Bruce Charlton's Notions

Whenever Ahriman sees a committee at work compiling statues, he is in his element! Point 1, Point 2, Point 3... First this will be done, then that; thirdly this member has these rights, fourthly that member ought to do such-and-such. The member would not dream, of course, of respecting these rights, nor doing what it says at all... But this part of it does not matter. The important thing is to compile the statutes and cultivate the Ahrimanic spirit.

Ahriman would like people to be active, but everything must be run along programmed lines. Everything should be forced into legal terms... Every morning, a person should (as it were) find a list lying on his bedspread telling him what to do throughout the day, and he should do it mechanically...

We do, of course, now and again see modern human beings rebelling against the work of Ahriman; grumbling about bureaucracy, which is absolutely Ahrimanic - complaining about the stereotyping of education and so on. But as a rule they only fall deeper into what they are trying to get away from.

The only thing that can lead us out from all this, is a complete change of attitude; a turning towards knowledge of the spirit, to the kind of thing that will once more fill our thinking with genuine spirituality - so that the living spirit can take hold of our whole being, and not merely our head.

From a lecture by Rudolf Steiner - 1921.
http://albionawakening.blogspot.co.uk/2017/04/bureaucracy-and-ahrimanic-influence.html

Within the next generation I believe that the world’s rulers will discover that infant conditioning and narco-hypnosis are more efficient, as instruments of government, than clubs and prisons, and that the lust for power can be just as completely satisfied by suggesting people into loving their servitude as by flogging and kicking them into obedience. Letter from Aldous Huxley to George Orwell, 1949

Making allowances for the fact that both Huxley and Orwell were here implicitly taking an ultimately political, hence evil, point of view; and thus they stop their analysis at 'power' when they ought to recognise that power is just a means to spiritual ends...

Then this passage highlights that we need to be aware that with evil beings it is 'lust', or motivation, that is being gratified. 

Huxley was correct that we need to appreciate that demonic beings enjoy the corrupting of Men into 'loving their servitude' - i.e. desiring their own damnation - as much or more-than inflicting short-term misery. They enjoy long-term manipulation leading to value-inversion (evil seens as Good, Good as evil) - as much as or more-than inflicting acute physical torment and death. 

 

That is indeed the primary motivation behind the Ahrimanic evil that is dominant in the world here and now. 

It is an error to suppose that the global Establishment are motivated by a desire to torment and kill the masses - Their primary motivation is to make the masses love their servitude, embrace a wholly materialistic and this-worldly understanding; and thus to desire damnation. 

In different words; the agents of Ahrimanic evil enjoy being regarded as Good; and hate more than anything being exposed as evil. 

 

Ahrimanic evil intends that it should be unknown, unseen, denied, hidden; and its agents therefore conceal their own activity behind what is presented as objective, materialistic, abstract Good. 

Thus whenever we perceive something evil-seeming presented as wholly-impersonal, just a 'process',/ procedure; mere 'randomness', luck, statistical 'probability', unintended consequences, accident or error... 

Whenever causes are put-down to mechanical operations of alogorthm, computer, committee/ bureaucracy... a mere outcome of The System; then we should suspect the presence of Ahriman. 

(In effect: Ahriman lives in the imuted impersonal: that is where he hides himself.)

 

Ahriman, or Satan - as Christians more often call him - never wants to be known for what he is.

He and his servants fear above all being detected; being detected and known as real; being known as beings who are evil in motivation. 

That is the weapon with which Ahriman's goals may be fought - whether in our own souls, or more widely.

Seek Ye Satan in the impersonal, in the 'merely' automatic; in the un-conscious, the ignored and the denied...

Terry Boardman is always worth watching and reading - for me, he is perhaps the premier Big Picture intellectual in Britain today.

Here he has some very interesting material on the nature of Rudolf Steiner's concept of Ahriman (who he expected to be incarnated and born close to the millennium), and the prophesied global revolution of materialism.

I am skeptical about the literal truth about these predictions and the reasoning behind them (based on numerology and a claimed understanding of the future course of human evolution stretching 1000s of years ahead) - I always read Steiner and his followers through a Romantic Christian filter; however, Steiner was undoubtedly in some ways very gifted at sensing 'what was coming' - and he might well be correct in a general sense, and for different reasons than those explicitly posited.

Thus, here you will find idea that the demon Satan/ Ahriman would be incarnated as a human born near the year 2000. It may be that - taken in a 'soft and flexible' fashion, in terms of the role a person (even if not literall A Demon) plays in the spiritual war or the world - this may turn-out to be broadly correct.

Anyway, we will soon know if a single Antichrist figure emerges as the focus for what is going on - and there is one very obvious candidate millennial baby who is being groomed, and might well be placed in the world leadership position very soon; someone born on 03/01/03.  

I would watch the whole video if I were you - indeed I bought the DVD from which this is excerpted; but for a flavour drop in at 15:00.

Regular readers will know that I regard Rudolf Steiner as an indispensable genius for our time and task. And/but also that I have considerable reservations about a great deal of what he did and said; and even more about the Anthroposophical Society (the AS) that he founded, and which regards itself as the guardians of all-things-Steiner now and evermore (or, at least, for the foreseeable).

One of my big reservations about Steiner concerns the massive emphasis he placed upon the role of the Archangel Michael in our world - and in the life of all of us in The West.

It all begins with the name. For English speaking Anthroposophists, it is necessary to pronounce Michael as something like My-kie-ell - with three syllables. You must do this, and if you don't - well it is a kind of blasphemy (only worse).


Why?

Because on a visit to England; Steiner once, in a personal conversation (that was lovingly recorded, repeated, and taught from thenceforth) expressed an aesthetic dislike of the usual English pronunciation of this name - which he regarded as too brief, slovenly, disrespectful.

That's it!


Here we encapsulate the problem with the followers of Steiner, in a nutshell. A century-plus years ago, Steiner casually opined concerning the pronunciation of a word (not in his native language) - and because everything Steiner ever said about everything* was literally and eternally true and vital - the Anthroposophical Society immediately fell into line, and enforced this practice on all members.

This kind of literalistic, legalistic fundamentalism is normal and mandatory among the mass of Steiner's followers - with, perhaps, expectations tacitly made for the (many) instances in which Steiner said something not-politically-correct about race, nation, sex or socialism (instances of non-woke-ness are explained away, re-contextualised out-of-existence, ignored or just not-acted upon - and given the pervasive Leftism of the AS, this is tolerated without dissent). 

The pronunciation of Michael would not matter except that Steiner, in his later years, developed a version of Esoteric Christianity in which Michael takes an absolutely central and indispensable role. This centrality is based upon Steiner's assertion that Michael was personally promoted above the Archangel level in 1879 (following a war in Heaven) to take the lead in this current cultural phase; especially in opposition to the dominance of the Satanic demon Ahriman.


(Ahriman is - with some filtering - one of Steiner's great insights, and a tremendously valuable - I find it essential - concept for understanding our times. Here we see the characteristic Steiner at work - indispensable insights cheek-by-jowl with massed arbitrary assertions.) 


I have read/ listened-to some tens-of-thousands of words by Steiner on the subject of the role of Michael; and his supposed intermediary job as the 'countenance' of Christ; and how we in the West are supposed to organise our spiritual lives around him - but despite my best efforts, I find the whole Michael theme tedious, unnecessary and essentially incomprehensible.

We are all (here-and-now) supposed to be living a Michael-centred spiritual life; but I canot see why. Especially given (for example) that Jesus Christ is personally accessible to each and every one of us, everywhere and all of the time. It is rather like those extra layers of bureaucracy that managers are so keen to inflict upon the modern world.

In sum; the Michael theme in Steiner is itself an aspect of the dominance of Ahriman.


So; the subject of Michael is representative of much that I find un-acceptable and un-interesting about Steiner - and also fits my narrative that Steiner (overall) got worse throughout his adult life after his towering philosophical achievements over about a decade from the middle 1880s to middle 1890s.

There is a Great Deal of value in Steiner's later work - right up to his death, so we still need to read with care and attention; but as time goes by, the nuggets of gold become more and more swamped by the (irrelevant, tendentious and just-plain-wrong) dross.

So, the serious reader needs to mine and filter a great deal of crude ore when considering the later Steiner. This is the proper approach; rather than the Anthroposophical Society practice of regarding every grain of dross - every casual comment - from The Master as a precious and binding jewel of revelation.

*In his 300-plus books, and all his recorded chit-chat.

Rudolf Steiner's The Philosophy of Freedom (PoF; 1894) played a very important role in my personal development - indeed, it was perhaps vital. Nonetheless it is ultimately wrong and can cause serious problems if not (after understanding it) one fails to discard or transcend it. .

This is because PoF explains itself in terms of an abstract, simplified, and grossly incomplete model of human thinking. It is A Model (Percept + Concept = united by Thinking).

And any model is false - because simplified compared with complex reality; and false because abstract when reality is 'animistic' (about Beings and their Relationships).

The PoF is, in fact, Ahrimanic in structure: it divides the world into categories of percepts and concepts, and suggests that these are united in thinking. Yet the world is not really divided into percepts; not is thinking objectively divisible into concepts.

Therefore if we begin in Ahrimanic materialist alienation; if we then understand PoF which tells us how it works, and how to escape it...

But if we stop at that point; assume the validity of PoF and try to live by the model of PoF - then we will be stuck in just another kind of abstract materialism: we will loop back into the demonic traps of Ahriman.

We will just create yet-another bureaucratic religion - as happened with Rudolf Steiner's Anothroposophy: which consists merely in learning stuff (studying the scriptures of The Doctor) and doing Anthroposophic stuff (education, medicine, agriculture etc) according to the usual Ahrimanic vocabulary/ lexicon, blueprints, flow charts, recipes, rules and regulations...); as defined by the usual Ahrimanic hierarchy or authority and temple structure with sacred places and rituals...

The Philosophy of Freedom does not, therefore, in itself give us freedom, not even a little bit - unless it is seen as a first step; as a ladder that is ascended then discarded. We need an alternative to Ahriman, not merely a different kind of Ahriman; nor a reaction back to seek an impossible to Luciferic unconscious instinct - or Original Participation...

We need, in other words, to move forward to what Steiner called the Intuitive Soul and Barfield called Final Participation - and this entails something qualitatively different-from the analysis, theories and methods of Steiner's Anthroposophy, and different too from the philosophical abstractions of Barfield.

They are perhaps essential - at least for some people such as myself, but they are a starting-point merely.  

I have recently written about Sorathic evil - the purest, most negative and destructive form of evil; as being the direction in which the world is going, here-and-now. 

But, Sorathic evil may be hard to understand. We are used to explaining evil actions in terms of fulfilling personal desires - whether the 'Luciferic' desires of immediate gratification by lust or cruelty, or the longer-term 'Ahrimanic' desires of power and control. 

It seems hard to imagine why 'mere destruction' would motivate someone when they might instead fulfil their desires? 

 

Well, it does happen. Perhaps if we introspect honestly, we can recognise the Sorathic within ourselves, as at least a momentary impulse?

An example are those resentment-fuelled spite-fantasies directed against people that we hate, or even who merely annoy us in some way that gets under our skin. For instance; day-dreaming the wish that somebody we have come to regard as smug, entitled, arrogant, privileged - will suffer massive public humiliation, fatal illness, or agonizing violence. Or somebody who 'thinks they are beautiful' and you 'wish' they would suffer a disfiguring accident that would make them hideous. Or when the idea flashes into mind that maybe I should kill myself and leave an accusatory suicide note; so that he/she/they will suffer lifelong agonies of guilt ("That will show them!").

If you can recognise any or all of these scenarios, then that is an example of the Sorathic evil in you. What identifies them as Sorathic is that the primary satisfaction is in the misfortune of others, rather in gratification of oneself. 

Indeed, someone in the grip of Sorathic evil might plot and scheme, expend time, money and resources - and maybe even take risks to his own health and safety - in order to inflict harm on others. 

Cutting off your nose to spite your face is the proverbial expression of Sorathic evil - although this makes a paradoxical quip out of what is truly the worst kind of evil; and such mockery misses that this 'nose-cutting' is exactly the kind of thing that people will do, when in the grip of Sorath. 

Saruman, in the Lord of the Rings, begins the story as in the grip of typically Ahrimanic evil. Saruman is a very 'modern' figure in the world of Middle Earth; an industrialist with a mind of 'metal and wheels', who even talks in slippery, euphemistic, manipulative management-speak. He works by surveillance (the palantir) and seeks control; even going to the trouble of creating the race of Uruk-Hai; a more obedient and loyal kind of orc-Man, who will stick to orders.  

But evil is a downward path - unless there is repentance: and that path has a slippery slope. 

Ahrimanic evil (while it lasts) retains some Good - insofar as order is better than chaos - and requires virtues such as prudence, hard work, loyalty, obedience...

When Saruman is defeated, he has a chance for repentance; but rejects it. Stripped of power, he refuses to recognise any wrongdoing. 

In particular (and this is amplified in the posthumously-published notes of Unfinished Tales) Saruman is spitefully-motivated against Gandalf. By the end of Lord of the Rings, Saruman has come to exemplify Sorathic evil - since he lives in order to hurt Gandalf, and - by proxy - the hobbits who Gandalf loved and cared for. 

The Scouring of the Shire is a representation of how the brief interlude of Ahrimanic evil administered by Lotho Sackville Baggins, gives way to a frenzy of destructive Sorathic evil when Saruman arrives. 

At first under Lotho - trees were felled to fuel furnaces; later under Saruman ('Sharkey') trees were felled because this would make the hobbits miserable. At first the rivers were carelessly polluted by the outflow of productive industrial processes, but later they were polluted because it would render them hideous... 

Evil as a means to an end, as a by-product; was replaced as evil for its own sake.

 

In his final speech, Saruman reaches the end-point of Sorathic evil when he deliberately courts death by stabbing Frodo in front of the army of hobbits. 

Having reached a point where he cannot destroy the Shire, Saruman tries to saddle the hobbits with a legacy of guilt and regret for having vengefully committed 'deicide' ('god-murder'; in that Saruman is a minor god; a maia or angel).  

But Frodo is protected by his mithril mail, and pardons Saruman - thwarting even his intended indirect 'suicide by cop' and inflicting a further wound of obligation upon the wizard. Yet this act of mercy only increases Saruman's resentment. 

The end-stage of Sorathic evil is despair, and the only perceived 'solution' is suicide. 

Thus Saruman (semi-deliberately) goads Wormtongue into killing Saruman; and thus the wizard 'finally' achieves his own death by that means.

 

Looking at Saruman's descent into Sorathic evil, it is striking how very small, how petty the wizard has become compared with the proud, powerful, 'wise' administrator of the grandiose, world-dominating schemes of his Ahrimanic phase - just a few months earlier. 

And indeed, Sorathic evil can only tend towards being small and petty, because it becomes less-and-less capable of the deferred gratification needed for making and sticking-with complex, long-term plans and manipulations. 

From this we can see that evil cannot go straight to the Sorathic extremity - without rendering itself ineffectual.  Lucifer and Ahriman are needed in the earlier stages to break-open the Good and allow the Sorath in*. 

 

Thus Luciferic and Ahrimanic evils alternate until they have created a situation of vulnerability where Sorathic destruction can take-over. 

On the other hand, the descent from Ahrimanic into Sorathic evil may be very rapid indeed - some historical examples suggest that it may happen in just day, or even hours - so that great tyrants may die suicidally while wishing the like destruction on everybody and everything else ('after me the deluge' - as a desired outcome). 

At the societal level, we reached the threshold of Sorathic evil within only months of the triumph of Ahriman...

 

In the West, we had the Luciferic promises of the 1960s - of a world of unrestrained hedonism; leading incrementally, decade by decade, to the Ahrimanic global prison of 2020 with promises of a world of omni-surveillance and totalalitarian-control (a system, apparently, pioneered in China to be rolled-out everywhere else). 

Yet, such was the triumph of evil and the feebleness of spiritual opposition in this atheist, materialist, leftist-corrupted world; that as the year reached its second half there was already evidence of merely, pettily destructive Sorathic frenzy - with violent riots, destruction, arson, terror, rape and murder; being not just officially funded, organised and defended; but publicly-advocated and approved. 

At a micro-level the brief "all in it together" spring solidarity of March-May devolved into the masked mutual hostility and informer-culture of the summer onwards. 

This happened even though such a spread of chaos erodes the very basis and capability of the global coup and its carefully-constructed Ahrimanic System!

 

The Sorathic spirit can also be seen in the apparent-gratuitousness of using surveillance and control technologies and enforcement for crushing society, church, education, sports, theatres, music, cinema, museums, singing and dancing - and finally Christmas.

In a single year has been wrought a truly colossal destruction of Culture. 

A genuinely Ahrimanic spirit would be subverting and using Culture to monitor, manipulate and control the population... Ahriman would exploit Culture to 'keep people happy' (in a bread and circuses fashion) while explicitly and covertly feeding them pro-System propaganda. 

But the Sorathic spirit of resentment and spitefulness is ever-increasingly getting the upper hand, and engaging in dysfunctional destruction for its own sake. The Sorathic spirit is destroying the Ahrimanic apparatus in all its aspects (including police and military functionality) - destroying, but not replacing. 

 

Because the world is so advanced in evil; such a Sorathic destruction of The System is not any kind of liberation, but a progression of evil delivering the world into chaos: a world of end-stage Sarumans, pursuing personal, petty grudges spiralling downwards into the finality of despair and suicide.  

(And a despairing, or spitefully-motivated, suicide is - surely? - a choice for damnation.) 

So, although the Luciferic, Ahrimanic and Sorathic types of evil fight each other, this conflict is not a negation - but the advance of evil; because evils don't cancel, they synergise. 

 

We cannot defeat Ahriman with Sorath, one cannot be played-off against the other - but only with God. 

If The Ahrimanic System is destroyed by Sorath, then we would be in far worse spiritual situation than if The System remained. 

Yet such a Sorathic collapse looks like a distinct probability for 2021...

 

If we want to resist Sorath spiritually - in our-selves, in our societies; this can only be achieved from a base in The Good. 

If we want Good (i.e. Godly) outcomes; the negative can only be defeated by the positive. 

The only true enemy of Sorath is Jesus Christ.

*I got this phrase from Ama Boden. Thanks!

The following edited excerpts are from a lecture by Rudolf Steiner from 1919, which was later gathered into a collection called Influences of Lucifer and Ahriman, and which I saw in a recent collection called The Incarnation of Ahriman. 

This lecture has a great deal of interest, and I have therefore excerpted and commented on several passages (above). 

It seems to fit a pattern that Steiner gave better lectures to better audiences. This one was in Bern, and I have seen other good ones from Zurich; but the great mass-majority of lectures from Dornach (the headquarters of Anthroposophy) are the worst; probably because that was the centre of cultic worship, and because Steiner's faults were therefore amplified. 

Even in this lecture there are tractlike repetitions of his 'crazy' (and wrong) micro-detailed theosophical schemas of vast sweeps of world history and future, and tediously vague, prickly, straw-man defensiveness against those who disagreed with him; and assertions that the colossally-massive ultra-systematised complexity of the 'facts' in his later work, was a sign of its superiority - implicity contradicting with other assersions that nothing of his was valid for another person unless intuitively checked.

(It would take several full-time, full-span lifetimes intutively to check every detail of the sheer bulk of what Steiner spouted in his later years!). 

Reading Rudolf Steiner (beyond his first three or four philosophical books) is therefore sifting for gold among dross - but there is real gold to be had - especially in his books and the lectures delivered outside of Dornach - and plenty of it!    

 

The nature of pagan culture can best be understood if we realize that it was the outcome of knowledge, vision and action born of forces much wider in range than those belonging to present earthly existence. this pagan culture was such that people felt themselves members of the whole cosmos. 

Human beings living on earth within the old pagan world felt themselves membered into the whole cosmos. They felt how the forces at work in the movements of the stars extend into their own action, or, better said, into the forces taking effect in their actions.

(What later passed for astrology, and does so still, is but a reflection — and a very misleading one at that — of the ancient wisdom gleaned from contemplation of the stars in their courses and then used as the basis for precepts governing human action.)

People living on the earth in those ancient times had a kind of instinctive soul life, in a certain respect more akin to the soul life of animals than to that of present-day human beings. But it is a very one-sided conception of human life to say that in those ancient times people were more like animals. 

Those human-animal bodies were used by beings of soul and spirit who felt themselves members of the super-sensible worlds, above all of the cosmic worlds. People made use of animal bodies as instruments rather than feeling themselves within those bodies. 

When they were awake, they moved about with an instinctive life of soul like that of animals, but into this instinctive life of soul there shone something like dreams from their sleeping state, waking dreams. And in these waking dreams they perceived how they had descended, to use animal bodies merely as instruments. 

People would say to themselves: When I am outside my body at night I belong to the forces of the cosmos, of the starry heavens; when I wake in the morning I make use of animal instincts in an animal body.

Then human evolution passed, figuratively speaking, into a period of twilight. A certain dimness, a certain lethargy, spread over the life of humanity; the cosmic dreams receded and instinct gained the upper hand.

The attitude of soul formerly prevailing in human beings was preserved through the Mysteries, mainly through the Asiatic Mysteries. The Mysteries were there, into which, through the powerful rites and ceremonies, the spiritual worlds were able to penetrate. And it was from these Mystery centers that human beings received continued illumination.

 

Note: I found that Steiner's description people felt themselves members of the whole cosmos struck an immediate chord of validity. This captures what I understand of the underworld 'dwat/ duat' of the Ancient Egyptians; and it also points at what is lacking from the Collective Unconscious concept of Jung - which is about archetypal human, instinctive and animal contents - and the 'cosmic' aspects are disregarded. 

The modern ideas of draem and the unconscious - from Freud, through Jung and more recent writers; almost always devolve to being 'therapeutic' - to making people feel or function better; to reconnection with the instinctive... 

But the cosmic aspect is lacking. I think that even now (albeit weakly and unconsciously) dreams - and deep sleep more generally - have an effect of reconnecting us with the totality of being; our place in the universe. 

A further aspect of this 'astral' quality of dreams, is that it directly refers to living among moon, planets, sun, stars, and other heavenly bodies such as comets - when these are known (as they were to the  ancient, and truly are) as Beings. 

Indeed, Steiner elsewhere usefully suggests that during sleep, we 'leave behind' the living physical body; and our 'astral' or conscious self travels to a different realm along with our personal 'ego' self of human self-consciousness. Thus, that part of our-total-self which is self aware and conscious of others leaves behind the alive but insinsible, unaware body; and 'travels' in an 'astral realm' - which goes beyond the personal. I find this a broadly accurate and helpful way of thinking.  

In dreams, therefore, ancient man primarily - and perhaps even now to some small extent - we experience, we know, the comos to be 'made of' living, conscious, purposive Beings; and we live among them and in relationship with them. 

This personal and nightly experience was, I infer, the basis of The Gods of ancient man; albeit imperfectly recalled and with personal and cultural distortions. But it explains why there always were gods, why they tended to converge on certain types, and why their importance was recognised. 

And it perhaps explains the detailed, functional angelic hierarchies of the early medieval era (e.g. Dionysus), when this kind of thinking (and dreaming) still had considerable influence - esepcially in association with 'mysteries' of monastic and eremetic (hermit) life.  

And this further seems to account for the uncanny effects that the night sky (in particular; but also the sky in general) has upon people - even now. We are being reminded of what we have experienced sometimes in sleep. 

 

I used to think automation was about saving money, but now I don’t think so. That’s just an excuse, which is often Not achieved. Automation is almost-never removed even when objectively worse than what preceded it, so long as it is minimally functional or can be made so.

For example the automated scanning tills in supermarkets have much slower throughput of customers, and require supervision/ multiple interventions by several staff. Automated telephone answering likewise. In general automated systems are considerably slower, and of course utterly inflexible - which means that less work can be done per unit time.

So why are automated systems introduced everywhere and with reckless disregard for effectiveness and efficiency? (Aside from that fact that 'implementing' any disruptive organisational change is a positive achievement for careerist managers...)

I think that, as almost always nowadays, we need to 'Think Ahriman'; that is think first about the dominant modern form of evil, and especially the totalitarian agenda at the heart of all bureaucracy.

We need to think Monitoring and Control. In automated systems everything is logged, everything that can happen is predetermined – everything can be audited...

With automation (of anything, including driving cars and the like), management has potentially-total surveillance – and management is part of the single bureaucracy/ The System – and the extension and empowerment of The System is the primary drive.

Adapted from my comment at Orphans of Liberty.

At the end of his life, Rudolf Steiner dictated a summary of the key ideas that he wished emphasise. These were not finished, but the very last things he wrote about - in a posthumously published book entitled Anthroposophical Leading Thoughts (Collected Works number 26) were some of his most insightful and prophectic statements - although difficult to understand without some background knowledge. 

These have been made much clearer by a 2020 book from Jeremy Naydler The struggle for a human future, which I recommend reading.  

The following blog post, written earlier today, is my current understanding of what Steiner is implying, but did ot live long enough to formulate and state explicitly.

Anyway, here is an edited excerpt from these final words, which can be seen in full here.

 

By far the greater part of that which works in modern civilisation through technical Science and Industry — wherein the life of man is so intensely interwoven — is not Nature at all, but Sub-Nature. 

It is a world which emancipates itself from Nature — emancipates itself in a downward direction. 

 

Entering the purely earthly element, Man strikes upon the Ahrimanic realm. With his own being he must now acquire a right relation to the Ahrimanic. 

But in the age of Technical Science hitherto, the possibility of finding a true relationship to the Ahrimanic civilisation has escaped man. He must find the strength, the inner force of knowledge, in order not to be overcome by Ahriman in this technical civilisation. 

 

He must understand Sub-Nature for what it really is. This he can only do if he rises, in spiritual knowledge, at least as far into extra-earthly Super-Nature as he has descended, in technical Sciences, into Sub-Nature. 

The age requires a knowledge transcending Nature, because in its inner life it must come to grips with a life-content which has sunk far beneath Nature — a life-content whose influence is perilous. 

 

Needless to say, there can be no question here of advocating a return to earlier states of civilisation. The point is that man shall find the way to bring the conditions of modern civilisation into their true relationship-to himself and to the Cosmos. 

There are very few as yet who even feel the greatness of the spiritual tasks approaching man in this direction. 

Electricity, for instance, celebrated since its discovery as the very soul of Nature's existence, must be recognised in its true character — in its peculiar power of leading down from Nature to Sub Nature. 

Only man himself must beware lest he slide downward with it. 

 

In the age when there was not yet a technical industry independent of true Nature, man found the Spirit within his view of Nature. 

But the technical processes, emancipating themselves from Nature, caused him to stare more and more fixedly at the mechanical-material, which now became for him the really scientific realm. 

In this mechanical-material domain, all the Divine-Spiritual Being connected with the origin of human evolution, is completely absent. The purely Ahrimanic dominates this sphere. 

 

In the Science of the Spirit, we now create another sphere in which there is no Ahrimanic element. It is just by receiving in Knowledge this spirituality to which the Ahrimanic powers have no access, that man is strengthened to confront Ahriman within the world. 

My idea here is that the Ahrimanic impulse - which is evil in its cold, rational, systematic manifestation - has over the past couple of centuries consumed the more traditional Luciferic ('devilish') evil of short-termist personal lust, pleasure and torment. And is now being-consumed, in his turn, by 'Sorath'. 

The archetypal Ahrimanic evil is epitomised by a manipulative bureaucrat who presides over a state or corporate PSYOPS/prison/death machine; while Luciferic evil would be characterised by proximate evil: for example those who personally beat, rape and torture helpless prisoners.  

The final turning-point of the Ahrimanic consumption of Lucifer was when the Luciferic revival of the 1960s ('sex & drugs & rock-n-roll') was captured by the state bureaucracy - leading to a pervasive and intrusive system of monitoring and control for political correctness. 

Modern leaders are primarily Ahrimanic - and often anonymous/ hidden/ personally-timid; while old-style leaders were often Luciferic gangsters and pirates who cultivated a reputation for recklessness and the enjoyment of inflicting cruelty.  Luciferic evil now operates at a low-level in The System - among the mooks, minions and henchmen; while the ruling architects of evil have an Ahrimanic nature.

The Luciferic values were condensed and operationalised into systemic and materialist form; their spontaneity and pleasure were drained-away. 'Free Love' and open-ended promiscuity became compulsory sensitivity-training, and the threat of harrasment prosecutions. Spontaneity ("Turn-on, Tune-in, Drop-out") was incrementaly transformed into a world of proliferating committees, laws, guidelines and procedures; checklists, forms and feedback... 

 

But from about 2000; there was a further move towards the purest, most absolutely negative form of evil - which could be named Sorathic (adapting this from Rudolf Steiner's identification of Sorath as the most extremely evil of beings). 

Sorthic evil is neither about pleasure nor about control; it tends towards the purely destructive.

If Luciferic evil is motivated by short-teremist pleasure; while Ahrimanic evil is motivated by God-denial, spiritual blindness and reductionism towards a meaningless world of mechanical procedures; then the Sorathic impulse is driven by negative impulses - primarily fear, resentment and hatred.

Sorathic evil will therefore tend to destroy both the lustful pleasures of Lucuferic evil, and the complex functional bureaucracies of Ahrimanic evil. 

This is the Sorathic world we inhabit in 2020. 

A world in which the Luciferic lusts of sex/ drugs and the rock-and-roll lifestyle are forbidden and punished; and also a world in which the global system is being disabled and destroyed - even as its Ahrimanic architects have successfully accomplished a silent global coup, and are trying to perfect it into the grandiose schemes of The Great Reset/ Agenda 2030. 

In 2020 we observe all modern institutions, corporations and every kind of bureaucracy as rapidly declining in efficiency and effectiveness - under pressure from an ever-increasing culture of fear, victimology, entitlement and resentment. 

Sorath divides Mankind into more-and-more, smaller-and-smaller, self-identified victim groups; each resentful-of and pitted-against each other. The aim is eventually for each person to feel alone, consumed by feelings of thwarted entitlement, and hatred of the world; and living in permanent fear of a whole world of other people, each of whom resents and hates the solo-victim just as he hates them. 

And then - eventually - Sorath's intent is that everyone, without exception, should die in fear and despair.

 

Thus we see that Sorath takes Luciferic and Ahrimanic and pits the one against the other, to weaken and destroy both. Whatever gives pleasure is thwarted. Whatever has been created, and is complex or functional, is reduced to chaos. 

Chaos is indeed the key term. Ultimately, Sorath is driven by resentment directed against God and all of His works; and resentment of Man as a loving creating-being and all of his works. Sorath wants to reduce creation back to a primal state of chaos. 

And then - when all else has been destroyed - to destroy himself as a act of spite against the God who created him. 

Such is Sorath's fantasy. 

Note: JRR Tolkien depicted Sorath in his Silmarillion legendarium under the name of Morgoth. 

 

What follows is a train of thought, of reasoning. It was stimulated by watching a fantasy TV program in which the hero fought demons, that is Luciferic evil embodied in actual personal beings that wanted to enslave, torture and murder. The fight was to contain or kill such beings.

It was difficult - for the hero; but the evil was locatable and understandable - the difficulty was in beating the demons.

Then I reflected that the evil we mostly encounter in this, our modern lives, is Ahrimanic - which means it is The System (the Matrix) - which is bureaucracy, which is impersonal, which is dispersed - behind every bureaucracy lies another. There are (it seems) "bureaucracies all-the-way-down"...


But then I realised: this is not so.

Ultimate metaphsyical reality is of beings and their relationships. The ultimate spiritual reality of modern evil is of actual Ahrimanic beings; that is persons, who have motivations and seek satisfactions in a way exactly analogous to the more familiar Luciferic demons. The Ahrimanic demons are motivated, living, conscious beings of a different kind, different nature; that is all.

So, ultimately The System, the bureaucracies are merely a mask, a disguise, a distraction from the reality of purposive evil pursuing its purposes.

What, then, can I actually do about all this? The answer became clear (or so it still seems).


I need to bear in mind - actively, deliberately - that nothing is dead, all is alive.  Consciousness is universal - motivation is everywhere.

The ultimate truth is that everything real is personal. There are no coincidences, no accidents - all has meaning - and there is no neutrality.


No neutrality means that the officials, the drones, the myrmidons, the petty agents of bureaucracy that we see all around (and our-selves very probably: aye, there's the rub!) are actually personal, purposive agents.

The minor implementors of The System - the slaves, serfs, servants - the clerks, managers, security guards, people who deliver... all of them (of us) are active participants in Ahrimanic evil - all have chosen to regard themselves as non-persons, all seek to avoid ultimate responsibility by sharing in the Ahrimanic assertion that 'nobody is to blame' - which means that in The System we are not persons - we are dead, lack consciosuness and purpose...

This is what must not be accepted - must be brought to conscious knowing, and refuted.


Primitive or psychotic paranoia - in which each person understands himself to be the centre of the universe, with life organised around-himself; is basically correct factually; but is wrong insofar as it is regarded as a passive situation - regarded as unavoidable. (The typical paranoid regards himself as a passive victim of external realities. He sees reality as outside himself.)

We are all and each actually at the centre of the universe; because we are co-creating that reality We are never passive (or, insofar as we are, then that is an evil choice: false, a pretence, a shirking of good, a service to evil).

We don't know everything here-and-now (of course!); but everything is potentially know-able - by each of us - in principle; and that 'in principle' makes All The Difference.

(About this Rudolf Steiner, in Truth and Knowledge and Philosophy of Freedom was profoundly and vitally correct).


How to fight demons? With 'magic' - obviously! But what kind of magic?

We know (from fantasy TV, movies and books) how magically to fight Luciferic demons... How then magically to fight the Ahrimanic demons that stand-behind The System; or rather hide behind The System? And use The System magically to make each of us Ahrimanic too. That is to make each of us choose to regard ourselves as material, non-personal, non-responsible - 'functional units' of that System.


The magic of fighting the Ahrimanic demons is knowing; and the effects of knowing. And victory is possible because the Ahrimanic beings assume their own passivity; that is their basic assumption, their metaphysical world picture.

When we are (or become) active and participating knowers; then They are defeated. But they do not realise how They have been defeated. Such is unknowable to Them.

The Ahrimanic magic is to induce people to regard the world passively, with detachment (as if meaning was out-there); to induce people passively to serve this machine, to deny their participation in the construction of this machine. 

Our magical challenge is therefore to see beyond the self-presentation of our world as dead, abstract, impersonal, mechanical, unconscious -- and to know the world as it really is.

The Ahrimanic magic is to make us believe the world is merely material; our counter-spell is to (our-selves) regard that world as also spiritual: more exactly the magic happens when we personally actually consciously experience the world as alive, of-beings; and embrace that experience as valid. 


This good magic will work when we know the servants of Ahriman (including our-selves) as deluded, self-suppressed, evil in avoidance of knowledge - hence respobsility for this vast structure of evil.

Good magic unmasks the beings behind the machine, unmasks the choices behind the obedience, unmasks the active promotion of evil behind the fear and despair.

A day at the office, a visit to the shops then becomes the front-line in the battlefield of spiritual warfare.

Our magic against Theirs.

I have often posted on the progression of evil from Luciferic - traditional selfish evil; through Ahrimanic - bureaucratic evil; to Sorathic - chaotic evil. 

(For those who know The Lord of the Rings, the sequence can be seen going through to completion with de facto suicide in the character of Saruman.)  

That part of the world known as The West is well advanced in Ahrimanic evil, with its establishment of a System of omni-surveillance and micro-control in service of value-inversion. 

But, because the mass of the population are Godless (even when they self-identify as Christian) this mature, advanced, more-evil type of evil has remained all-but invisible, undetectable - indeed its reality is denied and it is instead asserted as Good (due to the value-inversion made possible by anti-Christian atheism).  

The progressed evil of Ahriman works by a pretense of being and doing Good, concealed by that pseudo-concern and feigned-niceness, empathy and compassion; which is all-but universal among public figures. 

Because so many (especially of the managerial and 'expert' classes) are assimilated to this way of thinking - gross evils have become undetectable, denied or even boasted of and propagated. 

A clear example is the brain-washing, poisoning, mutilation, sexual grooming, and trafficking of children - that goes on under the 'caring' label of the transagenda. And those who dissent from such historically-unprecedented systemic vileness are themselves labelled as evil!

Meanwhile, the Western masses are trained to recognize only Luciferic evil, mostly using the single dishonestly-selective and -projected, dishonestly-honed and -crafted, example of the National Socialist Workers Party of Germany - the consequence of which means that Nazis are detected and opposed everywhere among enemies of The System - except (apparently) where they actually exist! 

Thus the evils of The West are invisible to The Western populace, hence increasing without limit because they are regarded as good; whereas the more 'blatantly' Luciferic parts of the world, who are actually less advanced in evil - still retain some significant ability to detect and acknowledge evil (and thus a greater possibility of self-limitation or even repentance). 

This makes The West the most evil part of the world. 

Which is why the most advanced, chaotic, Sorathic type of evil is currently making its greatest strides in The West. 

A comment by John Fitzgerald on yesterday's post clarified something for me. he said:

I was leafing through the Roman Catholic Diocese of Salford's 2019 almanac at my Mum's house today. There was a page devoted to one of those organisational-structure flow-chart diagrams, showing who's who and who does what in the Diocese. To me, the sight of the Church aping the world of business and HR in this way, was an eruption of pure Ahrimanuc evil and an admission and indeed a celebration of Ahriman's taking power in the Diocese. The medium is the message, form is content, etc. Honestly, an old-school pentagram would have been less alarming!

I replied:

A very good example. Yet, how few people can recognise that as a mark of actually-existing evil?

At most, some might acknowledge this as sign of a risk of corruption. But the truth is that it is a mark of corruption, it is evil being-implemented.

*

This is important - very important. When we see managerialism, bureaucratic thinking, then we are seeing evil: the main form of evil. Not just something that encourages evil, but actually-happening evil.

It is a lethal blind spot of our era that we fail to notice and identify the major form of evil in our era. This can be termed Ahrimanic (or specifically Satanic) evil; and is the bureaucratic evil of materialism/ reductionism/ positivism/ scientism.

The cold, dehumanising, despair-inducing Ahrimanic evil is far more common and dangerous than the 'old style' 'Luciferic' type of demonic evil - of impulsive lust, torture, killing. More common and dangerous because is simply is not admitted to be evil!

And the Ahrimanic is not admitted to be evil exactly because it is everywhere, obvious, triumphant; in all organisations and institutions including our most cherished Christian churches!


The worst that most people will say of managerialism is that it is a 'waste of time'. But it certainly is not that - because for the demonic powers time expended on managerialism is powerfully corrupting; keeping the mind away from Good, and enforcing and rehearsed the denial of God and the world of spirit and joy. 

The point is that when we see an organisation emphasising its hierarchical and functionally differentiated managerial structure, using Public Relations, dishonesty and manipulation in public announcements, pandering/ virtue-signalling in advertising material by emphasising Leftist weazel-concepts such as equality, diversity, anti-poverty, climate change...

When we hear or read the tropes of managerial language and behaviour; observe committees, voting, procedure etc - that whole crushingly-familiar world of The System; we are seeing actual evil being implemented - just as surely and solidly as if we were seeing demons with horns, pointy-tails and tridents boiling a human being in sulphur.


The big problem is that there are such powerful and plausible excuses for this type of evil.

It is all too easy to say - But we have to do this, nowadays - and if we didn't we could not function. And it is all too easy to accept this excuse, which is true - at least at the level of rational materialism, and simply to forget about the whole thing because it is inevitable, and a necessary compromise.

We have had many generations of this compromise; of the forces of Good using the instrument of evil on the basis that either there-is-no-alternative, or that they are doing-so in a way that the benefits outweigh the disadvantages.

Yet we look around and see that the opposite has happened. The instruments of evil have thoroughly corrupted all institutions and nearly-all Western people - who nowadays accept the inevitability and potential benefits of managerialism.

It seems that our society will go to its destruction, and we will go to our deaths, defending the absolute necessity of that which incrementally and systematically corrupts and dooms us.

This is perhaps going to be the great test of our times... 

We have an evil, global totalitarian System - encompassing and linking all the major social institutions. This global System is getting more and more aligned to the side of Satan with every passing month - with a mixture of tacit consent and active approval from (it seems) the majority of the population - and only a few spiritually-religious individuals in explicit opposition. 

Yet this evil System is also what keeps us alive. It is getting less and less capable of keeping us alive, as it gets more and more evil - nonetheless the The System is still what maintains us...

But, evil being evil, the Ahrimanic "lawful evil" that wants us all under micro-surveillance and total control; is giving-way to a wholly-negative, Sorathic, "chaotic evil" of each-against-all in short-termist, destruction.

And the great test is when we are in a situation of considering whether to defend the lesser against the greater evil... Should we do it? 

It seems rational to defend the lesser evil? (At least, to some extent.) But is it in practice corrupting? 

All 'viable' options are evil. People start-out recognizing that fact, but in the heat of battle or the routine of work; they 'forget' and become corrupted into supporting the lesser evil.  

Instead of fighting on the side of God and Good in the spiritual war; people find themselves fighting on the side of Ahriman against Sorath - embroiled in civil war among the demons.

That is the test of our times: to fight for Good instead of for the lesser of evils. 

It is the test of salvation.

 

Edited from Chapter 13, the final one, of Unancestral Voice by Owen Barfield (1965).

By the Adversaries, Barfield means Lucifer and Ahriman, who are conceptualised as as actual but distinct aspects of 'Satan' - they are the adversaries of Christ's plan for the development of Men to the fully-divine form of consciousness. This idea comes from Rudolf Steiner, but is too complex to explain here. 

In what follows, Barfield makes a subtle distinction concerning evil that I consider to be not just misleading, but false - however (in the parts I have emphasised in bold text) he also makes a deep, vital, important and neglected point. Square brackets indicate editorial additions.

"[The Adversaries seek, not transformation but either continuity or substitution. 

"We have spoken little as yet of good and evil. If you are wise you will not think of the adversaries as evil. 

"Not they, but what they do - if man fails to prevent it - is evil.  

"They are not evil, because it is only in the activity of preventing them that Man achieves freedom: the freedom without his transformation [i.e. resurrection to eternal life] would not be self-transformation."

Now, I regard the best definition of evil to be that which opposes the divine destiny for Man; and in that respect, the adversaries certainly are evil; since opposition to God and to Jesus Christ is precisely what they do...

I think what Barfield means here is that the adversaries just are the way they are; and God has made this world such that Satan's activities are a part of it: in other words, opposition is allowed.

That is just a fact of mortal incarnate life. God has his reasons; which we personally may or may not understand - and which nobody understands in detail.

However, Barfield wants to put the focus on a place we seldom allow; which is that the major evil in this world comes from Man's failure to oppose, to prevent, that which the Adversaries want to do.

In a sense demonic evil is just a fact of life, about which we personally can do nothing. But demonic evil nearly-always works by Men's implementation. And another fact is that Men have freedom (agency) either to implement or to oppose evil.

Assuming that we are here to experience and learn from life - this is one vital thing we are here to learn: we are here to learn to 'prevent' evil; that is not to implement it, to work against it.

We should ideally never allow ourselves to think along the lines of 'the devil made me do it'. And when we do think like this, it must be repented.

What Barfield is saying here is that we need to learn to take responsibility for the evil that is done - and to take responsibility for 'preventing' evil as best we may; because that is to be free; and to be free, to embrace our being as a moral agent, is one of the essential things that God wants from us.

The demon's problem is that, by Not incarnating and having separated themselves from God's direct presence in Heaven, they are not-easily brought-to-a-point...

They are eternal and indestructible spirits who have taken the side against Creation; and as such they are Not-very-good at learning from experience.

Perhaps, the hellish economy works more by a kind of 'natural selection' among demons, rather than by the learning and development of individual demons.

That is, maybe the individual demons stay much the same (because they don't learn from experience), but one or another comes to the fore at different times and places and situations; for which they happen to be best adapted.

Some rise, some fall back down the hierarchy; and the supreme Leader varies at different times, and perhaps too in different places - hence the several names for the chief demon in different sources and cultures. 

So The Devil may be sometimes the passionate and charismatic Lucifer, sometimes the coldly bureaucratic Ahriman, sometimes the sadistic Sorath - whatever is working most effectively here-and-now in the work of opposition to God, Good and Creation?

The problem with prophecy is that - when it is made public - it never seems to come true; or - even when some would interpret it as validated; prophecy never seems to do any good.

I have read many sincere, detailed prophecies made over the past fifty years or so; and they are often completely wrong - as wrong as it is possible to be.

There were, for example, from the 1970s - 1990s (and again leading up to 2012) many channelled messages about an imminent landing of aliens on earth and the consequences, and multiple predictions of an imminent planetary breakthrough to a higher 'frequency/ vibrational' level of consciousness. Didn't happen.


The only valid prophecy I have encountered has been Rudolf Steiner's of 1918 - about which I have written extensively. Perhaps significantly this was a pessimistic prophecy - about what bad things would happen if Western man continued to reject the reality of the spiritual; if we continued to assume the truth of materialism. And even in 1918 this was an extrapolation of a century-plus trend. 

But Steiner's main prophecy - of the Second Coming of Christ in c1933, was completely wrong - at many levels. Instead of Christ we got Hitler as Chancellor - although Anthroposophists actually interpret Hitler as a demonic reaction against the Second Coming. But if the 1918 prophecy is straightforwardly true, then the Second Coming prophecy is falsified by the same common sense criteria.

Another of Steiner's main prophecies was that Ahriman (Satan, the Antichrist) would be incarnated in c2000 - so I suppose that remains a possibility, although I think we might have noticed by now?

But from Steiner we can see that being A Prophet does not mean that one is correct about most things, most of the time. And if only a small percentage of  statements are accurate - and we don't know which percent until afterwards - then this really isn't much use.


There are several ways by which, it has been suggested, God could enable prophecy. But the question is why he would want to do this.

Prophecy essentially assumes divine planning to a timetable. And why would God (at least the Christian God) want to do that? And if he did, why would he want people to know about it. And if he did want people to know about it - why choose a human prophet as the mechanism - and expect the message to be accurately disseminated and understood?


There is no doubt that - through the ages - there has been a fascination with prophecies. But public, objective, social prophecy is beginning to strike me as a wrong idea at root. It may be a fascination - one I personally feel pretty strongly; but that fascination may be idle or evil rather than good.

I can certainly see the value in personal prophecy - among family, friends and the like. This can serve a function of retrospective validation - as apparently happened among Jesus's disciples when after his resurrection, they recalled some relevant prophecies. But something goes terribly wrong when these are made public, with 'general prophecy', when prophecies are made into objective statements, applicable to 'all'; when they are supposed to affect public policy.

Indeed, the most convincing stories of prophecy are when The Public disbelieve and ignore The Prophet, but a much smaller group of the prophet's family, friends, followers do believe; and these 'believers' are able to escape some prophesied disaster.

A good example is at the beginning of the Book of Mormon, when the prophet Lehi are ignored by the authorities, but he and his family escape the destruction of Jerusalem. Or in fiction when, in Watership Down, the shaman rabbit Fiver predicts the destruction of the burrow, is ognored by teh chief rabbit, but escapes with his brother and a small group of followers.   



I am certainly guilty, many times over, of worrying about what the future holds in general terms unless... or of trying to avert one or another prophecy. But surely this is a fault? Surely I ought to be discerning what I ought to do now - and (so far as possible) setting aside what might (but probably will not) happen as a consequence?

Or, if I did recieve a real prophecy, then this would surely not be about anything large scale - but about what should happen to myself or my family; something I can directly affect: where my personal decision is significant. 


Like most people, I want to be reassured that If I do X, then Y will eventuate; but we know that it is seldom possible really to know what will happen - too many factors impinge. Most importantly, all people (all Beings) have agency, and are capable of choosing. In principle, conscious behaviour cannot be known in advance - only guessed.

And therefore what we ought to do, ought not primarily to be aimed at consequences - especially when we know what it is right to do regardless of consequences. That seems the case in real prophecy - the future is not known with any great precision; but what ought to be done is clear. 

We may, if we are sincere, come to understand the reality of our situation - and this will include what we personally should do in consequence. To get back to that broadly-fulfilled 1918 prophecy of Steiner - we may reasonably infer that the bad consequences happened for broadly the reasons Steiner stated 100 years ago. But we only knew that for sure in (perhaps) the past generation or two; many decades after the prophecy was made.

And what we do not know is the consequences that would actually eventuate from here-and-now if we (from this point) did what Steiner rrecommended and remedied the defects Steiner outlined... If we (you and me, other people) regarded the spiritual realm as real, developed a more frequent and intense awareness of the spiritual realm etc.  What effect would this have?


In sum, even if we know that the prophecy was true, and what we ought to do about it  - this does not tell us what would happen if we actually went ahead and did it. If (for example) there was a general recognition that 'Steiner was right after all!' (at least, in that particular lecture of 1918).

What then: what would be the resulting consequences?

It seems we would need yet another prophecy!

The following is edited from Lecture 5 of The Karma of Materialism (1917) by Rudolf Steiner and translated by Owen Barfield

It was also inevitable that an ahrimanic [i.e. Satanic-materialistic] code of law should be particularly in evidence and concentrated, so to speak, at one particular spot on the earth at the time of the Mystery of Golgotha [i.e. the death and resurrection of Jesus].

Such circumstances did not prevail everywhere, but in this one place the social structure was completely ahrimanic. 

Therefore the appearance of its very antithesis - the appearance of a God - was for this society the most hateful thing that could happen, it had to be eliminated...

Two things in particular brought about this social structure. First, the kind of thoughts that had evolved out of Judaic law, were so saturated with ahrimanic forces that by means of them there was no possibility of grasping the fact that a God could come so close to man as was the case of Christ Jesus. This was something Judaic law had of necessity to reject. 

Secondly, the Romans were also responsible for the death of Christ Jesus; they were a powerful and efficient force in establishing the external side of the social structure. One cannot imagine a more powerful example than the social structure created by Roman Imperialism, particularly at the time of the Mystery of Golgotha. Yet at the moment the Mystery of Golgotha is enacted, Pilate, the representative of the strongest earthly power, proves a weakling when faced with spiritual power. He is incapable of coming to any insight or to make any decision about what is to happen.

This phenomenon of satanic materialism is therefore connected with the Mystery of Golgotha... it took place at a time when mankind was least able to understand. 

In earlier times the advent of Christ would have been understood, but when it actually happened it was not understood.

**


Note: Rudolf Steiner's idea of 'Ahriman' is a demonic being/ set of beings - roughly similar to the concept of Satan is the character of The Devil - a demon whose distinctive tempting of Men is this-worldly materialism, legalism, denial of the reality of the spiritual; who works by-means-of procedures and laws, organisation and systems; and who typically works-via emotions such as fear, resentment and demotivation.

Clearly, the ahrimanic has been The rising ideology in The West since the modern era (post 1600s) and since about 1800 is now globally dominant in the form of the single-interlinked, expanding totalitarian bureaucracy.

Steiner's point is that the timing and placing of Christ's life was such that the reality of the Son of God could not be acknowledged by either of the dominant institutions.

The Jews could see no further than that Jesus transgressed The Law - that was the whole of their perspective (just like any typical modern official with her standard practices, or the PC Thought Police and their many and multiplying taboo words/ facts); the Romans regarded stability of their systematic regime as the priority; and Jesus as having provoked a dangerous, albeit irrational, response from the Jews.

Both Jews and Romans were blinkered to any genuine and significant spiritual realities; such that it was either impossible or irrelevant that Jesus might be exactly who-and-what he said he was. Contrary evidence was by definition false; all eye-witnesses were by definition fools or manipulators.

The 'obvious' and apparently unavoidable, conclusion for Jews and Romans alike was to 'eliminate the problem' - by killing Jesus.

So, despite that all the people involved in the death of Jesus had free will, and any of them could have chosen Not to kill him; in an era of established and accepted Ahrimanic dominance it was almost inevitable that Jesus would be killed by 'the authorities' one way or another, living in that place and at that time.

(And this was why the death by murder of Jesus could be fore-known, prophecied - despite the free will of Men.) 

The many lessons for today are obvious enough...

Edited from a lecture by Rudolf Steiner at Bern, Switzerland - 4th November 1919 concerning the influences of Lucifer and Ahriman.

The phase of evolution beginning in our own time has a very special character. The present phase may be characterized in a general way by saying that all the experiences confronting humankind in the physical world during the earth's further existence will represent a decline, a retrogression. 

The time when human progress was made possible through the constant refinement of the physical forces is already over. In the future, too, humankind will progress, but only through spiritual development, through development on a higher level than that of the processes of the physical plane. 

People who rely entirely on the processes of the physical plane will find in them no source of satisfaction. 

We are heading for the “War of All against All”; its implications must not remain in the realm of theory but also come to expression in the actions, the whole behavior of human beings. 

The fact that people in the future are not going to get much fun out of developments on the physical plane, will bring home to them that further evolution must proceed from spiritual forces.

 

Comment: A hundred years later and we can see that Steiner was absolutely correct. Four generations of (mostly) development in the refinement of physical forces, clearly has Not brought about human progress. 

(Indeed the prevalent - and explicit - idea among the (demonically-driven) Global Establishment is trans-humanism, transcending the human; the abolition - and eventual genocide - of all humans, and their replacement with 'cyborg' human-computer hybrids. Why not? Does Satan care for humans?)

And the war of all against all has advanced so rapidly in recent years - and with unprecedented swiftness in 2020 - that implementing exactly such a Life has become the main plank of global public policy with barely any recognition and even less murmer of disconent that this should be. 

(Disguised merely by the flimsiest and least coherent of Big Lies, blatant fakery, and terrible consequences evident in the personal experience of every single individual on the planet.) 

Steiner knew and prophesied that the immediate post-1914-18 world war was the last chance for the dominant Western world to change its trajectory; but instead materialism/ reeductionism/ positivism was embraced and enforced with teh promise of a life without suffering and of greatly enhanced 'fun' - as was evident in the Roaing Twenties and the Swingin Sixties. 

Yet the underlying reality of the 20th century was unprecedented world was and atheist socialist/ communist (anti-Christian) regimes of staggering human destructiveness. And the self-destruction of The West primarily by increasing value-inversion with sub-fertility, and deliberate strategy social and suicide - which seems to have reached a decisive climax. 

Rudolf Steiner's great strength is not his analysis of distaster - but his pointing forwards towards The necessary, fundamental and potentially effective (Christian and spiritual) solution; which is why (for all his many faults) he remains one of very few genuinely vital thinkers of the past couple of centuries. 

It is easy to get distracted and misled by the fact that the sexual revolution began (mid 1960s) with an explicit assertion of the 'rights' of individuals to 'do whatever they wanted with whoever/ whatever they wanted' - the principle of open-ended and impulsive hedonism. Free love etc. - with an emphasis on extreme heterosexual promiscuity (because that is what most men 'want' at the purely-hedonic level).

The 'problem' was to persuade most women that they wanted it too. And in practice this required social indoctrination (by the fake female peer group of the mass media) and liberal usage of alcohol and drugs, and engineered pro-promiscuous social situations.

Most people fail to recognise that this ultra-libertarian and individualist 'let it all hang out', 'follow your dreams and impulses' spirit has long since been replaced by something very different in spirit: something collective, bureaucratic, totalitarian.

Perhaps the feminists began it with the slogan and idea: The personal is political.

This, unnoticed at the time, was a repudiation and reversal of carefree, individualist hedonism - and the assertion that all thought and actions (including sexual) were primarily political, hence collective, statements. At exactly this point - and, significantly, under the explicit guidance of women - began the assertion that The System had the authority, right and power to take-over sexuality.

Nowadays, the realm of sex and sexuality has been drained of hedonic significance and become a realm of earnest and hectoring political monitoring, propaganda and control - in an inverted morality by which sexual acts, including their discussion, are the primary theme used to enforce a top-down, collective ethos.

To be included in the totalitarian system, sex must be made explicit and universally discussed. But - as everyone feels and knows - the realm of sex is thereby enslaved to that system. When everything is shared socially and officially, and when that social and official realm has been absorbed into the social control system (with rewards, threats, sanctions) - we have what we recognise as modern reality of the sexual revolution.

60's sexuality was always a 'stalking horse' - a fake policy, a temporary battering ram for use against the 'repressive' Christian churches, behind which the real (global establishment) agenda was advanced.

Nowadays, the pro-impulsive sixties ethos is merely exploited as a lure (e.g. in pop videos, adverts and similar), to get people interested, to get them pro-sexual revolution with the promise of pleasure; before the transition into top-down, bureaucratic totalitarianism; where sex and sexuality becomes a controlled, symbolic demonstration of everybody's subordination to The System.


Note: For the sex n drugs n rock-and-roll generation, the sexual revolution has been a classic example of 'bait and switch'. They began as selfish, hedonic rebels; and ended as titled and awarded chairmen of bureaucracies encouraging/ celebrating/ imposing ever more laws, procedures and codes-of-practice and crushing all freedom and pleasure in the name of 'diversity' and 'inclusion'. Their always-evil-motivations are clearly revealed by the fact that so very few of them have chosen to refuse this trajectory, or even to acknowledge the U-turn in the sexual revolution. The few that have done so tend to be notorious and vilified - Camille Paglia is an example, who apparently remained an unreconstrcted 60s radical, and denied/ was refused the Establishment plaudits of her contemporaries. The System has attempted to crush her more than once, and currently. 

Further Note: I refrained from the use of the (handy) Steiner nomenclature; but I am obviously describing the way that a brief Luciferic hedonic anti-System sexual revolution in the 1960s; fed-into a prolonged Ahrimanic phase (still ongoing) in which the sexual revolution is primarily a series of excuses for more bureaucracy, hence further extension and tightening of the totalitarian System. The trajectory from anti-System to Pro-System - and many individuals undergo this exact same trajectory in their own personal development - because without God The System is inevitable and supreme as the only societal source of meaning and purpose - so being anti-System is ultimately futile, and Lucifer always leads to Ahriman.