Crack that code, and you’ll have the keys to your future.’
techno-fossils. And if you can put those elements, those fragments together, you’ll find the code.
‘If you can find the crossroads, if you can make an archeological dig into this, you’ll find fragments,
Black Audio Film Collective, The Last Angel of History, 1996
Just as forms evolve over time, so does the animic constitution of the human being and consciousness. Rudolf Steiner explains how earlier, in prehistoric times, consciousness is clairvoyant as well as shared in a group (non-individual), it is realised in images and not in concepts and ideas. The images, instead of referring to the physical world, refer to the world of the spirit that now humans think is 'behind' it. This explains the origin of myths, which are not elaborations of invented fantasies but a sum of images with a dreamlike impression (they actually belong to an intermediate state between wakefulness and sleep) that, even if in a fanciful form (because they are bound up afterwards), reveal a real vision of the spiritual world that gives them meaning and reason. Our dream-life is but a remnant of that ancient form of consciousness that makes humans perceive that which is above the sensible and which is once a normal attitude of the soul. Just as we today are certain of possessing a sensitive body that sees, touches and feels, so the
prehistoric human is certain of belonging to a spiritual world that is directly perceived through images. It is evident that already in Greece and Rome and in ancient cultures this prehistoric state of consciousness is manifested as already having been in crisis for centuries, then gradually declining and being lost, scripture is born, Kali Yuga has already begun and the gates of the spiritual world are closing.
Steiner invites us to delve into the ancient mythologies not with a modern materialistic consciousness, but with a soul capable of understanding human spiritual creations, thus discovering how the narratives are in full accord with the forces of the spiritual energy world behind the chemical, physical and biological ones. What is needed is an unprejudiced approach that accepts and identifies the historical content in these ancient texts, whose oral provenance testifies to a profound memory of prehistoric civilisations. Historians cannot a priori discredit ancient narratives because certain historical events are embedded in and intertwined with mythical and theological elements; in ancient civilisations, the modern separation of disciplinary fields makes no sense whatsoever, and our (only seemingly
non-ideological) narrative of history cannot be the only way to tell and understand the past. The blind king of the Kuru party, among the protagonists of the Mahabharata, Homer, Tiresias and Oedipus are only few exponents of a prehistoric era in which the manifestations of ancestral human clairvoyance still shine through. Everything that surrounds prehistoric humans only appears to them in a continuous relationship with divine-spiritual existence. The figure of the blind in ancient literature is the relict of that ancestral epoch, for they are blind to the world that directly surrounds them, going back in memory and song to all spiritual connections. They see into the spirit and the soul. This is why in the sagas and epic poems, those who in a profound sense must understand what is happening in the world are represented as blind, and manifest the passage from a ‘primordial’ humanity to an ‘ancient’ one, making themselves the bearers of complexes, such as the Oedipian one, such as the concept of honour and shame and multiformity (Homer), sexuality and genders (Tiresias), all cryptic dynamics deeply connected to humanity in its development in a new age and society, and still characterising today. The places to which the Vedic texts
refer are geographically real and, as with the places of the Second Testament, have been Tirtha, i.e. places of pilgrimage and worship, for centuries.
The mystical and the sensitive
Steiner defines the human as capable of sublimating the powers of the soul in order to ascend the higher spiritual worlds in two methods, the mystical and the sensitive. The first can be represented by a vector through an inner experience, penetrating the veil of the inner world by tending away from the outer world; the second can be represented by a vector from the inner to the outer that investigates the forces that regulate the world, that of sensible impressions, and penetrates the veil of the outer world. These two paths today should not be disjointed; indeed, both are essential prerequisites of spiritual analysis. In pre-Greek times, however, i.e. pre-Christian times, they belonged to two distinct though spatially close peoples: the Indian in its expression in the Vedas; the Persian led by the personality of Zarathustra.
Vedic culture invites alienation from the world
that is first of all Maya, great illusion, through the loss of contact with first of all one's own human nature: Yoga, the asanas and breathing are nothing but the best possible conceptualisation of body and mind that aims at their own disguise, at overcoming both. The asanas aim to overcome human nature, always in motion, through stasis and breathing, which slows down the flow of thoughts. Zarathustra teaches how to discern the Spirit behind every sensible manifestation, pointing his disciples to the immense periphery of being. The golden era of Greece according to Steiner, on the level of spiritual world history, unites these currents with opposite vectors. They reside in the Dionysian and Apollonian dimensions in Greek language; one can be found by immersing oneself in the mystery of human interiority, the other in the spiritual vision of what is outwardly presented to the senses. Steiner defines Greece as pre-Christian. This is because Greece is the cradle of western civilisation, destined then by organic causes and effects to achieve what could be considered a true cultural device that allows the birth, grafting and spread of Christianity: Rome. Christianity represents an extremely important point in the history of modern spirituality
In Steiner's analysis, in Christianity the individual ego becomes detached from the common ego: whereas in the ancient world, the ‘group soul’ character always prevails, whereby each ego feels connected and cohesive with the others, Christ is the spirit of the Sun, the Solar Logos that derives from the detachment of the Sun and Moon and descends into a highly evolved human being, Jesus of Nazareth, and sinks into the centre of the Earth through the blood dripping from the side of his open wound, an event with an extremely intense physical and spiritual charge and therefore destined to change the historical vision of the world and that of spirit.
India
The enormous intensity and scope of Indian thought has an origin that is difficult to locate and is certainly lost in prehistory.
Samkhya defines how its prescriptions serve to guide humans out of humanity itself, through the destruction of personality. This may sound strange to the modern Western individual for whom personality is the foundation of any level of consciousness and mysticism. For
India, what really matters is absolute freedom, which translates into the abolition of creation through the reincorporation of all forms into the primordial unity. If Samkhya is about gnosis and includes neither practice nor faith, Yoga prescribes the abolition of states of consciousness through their complete experience in practice and incorporates within itself the vision of God. Everything is derived from Prakriti, the material cosmic energy, which is distinct from Purusa, the spiritual cosmic energy, and individuality is determined by the Gunas, the material forces that determine the states of consciousness of things: Tamas, darkness; Raja, passion; and Sattva, purity. These are not qualities, but elements that mixed together have given rise to the entire universe. The goal of yoga is to maximise Sattva and minimise Raja and Tamas. The origin of the term, in its root 'yuj' refers to union, to conjunction and that was also the original Sanskrit pronunciation. Later it became Yoga. It consists, as defined by Patanjali, the editor of the Yoga Sutra ('sutra', literally 'desire to organise'), in the 8 limbs: Yama, the restrictions; Niyama, the penances; Asana, the yogic postures; Pranayama, the breath; Pratyahara, the withdrawal of the senses; Dharana, the concentration; Dhyana, the meditation; Sama-
dhi, the ultimate absorption of meditation. So Yoga means Samadhi. The goal of Yoga is not the conjunction of body and mind, but the actual disconnection of them, the disconnection of the Purusa/Prakriti relationship that the human mistakenly confuses. There is an ontological level difference between states of consciousness andSspirit. Mind is not the soul. Mind is not consciousness. Objects and subjects are not the Spirit. Spirit is greater. They belong to two different modes of existence. True freedom is the discovery of this truth. In the mind resides the ego, desire, and all its states of existence. Maya, the great illusion, as well as ignorance, arise from the confusion of the eternal and motionless Purusa with the flow of psychomental life and of Prakriti. To say ‘I suffer’, ‘I feel’, ’I want’, ‘I know’ and to think that this ‘I’ is part of Spirit is pure illusion. The ego is founded on identification, with physical and mental forms and states of consciousness. This is why the Yoga practice is founded as a selfless practice that does not require haste, impatience or individual desire to obtain its fruits, or to quickly join the state of Samadhi, which precisely is that contemplative state that allows one to grasp the forms of things directly, without categories. Yoga is ‘chitta vritti nirodha’, the activity
of calming the chattering mind, because movement is desire, expectations, and Moksa, freedom, is the liberation from Samsara, from the continuous state of change, birth and death, regulated by Karma and concerning all creatures subjected to movement. Yoga manifests itself through Yoga. With this practice, ancestrally as today, it is possible to maximise Sattva which can be understood as a state of purity of waters that otherwise disturbed by other gunas are turbid, or of a mirror, as Bryant often quotes, that cleanly can see and reflect Purusa in a crystal-clear manner recognising its pure reflection without identifying with it.
Egypt is the people that has most attempted to preserve the state of consciousness by images. It has most of all maintained relations with that state of clairvoyance by turning to the leaders of the people still endowed with clairvoyant faculties.
The ancient Egyptian consciousness goes back ancestrally to Zarathustra: the Assyrian, Egyptian; Babylonian and Christian animic forces derive from it. Zarathustrism is explained here without dilation so that we can speak more easily about the soul of the ancient Egyptian human.
The central concept is the relationship of Light and Shadow, both of which derive from a living being in oneness, 'Zervas akarene' or ‘that which is situated behind the light’. Just as the physical body is the outer body of a spiritual being that manifests itself in it, so the Sun, the light, is the outer body of a spiritual being, almost of a 'spiritual sun'. This principle is called Orzmud and is the spirit of light, and it is the spiritual being that is also physically in all things, for all things need and are made of light. The spirit of light is nothing other than a natural tendency to perfection.
Arimane is the spirit of the shadow. Just as we currently read letters written on paper, so Zarathustra explains in the stellar world the letters through which the spiritual worlds speak. The constellations are the words of a single discourse that is Ozmud and the zodiac therefore is a line that returns to itself, it is the line of time that returns to itself: time closes in a circle in which the connecting point is infinity. In this serpent that meets itself we are placed, we share in fact in our 12 pairs of cerebral nerves the actions of the 12 constellations, of therefore Ozmud and Arimane, and in this uruborus is woven on the one hand the discourse of light, all the brighter on the side of the future, and on the other that of darkness, ever darker behind in the past. Although Zarathism may seem to be a dualism, it is not. Darkness is not the absence of light, it is not evil, as introduced by Monoteisms, that enters the world through a woman, Eve. This tendency, Steiner specifies, which underlies all our thinking and feeling today, will be overcome one day, at the height of the Aquarian age into which we have already entered and which will bring back the regime of the Spirit. Its mission is of a heroic character destined to be felt by all future cultures. Today, the spiritual archetype of Zarathustra
has been almost totally lost. It is strange how his world view devoted to the great macroscopic manifestations, even in a materialistic age such as ours, takes second place to the impetus of the mystical current, which has been so favoured to this day.
Zoroastrism is a foundational and spiritual basis for the study of forms, as it has the admirable characteristic of rising above any categorical conception in order to picture the primordial basis of spiritual activity from another aspect, that inherent in the morphology of light.
force and is the same that lives spiritually throughout the universe and in the Being itself. In thoughts, representations and concepts themselves the Osiris-force flows, in a relationship therefore with those Osiris forces that Steiner defines in rapport as thinking is to thought, as representing is to represented, as activity is to the product of activity.
This Osiris-Isis relationship inherent the Egyptian soul is explained in the language of light, of Sun and Moon, and the ancient egyptian understands that this relationship is not accidental, there is a mysterious relationship between light and reflected light.
Underlying Egyptian animality, then, is the dualism Osiris and Isis, which underlies human evolution.
The Osiris-force is the active principle that fills souls with thoughts and feelings in the same way as the materials of corporeality take shape in the human in blood and bone. If the elements that make up the blood of the human once existed outside it scattered throughout the universe, the Osiris-force is that principle that makes them penetrate into the mould of human form, and the same is true for the thinking faculty that in the human is the faculty of representation: the Osiris-force is therefore active in the human as a thinking
Sun and Moon represent to the Egyptian the relationship between Osiris and Isis, and what lives in it is originally the basis of that mysterious relationship that brings the light of the Sun to the Moon. In the same relationship are seen the stars, the planets: everything is an image of the supersensible and those feelings that arise are ancestral, original feelings, experienced directly by them and handed down by the ancient clairvoyants. These feelings were the certainty of their original origin from those spiritual worlds of which they still possess the echo of that clairvoyance that was slowly being lost. The Egyptian says "We originate from the world of Osiris and Isis. The best part of us
yearns for a higher level of perfection because we come from that spiritual world, even though we are now placed in a sensible world of physical objects. That part that yearns for that spiritual world and can reach it is an emanation of Osiris and Isis: they live in us as visible forces, while all that is external is only a garment of the Osiris-Isis element.’
Parmenides
Raphael reads the Peri Physeōs (’On Nature’) of Parmenides in the prospective of an initiatory ritual of Pitagorean order. The author from Elea, modern city of Elia in Campania, Italy, does not offer a conceptual philosophy with dialectic methodology, but a way to follow to attain that knowledge that resolve itself into a internal state of consciousness. As Raphael specifies, in the philosophical ascesis what has been “heard”, known, is lived, and in this way knowledge becomes highly cathartic. There is so a transposition from a dianoetic conceptualization that comes from above, since thinkers often expound a discorsive truth that has been ‘heard’, as for example by the Vedic rsi, those to whom Vedic hymns are revealed, to a knowledge that ‘does not think’ but is self-revelatory, a silente knowledge that comes from
other dimensions of the entity itself.
So Parmenides is led by the revelatory maidens, daughters of the Sun and the Light into the presence of the goddess Dike that reveals to him the supreme Knowledge, the ultimate Reality. The initiated leaves the world of the Night, dominated by doxa, ‘opinion’, through the charioteers that belong to the intelligible plane, the Way of Light, thus are able to bring towards the door the would-be initiate into supreme Truth. For Parmenides whatever is born in the phenomena is the realm of opinion rather than the realm of Truth and thus contrasts the reality of Being. The latter is a dimension beyond, where the fundamental separation between the Being and the appearances becomes a Reality, since the Being is eternal, motionless and it is the center by which transitorily forms can exist.
The major mistake of the mind, again, is coinciding eón and physis, Being and Nature. The latter is the realm of Day/Night and has a beginning and an end since it exists in time, the former is unborn, imperishable. One must step over the door of initiation in order to embrace the Silence of the Being that has no names, eternally present and all well-rounded.
The Being reveals itself in the human being’s
a-temporal and immortal dimension as the foundation of its existence and constitutes the goal of liberating the human from the error in which it finds itself.
edge can be and can express themselves. These two aspects are qualities, but Being transcends qualities and quantities.
The criteria of identity, ‘that which is thus cannot but be’ (Fragment 2, page 51) and of not contradiction, ‘that which is not and which of necessity is not’ (Fragment 2, page 51) are clear and simple way to see appearances correctly for what they are in their nature: ‘This too you must learn: the things which appear must be correctly evaluated’ (Fragment 1, p.49).
Again, the illusion is to give appearances in the world of Day/Night, that is dominated by doxa, a degree of absoluteness that only concerns the Being. The Eleatic does not agree with pantheism by identifying Being with the world of appearances, the latter do not have the properties of the Being, but in Being the Day/Night world finds its metaphysical foundation.
‘Just as it is right to consider light and sight to be similar to the Sun but not the Sun, so it is right to compare knowledge and truth to the Good, but is not right to consider either of them to be Good, because the condition of the Good must be judged as something greater still.’ (Plato,
Indeed, apparances have some degree of Truth, since God Dike talks about them and, as we remember, it is not possible to talk about things that are not. The Being is the foundation on which both opinion and noetic knowl-
In the Fragment 12 Parmenides states some principles of cosmogony, even if the fragments on the second part of the Poem about the apparances are lacking and hard to reconstruct. Everything is made of fire/light: simple fire is at the center of the Sun, the things with less fire allow a planetary form to solidify. The foundation of everything, also of fire/light is Ether, that grants fire the potential to ignite. Ether is like the Being, like Prana, allows the foundation of the manifestation. The key of all manifestation is again Dike, defined as "Daimon", where Daimon in ancient greek language means spirit, destiny, and "Necessity", the cosmic order that makes everything in the rightful place. The goddess is the beginning of the world of forms and names, she is
Politeia, VIc 508e-509a)Logos and Mother. If Dike pervades everything giving life to the manifestation, directs the whole uniting the opposites of micro and macro it means that, in the substratum, everything contains an intelligent factor. No being that is part of Day/Night is isolated, but it is connected to other beings. As Raphael invites, one must be in the Maya but not of the Maya, in the world but not of the world.
1. Rudolph Steiner. Rudolf Steiner parla dei grandi maestri, CdL, 2019.
2. Valentino Bellucci and Swami Atulananda Maharaj. Srı Visnu Purana, Mimesis Edizioni, 2020.
3. Pinuccia CARACCHI et al. “Hinduismo antico–Volume primo–Dalle origini vediche ai Purana, Collana “I Meridiani”, Classici dello Spirito, Mondadori, Milano 2010
4. Mircea Eliade. Yoga: Immortality and freedom, Princeton University Press, 2009.
5. Edwin Bryant. The Yoga Sutra of Patanjali: A Biography. 2017.
6. Raphael. Parmenides. On the order of Nature. For a Phylosophical Ascesis, Asram Vidya Collection, 2009.
7. Platone. Repubblica, Bompiani, 2009.
Photo credit: Ezekiel Chariot’, Regina, Artstation.com; rendered in Cycles and Eevee, modeled in Blender. Arjuna and Krishna Chariot, image via web