Roots of Anthroposophy:
Peter Staudenmaier has invested a lot of time and effort in the the following notion from his outrageous article Anthroposophy and Ecofascism:
"Anthroposophy and National Socialism both have deep roots in the confluence of nationalism, right-wing populism, proto-environmentalist romanticism and esoteric spiritualism that characterized much of German and Austrian culture at the end of the nineteenth century. "
In his Libra article, Human Ethicism in Theory and Practice, Cato Schiøtz has the following comment about the above sentence:
"I have seen many critical endavors to place anthroposophy into a larger context, but Staudenmaier's endeavor is strikingly original, - unfortunately completely undocumented and also unable to be documented."
Peter Staudenmaier continues:
"But the connection between Steiner's racially stratified pseudo-religion and the rise of the Nazis goes beyond mere philosophical parallels. Anthroposophy had a powerful practical influence on the so-called "green wing" of German fascism. Moreover, the actual politics of Steiner and his followers have consistently displayed a profoundly reactionary streak."
In May 2001, I became entangled in a discussion with Staudenmaier about what the roots of anthroposophy really are, and this exchange made me realize the utter futility of explaining this to a crusading bookworm on his own hyper-intellectualized materialistic turf, so I decided to explain the roots of anthroposophy on my own turf, namely from a purely spiritual perspective,. Naturally, Peter Staudenmaier wrote me off as a nut, as expected.
In this post, I repeat a few passages from the articleRon Hubbard and Rudolf Steiner, including the section about black and white magic, which was so terribly distorted on the WC list recently. (See Diana Winters about black and white magic. )
Here is my post in question:
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Roots of AP
Tarjei Straume
May 20, 2001 19:30 PDT
Dottie wrote to Sharon:
I agree with you. I do not think Peter is laying full blown out blame on Steiner regarding racism. I don't think the issue is racism at all. It is Nazeism. That is a whole new ball game.
Tarjei:
Thank you for that statement, Dottie, which I will use as a point of departure for this post.
The only comment I first wish to make is that the charges of racism in Steiner's world view are demonstrably untrue, and it is my conviction that any unbiased, objective, unprejudiced reader who approaches the summary of the Dutch report will concur with this statement. The full report is on its way.
The interactions and confluences of occult streams in history is a difficult and complicated subject that needs to be approached from its proper perspective. I'll give you a sketch of mine, although it's inconclusive and controversial and does not reflect the views of any given group or its "dogma."
The roots and origins of Anthroposophy is to be found in the spiritual world. I am not talking about how these roots and origins manifested themselves in cultural and literary circles available to ordinary historians at this point, but about events and phenomena on the other side of the threshold of ordinary waking consciousness. Written documentation probably does exist, but this is even more inaccessible than books banned by lawsuits and censorship. If it exists, it's behind lock and key among various occult brotherhoods, and in the exclusive Vatican library.
Such unavailable records are, just like the Biblical documents and similar literary works, the results of seership, of claircoyant perceptions. It created quite a stir in such occult circles when Rudolf Steiner decided - having been given a green light by higher powers - to make public a body of knowledge and wisdom that had been concealed from lay people since antiquity. Some of these esoteric fraternities have pursued a so-called left-handed path of initiation, i.e. black magic.
Western occult tradition speaks of a right-handed and a left-handed occultism, which means, strictly speaking, white and black magic. The right-handed path, which it is called, is an extremely difficult and time-consuming approach, requiring enormous patience and endurance. It is based upon the moral purification of body, soul and spirit and the cultivation of total harmlessness and unconditional selfless love toward all living creatures. Because of the very lofty and difficult demands the candidate must make upon himself, it takes many life-times, or incarnations, to develop such spiritual-moral capacities to the point of intitiation, or modern clairvoyance.
All religions and idealistic philosophies that foster and encourage qualities of this kind, contribute to the preparation for a right-handed initiatory development.
According to Rudolf Steiner, such a right-handed occult development, or initiatory path, is entirely dependent upon the Christ-impulse, or the Risen One (the Resurrection Body). For this reason, it is also known as the Christian Initiation. The best tool, or technique, for this development, is Buddha's Eightfold Path, according to Steiner. He claimed that Buddhism was the religion of the future, that would be properly understood by the mainstream culture only in the future. For this reason, it is very interesting to compare Rudolf Steiner's book, 'Knowledge of the Higher Worlds: How is it Achieved?' with Buddha's Eightfold Path. They are strikingly similar, though the latter is not the source of the former. What they have in common is the spiritual source beyond the threshold.
The advanced stages of this Christian initiation involve inner experiences with close ties to the events in the Gospels designated as the Mystery of Golgotha. 'The Crowning of Thorns' for instance, means that the candidate patiently endures the blaspheming and ridicule of everything that he holds most sacred. 'The carrying of the Cross' signifies that the candidate begins to feel his physical body as a cross which he carries around on earth. (This latter is an interesting idea to contemplate when we approach old age and the body becomes heavier to move.)
By 'initiation' is meant the awakening of latent clairvoyance and clairaudience as a result of inner development. There are many different stages of these supernatural conditions. In order to perceive non-material phenomena in such an objective way that research by the scientific method is made possible, an extremely high level of initiation is required.
When Steiner begins his public mission as it is called, exactly a century ago, after having demonstrated the epistemological justification in his books published in the 1880's and 1890's of what he would later communicate as theosophy/anthroposophy, he also becomes the oracle of the Archai (Zeitgeist or time spirit) Michael, who in Old Testament times was the Archangels of the Hebrews, the Jews, and whose future world leadership was prophesized in the Book of Daniel (Daniel 12.1). The difference between an Archangel and an Archai is that the former represents one people, ethnic group, or nation and is the creator of its language, while an Archai rules an era, an epoch, for humanity as a whole. According to anthroposophical spiritual history, the role of Archai for humanity passed from Gabriel to Michael in 1879. One of the most characteristic distinctions to be made between the inspirations of Gabriel and Michael is that Gabriel inspired national romanticism and patriotism, but Michael seeks to emancipate people from such group-consciousness and implement instead universality, internationalism. As a herald of Michael's intentions, Rudolf Steiner promoted the kind of idealistic thinking that transcends Gabriel: Blood, race, tribe, family, ethnicity, and nationality.
There is an important aspect of the law of evolution that needs to be pointed out here. If an ideal properly belonging to a former epoch, or a future one, is revived at the wrong time, i.e. anachronistically, it becomes destructive; it becomes the property of "Opposing Powers" or "dark forces." This means that the rise of nationalism, fascism, and national socialism in the twentieth century was partly due to humanity's failure in making the transition from the age of Gabriel to the age of Michael.
This is why nineteenth century natioalism or patriotism was not destructive in the case of national poets like Henrik Wergeland in Norway and Walt Whitman in America. But what also needs to be kept in mind is that although the Gabriel-Michael transition took place beyond the threshold in 1879, the world did not change before the explosion of 1914; that is when the world went through changes in only four years that was equivalent to centuries of changes before that time.
I will now proceed to two perspectives of mine that are highly controversial - among anthroposophists and non-anthroposophists alike - and that I offer exclusively of my own accord, though it is not yet conclusive:
My first perspective is this: Rudolf Steiner's public mission, which began in 1901, elicited hostile reactions from certain quarters with vested interests in keeping such knowledge secret. If we try to look at this from a higher perspective, from the vantage point of the spiritual hierarchies where we have the progressive hierarchies (Christ, Michael etc,) and the Opposing Powers (especially the ahrimanic powers), Steiner's work in the German-speaking world was so revolutionary - according to my own view - that it caused an unforeseen avalance of reactions. To put it in plain English: I believe the outbreak of _both world wars_ were assaults upon Michael's and Steiner's work. The first world war was facilitated by the Opposing Powers succeeding in dimming the consciousness of the political leaders.
My second perspective reads as follows: Because Anthroposophy was so revolutionary and also capable of empowering the autonomy of each single human being in an "anarchistic" way - or to use a better expression I have coined, in an "anarchosophical" way - it produced two counter-images, two adverse and destructive mirror-images: The first of these was Nazism; the second was Scientology.
Both of these systems, Nazism and Scientology, represent the diametrically opposite pole of Anthroposophy. What they have in common with Anthroposophy is the genius of occult and psychological insight related to the deepest recesses and longings in human nature. One important distinction between Nazism and Scientology on the one hand, and Anthroposophy on the other, is that the two former systems both have strong roots in Jesuitism and in Aleister Crowley's left-handed occultism. Scientology was also strongly influenced by Beria, the chief of Stalin's secret police, which may be why Scientology resembles Stalinism more than Nazism.
This is why Nazism and Scientology include the cultivation of blind obedience to authority, another anachronism from the past. Anthroposophy does not, and it never has.
All of the above contributes to an understanding of why ultra-rationalists fail as a matter of course when they try to explain the Nazi era, an unprecedented manifestation of brutality and evil which can only be understood from an occult perspective, and Anthroposophy, which can only be understood from a viewpoint of spiritual history as it has unfolded on the other side of the threshold of ordinary waking consciousness.
From the above perspective, it's also irrelevant to the point in question what kind of confused "cross-overs" may have stood on the stage of history, or how many such confused individuals may be around today.
Tarjei Straume
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