IV. The ‘Ur’-Phenomenon of Modern Politics

We turn now to a closer consideration of what we call the global centres of occult political power. Conspiracy theory tries to engage with the subject, but does so in a very superficial and therefore one-sided way. But even that makes those powers nervous. Conspiracy theorists are ridiculed everywhere and they are accused of suffering from persecution mania. But this is the same as when the Cretan(s) said: “All Cretan(s) are liars.” (You have persecution mania, the persecutor says to the persecuted. And we can ask: Is he telling the truth or is he lying?)

For our own part we would say that present-day conspiracy theory does not hold water, not because there is no conspiracy, but because its “theory” has not yet been created. The phenomena only obtain a theory when the ideal archetype has been found – the primal image, the primary phenomenon, the source from which they have sprung, which lies at the boundary between the sensible and supersensible world. The attempts made today to produce this theory are based above all on materialism. Their explanations therefore normally boil down to a conspiracy of financial-political evildoers who strive for wealth and power.

However there are exceptions. We found one in the Moscow newspaper ‘Zavtra’ (No. 22, May 2013), where a conspiracy researcher is saying, like ourselves, that the weakness of the methodological concepts of conspirologists is that “nearly all known ‘conspiracy theories’ are limited exclusively to the plane ‘this side’ of the world of being...” But it is interesting to note in what direction the author leads the problem (we will not give the name, because the article was probably undersigned with a pseudonym). He blames “positivism” and the “mystical occult” understanding of the problem as the reasons why the research on conspirology is held fast on this side of existence. “Both standpoints,” he says, “trace conspiracy and its agents back to the plane of being that is exclusively ‘this-worldly’ ...” And if one is to be able to keep these things on the other-worldly level, one should please turn to dogmatic theology. This speaks of “two mysteries: the ‘mystery of godliness’ (1. Tim. 3,16) and the ‘mystery of iniquity’ (2. Thess. 2,7), which stand in confrontation from the beginning to the end of time. Mystery versus mystery. Conspiracy versus conspiracy. Rebellion versus rebellion (here the author quotes M. Voloshin) ... The awakening to such a ‘metaphysical background of conspiracy theories’ changes them from the ‘fantastic allegories of an excessively fertile power of imagination’ and from ‘persecution mania in the heads of politicians’ etc. into something real ‘that is able to a high degree to carry destiny ! ... Almost all conspirology is an ‘irrational-rational’ transference of Christian ‘providentialism’ (the theory of providence, of God’s intervention) from the language of theology and demonology into that of ‘policing theory and historical science.’ ‘Conspiracy theory’ and its ‘ubiquitous’ adherents practise a peculiar secular paraphrasing of the Christian doctrine of the providence of God, who guides history...”

We have allowed ourselves this long quote because, expressed in it in concentrated form is the ideology, and even its credo, which could indeed prove to be ‘destiny-bearing’ for Russia’s future. This will be discussed in the final essay, but here we will mention only the chief characteristic of the stylistic form of expression of this ideology. It is built up of elements of genuine knowledge and elements of lies and subtle insinuations, densely entwined together into an intoxicating whole, which overpowers the consciousness. (This ideological tendency can do this extremely well.) To ‘unmix’ the whole text and put everything in its right place would require the writing of a special article. And so we leave this as a kind of homework for our possible readers and stay with the main point. Everything here is reduced to the Biblical story of the temptation of paradisal man by Lucifer. Yielding to him, man ate of the fruit of the “Tree of knowledge” and, as a consequence, was driven out of Paradise. Orthodox theologians believe that this has cast him into the ‘mystery of iniquity’, meaning that he was driven out onto the earth where he wanders around aimlessly and creates sciences, cultures and other useless things. But all that is needed is that we become conscious of sin and repent of it, then God will forgive us and lift us up into Paradise. The decisive thing here, is that we renounce knowledge which “makes us proud” and leads us into temptation. This is the “mystery of godliness” and it is one of the most important dogmas of Church doctrine. All that remains for us now is the experience of the startling agreement with the Orwellian “ignorance – is power”.

A “mystical-occult” view of conspirology is, as Satanism, subject in this ideology to excommunication. According to such an ideology, no-one should ever know what Christian Providence, God’s guidance etc. really is. That is to say, no one should dare to learn of the true meaning and purpose of man’s descent into material existence. And to speak about political science in the terminology of Orthodox theology – is simply absurd. If theology is connected with political science, then all that arises is a further dogma which, like all the others, has to be followed without thinking. Or in a nutshell: dogmatic political science!

A metaphysical background of this kind cannot in the slightest degree lead conspirology out of this worldly plane, simply because theology in any confession is no more than an abstract play with thoughts; it cannot convey knowledge of the supersensible, with whatever dogmas it is operating, and still less provide insight into the social and political realities of the present time. Of course it can encompass them with dogmas of some kind. And one already exists. Namely: all occultism is Satanism. And no distinction needs to be made here, no clarity is to be sought! It is the “mystery of iniquity”. They must fight against occultism until the end of time, and not try to gain an understanding of what it is. Dogma is – the opponent of knowledge, although invented by mere mortals who, themselves, reflect and gain insight in order to be able successfully to “guard the flock”. Such is the political policy of the Church, and particularly its policy in relation to the world at large.

So here we have such a theory of conspirology. Through declaring occult, spiritual knowledge a “mystery of iniquity”, in everything else it leaves us only with the “mystery of godliness”, which commands us to remain forever on the childhood level of understanding. But in the Gospel it says: “Be not as children in your understanding.” The greater will their triumph be, the more strictly all spiritual knowledge is forbidden, and then eliminated with fire and the sword.

Such “limits to knowledge” cannot be accepted by any more or less self-aware human being, and still less by one who has taken hold of spiritual science to this or that degree. Its representatives know with absolute certainty, and do not merely believe, that in the beginning was the Word, and not a conspiracy, as Parvulescu said to show off his keen intelligence. The Word was creative and revealed itself for the sake of a new creation. In it there was no “mystery of iniquity”. Through its revelation it also brought to manifestation the laws of its creation. And implicit in these laws themselves was the distancing of the creation from its Creator so that in it – we repeat – the free will might be born.

Rudolf Steiner explains – as we have already mentioned – very simply why God creates new beings. He does so because he is good. He wishes to share his joy in being also with creatures who do not yet exist. But this joy can really be shared only by beings who have acquired an ‘I’ of their own. And the higher, more spiritual the ‘I’, the nearer it ascends to the Divine ‘I’, and the truer and stronger becomes the joy of being. This is the “mystery of godliness”, and those who wrote the Bible understood it.

But one cannot be master of one’s own ‘I’ if one remains ‘forever’ a ‘child of God’. It was therefore the will of God himself that his creation should distance itself from him and, for a while, even stand in opposition to him, in order then to return to him in freedom. Then arises the shared joy of God and man. This will be all the greater, the more of the unavoidable evil that has arisen through the necessity of the attainment of freedom and individually engendered love, the human being transforms into good. Thus iniquity (or lawlessness) is a mystery of evolution: the law of the creation of the new. When the laws of one stage of evolution are annulled, the created form collapses into chaos, and out of the nothingness of the chaos arises a new, more perfect form. If we understand this, we will also be able to understand the relativity of evil, in whichever of its frightful forms it may appear. It must not oppress the human being. Evil has the task of spurring man on to metamorphose the finished and therefore scleroticized forms of being. (This is described at length and impressively in the Apocalypse of St. John.) Man’s refusal to metamorphose being heightens the effectiveness of evil. Its extent is thus determined by the human being himself.

The forces of evil follow the laws of development, and laws are characterized by universalism. Evil is personified by supersensible beings, and it is their constant striving to extend their mode of action throughout the universe. Therefore, in direct confrontation they cannot be overcome, one can only metamorphose them. It is necessary to transform evil into good – that is man’s task. For this reason it is necessary to get to know evil, above all on an occult and mystical level, because its origin is supersensible and its primal source remains forever in the supersensible world.

One should not enter into compromises with evil. They are completely pointless, and the resistance offered by evil should only strengthen the power of love in the human being. If a person hopes to defeat evil by means of evil, then he runs the risk, in the end, of suffering a second death, the death of the soul. (This applies particularly to the purely militant priesthood.)

***

Evil conquers the human being by putting itself in him, to this or that degree, in the place of the “image of God”. And the human being needs to understand what this means, he must practise self-knowledge.

In his etheric, life-body, he has the form of a pentagram (Fig. 10). The stream of cosmic forces pours into the human form and permeates it, entering through the head, passing from there to the right leg, then to the left arm, the right arm, the left leg and then moves all around, enclosing the pentagram in the circle. Active in this stream are the forces of the planets, and for this reason the pentagram with the human being enclosed within it is called a microcosm, that is, a small reflection of the great planetary cosmos. How well the etheric flows through the pentagram and how well the life and form of the human being come to a unity, depends upon a number of attributes: his ability to think and act in a consistent and logical fashion, to be positive and free of prejudice, plus other qualities.

Man at the beginning of the earthly aeon, Adam Kadmon, had the appearance of a pentagram. Thus he was in Paradise, in the spiritual earth. But in order to set his foot on the material earth, he had to turn the structure of his head away from the highest spirit and direct it downwards to the middle point of the earth. That is to say, the pentagram of his being had to tip over. This was the expulsion from Paradise. Man turned away from the spiritual forces that guide him from above, and could therefore remain no longer in their higher sphere, in Paradise. He was persuaded to take this step in order, through participation in the evolution of the earth, to become an individuality, to taste of the fruit of the “Tree of knowledge” and then to attain once more to the “Tree of life”, that is, to bring life again into his thinking consciousness.

Passing, in the course of earth evolution, through the evolution of species, the human being has in his physical body raised his head upwards again – he overcame “original sin”. But in soul and spirit, man is not yet fully upright. This uprightness depends upon mastery of the forces of the ‘I’. Only in the higher ‘I’ does man become a fully upright, spiritually upright being. That is why the forces that are inimical to him try in every possible way to prevent him from achieving this. For them, “lack of knowledge, ignorance is – power”, the ignorance of the general masses, of course.

As we know, Lucifer, using the seductive power of the urge for knowledge, tempted the human being in Paradise. This resulted in man’s descent into matter, and this led in its turn to the attainment of individual thinking in the ‘I’. But with the gaining of ‘I’-consciousness the human being can now turn to spiritual knowledge and, with the help of this, begin the journey of his return to God. Those for whom evil exists “from the beginning to the end of time” remain caught up in the moment of the Luciferic temptation. They deny development. And this is why in Orwell’s Oceania all progress is brought to a standstill. All these connection are entirely real.

Whoever insists on the unchangeability of the Luciferic temptation, leaves the pentagram of man standing on its apex. This pentagram (standing on its apex) became in the end the symbol of all three powers of opposition mentioned above. It is their aim to eternalize man’s Fall into sin, and lead him onto paths of evolution that are harmful to him. To this end, the human being is made the target of dark, magical influences. The battle of white and black magic revolves around the pentagram. “This is a symbol,” says Rudolf Steiner, “of the occult script, the symbol of man; there is nothing arbitrary or contrived about this symbol; it has been read out of the cosmos...”

“With the apex pointing upwards it is the sign of white magic; it expresses the development within oneself of the sun-forces. With the apex pointing downwards it is the sign of black magic and expresses the influence of the negative earth-forces. The black magician concentrates his will on the person he wishes to influence and in this way awakens in him mental images of a particular kind” (GA 266-1, 22.10.1906).

“Black magic by means of the apex draws towards it the lower, negative forces of the earth and, through the two horns above, the black magician sends by means of his evil will these bad influences out into the surroundings in order egoistically to make use of the forces of nature and of the soul for his egoistically negative purposes” (GA 266-1, 1.12.1906).

And Rudolf Steiner explains still further: “Instead of starting from the head, the black magician guides the streams from the foot into the body and achieves thereby a quite different effect, in that the lower forces then stream into the human being. The white magician will therefore never start from anywhere but the head...” (ibid. 14.11.1906).

That is the principle of the black magic of the “Ingsoc” priests, as expressed by George Orwell in the image of a boot stamping into a person’s face to eliminate his individuality, make him into a group-being, and hurl him into the bottomless depths of the hell of the eternal Fall into sin.

Many descriptions of the way evil of this kind operates in real life are to be found in “The Gulag Archipelago” by Alexander Solzhenitsyn. It needs to be read with knowledge by the reader of the ways in which supersensible beings work.

The infiltration of the power of opposition into the pentagram of man had, sooner or later, to come to expression in society at large. Let us see how this process occurred. It is a fact that all of a human being’s soul-spiritual qualities without exception, once they have stabilized, come into relation with supersensible beings, are even personified in a particular way, generate spiritual beings of an elemental nature, and through them the person enters into relation with the beings of the hierarchies. If the human being’s qualities are good, their elemental beings are also good, and the person comes into relation with the beings of the hierarchy of normal development. In such a case the human being evolves in the direction of his higher ‘I’, and thus grows more moral and more free. If the qualities of soul and spirit incline towards evil then, correspondingly, the elemental spirits they generate are of either a Luciferic or Ahrimanic kind. Such beings are, themselves, always in search of humans who could be a suitable instrument for the achievement of their purposes. They join such people together into all kinds of groups, parties, sects, cliques etc. In these a group-consciousness starts to form and a Luciferic or Ahrimanic being, sometimes both, becomes its guiding spirit. Through such groups these spirits begin to steer the earth’s development – first the cultural-historical process, then evolution – in their own direction. These groups finally establish a kind of “priesthood”, introducing ritual, ceremonial magic through which at times a conscious relation of these “priests” with their supersensible patrons is formed. There does, indeed, stand behind every organization of people on the earth a spiritual being. For this reason politicians who do not allow themselves to view the folly and the facts of social-political life in a primitive, materialistic way act not so much in agreement with what is said in their Parties or in Party programmes, but rather in accordance with the intentions and aims of spiritual beings standing behind them. The consequence of this is, that Parties which draw their spiritual motivation from supersensible inspirer-leaders of polar opposite directions will always be at daggers drawn, and will always try to introduce a system that will enable them to simply eliminate their opponents. This is one of the truths of, so to speak, higher political science.

Thus arose the systems, the centres of occult-political power on earth. But in the world of their supersensible leadership intensive efforts are made to take possession of the primal substance that was enclosed in the human being by the Father-ground of the world. For the attainment of this goal, retarded hierarchical beings have to remove from normal evolution the form of the upright pentagram, stand it on its head and hold it in the reverse position. They therefore strive to fill with their own spirituality the cosmic stream that flows through the pentagram of the human being. This intention, this striving of theirs has of necessity the result that all the social and political centres they control gradually unite together in the form of an upside-down pentagram. Then the supersensible form of the human being, which remains in a continual process of Fall into sin, becomes the archetype, the ‘ur’-phenomenon of the occult-political life of earthly humanity, with that part of humanity that is in the grip of Ahrimanic and Luciferic beings.

Supersensible Luciferic, Ahrimanic and another kind of particularly fearsome Ahrimanic beings – Asuras – exist somehow in proximity to one another, despite their polar opposition: by virtue of the laws of evolution. Therefore the earthly reflection, the projection of their connection in a pentagram-like structure, lives on without destroying itself, despite the wild contradictions and battles of their underlying forces. When we can grasp this it grows clear to us why none of these forces can defeat the others entirely, and why even after a total military or other defeat of one of the sides their real leaders somehow remain alive and carry on fighting for their “cause”, as the Bolsheviks say.

Thus it emerges that, on the basis of our methodological premise, we must speak of five occult-political power-centres of world-encompassing significance. And they do exist. They arose during the 20th century. Once established, they arrived at a kind of unity, which is pervaded with irreconcilable hostility. This shows the wisdom of God, in the fact that the spirits of obstruction are manifold and are in conflict with one another. This conflict is held together today in the sign of the inverted pentagram. And so, because these hostilities extend into the political life, this pentagram is the ‘ur’-phenomenon for political science as directed towards conspiracy theory. All such theories should really take this ‘ur’-phenomenon as the basis for their research. ‘Ur’- phenomena are inexhaustible. Thus, the ‘ur’-phenomenon of evil has the ability to create conspiracies without end, with the aim of tearing the human being away from normal evolution and wresting world-being from Divine being. To prevent this, man has the task, the duty even, to uncover the conspiracies and bring them in this way into the consciousness of the higher hierarchies, who then intervene and can combat them at their primal source, which does not lie on the physical plane.

***

We will now try to look more closely at the structure of the ‘ur’- phenomenon we have discovered. In the esoteric wisdom of mankind (which has now become exoteric, accessible to all) it is known that the whole human race consists of two types of human being. The difference between them shows the more clearly, the more individual the personality in question. The characteristics of these two types determine many things that manifest in cultural-historical, social and political life. The representatives of the one type are called the “sons of Abel”, those of the other the “sons of Cain”. This is a very big subject, and we will do no more than touch upon a few aspects.

From the sons of Abel arose at all times, says Rudolf Steiner, mainly those of priestly, and also of kingly, rank. Their primal ancestor was a shepherd. The sons of Cain are builders, they are drawn to the secular life. Instinctively, the two types dislike one another. On certain questions they sometimes enter into irreconcilable conflict. Right at the beginning, as we know, Abel was killed by Cain (Rudolf Steiner gives an explanation for this); later, also according to the Bible, Hiram Abiff – a Cainite – built for Solomon – an Abelite – the Temple and was rewarded for this by his murder at the hands of Solomon. It is the evolutionary task of man to unite and harmonize the two types within himself or, figuratively speaking, to reconcile Cain and Abel.

The ancient Greeks experienced these two types of personality, as they come to expression in Apollonian and Dionysian art. The first is solemn, sublime, objective – the “major key”, but also more general, while the second is, as a rule, personal – the “minor key”, tragic as viewed from a simple, human aspect. In modern times the music of Puccini, for example, is more Dionysian, and that of Glinka more Apollonian. The genius of Richard Wagner was able to create in his music a synthesis of the two principles.

In cultural and social life the Abelites tend to be conservative, immobile, respecters of tradition. The Cainites are liberal, democratic, revolutionary. In politics the former are mostly of the “Right”, and the latter of the “Left”. Interestingly enough, modern scientists have even found genetic differences between them. But differences, as we know, aside from the positive they bring with them, contribute to division between human beings. And this is exploited to the full by the spirits of opposition.

We can keep our own exposition short by bringing a lengthy quotation from a lecture by Rudolf Steiner, which can clarify the subject more and contribute to a better understanding of the nature of evil. The lecture was held in 1904, and says the following: “How does life become form? Through the fact that it finds resistance, and that it does not bring itself to expression at once and in one form. Observe how the life in a plant, let us say a lily, moves on from form to form. The life of the lily has built up, given shape to a lily-form.” “When this form has reached its completion, the life overcomes the form, passes over into the seed in order later to be reborn as the same life in a new form. And thus life advances from form to form...” The form sets bounds to, holds back the flowing, formless life, creates hindrances for it. “It is from that which has remained behind and appears like fetters from the higher level where it now stands, it is from this that form emerges within the wider cosmos.” One example: The life of the Catholic Church from the time of Augustine to the 15th century is Christian, but the form is the life of the Ancient Roman epoch: “What was life then, later becomes form for a higher stage of life...” “It is always so, that the life of a previous epoch is the form of a later epoch. In the sounding together of form and life we have at the same time the other problem: namely, that of good and evil; the fact that the good of an earlier time is united with the good of the new, present time. And, in the final analysis this is nothing other than the sounding together of progress with its own obstruction. This is at the same time the possibility of material appearance, the possibility of manifesting in outer existence. This is our existence as human beings within the rigid mineral element of earth: Inner life, and the relic of life of a former time hardened into a constricting form. This is also the teaching of Manichaism regarding evil.” “Mani wishes to create a spiritual stream that goes beyond Rosicrucianism. This stream of Mani strives across to the sixth root-race [it will come in a few millennia; the expression “root-race” is a technical term of occult science to describe a period of development consisting of seven cultural epochs – G.A.B.], which has been in preparation since the founding of Christianity. It is only in the sixth root-race that Christianity will come to expression in the full sense. Only then will it really be there. The inner Christian life as such overcomes any form, it transmits itself through external Christianity and lives in all the forms of the different confessions. Whoever seeks Christian life will always find it. It creates forms and breaks down forms in the various systems of religion. The essential thing is not to seek everywhere for similarity in the forms of outer expression, but to experience the inner stream of life that is be- neath the surface everywhere. But what still needs to be created is a form for the life of the sixth root-race. It needs to be created beforehand, as it must be there so that the Christian life can pour into it. This form must be prepared by people who create such a form so that the true Christian life of the sixth root-race can be established in it. And this external form of society must have its source in the Mani intention... This must be the outer form of organization, the congregation in which the spark of Christianity will be able properly to establish itself for the first time.”

“It is not so much a matter of cultivation of the inner life – life will continue to flow in other ways, too – but more a matter of the cultivation of life’s outer form.”

“Let us look now at the way things will be in the sixth root-race. Good and evil will then form a hugely different contrast than they do today. ... On the one hand there will be human beings of a tremendous inner goodness, veritable geniuses of love and goodness; but on the other hand there will also be the opposite. Evil will be present as a frame of mind without disguise in a great number of human beings, no longer masked, no longer hidden. The evil ones will boast of evil as something of special value. There is already in some people of genius a first dawning of a certain voluptuous delight in this evil, this demonic element in the sixth root-race. Nietzsche’s ‘blond beast’, for example, is a kind of spectral foreshadowing of it.”

“This pure evil must be cast out of the stream of world-development like slag... into the eighth sphere. We are standing today directly before a time where a conscious grappling with evil by the good human beings will take place.” “The sixth root-race will have the task as far as is possible of drawing evil, by means of mildness, back into the ongoing stream of development.... Vigorously to prepare this is the task of the Manichaean spiritual stream. It will not die out, this spiritual stream, it will appear in many different forms... though these do not need to be discussed today. If it were to focus merely on the cultivation of an inner attitude, this stream would not achieve its true aim. It must come to expression in the founding of communities which, above all, regard peace, love, non-resistance of evil [through fighting] as the essential, and seek to spread it widely. For, it needs to create a vessel, a form, for the life that also continues without it.”

“Now you will understand why Augustine, the most important spirit of the Catholic Church, who developed in his Divine State the form of the Church, and created the form for the present, why he had of necessity to be the most strident opponent of the form that prepares the future. Here, two poles stand over against one another: Faustus [a Cainite] and Augustine [an Abelite – G.A.B.]. Augustine, who counts on the Church, and on its present form; Faustus, who wishes to prepare from out of the human being a sense for the form of the future.” “That is the contrast that develops in the 3rd and 4th centuries after Christ. It lives on and finds its expression in the campaigns of the Catholic church against the Knights Templar, the Rosicrucians, Albigensians, Cathars and so on. All of them are eliminated from the outer, physical plane, but their inner life works on. Later the contrast comes again to expression in a weakened, but still vigorous form in two streams, born of western culture itself, as Jesuitism (Augustinism) and Freemasonry (Manichaism). Those who wage battle on the one side are all aware of this, the Catholics and Jesuits of the higher degrees; but of those on the other side who are fighting in the spirit of Mani, very few indeed are aware of it. Only the apex of the movement is aware of it.”

“Thus, in later centuries Jesuitism and Freemasonry stand over against one another. They are the children of the old spiritual streams. For this reason you have in both Jesuitism and Freemasonry a continuation of the same ceremonies for initiation as in the ancient streams. The initiation of the Church in Jesuitism has the four degrees: coadjutores temporales, scholares, coadjutores spirituales, professi. The degree of initiation in actual occult Freemasonry[1] are similar. They run parallel to one another but pursue quite different tendencies” (GA 93, 11.11.1904).

And out of these two different tendencies the two streams have come into political confrontation. There emerged from them the two most important political forces, the two centres of occult-political power in the world.

Due to the decline of our entire civilization its elements and components are also disintegrating. It is therefore difficult today to find anything constructive in these two age-old streams. But to speak about this is just as difficult as it was in the former Soviet Union to speak about the inadequacies of the Communist Party. Any critical assessment of the one or the other stream is received with extreme hostility. But as the representatives of these streams are to be found everywhere: in government, in administration of finance, of industry, of the cultural life, in science, in the political parties – they need to be spoken about, all the same. They are numerous because membership of one of these streams has become the guarantee of a successful career. In this sense these streams are strongly reminiscent of the Communist Party, but they are far more important that it was. They are the instigators of the globalization project, of revolution – including the notorious sexual one – they force the mixing of the races etc. etc.

The real greatness of the “Brothers of the Shadow” is a thing of the past. Rudolf Steiner says: “[Freemasonry] had to decline in significance in the period when the fourth culture-epoch [the Greco-Latin] was still developing. The fifth culture-epoch [i.e. that of today] brought with it the loss of significance on the part of Freemasonry” (GA 93, 2.12.1904).

In one of his lectures Rudolf Steiner tells how Lessing, when he was received into the Masonic Lodge, was asked by the Master of the Chair: “Can you now see for yourself that you are not being initiated into things that are especially hostile to the State or religion?” And Lessing replied: Yes, I must confess that I haven’t learnt anything like that. But I would have been glad to learn something of that sort, because then I would have at least learnt something” (GA 93, 2.1.1906).

Rudolf Steiner also says that there is nothing Christian left, where the “Brothers of the Shadow” are concerned. In the end they simply became the instrument of “secret societies” which are engaged in geopolitics, and through these societies the esoteric practice of the “Brothers of the Shadow” took on a very dark character.

Nor, Rudolf Steiner continues, has anything Christian remained in the case of the “Fathers”. Their Order is an expression of the final stage of the degeneration of Roman Catholicism, which is a direct continuation of the old Roman Empire with its drive for domination. And even if they are “Fathers”, then this is not of spiritual light but of darkness, in which they spin out their dark stories. But it should be noted that if one can characterize the “Fathers of Darkness” in this way (the reader should not view this as criticism), it does not mean that the same can be repeated when one is speaking of Catholicism in general. “If we take Roman Catholicism in its totality as it is today,” says Rudolf Steiner, “not, of course, as it is understood by the individual priests who are generally very badly informed, but if it is taken... as a theological system, as the content of an encompassing world-view, then Catholicism is full of content as the system of an encompassing world-view. This is what is grandiose about the Catholic teaching as it lived in the Middle Ages as Scholasticism, that it is a world-view with a structure that is self-contained from all sides and elaborated thoroughly in its details on both a logical and ontological level..., and has preserved from ancient times the idea of Father, Son, Spirit; a structured world-view which has certain world-embracing dogmatic teachings about the Trinity, a structured world-view that, in the Augustinian-Thomist world-conception has succeeded in bringing forth from itself a view regarding the human social order. ... If you are to understand the Catholic system, the Catholic doctrine of faith – if one can call it thus – you must be able to operate with concepts in the most penetrating way, you must make clear and distinct conceptual transitions, you must be able to operate with concepts in a way that modern philosophers find extremely uncomfortable, and which Protestant theologians in particular find inconvenient.... Catholicism has a tightly-knit, strong-boned structure of belief which takes as its starting-point the principles of nature and works upwards, building itself from below and arriving at an all-embracing world-view which the human being can then unite with his soul, even if the higher realms are recognized as the merely revealed truths.” All this is of course only the last relic of the old world-views. And there is a big “contrast between Catholicism and modern civilization”. “Catholicism can never bring human beings further than where they are already ... If we look at what Catholicism has brought – in our present times it has brought Jesuitism, and not Christ-ism” (GA 203, 6.2.1912).

Nevertheless, Rudolf Steiner points to certain qualities of the “Fathers of Darkness”, which humanity as a whole would do well to learn. “Never,” says Rudolf Steiner, “will anyone, so I believe, have seen a gifted Jesuit in a nervous state, whereas modern scholarship and modern education get more and more nervous. When does one grow nervous? When the physical nerves come to the fore. Then something is asserting itself that has actually no right physically to assert itself, because it is only there to let the spiritual through. These things are intimately connected to the wrongness of our modern education system, and Jesuitism is certainly, from a standpoint that we must decidedly oppose, but from a standpoint of the enlivening of thinking, something that moves with the world, even if it goes backwards like a crab. But it moves, it doesn’t stand still, whereas our science (or learning) as we know it today does not actually take hold of the human being at all.”

“If I may point something out to you, then I would say this: I have often spoken of the pain that it causes, continually and repeatedly, to observe how this modern human being – who can think thoughts of all possible kinds and is so frightfully clever, but does not, with a single fibre of his existence, stand livingly in the present – does not see what is going on around him; he can’t see what is happening around him, he doesn’t want to be involved. With the Jesuit the situation is different. The Jesuit, who brings into movement the whole human being, can see what vibrates through the world today” (ibid. 29.4.1921).

***

The bitter struggle between the “Fathers” and the “Brothers” in the past is well-known. It forced the “Brothers” to hide and to work in a conspiratorial manner. But when the outer danger had ceased, the conspiracy remained. And the “Fathers” also resorted to it. Sometimes they even did such things together as, for example, in the socialist experiment in Russia. But they are still polar opposites, where the one has the impulse to cast the other into perdition. The world today is torn apart by their struggle. But despite this, they cannot be blamed directly for all the evil in the world. For, standing behind them are mighty supersensible forces. These two streams are only their instruments.

Inspired by Ahriman, the “Brothers of the Shadow”, who are the “tool of secret societies (of the left path)” (as Rudolf Steiner says) together with the “Fathers of Darkness”, created Bolshevism. This is their loathsome child. Once born and grown strong, it found its own patron in the spheres of the supersensible world, and now tries to swallow up its own parents and rule the world.

During the 20th century these two occult-political power centres were joined by two others, which are also steered from supersensible realms. They are National Socialism and Zionism. And when there were five of them the three kinds of retarded spirits brought them into a unity and extend their activity throughout society. This is shown in Fig. 11 or, rather, this was how it looked when the Soviet Union still existed, up to the time of Perestroika.

This pentagram is enclosed within the triangle of the retarded beings of the three hierarchies. On the one hand, it stands in relation to the Divine triangle which descended in evolution; on the other, it makes this heavier. The beings who form this triangle try to take away from the Divine triangle the power of metamorphosis – that is, the possibility of returning to the spiritual heights. The human being is the chief instrument in the battle of these beings against God and the Divinely-willed evolution, but only if man is prepared to undergo the eternal Fall into sin.

The five centres of present-day power on earth are led by three, let us call them, earthly “governors” of the retarded hierarchies, three Popes. One of them, the “white” one, is well-known – he has his seat in Rome (it is of no importance whether or not he is aware of his role – the main thing is what he does). There is the Pope of the secret societies. He is called the “black” Pope. And then there is the “red” Pope of Bolshevism. The first convincing account of him was given by Gregory Klimov, an officer who defected from Berlin to the West in 1948. (There he participated in the research of the so-called “Harvard Project”, which prepared the end of the Soviet experiment.)

The cosmic meaning of the ‘ur’-phenomenon which expresses the state of the eternal Fall into sin, is the following. The retarded hierarchical beings have created within the conditions of material culture a form with which they try to replace the Divine triangle of primal revelation. In this triangle was revealed the higher human being, who unites within himself the name, the kingdom and the will of the Father-ground of the world, which became the highest members of his spirit. They were to give birth to the lower ‘I’ of man, and this made materialization necessary, which would not have been possible if retarded hierarchical beings had not striven for this substitution. Can we describe this striving as a “conspiracy against God”? No, we cannot. For, we have to do on the one hand simply with a law of evolution, and on the other with con- sequences of the failures that human beings have been guilty of in the course of evolution. A tile that has broken from the roof will certainly fall, but whether it will hit someone’s head – depends to a great extent on the human being himself.

But the intervention of the retarded spirits in man’s social life exceeds of course their legitimate tasks in evolution. This can be compared to a falling tile that, during its fall, could think and veer from its path in order to hit the person on the head. And they naturally hide strivings of this kind from the human being; otherwise, if he knew of it he could learn to watch out for “falling tiles”. We can therefore speak of a conspiracy of the retarded spirits against human beings. The Gods are warning them of this, but they don’t want to listen. And this being so, human affairs on the earth will grow progressively worse. Humanity will continue to be subjected to inhuman socialist, eugenicist, genetic etc. experiments; the temptation of power and prosperity will draw people more strongly into parties, associations, blocs, orders, lodges and keep them there.

***

The Perestroika in Russia did not take place in order to free the enslaved people from Bolshevism. It was an expression of the renewed structuring (as “Perestroika” can be rendered in English) of the ‘ur’- phenomenon shown above, a new phase in social and political experimentation. If the political scientists had recognized this ‘ur’- phenomenon earlier and known that it is the real foundation for the theory of conspiracy, then one could, as early as the 90’s of the 20th century, have understood and spoken openly of the direction in which Russia and the whole of humanity is to be led next.

This ‘ur’-phenomenon probably appears on the supersensible level as a kind of hideous, hellish face, as is sometimes represented not unconvincingly by film-makers. During the Perestroika the expression on this face, figuratively speaking, changed, its lacerated features became distorted in a different way. And the movement of these features brings with it global events on the earth which we can observe today.

Bolshevist Russia was ousted from the lower apex of the pentagram. The Russians are not the ethnic group that can spread Bolshevism with full force across the whole earth. If Russia had been thrown out of the pentagram completely, it would have had the possibility of being born anew spiritually. But it was thrust inside the inverted pentagram and became there a kind of trophy around which all five power centres of the world are coiling their tentacles. They need it as a great, inert force in their struggle with one another. In practice they have long used it as such. Without Russia the First World War would not have broken out. Before the 2nd World War they were fully aware in Berlin that, without an alliance with the Soviet Union, they would not win the war against Britain, and in London they knew that they would not defeat Germany without Moscow.

The experimenters have now understood that without Russia the creation of the trefoil of super-blocs will not succeed. The best thing for Russia would be, not to become a political trophy for any world power. But it will not be possible for Russia to achieve this by external, military and economic means. This will become evident in the further events in the Ukraine. The Soviet Union’s place at the lower apex of the inverted pentagram has now been taken by the United States, and its place is now occupied by the “Brothers of the Shadow”, united in the EU (see Fig. 12).

Pan-Americanism as it was, in a humanist guise, was still more or less acceptable. But now it is transforming itself into “Oceania” with the ideology of “Insoc”. And this corresponds to a law, in a certain sense. At the beginning of the 20th century Rudolf Steiner warned: “Today we are, in practice, inundated with what is living itself out in Bolshevism as the most extreme radical wing of the West; and the West will have to experience that the element it did not want to have itself shifts across to the East, and that the element it has itself shifted over there comes to meet it from the East in a not very distant future. And this will be a remarkable piece of self-knowledge” (GA 19, 21.8.1920). This is what we are experiencing today, with one single exception – self-knowledge. In the West there is no wish to cultivate this. But let us hope that its time will come, eventually.

Rudolf Steiner characterizes Bolshevism from the spiritual side and points to the retarded spirits. He says that these spirits are described, in accordance with the Christian tradition of the Church, as Devils, Satan and others. But the Devil must not be confused with Satan. Compared to Satan, the Devil is a weaker force. “Satan has the rank of primal forces, Archai [Spirits of personality – G.A.B.], and it is he who, in the course of world evolution, took hold of this intellectuality long before it ... approaches the human being. Satan is at the present time the most all-embracing possessor, so to speak, of intellectuality and he strives to bind human intellectuality so strongly to his own, that man is able in this way to fall away from his evolution. Thus, to make the Mystery of Golgotha ineffective, is what this Ahrimanic power strives for.” Satan can gain access to the human being through the intellect alone, “... for, the intellect lives in man in such a way that, in him, it thinks the most independent content; everything else is attached to certain Divine powers.... Thus, the human being must learn to see that he should freely identify with the final goals of the Apocalypse, where it is plainly indicated by the Apocalypticist that the power will then appear which represents the Alpha and Omega of the onward-moving creative forces, the onward-moving creative Being of evolution [that is, the Christ – G.A.B.]....” Satan works with particular intensity in Eastern European Bolshevism, where the attempt is made by all possible means to unite human beings in such a way, that a group-soul would become necessary. “... If then, the most intelligent are carried across in this way into the lower region of the Ahrimanic, the groups that are formed there can, as groups, only be consigned to the Ahrimanic powers; and then this would enable the Satanic powers to wrest humanity from earth-evolution and bring it into a different planetary evolution” (GA 346, 22.9.1924).

What needs to be done in such a case, is also described by Rudolf Steiner. Under these circumstances the human being must place at the centre of his whole life of feeling the fact “that, if spiritual science is to intervene seriously in world-shaping forces, he must stress the importance, and gain people’s recognition of, what from our standpoint is called initiation science....”

Initiation science is possessed – though in a way that is far from beneficial for humanity – by the western secret societies. Initiation science is possessed also by all that is dependent on the “Fathers of Darkness”. “And Leninism, too, possesses an initiation science of a special kind. There is a definite reason for the fact that Leninism understands how to express itself so cleverly in the rational forms of the head. In Leninism there works its way to the surface of mankind’s development the cleverness of the human animal, the cleverness of human animality. All that flows as from human instincts, from human selfishness, assumes interpretations and forms in what manifests in Leninism and Trotskyism in a way that appears outwardly so clever. The animal wishes to work its way to the surface as the most intelligent animal, and wishes to make all the Ahrimanic forces whose aim it is to exclude the human, the specifically human, and all that is spread out as cleverness across the range of animal species, into forces that shape mankind – as I have often emphasized.” With great skill, the wasps make their nests with material that is the same as paper. “There, human cleverness is present within the animal kingdom. And if you draw together all this cleverness that is spread across the animal world and if you imagine that the Ahrimanic forces take it in order to pour it upwards into the human heads of those who only follow selfish instincts, then you will understand that it can be the expression of a truth if we say that Lenin, Trotsky and similar people are the instruments of these Ahrimanic powers. This is an Ahrimanic initiation, which simply belongs to a different world-sphere than our own world-sphere. But it is an initiation that bears within it the power to remove human civilization from the earth, to remove from the earth all that has taken form as human civilization.”

“We have to do with three initiatory tendencies: with two that lie on the plane of the development of mankind, and with one that lies below the plane of mankind’s development, but is an enormously strong-willed, an almost boundlessly strong-willed initiation. And the only thing that can bring order and an aim worthy of humanity into this initiation tendency is that which lies within true spiritual science. But a true aim, real earnestness can proceed from this spiritual science only if it is made into a resolutely pursued life-concern and if one is aware of how much idle chatter, devilish arrogance and soul-egoism often comes to expression in what is, mostly in all honesty, attached to this spiritual-scientific movement. To remain silent about these things has no sense. They need, on the contrary, to be spoken of again and again. Otherwise, how can one hope today to bring into souls those forces that have to be in souls if civilization is not to meet its downfall?” (GA 197, 13.6.1920)

Bolshevism shows its mystery, its initiation centre openly to the world. It is the mausoleum with the embalmed corpse, which appears to be dead, but whose cells nevertheless retain their own moisture (scientists wrote about it in the newspapers), and around it the “eternal Politbureau” in the form of funeral urns, built into the wall of the Kremlin. The complex is, in essence, a lodge, a public lodge that has made its mark on many millions of people who have passed through the mausoleum. And the military parades and mass demonstrations were black ceremonial magic raised to the level of State policy. During these mystery rites the so-called members of “government” stood on the tomb (!) (mausoleum) and received, absorbed into themselves the jubilation of the masses. Materialistic humanity has looked on at this for decades and shows no signs of a change of heart. And they are unconcerned by the fact that (as Rudolf Steiner himself says) “the Goetheanum was burnt down by the Jesuits and Freemasons”. The Goetheanum, ordained by the Gods for the establishing of a new centre of light-filled Christian initiation, under the leadership of the Archangel Michael – the fighter against the Dragon.