Theos-Talk Archives (September 2002 Message tt00110)

The 1914 war turned out to be a considerable embarrassment to 
Theosophy. While political fraternity and religious universalism
remained official policy, chauvinism flourished within the Society and
Theosophists were just as likely as anyone else to assume that God was 
on their side.

Some went still further, turning the catastrophe to their own
advantage. In tough social Darwinist fashion, the fanatically imperialistic
Leadbeater not only identified the Germans with the Dark Forces, but 
announced that the conflict was part of the evolutionary process, a kind 
of dialectic from which a higher human synthesis would emerge.' He 
even took a leaf out the Muslim book, asserting that to kill German 
soldiers was to do them a favour by hastening their occult advancement, 
whereas being a live Hun did you no good at all. British victory thus 
coincided neatly with the divine plan.

Steiner also followed his philosophical masters in distinguishing
national historical 'tasks', adding the piquant theory that each nation is
guided from above by an archangel who is somehow also the folk spirit 
of that nation. Prince Max of Baden, the last Chancellor of the German
Empire, particularly asked for a copy of his lectures on this topic. Other 
European nations, according to this argument, have been appointed to 
develop certain 'aspects' of humanity as their contribution to world 
evolution an interesting idea which is let down by the banality of 
Steiner's conclusion that the Italians were given feeling, the French 
thought, the English consciousness, and so on. Of course, only the 
Germans combine all these aspects at the highest level.

Arguments about national character were part of a larger, older and 
darker controversy about the Aryans, and they underline the racist
side of occultism. Nineteenth century research into the origins of
European peoples and their languages had suggested that both derived 
from a single pure source the Sanskrit speaking Aryans whose purity 
had gradually been diluted (and, as some thought, polluted) by 
miscegenation as they swept westwards through Europe. Since theorists 
from Rousseau to Gobineau were agreed that racial purity equalled 
strength and vigour, nations vied in their claims to ethnic purity
and Aryan origin.

The competition produced some bizarre assertions. In the later 
nineteenth century, the Germans torn between priding themselves on 
Teutonic exclusiveness and envying the prosperity and political
stability of their less immaculate English cousins whose bloodlines were
polluted with Celtic and Roman strains worked hard to prove that the
greatest Englishmen, such as Shakespeare, were really Germans. The 
French, patronised by Saxons on either side, responded by insisting that
their Frankish and Gallic ancestors were really Germans too. And 
everyone could unite in despising inferior races such as Slavs and Jews.

This contempt, which was soon to have such horrific consequences in 
Hitler's Germany and Stalin's Russia, was r the absurdities of occult 
controversy. Trying to preserve J his apparently undeniable Jewish 
origins, for example, Steiner and the racial theorist Houston
Stewart Chamberlain agreed that both Semitic and Aryan features, and 
was therefore as good honorary German. The next stage was to deny 
that Jesus was a at all, and there were plenty of people ready to take
that step. the Himalayan Masters of Theosophy combined their Indian 
looks with suspiciously pale skin and European features.
In short, the war was about more than imperial or rivalries. It was a 
Darwinian struggle for racial, moral and supremacy. Such ideas may
not have interested the men in trenches, but they sustained many of the 
politicians who sent there, and the jingoistic public who supported
the politicians exacerbating the bitterness of the struggle.


But as Steiner had access to General von Moltke and Prince Max von 
Baden, Leadbeater, played the occult ace of trumps, announcing that 
had been in communion not only with the influential living but aim
with the mighty dead, talking on the astral plane with Otto vas Bismarck,
who had discussed the struggle with him at length.
It turned out that Germany's former ruler, once identified by
HPBlavatsky herself as a distinguished occultist, was one of the Lords of 
the Dark Face, the agents of evil who were battling against mankind in
twentieth century Europe as they had done in Atlantis thirteen thousand 
years before. Their battle was not merely a spiritual one: according to 
Leadbeater, Bismarck had planted magnetic talismans at the four 
corners of Germany to prevent resistance to the Fatherland's armies 
to no avail, as it happened. But Leadbeater was anxious that no trick,
of this world or the next, should give victory to the Huns (though,
since he also argued that their machinations were anyway only part of 
the Divine Plan for a Second Coming, it is hard to see what he was 
worried about). Why the Lords of the Dark Face should have revealed 
their stratagems so willingly to an enemy, we are not told.

As to practical help, there could be no question of Leadbeater taking 
part in the battle, of course, but there was something useful he
might do. From his fastness in Australia, the Bishop nobly agreed to 
patrol the Front in his astral body in order to guide the souls of the dead 
on their way into the afterlife, as a sort of Stygian majordomo. Although 
it became timely in 1914, this was already a recognised theosophical 
activity, and there was yet another organisation within the Society 
specifically devoted to it: the Invisible Helpers. The idea of
spirit patrols seems to have surfaced in modem times among 
mesmerists, who claimed during the Crimean War that their founder 
was too busy shepherding the souls of dead soldiers to pay attention to 
otherthings. 

Leadbeater had written about Invisible Helpers as early as 1896. See
his Invisible Helpers, TPH London, and Steiner's Between Death and
Rebirth, trans. E. H. Goddard and D. S. Osmond. One incidental 
advantage of being killed in the war was that your soul could be reborn 
as a Theosophist. Emily Lutyens was an enthusiastic Helper, though her 
pacifism and her refusal to hate the enemy put her in a quandary when 
war broke out, because Leadbeater took the view that the Helpers 
should assist Allied spirits first. The Bishop hated pacifists and
eventually forced Emily Lutyens out of the editorship of the Herald of the 
Star on the grounds that she was too sympathetic to Germans. That 
journal, said his spokesman Jinarajadasa, should 
declare 'uncompromisingly on the side of the Brotherhood', i.e. the 
Allies. "

Theosophy and Anthroposophy were both to profit from the spiritual 
hunger aroused by the end of the war, and from the vague feeling that 
the old religious and political institutions had been finally
discredited. 
Both societies expanded rapidly through the 1920S, developing popular 
youth movements in the process.

There is a theosophical myth concerning the beings known as Lords of 
the Dark Face, evil angels whose cosmic role is to lead humanity
astray. 
Vaguely adumbrated by early Theosophists as the 'Dark Forces' who 
fight an unyielding war with the Great White Brotherhood of Masters, 
these Lords were given positive identities by a second generation 
member of the Society, the Austrian philosopher Rudolf Steiner (1861 
1925) Steiner named the main enemies of mankind as Lucifer and 
Ahriman, personifications of the spirit of pride and the spirit of 
materialism.' Ahriman tempts human beings to reject the spiritual by 
inducing them to trust only in the realm of the mind and the senses, 
thereby involving them in his own contradiction as a spirit denying
spirit. 
He is the presiding deity of modern science and technology, and of
all those who would describe Man as no more or less than animal. 
Lucifer the light bearer more subtly seduces mankind to overestimate 
their spiritual powers by persuading them they can transcend human 
limitations by their own efforts. He dominates modern literature, 
philosophy and art.
It was easy for Theosophists to conclude that anyone who disagreed 
with them, however well intentioned, was working in the service of
the 
Dark Forces. The charge was eventually to be levelled against Steiner 
himself, when he rejected Theosophy in favour of his own new society. 
He was an unlikely rebel: a small, quiet, earnest, visionary ascetic,
an obsessively hard working scholar trained in the German idealist
tradition. 
But though he briefly headed the German Section and would certainly 
have become a dominant Theosophist had he stayed there, Steiner left 
the Society Although Steiner was a romantic who relieved his
otherwise drab appearance with a flowing artist's tie, he was also a 
realist who created an empire which has since outstripped Theosophy in 
power and popularity. His reaction against Theosophy pinpointed 
everything wrong with the Society. And although he produced a body of 
occult literature whose fantastic claims rival or even exceed 
Leadbeater's, there could be no greater contrast to the fin de siecle 
frivolity and decadence of the LeadbeaterWedgwood circle than 
Steiner's high minded, plain living heterosexuality, his lofty philosophy 
and dedication to work.

Perhaps the only thing Steiner and Leadbeater had in common apart 
from membership of the Society was a father who worked on the 
railways.' The eldest child of a village station master, Steiner was
born in the remote mountains of Styria and brought up on the Austro 
Hungarian border, in isolated villages where strangers were disliked.

Steiner was not willing to accept (some say because it threatened his 
own ambitions to become President of the T.S.) the idea that 
Krishnamurti was the latest and in that sense the best 
reappearance of the Christ Spirit in the world, or that this spirit was
subordinate to the Lord of the World who resided at Shamballa.
The Order of the Star in the East had been formed to promote these 
ideas, and the crisis came when Steiner flatly refused to allow the
order to operate in Germany, requiring any German members who were 
already members of the OSE to withdraw from it. At the same time he 
sent a telegram to Annie Besant in Adyar, requesting her resignation 
from the presidency of the Society. She responded by canceling the 
German Section's charter and expelling Steiner from the parent
society. 

He then severed his links with Theosophy, and in February 1913
founded the Anthroposophical Society. Many German Theosophists 
followed Steiner, leaving the rest in the care of Dr Huebbe Schleiden, a
Munich factory owner whose letters where published about ten years 
ago claiming among others that Steiner "blessed" jewelry that 
next was sold at inflated prices to believing members of the 
Anthroposophical Society.


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