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Alan speaks in a very symbolic and esoteric manner in some parts of his books. Although they can be read anthroposophically, passages speaking of Atlantis, archangels, gods, etc. do not need to be taken literarily to be meaningful. The more you read, the more you will realize he uses many different religions to express ideas in a symbolic manner and not in a religious manner. His writings are not religious. In some places his writings are meant to refer to religious events in a historical way. In some places he is using religious figures (from Christianity, Judaism, Islam, Buddhism, Hinduism, Paganism, Ancient Roman and Greek Religions, etc.) in a symbolic manner. However, at no point is he promoting a specific religion or speaking from a religious point of view.
I have kept the writing as close to one-hundred percent original so you will also find that he speaks of Australia often and some spelling or manners of speaking may be cultural. Any words I have changed are presented like this: <word>.
Also keep in mind that these books are written by a Waldorf teacher with decades of experience who also studied with a Steiner student himself, so he speaks to an audience that is dedicating their lives to the Waldorf method without exception.
Because of this, all of his views are not reflected in the Earthschooling curriculum and not all of them may be ones you want to embrace or are able to use. In all of Alan Whitehead’s writings the opinions are his own and may not align with Earthschooling or Waldorf Books. In some cases, we will be updating some of these chapters in the future with additional and/or updated information.
Ultimately, however, as I read through these passages I find I can distill wisdom from even those paragraphs that do not resonate with me.
We invite you to read with an open mind and heart and with eagerness to learn and discuss…
1998 – YEAR OF THE BEAST!!
A 666 Number Story
The crocodile has 66 teeth.
In the last third of 1998, a formidable NATO arsenal coerced the ever-aggressive Serbian army into retreating from Kosovo. Public pressure for this increased as television images of bodies of, not only Albanian insurgents, but the elderly, women, children – and even babies – were discovered in the tranquil autumn woodlands. Maybe this whole Balkan horror was the fulfillment of the prophesy of Armageddon-type events in this year of the Beast – 1998? Probably not, as wars go, this is a mere skirmish compared with other conflicts in the 20th Century.
So what is this ‘Year of the Beast’? Occultists – especially Steiner people – waited all through 1998 to bear witness to the fire-and-brimstone events which were foretold by Rudolf Steiner nearly a century before to consume civilization in 1998. This is based on the interpretation of the ominous 666 references in St. John’s Book of Revelations. The chilling numerology is based on events which took place in 666-year periods after the birth of Jesus. (There is some tolerance here, due to the change from the Julian to the Gregorian calendar in 1582.)
3, 33 and 333 are Christian numbers. As Rudolf Steiner so astutely pointed out, 333AD was exactly the middle year of the Aries/Ares Age, from 747BC – 1413AD.
The first 666 period saw the birth of Islam, bitter rival of Christianity throughout the ages. Even today there is a simmering suspicion between the two great religions of each other’s values, beliefs and intentions “There are 6666 sacred verses in the Koran!” the Revelationists trumpet in triumph. Multiples of three are of course the sacred numbers of Christianity. For most of the past 1 ½ millennia, Islam and Christianity have sustained a state of hostility, often leading to warfare. (Steiner described the religion as Ahriman-inspired; a truth is seems, especially in its attitude to women.)
Add 666 to 666 and we arrive at the year 1332. Around this period, Christian Europe was in the grip of an Inquisitorial Dark Age – its very own Ahriman inspiration! This was a time of terrorizing superstition and persecution. May your god be merciful if you were a woman (read witch), a Jew, a Cathar, a Templar – or any kind of non-believer or religious fringe-dweller. Another 14th Century catastrophe was the Black Death, a bubonic pandemic which killed over 50 million people.
So 1332 plus 666 is…1998!! Dark mutterings early that year, using the data above, foretold of a terrible war, especially between Christianity and Islam. Doomsayers were particularly excited by Saddam Hussein’s brinkmanship early in the year. (Why do these people always seem to welcome the holocausts they predict?!)
Other foretold of a disease-born Apocalypse – and AIDS blow-out even. Wrong again, latest figures, from America at least, suggest that the ‘Grim Reaper’ is actually in remission, falling below the ten most common causes of death for the first time since 1992. Again using the Medieval benchmark, maybe it was a global eclipse of human rights?
Not so; the various freedoms, like speech, assembly, worship, et al were in growth-mode right through the ‘90s. So what could it have been? The Beast, in the scale of horror we expected, simply failed to appear.
Perhaps it was the greatest (and to most of us in the developed world, invisible) threat of all, the malignant if not terminal illness of the planet itself. 1998 would seem to be an historical nadir in terms of the health of biological earth, and by extension many of her human inhabitants. Will esotericists in 2664, the next 666-year, huddle in their life-support bubbles, speak of 1998 as the beginning of the slide – tumble! – into the environmental Abyss? Is it too late to stem the tide of biological destruction?
For many extinct species, alas yes. There are currently more higher vertebrate wild animals on the endangered list than are not. Forests fall daily to the clear-feller and fires’ many if not most fish stocks are under siege, or have collapsed entirely. At least 1998 was the hottest year on record, globally! That seems to be a ‘beastly’ or satanic phenomenon.
The hole in the ozone layer has turned the sun into an enemy; water is becoming a scarce commodity – if indeed it is safe to drink at all. In 1997 the Yellow River in China, a liquid lifeline for millions, was dry for 226 days – failing to reach the sea at all. Before 1972 it has never fun dry – in 3000 years! Yet in 1998 saw record floods! These were created by a combination of man-based destructive factors, not the least being (now banned) de-forestation of the catchments. In China and elsewhere, the air is polluted, the soil contaminated; coral reefs are dead, and once crystal rivers are now lifeless drains.
Here in Australis we live in a bubble of our own, one of well-being; this is largely illusory. The naked truth however is glaringly exposed in developing countries, where quality of life, as it is dependent on the biosphere, has diminished cataclysmically over the last half century. In former times misfortune like famine, flood and fire, struck sporadically, causing only pockets of suffering. This allowed communities breathing space to recover to a time of relative abundance. Today more people live in abject misery than at any other time in human history; and for most of them, there is no relief in sight. This distinguishes today’s disasters from those of a more natural origin in the past.
Environmentally at least, the future does seem hopeless. The saving grace is ‘seems’. Reason drives passion; passion drives action – thinking, feeling and will yes? This balanced approach to global problems may triumph over the largely university-based cerebral one so far depended upon. As a reasoning, passionate and hyperactive species, we should still be able to turn the tide, red and polluted as it is. In any case, it’s not as if we weren’t warned, Steiner must have been turning in his dodecahedron at the environmental folly that has brought the world to its knees this century; one which achieved the critical mass of wholesale destruction in 1998.
The meek may well ‘inherit the earth’ (the meek are spiritual folk, as opposed to their opposite, the materialists), but will there be an earth worth inheriting in the 3rd Millennium? Steiner says there will, and he’s been right so far.
Rudolf Steiner identifies The Antichrist, the 666 Beast of Apocalypse, as “Sorat” (or Sorath the Sun Demon). The numerological interpretation of the Hebrew spelling is 666!
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