Image by Gordon Johnson from Pixabay

This esoteric aspect has to do with ensuring that the Slavic peoples, and especially the Russians, will not fulfil their potential to become the world’s ‘vanguard culture’ from the mid-fourth millennium onwards, but instead will come under the domination of the English-speaking peoples, whose current ‘vanguard’ status – which has become overwhelmingly driven by materialistic concerns and ambitions – would otherwise come to an end in the mid-fourth millennium (the end of the Age of Pisces).

What does it mean that the Slavic peoples have the potential to become the world’s ‘vanguard culture’ from the mid-fourth millennium onwards? It means that in what Rudolf Steiner called the Age of the Spirit-Self (the Age of Aquarius), which, according to Steiner, will follow the Age of the Consciousness Soul (the Age of Pisces), the human ‘I’ (the essential self, the spiritual kernel of the human being), in large numbers of individuals, will have learned to see itself and other I’s as spiritual beings.

These spiritualised I’s will then seek to form new communities on the basis not of the old blood ties or traditional religions but out of their own insight. The Age of the Spirit-Self (the Age of Aquarius) will be a new age of community, based on empathy for others, an age of brother-and-sisterhood that we in the West today can hardly even conceive of, just as people in Ancient Greece and Rome would hardly have been able to conceive of our modern Western individualist culture.

But we can see foreshadowings of this future today in the remaining traditional communal behaviours of non-Western cultures, although such behaviour is instinctive and collective, based on blood ties, whereas in the future (Slavic) epoch of the Spirit-Self it will be based on the moral individualism that will have been won as a result of our current (Germanic) Age of the Consciousness Soul.

The seed of this new impulse to new community, new fraternity, Steiner described, is already there in the Slavic peoples, who not only have the impulse to community – which all eastern peoples too have to a greater or lesser degree in comparison with the more individualistic westerners – but the Slavs also have a Christian culture. The native Slavic sense of community has been infused with over 1,000 years of an empathic Christian sensibility, which one can see especially in the unfolding, for example, of village life in Russia, the nature of the mir, a word which translates variously as community, peace, village, world, cosmos. Russian and Slavic literature is permeated with this empathic sensibility.

The English-speaking peoples are a branch of the larger Germanic group of peoples that originated in northern Europe (Scandinavia). From the late fifteenth century onwards, these Germanic peoples gradually replaced the peoples of southern Europe as the arbiters of the destiny of the West. The southern Europeans of the Greco-Roman or Mediterranean region had been those arbiters since the eighth century BC (the Age of Aries) when Greek culture began to flourish and Rome was founded, but from the fifteenth century AD onwards, the military, cultural and economic power of the Italian states, Iberia and France (France straddles both south and north) gave way, chronologically, to that of Switzerland, the Netherlands, Sweden and eventually England.

Rudolf Steiner described in numerous lectures how in the period of just over 2,000 years until the fifteenth century, Europeans – a sizeable minority of them, at any rate – had learned to think for themselves; this was a key achievement in what he called the Age of the Intellectual-Mind Soul. No longer did they feel the gods or God thinking through them or inspiring them; now Europeans felt that they themselves were thinking.

In the following Age of Pisces, from the fifteenth century, the Germanic or northern European epoch, the focus of development is on the individual human will – how human thinking applies the human will and, essentially, how the individual will becomes morally informed and directed by the human ‘I’.

This is a very dangerous phase of development, in some ways rather akin to adolescence in an individual’s development, because its early stage is usually one of considerable confusion, egocentricity and selfishness as well as materialism, a view of life that results from feeling alienated, to a greater or lesser degree, as an individual from the rest of life and the cosmos.

We are only 600 years into this Germanic or northern European epoch, the Age of the Consciousness Soul, as Rudolf Steiner called it, with its American and Australasian offshoots, and though there have been positive signs of growing human maturity over the past 60 years or so, there is still plenty of evidence of a thoroughly egocentric and competitive, materialistic culture in the West, especially in economic life.

Steiner described that the spiritual counterforces – which exist to provide humanity with the resistance it needs to develop inner capacities for love and freedom – desire that these egocentric and competitive, materialistic attitudes and behaviours (which have become extreme in the age of American hegemony since 1945), should continue on into the next epoch of human development, the Age of the Spirit-Self (the Age of Aquarius); indeed, their aim is for human development, in effect, to stop at our present stage. Life on earth would then become so miserable and oppressive that most people would no longer wish to incarnate on this planet, or if incarnated, would soon seek to exit this life. This is the goal of those spiritual counterforces who oppose humanity’s growth and development. If it were achieved, the mission or task of humanity and the Earth would be a failure. Love and freedom would wither in human and social development.

These counterforces, Steiner pointed out, influence the thoughts and actions of those at the helm of the English-speaking countries in the modern age. What is the aim, Steiner asks, of the elite groups, once secretive and only semi-visible, which are operative in the English-speaking world? In January 1917 he said:

They do not work out of any particular British patriotism, but out of the desire to bring the whole world under the yoke of pure materialism. And because… certain elements of the British people as the bearer of the Consciousness Soul are most suitable for this, they want, by means of grey magic [he means the mass media – TB], to use these elements as promoters of this materialism. This is the important point. Those who know what impulses are at work in world events can also steer them. No other national element, no other people, has ever before been so usable as material for transforming the whole world into a materialistic realm. Therefore, those who know, want to set their foot on the neck of this national element and strip it of all spiritual endeavour – which of course lives equally in all human beings. Just because karma has ordained that the Consciousness Soul should work here [in Britain] particularly strongly, the secret brotherhoods have sought out elements in the British national character. Their aim is to send a wave of materialism over the earth and make the physical plane the only valid one. A spiritual world is to be recognised only in terms of what the physical world has to offer.

This last point can be understood in the ways in which, in the West, spiritual practice has been taken over by, or put in the service of, physical aims, e.g. the commercialisation of Christmas and Easter, the turning of Eastern spiritual practices in martial arts and meditation from ways of living into ‘techniques’ of supporting ‘health’ – sport and ‘mindfulness’, and more recently, the creation of alternative worlds in virtual reality, Second Life and the Metaverse, in which individuals can supposedly live out their fantasies. 

Terry M. Boardman - https://www.newdawnmagazine.com/articles/russia-vs-ukraine-and-the-anglo-americans-the-esoteric-dimension

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The above is reprinted with permission from the author’s new book, Western Hostility To Russia: The Hidden Background to War in Ukraine © Temple Lodge Publishing, 2023. Footnotes to this extract are found in the book, which is available from the publisher at templelodge.com/viewbook.php?isbn_in=9781915776075, and in Australia/NZ through woodslane.com.au (02 8445 2300), as well as online outlets such as Amazon.com.