We return now to the overall comments on the proposed time-schedule 1896-2012. It has often been stated that humanity has crossed the threshold to the spiritual world collectively and is now confronting the lesser Guardian of the Threshold, in the case of most people unknowingly. It has of course been a gradual process since 1413 as our discussion of electromagnetism elucidated, but there is a clear feeling that 1896-1933/45 marked a decisive turning point. Besides the revelation of anthroposophy, think of Freud’s The Interpretation of Dreams 1899, and Jung’s The psychology of the Unconscious 1912. Furthermore, 1933 was mentioned by Rudolf Steiner as the beginning of the third Sorath-impulse. After the Second World War man had totally lost his protective innocence, the dignity of man had suffered deeply, and both existentially and spiritually he was suspended in the air above the moral pit opened by Sorath. In the next two temptations man’s decency, modesty, respect and awe was lost, too. The metaphor of a pit is not incidental, because the transgression is not only “linear” (or to many people even an exponentially ascending progression), but actually a steep descent or a downfall. That is why the interior layers of the earth have been mentioned and also the redeeming descent of Christ to hell. In connection with the transgression 1896-1933/45 we have to focus on the crossing between the 6^th and 7^th layers, that is the direct confrontation with the first layer of the Asuras, the Reflector Earth. Normally a protective border was placed here, sheltering the six upper layers from direct penetration by the lover forces of black magic, corresponding to the “Erinnerungsspiegel” inside man protecting him from the deeper lying “Zerstörungsherd”[i] This protective shield was lost with the fission of the atom and the atom bomb, and since then the forces of electricity and magnetism have been used in combination serving the purposes of the Asuras and Sorath. The second temptation 1962-79 implicated a crossing to the 8^th layer. The Etheric Christ was not experienced and chosen to be man’s guidance in the administration of the new wisdom, and hence neither He nor the Holy Spirit became the spirit of community behind the New Age-impulse in those years. Individualism and “self-development” took over the scene based on a false Eastern idea of the I. As the Son was mocked and deserted in 1933, so was the Holy Spirit now in 1967. The result was a travesty of community and solidarity pointing forward to the harmful and false globalism of the last temptation, the lopsided, materialistic globalization of today. Finally man has crossed further down to the 9^th layer and acquainted himself with Sorath since 1998/99, mocking the Father and creation. The newest CERN particle accelerator, the Large Hadron Collidor, was switched on in September 2008 with the purpose of recreating the nuclear conditions of the Big Bang! This gradual down slope is precisely what Sorath had hoped for!

According to Rudolf Steiner,[ii] Sorath’s original plan was to generate an impulse in the year 666 that accelerated the development of the consciousness soul and introduced its content (which was not supposed to happen before the middle of the 5^th Age in 2493) in an ahrimanized form in the intellectual soul, overtaking the human I and blocking further spiritual progress. He remarks, that this is the general procedure of the evil powers – to anticipate the later positive and appropriate development of man. The expedited incarnation of Christ counterbalanced and partly disrupted this plan. It took place as many years before the middle of the 4^th Era, 333, as 666 happened after. And so the ahrimanic Sorath-impulse of 666 was weakened and occurred against a completely changed background, though this materialistic intellectual impulse found its delayed way to Western culture through arabism and created the basis for later science. In a most recent book[iii] on the descent of Christ down to the interior of the Earth, the author conveys a detailed exposition of the dispositions and actions of Sorath following the decision of Christ to incarnate in advance of 666. The main idea is that Sorath in a way hangs himself on to the incarnating Christ during the descent in order to overshadow and rise with Him on Easter morning, thus destroying the redemption of man’s I and making himself God. The three earthquakes demarcate Christ’s reaction, trampling Sorath underfoot, banishing him to the deepest interior layers of the Earth, where he is now present and has his province. It is explained by implication, how this inadmissible hanging on to Christ reverberates in the 33.33 and 333 year cycles and exercises a corruptive influence on them, resulting in the strange intertwinement of the 33.33, 333 and 666 years cycles we have discussed above. The content of this exposition is said to be based on independent supersensible research within the requirements of spiritual science. The present author is not in a position to verify this claim and can only resort to clear thinking and his own intuitive resources and extrasensory experiences. On one hand it is of paramount importance to avoid speculation, on the other hand it is equally important to try to understand the present situation of man in regard to Sorath and his actions. In our opinion the proposed explanation is not completely futile. It is on the track of the subtle realities of evil in our time and shows a peculiar susceptibility to the Sorath-phenomenon.

Rudolf Steiner has never unequivocally characterized Sorath’s province and origin, but apparently the demon does not belong to the human evolution and cosmos per se like the other evil forces. Sorath’s direct opposition to Christ, the Sun Logos, seems to be his most distinctive feature. Quote: “This seductive being is of quite a different nature from man. It originates from other worlds; it has acquired the tendencies of other world periods …This being could only have got something from the Earth by being able to gain the rulership at a certain moment, namely when the Christ-principle descended to Earth. If the Christ-principle had been strangled in the germ, if Christ had been overcome by the adversary, it would have been possible for the whole Earth to succumb to the Sorath-principle. This, however, did not take place, and so this being has to be content with the refuse of mankind who have not inclined towards the Christ-principle, who have remained embedded in matter; they in the future will form his cohorts.”[iv] This passage points to a Sorath-plan like the above-mentioned, only in connection with an earlier stage, perhaps the Baptism or shortly after in the Temptation. It is most likely that Sorath somehow shadows the Christ and works from the interior of the Earth after the Resurrection, when it became the planetary body of Christ. We can only guess what action Sorath could have taken at “that certain moment”, but the alternative idea of Sorath descending and rising with Christ at Easter seems a little to imaginative and attributes exaggerated power to Sorath.[v] We must ask ourselves this question: Why is it, that Christ to some extend tolerates the presence of a being and a destructive principle, which do not contribute anything positive to the development of man or Earth? The answer is simple. Sorath is in contrast to Christ and His cosmic I. He is nothing but a shadow of divine love. Christ could only succumb to His adversary if He had failed Himself in his freedom to do so, which He did not. The same goes for the human I and freedom, and that is why Sorath will take away from the human I everything, that is offered to him, that is not Christ-like. He will not enrich man spiritually voluntarily, but he will serve a function. Yes, he can shadow the Christ temporarily in relation to man, but he can not overshadow Him. The Passion of Jesus Christ was His obedience to God until death, when it was finished, and the Resurrection was his resulting victory – how could any shadow-being jeopardize that?

Sorath was not able to rise with Christ, he is never going to incarnate on Earth, and he has neither an incarnation nor a resurrection body at his disposal. What he certainly can do, will do and is doing right now – is to draw as many human beings as possible down to him, utilizing the three evil principles that is actually connected with man’s evolution and therefore built into his three lower members. And, as mentioned by Rudolf Steiner, he can only do so, if man does not show any inclination towards the Christ-principle. Sorath can only rise through man’s downfall, and that is his sole objective from 1933 onwards and since the Mystery of Golgotha. Sorath can only nullify Christ’s redemptive victory if man does so. And so he has mobilized and prepared since the Mystery of Golgotha, launching luciferic and ahrimanic impulses in the course of history (the Mexican mysteries, Gondishapur, the destruction of the templars) and waiting for the moment, when the Asuras became operative and the human I could be tempted full scale. From then on he started to work on man more directly from within as well as from without, in a highly coordinated manner, skilfully utilizing and enhancing the polarity-structures of the evil powers, adhering to the principle: “What comes out of a man is what makes him unclean” – always imperceptibly, staying behind the scene, calling things the opposite name. We can not prevent Sorath’s actions, but we can certainly renounce and resist them, and we can witness them for what they are.

It is noteworthy that the Passion of Christ and His descent into the interior of the Earth has received such an attention within anthroposophy in recent time, and we think it is sensible to interpret this event from a broader perspective of reality as pertaining to the present descent of man into Sorath’s evil, directly and intimately connected with the Mystery of Golgotha. We will qualify this interpretation further when discussing the period of the present temptation, 1996-2012, but for now it suffices to say, that it is mankind, not Christ, who sinks through layers of increasing evil and is stepwise tempted and give in to Sorath! And it is not mankind in general; it is us, you and me! As always, when something causes furore or provocation, you might ask yourself, if there is something in reality you have neglected or bypassed. In this case it is evident that many wish to be with Christ in his Glory (or have Christ to be with them and glorify them), but not many want to follow the actual way to this glory. Here we are not thinking of Christ’s Passion as such, but the personal and existential passion belonging to ourselves. The hardest thing in life is not to displace any evil away from yourself.

Besides taking a good look at the outer events of contemporary local and global reality from the point of view we have outlined above, we could try to imagine, reflect on or sense more clearly, what kind of inner collective conditioning of our three lower members Sorath has produced during the last century or even decade? This question is all the more relevant and urgent, since man has evidently crossed the threshold to the spiritual world and ought to have some inkling of his personal lesser Guardian of the Threshold, an experience described by Rudolf Steiner as a “disaster in your life”. How do we actually look today in that mirror of truth? We have to take into account, that mankind has far from guarded itself against the influences of Sorath, on the contrary! It is known in anthroposophy that the human double is connected with the electromagnetic and -chemical processes and qualities of the body, shadowing the etheric almost like Sorath shadows Christ. Then perhaps it is reasonable to expect, that the massive outpouring of Sorath-induced and Sorath-devised fabrications in and around us have not been traceless with respect to the structure and workings of the double – and since the Asuras and Sorath are involved, neither with regard to the I-structure and our thought-processes. Could and should we not imagine some kind of “descent-body” although we would rather discuss the regenerated phantom and the resurrection body? What do we think – when Sorath sounds the final signal to gather his cohorts, will we watch it on TV or the internet, or will we receive it directly through our double? We must remember that Sorath, contrary to Christ, does not respect a human freedom or individuality that has not been defended with Christ-faith and watchfulness. If we compare what Sorath has accomplished in the outer world in a century or two (we like to call it our progress and ingenuity) during the relatively undisturbed status of our inner personal ego-administration (apart from the few of us who are too sensitive, estranged or unbalanced) – what then should we expect, if Sorath shifted the open distribution from the outside to the inside of man? For now, we are relatively confident in ourselves only because we don’t actually experience our hanging in the air over the bottomless dimension below. But what does it mean to engage Sorath from the inside, when he has free access to all the bodies of our make-up? Remember, this is not a soap-opera, this is not fictional. This is our preliminary end-time, directly connected with the time of the Mystery of Golgotha only 2000 years ago, our first “serious” confrontation with Sorath. Let us remember Rudolf Steiner’s words: “Those concerned with introducing the Antichrist instead of the Christ have endeavoured to exploit what could work especially through the most materialistic forces, yet working spiritually with these materialistic forces. Above all they strive to exploit electricity and especially the earth's magnetism to have influence over the entire earth. I have shown you how, in what I have called the human double, earthly forces arise. This mystery will be penetrated. It will be an American mystery to make use of the magnetism of the earth in its “doubleness,” to make use of the magnetism in North and South to send guiding forces that work spiritually across the earth.”[vi] And again: “When Ahriman incarnates in the West at the appointed time, he would establish a great occult school for the practise of magic arts of the greatest grandeur, and what otherwise can only be acquired by strenuous effort would be poured over humankind.” We think this deliberation links up with the current efforts to establish the contours of a One World Religion and points to a future attempt of a spiritual take over by Sorath, which critically undermines the faith in Christ.