S. Clarke's Mexican Mysteries Redux

It has now been a full century since Rudolf Steiner presented the lectures of 1916, those most commonly known as containing enigmatic references to the “Mexican Mysteries”. Thus it is timely to take into account what has come into common knowledge in the time since as well as to review the understandings of such things as known by their own actors.

Those of us who are alive now have a fortunate opportunity for considering this material since Steiner’s indications concerning the Second Coming was that it was to be in his future, and full underway already in our present, along with the baleful counterImage of the 3 x 666. Whatever our appreciation of the situation might be, it surely has developed in the most interesting fashion. I offer these results of my longstanding spiritual-scientific research on it for your deepest consideration in meditation, contemplation, and peer review.

In these lectures where the mystery-traditions of the West are referred to in the most provocative yet fragmentary detail Steiner’s typical caution about his remarks as indications is most apt and I shall be taking him at his word. Implied is their unfinished and open-ended nature. In spite of the difficulties involved with discerning their import, the rewards involved are well worth the effort, as we shall see.

Messrs. Easton and Kozlik have provided an excellent initial examination of the material in their remarks prefacing the only published edition, that of 1984, but it remains to sort out certain fundamental issues, not only those as presented by Rudolf Steiner but also which have accumulated in the body of commentary since. Let us, first of all, examine the structure, context and presentation of the lectures. After having done so, we will be in a better position to consider their content.

To begin: the English-language Anthroposophical Press 1984 edition of these lectures contains seven lectures, given from Sept. 16 to October 1, 1916 (lectures #s 1 – 6 & 8 of the full GA171ⁱ, as given in chronological order and as published in German by Rudolf Steiner’s own publishing house, also in 1984). However the full edition of GA171 contains seventeen lectures, extending past Oct. 1 to Oct. 30 of that year (containing the additional lectures #s 7 & 9 – 16) as well as 133 sometimes extensive endnotes, omitted in the English edition. The significance of the omitted bulk of the series (entitled Goethe and the Crisis of the 19^th Century) is unknown since it remains unpublished in English but if in it Steiner had been covering the matter of Faust’s descent to the Mothers as he did in GA272ⁱⁱ, it would be most interesting, especially in light of what follows.

We shall begin by examining the structural dynamic in the material between, on the one hand, the legacy of European culture as revealed in the hegemonic drive of the Roman stream (and the defeat of the alternative Templar impulse, which also serves as covering a multitude of other exterminated prophetic streams) in five of the lectures and on the other hand that of the Mesoamerican stream (i.e.: pre-Columbian Central America, as there was no “Mexico” as such at the time of the events described). The contrasting internal history of the latter was not addressed at the time of the 1916 lectures but in spite of an embedded history of problematical mass-cultural assumptions, a modern understanding of it – incorporating the large body of anthropological, ethnographical, art history and cross-cultural interaction established since - confirms and builds upon Rudolf Steiner’s core occult insights placed before us in this contrast. “Occult” because he could not possibly have managed to develop such potent insights on his own solely from the meager pieces of historical fact available to him at the time. “Core” because of the problematical nature of some of the subsidiary material and basket of cultural assumptions which were assembled into his presentation. There is always noise in the signal . . . . Various confusions about these indications have never been cleared up and that constitutes a significant barrier to the appreciation of their import not only within the anthroposophical community but also, as a result, within the spiritual-Christian community at large as well as those who might be able to make good use of them in their own life and work.

We may ask: ”Why did Rudolf Steiner take this opportunity to contrast the arc of European history with that of Mesoamerica? A particular person in the audience? A matter of esoteric timing? An prophetic injunction to at least put on the record a certain conjuction of subjects, as ill adapted as he might have been to do so, there being none other who could do better? We will examine a possible specific intention, one which can be discerned from the Imaginative arc of the lecture-cycle as a whole.

Let us note that throughout the course of his career involving more than 6,000 lectures on a multitude of subjects Rudolf Steiner refers to the events in the West of two thousand years ago in any detail in only two lectures, those included in those under examination here. Furthermore, they are more than a matched pair; they are almost identical. A sensitive reading of those lectures indicates that he had difficulty eliciting comprehension within a perplexed audience - a pattern which has remained in the record of subsequent commentary, as we shall see. This is symptomatic of the cultural biases which all were – and most still are – embedded. The matter cries out for elaboration and enhancement, since it involves the missing half of his life’s work: the Christian gnosis. Indications, after all, do not end where they begin! We will examine the varied embedded implications that call for no less than a deconstruction and reconstitution of the directly relevant anthroposophical theory as well as more than a few of its underlying assumptions. We will proceed to fully ground those indications which lead into the spiritual backstory of the most profound contemporary issues such as that of the atomic bomb, genetic engineering and the possible miscarriage of egohood on this planet – nuclear war being only the most immediate endgame of the confluent renegade impulses involved in our most recent iteration of our local conflicts of two thousand years ago. Yes.

On the upside is participation in the reestablishment of humanity’s relationship to the Sacred Earth as Body of Christ– and the healing of our own Shadow portion of it; one closely related to the Roman paradigm which has flourished recklessly unchecked our own now-dominant culture in the West. As we shall see, the indigenous American portion has its own inherent and effective safeguards against these hazards which were violated wholesale in the malign and continuing conjunction of 1492 in which the retrograde Aztec influence, defeated militarily, only gained more force, while the ostensible victory of European genocidal spiritual politics has been no such thing in the long run.

Close scrutiny of the lectures’ fine detail is crucial because in these lectures, as in no others, Steiner’s remarks stand alone and have not been fleshed out by his standard practice of returning to significant themes from a variety of perspectives over a number of years. This is a tactic which tends, as much as possible, to loosen them from the strangleholds of one-dimensional literalism, the elimination of ambiguity and the typical Germanic tendency of ‘a place for everything and everything in its place’. In the absence of complementary indications a misshapen picture of the proto-historical events in Mesoamerica has arisen. Ironically, even a straightforward literalism untutored by half-baked theory but referenced to elementary facts-on-the-ground serves to disabuse much of what has been assumed as obvious.

Specifically, and essentially, what is commonly known in anthroposophical lore as the Mexican Mysteries should really be referred to as “the so-called Mexican Mysteries.” First of all it should be noted that nowhere in the lectures themselves does Steiner use the term “Mexican Mysteries”; this handy editorial meme has short-circuited serious reflection, as we shall see.

One example of how the matter has been garbled in the culture of anthroposophy is indicated by the publisher’s remarks appended to that back cover of the 1984 English-language edition:

“ [The events described herein reach] a tragic climax in the bloody Aztec Mysteries of ancient Mexico, until they were thwarted by the heroic efforts of a Mexican Sun-initiate.”

This is not helpful. First of all, the Aztec culture that was encountered by Europeans in the 16^th C. was not the civilization in which Steiner’s adept Vitzliputzli acted 1500 years previously. Although it was the renegade aspect of that stream that attained temporary dominance in that later era, it was the primal and positive aspect of that Mythos and initiate tradition that was successful in prevailing over its own eruptive Double in those years of c. 33 AD and which quite probably would have done so again if not for the European interference in that indigenous dynamic. More on this later when we investigate the nature of those mysteries themselves.

In Steiner’s era little was known about those alien civilizations and much of that was hack speculation (cf. Heckethorn which I do consider to have been a significant source for Steinerⁱⁱⁱ). Up until recently it was the default assumption that the little which was thought to be known about the demolished Aztec culture of the 16^th century could be extrapolated back in time to give an accurate picture of conditions in its prior local epochs. As more information has come to light this notion has been decisively retired. In fact, the comparative conditions between late and early periods were rather oppositely different, in much the same way that conditions in the Christian culture of mid-20^th C. Germany had become quite disassociated, though conclusively related, from their primal origins in 1^st C. Palestine. This iterating theme of inversion of impulses is a significant feature and clue in the search for the genuine and essentially Christian Mystery-stream of the West.

And more significantly, since while the Roman stream in Europe has remained dominant and the transitions in rulership forms have been relatively seamless - from Roman State to Papal Empire^iv to secular Nation-State to Trans-National Corporations to Globalization of Finance the paradigm of top-down full-spectrum hierarchical control has only consolidated itself. In the West by contrast, every attempt to establish such systems has been either abandoned or thwarted. In this regard, examination of the detailed history of civilization in Mesoamerica is most enlightening^v, as we shall endeavor to sketch in outline.

The historical record in the highland Valley of Mexico, now completely filled in and occupied by Mexico City, where the events described in these GA171 seem likely to have occurred, begins, roughly, at that same time as those events themselves (I concur with Kozlik in his estimation of the significance of that locale). However, the prophetic thesis here is that it was the outcome of the struggle described by Rudolf Steiner that was the impetus for the establishment and meteoric rise of Teotihuacan civilization, the simple existence of which is still a conundrum to academic history. The initiate who blocked the counter-impulse arising from the precincts of neighboring Cuicuilco^vi was precisely that; an initiate embedded within an established, living tradition, one that had an ancient pedigree and continued afterwards to attract hundreds of thousands of people from all over Mesoamerica and beyond. Neither was he nor could he have been a solo actor. Such individuals are embedded in a matrix encompassing ancestors, cultural Mythology, broad community support, spirits of landscape and bioregion, etc.^vii The event was such that everybody wanted to be a part of what had happened there. Pilgrims flocked to Teotihuacan and propelled it into prominence as the largest city in the American continents until the Iron Age megalopolises of a quite different order more than a millennium later. When the impulse cycled out in the 8^th C., the project was abandoned, the city evacuated and much of it razed by the departing inhabitants, leaving only the most substantial material features as traces. As opposed to history in Europe, where the fake Ahrimanic^viii impulse of Progress has remained ascendant, culminating in the paradigm of scientific materialism and its subnatural electronic technology in the service of authoritarian paradigms, here in the West our history has been consistently different - especially in North America where the pattern of civilization has been fractal in the most diversified and bio-regionally adapted fashion, human nature notwithstanding.

Between Teotihuacan civilization (preceded by the quasi-historical Olmec) and the following Toltec culture (which, among all later, reverenced Teotihuacan as the vanished golden age where “the gods were born” – note this formulation when we return to the method of the 1^st C. adept) there was a discontinuity of several hundred years in which history went fallow. The Toltec Tula which is famous for the celebration of Quetzalcoatl rose later to dominate that same central Valley of Mexico – but not from the same location; the site of Teotihuacan was never again populated to any significant extent. Tula ruled for a span of time half that of Teotihuacan: approx. 375 yrs. When it expired – quite possibly for similar cycling impulses; this remains to be investigated - there was another similar interregnum before the next and terminal civilization arose in the area. When the Spanish arrived to demolish that succeeding culture, it had been ascendant for less that two hundred years and the Aztec dynasty itself had only emigrated in and come to rule for less than half of that. It might be surmised that the corrupt society that Cortez encountered would have been doomed to fall anyway by its own internal dynamic, without any outside interference. If so, this might account for the relatively small amount of force needed by the Spanish to topple an unstable order already on its way out. At any rate, resolution from within its own indigenous dynamic was thwarted and Europe inherited, absorbed and interiorized a hugely unresolved Double of continental scope. “To the spoils belongs the victor”, to paraphrase the motto.

The situation here is at the same time most simple and also most complex. Simple because absent this embedding context the entire significance of the spiritual-historical events in Mesoamerica at the time of Christ has been completely inverted in the anthroposophical lore and entirely lost to Christian culture at large, with the content of the “Mexican Mysteries” themselves confused with, identified with and replaced by their antithetical opposite^ix: a remarkable iteration of the inversion of impulse within historical streams, a theme hinted at but not developed by Kozlik but quite familiar to those acquainted with the work of Carl Jung, altho applied by him on a smaller psychological scale. Thus the use of quotation marks herein to indicate the suspect nature of the formulation. A straightforward reading of the text readily reveals that the real Mexican Mysteries were those of the white magic of the adept shaman Vitzliputzli^x, not those devolved ones of lurid aspect which still populate the blank spaces of the Steinerian map of the world. If one does deem the renegade ‘black magician’ the epitome of the “Mexican Mysteries”, then what is left to describe the representative of its antithesis – a fluke, an accident? If so, one is thereby enabled to marginalize, disregard and demonize an entire civilizational stream, one which does not find its place in Steiner’s Theosophical Society-derived world-historical theory of linear racial “evolution” proceeding from Egypto-Chaldean on up through the Greco-Roman culminating in the pinnacle of his own blond and blue-eyed^xi. Combined with an almost complete disregard if not distain for the accumulated knowledge, not just of the spiritual history of pre-Columbian America but of even the exoteric side of those cultural traditions and their continuation into the present day (“red indians are a dying, atavistic race”^xii, etc.), the ensuing boilerplate commentary has, at best, not contributed much to our understanding of what is involved. As a result, the spiritual research into the esoteric aspects of what transpired in Central America during the biblical era has remained undeveloped and a crucial portion of Christ Jesus’ planetary saga left blank.

That indicates what examination of the simple matter of structure, text and context can reveal. Now we shall deal with the more complex but ultimately clarifying matter of the lecture content. Challenging the aforementioned syndrome of dismissive disinterest, note that Rudolf Steiner’s emphasis on the weaker devolved aspect of those mysteries of pre-Columbian America is not characteristic of those traditions themselves. Specifically note the reference to the supposed ruling nature of subnature in them (cf. p. 55; “sub-earthly” put forward as an adequate description). Subsequent commentators^xiii continue in this vein to conflate a never defined but sinister subnature - e.g.: where is it mapped out on a full-spectrum map of forces and what is that map? - with the entirety of the body of the planet^xiv. This is entirely unwarranted. Even though Mesoamerican initiates were in fact most alert to unresolved aspects of the planetary biography, more so perhaps than any other culture, they approached them with a sophisticated understanding rooted within a much larger field of forces tending towards integration.^xv It is only the disassociated, isolated, extracted, condensed portion of it which was astrally concentrated into a weaponized ‘black magic’ by a deviant faction. A consistently tragic element within human nature allied with unresolved Shadow and Double portions of the planet’s own physiology was the threat of two millennia ago. It has now shifted into a denser, fully precipitated form due to its confluence with Steiner’s own culture’s magically-precipitated materialistic technology – a development he prophesized most consistently and eloquently.^xvi Steiner’s perspective on his own culture’s contribution to this syndrome was trenchant but his perspective on Mesoamerica’s was that of an observer, not that of one initiated as a participant. As a result, what we have in the GA171 from 1916 is a dangling and dangerously incomplete fragment of a larger picture that Rudolf Steiner probably saw no way to take to completion.

“The silver-sparkling blue below, arising from the depths of the Earth and bound up with human weakness and error, is gathered into a picture of the Earth Mother. Whether she is called Demeter or Mary, the picture is of the Earth Mother. So it is that in directing our gaze downwards, we cannot do otherwise than bring together in Imagination all those secrets of the depths which go to make up the material Mother of all existence. While in all that which is concentrated in the flowing from above, we feel and experience the Spirit Father of everything around us. And now we behold the outcome of the working together of the Spirit Father with the Earth Mother, bearing so beautifully within itself the harmony of the earthly silver and the gold of the heights. Between the Father and the Mother we behold the Son.”^xvii

as well as other, similar remarks left hanging here and there throughout his work and never systematized. But, as a practical matter, access to this stream in ‘Western’ culture has always been exiled as taboo or interpreted as psychological allegory, along with the lore of the Grail, the Philosopher’s Stone, the Michael Altar^xviii, and the like, together with the lore of the Underworld as a whole – all these constitute the landscape of the actual Mexican Mysteries in a culture which had little use for distinctions between exoteric and esoteric. In them, however, it is all an open mystery, hidden in plain sight. To date, no successful attempt has been made to reconcile the sense of the above remark with what has come to be considered his definitive statements regarding the baleful nature of “subnature” and its supposedly related “Nine Levels of Evil” comprising the Inner Earth, aka UnderWorld, as lair for the worst demonic entities. We shall cite them here, since they are taken as unexamined starting-points by all those using them in their own remarks on the subject:

“The occult science of all epochs says the following about the interior of the earth…

That is precisely why this layer was laid down in the Earth – so that men should be enabled to develop harmony for themselves. The substance of everything evil is prepared and organized there. Quarrelsome people are so constituted that this layer has a particular influence on them. This has been known to everyone who has written out of a true knowledge of occultism. Dante in his Divine Comedy calls this layer the Cain-layer. It was here that the strife between the brothers Cain and Abel had its source. The substance of this layer is responsible for evil having come into the world.

9. The “earth-core.” This is the substance through whose influence black magic arises in the world. The power of spiritual evil comes from this source.”^xix

Good grief; only the deviant or mentally disturbed would want to muck around in this; why bother?

The conventional wisdom is that the “Mexican Mysteries” concerned themselves with this latter formulation of successive layers of evil, while the true nature of the matter is that they were of an emphasis upon the resurrection powers belonging to the domain of the Earth Mother and the above catalogue is only a list of the faults or “sins” of the would-be initiate who must overcome them within him- or herself as they appear to view as outer adversaries. Even as they appear as such, they function as guardians, not as evils, tho they may appear as such to dissuade the unprepared. In them the Feminine God was revered as the Other Face and gestator/sustainer of the emanating powers of the Father God who alone has been revered in the book religions of the Europe and the Near East. That region is not the “West” (as in Western civilization, Western science, etc.) again, a most revealing formulation which relegates the actual West of things including its spirituality to a semi-existence off the map – another indication of an excessive ethnocentrism and the marginalization of other non-European culture-streams within anthroposophical theory and practice. Again, the hegemonic undertow of the Jupiterian signature in European culture, resistant to even deeper Saturnian Americanism.

In this we confront the fundamental question: the reconciliation of the Above with the Below. This is the Great Work, which Christ accomplished for himself and re-established as a master template but which all spiritual citizens must strive accomplish for themselves, and, in that, for others, and all Others, also. Let us examine the matter still further, for it is essential in the process of making whole Steiner’s vision:

Rudolf Steiner states, prefacing the above selection (a formulation repeated almost verbatim when he cites the material elsewhere), that: “The occult science of all epochs says the following . . . “. Universal, categorical statements like this, which Steiner was fond of making, are tempting but logically fatal: they are impossible to prove (no number of corroborating instances suffice), easy to disprove (one contrary example is sufficient), cannot be maintained except by appeal to authority and cannot be applied as a practical guide in daily life - an epistemology that is anathema to the ethos as well as the doctrine of Spiritual Science itself. This is the Path of Thinking, after all, not epistemology 101! . . . . Nowhere in the books citing this passage do the authors scrutinized this statement. In any case it certainly does not apply to the substance of the true Mexican Mysteries which were the Saturn Mysteries of the Mother co-creating and continually upholding “the wrought work of the gods”: Steiner’s own formulation of the existent creation. The only corroboration which can be had for this outre’ vision is its uncanny similarity to the fully-devolved black-magic theology of the Aztecs, which was as much disassociated from its formative origins as was that of those elite of the God-fearing democracy who invented nuclear weapons. It is doubtful whether either Vitzliputzli or Jesus Christ would have recognized much of anything in what remained in their descendants of fifteen hundred year later, significant exceptions notwithstanding.

The origins of this luckless but symptomatic basket of contradictions can be found in typically incomplete understanding of the kabbalistic^xx theory of the qlippoth. In this, the inner realms (the UnderWorld) of the earth are mistakenly conflated with institutional religion’s doctrinaire disinformation about hell, damnation, and, in general, with what lies “below” - from the Inner Earth to the naughty lower chakras (This is the ‘Roman’ hierarchical/dualistic control paradigm and literalism again, with high as noble and low as base). The mystery traditions of the West, as they can be discerned nowadays not only in practical ceremonial participation on the Land itself but also as traced in the archeological and ethnographical material accumulated since the time of the lectures, refuse this theology completely. Examination of how and why Rudolf Steiner adopted this esoterically false appreciation of the Underworld is outside the limits of this Introduction – for reasons unexamined he simply never got around to examining his underlying assumptions about it; the necessary regressive analysis is absent in anthroposophy - but the reader is encouraged to examine the hypothesis and research it him- or herself. The formal kabbalistic literature on this is abundant and Jesus himself would have been intimately familiar with his era’s closely-related version of it, being the Rabbi He was.

Furthermore, it is a basic esoteric tenant that “evil”, whatever its aspect, is always a secondary, derivative phenom, never a primary one. To ascribe to it an objective reality is a fundamental occult mistake. “Evil is something good that is out of place, time, or emphasis”: R. Steiner, paraphrased, a classical kabbalistic formulation of the qlippoth as unbalanced representations of the Sephiroth on the kabbalists’s Tree of Life.

The only thing that makes “subnature” (whether interpreted as the Shadow of individual psychology, the Double of the planetary body or as the energetic substrate of physical matter) bad and the only thing that makes dealing with it worthwhile is that it is where we stuff all the stuff we don’t want to deal with: it’s the 95% of spiritual work that involves clearing all that up so that you can finally start getting with the program. But: “Whatever gets in the way of the Work is the Work.”

Several explanations can be put forward for Rudolf Steiner’s perplexing attitude towards the Inner Earth: 1. There is no problem; Steiner was correct, literally; we don’t understand him but that is our problem, not his. 2. Poor translations, not accurate on critical detail. Hardly: his talking points on this are consistent over a span of many years. 3. Steiner is correct but excerpts a narrow slice from a broader perspective, never fleshed out or fully sorted. 4. Steiner was, quite simply, misinformed, and his statements on this matter of the Nine Levels are not to be taken as initiate wisdom, his own statement to the contrary. 5. Steiner’s depiction of the ‘Nine Levels’ does not refer to the objective state of the Inner Earth itself but to the aspirant traveller’s unresolved Threshold experience of them (I think this is probably accurate but this is not what Steiner is saying). 6. His statements on the ‘Nine Levels’ constitute a “blind”: an intentional misdirection, common in the transmission of ‘Secret Wisdom’ meant as a task for the student to notice and restore to correct formulation from his or her own experience in practice. One can then proceed to the next level of initiation if one can successfully contradict the teacher. This explanation has some merit in that that the sole example of Rudolf Steiner’s explicit depiction of the Tree (GA341) also completely mangles the attributions of the planetary Sephiroth. However the likelihood that Steiner is ‘blinding’ the matter of the kabbalah as a whole throughout his work is refuted by his cosmology of Occult Science which constitutes a masterful explication of neo-platonic hermetic kabbalah. 7. Occult opposition muddled Steiner’s spiritual sight on this crucial matter. Definitely a factor, as this writer can attest from his own experiences trying to attain clarity on the issue in which, in over twenty years of transformational meditation within this same Earth under the direct guidance of Jesus Christ as under discussion herein as well as now almost fifty years working within Steiner’s own anthroposophy he has, not once experienced anything of the sort which Steiner describes. Opposition in general does not need to come from explicitly demonic powers; it can come from fawningly loyal but dogmatic obstructionists within one’s own ranks. The riddle remains, but is especially frustrating in the lack of critical insight brought to bear on it by those who should at least be able to ask some simple questions.

Nonetheless, Rudolf Steiner’s own anthroposophic format of cosmic evolution (as an evolution of traditional kabbalah and as readily mapped out from the Sephiroth Tree) can support this scenario if the cosmic evolution propelled by cosmic beings as described in Occult Science is expanded to take into account the completely parallel process experienced from the inside of that creation. Thus, successive precipitations of Old Saturn, Old Sun, Old Moon and Earth evolutions (simply an alternate vocabulary for the traditional kabbalistic worlds of Emanation, Creation, Formation & Existence as depicted in shorthand in Genesis) can be seen as having their parallel “tree-rings” in the building up of successive inner-earth layers corresponding to Saturn, Sun, Moon, and, finally, the surface world of Nature, all inhabited at their core and in every particle by divinity in its immanent maternal aspect. Thus the Father God is One, the Mother God is Many. These are the Creators in Beriah; the ultimate and unified “God” predating and beyond all things including the Creation itself is the Great Mystery, the Void, the All – the domain in language of paradox. This process iterates through all levels of creation, formation and manifestation from particles to planets to galaxies: That which descends from above conjoins with that which wells up from below. This is the archetypal pattern of life that courses through everything that exists. This link between everything is the macrocosmic kundalini, the kabbalah’s Middle Pillar and the Axis Mundi and the World-Tree. It is also the pivot point of a certain meditation which restores Sophia to her homeland. This upwelling portion of this unified picture was core to the Mythos in Mesoamerica and still finds expression in the contemporary traditional Navajo and Hopi cosmologies of the First, Second, Third and Fourth Worlds through which the Medicine Man takes his patients for their healing and restoration of wholeness – a holographic and sacramental attunement with Christ’s own transformational passage. In this expanded and unified picture the universal forces of the Father-God on the periphery impel from outside, with the diversifying forces of the indwelling Mother-God build up from inside through the Land.

A departure point for this scenario within the lore of anthroposophy can be discerned in an Intuition of Steiner’s own last A Christmas Study: The Mystery of the Logos^xxi in which the real mystery, hinted at by its conspicuous absence, is the other half of the Mystery. Reverse the typical chronology of the iconography of Mary: beginning with Madonna with Child and ending with Mater Dolorosa (cf: Michelangelo’s Pieta) and you will have the picture as it would be seen in the West. Also in this vein are Steiner’s discourse on the European cult of Nerthus and other scattered references which have never been assembled into a coherent picture. This may be because Steiner himself was conflicted on the subject. He certainly did not take it to resolution.

None of this contradicts the overall vision of Rudolf Steiner but it does challenge the devoted and sincere anthroposophist to come to terms with the question, referring to the “Nine Layers of Evil Within the Earth” formulation cited earlier: “At what point did all the work of the gods become evil?”

In the course of contemplating this conundrum, I have considered it to be a sort of meta-indication; impelling, not a resolution of perspectives from within their own dynamic, but a search for missing elements not included in the canon. For my own purposes, I have found this not only to be necessary but both reasonable and easily done, once the Intuition is accomplished. Of course, many new and more questions arise from this, which is quite normal and to be expected in any fruitful course of inquiry, for it is questions, not answers which are the vital element.

Reviewing and comparing the parallel courses of history in Europe and the West, one could make the case that the Christian impulse fared better in the West that it did in the European Middle of world culture, for the Vitzliputzli was, above all, the agent for a victorious Christian impulse, one that conducted the Christed initiate Jesus through the gates of death into the courts of Resurrection, one that remains as vigorous as ever within the cultures of the indigenous inhabitants across the continent, persevering in spite of relentless persecution by the mass culture’s undertow of its own sophisticated and normalized black magic.

For nowhere has the influence of the malign aspect of “subnature” been so ascendant as within the mythology of the science^xxii which has become the undisputed secular superstition of the “Western” occupying culture that has striven to supplant the true mystery-tradition of the actual West. A world-view which relies exclusively on forces characterized by being energy-lossy and morally vacant, sacramentalized in increasingly autonomous technology, cannot but result in such meta-mega evils such as the Mutual Assured Destruction (acronym “MAD”) of the atomic bomb and the genetically engineered, terminator-seed, poison-rich agriculture of for-profit corporations and World Wars in which not individuals or dozens or even hundreds of victims are sacrificed, but tens of millions – and not for a deformed theology, but for profit. This is savagery on a scale which would have horrified the black magicians of a previous era – a black magic which was repeatedly thwarted in Mesoamerica but which has in recent times become allied with similarly malign influences eruptive within European “Christian” (also ‘so-called’ if we are to be fair) civilization. The confluence of which reached its anti-apotheosis in the Manhattan Project of WWII, based in Los Alamos New Mexico USA where the worst of both cultures met again to renew old agendas. The area is also home to the largest population of non-displaced Native Americans in North America.

The context of my own research as alluded to herein is the vision of native mentors, passed on to me, of “The Next 500 Years.”

Reluctance to examine our own rapidly metastasizing joint-cultural Shadow and Double forces as we conspire to demonize the Other can only presage our doom – impulses which can traced back to the Aztec resuscitation of even more ancient drives deriving in turn from prior ‘worlds.’ Tendencies towards ethnocentrism - an insufficiently cosmopolitan attitude – within the mass-culture and as mirrored in anthroposophical doctrine and practice hinder our ability to appropriate the potentially dominant forces allied to recovery and restoration of natural order. These will remain latent unless they are activated. The shamanic (i.e.: Western white magic) pathway trod by Vitzliputzli remains open; it is the core of the Saturn Mysteries of the West.^xxiii To ask and answer what this is, is to enter the true and perennial “Mexican Mysteries.” What hampers this investigation as well as a new positive cultural encounter between Europe and spiritual America is a lack of practical experience regarding the nature of one’s own initiate traditions; anthroposophy remains mostly intellectual theory, experience remains suspect in many quarters and warnings about meditation still exist. Mass-culture Christian religion, for its part, promotes pretension and belief, not faith and knowledge. Steiner may have described initiation in exhaustive detail, but an anthroposophical culture based upon the fostering of the initiation process among its members – the sine qua non of a living tradition – still remains to be accomplished, particularly regarding acculturation into the known pathways of the West.

Images from the local era of the 1^st C. shaman are not known to exist but the same figure is depicted in the closely contemporaneous Mayan iconography:

Indicative of the barriers to moving forward in this is the following, which must be addressed head-on: Carl Stegmann, in his adventurous work The Other America – only one instance out of many - built upon, without qualification, the unfortunate opinion that “At the time of Christ . . . the population [in Mexico] could in no way be compared with the European human beings, who at that time had already begun to develop thought forces. It consisted of simple souls with ancient, primitive atavistic ‘capacities’ [sic].”^xxiv This discredited theory of racial evolution is allied in sentiment with Steiner’s own contention that the red races are extinct or should be. Such theories have an unfortunate history of sanctifying the most serious abuses and cannot be justified except by reference to ideological predisposition. No harm will come to anthroposophy or to the Creator’s desired revelations by retiring such notions. Having dismissed the potential of the “Mexican Mysteries”, he then goes on throughout his book to plead for a discovery of a new and better spiritual America, not Imagining that it is present underneath his feet the whole time.

We return to core questions: “What actually occurred in those events of two millennia ago; how are we to follow it?” and: “To what extent do they, in their present form, contribute to the Second Coming against the ongoing Apocalypse?”

In answering this question, one would first need to rephrase it into the vernacular; initiates in the West were known as shamans, as we have implied. A prior question needed to be answered then would be: “How does a shaman operate?” Although Patrick Dixon has given a remarkable Imagination of this alignment, one could go further and say that shamans – i.e.: initiates, in the West – operate by sourcing forces and allies of regeneration within the UnderWorld; within the Earth.

This is not the Inner Earth of anthroposophical subnature; it is our own cosmic-earthly Mother fully incarnate. Here we confront an unresolved dilemma within what has been indicated by Rudolf Steiner and we return to reiterate the question: on one hand, the Inner Earth is comprised of increasingly dense layers of malign forces down to a terminal layer of pure black magic, one the other, the most divine forces have built up and occupy this same space. It has been said that problems cannot be solved using the same sort of thinking that gave rise to them in the first place. Intellectual integrity on the Path of Thinking demands a reevaluation of assumptions towards correction of what has been a blind spot in ‘Western’ thinking.

With this in mind, the door is opened to a very different vista than that which is typically presented in “Western” esoteric doctrine. Consider: In the events of the Biblical scripture, it is the incarnation of Christ which in the Old Testament has its long prehistory in the events of his ancestry and in the New Testament the attacks upon the birth, childhood and ministry of the person of Jesus. In contrast, at his death the story begins to evaporate, with the blank space of Easter Saturday, the mysterious events of the Easter Sunday Resurrection and subsequent apocrypha constituting a dangling appendix, the resolution pending. For a case in point: the dominant icon of Christianity is dead Jesus nailed to the Cross; the resurrected and potent fully-Christed initiate is absent from the popular Imagination even though that is the present reality and the justification for that cosmic trauma. The question as to how that has or will transpire is not even asked, much less answered, since it is stated by Him in scripture, that he had left the realm of the Father. For most people, the story ends there; even if one has absorbed a certain gnosis regarding it, the culture hardly supports it.

In Mesoamerica, however, the other half of the story is told – and is still told. Half a world away, our unnamed shaman in the hamlet of proto-Teotihuacan, with the help of all his allies shepherded our avatar through the gates of death through all the UnderWorlds into the resurrecting arms of the World-Mother. The Weaver Goddess, Spider Woman . . . where God the Father creator has one name: “God”, God the Mother-sustainer is fractal in aspect and has many. The Intimate and Vast Loving Unity of All is respectfully hidden behind the designation of “The Great Mystery.” God is, in the end, One.

Typically, the timeline of Marian representations runs from Mother Mary to Mary Dolorosa; mother with child, mother with son down from the cross. In the Saturn Mysteries of the West, it runs the other way; in fact, it keeps running: first the Mother receives the initiate, then the resurrection of rebirthing the Child of Light who then ascends back into the surface world of Nature before continuing back to the Father. This is the mega-archetypal journey that every follower of Christ will follow as a fellow initiate-shaman. This pathway remains actual and open in the rites of contemporary indigenous healers who take their patients through the same route: to the Mother-forces in the First World where the one who is wounded is realigned with their primal pattern and Original Intention and brought back reborn as an integrated and transformed individual.

This, my friends, is the real planetary-level “Mexican Mystery” whose local variant in the Americas, which while it does not have the person of Jesus, has His resurrected Life and venerates corn as the living body of Christ and wherever one partakes of this core food staple (as a representative of all nourishment), one does this in remembrance as well as for maintenance of renewal in the cycle of life on earth; here, not elsewhere.

This is my understanding of what has been indicated to me in the course of twenty years of study and travelling on the inner planes of my ancestral traditions as well as instructed by the diyin dine’ of the Navajo in my adopted homeland, inheritors – along with many others - of the priestly traditions of Teotihuacan. In so doing, one benefit is the recovery of the full priestly function of the Mass. I will leave it to the reader to sort this out for his or her self in practice.

It is this that the predatory Europeans were blinded to and of which the esoteric streams within the presumptuous dominant culture still await. As Dr. Kozlik pleaded in 1984: ”When will all this change?”^xxv

It remains only to be mentioned that the matter of Steiner’s supposed citing of the excision of the stomach in Aztec practice appears to be a non-issue: The relevant passages read:

“This scaffold-like structure . . . was rounded off above and when the victim was laid upon it, he was bent strongly back. This special way of being bound to the scaffold forced his stomach outward so that with one cut . . . it could be cut out.” Lecture #3, p. 50.

“The one to be murdered was tied to [the scaffold] and his body bent is such a way that his stomach could be excised with a single cut. This operation, the excision of the stomach . . .” Lecture #5, p. 93.

“In the new (1984) edition of the present cycle the editor tells us that Rudolf Steiner’s library contained a book by Charles V. Heckethorn . . . in which both the excisions, the heart and the stomach, area referred to . . .”

“[Heckethorn] is the origin of the detail mentioned by Rudolf Steiner that the priests cut open the victims' stomachs, which has been criticized on various occasions as apparently not in accordance with recorded tradition.”

“From here Rudolf Steiner obtained the detail that he mentioned that the priests cut out the victim's stomach, an assertion that is variously objected to as apparently not corresponding to the traditions that have been passed down to our time.”

In the original German, magen: the organ of the stomach, bauchweh: belly, unterlieb: abdomen. Steiner’s note-taker uses magen in all these references, which we consider incorrect usage and most likely imprecise transcription.

“The high priest then opened his [the victim’s] stomach with the knife, and tearing out his heart, held it up to the sun, and then threw it before the idol in one of the chapels on the top of the great pyramid where the rite was performed.”

A close reading indicates that someone, somewhere, jumped to conclusions. In any case it is a small matter since the full details of Aztec practice are unknown, may have included excision of the stomach and which in any case cannot be presumed to apply to the 1^st C. C.E.

A personal note: These are the understandings of such things as have been shared with me. Many questions remain unanswered, many more remain to be asked. I have tried my best to resolve the ones that have come across my field of view. I beg the reader to consider that although I have resorted to theory for the context and support for my remarks made herein, that theory has come after, not before those understandings have been shared with me as a result of more than forty years of on-location experience in precisely those matters under discussion. Hopefully the reader will be provoked to consider new questions and reconsider old answers. If one should wish to apprehend these matter on his or her own and gain their own initiations into them there is ultimately no recourse other than to spend time on the Land from and through which they arise, for this is where the scripture of the teachings lie. Indigenous representatives of the local lore can be found anywhere. The observation and absorption by gradual osmosis and acclimatization comes first, the thinking about it comes last - the shift comes in through the Will, not through the Mind, for the Path is not one of Thinking (as Steiner’s is). That’s just the way it works here. The maxim might be: “Do the ceremonies; they will teach you.” My initial instruction was: “First learn the ways of your own people.” It wasn’t until relatively recently that I was able to reconcile the two seemingly irreconcilable anthroposophical attitudes towards the Inner Earth – sacred or evil – until I applied the perspective of Rudolf Steiner’s own core methodology of kabbalah to it, the study of which I highly recommend.

At this point my relationship to all this is primarily through my friends among the Dine’: the Navajo people who, in this place we call home, represent, in their way, the stream that ran through the Vitzliputzlis of a prior era. That is my adoptive ancestry and spiritual citizenship. My biological ancestry runs from the German, Dutch, Irish & Scottish and I have also acquired understanding about that which has come into me from those Lands and biological Ancestors via their appropriate introductions. In this way I have been able to participate in those things of which I have spoken as a mutual practitioner, not as observer. To some small but significant extent.

For those that are of the opinion that the indigenous inhabitants here lack the kind of intellectuality that characterizes European philosophical discourse, the situation is not that they have not yet developed it but that those typical modes of abstraction, hypothecation and reduction simply do not interest them very much; it has little to do with the practical and universal concerns of life in an environment where map has not been so abstracted from the territory and in which concerns are immediate, not philosophical. Yet the spiritual basis for lives which partake in holographic fashion with all the elements of the Earth is profound and full of all the texture and discernment one could wish for. For more on this, one could do no better than to begin by an attentive reading of John R. Farella’s The Main Stalk – A Synthesis of Navajo Philosophy^xxvi which discusses the matter with a full and sensitive rigor.

Finally, I offer these remarks in the spirit of Spiritual-Scientific inquiry as a member of the School of Spiritual Science, a main, if neglected, element of which is, or should be, peer review and criticism. I welcome such a process, first of all, for my own education and correction of any points of fact which others may be able to contribute. And secondly, for the enrichment of anthroposophic dialogue, not only within this readership but also among the greater community of spiritual citizens distributed among humanity at large, in any forum the publishers may wish to offer.

i “GA”: Gesamptauswerk; the collected works edition as catalogued by the Rudolf Steiner Nachlas and Verlag in Switzerland. In the English edition, the GA171 is entitled and known as Inner Impulses in Evolution.

ii Rudolf Steiner: Faust and the Mothers, lecture of 2 November, 1917, from The Problem of Faust. Lectures given in Dornach from 9/1916 to 1/1919. The GA attribution of these lectures is confusing, insomuch as the first two lectures in this series (9/30/16 and 12/10/16) are indexed as GA171, and the remaining 10 lectures (dating from 1/27/17 to 1/19/19) are indexed as GA273. Due to the wideranging nature of the lectures, their collation has failed to be tidy.

iii Charles William Heckethorn, The Secret Societies of All Ages and Countries: Embracing the Mysteries of Ancient India, China, Japan, Egypt, Mexico, Peru, Greece, Scandinavia, the Cabalists, Early Christians, Heretics, Assassins, Thugs, Templars, the Vehm and Inquisition, Mystics, Rosicrucians, Illuminati, Freemasons, Skopzi, Camorristi, Carbonari, Nihilists, and Other Sects. Kessinger Publishing Co, from 1875 & 1897 (2nd ed.). German edition published 1900.

Note also the seventeen endnotes appended to Steiner’s 1904 Temple Legend Esoteric School lecture-cycle citing Heckethorn as either an originating or corroborating source, including this by the editor: “A copy of Heckethorn’s book in German translation was found in Rudolf Steiner’s private library, and from marginal notes in [his] handwriting it appears to have been used by him in connection with this lecture and other lectures . . .” which then goes onto quote from it for nine pages, citing Steiner’s sources within it. Specifically note endnote #58 in the full German edition of GA171 which cites Heckethorn as Steiner’s source for Aztec lore.

Unfortunately, in the time since, Heckethorn’s reputation for reliability has been seriously downgraded – even his current publisher disparages it and calls it a curiosity - but back then it was as good as it got in the mass culture.

viii “Ahrimanic”: casually, “diabolical”, more specifically in anthroposophical vocabulary as Satanic as distinct from Luciferic. Discussion of the distinction is beyond the bounds of this article but is well-developed in the lore.

ix Sergei Prokofieff, The Encounter with Evil, p. 37: “. . . the cruel and repulsive Mexican Mysteries . . .”, as consistently since 1916. SP spoke authoritatively on this as well as on many other topics as, until recently as head of the General Anthroposophical Society.

x “Vitzliputzli”: the german transliteration of the Nahuatl “Huitzilopochtli” of the Azteca, the only ones with written records remaining. The identity of this agent was also inverted in Aztec ideology itself.

xi "If the blonds and blue-eyed people die out, the human race will become increasingly dense ... Blond hair actually bestows intelligence.", “. . . the white race is the spiritually creative race.” Lectures to the Workmen, Dec. 13, 1922, published in From Comets to Cocaine.

xii Steiner, The Mission of Folk Souls, GA121, Lecture 6: “The American Indians died out, not because of European persecutions, but because they were destined to succumb to those forces which hastened their extinction.", Past Incarnations of the Peoples of Today, GA203: “. . . these Indian peoples who were gradually exterminated by the colonists from Europe”, “. . . those exterminated Indian peoples . . .”, GA192, p. 310: ". . . . these American Indians, who were wiped out . . .", The Soul’s Progress through Repeated Earth Lives, GA202: “. . . those people who were conquered and exterminated after the discovery of America . . .”, and the diagram from Menschheitsentwickelung und Christus-Erkenntnis, GA100, p. 245, where the evolution is shown ascending from protozoa to Apes through Indians to Aryans:

and: Vom Leben des Menschen und der Erde: “The white race is the race of the future, the spiritually creative race.” The main question here is not whether Steiner said or meant such problematical statements, but to what extent anthroposophists adopt these opinions and apply them to their view of the world, specifically to the general matter of whether the spiritual identity of the West is worthy of consideration.

xiii Gleich: The Transformation of Evil and the Subterranean Spheres of the Earth, Arenson: The Interior of the Earth, ben-Aharon: The Spiritual Event of the Twentieth Century, von Halle: Descent Into the Depths of the Earth, Stegmann: The Other America, O’Leary, ed.: The Inner Life of the Earth: Exploring the Mysteries of Nature, Subnature, and Supranature, and others therein.

xv In this, it is entirely congruent with the Lurianic kabblah’s doctrine of “the raising of the sparks (or qlippoth)”. One can only wonder what the Sephardic or crypto-jews embedded in the Spanish entourage of 1517 or later might have recognized here.

xvi Note the altogether parallel process by which subnaturally dominant uranium is mined, extracted, purified, concentrated and weaponized by the concomitant National Security State apparatus of superstitious materialism. Similarly for cocaine, heroin, and other more directly soul-destroying substances.

xviii Steiner, Youth’s Search in Nature. “It is a fact that in the occult regions of the earth what is prepared by the forging of Michael’s Sword is carried to a subterranean altar in the process – to an Altar which is invisible and which really exists beneath the earth.”

xix Steiner, Rosicrucian Training – the Interior of the Earth – Earthquakes and Volcanoes, from At the Gates of Spiritual Science (alternatively: At the Gate of Theosophy), GA 95, lecture 14 in cycle I, of Sept. 4, 1906, Stuttgart. Rudolf Steiner Press, 1986, pp. 138-140 and as repeated several times elsewhere without significant alteration. However, it must be said the on April 16, 1906 (GA 96) Steiner gave the same Nine Levels a considerably more congenial description. Von Halle, to her credit, uses this set of characterizations in her Descent Into the Depths of the Earth.

xx Familiarity with classical kabbalah will reveal it to be the backbone of anthroposophy’s major features, both in its strengths and in its weaknesses. In Steiner’s time it was a secret wisdom and his references to it are negligible. In the absence of any better indications a strong default presumption is that he was introduced to it by Freidrich Ekstein, who was certainly capable of it (Emil Bock, The Life and Times of Rudolf Steiner, pp. 63 – 66 and throughout to p. 204). For further information on the qlippoth (also killipot), see Dion Fortune in the The Mystical Kabbalah and Zev ben Halevi/Warren Kenton, multiple sources.

xxi Steiner, Anthroposophical Leading Thoughts (aka The Michael Mystery), lecture of Dec. 24, 1924, Leading Thoughts #s 137 – 139: “The Divine-Spiritual Beings of the Cosmos were the creators and moulders of the Earth’s existence. But when the Earth was far enough advanced to become an independent heavenly body, Divine- Spiritual Being descended from the great Cosmos to the Earth and became the Earth-Divinity.” And, from The Karma of Untruthfulness, lecture 8: “The earth is not only a great living creature. It is also a lofty spiritual being . . . [Christ] could not have united with earth evolution if, in the days of earth’s beginning, other divine beings had not descended in a different, though equally divine way. The revelation of the divine on high incorporated in the worship of Nerthus [the Earth Mother] differed from the way it was later understood, but it existed . . .”

xxii For, of course, at the anti-heart of the scientific paradigm is a complete adoption of the principle of entropy; the four forces recognized by it – the electric, magnetic and the two nuclear forces as well as the outlier gravity - are all point-centered. QED.

xxv For more on this and many other things, see this writer’s Rudolf Steiner’s Mexican Mysteries Revisited from which this material has been condensed and revised, as well as his The Saturn Mysteries in Mesoamerica at the Time of Christ for still more and much else, both with extensive illustrations and comprehensive bibliographies, available via nizhoniful@zoho.com