Bruce Charlton's Notions

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. 

 

I have found a modified version of Rudolf Steiner's schema that evil can be distinguished in two forms - Ahrimanic and Luciferic - to be a valuable tool.

The Luciferic is (roughly) the impulsive, instinctive, self-gratifying, psychopathic kind of evil - as characterised by the frenzied violence and torture of unbridled war; or the greedy lustfulness that drives the sexual revolution. This tended to be the dominant form of evil in ancient times - and of course it still continues.

But that does not capture the modern form of evil - which may originate in this kind of 'id'-driven thirst for instant gratification; but which takes this and operationalises it in the form of definitions, laws, regulations, and bureaucracy - enforced by omni-surveillance and micro-control mechanisms. This is the Ahrimanic - a cold, rational, systematic form of evil.  

In other words, the distinctive and dominant form of evil of this time, of modern times, is totalitarian. The Ahrimanic is the totalitarian, bureaucratic, strategic...

It is the evil of a whole society organised in pursuit of evil that has been pre-defined as Good. It may be an evil without pleasure; evil as an industrial process - a crushing, icy evil. The modern sexual revolution is presided-over, guided, implemented - not by passion crazed Caligulas - but by stony-eyed officials.


The problem is that almost all the real and serious Christian denominations and churches (I mean the best churches - not those that are liberal, apostate, vaguely-Christianised-leftist organisations) still seem to regard evil as Luciferic; and respond to its threat (or try to respond) by doubling-down on the Ahrimanic aspects of Christianity.

For example, the sexual revolution is seen by Christians as primarily about the Luciferic - to be opposed by better organisation. Whereas the real problem is not the work of lust-crazed individuals seeking pleasure; but the Ahrimanic, incremental, planned strategy of a vast army of drab, cold-eyed, strategising bureaucrats; armed with United Nations mission statements, European Union laws, International consensus definitions, guidelines, terms-of-service, models of best practice etc etc.

All too often the Christian response to the sexual revolution has been along exactly the same lines as the totalitarian bureacrats. An increase in planning, systems, supervision; a greater number and precision of rules; tougher enforcement - and so forth.

This is to fight ice with more ice; to fight Sauron with the One Ring. Such a Christianity presents the individual with what looks like nothing more than a choice of rival bureaucracies - one powerful and growing, the other small and collapsing. A choice of two would-be totalitarian monitoring and control systems. Both alienate, both are evil in form.

One can either be crushed by secular materialism, or crushed by religious practices...


The answer to the dominant Ahrimanic evil cannot be merely a different version of the same. Nor can it be a version of old-fashioned Luciferism; which is, anyway, an impossibility...

The middle sixties saw a massive cultural upsurge in the Luciferic (turn-on, tune-in, drop out - let it all hang out etc.) and that would-be explosion of the id and the instinct, merely fuelled decades of ever-expanding and further-encroaching bureaucracy. Nowadays, the Luciferic 'liberation' serves merely as an excuse for ever-more Ahrimanic constraint.

If evil comes from some combination of the domination of the Genital urges (Luciferic), and the raionalism of the 'Left Brain' (Ahrimanic) - what is needed is the Heart. And that is something new, something untried - but something profoundly Christian.


What Christianity needs cannot be captured in any formula or rule (that is just more Ahrimanic stuff) - in a totalitarian age we cannot expect to protect Christianity, or even to be Christian, by adhering to any principle of truth, or any flow-diagram of validity.

Nor can we fall into the trap of regarding anything other than the systematic as Luciferic, hence evil. There is a third way - the way of Jesus - and that is the only Good way. 

We must acknowledge the individual person in relation with God to be the fundamental unit of truth, beauty and virtue. This has been said many times before - but never done. A religion of the heart must be rooted in persons, not abstractions; because only persons can love - yet love is objective, the primary basis of all creation, the heart of Christ's teaching.

One of Rudolf Steiner's most valuable insights was that evil has an older Luciferic and a more modern Ahrimanic form.

Luciferic evil is instinctive, short termist, selfish and psychopathic - for example the lust which desires other people merely for sexual exploitation, or the sadism that desires torture, or the power that desires to humiliate and crush. This is the evil of Caligula or Nero, of Ghengis Khan, of the post-war African dictators such as Charles Taylor.

The Ahrimanic evil is more modern; it is the despair-inducing, soul-destroying, utterly-demotivating Iron Cage of totalitarian bureaucracy - where all is a single system and all Men are merely cogs to serve it. This is the evil of late Soviet communism, of The Borg, of the overpromoted-middle-manager, Head Girl Type (e.g. the-3-Ms - Merkel, May, Macron) that increasingly runs large organisations, corporations and Western nations.

These evils synergise - especially when Luciferic liberation - such as the middle sixties style sexual revolution feeds the vast arrays of spies, informers, officials, inquisitors and controllers that is the realm of modern sexuality - enforcing their inverted value system with bribes, threats and coercion.

The modern era emerged from what Steiner termed the era of the 'Intellectual Soul' - and example of which is the medieval world of Western Europe, with its institutions of religion, law, education and the like. These institutions were simple bureaucracies but with a 'light touch, and considerable space for individualism, eccentricity and indeed selfish psychopathy...

But when Christianity receded then was excluded, these institutions became compromises which pleased neither the Luciferic libertarians, nor the totalitarian Ahrimanic powers. 

Think of the education system of the the first half of the twentieth century. It was regulated and hierarchical, it had rules and certificates and exclusion - but the period of education was relatively short, and there was space for considerable personal judgement and large variation in philosophy and practice between institutions.

Schools and colleges were regarded as suffocatingly oppressive and controlling by the little Lucifers of the sixties counter-culture. This began the destruction.

And then the Ahrimanic systemisers found more and more evidence of their bureaucratic incompleteness. Human judgement meant the possibility of individual corruption, variations meant that some institutions must be deficient or wrong. The pressure was irresistible to bring all institutions under a single 'true' ideology and to close off all loopholes, fill all the gaps in the systems...

Same applies to churches. They became a compromise that satisfied nobody. On the one hand they were institutions of patriarchal dictatorship; on the other hand they were economically and economically 'unaccountable' - what was going on in them? Nobody knew. Who controlled what they did, lost of mostly unidentified people, What were the details of their operations? Unrecorded...

The response was a massive programme of incremental monitoring and control of every aspect of decision-making - and the integration of this with the national (eventually multi-national) System.

There is no functional coherence to this pincer movement of institutional destruction - the only coherence is destruction. There is not coherence or direction to the end result of this crude mixture of psychopathic irresponsibility and totalitarian control - except the evil ethic of value-inversion.

But the end result is that nobody supports the actual compromise of any existing institution - always they want more Luciferic license, and/or more Ahrimanic 'accountability'.

Hence, all institutions, of every kind, have-been or are-being destroyed... With no end in sight, and no end possible even in principle - since in our secular, hedonic-despairing, God-eliminated society there is no higher value that might be able to transcend the destructive paradox.

Rudolf Steiner's idea that evil has two faces and natures - the unconscious/ instinctive/ spiritual Luciferic, and the systematic/ bureaucratic/ materialistic Ahrimanic - is one that has lodged permanently in my mind (although I don't use the terms exactly as Steiner did).

Steiner foresaw that the Ahrimanic tendency was dominant and increasing in our age - and he was absolutely correct; including within the Anthroposophical Society which he founded. Indeed, the history of Steiner's movement is worth studying from the perspective of just how pervasive, how inevitable-seeming, the Ahrimanic tendency is in our age. here we have a movement studying, and officially opposing, the Ahrimanic tendency but using highly Ahrimanic methods!

Such is, however, almost universal in our time. Whenever any human and individual priority or problem is highlighted; the 'solution' is always to set-up institutional, bureaucratic mechanisms that are supposed to deal with it: task forces, surveys, committees, conferences, statistical reports, agenda-items, targets...

(The middle sixties is a clear example; because the 'sixties impulse' was Luciferic - but this dominated for only about one year - from the summer of 67 to the summer of 68; and everything radical/ leftist/ progressive we have seen since, has been ever-more-thoroughly Ahrimanic. Nowadays, the sparks of individualistic Luciferic instincts - especially sexual and transgressive - merely feed the Leviathan of bureaucracy.)  

These are all both tools and manifestations of Ahrimanic thinking; and implement and sustain that cold, rational, spirit-denying materialism. This is specifci totalitarianism. Then the individual Ahrimanic bureaucracies link-up to make the Single Totalitarian Bureaucracy, centrally controlled - and Ahriman is triumphant.

It matters not one whit if the 'ends' and objectives are spiritual, heartfelt, animistic - because the means by which they are approached ensures that spirit-denying materialism is the medium of discourse.

We see this everywhere, except in small family or friendship groupings; every institution is not just contaminated but corrupted and inverted by Ahrimanic thinking; and it is this which makes me ever more convinced that our future must be post-institutional - involving a return (but with a major spiritual distinction) to that world built on loving personal relationships rather than formal organisation.

However, first-time-round; this personal world was Luciferic - and therefore unconscious, instinctive, 'given', immersive, unindividual. It cannot be Luciferic again - even if some would wish for that; because history is linear and a developmental process.

So the future personal world will be conscious, self-aware, deliberately-chosen - therefore individually-based. 

This prospect ought to be welcomed; but even though it is not welcomed, and is indeed opposed vigorously (even/ especially among most Christians), it will very likely happen. It will happen because corrupt institutions cannot sustain the modern world, and the corruption runs so deep and has already done such damage that there is no possibility of institutional reform. There is grossly too-little of the true source from-which a reform might be initiated and sustained.

Our institutional corruption is terminal - the cancer of Ahrimanism has overwhelmed the host; and there is not enough healthy tissue remaining for the cancer to be cut-away. The cure will kill us - more exactly; if the cancer does not kill us first, the cure will kill the institutions.

To put it differently: cancer is dysfunctional, and will kill the host; yet the global organism is almost-all cancer tissue: so either way, there can be no cure. 

A world of seven billion people without formal institutions seems impossible - and presumably is impossible. And if the vast population cannot be sustained, then it will not be sustained.

So this will be something like the End Times - even when examined purely in a material sense; although I have no doubt that its ultimate causes are spiritual.    

(Note: Here I am using a typology of evil: Luciferic, Ahrimanic, and Sorathic - which I have adapted and transformed from their origin in the works of Rudolf Steiner.) 

*

In the past, the dominant sins were probably the triad of Anger, Lust and Pride. These, at any rate, seem to be the dominant characteristics of great sinners of history - right up into the middle twentieth century. 

But as Western society became more industrialised, specialised, coordinated and impersonally-systemic; the dominant nature of evil became Ahrimanic. 

The most prominent triad of sins became Fear, Resentment and Despair. 

 

Fear, Resentment* and Despair is the dominant mood of the world in 2020 - these are the modern, 'bureaucratic sins'. 

The self-seeking, self-aggrandising evil of the mid-twentieth century (as exemplified by the atheist-socialist dictators such as Lenin, Stalin, Hitler, Mao, Pol Pot etc.) is not much in evidence in the West. Of course, Luciferic evil is still present; but these sins require greater courage and motivation than are possessed by the masses - or indeed the rulers - in 2020. 

Luciferic sin is weaker and less common than in the past; because it requires high motivation which is fuelled by the virtue of courage. 

Great Luciferic sin entails a positive, active, for-the-self mind-set. However; courage, hence motivation, has been incrementally eroded by the passage of several generations of de facto atheism. Hence the rise in Ahrimanic sin; which is much more passive, negating, and directed against-others. 

Beyond the Ahrimanic lies the Sorathic, which is even more fully negative in its motivations. I think this happens, because the Ahrimanic sins erode their own basis. 

A bureaucratic world tends towards a state of passive, unconscious, materialism. The Ahrimanic impulse begins with a denial of the aliveness of the mineral world, extends through denial of consciousness to plants, then animals, and eventually - as for the past decades, creates a world where aliveness, and consciousness is denied even to Men. 

This materialism (positivism, scientism) is the basis of modern bureaucracy; which terms Men 'human resources', and generates policy on the basis of numbers and statistics. The individual Man counts only as an integer. 

 

When this world view of negation of the Self, penetrates the soul and has been internalised; we get the Sorathic form of evil. 

...Evil as the negation of The Good - any good. 

So, evil loses any positive goal and becomes directed-against Truth, Beauty and Virtue; against life and consciousness, against the natural and spontaneous, against Beings and their relationships. 

Sorathic evil's only 'satisfaction' (because it has become incapable of 'pleasure') is in this destruction of anything that is of-God; anything created, anything capable of creation.

 

An example? Well, a very obvious instance of Sorathic evil in 2020 is the imposition of that demonic-triad of lockdown, social-distancing, and masking. Leading, as they must do, to the permanent annihilation of human society - and the construction of a world of universal solitary-confinement.

Obviously the mainstream, birdemic-related, excuses for annihilating human society and culture are lies. But - much more significantly - even the architects of the Great Reset cannot make a coherent argument why societal destruction is necessary!

They do it, but They can't explain it.

 

Their attempted justification of universal isolation relates to the need (and benefits) of automation, robots and artificial intelligence systems; but this is a non sequitur. The 'need' for one, does Not imply the destruction of the other.

What we are therefore seeing here is a very pure form of Sorathic negation. Even the Global Establishment themselves, the people who are imposing societal destruction on the world, do not understand why they are doing this work of societal destruction. 

They insist upon its necessity; but they cannot coherently explain it!

 

The reason is that the 'need' for societal destruction cannot be explained in materialistic terms - which are the only terms possible in public discourse; and among those who deny the reality of God and creation. 

The true reason for societal destruction is that human society is Good and therefore needs to be destroyed. Society between Men is indeed one of the great and essential Goods of this mortal world; as Men at all times, everywhere, have acknowledged and acted-upon - quite naturally and spontaneously. 

The idea that this can and should be dispensed with is monstrous, outrageous and ridiculous... for anyone who is Not deep into the servitude of Satan. But then, that is precisely what we are dealing-with. 

 

Therefore human society is an obvious, and essential, target for Sorathic evil; not because it is 'useful' to destroy human community, not because its destruction will enhance the lives of the Global Establishment - but exactly because human society is Good, and a Great Good; and because destroying it will induce suffering and (in this atheistic world) despair on a scale unprecedented. 

 

(And despair is a sin, because it is a rejection of God: a failure to trust in God, and a refusal of Jesus's gift of eternal life in Heaven. Despair - that is, as an existential decision, not a mere emotion - is therefore the choice of damnation.) 

 

In this burgeoning world of Sorathic evil, we need to stop looking for the 'advantage' in evil. Need to stop trying to 'explain evil' in terms of it (for example) making more money for Them, or giving Them more power...

From now, evil needs gain no advantage by its action: evil thrives purely on the destruction of whatever is Good. 

Evil has therefore ceased to be a triad, and has become a unity - the unity of negation; the unity of simple destruction of Good.

This is Sorathic evil. 

* Resentment can be understood as primarily directed against others. Spitefulness is another term for this. A person motivated by spite will put his greatest efforts into causing harm to others, rather than promoting himself. He will even harm himself in his zeal to harm others. The 'positive' face of resentment is the burgeoning phenomenon of 'entitlement'; which, again, has a strong flavour that 'my' privilege is best expressed in terms of the intrusive inconvenience, anger and misery it causes to others.

 

Note added: 

There are implications in the above understanding for Christians; because Luciferic evil was usually opposed by trying to build church-administered systems to 'tame' Anger, Lust and Pride - by encouraging/ insisting-upon obedience to church rules. 

However, this strategy of taming by obedience (as we have seen) played-into the reinforcement of the Ahrimanic sins. And church-Christianity has dis-couraged, and de-motivated itself. Thus all the churches have (more, or less) become part of the global, atheistic bureaucratic System of Ahrimanic evil. In 2020, the mainstream churches have actively embraced their all-but annihilation by birdemic rules.

Ahrimanic evil was opposed by 'counter-cultural', anti-System, individualistic ideas - which, when not 'Romantic' Christian - often fell back into Luciferic evils (especially lust). And it is tempting, nowadays, to suppose that evil can be attacked by resisting and destroying the Global Bureaucratic System ('The Matrix'). But, if I am correct that this Ahrimanic System is already being superseded and consumed by negative, Sorathic evil; then the current, world dominating evil cannot be resisted by any form of destruction. 

In sum; if we aimed primarily to destroy The System, we would only reinforce the emerging Sorathic spirit of destruction. 

What then? Resistance to Sorathic evil is as simple as the evil it opposes; in that it is to pursue the positive virtues most characteristic of God - which are love and creation (which are one: creation being a superabundance of love); that is, to pursue loving and creating.

('Loving' in the sense of love in the best marriages and families; 'creating' in the broadest sense of thinking and acting from our real, divine self - we are children of God; which is always original and generative.)

And, resistance to Sorathic evil must be individual, or based upon personal, loving 'familial' relationships; because of the danger of Ahrimanic ('Systemic') evil, standing behind the Sorathic.  

So, our course seems clear and simple, as well as difficult and hazardous; which is for each individual to resist Sorathic destruction by creation; to resist Sorathic negation by love. And to ensure that these values and behaviours of creation and love come from within-us: that is, come from God-within-us. 

And not to wait for a lead from any church, institution or other-person - nor to look behind to see if anyone is following us. We must do what needs to be done our-selves, starting now.

 

If we take the three types of evil - Luciferic, Ahrimanic and Sorathic  (lustful-tormenting, systemic-bureaucratic, and negative-destructive) - we can see that this ordering is reflected in several ways, which are related. 

First it describes the ordering of dominance in history, secondly the degree of evil-ness, and thirdly it reflects the societal hierarchy of The Masses, The Establishment, and The Satanic powers. 

By societal hierarchy I mean that Luciferic evil dominates the Masses - who are evil in impulsive, short-termist ways; Ahrimanic evil is typical of the Global Establishment and its managerial-class servants - who regard Men as merely human resources towards abstract goals; and the Sorathic evil of negation, value-inversion and destruction of The Good is characteristic of the demonic overlords.

 

This leads to considerable mutual incomprehension looking upwards. 

The evil Masses simply cannot recognise the evilness of the Establishment-managerial class; they cannot comprehend that the Establishement's vast and comprehensive agendas, plans, schemes are a kind of evil. 

The Masses cannot see this as evil because it is so abstract, so impersonal. Ahrimanic evil has very little 'fun'; it is dull drudgery - meetings, tick-boxes and flow charts. 

 

And when the Global Establishment look upwards to their demonic overlords; they too fail to see that demonic evil is of a very different nature from the complex Ahrimanic, international, bureaucratic systems that are so laboriously, so tediously, being constructed at present. 

The abstract system-builders do not recognise that the demons are sabotaging cherished Ahrimanic goals of a transhumanist technocratic society of total surveillance and micro-control; by, on the one hand, encouraging Luciferic destructiveness among the Masses (riots, arson, beatings, murder); while on the other hand degrading efficiency and capability faster than the systems can be built. 

The cause of this Ahrimanic misunderstanding is always-increasing dishonesty. 

 

Ahrimanic systems depend on real information, and real information depends on honesty. Yet the Ahrimanic Establishment class are continually selecting, hyping, spinning and (where deniable) fabricating the 'data' upon which their own power depends. 

Claims increasingly outstrip attainment - decline is re-analysed into growth, failure is redefined as success. 

Thus the Establishment always overestimate the degree to which their plans are succeeding. 

 

Put bluntly, the Establishment do not know what is happening; they do not know because nobody in their systems is seeking the truth or speaking with honesty. 

Consequently, the Establishment suppose they have done well in 2020! 

They know they are richer; They believe they are more powerful; and They are confident that everything is going pretty-much according to plan - and infer that Their prospects are bright...

But such evaluations are based upon a tissue of falsehoods. 

 

They do not know - consequently they do not realise that they are in truth (and very obviously, to anyoneone outside of the System's deceptions) elaborately rubbing their hands and cackling with glee at fouling their own nests!

The Establishment suppose they are creating a global totalitarian society of law and order with Themselves at the top and outside, pulling the strings and collecting the rents. 

In fact, they have created (and are actively worsening) global spiritual chaos, collapse of morale and motivation, and a conflagration of fear and despair; which will surely accelerate, spread and consume the Establishment uncontrollably; like a wild-fire.   

 

They began by lying to the Masses while sharing reality with each other in secret 'elite' meetings and conspiracies; but this Ahrimanic 'Iron Cage' very swiftly evolved to a pseudo-system of universal and mutual propaganda and manipulation, in which the Establishment were themselves enmeshed. 

Now, everybody is lying to everybody else, 24/7. 

And then - the biggest lie - making confident assertions about what is going-on and what will happen. 

(And then lying about that.)

 

The only real winners of 2020 are the Sorathic demons whose agenda is merely negative, destructive, and aimed-at universal human self-damnation. 

The demons despise all humans, but especially those arrogant and foolish Men who believe they have outwitted, and are controlling, the demons. 

Fairy stories and legends are full of warnings against dealing with demons; but the Establishment made the Faustian bargain nonetheless. 

They invited evil into their hearts (which is the only way it can enter); made a 'bargain' with the Father of Lies, were (apparently) 'rewarded' by power and gratification in the short term; but in truth they were actually selling their souls literally, surrendering their wills - and this (sooner or later) becomes de facto irrevocable.

 

This is a spiritual war, and the stakes are salvation and damnation. 

There used to be several 'sides' in the spiritual war, but in 2020 the middle ground has all-but gone: there are only two sides. 

One side asks that we consciously choose to acknowledge God our Father and the Creator as Lord, if we wish to follow Jesus Christ to our 'reward' of resurrected eternal life in Heaven. 

That is one choice.

 

The other side offers some (more-or-less brief) up-front gratification in mortal life, as reward for being invited-into the heart. And for which it enforces a payment which is always the same, and is always exacted sooner than expected: enslavement, fear, resentment, despair and eternal misery. 

That is the other choice.  

Two choices only: either to have the next world as our chosen priority; or this world - but not both. 

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.

Over the years and recently, I've seen several "revisionist" arguments that The Empire in the original Star Wars trilogy of movies, was actually good. 

This is the conclusion of evaluating Luke Skywalker and his gang of rebels to be the real baddies; broadly on the basis that they are, at root, just the usual leftist-fantasy revolutionaries, as imagined by the 1960s US counterculture.

But this is nuts! Regardless of the nature of the rebels; The Empire was clearly depicted as a totalitarian regime, ruled by "demonic" (Dark Side) affiliated and control-motivated types. 

This specific error of discernment is worth noting, because it is one instance of a general phenomenon that is an increasingly frequent and powerful: defending Ahrimanic evil, on the pragmatic basis that it is not-so-bad as the changes being proposed; to the point of actively supporting that evil.

In this instance of Original Star Wars, which is from some fifty years ago when Luciferic evil had been strong for the last time in the form of the sixties version of hedonic "freedom" - the idea is that we ought to take the side of communitarian order against the chaos ensuring from individualistic self-expression. 

Nowadays; the Ahrimanic System is mostly defended against the spitefully-destructive Sorathic spirit of encouraging war, famine and disease. 

The snare is that it is natural and good up-to-a-point to defend that which is traditional, culturally-significant, and functional - which will include much that is virtuous, beautiful and true - against that which would remove it.

But only good up-to-a-point; because these are ultimately - from an eternal and spiritual perspective - secondary matters; and we therefore must be prepared to abandon them when resistance does more harm than good.

(I should be clear. To defend any-particular-thing which is good can itself become evil - when it leads towards affiliation to evil hence rejection of salvation. No matter how specifically good some-thing may be, there may come a point that it must be set-aside. Such is the nature of our life, task, and challenge in this mortal life.)  

The snare is that we are - in practice - offered a package-deal; in which the package is the net-evil Ahrimanic System, and we can only retain the many specific "goods" by sustaining net evil totalitarianism - and when such arguments from practicality become internalized and personalized into a spiritual affiliation to the side of evil.   

For Christians; this happens with their churches. 

There are always powerfully destructive forces at work against anything that is noble, beautiful and meaningful in the churches. 

These attacks are (almost invariably for the past few generations) evil-motivated; whether the Luciferic evil of desiring permission and endorsement for one's own (often sex-related or sexual - sometimes materialist/ careerist) sins. Sometimes the attacks are motivated by sheerly spiteful pleasure of destroying that which is regarded as a source of Good. 

Yet (beyond a certain point) to pour time, energy and effort into resisting these many-pronged attacks sooner-or-later actually entails supporting an already net-evil social institution that is deeply integrated into the global totalitarian bureaucracy. 

In other words; to defend the church tends strongly to slide-into defending The Empire - which is exactly what we see with the revisionist interpretations of Star Wars. 

Because all large, powerful, ancient, mainstream Christian churches depend-upon The System for their survival; as well as because the churches are under continual attack from Luciferic and (increasingly) Sorathic forces...

Then we get the very familiar phenomenon of loyal and devout Christian church members who implicitly, covertly but decisively have abandoned their Christianity; and affiliated with Ahrimanic totalitarianism. 

"The rebels" usually are wrong and would make matters worse; however, The Empire is - by nature and intent - a machine designed for the damnation of Men; and we Must Not forget that massive fact! 

 

The twentieth century was the era when evil transitioned from Luciferic to Ahrimanic as the dominant form.

Luciferic evil is the 'traditional' type; hot, impulsive; characterised by violence and murder; the gratification of sub-human, 'animal' instincts; and the cult of personality:


During the late twentieth century; evil transitioned to become Ahrimanic: not just sub-human, but sub-animal - Men became regarded as meat robots and flesh computers. The evil was not concentrated into a dictator, but became impersonal, unlocatable.

Evil is now dispersed among committees, faceless bureaucrats, institutions: The System.


Then people celebrated a person - a man represented a nation; now people celebrate the largest organisation in Europe - a bureaucracy represents a nation.

Then the masses celebrated an individual; now an abstraction. 


Then the dictators aspired to mould the population into a cohesive functional unit that could be whipped into a frenzy of productive or destructive action, worship or hate - as required; and this mass could be directed to do whatever the dictator wanted doing...

Now The Matrix aspires to destroy all human society, break the population into individual, mutally-fearful, docile and despairing individual units - ultimately to reduce these units down to a sub-animal level of cogs in a machine; or ideally software components.

(If living tissue can be reduced to binary code simulations - so much the better.)  

Then we could see evil; now we cannot.

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. 

Things began with chaos, among-which were Beings. Beings are self-sustaining - from Beings come the energies that shape chaos into creation. 

As soon as creation had begun, there was entropy - which is the tendency for the created to revert back to chaos. 

In this current stage of creation (which we also inhabit) creation must always be-overcoming entropy; by the self-sustaining energies of Beings. 

The reversion of creation to entropy releases 'energy'.

Therefore evil Beings, those who hate God and creation, encourage the reversion of creation to chaos. They do this partly in order to destroy creation, and partly to use the released 'energy' for their own purposes. 

Luciferic-evil Beings reduce creation intending to feed-upon the released energies. 

Luciferic evil is thus parasitic in nature - a Luciferically evil Being will feed-upon the energies of creation, as he destroys it.

 

Ahrimanic-evil Beings destroy creation by opposing chaos with 'order'. 

Creation becomes confined within The Global Bureaucracy, The System, The Matrix: the Black Iron Prison (BIP). 

Dynamic self-sustaining creation is held in stasis - thus the energies of creative life are squeezed out from the imprisoned Beings. 

After taking a tithe for vampiric (Luciferic) self-reward; these energies are used to maintain, extend and reinforce the prison: to extend the BIP globally, to include all Men; and to eliminate all perception and awareness of any-thing at all beyond the prison.

(Actually not all Men; because Ahrimanic evil entails a sharp distinction between prison inmates and warders; between the Beings who are-processed and the Beings who-do-the-processing - between Us and Them.) 

The death-factory is constructed and fueled by the energies released from its destruction of life. Ahrimanic evil is thus an entropy-factory, a processing plant; it takes living creation and reduces it to dead matter: creation to chaos. 

Ultimately, Ahrimanic evil turns creation against itself; uses life to crush life. 

Sorathic Beings are saboteurs - they were supposed to be warders sustaining the BIP, but they have begun smashing the buildings, wrecking the machines, and torturing the inmates. 

Sorathaic Beings are defectors from the Ahrimanic plan - because they have come to regard the Ahriminic factory as too slow, too dull, too unrewarding, too conjectural in effect. They want to destroy creation Now, directly, indiscriminately. 

Sorathic Beings perceive the contradiction of creating a Black Iron Prison as a means to destroy creation - when the base motivation of evil is to destroy all of creation (including BIPs). Pure evil cannot postpone universal destruction when it can be started already. 

Thus, Sorathic Beings will burn the death factory, along with its inmates and the warders; will return every-thing to chaos without attempting to harness or use the energies for any purpose. 

The motivation is not pleasure (like the Luciferics), nor mass effectiveness (like the Ahrimanic) - but a spite-driven, burning-zeal for pure destruction of all - here and now. 

Sorathic evil is born of a distrust of complex, long-term plans and schemes, a revulsion against the hypocrisy and pretense of the Ahrimanic strategy; which poses as 'good' and continues to create, albeit justified in order to destroy.

Sorathic evil emerges and waxes when the Ahrimanic scheme is nearing completion - when it comes to be believed that There is Only the BIP - there is only a whole world of evil, inescapable, with no alternative. 

Then evil has only evil as a target - so the greater evil turns-against and consumes the lesser.

 

Frederick Nietzche is generally known as one of the most vehement and radical foes of 'Christianity' - certainly he described himself as such in his last main book The Antichrist. 

Yet as I read Nietzsche's argument in The Antichrist now; it seems to be directed against mainstream, modern, Establishment materialist Leftism - against 2020 systemic totalitarianism triumphant - rather than against Christianity as I understand it.

Indeed, read this way, The Antichrist is a brilliant exposition of the dominant reductionist and secular negative- ideology that has infiltrated, subverted, inverted and (since the global church closures of least year) all-but destroyed institutional Christianity. 

Nietzsche's criticism's of Christianity are characteristic of modern, mainstream, secular, bureaucratic Leftism: The morality based on resentment; the incoherence of equality; that mass inculcation of 'pity' which is designed to paralyze with guilt; and to induce self-hatred, nihilism, despair and the desire for death (eg. abortion, euthanasia, assisted suicide).  

Nietzsche's assumption was that there was only 'this world' and he failed to recognize that, if true, this negated all possible justifications for Life of the kind he sought. His diagnosis of Ahrimanic evil was exact and prescient. 

But - at the time of his final dementia and mutism - he had not recognized that his alternative of a morality of Life (by which he meant individual spontaneous instinct) was subhuman, selfish, destructively short-termist - and by nature and merely atavistic, regressive and Luciferic. 

In other words, Nietzsche had not got beyond a negative critique based upon unexamined assumptions. The development of human consciousness means that the Luciferic is unattainable (even if it were desirable) and the Ahrimanic inevitably defeats it. Thus the German National Socialists (who revered Nietzsche, and issued Zarathustra as a Bible-equivalent) began with a philosophy of Life; but inevitably ended with escalating bureaucracy. 

This failure of the Luciferic is why the actual effect of Nietzsche on the atheistic anti-Christian culture which followed, has been to lead towards the Sorathic world of spiteful destruction - a program of civilizational/ national/ personal annihilation - instead of his hoped-for fantasy of pagan strength, courage and dominance.   

What Nietzsche should have done (and perhaps would have done - given more time; and an intuitive recognition of such realities as God, creation and life beyond mortality) was to move on from his negative critique of historical-actual church-dominated Christianity, to apply his creative insights - his direct-knowing - to remaking Christianity instead of trying to destroy it. 

As things stood; Nietzsche was using a double-standard - applying his 'methods' only against Christianity; and not against the assumptions from-which he critiqued Christianity. 

Nietzsche's own method, if thoroughly applied, would have led him back to Christianity - but Christianity of a very different nature than the one from which he began. 

Also, as I have said before, I think it likely that Nietzsche was himself 'saved' - i.e. that after death he chose to follow Jesus Christ to resurrected eternal life in Heaven. 

Why? How? Well, in a nutshell, what Nietzsche had against Christianity was that he believed it was not true. 

If when, after death, Nietzsche discovered that Christianity was true; then a Man of his creativity and honesty - and with his passionate human motivations - would likely have chosen active, eternal, interpersonal Life in Heaven; rather than the anti-Life lies, ugliness and sordid sins of Hell; or the living-death, un-conscious, blissed-out passivity of Nirvana.  

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!

"There slumber in every human being faculties by means of which he can acquire for himself a knowledge of higher worlds."

Thus wrote Rudolf Steiner, the founder of Anthroposophy. In The Philosophy of Freedom he demonstrated that thinking was the power that allowed modern human beings direct access to the spiritual worlds, an access that had once been the privilege of only a handful of mystics. 

No longer was it necessary for average human beings to depend on scripture and other forms of religious authority, for they could discover spiritual truth directly through strengthened thinking. This direct knowledge, he argued, was the only foundation for true moral freedom. He went on to develop and teach practical methods by which it could be achieved.

A century later, the Society he founded seems dedicated mainly to preserving and disseminating his nearly 60,000 transcribed lectures [Note: this number seems considerably too large an estimate, since Steiner only lectured actively for about 25 years, which is about 9,000 days - and he did not deliver six lectures every day]. 

The result of his own spiritual research, these lectures cover everything from gnomes to seraphim, from the history of Atlantis to recipes for compost. "Steiner says" is the constant refrain of anthroposophists, who seem to prefer citations from these lectures to direct knowledge of anything. While Steiner's initiatives in education, biodynamic agriculture, homeopathic medicine and care of the mentally retarded have been lovingly preserved, anthroposophy has, since his death, produced little in the way of social innovation. 

Anthroposophists, when they can be understood at all, express superstitions and prejudices that would embarrass a redneck. Fearing injury by everything from rock music to microchips to Jesuits, they have become a society of esoteric hypochondriacs, in neo-Amish withdrawal from modern political and economic life.

How is it that a movement dedicated to strengthened thinking produces so many goofy and morally useless ideas?

How did the author of The Philosophy of Freedom become this ghost to whom his readers so idolatrously surrender their independence of judgement?

That sound and stirring concepts give rise to corrupt and neurotic human organizations is pretty much a summary of the history of all spiritual movements...


I have been again engaging with Rudolf Steiner - because I regard him as one of the most significant thinkers of all time, and because he is a vital contributor to my deepest understanding of reality. Steiner is essential, but...

Yet again I find myself up against the phenomenon of which MacCoun speaks above. When I read or listen to Steiner's own lectures, or to the best of his followers expounding, I am overwhelmed by a sense of suffocation under such a mass of wrongness that I find it hard to continue.

But I disagree with MacCoun in her specific diagnosis that this is due to the Anthroposophical Society (AS), and the way it dealt with Steiner's legacy. I also disagree with her belief that the AS could - in principle - be reformed... I regard the AS as a symptom of Steiner's deep mistakes, and therefore it is unreformable

The problems lay with Steiner himself, and with his decision to become a spiritual leader of an organised movement.  But I repeat myself...


The problems are deep, because Steiner made the serious error of developing a meditative technique that he regarded as intrinsically scientifically valid; and spent two and a half decades, day after day, putting himself into this trance-state and spouting forth in lectures whatever came to him in this state.

Steiner did not live up to his own best understanding - indeed as a matter of daily routine he fell below the standards he himself had understood and explained. Steiner distinguished the Luciferic and Ahrimanic types of spiritual evil - and he fell into both in his late work of lecturing and organising the Theosophical then Anthroposophical societies.

Steiner's focus on meditative technique - and training in this method - was Ahrimanic, materialistic. But (contrary to his own assertion that meditation should be in clear, alert consciousness) the actual meditative method he used was Luciferic - it was (according to multiple descriptions) a dissociated trance state of lowered consciousness, including lucid dreaming. He then took this unconsciously-generated, 'altered state', 'atavistic' material and systematised and taught it as fact - Ahrimanic again.

For many years, Steiner had this working like a machine. Ask him a question, he would go into a trance, and from his unconscious would generate vast masses of material on the subject - and by Steiner's unique intellectual brilliance (he was a genius) this dream-material would be systemised and rationalised even as it emerged in his speech. 

The vast bulk of Steiner's work from about 1900 was, then, an exemplification of exactly those errors and evils that he himself first diagnosed as spiritual problems of our time: the backward looking Luciferic trances, and the modern bureaucratic organisation he founded, led and left-behind: the Ahrimanic Anthroposophical Society.

I had a bad migraine day yesterday and was grateful for Dale Brunsvold's audio versions of Steiner to give me an enlightening distraction from the state.

I found much to appreciate in the lectures, which focused on Steiner's intellectual and spiritual history of Man since the time of Ancient Egypt including the work of what he terms the Luciferic and Ahrimanic impulses.

These represent the false ideals of losing individually into a primal will-less consciousness and the will towards a consciousness, rationalist, materialism. The Luciferic yearns for the immersive spirituality of childhood or Hunter gatherer animus; the Ahrimanic for science, control, order, mastery. Each has some good, both are ultimately fatal.

Anyway, I found many sharp insights and understandings but also something very important missing. Then I realized it was God who was missing - specifically the recognition of divine providence... of the purpose and phases of history as the product of a personal Creator God.

Everything about Steiner's scheme describes history as unfolding towards a purpose and according to a scheme, and a scheme that is relevant, indeed unavoidable, for every person as an individual. This only makes sense, and carries a moral imperative, if it is a divine scheme - and if the divine scheme comes from a God who has our best interests at heart. If the scheme Just Is, then there is no reason except expediency to embrace it.

I then recognized that this unsaid presence of God, the Christian God, is necessarily implied by Steiner's system - the lack of explicit mention of which is confusing. And it has been profoundly distorting to Steiner's legacy - which has been broken and dispersed and assimilated into mainstream New Age and Leftist political movements.

But if the reader fills in this explanatory gap, and restores God at the head of Steiner's universe - which he personally would have agreed with - things suddenly become considerably clearer and more coherent.

 A couple of profoundly-clarifying posts by WmJas Tychonievich have led to the following thoughts. 

Good and evil are not symmetrical - not mirror images - because Good is positive divine creation; while evil is 'various ways' of being opposed to divine creation. Thus Good is primary, and evil cannot exist without Good. 

(This is why I habitually capitalize Good, and make evil lower case - subliminally to emphasize their qualitative difference in kind.)

The reason that I have suggested considering evil as Luciferic, Ahrimanic and Sorathic is a matter of expediency - it need not reflect and actual categories or distinction in the real world. It is a (more, or less) useful way of understanding evil. 

The reason for doing it was becuase Ahrimanic evil was not being recognised consciously as evil. I think most people spontaneously feel that Ahrimanic evil is indeed evil - i.e. the modern workplace and mass media makes people feel bad (e.g. afraid, resentful, despairing). 

But they do not consciously recognize it as necessarily evil by nature and motivation because they do not understand that Good is rooted in God and divine creation; and even if Christians have become transfixed by ancient lists and exemplars of Luciferic sins (murder, torture, rape, arson, theft etc) which are not what it at issue in a totalitarian Matrix of omni-surveillance and micro-control. 

OK so much for evil; but why divide and differentiate Good? I think that a categorization of Good ought to reflect actual, natural reality - rather than being merely expedient. 

And this seems especially important in this Ahrimanic age, when we so often categorize to kill: categorize in order to destroy that which is alive, organic, conscious, purposive...

Lists of virtues, laws of behaviour... these Now (however it was in the past) function to short-circuit thinking from our real and divine self - and to make us bureaucratic functionaries, being instructed by checklists and flow-charts. 

All language, and all concepts, are merely 'models' of real-reality; but we should only be categorizing Good in so far as this is really based-on the categories of real-reality. 

Good is rooted in divine creation, which is rooted in love - so Good is ultimately a unity of motivation. For a Christian Love is Good and it is the single Good.  

Indeed, the purpose of Jesus making possible our resurrection to eternal life is that we may each become able to contribute, each in our unique way - from our unite nature, to the single harmony of many unique goods - to help-make a creation that is always (but always differently and changing) Good. 

But WmJas reminds me that (as we both know, from our acceptance of Joseph Smith's Mormon revelations) behind the integrated harmony of divine loving creation are Two divine beings: our Heavenly Father and Mother. 

God is a dyad, and the single harmony of creating comes from the love of our Heavenly Parents; who are therefore, two qualitatively-different kinds of being that is Good. 

In a sense Heavenly Father and Mother can each be understood (i.e. can be abstractly modelled in language) as what Wm terms Ahuric /Seeking-Good  and Devic Avoiding-evil; or active versus passive* Good - or (as I now think of them) man-good and woman-good.  

Mormon theology has it that sexual difference (male and female) is an essential characteristic of individual pre-mortal, mortal, and eternal identity and purpose. God the Father is not a self-sufficient 'monad' of Goodness. Instead - God is two kinds of Goodness. 

Instead "God" is a dyad of Heavenly parents, a man and a woman. It is their love (and love is always between Beings) that is the cause of creation: thus all creation is loving-creation. 

(I will now modify, summarize and expand on some comments from Wm Jas.) 

This implies that there are two complementary types of good. No being, no person (not even Jesus) can fully embody both. And, as Wm says, Jesus was indeed an exemplar of positive, active Good - but not so for the negative, passive* kinds of Good (which are instead represented in Catholic Christianity by the figure of Mary his mother). 

Since sexual difference is an essential pre-mortal characteristic. This difference comes before observable chromosomes, hormones, genitalia, motivations, abilities and behaviours. Sexual difference therefore reflects a fundamental division of primordial Human Beings - into promordial men, who are (insofar as they individually are Good) are orientated towards positive Good; and women who are orientated towards the avoidance of evil.

And that causal primary division of ultimate nature is usually reflected, or approximated, in the 'sexual dimorphism' of anatomy, physiology and behaviour of mortal incarnate humans. 

(...Remembering that this mortal life is individually tailored for our unique personal learning requirements - so no specific generalizations apply universally.) 

In sum: it is legitimate to state that really there are two qualitatively different kinds of Good - and that these are the two characteristic Goods of our Heavenly Parents. These are reflected in their Heavenly Children as we observe them - mortal men and women; and will be reflected in Heaven. 

That is the reality - and we can then summarize, model, and in general try to capture these reality-differences in language - but these linguistic descriptions will never be more that partial and distorted representations. 

The reality is in the distinction between the two persons of our Heavenly Father and Mother.

*Passive and negative are wrong terms - for reasons described in the comments. In truth, I think the distinctive complementary qualities of good in a man compared with a woman are irreducible; because this sexual difference of human Beings is primary (hence irreducible). 

William James Tychonievich has produced what looks like the best-ever exposition of the Luciferic, Ahrimanic, Sorathic classification of evil; of which I have made such use in recent months. 

The essay includes not just description; but also analysis of why it is and how that individuals and cultures go-through this evolutionary sequence - clarifying why civilizational evil needs to develop in this order. 

WmJas's piece is of fundamental importance to understanding and responding-to the world as we know it - but especially since 2020. 

I urge you to READ THE WHOLE THING 

This whole epoch... has, according to Rudolf Steiner, the task of recognizing and understanding evil. Before we seek to confront evil, we have to understand it... and it is no wonder that we are surrounded by evil as never before in world history. It is not right to say, as many do, that it has always been like this

TH Meyer. The Present Age magazine, 2020: 6; 3/4: 46. 

This striking passage, which I first read only a few minutes ago, is a clarifying encapsulation of something that has become very evident over the past year-plus: the triumph of evil. 

And exactly because these are such evil times, the people are deeply corrupt - so the scale and depth of evil are not evident; or, when they are, the source and are misunderstood and the causes misattributed - which only compounds the evil. 

Evil is largely invisible almost-always misunderstood because people do not understand Good; and people do not understand Good because (for the first time in history) we have a generations-deep secular society that rejects God, denies the spiritual and regards the universe as meaningless and purposeless. 

Evil has been incoherently reduced to psychology; something to do with 'suffering' (which cannot be measured but only claimed or inferred) which may then, somehow, be multiplied by the scale of people involved - except when the suffering of one or a few people or a minority is deemed to outweigh in importance that of other people or groups... 

Evil is sometimes regarded as the perpetration of specific extreme acts of violence or killing; but at other times, extreme acts of violence are excused or celebrated. Sometimes great evil is attributed to a person (or organization) on the basis of a sentence spoken, half a sentence, the use (or alleged use) of a single taboo word...

All this mainstream moral discourse is incoherent, it is meaningless - thus evil can neither be recognized nor understood. 

Yet, from a Christian perspective, it is clear that indeed 'we are surrounded by evil as never before in human history'. 

To know this we simply need to know what is Good - and then we can recognize that everything working against Good is evil. 

In particular, we need to focus on inferred motivations that underlie specific actions.

We need to ask ourselves whether this person, group, organization is on the side of God, The Good and divine creation - or against these. 

Are they on the side of the spirit, on the side of resurrected eternal life in Heaven - or against these. 

Because, as of 2021, anyone not working for the Heavenly and eternal agenda of Jesus Christ; is working for the temporary, worldly agenda of the global totalitarian government. 

Anyone not motivated by God and Good is motivated by the devil and evil. 

Having reached this point, we are in a position to 'recognize and understand' evil: the great task of this era. 

All evil is one in its ultimate motivation against God/ the Good/ creation; yet we may then recognize that evil comes in several, superficially very different, types with different priorities. 

And these different types of evil, with their different priorities, may be in conflict - may indeed hate each other (as evil is prone to do), work against each other, fight and kill each other...

All of which can make evil harder to recognize. For example, anyone fighting a particular evil in the world of 2021, is most likely to be another, different type of evil person who has different priorites. 

It is for such reasons that I have adapted some of Rudolf Steiner's ideas about Luciferic, Ahrimanic and Sorathic evil - as useful categories to describe the different priorities of evil, and to help us recognize what is going-on. 

For example; a Luciferically evil person might be in favour of sexual liberation and the removal of law - when he thinks it will help him to achieve more sex, of a more self-gratifying type, with more people of the kind he likes to have sex with. His motivation is short-termist, selfish and pleasure-motivated. 

And Ahrimanic sexual revolutionary will be keen to implement bureaucratic systems for monitoring and controlling sexual behaviour; backed by laws and corporate regulations. His idea of sexuality is mostly negative, little to do with pleasure and mainly about 'rights'. Often focused on a 'lawfare' assault on Christian morality which intends to make it illegal to promote or practice Christian sexuality - ultimately illegal even to think Christian sexuality. 

While Sorathic evil is personal like Luciferic, but negative like Ahrimanic. It is motivated primarily by spite and resentment - and wants to humiliate, torment and destroy anything that is created by God; including not just divinely-orientated forms of sexuality, but sex itself. It is this motivation which lies behind the 'trans' agenda and the mixture of confusion, inversion and lies which seek to erase men and women alike. 

This is just an example; others abound - including in the realm of 'aesthetics' where evil (in its various forms) seeks to confuse, subvert and destroy beauty - and to advocate and enforce that which is ugly, vile, repellant, misery-generating, soul-crushing, and despair-inducing.

Our task is to recognize, understand and confront evil; in all its forms. 

It is easy work to find; since evil is everywhere, and seeking us out - each and every one of us; every hour of every day; escalating week by week.

That much is unavoidable - the question is what we each will do about it...

   

Modern demonic possession is qualitatively different from that of the past. For a start it is a mass phenomenon, and enormously more common than in any previous era. And secondly possession nowadays is much less personal, far more abstract, then before...

So much so; that "Ahrimanic-demonic possession" is taken-for-granted as the attribute of a good employee, an obedient citizen; a nice and decent person with all the right opinions. 

Traditional demonic possession was an individual phenomenon. In return for greater power and/or lustful pleasure; the host sets aside his own ego and allows a demonic spirit to inhabit the space. 

In terms of responsibility; an individual refuses to take responsibility for his own choices - and hands-over his will to the demon. 

The consequence is that proud, often brave; spectacularly selfish, violent, sadistic and individualistic evil of the past; which I have termed Luciferic. 

Mass modern evil is very different; and anything-but spectacular: it is the grey evil of grey Men. 

Modern evil is detached, impersonal, cold, grey - bureaucratic. This is Ahrimanic evil. Instead of being short-termist and self-indulgent; Ahrimanic evil is characterized by pathological pseudo-altruism, self-hatred, and a suicidal despair.  

Ahrimanic possession is driven by a self that refuses to be a self; an 'ego' that refuses to take responsibility for its own freedom; and instead hands-over ultimate authority to 'the system' - that is to an abstract 'group mind' which functions by impersonal procedures and processes (such as committees and votes). 

In different words; the individual-ego submits to a group-ego*; and the negated individual passively-absorbs values from the group-ego. 

Or; Ahrimanic possession is a consequence of deliberate surrender of Being, a result of regarding oneself as an acted-upon thing, rather than an intrinsically free Being. 

Mass modern Ahrimanic demonic possession (which is so common as to be statistically-normal in the West: it is indeed the New Normal) can therefore be conceptualized as a form of group-possession.

Ahrimanic possession is when the group-ego is colonized by demons - and the individual ego merely submits to that group ego. 

So, mass modern demonic influence is at one remove and indirect; its motives abstract and procedural; which is probably why the vast and pervasive extent of modern demonic possession is so seldom recognized, so easily denied.

* For more on the group ego, see this post.

I have said, speculated, that the reason for the unique extremity and pervasiveness of evil-affiliation in these present times - especially the high prevalence and social dominance of value-inversion - is probably due to the nature of those souls being incarnated in recent generations. 

In other words, there seem to be a high number and proportion of people born who already have a tendency to reject God, and the gift of resurrection - such a tendency being part of their original makeup, and having continued in pre-mortal spirit-life. 

But why do such souls incarnate at all? 

Why allow evil-inclined souls to be incarnated; given that such souls may create and sustain the kind of world that we now inhabit: where global and national institutions and the mass media combine to be a kind-of machine for damnation...

Well, these are Not matters of predestination, because all Men have agency; any individual soul may repent and choose to join-with the side of divine creation. 

So, incarnation offers such souls a chance - and God (as creator) will engineer each life to provide experiences, learning from which may lead such souls to repentance. 

It seems that this mortal incarnate life - with its condensed consciousness providing a located-perspective on a world of constant inner and change and variation - is a better place for learning than pre-mortal spirit life. 

Indeed, I regard myself as exactly one such evil-inclined soul. 

I rejected God and became an atheist at a very early age; I think six years old - and with an eagerness and decisiveness that suggests it had 'always' been my unconscious intention to cut-loose from the solidly Christian framework within which I lived at school (although not at home). 

Without this mortal incarnate experience (if I had remained a pre-mortal spirit); I would have probably been something like a pantheistic pagan. That is, I would have rejected the opportunity to join-with God's plan to raise up Men towards divinity and a life of co-creation. 

Without this mortal experience; I would probably have 'handed back the ticket of consciousness and agency', and lapsed back towards a passive, un-personal state of mere Being: something like the ideal Nirvana of Eastern religions.  

But being incarnated, and entering-into the world as-is, also brought the hazard that my rejection of God's plan led instead to an incrementally-increasing affiliation (overall and substantial, although never whole-hearted) to the side of evil - as can be seen from many of my published writings before 2009. 

And I compounded my personal rejection of God and embrace of this-worldly evil by my writing (and teaching) - so, by the time I started to become a Christian, I was in a bad way - spiritually! 

...Not so much in terms of being a spectacular and Luciferic 'sinner' of lusts and greed - but certainly in terms of affiliation and motivations; and in my active and public support of the Ahrimanic System.  

And what of this current System of damnation, and the fact that this world is mostly ruled by evil affiliated Men who serve demonic powers? 

At an aggregate 'group level' - what is going-on from God's point of view? Why might God allow such a situation to develop and continue?

In particular; how can such an appalling general situation be of benefit to incarnated souls, many of whom are apparently - like me - disposed to reject the hopes of divine creation and the chance for eternal resurrected life? 

My best answer is the explanation of 'things coming to a point'. That Good and evil are increasingly-more separated (more polarized') and thus evil is more starkly revealed. 

Evil here-and-now is more absurd, as it becomes value-inverted, more clearly tyrannical, more obviously destructive.  

The excuses, or rationalizations, for evil have become thinner, more perfunctory, more labile and self-contradictory.

Of course, despite all this, most people still don't see through to what is really happening! 

Yet, if we accept the premise that the world is populated by especially evil-inclined souls; souls that are unusually (in historical terms) unusually hardened and fixed in their rejection of divine creation...

Then, from this point of view; we can regard the contemporary world as allowed by God because it represents extreme rescue measures; a spiritual shock designed to startle souls thrawn to evil into a sudden appalled recognition of what horrible things they are thinking, saying, believing...

 

Mortal incarnation is therefore a high risk business... 

Because it is a chance for learning: it is thereby a chance for learning evil, as well as Good. 

It is a chance for evil-inclined, God-indifferent souls to get spiritually worse, as well as to get better. 

This world we inhabit is a world planned and controlled by evil-inclined souls; so it cannot really be good of itself and overall. But, nonetheless; God has made use of the world's evil to provide an environment in which the spiritual war has been brought close to the surface; a world that serves the function of providing extreme learning conditions. 

Perhaps towards making a 'last chance' situation for even the worst of sinners; in which - for a moment - clarity is attained, and a final decision made. 

For some souls - such is apparently their only realistic possibility of avoiding their own prior-choice of damnation.