Understanding Our Time
by Terry Boardman
This essay first appeared as an article in New View magazine
Issue 51 April,-June 2009
Bewilderment is
widespread today. It is commonly recognised that modern society is experiencing
a major crisis that is economic, ecological, political and cultural. We seem to
be facing one of those major nodes of significant shift in history that have
occurred in former times such as at the end of the Roman Empire c.300, the end
of the Middle Ages c.1500, the emergence of the national and 'natural
scientific' state c.1650, the revolutionary epoch c.1800, or the First World
War. Confusion is commonplace at such times, and solutions seem hard to find.
How can we make sense of what is going on? The question could also be posed as:
how can we find our bearings by understanding where we are in our story?
Conventional
views of history do not help us much; embedded within a mainstream natural
scientific worldview, they condemn us to a random position in both space and
time: our Earth is a beautiful but insignificant speck in the Universe and is
bound merely for an ultimate 'heat death'. Compared to the astronomical wonders
revealed to us by technological marvels like the Hubble telescope, all our
cultural achievements and our human relationships have little or no
significance. Our lives are equally random happenings that occur only once.
After death there is nothing except the return of our ashes or corpses to the
material Earth. Philosophically then, all is an absurdity, ultimately quite
meaningless; existence is a comedy show, and all we can do is 'have a laugh', as
the English might put it. Certainly, there is no sense in our western culture's
religion and the calendar based on it. The second millennium that we celebrated
just 9 years ago is seen as a convenient fiction, nothing more. 2009 is held to
be but a number.
From
such a bleak philosophical perspective, which its adherents like to think of as
existentially 'heroic', it is indeed hard to make sense of what is going on at
present. We move on merely one step at a time into the darkness of the future
out of a dimly lit past with only the little candle of our
intellect, which was lit by the beginning of natural science just 400
years ago, to illuminate the vast darkness. The position of those who adhere to
the conventional, western secular humanist outlook on life as represented by our
mainstream media is akin to that of the British soldiers in the Great War who
sang: "we're 'ere because we're 'ere because we're 'ere because we're
'ere....", and cosmologists just add "and because there was a Big
Bang." There would certainly seem to be more to the present crisis than
just: "the bankers were too greedy, the politicians too lax, our industry
too exploitative of Nature, and the terrorists too resentful of our
freedoms", but in essence, that is all too often what conventional analysis
boils down to.
By
contrast to this tragi-comic bleakness, which reminds one rather of the dour weltanschauung
of the pagan Anglo-saxons, the spiritual scientist Rudolf Steiner (1861-1925)
offered a number of approaches by which we can understand the past in a way that
helps us to make sense both of the present and also of intuitions about what may
be coming towards us from the future. Some of these approaches Steiner was
presenting anew, or recasting, for modern times; they belonged to the esoteric
knowledge of previous eras. Other indications were his own contribution. Steiner
made innumerable contributions that help us make sense of historical events, but
seven major ones can be noted:
1)
the
Christ Balance in History
2)
the
Zodiacal Ages
3)
the
archangelic Regencies
4)
Axial
years (the 'mirror' principle)
5)
humanity's
crossing of the spiritual threshold in 1899/1900
6)
the
activities of spiritual counterforces in modern times
7)
the 'Etheric
Christ Event' & the 33.33 year Rhythm
This
article will address the first three
of these, as a presentation of all seven would be too long. I shall turn to
remaining four in the next issue of New
View. One other major factor that should be mentioned, and which was one of
Steiner's major The contributions,
especially in his later years, is that of human reincarnations, both of leading
individualities and of groups, indeed, of all of us, but these occur within the
contexts of 2) and 3) above, and will be mentioned in those contexts. (1)
We
breathe in, we breathe out, and between these two there is a lacuna, a pause. We
sleep at night and in unconsciousness, refresh our bodies and spirits. We are
wakefully active by day and in consciousness, exhaust our forces; and in between
there is dreaming. We exist in the spiritual world and we exist in earthly life.
In between, there is dying and gestation. In other words, in human breathing, in
our sleeping and waking, and in our existence as a whole, there are three
stages - two phases and a third,
a balance, between them. These three stages can
be compared to the three parts of the musical octave: the three lower notes
(do-re-mi) the three higher (so-la-ti) and the one between them (fa), or one can
see it in terms of corresponding pairs of musical intervals: the first and
seventh, the second and sixth, the third and fifth, and the interval of the
fourth in the middle of the three pairs, which is the axis or fulcrum of all of
them. One can also think of of the 7-branched menora candlestick used in Jewish
ceremonies.
Likewise,
we can think of our entire journey through Time on this planet as two vortices
or spirals, mirroring each other around a centrepoint, rather like an hourglass,
which is a three-dimensional representation of this movement as a lemniscate is
the two-dimensional. We can harmonise the eastern
cyclical and western linear progressive concepts of history in the spiral form,
which unites both. The menora gives a hint as to the central point, the
balancing fulcrum of the whole, for just as Palestine is in a central location
on the world map in space, so is it in history, in that civilisation has, for
the last 10,000 years, broadly moved from East to West, from China and India to
California. And why is Palestine in this central location between E.Asia and the
west coast of America? Why are the descendants of Abraham, of Isaac and Ishmael,
even today in dispute with one another? Why is the Middle East so much at the
centre of world affairs? Why have Israel and the Jewish people been the focus of
so much controversy for the last 2000 years? The answer is complex but in
essence, it revolves around Jesus Christ. For Steiner, the one physical
appearance on Earth for three years in Jesus of Nazareth by the divine Logos,
the Creative Word, the Being known to us as Christ, signified the
very balance and turning point of the entire story of
mankind
and the planet. At the heart of Steiner's message was that Jesus Christ was no
mere great teacher of morality but the Being or Consciousness that literally
brought our world and solar system into existence. Steiner repeatedly drew
attention to the point that it was not so much what Christ said or taught
but what He did that was of world-historical significance, and what He did,
through His death and Resurrection, was to reverse the very course of evolution
on this planet and begin the process of the ultimate transfiguration of the
Earth, which will happen as human beings increasingly unite themselves in
consciousness with the Christ Being. Steiner points out that despite an awesome
process of preparation, which actually involved the entire history of the
Israelite people, Jesus was only able to bear the Christ Power for just three
years, so It is clearly inappropriate to think of a Being of this nature as
'wholly contained' within the frame and brain of Jesus of Nazareth. Rather, one
can imagine a vast inverted vortex, the mere tip of which filled the human being
of Jesus at the Baptism in the Jordan. If the first half of Man's time on this
planet can be compared to a single inhalation, then the 33 years of the life of
Jesus are the interval before the outbreath; they are, in fact, what makes the
outbreath possible.
In
accord with this idea of the 33 year life of Christ as the pivot of human
history, we can think of the period
2009 years before the birth of Jesus as having a relationship with 2009
years after the Resurrection. The
year 1000 BC will thus approximately be mirrored by 1033 AD. When we come to our
own times, 1933 AD thus corresponds to 1900 BC, so
1939 BC, the probable date of the birth of Abraham (2) relates to 1972 AD. In
the 21st century AD, some fascinating observations result, for we realise that
the corresponding 21st century BC is before
the time of Abraham and the beginning of the story of the Hebrew people, in fact
of both peoples Jews and Arabs, who descended from Isaac and Ishmael, the
sons of Abraham. We also realise that the Babylonian Captivity of the Jews (587
BC), their subsequent release by the Persian King Cyrus (538 BC) and the
rebuilding of the Temple corresponds to the period which saw the birth of
Mohammed (570) and the beginnings of Islam (620). The life of Abraham is usually
dated to anywhere between 1750 and 2000 BC, and in 587 BC the Jews lost their
independence as a people when they went into the Babylonian Captivity. From then
on, with a short exception (164 63 BC) they were ruled by foreigners. The
period from c.2000 BC to 587 BC thus corresponds, around the axis of the life of
Jesus, to the period c.620-2033 AD, in which Islam has developed.
2)
the Zodiacal Ages
The
second approach
to interpreting history is that which relates to the precession of the
equinoxes; I shall call it 'the Zodiacal approach' to distinguish it from the
'planetary approach', which I shall consider later; the 'Zodiacal approach' was
not Steiner's phrase. In physical terms, this has to do with our planet's great
'wobble' around the celestial north pole, a wobble which takes approx. 26,000
years to complete and is known, more elegantly, as the Great, or Platonic, Year.
During this long period the vernal point (spring equinox, when day and night are
in balance), where the rising Sun is observed against the constellation 'behind'
it, is observed to shift, or precess backwards through the Zodiac of the fixed
stars at a rate of 1° every 72 years.(3)
This gives rise to a 'Platonic month' of 30 x 72 = 2160 years to precess through
one sign of the Zodiac. This 2160 year period is the key here. Steiner described
at great length that all such astronomical phenomena are caused not by the
intrinsic qualities of material bodies or abtract 'fields' and 'forces' but by
the actions of spiritual beings, higher dimensional consciousnesses. Indeed,
Time itself, according to Steiner, consists of spiritual beings beings whose
'bodies' are made of Time as our bodies are made of matter.
The
western esoteric tradition speaks of 9 distinct levels of spiritual
consciousness above the human consciousness. Beings of the third level above the
human are these Time Beings, who were created in the far distant condition
called by Steiner Old Saturn, a period in which there was no Time or Space as we
know it. There were already states of consciousnesses, sometimes referred to as
spirital beings, and the sacrifice offered by one of these kinds of
consciousness to the spiritual beings above it gave
birth to the beings of Time. Steiner gives a picture of such a sacrifice as the
giving up of a part of one's being so that a new possibility can emerge.
Every manifestation of heat, fire and warmth has 'sacrifice' at its
root. These Time beings that were created on Old Saturn Steiner called 'Spirits
of Personality' (traditionally they are known as Archai, Primal Beginnings)
because with them began the very first seeds of human personality. In the
present stage of the evolution of the Earth, it is their task to facilitate the
rebirths of those human souls who need to be reborn in a particular astrological
era. The concern of the Archai Time Spirits is with global humanity in a
particular epoch, not the individual or group, as with the two lower ranks or
consciousnesses of spiritual beings (traditionally, angels and archangels).
Spirits of Personality bring it about that certain human individualities are
born at certain times for the benefit of the whole of humanity. Other Spirits of
Personality, whom Steiner calls 'Time Spirits', have the task of influencing
physical conditions on the earth in such a way that human evolution can
progress; this is often done, for example, through such means as the (to human
eyes) 'fortuitous coincidences' that lead to new discoveries and inventions. We
can think of the activity, or 'office' of a Time Spirit, a vast consciousness
encompassing the globe for 2160 years, which is the
period Steiner attributes to the activity or office of successive Time Spirits.
It is like the weather and the seasons; it does not compromise our individual
freedom but it is there nonetheless. We simply have to operate within it, as we
are actually living within it.
During
each one of these 2160 year periods a different element of the ninefold human
organism. (4) is elaborated. Through three such periods, from 2907 BC until 3573
AD, the three human soul forces are being elaborated, and having developed the
Sentient (feeling) and Intellectual-Mind (thinking) Soul elements in the two
previous ages (2907 BC 1413 AD) and under our Time Spirit, since the 15th
century, humanity has been developing what is called the Consciousness, or
Spiritual, Soul, which relates to our sense of self and our will.
This
epoch has a number of characteristics which, if we understand them, help us
greatly to make sense of much of what is happening around us today. First, the
epoch is one of emerging individuality, in which more and more people
are coming to know themselves as spiritual beings with their own spiritual
biographies and destinies, who, while belonging to a family, tribe or other
collectivity, realise that in truth they as individual spiritual beings belong
to no collectivity save humanity itself. However, this requires a new
relationship with older, group associations, and this process often breeds
antipathy. Indeed, our age cannot but be of ever growing antipathy and
self-assertion, for the process of becoming a self is necessarily long and
painful. These antipathies, often radically expressed, give rise to great evils
in society and culture e.g. the world wars of the 20th century. It might seem
counterintuitive to say that; were not the world wars caused by societies that
sought to return to some form of collectivism, objectors might argue? No, a more
convincing argument can be made that they were the result of reactions by those
societies to other societies which were pursuing more modern agendas (free
market capitalism, colonialism, imperialism) that had freed the individual to
indulge his selfishness. Wilhelmine Germany sought to imitate imperialist
Britain; Russia's Bolsheviks gained support through claiming they wanted to give
the masses land, bread and peace a respite from the self-indulgent
westernisation of Russia's capitalist class. Italian Fascists and Japanese
militarists alike railed at western selfishness and individualism and called for
a more noble vision of society that looked back to ancient social forms. These
were revolts against what was perceived to be the modern selfish individualism
of the West. All traditional supports, the old unconscious forms of society and
community gradually wither and fall away in our age, so that we must now work consciously
at finding new forms of cooperation and community.
Parallel
to this growing experience of ourselves as individual essences, in which we both
separate ourselves from unconscious affiliation to groups while paradoxically
realising our sense of belonging to the greater whole, has been our exploration
of the mineral realm of material being since the 17th century and the consequent
growth of natural science. We can grasp this mineral realm through calculation
and fixed concepts because it is essentially dead and fragmentary. These fixed
concepts and precise calculations, however, fail us when it comes to advancing
to attempts to understand the dynamics of the biological and human realms, which
call for very different forms of cognitive approach. The mineral realm is
essentially the individualised aspect of the physical world in that it is
non-dynamic. Metals and ores were once in flow, and can become so again when
heated but in their natural state they are as frozen and can be broken up by a
suitable application of technical force.
Indeed,
a central leitmotif of our Age (1413-3573, the astrological Age of Pisces) is
one of humanity's struggle with power and will human will and the will of Nature, which,
from a spiritual scientific viewpoint, is the will of higher beings present in
Nature in frozen or dynamic forms. Since the 17th century, and the rise of
natural science and technology, we have had to struggle with will in a way that
challenges us to put our thinking at the service of the Good, as distinct from
at the service only of beauty or of truth, which were the leading values of the
two previous eras (2907-747 BC, 747BC-1413). Paradoxically, the mineral realm,
says Steiner, the lowest level of
material being, represents the created work, the frozen willpower, of the highest
forms of spiritual consciousness, the highest spiritual beings, just as our will
life within our metabolism is far older and wiser than our immature thinking
life connected to our nervous system. The technology that results from the
exploitation of the mineral realm thus presents mankind with problems of
literally world-shattering dimension, as we were shocked into realising on 16th
July 1945, when the first A-bomb was exploded at Alamogordo in the 'Trinity
Project'. In the social realm, according to Steiner, the leading theme of our age is
the rise to predominance of the economic life, following the ascendancy of the
religious and then political/military life in the previous two epochs, for
here too in economics, in the transformation of the fruits of Nature into human
products, we have to do with humanity's interaction with power, the
product of the greatest work of higher beings.
Indeed, in contemporary events such as the so-called global 'economic crisis',
can we not see the efforts of those active at the highest level of the economic
life to supplant politicians as the effective rulers of our global culture? Is
this indeed really a genuine 'crisis', or is it in fact rather, an engineered
event through which financiers and corporate leaders can assert their claim to
global leadership? How do we understand it? Here is the theme of the age : the
application of thinking in a moral struggle for the Good in relation to
economics and our power over Nature and over our fellow human beings. Since the
17th century our economic life has been based on antipathy, self-assertion and
personal profit. These self-centred motivations were the inevitable first stage
of what Steiner termed the Age of the Consciousness Soul (the Age of Pisces) in
which individuals emancipate themselves from traditional socio-cultural bonds on
their way to realising themselves as spiritual beings. But the time has come now
to move on beyond this necessarily 'adolescent' first stage. To carry on
essentially with the self-centred economic behaviour of the past two centuries
will lead inexorably to the destruction both of society and the planetary
eco-system.
The self-assertive power dimension of the age of the
Consciousness Soul considered above relates to another essential theme of our
time: the awakening to spiritual knowledge and life through the confrontation
with what is called 'evil'. According to Steiner, evil exists in our world not
for its own sake but actually for the purpose of enabling us to awaken to
spiritual freedom through inner struggle against evils which exist both within
our own souls and in the outer world. Unfortunately, our age has, since the 15th
century, become so spiritually ignorant, so enmeshed in materialism, that all
too often we only awaken after the most terrible inner or outer blows.
"Evil
will be openly present in a large number of people as an attitude, a way of
thinking, not any more covered up or hidden. The evil ones will praise the evil
as something especially valuable. A certain sensual pleasure in this evil, this
demony ... can already be seen in many people ... Nietzsche's 'blond
beast' is for example only a spectral premonition, pointing to it." (5)
This
fascination with evil can be observed in many aspects of modern culture, from
T-shirts and computer games to opera and the genre of 'death metal' rock music.
The two movie trilogies The Lord of the
Rings and The Matrix, which both
appeared round the millennium nine years ago, portray with great directness and
clarity and from two very different perspectives this awesome process
of global suffering, confrontation with evil and awakening to the spirit. This
confrontation will continue on until the end of this age of Piscses in the
fourth millennium yet we are steadily awakening new forces of spiritual
imagination and social sympathy and empathy to overcome the evils that beset
us.(6)
Three
other aspects of the Zodiacal periods can briefly be mentioned. If we recall the
menora mentioned earlier, or the parallel notes of the octave, we can understand
that each period of 2160 years on either side of the historical fulcrum, the
Incarnation of Christ, has a corresponding period on the other side of the
fulcrum. If we see the Incarnation of Christ falling in the central 4th
period(7), then our 5th period will reflect the 3rd (2907 747 BC) in some
way. This means that we should expect to see in this 5th age various
'resonances' with the 3rd age. That was
an epoch in which the most advanced cultures were those of the Near East: Sumer,
Egypt, Chaldea and Babylon. We do
indeed see these resonances in such varied phenomena as the symbology and
teachings of freemasonic or hermetic esotericism, in the overpowering
massiveness of modernist architecture, in the social forms and rituals of
totalitarian fascism, the resurgence of astrology and cryogenics ('mummifying'
bodies or heads for future reanimation), not to mention the return of expert
priesthoods such as we now have in our scientific
establishments.
All these phenomena have emerged since our 5th age began in the 15th
century.
This is not a matter of value judgments. Resonances with the 3rd epoch will
occur in any case; we just need to be aware of them and realise that they stem
from the past and not from the actual present or from the future. Steiner
indicated that the Time Spirit of the
Eye in Pyramid on US dollar billar since 1935
3rd Age (Egypt) rose in its evolution thereafter to the higher rank of the Spirits of Form, and those beings, concerned with form principles in general, tend to represent stasis in human and natural life. It is their appointed role to bring movement to quietude and relative fixity. Without them,
there
would be no physical or mineral matter; all would be in constant flow no
rocks, stones, metals, crystals or ice. This
means that there is a continuous dissonance in our 5th epoch between the
Consciousness Soul impulse to move beyond a physically-oriented, more static
kind of thinking based on logic and mineral realm-based calculations towards a
more imaginative and mobile thinking that is comfortable with dynamic processes
and metamophosis.
While
Time itself may consist of the consciousness of higher beings, within which
human beings move, Time in the form of human history also consists of the
consciousness of beings, namely, human beings. While secular and humanist
intellectuals, from Karl Marx to Richard Dawkins, have asserted that history
consists of abstractions unrelated to human individuality, such as class
struggle and dialectical materialism (8) or the efforts of genes to replicate
themselves, Steiner described history as the interaction between the
consciousness of spiritual beings, who themselves undergo a spiritual evolution,
and those of human beings, who evolve spiritually by reincarnating in different
ages. Normally, he said, human beings reincarnate twice in each of the
successive Zodiacal ages (2160 years), once as a man and once as a woman, to
share in and contribute to the emergence of the new developing human faculties
in each Age, for example, the development of the Consciousness Soul. To this
end, in the life in the spiritual world between death and rebirth, each
individual selects his future family, race, country and place to be born, an
awesomely complex process. Steiner gave many examples of how reincarnation
works, especially in the eight volumes of lectures titled Karmic
Relationships (1924), but owing no doubt to its complexity, karma and
reincarnation has been one of the least developed fields of research work in
anthroposophical circles since his death in 1925. He insisted, however, that
unless we come to understand ever more clearly how individuals carry over
impulses from their previous lives into present times, then our knowledge of the
truth of history will always be missing a major causative element.
At the
time of writing, Josef Fritzl (pic.) has just been sentenced in Austria to life
imprisonment
for one of the most appalling crimes of recent times the enslavement and
imprisonment in an underground cellar, of his own daughter, his repeated
incestuous rape of her over a period of 24 years, which resulted in the birth of
seven children, one of whom he murdered by neglect. The media are already
speculating that such dreadful crimes are the result of his own loneliness and
ill treatment by his own mother when he was a child yet many other human beings
today experience similar childhood conditions without becoming like Josef Fritzl.
A Freudian perspective might push the cause back to conditions in infancy. We
have even become used to the idea today of pushing things even further back to a
consideration of prenatal
conditions, for example what the mother was eating or experiencing in pregnancy.
But this is still trying to find the cause of events within the boundaries of
the single physical life, rather like the churches used to insist that our
destination for heaven or hell would depend on our behaviour in this
one life, and when it was asked: "how can God take the lives of
innocent children?" people were told: "The Lord moves in mysterious
ways", or "He does such things to test our faith". It was the
early mediaeval Church that, for its own reasons, restricted western humanity's
view of existence to just one life.(9) This doctrine of only one human life was
something that the Protestants did not reform, and so westerners whose
thinking is informed by natural science continue to hold this view - one
life: nothing before, nothing after and so they believe that all illness,
suffering and wickedness as well as great talents and positive characteristics
are to be explained either by environmental factors in the present life or by
physical genetic factors, which when traced, ultimately disappear into a
genealogical 'mist-ery'.
When
it comes to leading personalities who are to make major contributions to human
development in a Zodiacal age, these are guided to do so, says Steiner, by the
Spirits of Personality, the Time Spirits (Archai), whose 'bodies' are the
successive ages. They do this by guiding those incarnating souls into a
particular culture, and for this, they need the cooperation of the next lower
consciousness, that of the archangels, who are the guiding beings of
communities, great and small. This brings us to the third element under
consideration in this article.
3)
The archangelic Time Regencies
It
was said above that the Spirits of Personality (Archai), beings who are three
dimensions higher than the human, bring it about that certain human
individualities, who are born at particular times for the benefit of the whole
of humanity, have to be born into specific cultures or nations. The task of the
Archai is furthered by the lower rank of spiritual beings, traditionally known
as Archangels, who function as the guardians, so to speak, of groups of human
beings, whether large ones, such as nations, or smaller ones such as ethnic
minorities or associations. The archangels bring it about that during shorter
periods of history (approx. 350-600 years) a particular people hold the cultural
'baton' so to speak, and play a special role. Thus we see the Age of the
archangelic being traditionally known as Gabriel (c.1510-1879)(10) almost
exactly encompassed England's rise to, and enjoyment of, preeminent power in
material terms (military, finance, industry, science). Henry VIII, who separated
England from Catholic Europe, became King in 1509, and it was precisely in the
1880s that England's material power
began to decline markedly vis-ΰ-vis economic rivals such as America and
Germany. Just as there are seven days of the week, so there are seven
archangelic Time Regents who consecutively 'reign' for periods of 350-600 years.
They are related to specific planetary spheres. Traditionally, the two
archangels Gabriel (Moon) and Michael (Sun) stood at the gates of birth and
death. Gabriel always increases Man's interest in the material world and all
that is particular and local (e.g. natural science, nationalism), while Michael
who, according to Steiner, is now rising to Archai-level consciousness, directs
Man's attention to the spiritual world (e.g. spiritualisation of thinking, cosmopolitanism).
Michael
(l.),
In
1979 we entered the second century of the Michael epoch that is due to continue
until about 2300, so the Michaelic impulses of spirituality, idealism and
cosmopolitanism will gradually be growing in strength, while the nationalist and
materialist wave that carried all before it in the Gabriel era will fade by
comparison. This is not to say materialism will fade entirely. On the contrary,
Steiner held it be strong throughout the Age of the Consciousness Soul, and
necessarily so, to provide the resistance that the self-liberating individual
spirit requires. What is meant is that during this Michael era within the
2160-year period of the Age of Pisces, materialism will be weaker for several
centuries; it will doubtless grow again thereafter. It is critical therefore
that mankind make the most of the next two or three centuries of the Michael era
to sow good seeds for the future. The successive archangelic regencies do not
start and stop like clockwork. Their impulses
fade in gradually and build inexorably up to a peak towards the end of
the era like a great wave and then crash and subside. The Gabrielic impulses
that gave rise to nationalism therefore (attachment to an earthly locality or
country) were at their peak from 1879-1979: at the very end of the Gabrielic era
and in the first century of the Michaelic era. Those forces which work against
human progress not only work directly against the impulse of the new archangelic
Regency by seeking to keep the impulses of the former era dominant but can also
work with the grain of the new era by twisting it, distorting it and leading it
into a perverse direction. This can be seen in the efforts of Anglo-American
imperialist forces to exploit internationalist bodies such as the UN or by
proclaiming the benefits of 'globalisation' so as to increase the dominance of
western-based transnational corporations.
Of
great significance for the theme of the Age of the Consciousness Soul in the
eras of Gabriel and Michael is the relation between the English and
German-speaking peoples, who since the 17th century ought to have been
cooperating in developing natural (England) and spiritual (Germany) science but
who have been unable to do so sufficiently in such a way that would allow a
spiritual science to parallel natural science. While
England dominated in the age of Gabriel, as indicated above, Germany should have
come to the fore in the age of Michael (since 1879) with spiritual
culture and indeed she did 'rise up', but not in the way she should have
done, for the Germans opted to copy the English material
will to power, and failed to take up with sufficient energy what Rudolf Steiner
offered in anthroposophy. The English, meanwhile, not wishing to relinquish
their imperial will to power, sought to prolong it 'illegitimately' 120 years
ago by inveigling the United States into taking up 'the Anglo-saxon burden' of
global domination. German ambition for material power and Britain's arrogant
possessiveness and desire for a false spiritual power -
the British Empire as 'the Light of the World' - led
directly to the tragedies of the two world wars, which were in effect a single
30 year conflict. As Britain and America attempt to lead Europe and especially
Germany into waging war in Central Asia, we can see that we are still very much
suffering the consequences today of decisions made over a century ago. As the
generations that experienced the two world wars directly and their children's
generation pass on in the course of the second Michael century, it is to be
hoped that English and German speakers can find ways to overcome the wounds of
the past and work together for the benefit of humanity in this crucial era.
It is
hoped that this brief overview of the first three of Rudolf Steiner's seven
major contributions to understanding history from a modern spiritual
perspective will serve to stimulate readers to explore further themselves by
study of Steiner's works and with reference to their own experience. (11)
NOTES
(2)
Abraham is said in Genesis to have lived to the age of 175. According to Matthew
1:17 there were 42 generations from Abraham to Jesus Christ, and 14 generations
from the carrying away into Babylon, which occurred in 587 BC. A 'generation' is
therefore reckoned as 42 years. 42 x 42 = 1764. If 1764 BC is assumed to be the
death of Abraham, 1764 + 175 gives a date of
1939 BC for his birth, which relates to 1972 -
remarkable in itself, given the experiences of Jews and Arabs in the 20th
century. Traditional rabbinic
dating based on the Seder Olam Rabbah chronicle (2nd cent. AD) puts
Abraham's life at 1976-1801 BC.
(3)
More accurately, 71.6°.
(4)
There are 3 bodily elements, three soul elements, three spiritual
elements. See Steiner's book, Theosophy.
(5)
Rudolf
Steiner: The Temple Legend
(Rudolf Steiner Press, 1985), a lecture of 11 Nov 1904.
(6)
See
(7)
Actually just before the exact centre of the 4th age, which was in 333 AD,
midway between 747 BC and 1413 AD
(8)
The history of all hitherto existing society is the history of class
struggles. Communist Manifesto, 1848
(9)
Steiner indicated that the West had to be cut off for a time from the knowledge
of reincarnation. Otherwise a culture of materialism and natural science would
not have developed. But that time, he said,
ended in 1900. Western humanity now needs to regain an understanding that
human individuality transcends both death and birth. This knowledge has indeed
steadily been growing in the West, especially since the 1960s.
A
signficant date in the West's attitude towards the issue of one or more lives
was 553 AD, the 5th Ecumenical Council of the Church, at Constantinople, when
the teachings of the early Christian Father Origen (185-254 AD), who subscribed
to the idea of the pre-existence of souls, were anathematised.
(10)
1525 in the more rigid system of exactly 354 years and 4 months for each age
according to Abbot Johannes Trithemius of Sponheim (1462-1516) in his treatise On
the Seven Secondary Causes i.e. Intelligences or Spirits who move the Spheres
according to God (1508, publ. 1515)
(11) The online English-language library of Steiner's works at http://www.rsarchive.org/ is a great help.
©
Terry Boardman
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