Ahrimanic beings. Often, they bought our souls early in life, and we disappeared. Like the children or knights in fairy tales, we vanished into the forest. Our twentieth-century history is different from what we think it was. It was a psychological war, and it didn’t end. The war for your mind. Ahrimanic beings. They are beings now, around us, in society, living in people as hosts, determining much of what we experience in our lives and shaping our thinking and purposes. In UFO culture, they speak of ‘abduction,’ ‘hypnosis,’ the ‘stealing of one’s life path,’ ‘energy manipulation,’ ‘experimentation below the level of consciousness,’ and ‘orchestration of dreams.’
And while these are all symptomatic of the Ahrimanic effect, they are being dressed up as popular otherworldly fiction and fact. Hollywood has primed us for this surface-level view, like seeing images and figures in smoke. Those who would mind-control hold up the mirror behind the media’s smoke, and we are dazzled.
Managed from behind the scenes, we are supposed to be confused: while Ahriman hides.
To reclaim the occult subject of Ahriman from those who would mystify it into spiritual materialism and endless, limited hangouts of the intelligence services. Michael and Ahriman have to be spoken of in a way relevant to our personal paths in life. Ahriman works with lies. Covertly. Michael works with truth. Overtly.
In popular culture, the Greys, Ahrimanic beings, share a group mind. What one being thinks, they all know. Like a shared cloud of telepathy. They share penetrative insights into another person’s unconscious, instinctive impulses. They put anything given jurisdiction to them into action through your feelings. This is the image of the human being as a puppet. At first, people are unaware that their behavior in life is being steered from the Ahrimanic realm.
“Only if we clearly elaborate the Ahrimanic element and know the nature of the super-sensible influences which now arise as the counterpart, as it were, of Michael’s casting down of the Dragon. It is like a lifting up, out of Ahrimanic depths, of certain beings. And these beings find special points of attack in the human being if the latter yields to unbridled instinctive impulses and does not strive for clarity in relation to them.”
“Now, there exists today a method I might call it an anti-method, of concealing the instinctive element, by putting down a concept and pushing another over it, so that it is impossible to form a proper judgment concerning it.” Rudolf Steiner, The Mission of the Archangel Michael, GA 194. The Michael Deed and the Michael Influence as Counter-pole of the Ahrimanic Influence, 29 November 1919, Dornach
Jurisidiction?
In popular folklore, we know the adage, “the devil cannot enter your house without invitation.” Read the literature about “contact” with extraterrestrials, and you’ll find it is an affliction that often prompts a spiritual path to Christ as a means of healing: to uncover how we unwittingly, unconsciously welcomed Ahriman into our souls. This is one of the secrets those who understand the spiritual background of the twentieth century and into the twenty-first would have the public know little about in its esoteric depth:
“One can grasp that just the announcement of the mystery of beholding Christ, of this new relationship with humanity into which Christ will enter, would arouse ill-will and resistance from some human beings. These would be members of certain brotherhoods who wished to exploit the event of the twentieth century, this event of the appearance of the etheric Christ, who wished to use it for their own purposes and not allow it to become general human knowledge.” Rudolf Steiner, The Reappearance of Christ in the Etheric, GA 178, 18 November, 1917, Dornach, 10. Individual Spirit Beings and the Undivided Foundation of the World I
What is the spiriutal trial of your life?
Now, another thing I want to bring in here is this: the question of time. Michael is no longer an Archangel, which means that the anthroposophical thinking path works with Michael as an Archai Spirit, a Spirit of Time. How do we feel and experience this?
Look at the distinctions a person developing Michaelically will show against someone not doing this work, a more Ahrimanically influenced person. The latter have a very quick, instinctive ability to “see” into people. But they see only into people’s instincts. They can be very clever and perceptive, but only into people’s doubles: these beings are, by nature, meant to block higher spiritual views from the people involved. Now the other tendency is also there. The Luciferic-leaning soul. Not wanting the material comforts the Ahriman-driven person craves, but rather the ease of life that comes from following others, and absolving their own will.
Michael, as Time Spirit, shows you two things: Ahrimanically inspired people are too quick to dismiss others in their judgments. They do not wait long enough to know things spiritually, because they jump in and want to state facts now. Luciferically inclined souls are too slow. Their thinking dissipates and drifts, or simply vanishes, with little care for anything other than their own ease. Many people have a mixture. Too sentimental in self-regard and too critical in condemning others. Too indifferent to truth, or too quick to twist it.
Let me give a personal example of how this dynamic of time works.
In 2017, I had a car crash on Michaelmas Day, September 29. I drove a little frantically, around the city center on a Friday lunchtime, looking for a place to park. I drove over a stop sign and into an oncoming tram. In retrospect, I saw Michael imaginatively through the horizontal September sun. Physically, it blended me. Spiritually, it was symptomatic. As Rudolf Steiner points out, Michaelic karma can work through accidents because such times trigger a soul accounting of debts long since overdue.
Why? – Because there are two kinds of dream.
There are your true dreams of what you want and what you have to do according to your karma. This Ahriman will want to shroud. Lucifer will make you avoid them through your own “intelligence” poorly deployed. No time to think, and not knowing how to respond to life. I had accustomed myself to years of only seeming to work, busy out in the world, 95% action, 5% actual direction.
Gabriel’s Silver Light to Michael’s Gold Light
Our inheritance from Gabriel, the archangel who ruled from 1510 to 1879, is a popular one, expressed in common culture. Talking of Ahriman and Lucifer has entered modern vernacular. It is Narcissism, and Gaslighting is its technique, its method: Steiner well describes it as an “anti-method.” Speaking in opposites.
But it is also so much more: the double bind; gossip, slander, the witch hunt, the outcasting. We are now, in the twenty-first century, faced with something similar to what Alexander encountered at the end of the last Michael Age. The question of decadent cultures and individual karma. This prevailing culture, founded by Gabriel, is can be known under the watchword of Gabriel as “the swift power of the word,” where people build mirrored relationships of projection with each other in their karma; and this connects people to a emnerging materialistic culture. Words, in this sense of Gabriel’s rulership, are used as curses, bindings, praise, slogans, discourse, political manifestos, and poetry: but all these come to shape the collective mind quite differently in Gabriel’s Age than in Michael’s.
Rising from Despondency
Rudolf Steiner speaks of this Michael age (1879 to 2300) and its lesson to be learned from the previous Michael age, 601 BC to 247 BC. Prior to that last Michael age, there was widespread despondency in the places of the spiritual mysteries. At the end of that age, Alexander the Great was able to sweep away, with exact Michaelic thinking, expressed in battle stratgey, the lax, slovenly empires of Persia. But at its beginning, that age of Michael saw renewal of the mysteries of Asia, with Buddha in the 6th century BC. He completely personalizes the spiritual path.
In Greece, Heraclitus of Ephesus (535 BC to 475 BC) shows the breaking in to consciousness of the fire of the Michaelic Spirit, so sun-like spiritually: the sovereign, independent, and yet social I.
“Out of every one-hundred men, ten shouldn’t even be there, eighty are just targets, nine are the real fighters, and we are lucky to have them, for they make the battle. Ah, but the one, one is a warrior and he will bring the others back.”― Heraclitus
So we have like two streams before Alexander The Great completely refigures the landscape. Buddha and Heraclitus at the relative beginning of the last time period riules by Michael. Then, centrally, Plato (428 to 348 BC) and Socrates (469 to 369 BC) in Greece. Look at how they transform the spiritual mysteries into ways that can change human discourse and the potential dynamics of human thinking. Look at those two distinctions.
The Michaelic impulse completely reforms what existed before it. It sweeps away the karma laid during the preceding Gabriel rulership period. It is thoroughly permeated with the spirit and radically reworks earthly life, human relations, and human karma. The same as now. Michael (1879 AD to 2300 AD) changes karma in a way the Gabriel ages (1510 AD to 1879 AD) cannot.
“The rulership of Gabriel is characterised by the fact that his impulses enter strongly into the physical bodily nature of man. Michael, on the other hand, works intensely into the spiritual being of man. You can tell this from the very fact that he is the administrator of the Cosmic Intelligence. But Michael’s impulses are strong and powerful. Taking their start from the spiritual, they work through and through the human being. They work into the spiritual, thence into the soul-nature, and thence again into the bodily nature of man.
Now in the karmic connections of life, these super-earthly forces are constantly at work. Beings of the higher Hierarchies are working with man and upon him. It is thus that the karma of a man takes shape. And so it is with the Michael-forces. Working as they do upon the whole human being, they work also very strongly into his karma. Gabriel-forces work only very little—I do not say not at all—but very little into the essential karma of a human being. Michael-forces on the other hand work very strongly into his karma. Rudolf Steiner, Karmic Relationships III, GA 237, 3 August 1924, Dornach, IX. Entry of the Michael Forces — Decisive Character of the Michael Impulses
Michael when fully committed to, changes what is rudderless, lost in time. This is a social art of karma, of bringing spiritual mysteries into life. As before, it is about overcoming the sense of demoralization in the existing conditions of the spiritual mysteries.
The relevance of Blake’s Annunciation to Zacharias by the Angel.
“The old priest Zacharias was just about to burn incense in the dimly lit Jewish temple in Jerusalem when suddenly none other than the archangel Gabriel appeared to him. His gesture towards heaven underlines the divine origin of his message. He informs the high priest that he and his wife Elizabeth, who remained childless until old age, will conceive a son. They are to name him “John” (Hebrew for “God is gracious”, John the Baptist). Zechariah looks a little puzzled. His censer now hangs down unmotivated. Only the cloud of smoke tells us that it has just been moved wildly. Zechariah asks for a sign, whereupon the angel imprisons him with muteness until the son is born. This is both a sign and a punishment for Zacharias having doubted the message.” William Blake – The Annunciation to Zacharias by the Angel by Alexandra Tuschka.
Zechariah was made mute by Gabriel. In anthroposophy, just as in the wider world. The materialism of past centuries has flowed into human bodies due to the age of Gabriel. People are suggestible. But look at the temptations that come to and from the elites. It is Satanism. It mirrors an outworn moon impulse of Gabriel. We live in a culture, ruled by a fallen occult practice. Mysteries of the Moon, outdated, decadent occult mysteries.
Something essentially different is appealed to: Proletarians of all countries, unite! What does this mean? It means: Foster your antipathy against the other classes, foster, as individuals, what resembles hate, and unite; that means, love one another, unite your feelings of hate, look for the love of one class, search among you for the love of the members of one class out of hate. Love one another out of hate, on the basis of hate.—There you have put down two concepts of opposing poles.
Rudolf Steiner, The Mission of the Archangel Michael, GA 194. The Michael Deed and the Michael Influence as Counter-pole of the Ahrimanic Influence, 29 November 1919, Dornach
Or let’s take a similar inverted case I knew. A few years back my superior in a company wanted to bring in a new co-worker as a trophy pin-up for the company. Creepy? Well, yes, but you can’t say that. Because, you are in the dragon’s lair. She remotely controls the employees below her, watching them play before her, and enjoys being referred to and deferred to. The new handsome American figurehead for the global enterprise gets raised up, and then, when the group of coworkers are given nothing to do, no responsibility, and assigned menial tasks, she sits back and says it’s a shame they have poor character. Poor lost souls, she reasons. Just like the pet dog she keeps. One is raised and others demoted. But the key to recognise here, is truth cannot be spoken. It has to remain mute.
These are the intrigues which Ahrimanic beings perform:
“And what do they want? They burrow, as it were, in the deepest stratum of consciousness in which the human being is still asleep today in his waking state. Man does not notice how these beings enter his soul and also his body. Here they suck in, with their power of attraction, everything that has remained Luciferic, that has not become Christ-permeated. This they can reach: this they can take possession of.” Rudolf Steiner, The Mission of the Archangel Michael, GA 194, 29 November 1919, Dornach, 5. The Michael Deed and the Michael Influence as Counter-pole of the Ahrimanic Influence.
Look a little deeper into such types and excuse the image, but you find spiritually thick dirty blood, with no etheric light, like the greens and dark browns of putrid water: They bristle at criticism because you catch them in the act!
“Few love to hear the sins they love to act.
’Twould braid yourself too near for me to tell it.”Shakespeare, Pericles, Act 1, Scene 1.
And then the gray eminence behind the scenes – the owner – a character who says, “I have nothing to do with the “running” of the company. But yet, I own it. But I shall say nothing. I delegate that.” But in the gentlemen’s clubs – I shall share my amusing stories about how this is the way to run a company. It’s wise, cunning, efficient – simply good “management” of human behavior.
… And there is little to differentiate these two leading characters. There is no uniqueness of soul expression. The human I is absent.
Manichaean Mysteries of Evil
What can we learn from this as we go deeper into a commitment to anthroposophy and a more conscious relationship to Michael and Ahriman?
“All manner of karmic experiences come to the individual, each in his own way. The one will have this or that to undergo through the fact that he must tear himself loose from old connections and unite with those who are seeking to cultivate the message of Michael. There are some who feel this union with the mission of Michael as a kind of salvation. There are others who feel it in a different way, finding themselves in this position: ‘I am drawn to Michael on the one hand and to Ahrimanism on the other. I cannot choose. Through my life I stand in the midst of these things.’” Rudolf Steiner, Karmic Relationships III, GA 237, 1 August 1924, Dornach VIII. Ahriman’s Fight Against the Michael Principle — The Message of Michael
To sum up: In my last two jobs, I saw this explicitly. Men and women, professionally competent and secure. Both companies were half business, half public-facing institutions. Entrepreneurs, psychologists, doctors, men and women of high learning and science: training professionals. And yet each one, with their soul connection to themselves, was fearful of saying the wrong thing, on edge, anxious, hypervigilant. Hierarchy was highly esteemed, even when employees spent the whole day deriding it. Living behind these soul contradictions, each one acted as if hyper-alert, lacking peace. And yet our clients were individuals seeking healing.
What ails thee?
On November 29th, 1919 (GA 194), Rudolf Steiner reflected on how we have lost our connection to grand, conscious, and epic cosmic missions. Today, humanity feels “forced to accept the omnipotence of natural necessity.” We are told that we are nothing but biological machines, subject only to material laws and economic pressures.
We must find the courage to perceive what is happening karmically in these settings dominated by Ahrimanic beings. This path will create daunting feelings because you are over the target. Such experiences give us invaluable lessons in witnessing darkness and evil and in carrying a light for humanity’s future. Lucifer wants you in a box sealed off from the spiritual, content with your simple projections on the walls around you. A coffin. Ahriman wants you buried in the beings of your instincts. A grave. Michael demands our conscious initiative.
There is a far reaching Bible quote to meditate on with reagrds all we are saying here with regards karma, working socially with these mysteries, and establishing these new relations from heaven to earth. It is the passage where Peter is counselled by Christ as to how a true esoteric church is built and managed: First-century Jewish rabbis used “binding” (prohibiting or declaring unlawful: jurisdiction) and “loosing” (permitting or declaring lawful: recinding) as technical terms for making legal and moral decisions.
Mathew 16: 19 I will give you the keys of the kingdom of heaven; whatever you bind on earth will be bound in heaven, and whatever you loose on earth will be loosed in heaven.”
Christ’s counsel is to not overlook any thing you experience with reagrds another person in life; but to seek to bring it to full consciousness. To change etherically you cannot stay around some places and groups. At least not the same way as before. You have to change relations to the places you are in. Because these are invariably karmic settings that ask you to trade your spiritual sovereignty for lower impulses. With MIchael we pay that invoice.
“To cow before something” means to be intimidated, frightened, or made submissive by someone or something.
When you “cow” before a person, a threat, or a challenge, you lose your courage and give in to fear. At this our Michaelmas, wake up your “I.” Refuse to cow, and let the sun become veiled. This is the true gold credited to your account by Michael.
A “Boll o’ Meal Fraser” (often spelled “Bowl o’ Meal”) is a historical Scottish term for an “allegiance by affinity”—a person or family who joined Clan Fraser of Lovat not by blood, but by adopting the surname in exchange for protection, sustenance, or land.
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