Note by the translator: In this second section of his 5-part essay the author by virtue of his divine consultations "in heaven" truly reveals himself as a modern messenger of the Gods, as Hermes reborn, whom he after all reportedly said that he was.
The source for this remarkable statement and more is a program note written by the team of the publisher of these early essays, Achamoth Verlag (Tomberg Books) in Southern Germany on the occasion of the presentation of Vol. 1 of the Dutch translation of Valentin Tomberg’s book Meditations on the Tarot in Soesterberg, Holland on July1, 2017. This note reads (in my translation from Dutch): “Dear Friends and Those Interested in the Anthroposophical and Hermetic Work of Rudolf Steiner and Valentin Tomberg, As you know, the life work of Rudolf Steiner, anthroposophy, is a ‘resurrection’ of the Egyptian Mysteries’ as Rudolf Steiner has repeatedly said himself. Who now was the founder of these Egyptian Mysteries? That was Hermes, who inherited the astral body of the great Zarathustra and who since then bears this astral body, or rather was entrusted with it. This individuality was incarnated in almost every century because he is the future Bodhisattva Maitreya who will once bring “the Good”. – This individuality also lived in Valentin Tomberg, of whom it is known that when he was once pressed to answer the question of whether HE was the Bodhisattva said: ‘Ask me rather who I was in the Egyptian period!’ When the questioner held on three times to the question as to the identity of the Bodhisattva, Tomberg said quietly: ‘Hermes, I was Hermes during the Egyptian cultural period.’ After all no one will say directly of himself that HE is the Bodhisattva.”
No indeed, but indirectly Valentin Tomberg has in fact said this, at least for those who are able to read in between the lines what he has written as the “Anonymous author from beyond the grave” in his Meditations on the Tarot, a book that he wanted only to be published post mortem, but which on the contrary was published in his lifetime in 1972. In the 21st Letter to an Unknown Friend on the arcanum of "The Fool", it is written, starting on p. 613 on the given online PDF file:
“After Jesus, the GodMan, who was the complete unity not only of spirituality and intellectuality, but also of divine will and human will, and even of divine essence and human essence —the work of the fusion of spirituality and intellectuality can be nothing other than the germination of the Christie seed in human nature and consciousness. In other words, it is a matter of the progress of the Christianization of mankind, not only in the sense of a growing number of baptized people, but above all in the sense of a qualitative transformation of human nature and consciousness. This latter will work in conformity with the law: general aspiration and longing; culminating point of success in an individuality; general diffusion spread out over a number of generations, i.e. the climate of general expectation will lead to the particular realization which will subsequently become general. This is why Buddhists await the coming of the Maitreya Buddha and Hindus that of the Kalki Avatar. They await him having in view a step forward in mankind's spiritual evolution which will be crossed as a consequence of the manifestation of the new Buddha and the new Avatar. And this step forward will be nothing other than the fusion of spirituality and intellectuality. This expectation is, moreover, not restricted to the Orient: theosophists made a considerable contribution to it by launching a movement of international scope aiming at preparing minds for the coming —supposedly at hand —of the new teacher. To this end they founded the Order of the Star of the East which numbered about 250,000 members, and which organized congresses, conferences and rallies all over the place, as well as publishing hundreds of books and brochures. Whilst spreading the idea of the imminent coming of a new teacher for mankind, the Order of the Star of the East was, alas, too fixed on a particular personality — chosen not by heaven, but rather by the leaders of the Theosophical Society — who was extolled in advance so as to build up his prestige, which in the last analysis displeased this person, who disbanded the Order.
It was more discreetly, and without putting a particular person in the limelight as candidate, that Dr. Rudolf Steiner, founder of the Anthroposophical Society, predicted the manifestation — again in the first half of the twentieth century— not of the new Maitreya Buddha or Kalki Avatar, but rather of the Bodhisattva. i.e. the individuality in the process of becoming the next Buddha, whose field of activity he hoped the Anthroposophical Society would serve. A new disappointment! This time the disappointment was due not to an error with regard to the awaited individuality, nor even with regard to the time of the beginning of his activity, b u t rather to an overestimation of the Anthroposophical Society on the part of its founder —thus nothing became of it.
Be that as it may, the idea and the expectation of the coming of the new Buddha and new Avatar lives at present both in the western world and in the orient. There is much confusion concerning this idea, above all among theosophists, but there are also those who see clearly here. Rudolf Steiner, for example, saw very clearly: of all that has been written and said in public, the most correct is what was said by Rudolf Steiner. He was on the right track, at least.
Now, in following the same track—that leading to the culminating point of the fusion of spirituality and intellectuality—we arrive at the following synopsis:”
Those further interested may read on, but for all those who know the biography of Valentin Tomberg with respect to his suspended career as General secretary of the Anthroposophical Society in Estonia, as writer of numerous articles, as respected and beloved speaker in various European countries, his Anthroposophical Meditations on the Old Testament, the New Testament and the Apocalypse of John collected in the book Christ and Sophia with as an Appendix his lecture cycle in Rotterdam in 1939 the Four Sacrifices of Jesus Christ and his Appearance in the Etheric given one year after his lecture cycle there on Inner Development, his work The Foundation Stone Meditation of Rudolf Steiner and then the dramatic break just before the outbreak of World War II, “nothing came of it”: his forced withdrawal from the Anthroposophical Society motivated by the attitude of the then president of the Dutch Society, who found this work of Valentin Tomberg to stand in his way and not quite suitable for the education of the Dutch folk soul (!), and furthermore for all those who can give credence to the report “On the Proceedings of the Day Before the Christmas Conference on December 1923” by his late German publisher Willy Seiss that Rudolf Steiner even intended to invite Valentin Tomberg to become a member of the original Council of the Society, these self-identifications of the individuality of Valentin Tomberg appear not at all so incredible as they seem to those who believe e.g. that as a writer of merely secondary literature he has neither been of any service to the Anthroposophical Society nor to the Catholic Church.
But judge for yourself now: We now feel the need to comprehend the overall significance of the Mystery of Golgotha, namely its significance for all three kingdoms of the world: for the heavenly, for the earthly, and for the human kingdom.
Thus we ask ourselves: What is the significance of the Mystery of Golgotha for heaven? What is the significance of the Mystery for the earth? What is the significance for mankind? We must ask ourselves, what is necessary for heaven, the earth, and mankind, what are these three worlds longing for, and what would have happened to them if Christ had not come.
First, we will direct our attention toward heaven and consult the Gods. Yet here we enter an area that actually lies beyond the normal, earthly faculty of imagination. The highest truths of the world can only be expressed in the form of paradoxes. To that end, we must however clear away certain axiomatic notions. Only when certain representations obtained from the earthly world no longer stand in our way, do we acquire the possibility to fruitfully think about the primal secrets of the divine worlds.
Something similar must also arise in the field of mathematics. As long as one wanted to stick to the principle that the straight line is the shortest distance between two points, it was not possible to construct a theory about four-dimensional space. In this way, we must also concerning knowledge of certain truths of higher worlds liberate ourselves from certain earthly principles, namely from the notion that the top one is at the top and the bottom one at the bottom, that the innermost is inside and the outermost outside. In the higher worlds, the fact of the matter is that in order to ascend, one must descend, and in order to come inside, one must reveal oneself to the outside. How deeper one descends there, how higher does one come, and how more one goes outside, how more one penetrates into the inside.
How deeper the levels of existence are ruled by a being, how higher does it stand. And that is the reason why the Father is the highest being of the world because He rules the lowest.
It is He who determines wickedness as evil and goodness as good. Exalted beyond both He, therefore, becomes the primordial ground of the world. He establishes the polarity between good and evil, since He Himself is exalted beyond both. In this way, the whole world process is thus based on a polarity between good and evil, a polarity that is established and suspended by the Father. For He is the dormant one beyond both. Goodness is here because the Father from the primordial beginning in eternity overcomes evil by it. The evil is here as a support for the good that through the eternal overcoming of evil becomes as such conscious of itself. Between these two poles in eternal tension moves the stream of beings, which ascends from below to above, which streams from above to down below.
Calmness wants to move, the self-moving wants to rest. In-the-calmness-self-moving is duration, in-the-movement-calmness is eternity. And it is towards this in-itself-moving-calmness, to the Father that all beings of the divine world are striving, for they know that in Him the meaning of the world is hidden. Him they behold from the primordial beginning, before the creation of the world on high. From the primordial begin they were in a position to behold Him, yet they were not in a position to approach Him, in no position to reach Him in His heights. And this is what the imperfection of their nature consisted of, namely that they could behold the Father, but were unable to reach Him.
In order to come to the Father, the Gods had to pursue their path downward. In extreme darkness, they had to create a world in order to penetrate into their own innermost self. They had to rule the lowest realm in order to reach the highest. And from the awareness of their own imperfection, from the longing for divine self-knowledge, towards the exploration of their own essence, the Gods became the creators of the world. In that way, they thus awoke to creative activity, because they knew that only down below and outwards they could attain the highest and innermost goal; the image of the Triune Godhead.
It is this image of the Most High that the human being ought to become. In the human being that was created by the Gods, the meaning of the world was hidden for them. This meaning of the world still had to be fathomed by the Gods, through the human beings the Father had to utter the Holy of Holies to them. Yet eons passed by and the Father remained silent…
The Father remained silent from the beginning of cosmic time until the hour that God the Son had to die. Creating the good, controlling the evil, exalted beyond both He remained silent about His profound primordial ground plan of world evolution, in which evil ought to play a part as well in order to be transformed into the good.
In silence, He allowed cosmic time to emerge, in silence he allowed the Fall of Man to occur, in silence He condoned the ever-growing, tragic mood of the Gods, which after the Fall of Man became more and more acute.
For it was this tragic mood of the Gods, this growing tension of their experiences that was necessary as a preparation for the probation of the divine initiation, the violent initiation into the secret of death that they had to undergo at the hour of the Mystery of Golgotha.
Originally, this meaning of the Fall of Man presented also to the Gods a riddle, so that they had to experience the Fall as a failure of their own development plan. For according to this divine development plan, the human being was supposed to remain sinless and only behold the evil from the outside, but not absorb it in himself inwardly. And God was supposed to reveal Himself to this sinless human being not in the figure of the Crucified One, but as eternal life. It was only at Golgotha that the profound primordial development plan of the Father was revealed, according to which death ought not to be overcome by eternal life, but through death itself. Something completely new and never seen before was revealed by this victory over death by death for the Gods. For while the Gods took their plan from an experience that stemmed from worlds prior to the existence of ancient Saturn, while they thus created their plan from an infinitely distant past, the primordial ground plan of the Father stemmed from the ineffable heights of the primordial mystery, from a realm that in human existence corresponds to the sphere of moral intuition. In this sense, the crucifixion at Golgotha can be regarded by us as a moral intuition by the Father that was realized through the moral phantasy of the Son and the moral technique of the Spirit in the course of world history.
The horizontal line of the evolutionary plan of the Gods, which led from an infinite past to an infinite future, was crossed by the vertical line of the moral intuition of the Father. And at the point where both axes are crossed, there arose the cross of Golgotha. In powerful images of historical reality, the Father uttered that what we now know as the three Rosicrucian sayings: The world born out of the Father must die in Christ in order to be able to resurrect in the Holy Spirit. The development of the world is based on the overcoming of death. Through the development of the world, the Holy Trinity overcomes death.
At the hour of the Mystery of Golgotha, the Gods were initiated into this great secret of the Father. It was a huge shock on the part of the divine initiation that they had to undergo. And the tragedy of this divine initiation was even infinitely greater than that tragic mood which a human initiant must undergo. Then as tragic as death is every initiation and were it not be tragic, then it could not also be followed by the joy of resurrection. Tragic, infinitely tragic was the mood of the Gods at the hour of the crucifixion. Indescribable dismay overcame all beings of the heavenly world. And this consternation of the Gods found its expression in the eclipse of the sun, which during the hour of death, of the crucifixion spread out over the whole area of the earth there. Because of the fact that the Moon positioned itself between the sun and the earth, the sun was not only covered by the earth but also the earth by the sun. The corpse of the earth, the moon, covered the holy mystery of the Crucifixion. The earth lay dead under the coffin lid of the moon for the Gods; the Divine Word of the Father, the meaning of world development, lay dead in the earth.
In that way thus the immortals had to undergo the death of the Word – this was their divine initiation into the mystery of death, an experience that was to be the basis for their whole future development.
They had to experience how their holy essence, the Cosmic I, disappeared in the darkness of the kingdom of death. Yet soon afterward they experienced how this Holy of Holies ascended again from this kingdom of death and darkness as a victor over death. And the holy and lofty meaning of the world was revealed to them, which as the secret of the Father rested from the primordial beginning in His bosom. From now on they knew why they are creating, why the world must be born and why it must die. The crucifixion of the Most High as a synthesis of birth and death, as a simultaneous victory over the arch-Lucifer of time and the arch-Ahriman of space, stood from now on always before them. In this way, the great longing of the Gods for self-knowledge was fulfilled. By now looking downwards to Golgotha they established the Most High; by looking at death they recognized the nature of the Father and the path that led to Him.
And by thus looking downwards to the Cross of Golgotha they were permitted to experience something else, something highly important, with which their whole future mission was connected. They experienced namely that the Mystery of Golgotha signified an enormous turning point in time. For the arch-Lucifer, the time, was converted by this mystery of the crucified Godman and acquired henceforth the power to gradually overcome the threefold denial of God’s existence in a moment of space.
The time, which before the Mystery of Golgotha, distanced itself more and more from the Holy Trinity, acquired through the Cross of Golgotha the poweful impulse to henceforth ascend upwards, to ascend into that sphere where the beginning can be connected again with the end, the A with the O. And as on ancient Saturn, on ancient Sun, and on ancient Moon, the time became poorer and poorer, as it was first abandoned by the Father, then by the Son and finally by the Holy Spirit, it will through the great sacrifice by Christ of Golgotha unite on the future levels of existence of Jupiter, Venus and Vulcan first with the Spirit, then with the Son and finally with the Father.
At the end of Vulcan, the time will stream again into eternity, which is to occur through a complete overcoming of space. Saturated by the spirit and the Son, the time will then be able to return to the Father, through the region of the Cherubim who are waking at the threshold of eternity. And all beings that are developing themselves in the current of time, the whole infinite plethora of the children of time, will be able to stream into eternity, to where eternity will be girded by the time as in a circle where time shall again catch its snake’s tail, the A connecting with the O. And the Gods, by beholding this wonderful conversion of the arch-Lucifer, of time, will realize how they are to work in the future in order to help this salvation of time and all its children on one’s own accord. In view of the great sacrifice of Christ, the three hierarchies make a holy decision to set in the spirit for all children of time an example of the three future stages of earth’s evolution already in the present and stand for mankind as paragons of the future.
Thus the third hierarchy sets already today in the spirit an example of the Jupiter stage for mankind, and likewise the second hierarchy by setting an example of the Venus stage while the first hierarchy does the same with respect to the Vulcan stage.
Thus the Gods position themselves as a shining ladder of the high ideals underlying the evolution of the world in order to show the converted cosmic time, arch-Lucifer, the way to the Father. This they could never do however if Golgotha had not occurred, because only Golgotha gives a higher meaning to the activity of the Gods too by showing them the way to the Most High.
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