zarathustra was lifted to the Spirit. He, thus, remained with only three sheaths duly prepared by the great initiate, the astral, etheric, and physical bodies. Remaining in only three sheaths and without an I, although the most spiritualised and advanced human sheaths, the Nathan Jesus became a “strange being”, incomprehensible for those around him but driven by “something like a compulsion, which took the form of a powerful, cosmic impulse”. This strange impulse made him one day take the road to Jordan. 

When referring to the Solomonic Jesus and the first departure of the I of Zarathustra, Rudolf Steiner tells us that immediately after the departure of the great initiate, the boy “dried up”, “withered away, because he was actually egoless”, and died. Therefore, we must ask why didn’t this happen to the Nathan Jesus. What was this compulsion, the cosmic impulse that kept his corporealities together in that short period of time before the Baptism, which is the actual descending of the Christ? 

To answer this question, we need to follow the events through the imaginative portal opened through Rudolf Steiner’s communications: We can imagine the egoless Nathan Jesus walking on the road to Jordan. We can also look at the other side of the senses, where the Christ Being, the loftiest of Gods, was waiting to enter humanity. We must assume that the Gate of Death was largely open for Christ to enter if one can give this description. We already know that the Gate is the Guardian, a living being who is the Archangel who drew the curtain of senses after the expulsion from Paradise and hid away from humans. Thus, we can only assume that on the road to the Jordan River, the Guardian of the Threshold was the one talking through the Nathan Jesus, physically and cosmically, like never before. The lower Guardian of the Threshold has temporarily taken the place of the I of Zarathustra and safeguarding the body and soul of the being Christ would later incorporate. 

Let us take the first meeting with the two Essenes. According to Rudolf Steiner, Jesus had previously lived in their community and had met them before. However, after being emptied of his self-memory, he did not remember them, but the two Essenes remembered him. During this encounter, Jesus was seen as the same being of sublime, pure love, radiating infinite mild tenderness through his eyes, just as he always was. However, this time, when the two Essenes looked deeper into his eyes, they experienced an intimate reproach, which didn’t come from Jesus himself. The reproach could only be triggered by the most intimate self-experience, the Guardian of the Threshold himself: 

“Both Essenes saw in him [Jesus] an old acquaintance. They experienced Him such that they couldn’t look away from the tremendously mild glance of Jesus, intensified to infinity, as he now was. But then also, when they looked into these eyes, they felt at the same time a kind of reproach that didn’t come from Him. It was something like a power that welled up in their own souls, streamed forth into His eye, and streamed back, like mild moonlight, but as tremendous reproach to their own being, to what they were.” (GA148, 08.12.1913)

Dear friends, this is the specificity of the Archangel of the Gate, the Guardian. This really helps us understand the Guardian better in comparison to other spiritual beings: by his transparency and perfection, he triggers the most intimate experience of the self. In the beginning, this experience feels like an uncomfortable reproach, as it is meant to pull out one’s being from one’s earthy coverings. As mentioned in the first part, people who approach the Threshold in life start having the Guardian’s marks. This can also be visible from a very early age nowadays. You may have noticed people who make you feel uncomfortable in their presence, like they can see through you, although they don’t say anything. I have already defined these persons as Threshold personalities, although in a true sense, they are only human beings called to initiation or going through other processes that imply approaching the Gate of Death. The Essenes must have felt similarly when meeting Jesus; they recognised the old Jesus, but they felt for the first time uncomfortable in his presence. They asked him where he was going, and the Guardian replied:

“There, where souls of your kind don’t want to look, where the pain of humanity can find the rays of forgotten light!”

The Essenes were highly esteemed in those times, much like Hollywood celebrities are viewed today. Unlike today, where people often gain influence through notoriety, wealth, or status, the Essenes were revered for their spiritual advancement and holiness. Thus, the Essenes were disregarded when the one who spoke through Jesus gave the impression that they were no different from the profane people: “souls of your kind”, “forgotten light”.

What happened next is of incredible significance, and I need to warn the reader that for the following explanations, I may stand alone, as Rudolf Steiner let us free and did not explain these processes all the way, but we are today mature enough to penetrate the images from the Akasha he opens for us further on our own. Rudolf Steiner tells us that through specific techniques, the Essenes could expel Lucifer and Ahriman from their gates, from their enclosed community. The Nathan Jesus had previously seen how the weakened and famished Lucifer and Ahriman were obliged to look for nourishment elsewhere, at the expense of the rest of the community. Therefore, the Essenes were only concerned about their own purification, becoming holy, while the uninitiated community had to endure the attacks of the hungered Lucifer and Ahriman. But what does it mean that Lucifer and Ahriman withdrew from their gates? It means that a person undergoing Essene spiritual preparation could separate Lucifer and Ahriman in such a way that they expelled them from their sheaths until they remained totally without a Double! This was achieved without the participation of the Guardian of the Threshold, who is the sole authority in the process, so in a way, they could trick the Guardian of Threshold by not even reaching the Gate of Death. As the Essenes were healers, it is highly probable that they had knowledge of elementals, enabling them to use various techniques to expel Luciferic and Ahrimanic elementals from their communities or human sheaths when healing. We learn about this from the Guardian himself, whose cosmic voice was heard from Jesus’ mouth. He addressed them, saying: 

“What kind of souls are you? Where is your world? Why do you hide yourself behind illusory veils? Why does a fire burn without you that wasn’t ignited in my Father’s house?” (GA148, 08.12.1913)

The Guardian clearly sees that they don’t have a Double, which is typically a sign of initiation. However, they did not undergo the normal process of crossing the portal of death, so they were not recognized by the Guardian. Essentially, they were caught spiritually cheating, like pupils are caught at school with cheat sheets: “What kind of souls are you? Where is your world? Why do you hide yourself behind illusory veils?”. They triggered the initiation process but didn’t do it morally; the fire of will did not burn as taking responsibility for one’s karma and moral transformation but at the expense of other people. There is even more, Rudolf Steiner describes the Gate of Death in relation to the Father principle in GA112, 06.07.1909:

“Instead of the mirage of the senses, man should see everywhere and in all things the divine Father principle, of which all things and he himself are a part. The Father principle, then, does not appear in its true form. Because of the decline in human faculties, of which we have spoken, we see the Father principle veiled by delusion, by maya.

What do we find woven into this great delusion? Among all the phenomena we perceive, one stands out as essentially fundamental: death. Therefore we should tell ourselves that the outer objects confronting our senses are in reality the Father principle, are expressions of the divine-spiritual Father element. And since death is interwoven in the totality of the sense world, it is something that pertains to the divine-spiritual Father principle. Owing to the nature of man’s development the divine Father principle has become obscured for him by many a veil, and ultimately by the veil of death. What must man seek? The Father, the cosmic Father; and just as he must learn to think of every object as being in truth the Father, so he must come to feel that death, too, is the Father. And why does a false picture of the Father appear to us in the physical sense world? Why is it distorted into the grotesque image appearing to us so deceptively as death? Because the Lucifer-Ahriman principle has been infused into every phase of our life.”

We have gained a larger understanding of the Guardian’s first words to the Essenes: He saw two human beings who didn’t initially leave a lasting impression on him. However, he soon realises they don’t have many Luciferic and Ahrimanic elementals with them (the Double), yet they hadn’t undergone initiation in a normal way by meeting him first. The Guardian doesn’t recognise them as candidates for initiation. They did not ignite the fire of the I at the Gate of Death because, in this context, “my Father’s house” literally means the Gate of Death: “Why does a fire burn without you that wasn’t ignited in my Father’s house?” The Guardian was righted to be severe. The Essenes were surprised firstly because the one speaking through Jesus was not the loving figure they had previously known, the one who has always looked upon them with infinite love and mildness, and secondly, because the Essene practices were so dogmatised, so normalised that the two weren’t even aware of the faults in them. It was simply the way they lived. The Guardian addressed their ignorant Luciferism further:

“You are like lambs who have gone astray, but I was the son of the shepherd from whom you fled. If you know me rightly, you’ll run away again. It’s been so long since you fled from me into the world.”

“You have the mark of the tempter on you! With his fire he has made your wool glistening. The hairs of this wool are offensive to my sight!”

“The tempter met you after your flight. He has permeated your soul with arrogance!”

The Essenes were so accustomed to their practices that they couldn’t even recognise Lucifer when the god of self-knowledge pointed him out to them. Although familiar with the lower Luciferic beings, they were strangers to the rarefied Lucifer, the cosmic Lucifer who acted as a tempter during the initiation process. One of the Essenes dared to ask about it, which is an important lesson to remember at the Gate of Death – we must overcome ourselves, push past the paralysis we feel, and ask questions to continue learning from the Guardian. The Guardian explained to them where the immorality was infiltrated:

“Indeed, you showed him [the tempter] the door, but he ran to the other people and overcame them. Thus, he’s not around you, but in the other people! You see him everywhere. Do you think you’ve lifted yourself up by showing him the door? You’ve remained only as high as you were. You only seem to have been raised up because you’ve denigrated the others. In the diminishing of the others, you’ve only seemed to rise.”

“Vain is your striving because your heart is empty; you have filled it with the spirit that deceptively hides its arrogance in the clothing of humility.”

In this passage, we learn that it is important to meet the lower Guardian both as individuals and as a community. The Guardian spoke to two representatives of the Essene order together, addressing a communal fault of the entire order in a common experience, clear as day. The Guardian planted newness in these two representatives, but it could have only come to fruition in another incarnation. The two Essenes began their initiation with the Guardian in that lifetime, but it continued in their next incarnation. However, they remained quiet about this until the end of their lives because the Essene order had truly encountered death on their way to Jordan.

Now, let’s take a closer look at the imaginative composition of the scene. The Guardian appears to the Essenes as a fata morgana, an after-image of what they had previously experienced. When the process of self-reflection began, the two Essenes no longer saw Jesus, whom they knew and loved, but an after-image of his face, gigantically magnified by the power of his reproach. The power of the Guardian is compelling, and one cannot retreat from the experience. Instead, one must experience his creative Word in the depth of one’s soul. His Word shakes one’s being like an incredible earthquake. 

The following two meetings of the Guardian in Jesus’s sheaths bearing the effects of Zarathustra differ substantially from the first meeting. For our study, these two meetings must be analysed together. But let us dive into the description:

Rudolf Steiner’s description of the two meetings, one with a desperate man, and another with a leper (GA148, 10.12.1909):

“When Jesus had gone on a ways, He encountered a man who made the impression of the deepest sorrow, of being oppressed. With a sunken head, and also with a physically depressed body, the person in question came towards Jesus. Then he perceived how that being, which I characterized the day before yesterday as Jesus at this time, spoke words to him that resounded as though from the deepest well of this being. This oppressed man heard that Jesus spoke: Whither has your soul led you? I knew you once millennia ago, many millennia ago; then you were different. This oppressed man felt compelled to say certain things in the face of this phenomenon, for we can’t designate as human such a being, who consisted only of a physical body, an etheric body, and an astral body, with the after-effects of Zarathustra’s ego in these three sheaths. We can only call it a being. The person who found himself in despair felt compelled to say to this being: 

‘I was granted high honors during my life, and always, when I rose up to new honors, I felt completely in my element, and often this feeling overcame me: What an extraordinary person you are that your fellow human beings raise you up so high, that you were able to get so far! What an extraordinary person you are! I was happy beyond all measure. But then it went quickly that I lost this happiness. It happened over a single night. And once when I fallen asleep, a dream came over me, and I brought into the dream the feeling that I was ashamed to dream such a thing. I dreamt that a being stood before me, who asked me: Who has made you so great? Who has brought you to such high honors? I was ashamed that such a question could be directed to me at all in a dream, because it was so clear to me that I was an extraordinary person, and of course I had achieved these great honors because of my great virtues. And as the being spoke to me, I was gripped in the dream by an ever increasing feeling of shame.’ 

So said this desperate person. 

And in the moment that the man had spoken this – so it stands in the Akashic Record – the apparition was again before him, representing Jesus of Nazareth, who at the same moment disappeared from before his eyes. Then the apparition dissolved, and the man was left to his destiny.

His drive led Jesus further. He met a leper and had to say to him: Whither has your soul been led? I saw you millennia ago, many millennia ago very differently. Yes, at that time you were different. The leper said: 

When he spoke thus, the skeleton stood there again and covered up Jesus, who disappeared and had to go on because of the drive that was residing in Him. The man also had to go on.”

We will analyse the imaginative composition, bringing together what was said about the Guardian in Part I. The desperate man meets his Luciferic Double, which has formed as a consequence of his falling into earthy temptations. Rudolf Steiner teaches us in a lecture often named Facing Karma (GA130, 08.02.1912) that joy is not a karmic consequence but an act of grace from the gods. Due to Luciferic temptation, the desperate man took the joy in his life as a sign of self-worth, thus attributing every accomplishment gained to himself. So what he experiences now torturing him is the consequence of his lack of humility, vanity. The Guardian, dressed as his own Luciferic Double, hunts him to his repentance. When the man learns the lesson of repentance, the Guardian shows his true face. It was he who appeared in vivid hunting dreams to instil repentance and self-transformation. In the fire of his karma flowing shame into his will, the desperate man learns that his oppressor was him, the Guardian, all along.

The leper man meets his Ahrimanic Double as a karmic consequence. This time, the consequence has its root in another incarnation. In a lecture commonly named The Astral World (GA94, 02.06.1906), Rudolf Steiner speaks about leprosy as a consequence of terror in a previous incarnation, as “the moral malady of fear in the astral world”. The being of terror takes the form of a skeleton (death) who offers him of a dim impression of the past, when in another incarnation he enjoyed his long luxurious life, most probably on the expense of others. The Guardian, now dressed as his own Ahrimanic Double, hunts him in his sufferance to a point where he also shows him his true Archangelic face. In the pustules of his leprosy, the leper learns that the repellent skeletal face of death was him, the Guardian, all along.

The reader can observe in Rudolf Steiner’s exact communication from the Akasha Record that the Guardian was not judgmental in these two meetings as he was when meeting the Essene. It is because meeting the Guardian as a result of deliberate spiritual training, as the Essenes did, is different from meeting the Guardian as a result of a karmic effect burning in the will. Lucifer and Ahriman, as parts of our Double, are living consequences of our karma. The Guardian teaches one to love one’s karma; the Guardian serves one’s karma. The Essenes, through their specific training, were not incorporating the effects of their karma but rather pushing them away selfishly to the rest of the population. It was the highest form of immorality. We can observe that the Guardian acknowledged both the desperate and the leper; he addresses them: “Whither has your soul led you? I knew you once millennia ago, many millennia ago; then you were different.” This means: I am following the consequences of your karma from before the falling from Paradise, when you were living purely amongst the Gods. 

At the end, please allow me to add from Rudolf Steiner’s hand notes the exact composition of the deeds of the Guardian of the Threshold united with the Nathan Jesus before the Baptism into Jordan, as read directly in the Akasha Record by the greatest initiate of our times:

“After he had conducted the conversation with his [step-]mother,
he felt himself driven by the Spirit
to the Jordan to Joh[n]. On the way he met
two Essenes, with whom he had often conducted
conversations. And he didn’t know them. But they
knew him very well.
“Where are you going?”
“To the place that souls of your sort
don’t want to look. – Where the pain of humanity can find
the forgotten light.”

His eyes – they were filled with love, but his love
had the effect as though it had been caught
doing something wrong –
“What kind of souls are you?
Where is your world? – Why do you veil
yourselves in deceptive shrouds? Why
does a fire burn within you that
was not lit in my father’s house[?]” –

And they didn’t understand what he said.
And they noticed that he didn’t recognize them.

Jesus o[f] N[azareth], they said, Don’t you know us?
“You are like lost sheep; but I was
the son of the shepherd, from whom you ran away. If
you recognize me rightly, you will run
away again. It has been so long since you
fled from me into the world[.]”

And they didn’t know what to make of him.
And he spoke further: “You have the tempter’s
mark upon you. With his fire he made your wool
shine and glisten – the hairs of this wool
shoot pains into my eyes. – The tempter met you
after your flight, and filled your souls with arrogance.”

Then one of the Essenes spoke and said:
“Didn’t we show the door to the tempter?
He no longer plays any part with us.”

And Jesus spoke: “Indeed you showed him the door; but he ran away
and came to the other people.
Thus he grins at you from all sides. You
do not raise yourselves up by denigrating others.
You only seem large
because you have made the others small.”

Then they were frightened. In that moment
it was to them as though he disappeared
before their eyes: in the distance, however,
they saw his gigantically
enlarged countenance – and heard
the words:
“Vain is your striving; because your heart
is empty, which you have filled with
the spirit that hides your pride deceptively
in the veil of modesty.”

And then for a long time they saw nothing;
when they had come to themselves again,
he had gone on his way – from them.
They didn’t convey what they had perceived
to the other Essenes, but rather were silent
about it their entire lives. –
Then he encountered someone who was distraught;
after J[esus] asked: What path has your soul brought
to you? I saw you eons ago,
then you were different –
This one spoke: I had attained high honors; whenever
I received an honor, I said: What an extraordinary
person you really are; your high virtues
raise you up above all other people; I was
happy; then there came to me when asleep
as though in a dream a question, that I never
would have posed when awake: for I felt in the dream
as though I was ashamed of myself for having
posed the question: “Who made you great[?]” Then
there stood before me a being, who said: “It was I
who raised you up, therefore you are mine – then
I had to flee: I wandered about, seeking and
not knowing what I sought.

When he had spoken thus, the being stood there again:
it concealed itself to J[esus] with its figure – he departed
from the one bearing sorrow.

Then along came a leper –
He said, after J[esus] asked him; the people
have shunned me –
once I stumbled through a forest at night;
a shining tree drew me to it – I stepped up
to it; there stood death before me in the form
of a skeleton – it said: I am you; I am feasting on you –

then I was afraid; but he spoke: why do you fear[?];
did you not once love me[?]; and I knew
that I never had loved him, then he was
transfigured into the most beautiful archangel – and
disappeared – I fell into a sleep and found myself
waking up in the morning by the tree – then
my leprosy became ever worse –

When he had spoken thus: the A[rch]A[ngel] appeared
covered up [the leper for] J[esus] – he disappeared.”

(This text belongs to a series of articles dedicated to the Guardian of the Threshold. To be continued with subjects such as: Dynamics between Lucifer and Ahriman, Lucifer decayed in Ahriman’s kingdom, Ahriman trapped in Lucifer’s kingdom, Lucifer and Ahriman’s gifts, The three beasts, The Asuras and the anti-Self.)

Alexandra Vasilache

100 years after the Christmas Conference and the forgotten promise

One hundred years after the Christmas Conference 1923/1924 were celebrated worldwide with enthusiasm and festivity, conferences, seminars, music, and eurythmy. One thousand people from all over the world gathered at the Goetheanum in Dornach for Christmas 2023 with lightness, joyfulness of heart, and goodwill to pay tribute to the sacrifice of Rudolf Steiner to embody and carry in the world the greatest gift one could possibly receive in life, Anthroposophy. Still, the most significant task Rudolf Steiner laid upon us at the Christmas Conference has been forgotten or ignored: The responsibility Anthroposophists have for the men of today when they are standing before the Guardian of the Threshold, who is obliged to forbid their entrance into the spiritual world. 

In the last lecture of the Christmas Conference (GA233, 01.01.1924), Rudolf Steiner described the tragedy of the souls imbued with materialistic ideas that need to be held back from entering the spiritual for their own sake because if the souls of men passed through the Gate of Death into the spiritual world with the materialist ideas of the time, they would be unable to bring any mental vigour into the next earthly life; they will be paralysed in their thinking. He saw that in the last third of the 19th century, hardly any human beings succeeded in approaching the Guardian of the Threshold in waking consciousness. After 100 years since Rudolf Steiner’s warning, we must ask ourselves with vulnerable and devoted honesty: Did we understand this responsibility? Have we achieved the conscious meeting of the Guardian ourselves, individually? Did we take upon ourselves the responsibility for our own entrance, not to mention the responsibility for others? Are we even on the way yet?

We must go even further because 100 years have already passed: Some people have already incarnated in a very short time, some even having two incarnations in the last century. They are not only a part of the Aristotelians and Platonists who promised to return in the last quarter of the 20th century, from whom, to some extent, we expect some inner development to be able to carry into the world their spiritual and progressive promise. There are many souls returning with them in a short time, some because of the impossibility of fulfilling their karma due to the tragic events that occurred in the last century; others because they committed suicide or horrible deeds against their fellow men, and the higher laws demanded their return, and others, because they are simply karmically linked to them, and their evolution depends on them. For all these people, regardless of their personal realities, the higher hierarchies worked forcefully to reconfigure their karma and, thus, the karma of entire humanity. Yet, they, too, are still numb and in deep sleep when they approach the Guardian today. On top of that, many refused incarnation, leaving their sheaths prey to a higher evil approaching humanity. At the advent of his incorporation, Ahriman is already making use of countless egoless persons, automatons incorporating Asuric or powerful Ahrimanic beings, and their human servants who, either from their free will or a previous decision, serve evil.

Things have changed in 100 years; every action today is done through an intermediary screen. The Ahrimanic screen installed itself between one and the world, between one and another. It is simple to forget about the real Guardian of Threshold or to envision him erroneously when screens are everywhere, storing so many materialistic pictures belonging to the past, the present, and the imagined future. Ah, the technology! It’s so easy to blame it on the technology… What is technology other than the Cosmic Intelligence that slipped from the hands of Michael, his righteous administrator, and fell prey to Ahriman, who magically entangled and welded it into matter? How did we come to this advanced technology anyway? To this question, Ahriman, the greatest sorcerer, will be proud to announce his second significant magic still to come from the times when he turned stones into bread: uniting the three fallen ethers, electricity, magnetism, and radioactivity, and welding them into the matter or, more precisely, into everyday life, to provide him with an existence of his kingdom on Earth—no more living in the shadows of existence, but physically among humans and in their own body and soul with their own consent. The Beast itself, with Ahriman, his appointed lieutenant, will teach humanity to abolish death and karma as obsolete. Computers that look and talk like men will soon be mistaken for men. By 2029, computers will pass the Turing test, which is a test of simulating or mimicking human consciousness, and by 2045, the Singularity, the final unification of the fallen ethers with spiritual human beings, will be complete, as Ray Kurzweil proudly announces, of course, in his own terminology and words.

So, 100 years of changes did not get us closer to the task but moved us far away from it. Yet, humanity is at the Threshold, and it is more stringent than ever to hear the severe Word of the Guardian and take it into our deeds in life. The teachings of the Guardian remain unlearned as the situation did not change much except for advancing in the depths: Humanity is now living right in the abyss of existence, and men are still unwilling to see or hear the grave Word of the Guardian of the Threshold. 

In my experience, the most problematic aspects occur right from the beginning on the path, mainly because Anthroposophists either do not take seriously their esoteric development as an incarnation task and prefer to remain at the Gate, intellectualising excessively and savouring exoteric Anthroposophy alone or they entrust themselves to natural clairvoyants who misuse Anthroposophy to justify or impose their visions. Those who understand the task, however, find themselves lost in the immensity of books challenging to comprehend for a beginner, sophisticated blogs and Facebook posts, vast notions, and esoteric exercises, confusing amateurs, derailers or detractors not easy to separate from genuine Anthroposophists. Therefore, it is seldom difficult to know where and how to begin preparing oneself to meet and understand the Guardian properly. 

Preparations to meet the Guardian

Training the memory and consciousness

Rudolf Steiner described the Guardian of the Threshold in many lectures from various points of view, and one should start from there. My purpose is not to repeat what he said but to bring some clarifications from experience to this very starting point, precisely the one that is not taken by the majority of the Anthroposophists of today, related to the entire esoteric task: how to get to the Gate of Death and how to recognise the Guardian in full awareness outside the body when this first meeting occurs. It is my experience that if the first meeting goes well, and the disciple recognises the Guardian of the Threshold in the awakening experience, the Guardian then becomes the teacher and educates the disciple directly. After this very first point, the disciple will work to unite the Guardian’s teachings outside the body with the organism of knowledge Rudolf Steiner created for us to ascend to the higher realms, thus creating a bridge over the abyss. But after this meeting, the disciple does not need books or articles like this one for orientation, as the orientation is given in the direct teachings of the Guardian, which can be assimilated further following Rudolf Steiner’s footsteps. However, first steps must be taken, and I will describe in detail how to prepare for the very first Threshold imaginative experience and the personal and cultural hindrances that are there to prevent it.

Preparation must start from the most intimate freedom with an inner decision: the decision to be a candidate for Initiation at all costs and with all life sacrifices required. This is the most important thing that usually escapes immediate attention. One needs to decide this freely, take a vow before the Spiritual, and keep one’s promise. One cannot expect to be initiated if one does not engage in serving the Spiritual at all costs. We are all called for Initiation simply by meeting Anthroposophy, but we must respond to this call. The Guardian himself will next decide our entrance to the Spiritual. 

Then, one must consider the spiritual practice one adopts to undergo the transformations in all human sheaths necessary to maintain consciousness outside the body. In relation to the first experience of the Guardian, two things are vitally important: one is the continuity of memory beyond the Threshold, and the other is the Guardian’s proper knowledge and recognition. In the beginning, all the practice must concentrate on these goals, enhancing the continuous memory and finding ways to familiarise oneself with the Guardian before the experience. Therefore, practice cannot be random, not even when choosing from the vastity of exercises given by Rudolf Steiner. 

Once the disciple awakens in a dream-like state, the consciousness changes. Everyday memory is mechanical in a way that one can see the lapses. When one is conscious of the gaps in one’s memory, one says: I forgot. Even the amnesic knows about the missing in their memory; they know there was something which is not there anymore. But in a superior state of consciousness, the mechanical memory is completely left aside, and what is carried out is only the spiritual memory. This memory is a fluid of vivid images. But with this memory, one cannot say “I forgot” because one does not even know something is missing in the first place. Beyond the Threshold of senses, everything one does not remember in that state of consciousness is simply not understood, recognised or even seen. The gaps in one’s spiritual memory are perceived as foreign dream images or illusions, and they add to the non-personal illusions that are also floating there. So, there is no consciousness regarding the fact that one thing or another is forgotten. What is forgotten is precisely a lack of consciousness. 

One must develop a spiritual memory, which is an imaginative memory. The danger of not doing so is that one can wake up in this state and not remember any notion of Anthroposophy they read! Or, in more advanced cases, they cannot even remember who they are or recognise themselves as human beings, as individual selves! If one does not create vivid images when studying Anthroposophy, one cannot take Anthroposophy beyond the Threshold. Truly, we are rising to the spiritual on the wings of Anthroposophia, meaning that we orient ourselves outside the body through the fact that we carry in our consciousness the living notions Anthroposophy gave us, the organism of thoughts Rudolf Steiner created for us, which becomes alive. We orient and recognise the Spiritual through them; we build ourselves on them. Therefore, spiritual memory must be worked on daily. 

One of the known consequences of living a life of ease in thinking and relying only on mechanical memory is the tremendous fear when one sees the demonic aspect that the Guardian might take for the first time. It is precisely because one does not know or remember the notion of the Guardian, for which one did not create proper images or any image in that respect. Beyond the Threshold, not knowing and not remembering is one and the same thing. If one does not establish a relationship with the Guardian before the experience, the Guardian might be obliged to take a demonic form to discourage passing the Threshold half-asleep. In this specific case, half-asleep means having significant gaps in one’s consciousness/memory. 

Human memory is currently undergoing a significant transformation. In a few lectures, when talking about Otto Weininger, Rudolf Steiner said that we live in a transitional period (we can correctly assume today is more the case than when Rudolf Steiner spoke about these things). This period, he says, prepares 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. He saw, in his time, people incarnated with this very task. Otto Weininger was one of them, and in his case, some anomalies occurred. Due to a lack of spiritual training and also his karma, the future incarnation burst into the current one, causing him to commit suicide (GA170, 29.07.1916). Rudolf Steiner was impressed by his case and, in his autobiography, mentions him as the most important factor that led to the revelation that a man’s etheric body is female and a woman’s etheric body is male (GA28, chapter XXXVII). This revelation is the most significant in relation to the Threshold because when one crosses with awareness the boundaries of their physical body in the process described below, they become, in a way, the opposite sex:

“For every woman who will make herself male will enter the kingdom of heaven.” (Gospel of Thomas, from the Nag Hammadi Library)

One can follow the mysteries of space, mysteries of time, or mysteries of the human heart (GA270, 15.02.1924). We must expect that the transitional personalities of today have more to do with the mysteries of time. But there is only one Threshold, and the passing is the same in all cases. However, the first characteristic that differentiates transitional people from the rest of those called for Initiation is that they need to develop abilities regarding spiritual recollection. A consequence of their 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 their death. 

Many people with this special Threshold mark were born in the last quarter of the century to the end of the millennium. This abysmal imprint, at many born in the late ’70s, ’80s, ’90s, and ’00s, and many more after, is distinctive and unique; one cannot misidentify it. In everyday life, they are normal people with normal duties. However, they are special in the way they form images and events correlations. They have a special kind of deepness, profoundness, from early childhood, like they have hidden darkness with them all the time. Their life experiences are usually tough because many incarnate in a shorter time than others. It is a sweet, bitter sadness mixed with royal love and painful savagery. It is a cold light in the dark – one is happy to see something but unhappy with what they see. One can feel it all at once, fascinated and terrified of being skinned alive. This is their mark: people with embedded Threshold. Transgender theory is the cultural aspect derived from it. Sometimes incarnation anomalies occur, too, such as in Otto Weininger’s case, Borderline syndrome being one of the effects.

In relation to the continuity of memory, evening retrospection is a vital exercise. Regarding the retrospection exercise, Rudolf Steiner says:

“When we strengthen our memory in this way, then astral vision is formed. This transforms our astral body into an organ of the will that we can then use. We must disaccustom ourselves to tears, we must overcome sympathy and antipathy so that we can bring the proper attitude to images in our memories.

When we have become lord over our memory, over our ability to think and form mental pictures, then we have reached our preliminary goal. We recognise that those who do not practice this must constantly feel that they are dependent upon every spiritual “draft” around them, like a swaying reed that is thrown this way and that by every passing thought. There is no other means of getting into the astral and mental world than to create and form oneself from within. Those who organise their memories, who in the evening form the cloud-like shape into regular radiant forms, namely the higher parts, which proceed from the head and heart, those people will show that they live from within into the outer world. When human beings have come this far, then nothing bad can reach them anymore. In their presence, we could send thoughts of the worst sort, and those thoughts would come right back as if they had not even touched them. In their meditative work, they have built a spiritual covering that surrounds them.” (GA266/1, 15.02.1904)

With this, we come to our first task: Practice Spirit Recollection!

Creating a relationship with the Guardian before the experience

The next important thing is to accustom oneself to the proper notions regarding the Guardian of the Threshold. Firstly, it is important to have the big picture and gather all related materials that Rudolf Steiner gave about the subject, not only GA10 or GA13, as people are usually accustomed to doing. The common tendency is to just tick the notion of the lower Guardian as being part of oneself and the higher Guardian as Christ and close the subject. Not only is this redundant and not fully spiritually true, as I will show below, but it is also in itself a grotesque image of the Guardian that will be revealed as such later in the experience. The half-notions one creates through the comfort of thinking, disinterest and superficiality will show their true face at the Threshold as a part of the Double. An enriched notion is constructed only when one studies everything Rudolf Steiner said about the lower Guardian of the Threshold, including the First Class lectures, and this can be done easily today by means of the online archives. 

To answer the question “Who is the Guardian?”, efforts have already been made by reputed authors. However, no matter how good, intellectual analysis alone does not satisfy the spiritual accuracy needed when describing the lower Guardian of the Threshold. Very few people compliment their intellectual knowledge from Rudolf Steiner with a genuine experience of meeting the lower Guardian in full awareness outside the body, in a true spiritual encounter and not merely a meditative simulation. But to do that, one needs countless meditative simulations. Every image that appears in training, meaning in the preparatory process (concentration, meditation, biography, artwork, etc.) is very different from the real experience. The process of creating the proper mental images/representations of the Guardian is carried later in their spiritual memory. Here, the images themselves do not matter because all images will fade away eventually; what remains is the result of the imaginative exercise, the active process of dissolving and recreating images, which in esotericism is called the salt process.

In the following, I will try as much as possible to essentialise the important items of knowledge Rudolf Steiner gave that help one in the experience, as well as to demount some dogmatised ideas derived from the secondary anthroposophical literature that makes things more difficult if they are taken beyond the Threshold. From the start, we need to separate the Guardian’s independent being from our inward experience of him in our sheaths and the human self. We know from Rudolf Steiner that the lower Guardian of the Threshold is a spiritual being at the rank of Archangels (GA138, 27.08.1912), who separated along with those of his kind from the path of humanity on Earth since primeval times. Rudolf Steiner says that about the Guardian, one must say to oneself: 

“I have a being before me who experiences much in the world, but it does not concern itself with the love, pain and torment, but also of mistakes and immorality on earth; it knows nothing and wants to know nothing of what has taken place up to now in the depths of man’s nature.” (idem). The Guardian is the Archangel appointed to conceal the Paradise after the human being was driven out. He became and remained invisible to man ever since (GA145, 27.03.1913). 

The consequence of this invisibility, which is the same as transparency, is that the Guardian is not seen in the very first experience. What is seen, however, is one’s Double.

“The lesser Guardian of the Threshold is an independent being. He does not exist for the human being before the corresponding stage of development has been reached.” (GA10, chapter The Guardian of the Threshold)

What is seen in the experience is a mirror reflection of oneself; what is heard in the experience is the Word of the Guardian. 

Here we come to the second demand: Practice Spirit Reflection! In English, the German word “Besinnen” is often translated as “mindfulness”. However, to understand properly the spiritual process that happens outside the senses, one needs to consider the phenomenon of reflection/mirroring in relation to the light. This transitory zone beyond the world of senses is the Gate, and we know already from Rudolf Steiner that the Gate is the Guardian himself. The Guardian in the First Class says:

“Behold, I am the only Gate to knowledge!” (GA270, 15.02.1924)

We must take literally what the Guardian says about himself and interpret it as such: the transitory zone is the Gate, which is the Guardian. The Being of the Gate, which is the Gate of Death itself, is an Archangel whose only mission is to distillate the human being, to refine it in such a way that only the higher, refined parts of the sheaths and human self will pass the Gate. There are two major gates and, therefore, two guiding Guardians. One is the Gate of Death, the gate of senses, protected by the Archangel, who retreated from the world after the expulsion from Paradise and hid his own being from men. Another Gate man meets at the end of the First Class teachings (and in experience, if they absolved the lessons of the lower Guardian). This is the Gate of the Sun; here, the human being meets the greater Guardian, who is Christ Himself. Between the Gate of Death and the Gate of the Sun, there is the Gate of Elements. The entire road of development from the Gate of Death to the Gate of Sun is guided by the lower Guardian, who remains at the Gate of Death, and the student of the First Class hears him from farther and farther away when advancing in their development. At the Gate of the Sun, the disciple unites with the Christ:

“I am the Gate; whoever enters through Me will be saved. They will come in and go out, and find pasture.” (John 10:9) 

So, the entire road from the gate of senses, the Gate of Death, to the Gate of the Sun is the schooling of the first lower Guardian, the First Class Initiation. 

The Double and the Guardian, the difference of the two in notion and experience

I would like to clarify further some confusions that have been prolonged in the Anthroposophical literature merely from not understanding the descriptions of the lower Guardian Rudolf Steiner gives in GA10 and GA13. One is the statement that one needs to cleanse one’s Guardian in order to pass the Threshold. This is not an accurate spiritual fact. One needs to cleanse their Double, their Doppelgänger, and then absolve the lessons on the Guardian one by one, transforming themselves to pass. So, one does not need to transform the Guardian, who is a sovereign, objective spiritual being, like Christ or Michael, or any other spiritual being but themselves. 

To explain better, we must consider the spiritual process that takes place when one leaves one’s physical body aside and wakes up in a higher consciousness outside the body. Here, the most important things we always need to have in mind are the level of consciousness intrinsically linked to memory, the process of reflection into the Gate, which in the experience behaves like a mirror back to the human being and the process of entering through. With exercises, in the beginning, the disciple gains two significant victories for their consciousness: the interval between day consciousness and sleep and the interval between sleep and awakening. In some random experiences, which are in the beginning gifts from the Spiritual, the disciple might find that they sometimes are awakened in a dream state immediately after going to bed or when they return from the Spiritual immediately before entering the body. These are the first true spiritual experiences. In one of these experiences, one invariably meets the Guardian in the form described in GA10 and GA13. However, the Guardian does not reveal himself at this very point in the experience but merely mirrors one’s Double. 

Are the Guardian and the Double the same thing? No, they are not. The Double represents a composite being of gross Luciferic and Ahrimanic aspects that individuate at the Threshold, giving the appearance of two different (human) forms merging into one another. At this level, the experience is purely individual and subjective. As an imaginative appearance, the Double may take an animal form, or a human one, or both. It is important to recognise that, behind the different forms the Double may take, there are symbolic images of unassimilated parts of the human being that intimately speak to the disciple in the common language of their soul. 

“I am that very being who shaped my body out of thy good and evil achievements. My spectral form is woven out of thine own life’s record.” (GA10, chapter The Guardian of the Threshold)

In a typical experience of the Double, one can notice that the Luciferic composites in the human being mould themselves a Luciferic (human) appearance and the Ahrimanic aspects conceive another, distinctive from the first one, an Ahrimanized (human) form. It is a double(-human) form. The Guardian of the Threshold “dresses” himself with the human Double, thus merely “mirroring” one’s own deformed reflection. The Guardian here becomes the refractor of one’s being, which is similar to projecting a beam of light into a prism. There is not only one Luciferic being and only one Ahrimanic being; this is not how it is. There are hordes of Luciferic and Ahrimanic beings in human sheaths and all mould one form in the Being of the Guardian, which is the Gate itself, thus creating a distorted image of one being. One can represent things like this: If I wear a costume, one cannot say that my face is the mask and my body is the outfit. In the same manner, one cannot say that the Guardian is the Double. These forms change if the disciple begins their conscious transformation of the Double, meaning the Luciferic and Ahrimanic composites of their being. In a way, the Guardian changes its clothes, always projecting the level of self-development the disciple has reached. 

Imaginatively, the Luciferic Double frequently appeared in the past under a cat/fox image; the Ahrimanic Double appeared with a dog/wolf figure. However, please note that the animal forms are old representations. In a modern experience, they might appear more and more in human forms. Here is one of the oldest representation of the Guardian – the Egyptian god Anubis. Anubis is a jackal, an mix between a fox and a wolf. We suppose correctly if we identify Anubis with the Guardian of the Gate of Death.

These images of the Guardian are all Maya, as they will change form with time, sometimes within the same experience. It is a duty to transform, to “beautify” (even though here “beautifying” does not have an aesthetic aspect, but a moral-spiritual one) the aspects of one’s own Double, Luciferic and Ahrimanic. And by doing so, from experience to experience, the Double changes its appearance. Here, it is not important what one sees but what one hears, which is comprehending the symbolism behind the image that will lead the disciple to self-knowledge and transformation. The disciple will often return to real life to integrate the lessons at the Threshold.

Practical tips to prepare for the very first meeting of the Guardian

How can one prepare for this very first meeting with the Guardian? Firstly, one needs to enhance one’s spiritual memory more and more by means of retrospection exercises. Secondly, it is important to educate the etheric body. Rudolf Steiner indicated many ways to do this; one way I found efficient is meditating daily, at the same hour, on the Foundation Stone rhythms. Meditation must be daily, and disciples must disaccustom themselves from treating esotericism like a hobby. If one can understand the necessity of brushing one’s teeth in the morning and evening for one’s physical well-being and not to be repellent to other human beings, one can understand the necessity of daily meditation for one’s spiritual well-being and not to be repellent to spiritual beings. The Foundation Stone rhythms revigorate and restructure one’s etheric body entirely. No matter what exercise is chosen in this respect, it is important, however, to be done daily. 

Then, a great deal is done prior to the first meeting with the Guardian if the disciple understands that behind any form the Guardian might take at the Threshold, which merely reflects their untransformed parts, stays a lofty being with whom they need to create a relationship of devotion and veneration. This being will be their very first spiritual teacher, and enthusiasm must be nurtured to meet this being. One must prepare for this very first meeting in the same way one prepares to meet a person they highly respect in life. The entire schooling of the first Guardian was brought to Earth from Michael School by Rudolf Steiner in the First Class. Meditating on the Class Mantras, and thus taking them in the etheric body and continuous memory, helps one understand the processes the Guardian will guide himself through outside the body. It is the best preliminary Michaelic training there is.

Added to the correct notions regarding the Guardian, one can already make steps if they start separating with consciousness the Luciferic and Ahrimanic parts of their souls through biography work. Lucifer and Ahriman work upon the human soul in polarity but also complementarity. In biography work, it is useful to understand them as collective beings, as archetypal representatives of their cohorts, so that when we say Lucifer or Ahriman, we refer to that which is Luciferic or Ahrimanic as their inner nature, in the same way, that when we say Man, we refer to the general human archetype. These two forces, Lucifer and Ahriman, are connected to our elemental soul beings. Lucifer is related to the Luciferic elemental beings, and Ahriman is related to the Ahrimanic elemental beings. Each of these acts in the outer nature, but also in the human nature. In general, these elementals act in the human soul as composite beings, indistinctive from each other. This interests us the most because each of these beings creates our Double. Only the consciousness can make the separation between them.

With this specific type of biography work, the disciple can experience in everyday consciousness how Lucifer and Ahriman are moulding different beings into their souls, creating soul patterns or mechanisms. It is not correct, however, to call the beings themselves patterns or mechanisms as they are living realities. But their actions are creating soul patterns and mechanisms if they are working beyond one’s consciousness. Often, behind how one reacts in life stays a composite of Ahrimanic and Luciferic elementals, moulded together in one’s soul in the course of their biography or even before in previous incarnations or “imported” from the external world. Working with archetypal beings from the Luciferic and Ahrimanic realms and the separation between them in biography work sessions, one creates the free, middle path through which a higher force can operate: “Not I, but Christ in me!” To understand the transformation in the human being that this kind of work induces, one can contemplate Rudolf Steiner’s statuary sculpture, Representative of Man. Christ creates the free middle path by separating the two representatives of the adversaries in joining forces and limiting their actions to their legitimate realms. In the same way, the human I, which aims to become the microcosmic representative of Christ, can take responsibility for the composites of the soul, separating the Luciferic and Ahrimanic soul beings and limiting their actions to activities in which they are beneficial. In this type of biography work, one works with one’s astral aspects, correcting with consciousness the imperfections of one’s soul brought by karma from previous incarnations or formed in the current biography, perpetually repeating in different life experiences at different stages. Through this work of separation, man strives to become the tenth spiritual hierarchy, the Hierarchy of Freedom (of destiny).

Lucifer and Ahriman as parts of the Double in everyday life

To be able to separate the Luciferic and Ahrimanic beings in one’s soul and biography, one needs to explore the specifics of each and the dynamics between them. Firstly, we can observe that we are always dealing with two polarities of processes behind which stand archetypally the spiritual beings that we collectively identify as Lucifer and Ahriman. In a nutshell, without getting too much into the history of Lucifer and Ahriman that Rudolf Steiner extensively presented throughout all his work, “Lucifer is a being which we can designate as an Archangel retarded on an earlier stage, Ahriman a being which we can designate as a Spirit of Personality retarded on an earlier stage.” (GA154, 25.05.1914) Lucifer has continuously worked in the human being ever since the falling from Paradise, so from the Lemurian epoch. He is the snake in the Paradise imagination who caused the fall of men by infiltrating their sentient souls, which came into being by the unconscious transformation of the rudimentary astral bodies acquired on the Old Moon. Ahriman could infiltrate later, after the territory was duly prepared by Lucifer, in the Atlantean epoch, the intellectual soul of men, which came into being as a transformation of the rudimentary etheric body acquired on the Old Sun. Although the original infiltration was in the astral, respectively etheric bodies, Lucifer and Ahriman now work in complementarity in all human sheaths, physical, etheric, and astral, and they have in each of the bodies clearly defined areas of action. These domains are legitimate and approved by the evolutionary forces, so to speak. However, most of the time, Lucifer and Ahriman simply overstep their jurisdiction, trying to conquer each other’s domain and the free areas of human beings that are not normally under their influence, creating immorality and imbalance.

Regarding the activity of Lucifer and Ahriman in the physical body, Rudolf Steiner tells us:

“Our organism does not really belong to us; we are a battlefield for the Luciferic and Ahrimanic powers — and for other powers too, of like nature with them, but into that subject we cannot enter now. We men are thus in reality surface beings wedged between two entities that are no concern of ours! Our left man does not concern us, neither does our right man: what concerns us is the process that goes on between the two.” (GA158, 21.11.1914)

The left side of the head belongs to Lucifer, while the right side of the head belongs to Ahriman. However, “thinking, pure thought as such, is very little disturbed by Lucifer and Ahriman; because in the head they recoil from one another.” (idem) Lucifer works in the physical body from the front to the breast bone, from left to the stomach and from above to the horizontal surface of the cervical vertebrae. Ahriman works forcefully from the back to the spinal column, from the right to the liver, and from below to the diaphragm. Thus, the stomach and the liver, Rudolf Steiner tells us, are perpetually at war with one another. Lucifer built the stomach of man, while Ahriman built the liver. The space between the breast bone and the spinal column from front to back and the one between the cervical vertebrae and the diaphragm, from above to below, are spaces free of Lucifer and Ahriman in the physical body. It is where the human heart is. Lucifer and Ahriman send to each other poisonous arrows of thinking in the left to the right direction, arrows of feeling in the front-back direction and arrows of will in the above-below direction, fighting for the free spaces in the human being and each other’s territories. Lucifer acts in human blood, while Ahriman can be found in the human nervous system. Ahriman is denied the warmth of the blood. Therefore, all black magic techniques include practices related to blood to invoke the Ahrimanic powers.

Lucifer influences the light and warmth ethers; through this influence, we have the female form of the human body. Ahriman has influence over the chemical and life ethers, and we owe to his influence the masculine form of the human body (see GA272, 16.08.1915).

The etheric body, as an expression of the activity of thinking, feeling, and will, is also Lucifer and Ahriman’s working domain. Thinking, feeling and will are soul forces. However, traces of their activity can be seen in the etheric body. Ahriman hardens the soul activity, and its expression is thinking. Lucifer rejuvenates it, and its expression is will. Feeling is striving to be free, therefore Lucifer and Ahriman battle for human feeling (see GA158, 22.11.1914). It is in the feeling where a man can unite with Christ. Wherever in the etheric body, luminous centres can be seen, that is the result of Lucifer’s activity in the will, and wherever there are opaque spots, this is the result of Ahriman’s activity in thinking. The activity of feeling is also expressed in the etheric body as perpetual hardening and dissolving. In feeling, Lucifer and Ahriman mutually cancel each other. Lucifer takes a form that shows an extension of the etheric body, while Ahriman takes a form that shows an insufficiency of the etheric body.

When it comes to the astral body, Rudolf Steiner teaches us to look at consciousness. Day consciousness is where Ahriman has the upper hand over Lucifer, and sleep consciousness is where Lucifer prevails. The sleep consciousness with dreams is where the two forces are in equilibrium (see GA158, 22.11.1914). With this, we arrive at the essence of our work of separation of Lucifer and Ahriman in biography work, which is retrospection, meditation and art. In meditation, the I is brought to a state between day consciousness and sleep but fully aware and active. To be active in a dream-like state is the purpose of anthroposophic meditation. With meditative retrospection, one can observe tendencies and soul behaviours unnoticed before. It is bringing forward to consciousness what was once taken in by the senses. The value of meditative retrospection, unlike simple remembering, is that one can see now what was omitted in the past. By using art, one can represent the soul beings that one can further recognise and analyse.

There are at least three dimensions by which one can recognise and differentiate the actions of Luciferic and Ahrimanic beings: processes or specific activities, feelings as derivations of love, and colours as derivations of light. Rudolf Steiner tells us:

“If we were to do research in the same way, by means of the methods of Spiritual Science, into the substance, into the really fundamental essence of the soul, then it would appear that just as all matter is compressed light, so all the different phenomena of the soul upon earth are modifications, are manifold transformations of that which must be called if we truly realise the fundamental meaning of the word: love. Every stirring of the soul, wherever it appears, is in some way a modification of love, and if the inner and the outer are, as it were, intermingled, impressed into one another in man, we also find that his outer bodily part is woven out of light, and his inner soul is woven spiritually out of love. Love and light are, indeed, in some way interwoven in all the phenomena of our earth’s existence, and anyone who wishes to understand things as explained by Spiritual Science will first of all ask: To what extent are love and light interwoven? Love and light are the two elements, the two component parts of all earthly existence: love as the soul part, and light as the outer material part.” (GA120, 17.05.1910)

As human tendencies, the polarities between Lucifer and Ahriman include but are not limited to: left/right, light/dark, warmth/cold, life/death, past/future, imponderability/weight, instinctive/intellectual, inflation/alienation, extraversion/introversion, diffusion/crystallisation, agitation/paralysis, increase/decrease, rejuvenation/ageing, fluidisation/coagulation, limitlessness/restriction, greed/thirstiness, voluptuousness/isolation, sleep/insomnia, superficiality/pedantry, etc.

When it comes to soul substances, one may say that the Luciferic beings of the Double are of perverted, misused, individualised, and egotistic love – love for self, while the Ahrimanic beings of the Double are of blocked, dried, frozen, and petrified love – love for no one. As soul beings, the Luciferic beings of the Double can be called by names we already know: egotism, self-sufficiency, superiority, vanity, pride, pretentiousness, envy, jealousy, fury, lust, manipulation, narcissism, hysteria up to the bottom of Luciferic degradation which is pure hatred. Fear is at the bottom of the Ahrimanic degradation, and we identify the Ahrimanic beings also as anxiety, depression, lie, falsity, smallness, weakness, pettiness, self-worthlessness, deception, aggressiveness, hunger for power, humiliation, etc.

In between, the feeling of shame is the only feeling belonging to the Guardian alone. 

The archetypal colours by which the Ahrimanic beings of the Double can be identified are the colours of the cold spectrum, dark blue, indigo, brown, black or colours with dirty impregnation. The archetypal colours by which Luciferic beings of the Double can be identified are red, orange, yellow, and generally anything that has to do with diffusion or etherisation of a colour.

Lucifer and Ahriman as parts of the Double at the Threshold

A great deal of the work with the Double can be done by separating the Luciferic and Ahrimanic aspects in everyday consciousness in preparation for the actual experience. However, things slightly change in the actual experience. At the Threshold, a part of the Double, the Ahrimanic part contains in itself the remnants of our untransformed parts from repeated lives, including the current biography – the past; another part, the Luciferic one, represents the ideals we project into the future but also the life unlived yet, the consequences of the past deeds projected to the future, what did not yet come to pass; these consequences stream back from the future at the Gate of Death, creating a Luciferic temptation. Now, it is important to understand that everything that came to pass and was acknowledged by the consciousness, even if it was once Luciferic, is now moulding the Ahrimanic Double. When one works upon these aspects of their souls previously to the experience, one ennobles them, releasing the spiritual part of them and leaving aside all the residues, Luciferic and Ahrimanic. These residues of the conscious transformation are now forced to take an Ahrimanic form even if they were previously Luciferic. 

If a person comes in front of the Guardian half-asleep, by mistake, so to speak, the Guardian will take the Ahrimanic form, preventing them from taking a step further. The Ahrimanic Double’s discourse at the Threshold is: “Idiot, you will die!” activating a gravity force made by the essence of fear to drag the disciple back to Earth. It is only when one owns one’s past, when one properly understands the biographical past in a higher sense, that the demonic Ahrimanic form remains inactive behind when experiencing the Double. If the disciple worked with retrospection or other biography exercises long enough to enhance the higher memory which they can behold in the experience, they would recognise the Ahrimanic Double as a residue of their past experiences, take responsibility for it and thus silencing, deactivating this reality at the Threshold. The Ahrimanic Double remains behind in the experience when one has already taken important steps in their spiritual development with their ordinary consciousness in their everyday life. All moral exercises have, as a result, the recognition and deactivation of the Ahrimanic Double at the Threshold. If the disciple overcomes the tremendous fear that the Ahrimanic Double inflicts, they can listen further to the lessons of the Guardian. However, deactivating the Ahrimanic Double in contemplation does not provide one an overall win over Ahriman. It is only the first step.

The Luciferic Double, on the other hand, is always an active reality as it is something deeply hidden in the human being and not reachable in ordinary consciousness. It is behind all ideations, desires, wishes, secret longings, and consequences of past deeds projected to the future. At the Gate of Death, all these desires stream back from the future, creating a tempting reality whose discourse can be heard approximately like this: “Look at me as an essence of what you can still have in your life! This is your life unlived, the one you give up if you want Initiation. Are you sure you want to leave all behind instead of being happy in this beautiful reality that I prepared for you? I represent all your secret wishes, and I can still make them happen for you”. The Luciferic Double teaches one about one’s hidden parts, hidden desires, or longings that they do not even know they have because they are rooted in the human being from before the expulsion from Paradise. 

When the Guardian takes the form of the Ahrimanic Double, it is usually a sign that the human being is not yet prepared and thus rejected from the Threshold. When the Guardian takes the form of the Luciferic Double, the first true self-knowledge lesson begins, guided directly by himself. It is when the First Class truly begins. If one intercalates the entire Class Lessons between chapters The Guardian of the Threshold and The Greater Guardian of the Threshold of GA10 (Knowledge of the Higher Worlds), one will have a full Initiation path facilitated by Rudolf Steiner and protected by Michael.

(This text belongs to a series of articles dedicated to the Guardian of the Threshold. To be continued with subjects such as: The Nathan Jesus and the Guardian – archetypal experiences at the Gate of Death, Dynamics between Lucifer and Ahriman, Lucifer decayed in Ahriman’s kingdom, Ahriman trapped in Lucifer’s kingdom, Lucifer and Ahriman’s gifts, The three beasts, The Asuras and the anti-Self.)

Alexandra Vasilache