Christ’s Gift of the Key of Evil

Christ’s Gift of the Key of Evil

World History in the Light of the Apocalypse of the Age of Michael

Nine Christmas lectures, 24.12.2023 - 01.01.2024

Lecture 1: The Knowledge Drama of the Second Coming

December 24^th, 2023

Third Part: Christ’s Gift of the Key of Evil

Christ’s Gift of the Key of Evil

 When come nearer and nearer to the deeper being of the Christ, through the using the gift of his I and the forces of the key of death, we find a new aspect of His Being and becoming, and we can become His true partners in His struggles to resurrect and heal all aspects of human life. And if we go that far, the Christ will lead us to the next stage of the work. He will tell us: ‘You have used my previous gifts for the  good of the whole!, now you can do more!’ You know, in spiritual things, if you do something right, what you get as a reward is a much more difficult task. And then Christ says: ‘The overcoming of death was really the power that I gave humanity in the first, physical, Mystery of Golgotha 2000 years ago. Today humans have to learn how to make this power their own. When this is done, the first part of the work is accomplished. He says: ‘2000 years ago when I came to the earth for the first time and incarnated in a physical human body, the real question and riddle of that age was concerning the fate of the soul after death. Death has become increasingly the ending of the existence of the soul; the knowledge of immortality and pre-earthly life was lost, as the result of the gradual disappearance of spiritual perception’. This is how the Christ sees it from His point of view. The riddle of death- and birth- faced humanity as something entirely new. People had lost the view of life after death, and forgot the life before birth; they were now fully exposed to the Attacks of the forces of death, of Ahriman, and Christ had to give them the answer to the riddle of death. He did through His physical death and spiritual resurrection in a mortal human body.

  Through the knowledge drama of the Second Coming, the key to the riddle of death, given by the Christ in the first Mystery of Golgotha, can be used by all human beings, that strive to realize modern spiritual science. That death is no longer such a formidable riddle as it was previously, is becoming increasingly clear in present human life. Just look around you in the world, dear friends, and see how many millions of people are going through near-death experiences today. You can say, for so many millions of people, death is no longer the end of the life and the immortality of the soul is a fact of experience for them, often accompanied also by first-hand experience of the truth of karma and reincarnation. The Spirit of the Time is definitely leading millions of people, in a natural way - previous spiritual training is not required for this - to overcome death during physical life, and they come back from their near-death experiences to transform, for the good, their life on the earth. This experience is something that is really happening for millions, and we can understand why death is no longer the main problem today.

 The same can also be said from the other side: the gate of birth that was tightly closed, is beginning to loosen and open and more children and adults are beginning to remember their life before birth. The gate of birth is also opening for millions of people today. In this sense we can understand what Rudolf Steiner meant when he said that the first riddle of earth existence is the mystery of death, which was the mighty and unsolvable riddle in the fourth post-Atlantean cultural epoch. But in the present fifth epoch due to the fact that the Christ overcame death in Golgotha,  its solution is becoming part of humanity at large. We must be very relived and encouraged by this fact, for this shows how the Christ impulse is working worldwide through centuries, and how His life-giving forces are bringing about such far reaching positive transformations in so many human souls all over the world. 

  After we have resolved the mystery of death in the knowledge drama, and have implemented the forces of resurrection in our spiritual research, the Christ tells us: ‘If you want to fully grasp the mysteries of the Second Coming, you may want to progress one step further and shoulder another task’. If we confirm our resolution to move on, He turns our attention to what took place on earth since the 30s and 40s of last century, in the tragic culmination of the second Mystery of Golgotha, and tells us: ‘To find my true being in the present and in the future, it will not be enough to solve the riddle of death, for there is another riddle to which humans have no solution at the present time. So, I also have a third gift to offer you, a second spiritual key, which however you want to consider well before you accept it. If you consent, I will offer you the key of evil’. When we accept this third sacred gift, we find out that this key leads to the new mysteries of the riddle of evil forming now inside man, and we also realize that with all its present horrors, it is just in its beginning. This stage of the knowledge drama, it must be admitted, brings man to the threshold in a totally different manner. It places you right in the middle of the most severe and painful ordeals and probations of the present and future evolution of humanity.

The riddle of evil can be described in this way: Why is it that, all of us, desent and normative humans that we are, can at any given time do horrible things? Why are all human beings capable of so many deeds of evil? And indeed every one of us can, and does it, in various degrees. It doesn’t take profound self-knowledge to look a little deeper into your being to see that you have all the inclinations, desires and propensities to do all the worst things that many other people actually do around you, and perhaps you don’t do them today, because of some external or internal obstacles prevent you from doing them… but perhaps tomorrow you will!, And if you don’t it is not because you don’t have the inclination to do so, but only because your education was different, or other life circumstances protected you until now. Such realistic self-knowledge makes you infinitely humbler about your cherished ego, and compassionate about the deeds and fate of others. And one is really led to this experience very deeply in the third stage of the knowledge drama of the Second Coming, after one has individualized the gifts of Christ’s I and the key of death. One enters also into the vast field of universal evil, as I described it in my first book, The Spiritual Event of the 20th Century, when the Christ leads you to perceive what took place during the 12 years of 1933-45 in the etheric world, where His confrontation with the modern form of human evil happened and is still happening today.

 To follow the Christ on this path, to this etheric Calvary and descent into hell, to the depths of the new radical human evil, one needs all the forces of His self, the operative key of death, and the key to open the portal that leads to the new mysteries of evil. And this is because the path that leads to the place where the etheric Christ is working today, cannot be opened by our ordinary human forces. It can only be opened through His indwelling I in our I, through the gift of the key the unlocks the mysteries of death, and through the gift of the key that let us confront and redeem evil in our soul and in human history in a conscious and fully human way. We should not imagine it as if Christ takes us to an historical place, where we become external onlookers, watching what He is doing for us outside of us. Oh, no! He offers us a special gift the force that guides us safely into the depths of bitterest evil in our own being. He shows us how He plunges into these depths, and how He experiences evil in human souls. He says: ‘What objectively happens in human history on a planetary scale, happens in all human souls, whether they are conscious of it or not. To find a path that leads to this objective universal process, you have to go through it yourself, in yourself, and this is what leads you to me and to my work in the present age and in all future ages to come. Only this path can lead you also to develop in your soul the highest forces of healing love, required to transform evil into highest good’.

 So, just as we have to use the key of death to overcome the death forces of the intellect in thinking and perception and create fully conscious and precise spiritual cognition, as we must first learn how to resurrect all the forces and process of ordinary knowledge from the grave of the brain, and spiritualize them into new forces of spiritual cognition, in the same way we have to penetrate in full consciousness to the deeper evil instincts, inclinations, and desires in the depth of our own soul and body, and prove that we can use this key of evil, given by the Christ, and transform them in to forces of higher good. Only then, when we have used this key in this way, the modern portal of imaginative perception is opened in our soul, and we can see what takes place in this regard also in human history. We can only see what takes place in the world to the extent that we first experienced it in ourselves. And only then can we find the positive, life-giving, and healing answer to the apocalyptic riddle of evil as it appears in the Age of Michael, and indeed for all coming Ages in the future.

 This is described out of the real experience itself. I am not simply repeating what Rudolf Steiner predicted about what may happen in his future, which is our present, that actually happened after his death. After we begin to comprehend this mystery as a real spiritual experience, we can read again what Rudolf Steiner said about what is going to happen in his near future. But then we will lister not with the abstract and detached thinking of our heads, but with our whole human being, with all the forces of our hearts and souls.

 On October 25^th, 1918, right at the end of the never before seen horrors of the First World War, which was the first truly apocalyptic event in modern history, he said: 

Today when Christ is destined to appear again in the etheric body, when a kind of Mystery of Golgotha is to be experienced anew, evil will have a significance akin to that of birth and death for the fourth post-Atlantean epoch! In the fourth epoch the Christ impulse was born out of the forces of death for the salvation of mankind. We can say that we owe the new impulse that permeated mankind to the event on Golgotha. Thus by a strange paradox mankind is led to a renewed experience of the Mystery of Golgotha in the fifth epoch through the forces of evil. Through the experience of evil it will be possible for the Christ to appear again, just as He appeared in the fourth post-Atlantean epoch through the experience of death. ^[1]

  When we hear these words, not with our heads alone, but with our whole soul and heart, we can agree that the mystery of death is no longer our main concern, and acknowledge that our struggle with evil is just beginning. The resurrection of the Christ through the mystery of evil in the Spiritual Event of the 20^th Century, will reveal itself more and more in the future. This is the reason that the good news for the apocalypse of the present age of Michael and for the 21^st century - the second and middle, decisive century of this age of Michael - is that the Christ offer His Self to all people who would want to accept it, and that His self in us is the source of the forces that we can individualize and employ in the transformation of the forces of death and evil to the good. This is the reason why any real study of modern history can only be undertaken if we understand its apocalyptic nature,  especially since the end of the 19^th century, through the entire 20^th century, in the 21^st  and the coming centuries.  

 Tomorrow, in our second lecture, we will travel in time from the present to primordial times, to the very beginning of the evolution of the earth. We will ask ourselves how the earth was formed and how the foundation stone of the earth was created. Then, in the third lecture, we will consider the connection between the two Mysteries of Golgotha, the first, physical mystery, that took place 2000 years ago, and the second, etheric mystery, that begun in 1933. In the fourth lecture, we will describe how the Christ impulse was taken up in the first centuries after Christ, especially by Christ’s initiated pupils, John and Paul. We will see how the stream of esoteric Christianity started, after the burning of the temples of Jerusalem, Ephesus, and Eleusis that signified the end of the old mysteries and the beginning of the new. In the fifth lecture, we will visit some of the major events that took place on the earth and in the spiritual world in the 9^th century, as Rudolf Steiner described them. On the earth, while the Christian church exterminated the human spirit, Parsifal, the great teacher of humanity, fulfilled, for the first time, the mission of the Holy Grail. He individualized, in full consciousness, the entire Being of the Christ in spirit, soul and body, while in the spiritual world Michael offered to Humanity the cosmic intelligence, that he governed in the sun from immoral times.

  In the sixth lecture, it will be our task to review some of the indications given by Rudolf Steiner about the activities of the school of Michael in the spiritual sphere of the Sun from the 15^th to the 18^th centuries. At the end of the 18^th century and the first half of the 19^th century Michael summarized and condensed his teaching into great cultic Imaginations, to prepare the souls for his coming rule and the etheric reappearance of the Christ, that must be fought through earth-shaking and world-transforming apocalyptic events. In the seventh lecture, we will describe how the school of Michael was actualized on earth through modern spiritual science and found its fullest expression in the Christmas Foundation Conference and the laying of the Foundation Stone of the Anthroposophical Society in 1923/24, that we shall place in the light of the coming apocalyptic Ragnarök and Weltenbrand of the 20^th century. To the apocalypse of the 20^th century, the eighth lecture will be dedicated, and we will describe the Spiritual Event of the 20^th century on earth and in the etheric world, and how in this event, the whole being of Anthroposophia was transformed. In the last, ninth lecture, we will describe how the Christmas Foundation impulse is renewed today according to the signs of the Spirit of our Time, to let the age of Michael start on earth and accomplish in his second century what humanity must not miss, as it did in the 20^th century.

[1] Lecture of 25 October 1918 (GA 185).