Dear Friends,
We continue with the investigation of the spiritual significance of the Age of Eclipse. Parts One and Two can be found here, and Part Three here.
Peace to all,
Joel
IVa. The Present: Annular Solar Eclipse of October 14, 2023
On October 14, 2023, the United States will experience the second of three eclipses that travel across the entire United States. The three of them together form a triangular shape over the country. If August 21, 2017 was the gateway leading into the Age of Eclipse, and the Great Conjunction was the turning point in the journey, then we can consider the event of October 14, 2023 as a kind of prelude or preparation for the gateway leading out of the Age of Eclipse properly and completely on April 8, 2024.
Image courtesy of https://www.greatamericaneclipse.com/eclipse-maps-and-globe/american-solar-eclipses-2017-to-2024
What is fascinating about this event is its strong resonance with the August 21, 2017 event. The eclipse of 2017 occurred 100 years after the visions of Our Lady of Fátima. These visions culminated with the Miracle of the Sun on October 13, during which thousands of people witnessed the Sun (at 26° Virgo) dance across the sky for about ten minutes. And so the Sun at 26° Virgo on October 14, 2023 is remembering the culmination of the miracle of Our Lady of Fátima in 1917!
From the perspective of Catholicism, it is also significant that on October 13, 1884—exactly 33 years prior to the Miracle of the Sun—Pope Leo XIII was given a vision of a century of temptation on the part of the Catholic Church akin to the testing of Job (see here). As a protection against it, he was given the following prayer to St. Michael, which became a part of the Low Mass from 1886 - 1964 (its removal was bound up with the results of Vatican II):
St. Michael the Archangel, defend us in battle. Be our defense against the wickedness and snares of the Devil. May God rebuke him, we humbly pray, and do thou, O Prince of the heavenly hosts, by the power of God, thrust into hell Satan, and all the evil spirits, who prowl about the world seeking the ruin of souls. Amen.
In the Autumn of 1884, Rudolf Steiner had just published the first volume of Goethe’s scientific writings, and had moved in with the Sprecht family to tutor their boys.
On the other hand, nearly simultaneously with the Miracle of the Sun, it was on October 14, 1917 that Rudolf Steiner delivered the central lecture of his series The Fall of the Spirits of Darkness: “The Battle between Michael and ‘The Dragon.’” Over the course of this lecture, Steiner laid out for the first time in explicit terms the expression of this battle over the course of the 19th-20th centuries. He described how this image of Archangel Michael slaying the Dragon is an eternal image with manifold meanings at different points in human history, the most recent battle taking place over the course of the 19th century, during which time human culture had the least access to spiritual thinking, and materialistic thoughts infected the minds of human beings in a way analogous to bacterial infection. This battle in the spiritual world between Michael and the Dragon took place between 1841-79, at which point in time the Age of Michael began, and the ahrimanic spirits were cast down into the earthly sphere, into the thoughts and will of human beings.
He indicates that the year 1879 is a pivot point: the War in Heaven lasted for 38 years prior to 1879; 38 years after 1879 would see the full expression of the fall of the spirits of darkness on Earth. That year was 1917, the year he was giving these lectures. It was also the year of the Bolshevik revolution, which took place less than a month after this lecture was given. And so again, very strongly, our gaze is drawn by the star memories of the October 14, 2023 eclipse to the years 1879 and 1917, as years heavily related to our current Age of Eclipse.
Rudolf Steiner makes astounding claims in this lecture that might bring to mind the events of the past years (emphasis mine in bold):
The deepest impulse which has been living in many human souls since 1879 is therefore one which was cast down into the human realms; before that, it lived as ahrimanic power in the world of the spirit. It is helpful to look for other ways of strengthening the idea in our minds by using concepts from the material world, using them essentially as symbolic images. What happens today more at the level of soul and spirit had more of a material bias in very early times. The world of matter is also spiritual; it is merely a different form of spirituality.
If you were to back to very early times in evolution, you would find a battle similar to the one I have just described. As already mentioned, these battles have recurred over and over again, but always on different issues. In the distant past, the crowd of ahrimanic spirits were also cast down from the spiritual worlds into the earthly realm when they had lost such a battle. You see, they would return to the attack again and again. After one of these battles, for example, the crowd of ahrimanic spirits populated the earth with the earthly life-forms which the medical profession now calls bacilli. Everything which has the power to act as a bacillus, everything in which bacilli are involved, is the result of crowds of ahrimanic spirits being cast down from heaven to earth at a time when the dragon had been overcome. In the same way the ahrimanic, mephistophelean way of thinking has spread since the late 1870s as the result of such a victory. Thus we are able to say that tubercular and bacillary diseases come from a similar source as the materialism which has taken hold of human minds.
We can also compare the occurrences of the last century with something else. We can point to something which you know already from Occult Science: the withdrawal of the Moon from the sphere of Earth evolution. The Moon was once part of the Earth; it was cast out from the Earth. As a result, certain Moon influences took effect on Earth, and this, too, followed a victory won by Michael over the dragon. We are therefore also able to say that everything connected with certain effects relating to the phases of the Moon, and all impulses which reach the Earth from the Moon, have their origin in a similar battle between Michael and the dragon.
These things really do belong together, in a way, and it is extremely useful to consider this, for it has profound significance. Some individuals develop an irresistable hankering for the intellectual materialism which arises from being in league with the fallen Ahriman. They gradually come to love the impulses which Ahriman raises in their souls and, indeed, consider them to be of a particularly noble and sublime way of thinking. Once again, it is necessary to be fully and clearly aware of these things. Unless they are in our conscious awareness and we have clear insight, we cannot make head or tail of events. The danger inherent in all this must be looked at with a cool eye, as it were, and a calm heart. We have to face them calmly. We shall only do so, however, if we are quite clear about the fact that a certain danger threatens human beings from this direction. This is the danger of preserving what should not be preserved. Everything which happens within the great scheme of things does also have its good side. It is because the ahrimanic powers entered into us when Michael won his victory that we are gaining in human freedom. Everything is connected with this, for the crowd of ahrimanic spirits has entered into all of us. We gain in human freedom, but we must be aware of this. We should not allow the ahrimanic powers to gain the upper hand, as it were, and we should not fall in love with them.
This is tremendously important. There always is the danger of people continuing in materialism, in the materialistic, ahrimanic way of thinking, and carrying this on into ages when, according to the plan of things, it should have been overcome. The people who do not turn away from the ahrimanic, materialistic way of thinking and want to keep it, would then be in league with everything which has come about through similar victories won over the dragon by Michael. They therefore would not unite with spiritual progress in human evolution but with material progress. And a time would come in the sixth post-Atlantean age when the only thing to please them would be to live in something which will have been brought about by bacilli, those microscopically small enemies of humanity.
Something else also needs to be understood. Exactly because of its logical consistency, and indeed its greatness, the scientific way of thinking, too, is in great danger of sliding into the ahrimanic way of thinking. Consider how some scientists are thinking today in the field of geology, for instance. They study the surface formation of the earth and the residues and so on, to determine how certain animals live, or have lived, in the different strata. Empircal data are established for certain periods. Scientists use these as a basis for their views as to what the earth looked like thousands and millions of years ago, arriving, for instance, at the nebular hypothesis of Kant and Laplace. They also develop ideas as to the future evolution of the earth, and from the physical point of view these are quite correct. They are often utterly brilliant, but they are based on a method where the evolution of the earth is observed for a time and then conclusions are drawn: millions of years before, and millions of years afterwards.
What is really being done in this case? It is the same as if we were to observe a child when it is seven, eight or nine years old, taking note of how its organs gradually change, or partly change, and calculate how much these human organs change over a period of two or three years. We then multiply this to work out how much these organs will change over a period of centuries. So we can work out what this child looked like a hundred years agao, and going in the other direction we can also work out what it will look like in a hundred and fifty years. It is a method which can be quite brilliant and is, in fact, the method used by geologists today to work out the primeval conditions of the earth; it was also used to produce the hypothesis of Laplace. Exactly the same method is used to visualize what the world is going to be like according to the physical laws which can now be observed. But I think you will admit that such laws do not signify much when applied to a human being, for example. A hundred years ago the child did not exist as a physical human being; neither will it exist as a physical human being in a hundred and fify years’ time.
The same applies to the earth with reference to the time-scale used by geologists. The earth came into existence later than Tyndall, Huxley, Haeckel and others reckon. Before the time comes when you can simply paint the walls of a room with protein and have enough light to read by, the earth will be nothing but a corpse. It is quite easy to work out that one day it will be possible to use physical means to put protein on a wall where it will shine like electric light, so that one can read the paper. This is bound to happen as part of the physical changes, no doubt. But in fact the time will never come, just as it will never happen that in a hundred and fifty years time a child will show the changes calculated from succcessive changes seen in its stomach and liver in the course of two or three years between the ages of seven and nine.
Here you gain insight into some very strange things we have today. You can see how they clash. Think of a conventional scientist listening to what I have just been saying. He will say this is sheer foolishness. And then think of a spiritual scientist; he will consider the things the conventional scientist says to be foolish. All the many hypotheses concerning the beginning and the end of the earth are indeed nothing but foolishness, even though people have been utterly brilliant in establishing them.
You see from this how unconsciously human beings are, in fact, being guided. But we are now in an age when such things must be perceived and understood. It is necessary to link such an idea with the other ideas we have characterized today. A time will come when we must have transformed our materialistic ideas to such an extent that we can progress to a more spiritual form of existence, but by then the earth will have become a corpse for a long time. It will no longer support us, and incarnations in the flesh such as we seek today will no longer be sought. But the individuals who have become so tied up with the materialistic way of thinking that they cannot let go of it will still sneak down to that earth and find ways of involving themselves in the activities of bacilli—the tubercle bacillus and others—bacillary entities which will be rummaging through every part of the earth’s corpse. Today’s bacilli are merely the prophets, let us say, of what will happen to the whole earth in future. Then a time will come when those who cling to the materialistic way of thinking will unite with the moon powers and surround the earth, which will be a burnt-out corpse, together with the moon. For all they want is to hold on to the life of the earth and remain united with it; they do not want to take the right course, which is to progress from the earth’s corpse to what will be the future soul and spirit of the earth.
(The above quotations are from pages 139-43 in lecture 9 of The Fall of the Spirits of Darkness. Note that in other contexts, Rudolf Steiner indicated that reunion of the Moon with the Earth around AD 5734 (the start of the Anglo-American Age), and that this event would coincide with the loss of the ability for sexual procreation in human beings.)
During this Age of Eclipse the world has witnessed quite publicly the transhumanist motivations of individuals attempting to bring about the so-called Fourth Industrial Revolution, primarily through the vehicle of the World Economic Forum. On the other hand, the experimentation with live attenuated viruses in bioweapons research, as well as in mRNA technologies to combat them, has also risen to the surface of collective consciousness. Rudolf Steiner’s indications shine a new light on this unholy union of the military, pharmaceudical industry, technology, economics, and politics: it would seem that the transhumanist (i.e., ahrimanic) urge to overcome death by uniting completely with the machine world will find its fulfillment in the form of microscopic organisms that help to break down the “earth’s corpse.”
It should be noted that precisely at the time of the fall of the spirits of darkness—the autumn of 1879—the possibility of live attenuated vaccination was discovered due to Louis Pasteur’s assistant forgetting to administer cholera samples to the chickens upon which they were experimenting. The development of live attenuated vaccinations—which invariably deattenuate, eventually coming back stronger and more virulent than before, demanding a new vaccination to confront them—opened up the path to the techno-pathogenic development Steiner alludes to above.
At the same time that Steiner was delivering the lectures on the Fall of the Spirits of Darkness, he began publishing a series of articles on The Chymical Wedding of Christian Rosenkreuz. This again points to Lazarus-John, the Apocalyptist, as a guide through this time (we will return to The Chymical Wedding later on).
When we look at what was happening 100 years prior to the October 14, 2023 eclipse, Rudolf Steiner was delivering the fifth and final lecture of his series The Four Seasons and the Archangels. Once again, the Michael imagination is highlighted here, but brought into relationship with the other three Archangels—Gabriel, Raphael, and Uriel—as well as natural processes throughout the seasons. In a way, it was a precursor to the Agricultural Course he would give in Koberwitz eight months later. Perhaps we can bring Gabriel into relationship with Mary-Sophia; Raphael into relationship with Christ; and Uriel with the impulses of the so-called “Great Teachers of Humanity”—in particular Christian Rosenkreuz and the Master Jesus in terms of our present study.