עברית The apocalyptic event of the twentieth century contains and prefigures, as a seed, all the essential components of the future apocalypses that will characterize the future of humanity and the earth from now on.
The Twilight and Resurrection of Humanity
The History of the Michaelic Movement since the death of Rudolf Steiner
An Esoteric Study
Temple Lodge, 2020, Ereignis Verlag, 2021.
Excerpt from: The Resurrection of the Esoteric Youth Impulse in the Twenty-first Century
From the second lecture, 13 February 2019: The Twilight of Humanity and its Resurrection
The apocalyptic event of the twentieth century contains and prefigures, as a seed, all the essential components of the future apocalypses that will characterize the future of humanity and the earth from now on.
If the above described karmic possibility, the center of the new Michaelic karmic plan, will be realized, and the two small groups will meet each other in the first third of this century, then among all the old impulses of Anthroposophy, also the esoteric youth impulse will be resurrected to wholly new life. In order to form a first preliminary picture of what this resurrection means, we will have to experience the three major supersensible transformations of the Michaelic stream in the last century…
Rudolf Steiner told his young listeners, during the day before the end of the Christmas Foundation Conference, that in this darkness of the abyss, opening in the 1930s, human beings must learn to create the above-mentioned new sun-star, by means of their own forces of will, feeling, thinking and sense perception, and only if the earth would become such a humanely created and cosmically radiating sun, would humanity and the earth be able to fulfil their true mission.
Now we must take these prophetic indications, that Rudolf Steiner gave in 1923 and 1924 to his young listeners, into our presently awakened and active etheric hearts. In our etheric hearts, to the extent that we have consciously spiritualized them, as I showed in my book, Cognitive Yoga: Making yourself a new etheric body and individuality, we will be able to experience what really took place in the etheric world closest to the earth, during the crucial 1930s and 40s. As I said above, while these young souls to whom Rudolf Steiner spoke in 1924 suffered on the earth the physical tribulations in Germany and Dornach, we were in the etheric world together with Rudolf Steiner and Michael, and the human souls and spiritual beings that remained loyal to them. Now, in the etheric world, starting in 1933, ‘when the Beast raised its head from the abyss’, it was absolutely clear that the real spiritual task was no longer to try to grasp and hold the last burning thread of light, the last remnant of the old spiritual stream of world becoming. In the 1930s and 40s it was becoming clear, that all the beneficial spiritual forces of the past were finally totally annihilated.
When the earth and humanity sank into the abyss, the old stream of becoming and with it the last thread of light died out too. It was clear to us that Rudolf Steiner’s predictions about this apocalyptic time were actually coming true, that ‘Before the Second Coming, all that remains of the old must be driven into the nullity... The human being must find his full freedom out of the nothingness. And the new insight must give itself birth out of this nothingness. The human being must find his full freedom out of nullity.’
What Rudolf Steiner predicted indeed came to pass, with absolute overwhelming intensity, and humanity on the earth has lost its path and lost itself, because it also lost the last thread of light, the living earth under its feet, and the old source of spiritual becoming. For the souls that lived in the etheric world, it was clear that what humanity could not accomplish on the earth must be balanced in a spiritual way in the etheric world.
In the etheric world, the new earth star, the earthly-human sun had to be created, that humanity failed to build from below upward, as was and is expected from us in the present age of Michael and the etheric appearance of the Christ. Only after the old world and humanity fell totally into the abyss, could this new sun-stream of human becoming be created, whose source is found in the new revelation of the etheric Christ in His new etheric activity and world.
Dear friends, this is something about which we can only speak haltingly among ourselves. It cannot be communicated to those who simply want to accept Anthroposophy in an old, traditional and passive way. You cannot grasp and experience honestly, spiritually speaking, what Rudolf Steiner communicates out of his living actual spiritual experiences about the great spiritual events of our time in this manner. You will never find the new source of living light from which the new stream of becoming gushes forth today, if you are looking for the last thread of light, which was totally extinguished and has not existed since 1933. This last thread of the old stream of becoming is no longer there. I know this from my real spiritual experience because I searched for it for a long time in the darkness of last century’s abyss, as I tried to actualize Rudolf Steiner’s request after I read this esoteric lesson for the first time. But what I found was something entirely different. I found out that exactly there, in the etheric place and time in which this last burning thread of light disappeared in the abyss, the new source of becoming of the earth and humanity was born. I realized that the second major transformation of the Michaelic stream and Anthroposophia that took place in 1933-45, is a totally new restart and new beginning of the evolution of the earth and humanity as a whole. I could see it; I could experience it in the very moment of its happening and follow its development and transformations since then. I could witness, as a participant, the coming into being of a wholly new earthly, human and cosmic stream of evolution and reality, in the centre of which I experienced the eternally living and creative being of the etheric Christ, as the active and creative centre of the new earthly-human sun. This is our task now in 2019, and it must be accomplished by an ever growing community of dedicated, enthusiastic, comrades of Michael, in the coming 2020s and 30s to actualize for the first time what humanity failed to do in the first century; it will then be possible, ‘in the second entry to the Grail castle’, to actualize the task of the second century of Michael, and realize the true impulse of Michael in this age on the earth for the first time.
Then we shall also be able to take the wholly etherized impulse given to the young at the beginning of last century into our awakened and active etheric hearts. There we will learn how to let it be transformed through our own transformations, how it breaks down through our own breakdowns, as we learn to enter consciously, now on the earth, into the nothingness of the abyss together in humanity’s twilight and apocalypse of the twentieth century, and be resurrected and born anew in our active etheric hearts in the first half of the twenty-first century. We can only do it if we begin to experience the death and resurrection of the whole earth and humanity as our own individual and communal etheric and conscious process of death and resurrection. Now we must embody this process as a whole in our etheric bodies, actualize it as real spiritual practice together as a growing community. Then what took place globally in the etheric world in the second major transformation of the earth and humanity in 1933-45, and what became conscious as an individual experience at the end of the twentieth century on the earth, will begin to light up in our immediate, real, conscious communal experience. It will become community life, not theory, and penetrate deep into our communal will forces, not only into our heads and abstract thoughts.
Then the following would become an actual, real experience in our souls. We will experience what actually took place a short ten years after Rudolf Steiner told his young pupils how the sunrise changed at the end of Kali Yuga and the beginning of the new age of light in 1899 and the new age of Michael. We realize that ten years after Rudolf Steiner died and while humanity and the Anthroposophical Society were already engulfed in the spreading darkness, the sunrise had changed again. We will experience how the newly flaming Michaelic sun was totally darkened when the earth went through the bloodiest and cruelest century in human evolution. We will see how until the end of the last century, the sun was rising every day through the blackest sphere that covered the earth all around, the sum total of Holocausts and gulags, atomic explosions, and the annihilation of all the ancient human and natural forces and heritages. The youthful flames of the Michaelic sun, so beautifully described by Rudolf Steiner in 1924, have appeared since 1933 as blood-red, and eventually they became dark and black because they reflected the black flames of hatred streaming from the earth, erupting from the infernal earthly volcano, spreading poisonous astral smoke and deadly ashes far and wide into the surrounding cosmos. These flames of hatred converged to create the dark sphere of evil, covering the whole face of the earth. Then the apocalyptic words were fulfilled, ‘The sun became black and the full moon became like blood’, as it is said in St John’s Apocalypse.
At the end of the twentieth century, this is what one experienced when one looked back into the sunrises of 1933-45 and also of the coming decades. The sun darkened as in a never-ending, nightmarish eclipse. As Rudolf Steiner told the young, this darkening had already started in the last third of the nineteenth century, when ‘the cosmic disgrace of humanity began to stream into the universe’. What happened in 1933-45 was that this earthly darkness and cosmic disgrace eventually became crystalized as a dense, impenetrable, evil astral cover, that hardened around the earth, isolating and blocking the light coming from the new etheric Christ sun, shining from within, and also from the spiritual beings and their cosmic light shining from without.
This apocalyptic event of the twentieth century contains and prefigures, as a seed, all the essential components of the future apocalypses that will characterize the future of humanity and the earth from now on.
Rudolf Steiner described it, in another context, in this way: ‘Now which colour would we use for the feeling of dying, for withdrawal from the outer things to the spirit? Black, and that’s why we have the black cross on which red roses bloom. Black, charcoaled wood in which all outer things have died is an expression to us of the fact that the spirit reveals itself behind all dying things. Goethe once spoke of the colour that the earth would have to display when it’s dying at the end of the present cycle and passes over into a spiritual realm, as it is fertilized by the spirit. It would have to ‘glow in flaming red’. This remark arises from deep knowledge.
For when the earth is mature enough to be fertilized by the spirit, how could the earth do anything else than to glow in deep shame?’ We were right there in the centre of this cosmic and earthly apocalyptic drama, in the etheric world, as this ‘fertilization of the earth by the spirit’ took place and the most shameful ‘cosmic disgrace’ of humanity was streaming out to the whole universe. We decided to fulfil our Michaelic resolution and incarnate on the earth in order to bring this to earthly consciousness at the end of the last century and make it real as the new Michaelic stream and movement in the twenty-first century. We bear witness to it from direct experience. We can embody and carry this cosmic disgrace of humanity in our free etheric hearts, if we freely choose to do so, as our share in humanity’s karmic debt. But we must let our courageous fiery enthusiasm be tested in its inner creative energy. We must test its honesty and strength, in carrying the pain and suffering of humanity, nature and earth. We must prove to ourselves that we can take it into our etheric hearts and go through it strengthened and rejuvenated. Our newborn strength must carry this burden willingly, not crushed under its infinite weight, but rather using it to strengthen our resolve to join our etheric forces with Christ’s will; to not let go of the earth, not give it up to the forces of evil, to remain loyal to the new Earth spirit, the etheric Christ, and the newborn being of the earthly-human sun.