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