How to Recognize and Connect with Vidar
The Archangel of the New Community
How to Recognize and Connect with Vidar:
The Archangel of the New Community
By Bill Trusiewicz
Figure 1: Depiction of Víðarr holding the jaws of Fenrir apart.
By W. G. Collingwood, 1908, inspired by the Gosforth Cross
When we feel ourselves to be related to this figure of Vidar, of whom we are now trying to understand the deeper side, we hope that that which must be the central nerve and the vital essence of all anthroposophy, will result from those forces which the archangel [Vidar] can contribute to the evolution of modern times.
- Rudolf Steiner, GA 121, The Mission of Individual Folk Souls
AS ARCHANGEL MICHAEL emerges as the Time Spirit (i.e., as an Archai) and works on a higher plane to harmonize the forces that will support the now-forming new exoteric Church (Gk.,“ecclesia”: called-out ones), Vidar will take the former position of the Archangel Michael, but equipped with a more human connection, having united with the Nathan Soul and Buddha’s guardian angel (around 600AD), to guide the esoteric “called out ones,” that will have the task of forming a community preparing for the sixth epoch. Vidar’s preparation includes being taught by Archangel Michael and a Roman Time Spirit (p. 119, Mission of Folk Souls), inspiring the teaching of esoteric Christianity, the mysteries of the Holy Grail and Rosicrucianism, and with his father, Odin, guiding the Northern Mysteries during an earlier period.
Through the presence of the Archangel Vidar, who has in our time become the guardian and inspirer of the esoteric impulse for the community that will have its flowering in the Sixth Cultural Age, we can connect ourselves as indicated in my opening quotation, to “that which must be the central nerve and vital essence of Anthroposophy.” This would be to realize, together, the goal of spiritual science for our time, which is indicated by Rudolf Steiner with the words: “This will be the secret of progress of mankind in the future: to work through communities.” (Brotherhood and the Struggle for Existence, A Lecture by Rudolf Steiner, Berlin, November 23, 1905, Mercury Press, Spring Valley, NY.)
Vidar is the new guardian, following Archangel Michael’s elevation to Archai, of the youth forces of the Nathan Jesus soul. One can connect with Vidar if one will allow the picture of the Nirmanakaya of Buddha (i.e., Buddha’s angel and its entourage) surrounding the young Jesus of the Luke Gospel, before and after his birth, to enter one's feelings. Also, the atmosphere surrounding the shepherds spoken of also in the Gospel of Luke, who heard the whispering of the spiritual world, announcing the birth of this child, is indicative of the presence of Vidar.
While Vidar has an intimate connection to the Buddha, he is not, as others have claimed, the angel of Buddha raised to Archangel. Vidar as a son of Odin (or Wotan) would be connected to Buddha since Wotan (“Buddha” in Old German) was the human vehicle for an earlier incarnation of the Bodhisattva who became the Buddha.
Just as the pure angelic presence of the Nirmanakaya of Buddha surrounded and protected the coming of the "light of the world" at the time of the Mystery of Golgotha, so now Vidar is watching and protecting, we could even say “acting as mid-wife” to the emerging new community, which might be characterized as the first shoots of the Philadelphia community of the Sixth Epoch that will flower in about 1500 years. In his intimate relationship with Buddha’s angel (raised to Archangel) and the “Nathan Soul,” this being we call Vidar is a hero of the great Northern Mysteries, and is connected to and guardian over the youth forces that are needed to give birth to the new consciousness: the new way of thinking that is hovering above striving souls. Without these youth forces to overcome our old patterns of thinking we are condemned—locked out of the new world-consciousness.
Look for Vidar when you are able to hold two opposing thoughts at the same time, when you find yourself in or observing a polemical debate, for instance. A good example of this is Ita Wegman’s advice to her colleagues during the highly polarizing Nazi regime: “...remain as neutral as possible – not because it is convenient, but out of a love for humanity...Those who are neutral in the most genuine way will comprise the third army, which has the spirit as its weapon and unites with the dead whose souls have been awakened and who are being led by Michael in the suprasensory worlds.” (From Peter Selg’s book I’m for Going Forward).
When the paradoxical nature of materialistic thinking breaks down and what seemed like irresolvable paradoxes begin to yield a higher understanding, Vidar is there. Rudolf Steiner points to this in his lecture entitled “Why Contradictions Exist Everywhere and Must Exist”, Lecture 6, from the book, Wonders of the World: Trials of the Soul and Revelations of the Spirit. In this lecture he speaks of Dionysus Zagreus (the Gk. god) being torn apart by the Titans, which represents the old consciousness—divided into a multitude of parts lacking order. The New Dionysus, the young Dionysus is the new consciousness—whole and vital. The New Dionysus brings the ability to see in the contradictions that are inherent in life, not untruth, but a capacious container for life—for “life is full of contradictions.” "[T]here could not possibly be a development in the world if contradiction (or opposition) were not found in all things, at the very basis of their existence," says Rudolf Steiner. As we progress in these studies we will keep coming back to the matter of duality, polarity and contradiction, but more importantly, to the middle ground between the poles as key to understanding Vidar as the principle teacher of the development of etheric vision in our time, and midwife to the new thinking that is bequeathed with the experience of Christ in the Etheric.
In the realm of literary art, my favorite author is Thomas Mann, (1875-1955) the German ironist who won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1929 for his books: Buddenbrooks, Death in Venice and The Magic Mountain. Mann, one discovers with close inspection, was an early literary exponent of the spirit of the Archangel Michael and Vidar (without mentioning them), after the close of the Kali Yuga at the dawning of the Age of Light (Krita Yuga). I’ve chosen an excerpt from Mann’s 1922 essay, Goethe and Tolstoy, to help us gain a less abstract sense of how Vidar works. Below is the artist’s description of his personal modus operandi—the essence of his working style, which is particularly “central European,” and, I believe, indicative of his connection to Vidar.
“Beautiful is resolution. But the really fruitful, the productive, and hence the artistic principle is that which we call reserve. . . In the intellectual sphere we love it as irony: that irony which glances at both sides, which plays slyly and irresponsibly—yet not without benevolence—among opposites, and is in no great haste to take sides and come to decisions; guided as it is by the surmise that in great matters, in matters of humanity, every decision may prove premature; that the real goal to reach is not decision, but harmony, accord. And harmony, in a matter of eternal contraries, may lie in infinity; yet that playful reserve called irony carries it within itself, as the sustained note carries the resolution. . . . Irony is the pathos of the middle . . . its moral too, its ethos. . . . We [Germans] are a people of the middle. . . there is a fittingness in our geographical position and in our mores. I have been told that in Hebrew the words for knowing and insight have the same stem as the word for between.”
Of the many observations that could be made concerning this intimate look into Thomas Mann’s artistic process, which appear to connect him with Vidar and with Anthroposophy, I will mention only two.
THE FIRST: The second stanza of the Foundation Stone Meditation is concerned with the rhythm of “heart and lung,” the realm of feeling, which we identify with the etheric Christ, where we read: “The Christ Will in the encircling round holds sway in rhythms of worlds...” There within the rhythms, between the pulses (of heart and lung) is “reserve.” Eastern esoteric wisdom refers to the heart chakra, as Anahata (“unstruck”): this term speaks of “a space” in the heart that is free of compulsion, between systole and diastole. One can deepen one’s feeling capacity (sympathy) if one cultivates equanimity—“in balance of soul,” or “in the middle,” which is none other than Thomas Mann’s “reserve.” Mann’s words are actually a clue to developing “etheric” perception in which learning to “truly feel” we experience empathy (em from German ein “in” and pathos, “to feel”) and compassion—the ability to “feel with” others, (com, “with”; passion from pathos, “to feel”).
THE SECOND: We recognize that Rudolf Steiner held the same view of the position of Germany described as “middle Europe” to be significant from an esoteric perspective: Europe as a mid-point between the Far East and the West, which represent “the mystic” and the “materialistic” respectively. Steiner often referred to our own Fifth Cultural period as the “Central European” or “Middle European” epoch.“In the Central European countries there is a middle condition of affairs. There, it is as if one were in a balanced condition, between extremes of the East and the West.” Rudolf Steiner, GA 186, 12 December, 1918, Bern, Social and Anti-Social Forces in the Human Being.
Perhaps you have heard of or read the author Are Thoresen’s ideas about Vidar, which he employs with animals in his healing practice as a veterinarian, and recommends for healing in general. He speaks repeatedly of “the middle.” No surprise, if we consider Rudolf Steiner’s group sculpture of the Representative of Humanity with his left and right arms stretched out above and below, holding at bay the polar forces of Lucifer and Ahriman, to make a space “in the middle.” And if we remember the incarnation of the Bodhisattva who became Gautama Buddha, who had a previous incarnation as Odin of the Nordic Mysteries and is thus connected with Vidar, the son of Odin, we will recall, not insignificantly, that he called his teaching “The Middle Way.” Rudolf Steiner concurs in this regard: “...a middle course is appropriate when the opposing sides are also present and are recognized as forces. If something has to be weighed, the two scale-pans are needed as well as the beam...Life needs antithesis: life progresses in and through polarity” (from GA 141).
What is it that manifests “in the middle”—in the rhythm and the pulse of Life that finds expression in our breathing and our heart beat? In the quest for the secrets of Life (in the etheric or life-body), the capacity to encompass it with our thinking requires a leap into the inconceivable, into paradox, which one finds well-expressed in the Secret Book of John (a Gnostic text found in Nag Hammadi, Egypt in 1945) in the following enigmatic words of Jesus:
"When you make the two, one, and if you make the inside like the outside, and the outside like the inside, and the upper like the lower, and so you will make the male and woman one alone, so that the female becomes male and the male becomes female, and when you make a vision in the place of an eye, and a hand in the place of a hand, and a foot in the place of a foot, and an image in the place of an image, then you will enter the kingdom."
Here the Master is speaking of the etheric realm and etheric vision. Through such vision we can see the “tree of life”, the fallen warmth and life ethers restored. In this single sentence one sees the return to original primal union before self-consciousness—before the female (Eve) was separated from the male (Adam) as we read in the second chapter of Genesis. Here the “Dionysus Zagreus” divisions and duality that appeared at the time of Adam are resolved by the “younger Dionysus” who is whole and restores wholeness. Here duality returns to original unity but on a higher level, in which opposites unite in a heiros gamos, a sacred marriage.
This, I believe, is among the most important tasks of Vidar in our time—to overcome the Dionysus Zagreus of our thinking, the analytical penchant to separate, which is at the root of the dichotomy of self-other consciousness. I've written about this (without reference to Vidar) in my two-part article entitled "Piercing the Veil of Language: How to Achieve Intuitive Knowledge in Meditative Reading." The following paragraph excerpted from this article speaks to this question.
[I will now] attempt to elucidate the goal of meditative reading, “where process and content are one,” as stated by Christopher Bamford. . . That goal being, if I may reword it: to break through the barriers of subject and object, to experience the world in-participation-with-it instead of over-against-it. To feel oneself to be over-against the world is the experience that is fundamental to the analytical mode of perception, which has its basis in literal thinking. By an unremitting fixation on words, an over-reliance on the discursive intellect we perpetuate the curse of our age—the experience of alienation, of separation from the essential nature of the world around us.
This “alienation” is how one experiences what we might call “lower selfhood,” or the lower personality, which is the entry point for consciousness-soul experience, where our primal individuality, the “anti-social self,” begins its development toward spirit-self, eventually achieving “ethical individualism”—the “social self.”
This is one indication among many possible others, through which I hope to bring clarity in this and in future articles, exploring how Vidar can be recognized, and how one can begin to forge a connection with this new leader of humanity in our time to accomplish the great task incumbent upon us—“to work through communities.”
“Vidar...will become the active friend of cooperative work or cooperative endeavor…” p. 185, Rudolf Steiner, The Mission of Folk Souls, In Relation to Teutonic Mythology, Rudolf Steiner Press, 2005, GA 121.