Since this essay speaks of "spiritual" matters, I would like to bring into focus the concept of spirit, along with the concepts of soul and body.

(I follow Steiner's exposition in his Theosophy.)

The "body", of course, is the physical form, perceptible by the outer senses, in the world that is usually perceived in common by people's outer senses.

By soul I mean the inner world of subjective feelings and sensations of a Man (or animal).

The sensation of an outer sense-perception (such as the green of grass), as well as feelings (such as pleasure or pain), are in the soul.

Also, the inner being acts through the soul by the will, though the will is not usually conscious.

We might say that the physical world acts on the soul through sensation; the soul lives in its own feelings, and acts upon the world through the will.

We (generally) experience sensations in wakefulness, feelings as if in a dream, and will as if in deep, unconscious sleep.

         Following the communications of this spiritual science, I will posit that spiritual beings, known as "angels", live invisibly (to us, usually) and involve themselves in earthly affairs.

(This idea has been gaining acceptance in the general culture in recent years, with a surge of interest in angels.)

I will also posit the existence of other spiritual beings, higher and more advanced than the angels, called the "archangels" in theology or angelology.

Modern spiritual research (by Steiner), as well as ancient tradition (from Dionysius the Areopagate, pupil of St. Paul) speaks of at least nine orders of angels and supra-angelic beings -- which, taken together, are called the hierarchies, sometimes the "choirs of angels", or sometimes the "Gods".

(Other, still higher Beings are not discussed here.)

Some of the names given to the nine hierarchies, in ascending order, are:

• Angels (Angeloi, Sons of Twilight, Sons of Life; all Men have individual angels as guardians and carriers of their eternal Selves)
• Archangels (Archangeloi, Spirits of Fire; the "folk-spirits" are of this rank)
• Archai (singular "Arche"; Spirits of Personality, Primal Beginnings, Principalities; the "Time Spirit" or "Zeitgeist" is of this rank)
• Exusiai (Spirits of Form, Powers, Authorities; the "Elohim" and "Jehovah" are of this rank)
• Dynamis (Spirits of Motion, Mights, Virtues)
• Kyriotetes (Spirits of Wisdom, Dominions)
• Thrones (Spirits of Will)
• Cherubim (Spirits of Harmony)
• Seraphim (Spirits of Love).
  
  

         These spirits are not all "angelic", in the sense of "good and holy".

Some, sometimes, oppose the regular, good world-order.

Ahriman ("the Unjust Prince of this World") is a "retarded" Spirit of Form, working as an Arche, opposing (in a sense) the good world order.

(Yet, this opposition is not purely "evil", as I will discuss below.)

Since Ahriman is a spirit of opposition, we might begin to understand his nature by understanding what he opposes: the Gods' plan of earthly and human development.

But the situation is not as simple as a two-sided contest; basic to competent understanding of the world-process is the recognition of at least three kinds of spiritual influence upon the evolution of Mankind and the cosmos.

(We must be clear that this "evolution" is something very different from the random, meaningless, material process conceived by the neo-Darwinists and suchlike theorists.

I mean by evolution a thoroughly purposeful, thought-filled process of development initiated and guided by spiritual beings.)

         The normal Gods (the regular hierarchies) create and nurture the evolvement of the world and Mankind, so as to bring about the possibility of Men attaining the status of divinity as "Spirits of Freedom and Love" -- the tenth hierarchy.

(At the present stage of evolution, the Man progresses through alternating periods of earth-lives and purely spiritual lives: birth, death, and reincarnation.)

As the name implies, essential to the fulfillment of Mankind's task is the realization of "freedom", meaning not so much political freedom as spiritual freedom -- that Men should become independent, unique individuals acting consciously as the originators of their own deeds.

Occult wisdom, rediscovered and made public by Steiner (and greatly simplified here, to put it mildly), explains this evolution as being created and guided through seven great cosmic ages.

We are now in the fourth great age, called the Earth Age.

(All ages' names here are given in order of succession.)

The previous three ages are called "Saturn", "Sun", and "Moon".

Again, these are past ages of cosmic development, not to be confused with the present-day heavenly bodies of the same names.

The same holds for the three future ages: "Jupiter", "Venus", and "Vulcan".

The great Earth Age comprises seven lesser ages, of which we are in the fifth.

These five are called "Polarian", "Hyperborean", "Lemurian", "Atlantean", and "Post-Atlantean".

And the Post-Atlantean Age comprises seven cultural epochs, of which, again, we are in the fifth.

The previous four are called "Indian", "Persian", "Egypto-Chaldean", and "Greco-Roman".

Recorded history begins only with the Egypto-Chaldean Epoch; what is generally known of ancient Indian and Persian culture derives from records made in the third epoch.

-- These names of epochs do not imply that nothing important was happening in other regions of the earth, but that the archetypal evolutionary impulses of the times were centered in the regions designated.

The epochs last approximately 2160 years; and the present, fifth post-Atlantean epoch began about 1413 AD.

Neither are these epochs considered to be sharply differentiated; transitions happen gradually, future developments being prepared in advance, and past influences lingering after.

         The central event of the Earth Age occurred during the Greco-Roman Epoch, in Palestine.

It was the incarnation of a very high spiritual Being, a God of the normal current, called the Christ -- culminating in the events surrounding the Crucifixion: the "Mystery of Golgotha".

This Event was the turning-point of Earth-evolution from descent from spirit into matter, toward ascent back to the spirit, with the fruits gained from the sojourn into matter.

(Steiner himself did not begin with a Christian world-view.

He rediscovered the "mystical fact" of Christianity during the course of his consciously clairvoyant experiences.)

         Besides the normal Gods, a host of abnormal spiritual beings, called "Luciferic", also influences earthly evolution.

In a sense, these oppose the normal Gods' plans for evolution.

The Luciferic beings try to draw Mankind away from the normal earth-evolution to their own abnormal psychic-spiritual cosmos of light.

In the human soul they inspire pride, egotism, disinterest in one's fellow Men, fiery emotionalism, subjectivity, fantasy, and hallucination.

In the human intellect they inspire generalization, unification, hypothesizing, and the building of imaginative pictures beyond reality.

Human speech and thought are Luciferic in origin; so are human self-consciousness and the capacity for independence and rebellion against the normal Gods' world-order.

Also, the susceptibility to disease originated from Luciferic influence.

-- A high spiritual being, in a sense the leader of the Luciferic host, "Lucifer" himself, incarnated in a human body, in the region of China, in the Third Millennium BC.

This event brought about a revolution in human consciousness.

Before then, Men could not use the organs of intellect and lived by a kind of instinct.

Lucifer was the first to grasp by the intellect the wisdom of the Mysteries theretofore revealed by the Gods to Mankind in other forms of consciousness.

The effects of this incarnation inspired the wisdom of Pagan culture, up through the Gnosis of the early centuries AD, and lingered even into the early Nineteenth Century.

-- This wisdom should not be considered to be false in itself; it is good or evil depending on who holds it, and for what purposes it is used.

The great Pagan initiates took it upon themselves to enter into the Luciferic influence and turn it to the good of Mankind.

Only through the Luciferic influence has Mankind risen above the status of childishness.

(Apart from the Pagan culture of Nature-wisdom was the Hebraic culture, which [in a sense] separated the Man from Nature, and which prepared an hereditary current to provide a body for the incarnation of Christ.

In Pagan culture the Man felt membered into the starry cosmos, without what we now know as moral impulses.

Moral impulses in the human soul were prepared by Hebrewism and furthered by Christianity.

Christianity is also a culmination and fulfillment of Pagan wisdom.

-- Here Christianity means not so much "organized religion" as the deeds and continuing influence of the Christ-Being and His hosts, not necessarily confined to formal-religious organizations.)

         In the present, fifth cultural epoch the Ahrimanic influence in human culture is reaching a climax.

The modern scientific revolution, since the fifteenth century, has been inspired largely by Ahriman.

He is the inspirer of amoral, atheistic, mechanistic materialism, and the kind of cleverness that goes with it.

The regular Gods' intent for the present epoch (also called the Consciousness Soul Epoch) is that Mankind should develop increased consciousness, together with the individuality and spiritual freedom that go with that consciousness.

Ahriman opposes this; he wants the Man to live from unconscious instincts as an unindividualized, impulsive animal -- clever, but an animal nonetheless.

(Ahriman is the teacher of the lie that the Man is an animal: neo-Darwinism and similar theories.)

         To the modern mind it might seem a contradiction to say Ahriman opposes increased consciousness but promotes intelligence and science.

This is because the modern mind is so immured in what is generally considered to be "scientific thinking" that it has almost no conception of the true nature of conscious thinking.

(Steiner, especially in his book Die Philosophie der Freiheit [1894; 1918], has been our teacher of real thinking, but the general intellectual culture has not learned the lesson.)

The fact is that the "scientific" thinking normal in this epoch, no matter how clever, is hardly conscious at all (possibly with some relatively rare exceptions at moments of "insight" or mathematical discovery).

In the kind of consciousness usual in our "scientific" culture, we become conscious only of the fixed results of the thinking, after it has been accomplished; we are not (usually) conscious of the thinking-process itself.

And since it is unconscious, it is not our free action; it is automatic.

When we think in the manner usual in our epoch, we are sentient automata, acting from instinct.

(Formerly occult fact: this instinctive thinking in the wide culture had been inspired by Jehovah up to about 1840 AD.

Since then it has been inspired by Ahriman, resulting in the Nineteenth-Century torrent of materialism, which, aided by the withdrawal of the German folk-spirit, drowned the life-positive Romanticism in culture.)

And this is what Ahriman wants: he wants to stamp out all traces and all possibility of free, individualized human consciousness; he wants the Man not to be an individual, but only a member of a general species of pseudo-Mankind -- to be a clever, earth-bound animal, an "homunculus".

         According to Steiner, it is characteristic of the present culture of Ahrimanic scientism and Anglo-American economic imperialism that language has lost its instinctive spiritual meaning; that is, the connection is lost between the literal word and the spiritual impulse that constitutes meaning.

         Without real, spiritual content, language consists only of "empty phrases", such as rule by the will of the people, the free world, individual freedom, and so on.

These phrases are largely devoid of reality in our socio-political structure; there the pervasive actuality is the power of money over Men and over life.

And where the empty phrase rules in language, mere conventions -- rather than living human contact -- rule in social life, and mere routine -- rather than lively human interest -- rules in economic life.

And: "It is only a short step from the empty phrase to the lie."

Again, this is especially true in politics and economics, for the prevalence of empty words makes possible the falsification of realities -- a potent weapon in the hands of those with occult, conscious intentions to manipulate people for devious ends.

In our time, people en masse act as if they are possessed by evil forces, because, in a way, they are.

The demons of materialism speak through empty words.

A language in which the demons of materialism have taken the place of human spiritual impulses can lead only to destruction.

         Certainly Steiner was not the only one to notice this aspect of modern language.

George Orwell was perhaps the most prominent writer to decry this trend.

See, for instance, his classic essay "Politics and the English Language".

He envisioned the dehumanization of language becoming deliberately intensified in the "newspeak" of the Ahrimanic nightmare 1984.

Having no apparent knowledge of spiritual science, and working with only keen observation and a love of truth, he saw what was happening in the political discourse of Western Europe and carried to extremes in the totalitarian regimes.

         In the social-cultural sphere, Ahriman's influence is apparent everywhere, especially strong and growing stronger throughout the Twentieth Century and into the Twenty-first.

Chief among the Ahrimanic trends are:

• Antagonistic nationalism based on ethnicity. (Moderate folk-nationalism was a progressive principle in the past, but ethnic nationalism is retrogressive and destructive in the modern world.)
• Dogmatic party politics, engendering hatred and bitterness arising from the refusal to see other, equally valid (or invalid) points of view
• The subjugation of cultural life (e.g. medicine, education, research, criminal jurisprudence) to political and economic power
• The mechanization of the political state, bound by rigid laws everywhere, with little place for free human initiative
• In everyday life: Philistinism, tedium, and alienation, lack of interest in one's work, even in intellectual work (Ahriman wants knowledge to be devoid of warm human interest and connection, to be stored in libraries and not to live in human souls.)
• In medicine: materialistic, mechanistic (and atrocious) experimentalism and treatment, without understanding of the living human individual (The related practice of embalming corpses tends to bind the human entity to earth; this is an Ahrimanic reflection of ancient Egyptian mummification.)
• In social science: blind acceptance of statistics, and the belief that the satisfaction of economic needs by itself will secure human welfare
• In economics: the subjugation of all living and human interests to the inhuman, impersonal mechanism of profit-seeking, to the "artificial person" of the corporation (In the USA this has come to such a situation that the humanizing influence of the labor movement is being obliterated, and the exigencies of "making a living", along with other destructive Ahrimanic trends, are destroying the human family -- this in the so-called "richest country in the world". [A perspicacious American folk-wisdom has coined the phrase "the Almighty Dollar".] The Ahrimanic "Mammon" is archetypally the god of "filthy lucre" and of the power of money over life, as well as of all low and dark forces; his hosts also attack the human body and soul to corrupt and destroy them.)
• In the Christian religion: narrow, simplistic interpretation of the Gospels, without appreciation for the occult wisdom needed for an approach to the deep mysteries of the Christ Being
• In literature: books inspired directly by Ahriman, works of great intelligence that further Ahriman's goals (e.g. some parts of Nietzsche's Antichrist and Ecce Homo)
• In technics: very refined developments, but directed only at satisfying animal needs, promoting human immersion in the sense-world to the exclusion of the supersensible
• In world-view: Men as animals, animals (and all living things) as mechanisms, the non-existence of soul and spirit, and the non-existence of moral reality: amoralism.
  
  

         To sum up this description of the triad of spiritual streams: The conflicts of human and spiritual life do not derive from a simple, two-sided war between good and evil.

It was one of the great insights of Steiner to renew the ancient teaching of the "Golden Mean", of good as the middle way between opposing extremes.

-- Lucifer is too warm, too flighty, too unstable; he inspires human fanaticism, false mysticism, hot-bloodedness, and the tendency to flee earthly reality for hallucinatory pleasures.

Ahriman is too cold, too hard, too rigid; he tries to make people dry, prosaic, philistine, materialistic in thought and in deed -- and hardens what would be healthily mobile, supple thoughts, feelings, and even bodies.

Christ, as the Exemplar of the regular Gods, represents the middle way between the too-much and the too-little, holding the opposites in balance -- and leading Mankind to find the healthy middle way.

Seen this way, Lucifer and Ahriman are not purely evil; they both bring to human and earthly evolution forces that are needed for good, healthy development and the fulfillment of the Gods' plans.

Evil results only when events get out of balance and run to extremes.

-- However, neither do Lucifer and Ahriman simply oppose each other; in a sense, they work together in opposition to the Gods' intent for evolution; they both work to prevent Mankind and the earth from progressing together to the New Jupiter.

Lucifer draws human spirits away from earthly embodiment toward his own psychic-spiritual "planet" of light; Ahriman pushes the individual human spirit out of the human organism and away from the earth, so that only a hardened, mechanized, ghostly human organism, devoid of free individuality and living an instinctive-but-clever animalistic species-life remains on the hardened "cosmic slag" of the earth (surrounded with Old Moon forces).

Mankind's rightful task for the present is to lead lives of healthy, progressive alternation between the earthly and the cosmic (life, death, and rebirth), so as to lead the earth over to New Jupiter.

-- The profound mystery of evil is that in a higher sense, in the long run, it serves the good.

Not to imply that we would be justified in doing evil with the rationalization that good would result.

"...it must needs be that offences come; but woe to that man by whom the offence cometh!" [Matthew 18;vii]

         Steiner says that the Ahrimanic incarnation will happen the West in the Third Millennium.

In his nomenclature West means primarily Britain and English-speaking America.

There is ample reason to suspect that the destined place for this event is (North) America, for the effect of the American natural environment on the human body and soul especially favors Ahrimanic tendencies.

According to Steiner's insights, each of the various regions of the earth has its unique effect upon the human organism.

In America the Ahrimanic influence is strong, rising from the center of the earth, carried by electromagnetism.

This strengthens the entity known to occultism as the "double" or "Doppelgänger".

(This author does not entirely understand the Doppelgänger.

In one sense, it seems to be an astral quasi-personification of a Man's karma, both "good" and "bad"; it is a being with intelligence and will, but with no individual, spiritual Ego, and tends to bind the human soul to the body, hardening human thinking, feeling, and willing.

All Men have a Doppelgänger [or Doppelgängers?], living in their nerve-electricity, infusing into their souls all sorts of degrading, depressing impulses, as well as instigating internal illnesses.

In another sense, there seem to be [perhaps] two other "doubles", both Ahrimanic and Luciferic.

In relation to America, Steiner seems to be speaking mainly of the Ahrimanic "double"; see especially the lecture of 16th November, 1917.

[Electricity is the "sub-natural", rigidifying shadow of soul forces.])

-- The Ahrimanic tendencies in America are well-known even to those whose perception is not enlivened by occult knowledge; American culture has long been famous for its violence and "hard-boiled" materialism, and, more recently, for its degeneracy and decadence.

         It is a fact, unknown to history but revealed by Steiner's spiritual research, that while the Incarnation of Christ was happening in Palestine another stupendous drama played out in Mexico.

A high initiate of the negative Mysteries, the most advanced "black magician" in the world, had reached, by repeated ritual murders of an especially horrible kind, the threshold of knowledge of certain deep, cosmic secrets.

This knowledge would have given him the ability, as was his intention, of achieving the Ahrimanic goals of completely rigidifying the earth, so as to draw it out of the progressive development toward the New Jupiter, and of binding human organisms as automata in that "slag" of the earth.

He was thwarted in this intention by the incarnate high Sun-being "Vitzliputzli", who caused the black magician to be crucified at the same time as the Crucifixion of Jesus Christ -- a shattering reflection in the American continent of the Events in Palestine.

(Since then the soul of this black magician has been held in a kind of "prison".)

         As indicated, the Greco-Roman Epoch ran approximately 2160 years, from 747 BC to 1413 AD.

The midpoint of this epoch was 1413 AD minus 2160/2 = 333 AD.

One might consider (as an hypothesis) the occult teaching that events in history occur at times that, as it were, reflect and balance the events equidistant in time from a midpoint.

Taking 333 AD as the midpoint, the fulcrum of the balance, and on one side the Birth in Palestine, on the other side of the scales would be 333 AD + 333 = 666 AD.

The big event , known to history, of the Seventh Century was the rise of Islam.

Another event, not so famous but still known to history, was the transfer of ancient Greek philosophy (especially Aristotle's works, probably including the lost work on alchemy) to the Academy of Jundi Sabur (near present-day Baghdad).

Following the expulsion of the philosophers from Syrian Edessa in 489 AD and from Athens in 529 AD, the philosophers had found refuge in what was then the Persian Empire, and at that Academy they pursued their work.

Then this knowledge passed to the Islamic Arabs, and science of a particular bent reached a high development under them, while Europe was in the "Dark Ages".

Only gradually, over many centuries, did this science pass over to Europe, where it developed into the modern scientific revolution.

Again, the trend of modern science, as it has in fact developed, is Ahrimanic.

The direct ancestor of scientific materialism was this Arabian science, which was itself derived from the Academy of Jundi Sabur.

Thus, on the other side of the 333 AD midpoint equidistant from the Birth in Palestine was the rise of an active materialistic, anti-Christian world view in Jundi Sabur.

         The true spirit of the usual kind of scientism can be illustrated by a telling metaphor coined early in this epoch by scientism's seminal spokesman, Francis Bacon.

He said, propounding scientific experimentalism, that we must put Nature on the rack and force Her to answer the questions we put to Her.

-- This figure will speak volumes to those who meditate upon it: We, seeking information for whatever motives, are to torture the Goddess who gave us birth and nurture, so as to cause Her, through unbearable pain and injury, to blurt out secrets which She, in her wisdom, conceals from the impure and self-seeking.

-- In much of so-called "physiological research" and "medical training" this is hardly even a metaphor; the torture unto death is quite literal.

The usual victims are animals, but all too many "researchers", when they can get enough power, are not above using human "subjects".

And even a slight whiff of occult knowledge shows us a deeper meaning: The central rite of "Satanism" or "black magic" -- sometimes crude, sometimes sophisticated -- is the deliberate, ritual torture and killing of animals and, at a more advanced level, of human beings.

When done in a precise way, this practice confers knowledge and power upon the practitioner; also, it affects the whole earth, hardening and rigidifying it, to the characteristic Ahrimanic purpose.

Thus we can see the hordes of "researchers" and medical students -- who hurt, injure, and "sacrifice" animals -- as undergoing an unconscious, Ahrimanic black magic initiation, which hardens, brutalizes, and Ahrimanizes their souls, and through them also the culture, and even the earth itself.

(Sacrifice is the actual word they commonly use, not thinking which "god" they sacrifice unto.)

Vivisection is truly the archetypal act of modern science as it is generally understood and practiced.

         The 666-year rhythm continued further; another period ended in 1332 AD.

Around this time (circa 1312) the cruel suppression of the Knights Templar began.

Little is known to history of the true nature of the Templars, because of their secretive nature and the distortions passed to history by their triumphant enemies.

But these Knights did cultivate an esoteric Christianity that, although somewhat flawed, had the potential of bringing about a more humane civilization in Europe.

This possibility was thwarted by the power of the French king, Philip the Fair, and his allies in the Church.

Philip, through the torture and killing of the Templars, and through the material inspiration from their looted gold, attained a kind of Ahrimanic initiation-knowledge, but he died soon thereafter.

The Templars were either killed or driven underground, and Medieval culture declined until the Renaissance and Reformation.

The Templar-impulse did continue underground, to pass over to the "Lodges", especially York and Scottish Rite Freemasonry.

These Lodges worked in opposition to Roman Catholicism (at least until the end of the Eighteenth Century, when Freemasonry and esoteric-political Catholicism united in opposition to Napoleon), but the esoteric content of Freemasonry eventually became decadent and Ahrimanized.

Nevertheless, many of the modern institutions of "liberal republican democracy" (such as freedom of speech, religion, and the press) are very largely due to the influence of Freemasonry, especially in the USA.

-- This is a huge and interesting story, but it is beyond the scope of this essay (as well as the knowledge of this author).

         And, of course, another 666-year cycle ended around 1998 AD.

As stated already, it is apparent that the Ahrimanic influence in culture is building to some kind of climax.

Indeed, as is obvious to all with eyes to see, that in the society in the USA, despite (or because of) the triumphant march of technology, human culture and civilization are decaying (regardless of any erstwhile "rising economic indicators").

It is an easy guess that the times around 1998 AD are a propitious period for a major Ahrimanic manifestation: perhaps the incarnation of Ahriman himself; or since 1998 = 3x666 years since the Birth of the body for the incarnation of Christ, perhaps the body was born which is to be the vehicle for Ahriman, possibly 30 years later; or perhaps some other major event, such as the advent of the "false prophet" of the Apocalypse.

          (These are approximate times only; the outer effects of occult [="hidden"] events may manifest only gradually.

In 1998 we did not see newspaper headlines announcing a spectacular, "supernatural" event.

But if we had been alive in 666 AD or 1332 AD neither would we have likely been informed by the then contemporary analogues of headlines that any major, "supernatural" events had occurred.

Those manifestations of evil did not fully succeed according to the "plan"; other influences intervened and moderated the outcomes.

The occult machinations were hardly known to the public.

Such may also be true in the present: the actual course of events depends on many contending forces, and upon the consciousness and will of Men; and the crux of the struggle will likely be hidden [="occult"] to the wide public.

We will live and/or die in the outer effects of the occult causes, as uncomprehending [most of us, probably] as is usual in social cataclysms.

This essay is an attempt to lessen the incomprehension, and to lighten the mental atmosphere of this planet, even a little.

Surely, as "thoughts are things", even a slight change in consciousness can influence physical events in the right direction.)

         Steiner repeatedly pointed to the turn of the Century/Millennium as a time of crisis.

(As is the turn of every millennium: every 1000 years Lucifer and Ahriman work together with special power.)

-- Also, the Dutch Anthroposophist Bernard Lievegoed, in his deathbed testament, made the following remarks:

"From indications by Rudolf Steiner, we have to assume that in the year 1998 Ahriman will play an important role....it is a part of the development of the earth and of mankind that Ahriman will at one time be on earth in a physical body. In lectures, Rudolf Steiner has mentioned a time in the third millennium: 'before even a part of the third millennium after Christ has passed'. However, he said at a meeting of young people in Breslau, that Ahriman will do everything in his power to advance this moment as much as he can. Steiner then mentions the year 1998. It will depend on all of mankind together whether Ahriman will succeed in this or not....Whether he will succeed in this will depend on the question whether there will be enough people who see through his designs....In 1916 Rudolf Steiner said that at the beginning of the twenty-first century, evil will appear in a form which at that time [1916] could not yet be described....My estimate is that the nadir of this battle will fall around the years 2020 to 2040. Then the abyss of the demons will open. National Socialism and Bolshevism will pale in comparison with this. Millions of people will perish." [The Battle for the Soul; pp. 98-113]

         A cynic might say that these predictions allow for plenty of "wiggle room" for the incarnation of Ahriman: 1998 to the first part of the next millennium, or even the end of that millennium.

-- I will concede that the predicted time is not very precise, but I believe nevertheless that it is highly likely that this incarnation will manifest in the next few years to half-century or century.

And even without occult insight, one who observes the present social/cultural decline can hardly avoid seeing some kind of wrenching changes approaching.

         Another tremendous revelation from Steiner's spiritual science concerns the true nature of the Second Coming of Christ.

Steiner was adamant that the physical incarnation of Christ can happen once and only once.

"Just as a pair of scales can have only one balancing-point, so in Earth evolution the event of Golgotha can take place only once".

The amazing fact is that the Second Coming is happening now, but that most of Mankind is unaware of it.

(Actually, the term "second coming" is not in the New Testament; the Greek word is parousia, meaning roughly "active presence".

It was this "presence" that Saul/Paul experienced on the road to Damascus; Paul being Mankind's "premature birth" of the coming new experience of Christ. Parousia was translated into Latin as adventus, which means arrival, thus helping to give rise to the expectation of a physical arrival of Christ.

The original Greek term seems in consonance with Steiner's explanation.

See Emil Bock's St. Paul.)

In fact, it is the driving force behind the "apocalyptic" convulsions and struggles of our time.

For, as the picture is given in the Apocalypse of John, the bottomless pit is opened, Michael casts the dragon and his hosts onto the earth, the vials of wrath are poured out, and Babylon is overthrown -- all in preparation for Christ's triumph that brings the New Heaven and New Earth.

Most of us are unaware of this present Second Coming because it is not happening in the visible, material world, but in the "ethereal" region of the earth.

"Ethereal" means the system of "formative forces", bordering on the physical, that raise inert matter to the realm of the living.

Plants, animals, and Man all have ethereal, formative-force "bodies", and when the ethereal body forsakes the physical body, the physical body becomes ordinary matter; in other words, it dies.

The earth, being the body of a living Being, also has a formative-force body, the "ethereal earth".

These ethereal forces manifest especially in weather phenomena, such as cloud formation.

(It is a false, Ahrimanic science that sees cloud formation as a merely material process of evaporation and condensation of "water molecules"; this is rather a process of de-materialization and re-materialization through the workings of the ethers.)

         The incarnation of high spiritual beings in human bodies has the special significance that new possibilities for human development are opened up, because, as it were, the way is cleared by these high-spiritual-beings-in-the-flesh being the first to accomplish these developments.

Lucifer was the first to use the organs of intellect.

Christ was the first to redeem the "fallen" death-prone human body with the Resurrection Body.

(This was but one of the tremendous deeds of Christ. Even a minimal exposition of the scope of the accomplishments of this Incarnation is far, far beyond the limits of this essay.

Suffice it to say, for now, that Steiner, out of his clairvoyant initiation-knowledge, revealed that the Incarnation of Christ was the turning-point of the evolution of the earth, and of Mankind, from descent into the physical toward ascent into the spiritual.

Not that this evolution "turned on a dime"; the downward momentum is obviously still very great; but the seed for the upward growth was planted.

The true "stigmatists" have participated somewhat in the Redeemed Body, as harbingers of future evolution.)

Likewise, Ahriman-in-the-flesh will try to inaugurate a new human capacity, for his own ends: he wishes to bring the shadowy, brain-bound, semi-conscious, clever Ahrimanic "thinking" into the human ethereal body.

This would be an especially evil development if it is carried into the average human organism.

It is normal and healthy, at the present stage of human evolution, for the human ethereal body to dissolve into the wide cosmos in the days immediately following death (after "one's whole life passes before one's eyes").

Afterwards the human soul-and-spirit entity rises to higher regions, where it is purified and prepared for a new earth-life.

But materialism in the earth-life hardens the ethereal body so that it does not dissolve, but remains near the earth for a longer time, while the dead human entity serves Ahriman.

Only slowly and in unconsciousness do such dead spirits enter the spirit-worlds to prepare for a new incarnation.

Ahriman wishes to be the first to so harden the ethereal body so that it becomes the vehicle of automatic, intellectual thinking-devoid-of-will, and thus to make it possible to keep human ethereal bodies permanently in the region of the earth.

Then the earth would become so hardened that it would not pass over to the Jupiter Age, and Man would become clever, animalistic, ghostly, earth-bound creatures.

The Gods' plan for human and earthly evolution would be obstructed.

Steiner put it this way: "Ahriman works against the word 'Heaven and earth shall pass away, but My words shall not pass away'.

He wills that the words shall be thrown away, that heaven and earth shall continue on."

(Here we can get a glimpse into the motives of the sophisticated "Satanists" or "black magicians".

Ahriman's acolytes seek a kind of "immortality" in the slag-earth-surrounded-with-Old-Moon-forces, but an immortality with egotistic, earthly consciousness instead of the cosmic consciousness of the individualized spiritual Ego.)

         But Ahriman's incarnation need not be an evil event, as he wishes it to be.

This incarnation is necessary in human and earthly evolution, and it can be turned toward the good, if Mankind meets it in the right way: On the mundane level, we can remedy Ahrimanic tedium in the work-life and the intellectual life, by filling them with warm, Luciferic enthusiasm, by finding what is interesting in them, by getting ourselves interested in objective, impersonal facts and processes.

On the psychological level, we can remedy Luciferic subjectivity and fiery emotionalism by observing ourselves coolly, as we would an external natural process.

         The fundamental evolutionary principle in this, the Consciousness Soul Epoch, is the emergence in the Man of conscious, individualized, independent thinking.

Concurrent with the emergence of this soul-force (as a by-product, as it were) are wider possibilities for the workings of the forces of Death and Evil.

But these workings are (as is characteristic of Ahriman) so falsified that, for example, the cultural institutions that are generally regarded as most beneficial -- education and medicine -- are in fact among the worst carriers of evil.

(Not to imply that these institutions should be shunned or destroyed, but purified and renewed -- in part by their liberation from money and politics.)

When this epoch has run its course (if it will have fulfilled its potentials), human culture will be vastly changed.

For example, the distinction between "civilized" and "primitive" peoples will have been erased, and a kind of moral "socialism" will have become instinctive.

         Our specific task for the Consciousness Soul Epoch is to acquire three great truths, the same truths that Sorat wished to foist upon Mankind in the Seventh Century, with his own slant.

One might presume that Ahriman-in-the-flesh will likewise try to insert them into our culture and distort them to his own ends.

It is the task of an alert and conscious Mankind, schooled in spiritual science and led by the Christ, to gain these three truths through our own striving and to use them for the good development of the earthly creation.

         The first truth concerns the Mystery of Birth and Death: that the human soul in the physical world has but the semblance of the true soul-life that it had before conception and will have again after death.

The life in the sense-world interrupts the supersensible soul-life in the world-between-death-and-rebirth, so that we can gain, for the spirit, that which can be gained only in the sense-world.

To see this truth, we must "look Lucifer in the eye", and thus see through the distortions and illusions he spreads over the human soul.

The destiny of the "East" (meaning the Slavic regions and eastwards) is to give rise to an "eugenic occultism": the knowledge of how, through astrological regulation of conception, to bring the right human entities to birth at the right time and place for forward evolution, or conversely, to bring in the wrong entities, for the hindrance of right evolution.

Thus, this eugenic occultism can cause great good or great harm, depending on how it is used.

         The second truth concerns the Mystery of the Body: that the human body is not a lump of matter, but a form, which is spiritual in origin, and through which interchanging substances are constantly in flux.

This knowledge will lead to a true medical art, the essence of which is to keep intact the natural healing forces of the body.

The destiny of the "Middle" (meaning Central Europe) is to give rise to this "hygienic occultism" -- which, of course, can lead to great good, but can also cause great harm if it is used without strict conscientiousness.

         The third truth concerns the Mystery of Matter: that the reality behind "material substance" is not "atoms", "molecules", or "ultimate particles", but is spirit -- to be exact: Ahrimanic spirits, in rhythmic inter-relations.

The true picture of "solid matter" is not a machine, but a rainbow: a ghostly appearance, an outcome of spiritual processes.

Modern physics, in some advanced theorizing, may have made some halting moves toward this truth, but the dead, mechanistic world-conception still holds sway over the scientism which dominates world-culture.

This scientism is the Ahrimanic lie, the descendant of the Jundi Sabur influence, which, even though weakened, banished soul and spirit from the scientific world-view.

To see through this lie, we must "look Ahriman in the eye" -- a dangerous undertaking if we are not prepared by spiritual science.

The destiny of the West (meaning primarily the English-speaking world) is to give rise to a "mechanistic occultism", which will bring about previously unpublicized machine forces, based on rhythm and resonance.

(The lost, fabled "Keely motor" was a start in this direction.)

But the introduction of such machine forces would cause harm to society if the political, cultural, and economic spheres are not made mutually independent, and if egotism is not banished from the economy.

(Steiner laid down the basis for this healthy social re-ordering, in his concept of the "threefold commonwealth".)

         Ahriman seeks to divert and pervert these three destined developments of the Consciousness Soul Epoch, through the activity of angels who rejected the Christ influence during the Egypto-Chaldean Epoch.

In the present times, the "Christian" angels pour pictures of spirit-realities into the deep regions of the human soul-organism.

If the Man does not take up these pictures consciously, they sink down into the ethereal body and act as unconscious instincts through the influence of the Ahrimanic angels.

These unconscious instincts work against the three progressive evolutionary trends in the following ways:

1. Perverting the Eugenic Occultism, destructive sex impulses affect the whole social life, working against the development of conscious human brotherhood, and making a Mankind entirely egotistical and entirely controlled by instinctive urges carried in the blood.
2. Perverting the Hygienic Occultism, medicine becomes materialistic and can be used to heal or harm, according to egotistic purposes.
3. Perverting the Mechanistic Occultism, powerful, Keely-like machine forces are employed, controlled not by the "vibrations" of good people (seeking the liberation of the workers), but by egotistic people for the evil purpose of attaining power and control over the masses.

         Some powerful, Ahrimanic secret societies, linked to the Lodges, in Britain and the USA strive to keep their version of this third truth (of the spirituality of matter) as their own secret and to ensure that the wider public knows only a crude atheistic-mechanistic scientism, in which spirit and soul have no place.

(In more recent times, one can notice that the "crude materialism" given to the public is beginning to be replaced by a more quasi-esoteric materialism.)

These secret societies also strive to guide political and economic trends over the world so that the budding potentialities of the Middle and Eastern peoples come under the domination of these societies.

The history of modern times has very largely been the story of the outworkings of this struggle.

(The crimes of the secret Anglo-American power groups include the instigation of the First World War and the consequent establishment of the Bolshevik regime in the East.

These power groups believe that the English-speaking peoples are destined to justifiedly dominate the East-Slavs in this, the fifth cultural epoch, for the purpose of guiding their nascent potentialities, which should blossom to lead the world-culture in the sixth epoch -- just as the Romans, during the fourth epoch, dominated and educated Britain for her future leadership in the fifth epoch.

Some truth does lie behind this concept: this is the epoch of the consciousness soul, and the English-speaking peoples are gifted to develop the consciousness soul in an instinctive way, and it is true that the Slavs are destined to lead world-culture in the sixth epoch.

But these power groups seek, through illegitimate means, to guide toward illegitimate, Ahrimanic ends these inherent potentialities, which are loosely "written into" destiny.)

Many historians and "paranoid right-wing conspiracy nuts" have, solely through common sense and open-eyed observation of external events, discerned some of the outworkings of the influence of these secret societies through their semi-secret instruments: the Council on Foreign Relation, the Order of Skull and Bones (whose members included George Bush, Averell Harriman, and an amazing number of powerful Americans), the Rhodes Scholarships, the Round Table, etc.

But these observers, lacking occult knowledge, can only guess at the true aims of the secret power groups.

The "Anglophile" societies may disagree among themselves about means and details, but essentially they aim to gain world-domination for themselves (though certainly not for the good of the masses of the English-speaking peoples) and to influence all cultural trends in an Ahrimanic direction.

         Now, in "post-Cold War" Europe, the Anglo-Americans and the Jesuit-Catholic power groups apparently are working together to make the basic arrangements of this part of the "New World Order": Central Europe, from France to Poland, is to be dominated by the Jesuit interests, while the "East" (meaning roughly the regions historically Orthodox Christian) is to dominated by the Anglo-American "West".

This arrangement furthers the aims of the Anglo-Americans by preventing cultural collaboration between Central Europe and the Eastern Slavs, thus preventing the rise of a strong, healthy, and independent Central European culture that could mediate and balance the East and the West.

Thus, the present push toward the "New World Order" in Europe is a continuation of the long-standing Anglo-American policy of obliterating Central Europe (especially Germany) as a political/cultural force and of controlling the future-seeds being prepared in East-Europe -- the same policy that led to First World War and the Bolshevik Revolution.

         The deeper, Ahrimanic aim of these Anglo-Americans is to defeat the Gods' plan for Earth-evolution, by turning the earth into a heap of dark, frozen, cosmic slag, haunted by an earth-bound Mankind consisting of ghostly homunculi -- and to secure for themselves a privileged place in this Ahrimanic world-order: an Ahrimanic immortality, with earthly consciousness and with power over the uninitiated.

(The late Professor Carroll Quigley, mentor of the young Wm. Jefferson Clinton, wrote the fairly well-known tome Tragedy and Hope, and the lesser-known work The Anglo-American Establishment, in which he described, from a sympathetic point of view, some of the machinations of semi-secret "Anglophile" [his word] power groups.

Prominent among these "Anglophile" groups was the secret society organized by Cecil Rhodes around 1891.

Its members included Wm. T. Stead [a spiritualist known to Annie Besant of the Theosophical Society], Lord Esher [an advisor to Queen Victoria], the Earl of Rosebury, Nathan Rothschild, Alfred Milner [whose posts included Colonial Secretary, and War Minister during the First World War], H.A.L. Fisher [sometime Education Minister], and A.J. Balfour.

I do not imply that Quigley, or Clinton [or all those working for the goals of these power groups] were, or are, fully aware of the deeper aims behind the "Anglophiles", but that they are more or less knowingly, or unknowingly, under the influence of the occultists and will usually act in the way desired by these occultists.

Altogether, of those who work in accordance with the aims of what may be loosely called the "Anglo-American power groups" [e.g. the Freemasons (or at least some factions of them), C.F.R., Round Table, Rhodes Scholarships, Skull and Bones, and their associated political and economic instruments] -- or of the Jesuits -- very few are aware of the true, occult aims.

This is true even of most of the "initiated", for the ceremonial magic of the initiation-rituals works on the ethereal bodies of the acolytes so as to make those lower initiates into receptive, unsuspecting instruments for the wishes of the few who are more aware.

This process might loosely be likened to a sophisticated kind of "post-hypnotic suggestion".

In general, we should hold suspect any secret society that practices ceremonial magic and is administered by higher "grades".

-- Nor do I wish to imply that one super-secret power group on earth "controls everything"; various occult power groups, arrayed in various and shifting alliances and antagonisms, vie for their various aims.

The centers of the conspiracies do not lie on the physical plane, and no matter how great their power, they are not omnipotent.

Again, the primal force behind present-day turmoil is the Coming of the Ethereal Christ. As an old saying goes: "Where there is bright light, there are deep shadows.")

         "What's wrong with all that?" -- It is true enough that runaway "market forces", aided by their agents in government, are grievously oppressing Mankind; the gap between rich and poor is cruel and dangerous; the natural environment is being degraded; and so on and on.

We can begin to see "what's wrong" when we consider, as explained above, that Christ appears once and only once in the flesh, and that His Second Coming is now taking place in the supra-physical, ethereal earth.

Clearly this is inconsistent with the supposed Christ-Maitreya coming down from the Himalayas to live in London and appear around the world to the physical senses.

Furthermore, the "Maitreya's" supporters teach that the "anti-Christ energy" will not be manifested through individuals on earth, until 3000 years will have passed since the defeat of Hitler.

Again, this is the reverse of the truth, as explained above: this is the time of climaxing activity of the Antichrist, through Ahrimanic influence, leading to the physical incarnation of Ahriman.

Evidently, this supposed Maitreya-Christ is an impostor who tries to falsify the tremendous events breaking upon us.

         We get a strong clue to the true nature of the "Maitreya" from this statement of his supporters: "For the last 100 years, the Ageless Wisdom teachings have been released through individuals such as Helena Blavatsky, founder of the Theosophical Society, and later by Alice A. Bailey and Helena Roerich.

In 1948, the imminent return of Christ was revealed in Alice Bailey's book, The Reappearance of the Christ." [Emergence Quarterly, No. 9]

         Steiner and, following his researches, Sergei O. Prokofieff (grandson of the composer) have uncovered the occult influences behind Blavatsky, Bailey, and Roerich.

This story, much abridged, goes as follows: Around 1875 Blavatsky gave voice to some true Western (Rosicrucian) wisdom, much garbled, in her Isis Unveiled.

She later came under the influence of a particular group of Eastern, Tibeto-Indian occultists, who inspired her Secret Doctrine, with its strongly anti-Christian bent.

These inspirers were the "mahatmas", the supposed "Morya" and "Kut Humi".

(The true identity of these "mahatmas" is problematic.)

Under her influence, and that of A.P. Sinnet (whose Esoteric Buddhism was inspired by the same "mahatmas"), the Theosophical Society took a decidedly Eastern turn, even moving its headquarters from New York to Madras.

The teachings of the "mahatmas" derived from a pre-Christian occult wisdom and held Lucifer higher than Christ, but also had a strongly materialistic and atheistic tinge.

This "occult materialism" did not deny the existence of higher beings (up to a point), or the human afterlife and reincarnation under the law of karma (indeed, the concept of karma entered Western culture mostly through the Theosophical Society), but it did deny the existence of a theistic God and held that the higher realms consist only of refined, subtle matter.

Blavatsky traveled to India and a secret location in Tibet to be initiated into these teachings.

The "mahatmas" aimed to get a kind of revenge on the Western world for having overwhelmed the East and suppressed Eastern occultism.

We have Blavatsky's (hearsay) testimony that at least one of her "mahatmas" even hated and despised the white race.

On a deeper level, the aim was to work with Lucifer and Ahriman to draw Mankind into the illegitimate realm known to occultism as the "Eighth Sphere".

This realm lies outside the normal seven great ages of the Saturn-Vulcan series.

It arose through Lucifer's introduction, into the Earth Age, of the supersensible Old Moon forces, containing reflected images of higher worlds.

Ahriman tries to take earthly, dense matter and join it to these images to create "densified imaginations" or "spectres".

Materialistic thoughts in human brains, especially the "occult materialism" taught by the "mahatmas", greatly furthers this process.

If human evolution could be diverted into this Eighth Sphere, the Gods' plan for earthly and human evolution would be defeated (at least temporarily).

         Later, after Madame Blavatsky's death, the Theosophical Society, under Annie Besant, tried to put forth the young Krishnamurti as the Christ, or Maitreya, or both.

Krishnamurti was prepared over a number of years, going through some "initiations", but later lost faith in his putative mission, at least in part because his ailing brother died despite the assurances of the "Masters" that he would recover.

As is well known, Krishnamurti later disavowed his nomination, and the whole undertaking collapsed.

(This affair also led to the departure of Steiner from the Theosophical Society -- wherein he had been the Secretary of the German Section -- and subsequently to the founding of the Anthroposophical Society.)

Helena Roerich (and her husband, the painter Nicholas Roerich) came into the picture in the 1920's.

Helena Roerich started receiving telepathic dictations from a "mahatma", and she began to write these inspirations in her multi-volume work Agni Yoga.

Then began a series of journeys, the most amazing of which (1925-28) was an expedition which, under the American flag, crossed India, Tibet, Mongolia, and the then-new Soviet Union.

Incredibly, they traveled to Moscow -- with aid of the OGPU (later called the "KGB") -- to meet with high Bolshevik commissars, and to deliver a letter from the "mahatmas", along with some Tibetan soil for the grave of "our brother Mahatma Lenin".

For the "mahatmas" were indeed cooperating with Anglo-American secret societies in promoting the "socialist experiment" in Russia.

Emissaries of the "mahatmas" had even met with Marx in London and with Lenin in Switzerland.

Though the Anglo-Americans and Indo-Tibetans oppose each other in some ways (the Indo-Tibetans opposed British rule in India), they were united, for somewhat differing motives, in supporting the Bolshevist war against the Russian people and culture.

For the destiny of the Slavic East is to create an humane, Christ-inspired society in the Sixth Cultural Epoch; both these occult groups wish to divert this destiny into other paths -- even by the destruction of human civilization, which would have been the result of Bolshevism, had it succeeded.

(Today, after the "fall of communism", Russia and much of Eastern Europe lie prostrate, both physically and morally.

Russia is grievously wounded, but not yet dead; she might yet rise to her destiny, if "free market reforms" and other destructive Western influences don't kill her first.)

It even turns out that the Indo-Tibetans were behind the depredations of the "Mongol Hordes" of Genghis Khan and his successors, who devastated and enslaved most of Russia.

-- And even today the supporters of "Agni Yoga" are active in Russia; Mikhail Gorbachev is among them.

-- The hidden Tibetan "mahatmas'" headquarters visited by the Roerich expedition was the same as was visited by Madame Blavatsky.

This is the "earthly Shamballa", whose high ruler, according to H. Roerich, is the "Maitreya".

(In its true meaning Shamballa is an Eastern term for the soul-spirit world which was lost to ordinary human perception with the decline of atavistic clairvoyance.

The return of Shamballa refers to the coming recovery of this perception with the new, higher clairvoyance.)

         And it is this same "earthly Shamballa" and these same "mahatmas" who inspired Alice Bailey, and her organizations, the "Servants of the World" and the "Secret School" (Schola Arcana).

Creme's group uses the same prayer, now called the "Transmission Meditation", given in Bailey's The Reappearance of Christ.

And, of course, Bailey's "Christ" who will "reappear" is none other that this so-called "Maitreya".

         The truth, as given by Steiner, about the real Maitreya is roughly this: There are twelve exalted beings, called Bodhisattvas, who serve the Christ Spirit in the guidance of Mankind.

One of these Bodhisattvas was incarnated in the Sixth Century BC as Gautama, who rose to rank of "Buddha".

The excarnate Gautama Buddha closely cooperated with the mission of Christ-Jesus in Palestine, and later took on a mission of redemption on Mars.

His successor was "appointed", so to speak, to take his place in the Lodge of Bodhisattvas, and this Bodhisattva is destined to become the Maitreya Buddha, "the Bringer of the Good", approximately two and a half millennia from now.

Meanwhile, he repeatedly incarnates, at least partially, on earth, in the service of the Christ.

One of these incarnations (or "incorporations" -- not quite incarnations in the usual sense) was as Jeshu ben Pandira, the Essene teacher and martyr (circa 105 BC).

Today this Maitreya-Bodhisattva works to proclaim and further the coming of the Ethereal Christ.

When this Bodhisattva becomes the Maitreya Buddha the earth and the human organism will be constituted very differently than now: thinking, speaking, and doing will be morally consistent.

         Now, some might say: "Your occultist Steiner says one thing; these Indo-Tibetans say something else; still others say yet other things.

What's to choose between them, or among them; it's all incomprehensible anyway."

-- Again, the aim in this short essay is not to prove things conclusively, but to get some important information to a wider public.

Those who absorb these concepts will at least be forewarned, so that they need not be caught wholly unprepared, and unaware, by onrushing events.

It is hoped that those thus forewarned will not easily take at face value the phenomena surrounding the putative "Maitreya" or "Christ", and that they will not be wholly oblivious to the real, Ethereal Christ. And further: it is hoped that people will take the information given here, and begin their own investigations, and even start on the "Path of Knowledge".

There is no need to be dismayed and defeated by the complexity and abstruseness of this subject-matter: truth does live in the human heart, and it speaks to us through a "sense of reality", if we truly will to listen to it.

Those who have a real, persistent will-for-the-truth will eventually find truth, even though most may stray temporally into byways.

The Law is: "Seek, and ye shall find".

         Many modern people, especially those trained in the sciences, regard such concepts as spiritual beings, spiritual worlds, divine Providence, etc., to be preposterous, impossible, or at least unknowable.

The prevailing epistemology (usually unconsciously assumed) of scientific-technical culture holds that whatever "knowledge" we can gain, whether considered certain or hypothetical, we can gain only through the physical senses, mathematizing, and inductive reasoning.

But, as we are taught primarily by Steiner in modern times, we can find other approaches toward gaining experiential knowledge.

Sense-bound, mechanistic-mathematical scientism is peculiar to a particular mode of human consciousness; this mode is prevalent in our time but is not the only kind of consciousness available to Mankind.

(We might regard the "psychedelic revolution" as a muddled attempt to open up these other kinds of consciousness.)

In ancient times Mankind had a dream-like consciousness of "supersensible" realities.

(This consciousness is often and somewhat confusedly called primitive animism).

In the course of evolution we lost this faculty in order to enter deeply into the sense-world, losing our experiential membership in the spiritual cosmos, thus to gain the possibility of individuality and freedom.

We have now reached the evolutionary stage at which we are poised to regain this supersensible experience ("clairvoyance") at a higher level; that is, with the ability of independent, self-willed thinking.

And the practice of this consciously self-willed thinking, as opposed to the Ahrimanic thinking discussed above, is the gateway to true clairvoyance.

For thinking itself, when consciously self-willed and freed from dependence on the subconscious human organism, is itself the first stage of clairvoyance -- a "waking-up" to a higher state of consciousness, which is just as experientially distinct as is ordinary waking day-consciousness from dream-consciousness.

Still higher development of clairvoyance leads to experiences which can be metaphorically described as spiritual "seeing", "hearing", and "touching".

Steiner has given detailed instructions for the orderly, healthy development of these higher faculties of experience.

To entertain another figure of speech, we might consider the developing of these faculties as the refining of the human organism itself into an instrument for scientific investigation -- just as the mineral substances of the earth can be refined and developed into, say, a telescope -- only, the human organism consists of body, life, soul and spirit, and its refining is to make us conscious of supersensible realities.

Rudolf Steiner accomplished this self-development to a higher degree than anyone else who has made himself publicly known in our times, and his teachings on "spiritual science" flow from his supersensible experience.

(There are other, dubious -- or downright evil -- ways of gaining some kind of supersensible experience, but these can lead to delusion and/or moral and spiritual ruin.)

         But this knowledge is not altogether closed to those who do not yet have this clairvoyance.

Steiner time and again emphasized that those of us without spiritual vision can, because true thinking itself is a kind of living-into spirit realities, understand and justifiably believe true information given by the spiritual seer:

"It would be wrong for anyone to say: 'I cannot accept the teachings of spiritual science until I myself become a seer,' for without inward application to the results of spiritual research there is no chance whatever of attaining genuine higher knowledge. It would be as though a child, during gestation, were to refuse the forces coming to it through its mother, and proposed to wait until it could procure them for itself. Just as the embryonic child in its incipient feeling for life learns to appreciate what is offered to it, so can the non-seer appreciate the truths of spiritual science. An insight into these teachings based on a deeply-rooted feeling for truth, and a clear, sound, all-round critical and reasoning faculty are possible even before spiritual things are actually perceived. The esoteric knowledge must first be studied, so that this study becomes a preparation for clairvoyance." [Knowledge of Higher Worlds; p.189 f.]

"For in thought itself an inner entity is present that is connected with the supersensible world." [Occult Science; p.]

"...one, by really thinking, finds oneself in the region of a living supersensible world." [Occult Science; p.295].

"...if we read communications about supersensible facts in the right way, we are living into the stream of spiritual existence." [Occult Science; p.18]

"Certain powers are required to discover the things referred to, but if after having been discovered they are made known, every person can understand them who is willing to bring to them unprejudiced logic and a healthy sense of truth." [Theosophy; p.xx]

"...all knowledge of the worlds of soul and spirit slumbers in the profoundest depths of the human soul. We can grasp, however, not only what we ourselves have brought to light, but also what someone else has brought up from the depths of soul. This is so even when we have ourselves not yet made any preparations for the treading of the Path of Knowledge. Correct spiritual insight awakens the powers of comprehension in anyone whose inner nature is not beclouded by preconceptions and prejudices. Unconscious knowledge flashes up to meet the spiritual fact discovered by another, and this 'flashing up' is not blind faith but the right working of healthy human understanding." [Theosophy; p.156]

"The thoughts [presented by the seer] are, indeed, already present when one [the non-clairvoyant reader] surrenders to them; but one cannot think them if one does not, in every case, recreate them anew within the soul. What is important is the fact that the spiritual researcher calls up thoughts in listeners and readers that they must first draw forth out of themselves...." [Occult Science; p.296]

         We can find our way toward the truth about soul and spirit through our healthy human feeling for reality:

"The feeling for truth and the power of understanding it are inherent in everyone.... This feeling, which perhaps at first perceives nothing at all of what it is told [about higher worlds], is itself the magician that opens the 'eye of the spirit'. In darkness this feeling stirs, the soul sees nothing, but through this feeling it is seized by the power of truth. The truth then gradually draws nearer to the soul and opens the higher sense in it." [Theosophy; p.xviii-xix]

         Of course, we must learn what is so hard for most of us: to distinguish between a healthy feeling for truth and the feeling of satisfaction of our egotistic prejudices.

The key here is unsparing self-examination and a sincere preference for objective reality over our short-sighted, selfish interests and subconscious impulses.

We must have a firm grasp of the fact that the truth is still true regardless of our ignorance or resistance, and have an energetic Will-to-Reality.

Again, the Law is: "Seek, and ye shall find."

If we really love the objective truth above all else, we will come to feel healthy and happy in the presence of truth, and to feel sick and pained in the presence of falsehood.

These pure feelings, and pure, objective thinking are our touchstones of reality and of guidance, and, if fostered, will eventually develop into personal, firsthand, higher cognition -- perhaps not in the present incarnation, but the Will-to-Reality is itself an indestructible reality which carries into future lives and into eternity.

-- Of course, treading the "Path of Knowledge" does not immediately confer infallibility.

In occultism the possibilities for illusion and deception are vast.

One might yet stray into error; however, the essential thing is the seeker's purity of striving for truth.

In Steiner's words:

"...the truth is what leads to the highest and noblest impulses for human evolution; the truth should be dearer to us than we are to ourselves. If our relationship to truth is guided by these words and we still make a mistake in this life, the truth will be strong enough to draw us to itself in the next incarnation. Honest mistakes we make in this incarnation will be compensated and redeemed in the next. It is better to make an honest mistake than to adhere to dogmas dishonestly. After all, our path will be lit by the promise that truth will ultimately prevail, not by our own will, but by its own inherent divine power." [Spiritual Guidance of the Individual and Humanity; . 88-9]

          (Note: One of the questions which occasion much illusion and confusion is that of reincarnation.

Even many of those who readily accept the reality of the supersensible worlds can easily fall into error here, if they do not appreciate the complexities and possibilities for illusion.

According to Steiner, not only does the individual human spirit undergo reincarnation on earth, but so also might, in a way, the ethereal bodies, astral bodies (i.e. the soul-organisms), and even "copies" of the individual Ego.

All these latter are not at all necessarily unique and individualized; they might be shared by many incarnated individual Men. [See the lectures published in English as The Principle of Spiritual Economy.]

-- It is possible that one with insufficiently developed clairvoyance might misperceive these other kinds of reappearance of supersensible entities, taking them to be the true reincarnation of human individualities.

To see how and why, we need some understanding of the stages of higher knowledge metaphorically called spiritual seeing, hearing, and touching.

Steiner calls these stages (in his special, restricted meanings) Imagination, "Inspiration, and Intuition.

-- "To have knowledge of a sense-being means to stand outside it and to judge it according to the external impression.

To have knowledge of a spiritual being through intuition means to have become completely one with it, to have become united with its inner nature.

Step by step the student of the spiritual ascends to such knowledge.

Imagination leads him to sense the perceptions no longer as outer characteristics of beings, but to recognize in them the outpouring of something psycho-spiritual; inspiration leads him further into the inner nature of beings.

He learns through it to understand what these beings are to each other; with intuition he penetrates into the beings themselves." [Occult Science, p. 310]

-- And further: "What is released after death from the human bodily nature goes through various states in the subsequent period.

The states directly after death might be described in some measure through imaginative cognition.

What, however, takes place when man advances further into the period between death and rebirth would have to remain quite unintelligible to imaginative cognition, if inspiration did not come to the rescue.

Only inspiration is able to discover what may be said about the life of man in the land of spirits after purification....

Whoever wished to fathom the nature of man by imagination and inspiration alone, would miss the innermost processes of his being that take place from incarnation to incarnation.

Only intuitive cognition, therefore, makes possible an adequate research into repeated earth lives and into karma." [Occult Science, . 310-1]

-- In general, those of us who have not attained to "intuitive cognition" should use great caution in forming judgments on our own about the identities of particular individuals in cases of reincarnation.

We might be misled by an incomplete perception of the reappearance of unindividualized parts of the human entity.

To judge these as indicating "reincarnation" might be partially true, in that some supersensible human "energies" are indeed reappearing in the physical world, but such judgments could be seriously misleading if one were to read uncritically from them deep meanings concerning an individual's destiny through repeated earthly incarnations.)

         A.P. Shepherd's Scientist of the Invisible [Inner Traditions; New York; 1983] presents a quick overview of Rudolf Steiner's lifework.

This work provides only the barest introduction; the serious investigator will need to probe deeper.

Steiner left a stupendous, vast body of work in German; not all of it is available in English.

Most of the publications bearing his name are not his writings, but his lectures, preserved in stenographic records (of lessor or greater accuracy) and published without his review and corrections.

Most of these lectures were given to audiences who were familiar with his basic teachings, and he spoke directly to the particular needs of his listeners.

He only reluctantly allowed (most of) the stenographic records to published, with the disclaimer that they might contain errors and could be rightly judged only by those who already had a thorough understanding of the basics of spiritual science.

Thus the investigator might best begin by studying Steiner's basic writings, which he intended for the general public, and which systematically set forth his fundamental concepts.

Chief among these basic works are Theosophy [1904] and Occult Science, an Outline [1910].

These are indispensable for an understanding of Steiner's spiritual anthropology and cosmology, and give condensed expositions of the "path of knowledge".

The chapter by that name in Theosophy should almost be memorized by the serious truth-seeker.

An extended exposition of this Path is given in Knowledge of Higher Worlds [1904-5], also in a new translation: How to Know Higher Worlds.

         Steiner's basic work on the enlivenment of thinking itself is The Philosophy of Freedom [1894; 1918].

(Other translations: The Philosophy of Spiritual Activity and Intuitive Thinking as a Spiritual Path.)

This book can be hard reading; we can get some help from Otto Palmer's compilation: Rudolf Steiner on his Book The Philosophy of Freedom [Anthroposophic Press; 1979] and from Georg Kühlewind's Stages of Consciousness, "Chapter One" [Lindisfarne Press; 1984].

         Steiner gave many lecture cycles expounding his clairvoyant insights into Christology, but his basic written treatment of that subject is the early work Christianity as Mystical Fact (another translation: Christianity and the Occult Mysteries of Antiquity).

          Robert McDermott's The Essential Steiner includes a reading guide to Steiner's works; this book also contains introductory essays by McDermott and selections from Steiner's works.