The Ahrimanic Moment

In a poetic metaphysics such as the one I’ve been promulgating for some time now, one finds that the distinctions between actual and imaginal, between the concrete and the dreamt, between the logical and the intuitive are in reality constructed and that the barriers separating them easily dissolve before the beholder’s mindful and attentive presence.

We’ve recently been confronted with a number of narratives that shapeshift in response to need, even if the need is to confuse and destabilize. We’ve witnessed, of course, the myriad conflicting reports and mandates regarding the Covid phenomenon so engulfing our lives as of late—conflicting reports more often than not arising from the same entities, be they human persons or corporate bodies. Simultaneously, we stand and watch in a kind of awe if not bewilderment as our basic freedoms as human agents are challenged, muffled, if not canceled in the face of a totalizing onslaught of speech codes, restrictions on mobility, and threats of repercussion if we question these phenomena at all.

One of the disturbing developments in this moment, for me at least, is the migration of so much of our lives into online environments, not least schools and shopping. The gradual disappearance of coinage, for one, appears a bellweather of a disturbing trend. We have all become avatars, projected selves that would melt in the presence of other human beings of flesh and blood, warmth and spirit--presences which are at the moment discouraged.

As a result of all of this, what I’ve been thinking about lately is Rudolf Steiner’s notion of “the Incarnation of Ahriman.” For Steiner, Ahriman is a spiritual being that wishes to enslave us to logic, efficiency, and the technological (The Evil Genius in Terry Gilliam’s 1982 film Time Bandits illustrates this in a humorous manner). In a lecture delivered a century ago, Steiner contrasts this image with that of Lucifer (Hegel haunts Steiner to a degree):

“Lucifer is the power that stirs up all fanatical, all falsely mystical forces in human beings, all that physiologically tends to bring the blood into disorder and so lift man above and outside himself. Ahriman is the power that makes people dry, prosaic, philistine—that ossifies them and brings them in the superstition of materialism….

“Ahriman has the greatest interest in concealing from mankind that in modern intellectual, rationalistic science, in superstitious empiricism, one is dealing with a great illusion, a deception—that men should not recognize this is of the greatest possible interest to Ahriman. It would be a triumphant experience for him if the scientific superstition which infiltrates all areas of life today and which human beings even try to use as a template for the social sciences should prevail into the third millennium. He would have the greatest success if he could then arrive in western civilization in human form and find the scientific superstition as prevailing dogma.”1

As I’ve written in my book Transfiguration, I’m not exactly sure how to read Steiner’s take on Ahriman—as a metaphor? or as a spiritual reality? Maybe as both. Because, let’s face it: Steiner was on the money about the twenty-first century and every physical reality has a spiritual counterpart. In addition, the morass of scientific superstition in which we now wallow is more dogmatic than any pronouncement from the Catholic Church, and secular scientific inquisitors infest every corner and pixel of the internet, the world where most of us now live.

Steiner was hardly alone is his concerns about an encroaching technological evolution that could compromise the essence of being human. The Russian philosopher and prophet Nikolai Berdyaev predicted much the same thing, as did in their way Marshall McLuhan, Jacques Ellul, Ivan Illich, and, most notably, Martin Heidegger. Berdyaev, writing in the 1930s, speaks directly to our moment:

“The speed consequent upon the increasing mechanization of life has had a deadly effect on the human Ego, and has sapped its foundations of unity and consistence. The advent of machinery and the mechanization of life have led to an extreme objectification of human existence, to its materialization in a strange, inhuman and frigid world. And though this world is the work of man, it is essentially anti-human.”2

Sophiology stands in firm opposition to this mechanization of life, this Ahrimanic moment. Sophiology offers a relationship to the Real—to other creatures, to people, to plants, animals, and the cosmos, including even microbes, not to mention the angelic and divine orders. Our current moment encourages just the opposite.

One could say that our times have forgotten the incipient philosophical question posed by the Psalmist: “What is man, that thou art mindful of him? and the son of man, that thou visitest him? For thou hast made him a little lower than the angels, and hast crowned him with glory and honour” (8:3-4). The Psalmist furthermore places these relationships at the center of human flourishing: “Thou madest him to have dominion over the works of thy hands; thou hast put all things under his feet: All sheep and oxen, yea, and the beasts of the field; The fowl of the air, and the fish of the sea, and whatsoever passeth through the paths of the seas” (8:6-8).

Our own path to human flourishing is a simple as it is clear. Will we embrace it?

The Evil Genius plans on remaking Creation.

Michael’s latest books are an edition of The Chymical Wedding of Christian Rosenkreutz and Transfiguration: Notes toward a Radical Catholic Reimagination of Everything. He can be reached at director@thecenterforsophiologicalstudies.com See also The Center for Sophiological Studies' available courses.

1. Rudolf Steiner, The Incarnation of Ahriman: The Embodiment of Evil on Earth: Seven Lectures, trans. Matthew Barton (Forest Row, UK: Rudolf Steiner Press, 2006), 17–18; 22. My emphasis.

2. Nicolas Berdyaev, Solitude and Society, trans. George Reavey (1938; repr., London: Geoffrey Bles / Centenary Press, 1947), 109.

The Sophianic Resistance

A quick rundown of recent news:

• Elon Musk keeps launching satellites at a rate greater than a finale at the Fourth of July fireworks.

• Billionaires are racking up record profits while small businesses drop dead like dinosaurs after an asteroid hit.

• 5G, the safety of which has been questioned by scientists and some municipalities for a good long while, has suddenly become “essential” (how I have come to despise the word) to “the new normal” (another term worthy of contempt).

• Oh, and there’s this coronavirus thing, which is apparently what Thomas Hobbes was praying for when he prophesied the war of all against all.

• Because of the coronavirus thing, governments are being very governmenty about events in much the same spirit as the PATRIOT Act was about patriotism and security and their responses have a good deal to do with surveillance and another dreadful word: “tracing.”

All of this, at least for me, contributes to what I can only describe as a technocratic nightmare. As Nikolai Berdyaev wrote long ago, “The world threatens to become an organized and technicized chaos in which only the most terrible forms of idolatry and demon-worship can live.”1 To which one can only add: “Mission accomplished.”

Of course, these deadening developments are not the only things going on. Some people (though often maligned by their contemporaries) are resisting the technocratic paradigm and seeking instead a more holistic and healthy response to our moment. I see this mostly in the renewed interest in locally-produced food and Community Supported Agriculture (CSA) as well as in the sudden care for local businesses in a spirit that should give hope to any distributist or communitarian heretofore languishing in cultural atrophy and neglect. Likewise, some people are starting to think more about building immunity through nutrition and methods more in accord with Nature than through the administration of vaccines and other varieties of allopathic medicine that operate on fear and a military search and destroy model.

Nevertheless, I do think we are at a watershed. How we come out of this crisis is important. Unfortunately, the money and power is on the side of the technocrats—as we can see by the way they’ve been maneuvering during this “crisis” to secure and expand both their wealth and power. Most of us don’t have that kind of cultural cache, so either find ourselves enthralled by fear and the mandate of the powerful or we just try to ignore them and hope they go away. But they won’t go away.

This didn’t just happen. For decades, our relationship to Nature has been compromised by scientists, medical experts, and governmental agencies in a drive (a real Will to Power) to “make our lives better.” I’m sorry, but glyphostae, “three-parent babies,” the prescription of opioids, or waiting for a vaccine until we can open up the world, to name only a handful of examples, aren’t making anyone’s life better—not even for Bayer and The Gates Foundation. Living in disharmony with Nature and Divinity never could.

In my book Transfiguration, I talk about this at length. The problem, ultimately, is not one of human power games and control (though those are its tools); rather, the problem is metaphysical, a spiritual problem. As I write in the book,

‘This encroaching and, in the main, uninterrogated acceptance of “technological reproduction” in all of its forms delineates a movement away from Sophia and her illumination of the united natural and supernatural realms and toward Ahriman and the darkness of a natural realm subordinated to subnature. When we can no longer differentiate between the Real and the simulacra, we have already compromised our connection to the spiritual in the universe, to God by way of Sophia. And when differentiating between the Real and the simulacra invites ridicule, hostility, and ostracization, we can then be sure that we have entered the realm of the demonic, of Ahriman; that culture has been lured into subnature; and that “our struggle is not against flesh and blood, but against the rulers, against the authorities, against the powers of this dark world and against the spiritual forces of evil in the heavenly realms” (Ephesians 6:12). Ahriman’s genius is that it has convinced us that spiritual forces, of any kind, do not exist, and that science and technology hold the keys to prosperity, health, and happiness. In this, it is we who are imprisoned and isolated from the Real, as Sophia is in the gnostic mythos. It would appear that only a god can save us.’

What I propose (and have been proposing for years) is a Sophianic Resistance to this totalizing, technocratic, and Ahrimanic paradigm threatening our lives and ways of being from so many sides. Many have already capitulated to this paradigm. But humans are free, and an aspect of freedom is in the changing of one’s mind. As the Master said, “Repent, for the Kingdom of Heaven is at hand” (Matt 4:17). The Greek word here translated as “repent,” however, is Μετανοεῖτε (metanoite) which, in addition to repentance, refers to changing one’s way of life. This is precisely the moment at which we find ourselves.

Berdyaev, so prescient, was able to diagnose our trajectory—now nearing its apotheosis—almost a century ago:

‘The speed consequent upon the increasing mechanization of life has had a deadly effect on the human Ego, and has sapped its foundations of unity and consistence. The advent of machinery and the mechanization of life have led to an extreme objectification of human existence, to its materialization in a strange, inhuman and frigid world. And though this world is the work of man, it is essentially anti-human.’2

In order to reorder our lives, we first need to acknowledge how entrammeled we are by fear. Then comes the time of the turning. Repent, for the Kingdom of Heaven is at hand.

Michael’s latest books are an edition of The Chymical Wedding of Christian Rosenkreutzand Transfiguration: Notes toward a Radical Catholic Reimagination of Everything. He can be reached at director@thecenterforsophiologicalstudies.com See also The Center for Sophiological Studies' available courses.

1. Nikolai Berdyaev, The Fate of Man in the Modern World, trans. Donald A. Lowrie (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1935), 125.

2. Nicolas Berdyaev, Solitude and Society, trans. George Reavey (1938; repr., London: Geoffrey Bles / Centenary Press, 1947), 109.

Sophiology and the Unnatural Response to Nature

'Mary Magdalene' by Georges de la Tour

If I have learned one thing from this pandemic, it is that the primary recourse of most of the archons running the world is to flee nature and what is natural and cleave to the unnatural as the salvation of our souls. The unnatural idols range from the Messiah-like vaccine promised to arrive some time in the future and deliver us all from the scourge to the Ahrimanic desire to track people and isolate them “for their own safety” to the more simple “remedy” of sequestering people in their homes—by force if need be—under the mistaken assumption that nature is somehow unable to get in as if a safe zone in a game of tag, even though New York City recently discovered that most new cases of the virus are infecting those in their homes.

We fear nature, and due to our fear we attempt to dominate her. This has been the trajectory of science at least since the seventeenth century. Nature, formerly spoken of in decidedly feminine terms as Natura, needed to be dominated like any other willful female to the misogynistic and mechanistic thinking of early modern science, a practice that persists in all but semantics today. As Mary Midgley so clearly describes it,

“The literature of early modern science is a mine of highly-coloured passages that describe Nature, by no means as a neutral object, but as a seductive but troublesome female, to be unrelentingly pursued, sought out, fought against, chased into her inmost sanctuaries, prevented from escaping, persistently courted, wooed, harried, vexed, tormented, unveiled, unrobed, and ‘put into question’ (i.e. interrogated under torture), forced to confess ‘all that lay in her most intimate recesses,’ her ‘beautiful bosom’ must be laid bare, she must be held down and finally ‘penetrated,’ ‘pierced’ and ‘vanquished’ (words which constantly recur).”1

I could get into a whole Freudian thing about the method for injecting a vaccine here, but I will resist.

Coinciding with the scientific domination model during this COVID phenomenon has been a perhaps more troubling move toward political or governmental domination. Government authorities assert their power over their unruly charges with all the authority of a first-year elementary school teacher with no classroom management skills and a host of unacknowledged anger issues, while the populace wobbles between obedience and rebellion. As Wilhelm Reich observed, “People fear or admire what they cannot grasp.”2 It’s a recipe for disaster.

Trying to divorce ourselves from the natural world will not work, because we can’t. And no one needs expertise in quantum mechanics to realize this.

It is telling, I think, that the places hardest hit by the COVID phenomenon are places most alienated from nature and most afflicted by varieties of pollution, cities mostly. And the fact that most people are the victims of diets also characterized by the scientific domination of nature—and often the exclusion of nature—and thus even more susceptible to diseases (also known these days as co-morbidities). American diets, for example, are rife with unnatural products which contribute to hypertension, diabetes, obesity, heart disease, stroke, and so forth. As an aside, one of my sons worked as a hospital orderly through college. One day he told me that his job taught him how harmful diets contributing to obesity are: the greatest share of the patients he had to move at the hospital were morbidly obese, their health and quality of life destroyed by the garbage they consumed sold as “food.” Interestingly, yesterday I was listening to an interview with two physicians on NPR about the disproportionate representation of people of color in C-19 deaths—but nobody said anything about diet. Poor diet, we could say, is the engine that drives our medical economy. I have yet to hear Dr. Fauci or Bill Gates talk about nutrition.

Illness and death, I am sad to report, are part of the natural world, as much as we fear them. All generations have been awed by the mysteries of illness and death, the author of the Epic of Gilgamesh no less than the Psalmist or Dylan Thomas. But we have an antiseptic relationship to death—even bodes of the deceased are disappearing from funerals, not to mention the tragedy of so many people dying during this pandemic deprived of Last Rites and holy burial, unaccompanied on their journey to the undiscovered country. What an inhuman and unnatural tragedy.

It was not always thus. Julian of Norwich, for example, actually prayed that she could become ill in order to draw closer to Christ. Her shewings, or revelations, in fact, occurred during an illness when she came very close to death. And her take away, as told by Jesus: “All shall be well.” This way of being is absolutely foreign to our current ethos. We don’t think all shall be well. Not ever. Instead we tell ourselves creation myths about a “new normal.”

St. Francis of Assisi also acknowledged the reality of death as part of life. Toward the end of his relatively short time on this earth, he added a verse to his Canticle of All Creatures in honor of Sister Death:

Praised be You, my Lord, through our Sister Bodily Death, from whom no one living can escape.

Woe to those who die in mortal sin. Blessed are those whom death will find in Your most holy will, for the second death shall do them no harm.

Praise and bless my Lord and give Him thanks and serve Him with great humility.

It may be that part of our forgetting how to live is attributable to our forgetting how to die. Did the Master not say “Blessed are they who mourn, for they shall be comforted”?

Sophiology, at its core, celebrates the shining of God through Creation via his Mediatrix, Sophia. The world, as the Lord says in Genesis, is good. Christ, the Lord of the Dance, is that goodness incarnate: “He has the full power of the God-given Life force. He understands the birds and he knows how to distinguish a grain of rye from a grain of wheat.”3

We can get through this, but we can’t hide from it.

A useful interview with an MD who understands both virology and nature.

Michael’s latest books are an edition of The Chymical Wedding of Christian Rosenkreutzand Transfiguration: Notes toward a Radical Catholic Reimagination of Everything. He can be reached at director@thecenterforsophiologicalstudies.com See also The Center for Sophiological Studies' available courses.

1. Mary Midgley, Science as Salvation: A Modern Myth and Its Meaning (London: Routledge, 1992), 77.

2. Wilhelm Reich, The Murder of Christ: The Emotional Plague of Mankind (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1953), 21.

3. Ibid., 33.