The Ahrimanic Deception

Also Rudolf Steiner on vaccines, and a few photos from Istanbul

A display from the Museum of Archaeology (left) and from the Museum of Innocence (right), Istabul

Greetings from Istanbul! 

I have been here for a week or so, fascinated by this vast city with its incomparably rich and violent history. Cities remind me of neural networks; you make new synaptic connections as you learn to orient yourself—spatially and culturally—in a different environment. I find visiting unknown cities pleasantly rearranges my internal psycho-geography, sparking connections between ideas, revealing new in-between spaces, corners, and crevices of unanticipated insights and possibilities.

Istanbul was once Constantinople–seat of the Holy Roman Empire, center of Christianity–and, before that, pagan Byzantium. It was fought over, besieged, recaptured, liberated, razed, rebuilt, over and over again. During those many centuries, it toggled from Democracy to dictatorship and back, many times. Emperors and then Sultans were routinely defeated and beheaded, or committed fratricide to get rid of potential rivals. Rivers of blood and madness coursed from ancient times up to the present day. Meanwhile, carpet sellers kept promoting their wares and stray cats pranced in the alleys. 

Does anything ever change? 

There are many reflections I could offer on Istanbul, but I will limit myself, here, to one thought stream. I remember, growing up in the 1970s and 80s in liberal/Leftist New York City, we thought Islamic society was antiquated, patriarchal, and reactionary. Obviously, Islam often tilts toward horrific over-reach and tyrannical oppression (Is Christianity much better?). Today, we see this with the repressive dictatorship in Iran and the heartbreaking courage of the women-led protest movement.

But other aspects of Islam—not the repressive, patriarchal parts—increasingly appeal to me. For example, I appreciate the daily prayers that interrupt routine and focus attention on something—a divine presence—beyond the mundane. Such reverence no longer seems foolish to me, but dignified and true. (For those who want to follow this out, Frithjof Schuon wrote two books that transformed my conception of Islam: Understanding Islam and The Transcendent Unity of Religions.)

Hagia Sofia, center of Christianity for a thousand-ish years, now a Mosque

Today I want to continue my investigation of Rudolf Steiner and his idea of the “Ahrimanic deception” and the imminently approaching “incarnation of Ahriman.” 

For those of us immersed in today’s language and culture, it is not easy to assimilate Rudolf Steiner’s way of thinking. It requires quite a bit of cognitive work. Recently, I discussed Henry Corbin’s approach to “active imagination” and the “imaginal world,” via his study of Iranian mystics from the 11th Century. Steiner was also a practitioner of active imagination in this sense. 

In The Ahrimanic Deception Steiner writes: “The world bordering upon that known to our ordinary consciousness is the so-called world of Imagination. The world of Imagination is far more inwardly mobile and flexible than our physical world with its clear-cut lines of demarcation and its sharply defined objects. When the veil formed by the physical world is broken through, we enter an ethereal, fluidic world…” 

It should be clear Steiner was speaking of the same faculty and capacity that Corbin explored with great subtlety and sophistication, as in this passage:

This other world, with the mode of knowledge it implies, is the one which, as we shall see, has been meditated upon tirelessly throughout the centuries as the "world of Hûrqalyâ.” It is the "Earth of visions”… Indeed, this is the world in which real spiritual events "take place," real, however, not in the sense that the physical world is real, nor yet in the sense that events chronologically recorded to "make history" are real, because here the event transcends every historical materialization. 

It is an "external world," and yet it is not the physical world. It is a world that teaches us that it is possible to emerge from measurable space without emerging from extent, and that we must abandon homogeneous chronological time in order to enter that qualitative time which is the history of the soul. 

Steiner’s fame skyrocketed during the COVID pandemic due to strange medical predictions he made more than a century ago. His comments on the future of vaccinations went viral in anti-vax and New Age / spiritual circles. 

I spent some of my morning tracking down the original quotes. They can be found in the book, The Fall of the Spirits of Darkness, a compilation of lectures Steiner made in 1917 (the entire book is online here). Steiner said the following: 

The soul will be made non-existent with the aid of a drug. Taking a ‘sound point of view’, people will invent a vaccine to influence the organism as early as possible, preferably as soon as it is born, so that this human body never even gets the idea that there is a soul and a spirit… 

WI have told you that the spirits of darkness are going to inspire their human hosts, in whom they will be dwelling, to find a vaccine that will drive all inclination towards spirituality out of people's souls when they are still very young, and this will happen in a roundabout way through the living body. Today, bodies are vaccinated against one thing and another; in future, children will be vaccinated with a substance which it will certainly be possible to produce, and this will make them immune, so that they do not develop foolish inclinations connected with spiritual life — ‘foolish’ here, of course, in the eyes of materialists.

The great difficulty, with Steiner, is defining a proper distance where you can appreciate and absorb his perspective without taking all of his ideas strictly literally. I admit I find these particular comments on vaccines alarming. I resonate with many of Steiner’s prophetic musings. 

Rather than literally believing the mRNA COVID vaccines may have already amputated people from their spirit, however, I feel or intuit that the truth is more complex, more ambiguous. We are on a trajectory where our latest technologies—biotechnology, Artificial Intelligence—tend to degrade our soul capacities. Increasingly, we are cut off from the possibility of communing with spiritual worlds or higher dimensions. Each step toward technocracy seems a progression in this direction. It becomes harder to backtrack as we get more pulled into what Steiner calls the “Ahrimanic deception.” 

I worry that Elon Musk’s Neuralink, or something similar, will be an irrevocable step in this direction, for anybody who gets implanted with it. My sense is that we have lost deeper faculties of perception and cognition, which Steiner explores (“imagination, “intuition,” “inspiration”). By wiring ourselves permanently into the digital matrix, we may finally disconnect from the spiritual powers animating and mediating natural and cosmic realms. 

I recently read about how the Kalahari people were able to hear the stars sing. They were shocked to learn that a Western anthropologist visiting them couldn’t hear the songs of the stars. Similarly when I visited the Kogi and Aruak people of Colombia, it was clear they had visionary capacities of seeing and sensing that we Anglo-Europeans have lost.

I worry that the fate of humanity may hang in the balance: We could seek to relearn and regain these forfeited capacities instead of rushing (why is it always such a rush?) to imprison ourselves forever in a digitally mediated reality.