G.A. Bondarev
The Crisis of Civilization

VI. Britanno-Americanism, Latinism, Bolshevism


The Tyranny of ‘Inverted’ Dialectics

It is a widespread peculiarity among anthroposophists to admonish to a positive attitude in every life-situation. One or the other reader is therefore likely to ask: ‘You are looking at global phenomena of world events, but only show their negative sides. Why is this? Is there nothing good and creative there as well?’

We could reply that instead of a short chapter a weighty monograph ought to be devoted to each one of the problems touched on in this book. But even then the causes of today’s crisis would only become more impressively visible, an even more convincing picture of the penetration of
radical evil into the world would be drawn. Of course this is only one side of reality. And if we were asked about the other side, then the history of esoteric Christianity, of culture and of philosophy would need to be written. We would have to write about Anthroposophy and social threefolding etc., with which all these forces of evil are quite unconnected – except in a negative sense.

But here we have set ourselves a different task. Certainly no-one would think of reproaching a physician for a negative world-view because he has made a discomforting diagnosis. We expect of a diagnosis only one thing: it must be reliable so that we know what therapy is called for.


Nor will anyone today question the assertion that our civilization is seriously ill. And there will be no sense in dwelling on joyful memories. It is first of all necessary to make a thorough and exact diagnosis of the illness, so that one can then speak constructively about the healing process.


Jesuitism, Pan-Americanism (Britannicism), Bolshevism – harbour within them mighty destructive forces that are able to send the whole of civilization to the grave, rob the entire earth-development of its meaning; indeed, destroy the whole planet. Most of us think about this only abstractly. But we should become conscious of the fact that if it were really to take place, all human souls would pass over into the supersensible world. After several centuries the necessity would arise for them to incarnate again, but there would be nowhere for the incarnation to take place. A soul approaching a new incarnation cannot remain in the spiritual world; this world begins to burn it – just as a sunbather must seek shade after a while so that the benefit does not turn to harm. Something similar is true for humanity: if it were to lose the earth as the place of its incarnation, it would be condemned to indescribable suffering for millions of years, for as long as it takes for a new heavenly body to be prepared. Only a few – the great initiates – would not suffer that fate. The Apocalypse describes how, at the end of earthly time, souls who persists in evil, and are not ready to prepare for a prolonged, exclusively spiritual evolution, will suffer this tragic fate.


Modern humanism speaks merely of the possibility of a general physical death that can befall humanity. Even such a perspective helps people to learn to understand each other despite differences of faith, nationality, form of group-egoism. What is there to be said about the threat of the second death, the death of the soul?


The danger emanating from those forces which we absolutely have to learn to understand threatens also those peoples in whom they have their root. The estrangement of nations and nationalism of any shade give additional support to those forces, because through them people lose their ability to see and understand the
all-encompassing general danger. Internationalism and humanism, viewed as an abstract complex of ideas, are of no help either but increase the harm done. Such ideas are altogether falsified as soon as they are taken hold of by the representatives of the destructive forces mentioned here. We can and must come to clarity in this matter by following Goethe’s maxim, which we have allowed ourselves to change slightly:
Consider well the ‘What’,
The ‘Who’ still more (Faust II, Act 2).
Everywhere there are people who can see the world beyond their own nose. The unquestionably great English writer John Tolkien says in a letter: It is easy to invent a green sun; it is difficult to create a world in which it would be natural. But this is true only for man. For the dark, metaphysical forces of world-creation there is nothing more abhorrent than our radiant golden sun. These forces have made countless people into their servants. Consequently there is a danger that they might attain a universal, total power over humanity and lead it to a ‘green’, maybe even a black sun. Tolkien presented a similar idea, the idea of the Ring that bestows power to rule over the world, in his famous trilogy Lord of the Rings.
One (Ring) for the Dark Lord on his dark throne
In the Land of Mordor where Shadows lie.
One Ring to rule them all, one Ring to find them,
One Ring to bring them all and in the darkness bind them
In the Land of Mordor where the Shadows lie.
There are various forces that wish to assert their claim to rulership over humanity. Two of them are already traditional in a certain sense; namely Latinism and Britannicism as two diametrically opposite forms of spiritual imperialism. The origin of their antithesis lies in the distant past, in the time when the great migration of peoples began after the Atlantean catastrophe. We know from spiritual science that the most advanced – in respect of the development of the intellect, thinking consciousness – of Atlantean inhabitants, the Aryan race, turned, under the leadership of the great Initiate Manu, towards those regions that extend from the Ural Mountains to the Hindustan Peninsula. Part of this stream formed the beginning of the first post-Atlantean cultural epoch; another remained for millennia in a slumbering state in complete inactivity. At that time Siberia had a warm climate. But then came the time when the entire gigantic continent rose, the cold winds came from the North and thus nature itself brought it about that people migrated from East to West (Mar. 15, 1924, GA 353). The inner cause for the migration was spiritual pre-determination.

The migration began approximately two hundred years before the birth of Christ and continued for several centuries. The tribes pressing to the West settled in the South of Russia for some time before they moved on and became known as the East-Goths. The West-Goths settled in the region of today’s Romania and Hungary, the Saxons between Rhine and Elbe etc. Europe was peopled at that time by the Celts – the descendants of those Atlanteans who did not move further East with Manu. The newcomers pushed them in part to the West or mixed with them. From the South the Roman peoples pressed into Europe – descendants of a different migrating stream from Atlantis – and displaced the Celts. After some time a ‘mixture’ of the most varied old-Germanic tribes had established itself in Middle-Europe. From there, as though raying out to the periphery, groups of settlers were sent to the West, North-West, North and South. And, says Rudolf Steiner,
in the Lombards and the East-Goths, something went to the South that we could call: the Wotan-element, spirit and life ... and this made possible the further development, the further unfolding of this southern culture.

With the Franks the Wili-element, reason and movement, went to the West ... To the British Isles there went what found its later formation in English empiricism in physiognomy, speech, sight, hearing
(July 24, 1915, GA 162).1

In another place Rudolf Steiner calls the stream that pressed to the South from Central Europe cultic-hierarchical, the one going to the West political-diplomatic and the one moving to the North-West, mercantile. One caste moved to the South, the one with the priestly tendency, the priest-caste ... priestly in a good and in a bad sense. That which was left behind became the opposition ... The second caste moved to the West: the warrior-caste, kingly caste, royalty. Only through various anomalies of development did this caste later become republican, remarks Rudolf Steiner (Jan. 22, 1917, GA 174).

In time the Latin element triumphed over everything that had come from the center to the South. The Roman became the dominating element to a large degree in France, though not everywhere. But the impulse of Central Europe was preserved in the most noticeable way in the British Isles (cf. July 24, 1915, GA 162). At the same time occult impulses went out from three sides, making use of the priestly, the warlike and the mercantile for their group interests. Two of these forces turn towards the heritage of the third and, partly, the fourth cultural epochs. They follow again the path already trodden, so to speak; the third force on the other hand turns towards fulfilling the tasks of the fifth post-Atlantean cultural epoch (ibid.).

We need to reflect that the main task of each cultural epoch is only taken up by a small number of its representatives. The general masses only catch up in the course of development of the following epochs. The same applies to the inhabitants of the new Europe. The greater part is only now developing an individual sentient soul (the task of the Egyptian epoch) and the intellectual soul. For this it needed the above-mentioned mixture of tribes and races.

To Middle Europe fell the task of developing the phenomenon of the ‘I’ as a center, that draws into a synthesis the experience of the entire triune soul. The Italians learn to master the individual ‘I’ out of the forces of the sentient soul, the Spaniards and the French out of the forces of the intellectual soul, the Anglo-Saxons out of the consciousness-soul (cf. June 16, 1910, GA 121). In Middle-Europe ... the national element lives itself as the ‘I’. We find a certain anticipation of the future in the Slavic world, in Russia, and therefore this is the region where the ‘I’ lives itself out – although the expression is not entirely correct ... – as Spirit Self (Oct. 31, 1914, GA 157).

The task of individually elaborating the Spirit-Self is set only in the next, the Slavic-Germanic cultural epoch. The peoples of Russia therefore live in a mood of anticipation; an apocalyptic mood prevails in their midst. The fulfilment of the present task lies with the Anglo-Saxons and this gives them their character as ‘men of the world’.


The sentient soul contains in its deeper parts the eternal driving forces of human nature, those forces that pass through birth and death,
says Rudolf Steiner (Mar. 7, 1915, GA 159). This is the archetypal phenomenal nature of the ‘eternal’ city, the center of Italian culture. Much of what we find in the Russian character is grounded in the nature of the sentient soul, but differently from the Italians. Anticipating the future is only one side of our character; in their everyday life, the Russians live in the element of the sentient soul.

The intellectual or mind-soul contains half that is temporal and half that is eternal
. This determines the archetypal phenomenon of the entire Roman culture, the archetypal phenomenon of the ‘people of the Church’. The consciousness-soul, as it now is, contains mainly the orientation of man towards the temporal ... so that the British people, according to a wonderful statement by Goethe, has nothing in the nature of deep reflection, but is directed to the practical, the outer, competitive struggle for existence (ibid.).

Ideologues of the so-called ‘Eurasian’ and ‘Atlantean’ direction attempt to perceive these qualities. But since they reject spiritual science (as ideologues and non-scientists they must of necessity reject it), they do so as in a half-sleeping state. They hopelessly confuse what is evil with what is legitimate, throwing into disorder all judgments without exception – an approach that will, we may assume, bring further social chaos of a very special kind.

The leadership of humanity gave to the English people the task of evolving the consciousness-soul as it must be developed in the epoch of freedom and materialism, the epoch of the greatest ‘God-forsakenness’. Herein lies the reason why the Anglo-Saxons experience their fellow-men as competitors. But it is the consciousness-soul in particular that experiences in this way the other human beings in the physical world. This is also why the entire British philosophy, as an expression of the individual spirit, has the air of being an ‘observer’ of life. The greatest herald of the British soul was Shakespeare (cf. Oct. 31, 1914, GA 157).

The positive task carried within a nation or race is anchored in its instincts. For this reason, in the sphere of English-speaking nations the intellect, the substance of the thinking spirit, is given as instinct.
The economic impulse and the spiritually productive impulse – explains Rudolf Steiner –, stand entirely in the shadow of what comes out of the instinctive impulse that tends towards the development of the consciousness-soul (Dec. 8, 1918, GA 186). For this reason everything spiritual has to be materialized to a certain degree in these nations. Thus, too, they will incline to the firm conviction that everything mediumistic, i.e. the heritage of antiquity, derives solely from one single nation but not from the universal human nature (cf. Dec. 18, 1916, GA 173). This will give the direction for the occult strivings of the Anglo-Saxon peoples2 now and in the future.

But these Anglo-Saxon peoples differ from one another in their inner dispositions. Those who settled in North America owe their existence to the
retarded spirit of personality, who does not lead them to a development appropriate to the nature of today’s cultural epoch (cf. June 8, 1910, GA 121). This is a fact of utmost importance for understanding American geo-politics and ‘Americanism’ as a cultural phenomenon.

Rudolf Steiner characterized the American soul constitution thus:
Overall one can see in the American attitude how souls do not quite sit in their bodies. Thus they want to grasp the body from the outside, and even the study of psychology in America takes on a character in which one basically has no true concept of the ‘I’ ... This ‘I’-embodiment, as it now happens in the West (i.e. Europe), [will] not be properly developed. What appears then is, that one thought cannot be placed together with another. It is called ‘Association-psychology’. Here man becomes as it were the plaything of thoughts that associate in this way. Curiously, something appears there, which ... is often quoted in a defamatory way against us [as] the teaching of repeated earth lives: one speaks of the ‘wandering of the soul’. But in connection with repeated earth lives we may not speak of a wandering of the soul if it does not happen from a defamatory side (Dec. 14, 1920, GA 202).

Rudolf Steiner also said that the souls of people from Europe who gradually settled America were incarnated in Asia in the time before the Mystery of Golgatha. They then spent a long period in the spiritual world and did not incarnate. All of American culture with its love of material values is the creation of such souls
who now dive down into bodies where this physicality is alien to them. They are drawn down into the body with the concepts which had already been decadent in the past, and do not understand the body. They view it in a quite primitively materialistic way, and more or less pass the human being by, who has grown alien to them because they basically sought extreme abstractions in their previous earthly life. They cannot find their way into the present incarnation, but carry over from their previous earth-life all that then lives in the often sectarian religiosity that is divorced from the outer observation of nature. This goes even so far as the denial of matter by Mrs. Eddy (founder of ‘Christian Science’; Dec. 12, 1920, GA 202).

If in addition we consider that something [develops] that tends towards the absorption of Britannicism into ‘Pan-Anglo-Americanism (May 21, 1918, GA 181), and that Jesuitism and Americanism ... are two very, very related things (Aug. 18, 1918, GA 183), then a certain ‘Doppelgänger’ aspect of the dialectic law of unity and conflict of opposites will be revealed as a law of the development of the human spirit which leads to infernal sociality and thereby prevails as a law of the total destruction of civilization.

In all institutions of Society Latinism (Jesuitism) and Americanism (Freemasonry) are antipodes – an expression of the polarity of luciferic and ahrimanic forces. But both are ruled by a pronounced tendency to materialism and are furthermore united in the intention to find
an impulse through which one could put oneself in a position to lead people away from an understanding of the Christ (Aug. 19, 1918, GA 183).

Therefore we may rightfully speak of a certain ‘
inverted dialectic’ contained in the luciferic-ahrimanic opposition to Christ. In its highest aspect this dialectic leads to the creative synthesis of opposites, just as it was described with genius by Hegel and divined by Socrates. In its negative aspect Marx used dialectics for his sociology. Nowadays it is called a ‘conspiracy theory’ and is also discussed in the anthroposophical press. It is disputed whether forces exist that are striving for world-domination, or whether economic conflict or the desire for total control over the spiritual activity of people are the possible motives. We have to examine this question in its all-embracing significance.

If reality exists for us as a complicated sense-supersensible interweaving, the concept of the ‘natural’ must be regarded as synonymous with the concept of lawfulness, which is rooted in both spheres of reality. The laws of dialectics as an organic part of the totality of the laws governing world-development inevitably lose their natural character in their ‘inverted’ sense, in their reversed application. Thus that which dialectics brings, in the one case, as a revelation of the divine creative intention, is in the other case expressed by it in the usurpation of the divine goal of development, which is the nascent self-conscious, free individuality. ‘Conspiracy theory’ is therefore immanent in the falsification of the spiritual laws of development of ‘I’-consciousness. This is, as it were, its methodological foundation.

All earthly events that testify to the existence of a ‘conspiracy’ are merely a consequence of the meta-historical-cosmic-transcendental ‘conspiracy’ of the luciferic-ahrimanic forces against the divine hierarchies. The Apocalypse of St. John prophesies the future course of this battle, at whose threshold we stand today. It is something global, world-encompassing. The luciferic-ahrimanic forces falsify not only cultural-historic phenomenology; they strive also to turn the
laws of development to their own advantage. It would be helpful for man to know this so as not get burned while playing with this fire, through which we fall out of the human line of evolution and could sink directly into the sub-natural realms.

The Jesuits are active in two directions: in the dogmatizing of what man should seek for by way of knowledge and by working in science itself, in natural science.
And [the Jesuit activity] – says Rudolf Steiner – wishes for no other inner relationship than that between modern science and Americanism, between modern science and Jesuitism. Jesuitism excels in this: to do work of enormous significance in the physical sciences. The Jesuits are great spirits in the realm of physical, sense-oriented science, for Jesuitism reckons with this elemental tendency of human nature ... to fear the spiritual. And it reckons on being able to socialize this fear by telling people something like this: ‘you cannot and should not approach the spirit’. We administer the spiritual for you; we bring it to you in the right way (July 30, 1918, GA 181). How they do this we know already – through the reduction, the simplification of the human spirit, through the introduction of Terrism to which, in K. S. Mereshkovsky’s opinion, spiritualists may also confess. And this they do already in every sphere – by devoting themselves to parapsychology, suggestion, psychoanalysis, the UFO-inquiry, TV-healing, by developing further scientific-technological fantasy etc.

If on the other hand we turn from Jesuitism to Americanism, the latter proves that monotheism was victorious over polytheism because it was cheaper. (We should compare the book The Law of Civilization and of Decline by a certain Brooks Adams, to which Th. Roosevelt wrote the foreword; Rudolf Steiner referred to it on December 16, 1916; GA 173). Protestantism is stronger than Catholicism for the same reason; but atheism is even stronger than Protestant- ism, for it is cheaper than all religions (cf. GA 65, p. 678). Americanism and Jesuitism thus work inwardly into each other. Rudolf Steiner advises us not to take this in an over-simplified, superficial way.

Their immanent affinity has its roots in the entire crisis of European culture. In the threefold constellation: Montaigne, Locke, Comenius (we should recall that the latter belonged to the initiators of the impulse of Gondishapur in an earlier incarnation3) – says Rudolf Steiner – one can effectually see how the turning away from the Logos and towards the things of the senses becomes the greatest impulse in the civilization of humanity. One was afraid of the idol (Francis Bacon) in words ... And so we see with what anxiousness Montaigne, Locke, Comenius want to turn humanity away from anything supersensible, that lives in the Logos ... How they ... seek to avoid all that cannot be given through the senses, how they strive to bring as much as possible of sense-content to young people through pedagogy. We see how Comenius designs books in order not to act by way of the word, but through artificially made sense-perception ... We see how our entire civilization can no longer inwardly take up something like ‘In the beginning was the Word’, but how humanity attaches its civilization to the outer facts of the senses and how the Word, the Logos, is taken only because it has become a tradition (Aug. 9, 1923, GA 307).

Truly unlimited possibilities are offered for the failure of civilization. In our century in particular one looks for practical ways to make it fail. A new science was inaugurated in 1912, ‘eugenetics’, by means of which we allow the human race to ‘grow healthy’ through selecting, by criteria that lie between those of political economy and anthropology, men and women for the purpose of reproduction. By taking the skull measurements of rich and poor one wishes to ascertain in advance what the human being will be like, depending on the character of his work, and of his working functions (cf. Oct. 7, 1917, GA 177). These are no longer an author’s fantasies, but social Darwinism experimented with in real life, that brings baffling successes such as the clarification of organic structures.

Rudolf Steiner calls this the
noises in the brains of those who have freed themselves from the soul. We meet these people amongst the scientific elite of the Anglo-Saxon world and ... in the novel of a Russian author propagating the Jesuitic model of the ‘renewal of humanity’. And if, as is claimed, eugenic experiments were carried out under the auspices of national-socialism, there is no reason whatever to look upon them as original. Already in the epoch of old Atlantis people were occupied with similar things. At the time one tried to let various beings arise out of the union of man and woman as black-magical foolery (ibid.). It is now coming to life again, even scientifically!

The central purpose behind all this is to erect an insuperable barrier on the path to the consciousness-soul. Rudolf Steiner undertakes a comprehensive analysis of our epoch and describes in great detail how this barrier can be overcome. Those who do not want to know about it rob their life of its
true meaning because they refuse to fulfill the task for which they were born in the 20th century.

In order to fulfill the task of the century, and of the epoch, it is first necessary to master the consciousness-soul. As a personality one has to emancipate oneself from the old group-consciousness, but without simultaneously connecting oneself to a new center of group-consciousness. This process is extraordinarily complex; it requires joint human efforts, social and spiritual relationship of a special kind. The Anthroposophical Society should actually be engaged in these tasks. If, however, as Rudolf Steiner says, one were to abandon the human being to what is contained in the free impulses of culture in its onward movement, if one were to let him swim freely on the open sea of the quest for the consciousness-soul, Rome would have attained still greater power. But the human being would lose all connection with his further development. Confirmation of these words can be found at every step.

Yet this is not enough. An age-old principle is applied, which becomes effective when the progressive impulses are divested of the force of progress and the old is allowed to prevail. It had been brought from the Orient by esoterically initiated Templars, but originally with a different intention. But after the force of their striving had been weakened ... there remained what had been brought as culture from Asia ... By way of many channels ... there filtered through what the Templars had brought, but the actual spiritual content had often been removed ... This was essentially the content of the third post-Atlantean period. Catholicism brought the content of the fourth. And that which was propagated as exoteric Freemasonry, the Scottish or York-Lodges or whatever, from which the spirit had been pressed out like juice from a lemon, that which was taken hold of by the false esotericism of the English-speaking peoples, this is the pressed out lemon which therefore, after having been pressed out, contains the secrets of the third post-Atlantean, the Egyptian-Chaldean epoch, and which is now used to send impulses into the life of the consciousness-soul (Oct. 19, 1918, GA 185).


In a certain sense something similar is created
(due to the repetition of cultures: the third in the fifth, the second in the sixth; the fourth lies in the middle) to that which wants to take place in the world when the esotericism, the cults of the Egyptian-Chaldean era are carried over. But one can now use what is carried over not only to remove by suggestion the independence of the consciousness-soul, but, to subdue, to lame the central driving force of the consciousness-soul (to simplify the spirit) ...

Rome –
figuratively speaking – uses incense and puts people half to sleep through causing dreams to arise in them (ibid.). This is what is done from the one side. From the other, one proclaims the slogan: Liberty, equality, and fraternity! But what is coming from the first side works against an understanding of the whole – for an understanding is possible only through the consciousness-soul! When men awaken in the consciousness-soul, then they first of all feel themselves (today) in the body, the soul and the spirit.4 But it is exactly this that is to be put to sleep. So that we have these two streams within modern history: on the one hand one wants, now that the impulse towards the consciousness-soul is there, fraternity, liberty, equality in a chaotic way (out of the momentum of the French revolution). There is on the other hand the aim of the various Orders to extinguish the awaking in the consciousness-soul, so that a few individualities (the guild of ‘Mentors’) can use this awakening in the consciousness-soul for themselves. These two streams merge throughout the entire course of the historical life of modern times (ibid.). Through these streams the luciferic and ahrimanic spirits, who pursue to the detriment of humanity their own exceedingly far-reaching – one could even say cosmic aims –, penetrate the spiritual life of humanity. These spirits, antipodes by their nature, always appear together.

The geo-politicians of a Marxist bent try, as the expression goes, to grab the devil by the tail with the aid of the law of unity and the conflict of opposites. But the unity appears in this case as the phenomenon of penetration of
asuric spirits into civilization. The human being needs, not this unity, but the unity that can be attained through Christ, whom today we seek in vain in the Orders and Lodges (Brotherhoods). A modern author writes with reference to the ‘History of Freemasonry’ of G. J. G. Findel: the representative of English Deism, Toland, proclaimed solemnly: There is no need for a dogmatic teaching. He found support from Shubb: No! To dogmatic Christianity; Bollingbrock went a step further and concluded: There is no need for Christianity at all.

It is a peculiarity of man to be incapable of moderation. Because of this failing many noble works have been destroyed. Anthroposophists would do well to impress upon themselves this experience. For in our circles too there are some (people of the older generation) who ever more frequently repeat the statements of Rudolf Steiner concerning Christianity in an abstract, indifferent and hypocritical way. While others say: ‘Leave this theme alone, it only offends people of other beliefs, we subscribe to the principle of tolerance towards all confessions’. The younger generation (not that of the Moslems – of course) proclaims, or increasingly lives by, the principle: There is no need for Christianity at all.


The New Impulse of Gondishapur


We are approaching the year 1998, where the number of the ahrimanic rhythm – 666 – will be repeated for the third time. In the period of time around his ‘jubilees’ Ahriman intensifies his striving to anticipate future developments, and prevent their occurrence at the right time. In the surrounding world active preparation is taking place for
the second impulse of the Academy of Gondishapur; this time almost on the scale of mankind as a whole. Everywhere the plea for the emancipation of the personality can be heard, for the most extreme individualism to the point of narcissism (Jacques Attali), gentle lawlessness, for the complete intermixing of races, nations and genders. This process has moved forward with especial vigour since the French Revolution. At first the balance tipped quite strongly to the side of Lucifer. Thus everything took place in a stormy way, in crass contradiction to every human rhythm. This called forth a counter-attack by the ahrimanic forces, with the scale inclining strongly to the right. Napoleon appeared – a body in which, as Rudolf Steiner remarks, everything was subject to a strict rhythm. The power that is the enemy of mankind works within a rigid seven-year rhythm in such a body: the preparation for the ascent to power lasted seven years, likewise the triumph and the destruction of Europe; and a further seven years of decline (ibid.).

The result of this confrontation of luciferic and ahrimanic forces was their mutual extinction. Europe had once more the opportunity to develop the impulse of the consciousness-soul, an impulse that leads to the freeing of the personality and the overcoming of national barriers. But it does this exclusively on the basis of the
elevation of the personality, not through the instigation of chaos and lawlessness. Therefore it is futile to look for anything positive in the French Revolution or the reign of Napoleon. But no conclusions have been drawn, nor has the most important fact been recognized, namely, that these two forces of evil extinguished each other and that the path was thereby freed for normal evolution. It was not long before the consequences of this failure materialized.

Already in the middle of the 19th century the impulse for the consciousness-soul development of humanity was again extinguished. It lost its autonomy because [of] the opposing stream ... of the Orders that, especially in England, infect all of public life to an appalling extent, much more than the outer world can imagine. Because of these Orders the unfolding of the free personality cannot progress. And thus we see remarkable personalities appear, like Richard Cobden or John Bright.5 On one hand they are true bearers of the impulse for the emancipation of the personality, the overcoming of what is national through the personality over the whole earth. They came so far that they touched upon something that could be of tremendous significance politically if it would dare to enter modern historical development, but differentiated geographically ... But hardly had it appeared than it was completely stifled by the other striving that arose out of the impulse of the third post-Atlantean time. And we see how up to the middle of the 19 th century there arises in the West what is usually called liberalism, the liberal attitude – soon it will be called free thinking –, well, whichever one prefers ... and (which) died out in the last third of the 19th century (ibid.).

For a certain time the impulse of the consciousness-soul brought forth a wave of liberalism whose representatives
let themselves be influenced by no-one, and had good control of themselves. But from the middle of the 19th century the fruit of what came out of the Orders and secret societies of the West increasingly showed itself: the putting to sleep, the lulling to sleep of the consciousness-soul as such. Then all that is of soul and spirit is no longer active; only what is present in the outer, physical sense world is active. And this appeared in recent times ... in all the possible forms of the socialism that is conscious of itself (ibid.).
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The exercise of power in an ahrimanic form hindered and lamed the development of the consciousness-soul in a large number of socialistically-oriented countries. In the rest of the world the impulse of the consciousness-soul was stifled in the chaos of immorality, of ‘everything is allowed’, of participation of
the masses in a form of pseudo-art that acts as a substitute for the fury that in other instances can discharge itself in revolutions. The personality is emancipated because the present time demands it and at the same time it is everywhere weakened, only to be hardened in the next moment in an even more rigidly ahrimanized social structure. The next step on this path will be to disconnect people from the leadership of the folk-spirits, the archangeloi, through a mixing of the nations and races, through abolition of a differentiated approach to the question of emancipation. Marxists practised this throughout the earth – in Russia, China, Ethiopia, Cuba, Vietnam – where they introduced a unified form of socialism. Under the pretence of liberating the personality they in truth subjected it to a form of unified slavery. Today this method appears to have fulfilled its purpose. In its place another is used to create globally and on a unified basis the semblance of the emancipated personality, where in reality emancipated cripples of soul and spirit already now appear. But this means that the new impulse of Gondishapur allows the so-called evil race to arise in humanity before its time. This race is supposed to appear only in the distant future. They would be people who consciously reject the principle of the emancipation that takes place with the help of the Christ-power. They would develop an extreme egocentricity leading to the ‘war of each against all’. In that race all that is national would also have been overcome, but in a different way than in the ‘good race’, which would then bear the name ‘Michaelic’ (after the archangel Michael). Human beings would be led to this race by the folk-spirits, by way of the cultural process. And on this path Social Threefolding should become the form of the life of society in our time.


Three Papacies


We, the people of the epoch of consciousness-soul, should understand how fundamental are the changes undergone by the soul and spiritual nature of man, and with it all factors of civilization, in the transition from the fourth to the fifth cultural epoch. We need to know that the fourth post-Atlantean epoch, which encompassed Greece, Rome etc. and lasted until the beginning of the 15
th century, elaborated in an entirely human way that which had previously been spiritual revelation. In the fifth epoch man began, to a still greater degree, to live entirely for the physical without developing new concepts, but by using what had lain at his disposal in the fourth epoch. Learning how to master the physical plane is, however, a legitimate task of our epoch and the Anglo-Saxon race is best equipped to fulfill it.

But the Catholic Church rejects the forces of revelation of antiquity, the old clairvoyance, for entirely different reasons. As we have already pointed out, it is led by fear of the supersensible. Already in the 9
th/10th century the universal Church makes its entrance into the entire configuration of Europe through the battle it waged everywhere against the clairvoyance of antiquity, which had its rightful place until the beginning of the 15th century. When the Christian-Rosicrucian mysteries arose in Europe, which were in part described in the legends of the Holy Grail, they were in no way opposed to the mysteries of antiquity but were their continuation. This was the esoteric path of Christianity, which could be followed only by those who were sufficiently prepared spiritually. In this most genuine Christianity Catholicism recognized its enemy.

We can see, says Rudolf Steiner in this connection, that
where worldly power and the power of the Church enter into a compromise ... we speak of Princes and Popes ... leading the battle against the heretics. Just think of the Waldensians ... the Cathars; there are such heretical elements everywhere ... The remarkable thing is that from amongst the heretics people gradually came forward, who looked at Christianity from out of themselves and could recognize that what comes from Rome is something different from Christianity ... [They were] actually fiercely-persecuted Christians, who often remained quiet, founded all kinds of communities, spread a veil of secrecy over this (Jan. 17, 1918, GA 180).

Having degenerated to a purely political force, Rome had to look for means to instill enthusiasm into the masses artificially. The crusades were one of these means, but the ‘heretics’ took part in them as well. One of them was Godfrey de Bouillon.
And for them the aim was initially a Christian one: with the help of the crusades, by founding in Jerusalem a new (spiritual) center against Rome, they wanted to put a true Christianity in the place of the Christianity of Rome ... And the secret motto of the Crusaders was: Jerusalem versus Rome. This attempt failed when the Papacy proved to be too powerful. But the Crusaders found the opportunity to widen their horizon; they were able to continue to work secretly, to found Orders and alliances. Actually at that time the difference developed which today can only be met when one is visiting a church in Italy, and in there someone has preached a sermon against the Freemasons shortly before (ibid.). The Reformation also fights this battle with Rome.

With the struggle against the heretics and the disappearance of the last remaining elements of legitimacy from Roman Catholicism, the intention grew to extend its domination over the whole of Europe. The ideology developed by Catholicism in the fifth cultural epoch was brilliantly formulated by Count de Maistre (1754-1821). This Jesuit philosopher considered man to be a fallen creature. With the beginning of the epoch of materialism, so he reasoned, the whole of civilization has also fallen into decline. Humanity divides into two categories: those who are representatives of the Kingdom of God and those who represent the earthly realm. The people of the first category believe in the age-old truths that have lost their place in civilization since the 15
th century. These people are predestined (and St. Augustinus had spoken of this) for salvation. The people of the earthly plane, already given over to superstition in antiquity, turn away from faith entirely today. Their fate will be damnation. All people appear mixed together – but the eye of the spiritual world distinguishes strictly between sheep and goats (de Maistre does not use these concepts). This opinion of the French Jesuit is also shared in many aspects by the world-view of the Eastern Church. And in recent years it can be heard increasingly from Islamic fundamentalism and the ‘New Right’ in Western Europe, and also in Russia where it is made into the basis for a new ideology and geopolitical theory. Microsoft Word - Crisis A5 18-12-09.doc

De Maistre developed grandiose ideas with regards to Russia. He dreamed of uniting the Eastern way of thinking, which extends into Russia, with Rome. And it seems as though today the time has come in which de Maistre’s ideas are the blueprint for a new movement that intends to lead Islam, the Eastern Church and Catholicism to synthesis in a unified Eurasian bloc and place it over against the decaying world of Pan-Americanism. This movement upholds tradition and the imperial form of organizing society, as a counterweight to the process of Western emancipation that destroys the personality.

The ‘New Right’ supports the restoration of the Middle Ages, when the principle of statehood still possessed something of the sacred. In 1810 in Petersburg de Maistre wrote the book
Essay on the Creative Archetypal Ground of the State Constitution, in which he basically turns to the Christianity of the epoch before scholasticism, to Augustinianism, for de Maistre is an opponent of Aristotle; he would like to banish him from culture altogether, despite the fact that the Church Father Thomas Aquinas was one of the most fervent pupils of Aristotle.

In another work, entitled
Concerning the Pope, of which Rudolf Steiner said that it stirs the heart as only spiritually-inspired books can do, de Maistre attempts to present the Pope as the rightful Prince of modern civilization; in other words, as the Prince of this world! The Popes and the Papacy, he writes, are not one and the same thing. In the Papacy there is in a certain way the incorporation of what, as the spirit of the earth, is to take over the rulership of the whole planet.

When we familiarize ourselves with these things in the face of all that takes place behind the scenes of outer events in our century, we find astounding interweavings of seemingly incompatible things. Two books recently appeared in Russia by a certain Gregory Klimov (hardly known to the wider circle of readers, but all the more so by Western Sovietologists).6 The then officer of the NKVD7 fled to the West in the late ’Forties and worked for many years in an American institute that carried out research into the Soviet Union. He has now reported for the first time on the ‘Red Pope’, the mightiest ‘Prince of this world’ existing in the very heart of Bolshevism!

De Maistre’s final work is called
Evening Hours in St. Petersburg. After recapitulating the above-mentioned ideas, he dedicates the book to the radical struggle against Britannicism, and sides with Roman Catholicism. This time he turns against John Locke in particular. Disciples of de Maistre today have shifted his struggle into the sphere of a not merely spiritual but also political resistance against Anglo-Americanism. Sometimes centuries lie between the ideological ‘seed’ and its ‘shoots’.

Rudolf Steiner characterizes de Maistre’s view of life as follows: de Maistre basically saw the Godhead present in the development of man only into the fourth post-Christian century. He did not want to confess to the continually active Christ ... he wanted to return to olden times and thus the idea he had of Christ took on something of the old Jahve quality, something of the old heathen Gods; he basically went back to the Ormuzd cult. There, of course, the divine was sought outside the consciousness-soul. De Maistre said that the Gods had a loathing of blood, and if people were to sacrifice it they would be able to be reconciled with the Gods. This might appear ridiculous, concludes Rudolf Steiner, but we should not forget that de Maistre has a great many followers in the Roman Church, that he is an illustrious representative of the French element that revealed itself in the clergy and in politics (May 1, 1921, GA 204). Today we have to add that the ‘illustriousness’ of the famous Frenchman has blinded the ‘New Right’ in Russia. This ‘brightness’ helps us to explain and understand their truly dark call for the spiritual values of the Orthodox faith, behind which the nostalgic longing for the heathen, pre-Christian past of the Slavs is habitually exposed. And does not de Maistre’s Zoroastrianism possibly explain the attempt to build a bridge between Christianity and Islam?

Of course, in our time all relationships are reduced to the political struggle, in which all means are permitted. But de Maistre was an outstanding thinker. The spiritual succession is unmistakable, however, and it is of the greatest importance that we are dealing here with one and the same basic fact: the shadow of the old Roman Empire that has taken Christianity captive. But Christianity is full of life-forces and that is why Rome, acting in its name, is able to give political and spiritual form not only to Europe but even to all world-wide connections.

In Spain, says Rudolf Steiner, this is visible in the cult borrowed from the Egypto-Chaldean epoch. It is the cultic-hierarchical-ecclesiastic element into which Romanism was transformed. It becomes apparent that what gradually ripens in modern times as a state structure is more or less permeated by this Roman Catholicism. We see how the emerging English state structure at the beginning of the fifth post-Atlantean period is, to begin with, in the hands ... of this Roman-hierarchic-cultic element ... There exists in Rome the aim to saturate, to completely permeate the culture of Europe, right up to the bulwark that it created for itself in Eastern Europe, with this hierarchical Church element.8 – But remarkably enough, such a striving, when it is a retarded impulse, takes on an outward character ... It flows, so to speak, into the widths and does not have the strength to penetrate its own depths ... we see, that ... Roman hierarchism ... in the countries from which it rays out, undermines its own population, it provides no inwardness (Jan. 15, 1917, GA 174).


To make this clear Rudolf Steiner suggests that one should study the example of France; looking particularly into the way the statesmen – Richelieu, Mazarin – ceremoniously inaugurated world-politics while the inner hollowness is revealed in the revolutionary uprising of the people – the exact opposite of the principle of hierarchic rulership, of the kingdom.


From the vantage-point of the experience of the 20
th century as it approaches its close it may be added that through its revolutionary upheavals the cultic-hierarchic principle of Romanism comes to life again in Bolshevik dictatorships. Though one is there forced to forsake Christianity entirely and turn instead to the ‘religion’ of atheism. But this should come as no surprise when we consider that the whole process boils down to no more and no less than the principle of ruling the masses with the aim of preventing the unfolding of the epoch of the consciousness-soul. For this reason the Roman-Jesuitic principle, in whatever form it appears in the world, will always proclaim the precedence of the group over what is individual. By this criterion one will be able to recognize it behind any mask.

This principle that is actually luciferic in nature is everywhere opposed by the ahrimanic nature rooted in Pan-Anglo-Americanism. It is the intention of the latter
to prolong the present moment, to eternalize the epoch of the conscious- ness-soul in its material-instinctual aspect. Ahriman cannot fulfil this task alone. He needs the support of the retarded, ahrimanically retarded (the American folk-spirit is luciferically retarded) spirits of personality, i.e. the Asuras. This is a special problem that has still to be addressed. Suffice it to remark here that the ‘socialistic experiment’ in Russia is the child of thoroughly abhorrent parents – ahrimanized Britannicism and luciferized Jesuitism. It has become, next to them, the third force in the world, and yet is their fruit. Hence its double nature – on the one hand, constant dependence on the ‘parents’ and, on the other, the longing to devour them. This is in its innermost nature an asuric phenomenon. To understand it we have to be able to lift the veil from politics and ideology. This phenomenon can lead a parasitic existence in any ethnic group, not only the Slavs.

But let us return to the Anglo-Saxon world. The impulse of Britannicism as such contains much that accords with the tasks of the fifth cultural epoch.
Hence the pretension of the British element towards (different) universal- commercial-industrial world domination ... No-one should believe that British politics will be converted morally and, out of special consideration for the world, renounce its pretension to take the world completely into its hands industrially and commercially. For this reason we need not be astonished to find that those who see through these things have formed associations for the sole purpose of realizing something of this kind, and realizing it by employing means that are at the same time spiritual means. Here we have the beginnings of a forbidden interaction. For occult principles, occult means, occult impulses may obviously not be used to further, to promote, especially not in the fifth post-Atlantean culture, which has to be a purely material culture ... One wants to further this culture (but not politics) with the help of the impulses of occultism, of the impulses that lie in the world of the non-manifest.

Thus one works with occult means, no longer for the benefit of general humanity, but only for the benefit of a group
(ibid.). Rudolf Steiner advises in conclusion: When you connect such insights, which arise for you out of deeper knowledge, with everyday events, you will come to a thorough grasp of many things (ibid.).

We will then understand that everything with which our times are plagued has arisen and ripened through the course of centuries – ripened as great world-opposites that set development in motion. It can also bring it to its grave if people thoughtlessly and without will give themselves over to religious or political fancies which are so tightly interwoven with one another and form unthinkable symbioses that are inwardly torn apart by century-old polarities.


Rudolf Steiner elaborates that already in France the impulses of liberty, equality and fraternity collide violently with the pretension of Roman Catholicism.
9 We should pay attention to the reaction of the clerics during the social experiments of Gambetta, to what lives in Napoleon III, in Boulangism10, in the struggle over the personality of Dreyfus and what lives on in our own time (in the ‘New Right’ – Author’s note). There lives here what is in inner, spiritual, archetypal- radical contrast to what is across the Channel and is basically incorporated in what is left behind from something else, what has remained behind in the various Freemasons’ Orders, Lodges. If, on the one hand, we have initiated Roman Catholicism, then on the other we have those secret societal streams ... that represent the ahrimanic stream. Rudolf Steiner advises us to compare the parliaments in France and England. In France everything arises out of theory, a certain ideology (this was also the case in Russia under the Bolsheviks and the same emerges from the ‘New Right’ – a large-scale theory of geo-politics). In England it is based on the immediate practical relations of trade and industry (Russia’s present liberals try unsuccessfully to copy Anglo-American capitalism, they will never master it). In France one fights for freedom etc., for the independence of schools from the Church, for a general restraining of the Church. (In the same way one could also fight for the mutual adaptation of Church and State.) But the restraining is unsuccessful because all this lives in the unconscious depths of the souls but is fought out in the realm of dialectics, in a certain debate. In England, on the other hand, the question of power is decisive (May 1, 1921, GA 204).

How far does this will to power extend? Rudolf Steiner has the following impressive answer: at the beginning of the 15
th century there was a danger that the exclusively physical strivings of Britannicism might mix with the spiritual life handed down from antiquity. This happened at the time when the English sphere of rulership extended across the Channel to include a part of France, while Roman aristocratism advanced towards England. But the rise of Joan of Arc decided Europe’s destiny.


The occult life of Britain, which was no more than a continuation of the occult streams of the fourth cultural epoch, was formed as a result of these processes, which also found their reflection in the War of the Red and White Roses, in the battles of the Scottish, the Norman and the French.


The occult schools of England were founded, but their members were not able to advance to supersensible cognition, since the ether-body of modern man has become very inert.
But they preserved the old traditions in the occult schools; they preserved what had been handed down by the old clairvoyant observers and sought to penetrate it with concepts. An occult science arose that in reality only works with the experiences of the clairvoyants living in the fourth and even the third post-Atlantean epochs. But ... one worked this through with purely physical concepts, with the conceptual material that one has if one thinks only through the physical body (Mar. 28, 1916, GA 167). (This is the work with the symbols that is carried out in the Lodges.)


The following dogma was fixed in these schools: The fourth cultural epoch, in which the Greco-Roman element was dominant, was succeeded by the fifth cultural epoch in which the Anglo-Saxon element prevails. The role of Britain was described as being that of a nurse to the child-like Slavic nations. Poland, it was said, has to join the sphere of the Russian element; the independent Slavic nations along the Danube will exist only until the great European war and will then have to forfeit their independence etc.

Similar ideas spread through the occult brotherhoods in other countries. And in those days it was understood why an English politician for example publicly expressed his good-will towards a Danubian state that belonged to Austria. At the same time a book was published that contained a string of insults directed against that same state and its citizens in order to undermine what was seemingly built up on the other side.
11 This was a devilish, a purely ahrimanic tactic (ibid.).

All these methods have been kept alive to the present day. We find them in the period of the Cold War as well as the era of ‘Perestroika’. Only they are no longer hidden, they are completely open. What could this mean? We will now try to answer this question.

There are in civilization two Papacies who oppose each other in the starkest antitheses: the Roman (old, ‘white’) and the British-American (new, ‘black’). And above it all there arises as a terrifying spectre the ‘red Papacy’ – mysterious, unrecognized. Three deputies of certain ‘Divinities’ – ahrimanic, luciferic and asuric – threaten to settle scores with the entire planet earth. Those who do not wish to know them will not be able to resist them; they will become their slave or servant and it may mean the second death, the death of soul for them.



Notes

 1 Yet another impulse came from the North Germanic nations which, when it reached Russia, effected the creation of a form of statehood.

 
2 Hence the attempts of ‘Eurasians’ to ascribe this occultism to themselves, Romans or even the German-speaking world seem paradoxical.
 

3
Some Waldorf pedagogues are now busy rediscovering the ‘treasures’ of his educational wisdom. The system of Comenius served as a basis for Russian pedagogy to develop, out of it, its method. We all learned at school: A- apple, B- bee etc. 

4 The Catholic Church rejects this trichotomy.
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5
R. Cobden (1804-65), leader of the Manchester Movement (extreme liberalism in economy: free trade, competition without state interference in the economy), chairman of a party that demanded the abolition of the bread-grain taxes. J. Bright (1811-99), English statesman. After 1843 leader of the Manchester Movement.


 6
The situation is changing now; the books by Klimov are published in editions of hundreds of thousands (Publisher’s Note; 1994).

 7
NKVD – Russ. Abbreviation for People’s Commissioner of the Internal; Soviet political secret police 1934-1946 (Publisher’s Note).

8 For the first time in the history of Catholicism a change comes about in this question. It is as if the ‘bulwark’ is removed. This is accompanied by the most fantastic trans- formations of Jesuitism. Which is why it is so extraordinarily important to understand the current events in Russia. But who is capable of this? Who indeed tries at all to do so?

9 This is also the case in all other revolutions.

10 Léon Gambetta (1883-1882), Prime Minister of France, leader of the left-wing republicans; turned against clerics and monarchists.

Napoleon III. (1808-1873) was elected President, later Imperator; the Crimea war and the war against Austria fell during his reign.

Boulangism – movement of the ’80’s of the 19
th Century; it was led by General Georges Boulanger. This movement was nationalistic and was in favour of war against Germany, a revision of the constitution and dissolution of the parliament. An echo of this point of view can be detected in de Gaulle’s politics.

11
In this connection we would advise Germans to consider the compliments paid by US-President Clinton in Berlin in 1994, when he declared Germany a major power. Most dangerous, terrible omens lurk behind it. Behind the scenes of world politics it has possibly been decided to assign Germany the role of a European or World scoundrel. In this case the Germans would be condemned instead of the Yankees, which is especially dangerous because Germany has no influence whatsoever on world ideology, which still remains in the hands of the USA.