The Christmas Conference and the Polaric Impulses of the Michaélic and Ahrimanic Schools Richard Ramsbotham 1. In a lecture shortly before the conference, Steiner described how since Aristotle the full science of the Mysteries had been kept from humanity. One part of Aristotle’s work (to do with philosophy and logic) bore fruit in European culture through the medieval scholastics, while the other part (to do with science and Mystery-knowledge) had traveled eastwards with Alexander. This reappeared in Europe in a deadened, distorted form in materialistic natural science, but its reality was lost. In 1923, after the destruction and tragedies of the previous ten years, nothing could meet the catastrophe civilization was facing except the renewal, in contemporary form, of the full reality of which the destructive forces in the world were a caricature. Thus Steiner announced: For a while […] the other part of Aristotle’s teachings had to wait. Now the time has come, however, when these other things have waited long enough […] Alexander had, fundamentally, to bury these secrets of nature in Asia, for only their corpses were brought over to Europe. It is not our task to galvanize these corpses but to rediscover the original living truth.1
This was the civilizational deed that was enacted at the Christmas Conference. Its world-historical importance is clearly seen when we recognize that the teachings and work of the Academy (and Hospital) of Gondishapur, of such wide-ranging influence, were also a distortion of the work of Aristotle and Alexander. Steiner’s lecture The Working of the Angels in Man’s Astral Body2 (given in Zurich, where Ita Wegman was) was given immediately after his lectures on Gondishapur and reveals the forms of its negative influence today. 1 Lecture of December 15, 1923 (GA 232), in Mystery Knowledge and Mystery Centres (Rudolf Steiner Press, 2013). 2 Lecture of October 9, 1918 (GA 182), in: Death as a Metamorphosis of Life (SteinerBooks, 2008).
Modern materialistic medicine, says Steiner, is where this influence is most extreme.3 Thus a renewed “Mystery medicine” is essential to the new civilizational impulse that the Christmas Conference made possible. But this impulse has to do, ultimately, with the transformation of the whole of civilization in the way necessary if we, as humanity, are to reverse the steep downslide we are on and create a healthy social order. 2. An utterly different radical transformation of our civilization is currently being raced through and promoted as a global panacea. Named The Great Reset or the Fourth Industrial Revolution, it “heralds a series of social, political, cultural, and economic upheavals that will unfold over the 21st century.”4 Its leaders (like Bill Gates and Klaus Schwab) boast that “new technologies and approaches are merging the physical, digital, and biological worlds in ways that will fundamentally transform humankind.”5 The drastic, inhuman changes to society imposed during “Covid” are, for such people, the essential first phase of the Fourth Industrial Revolution. This is clearly presented, as policy, in Klaus Schwab’s inaugural book, Covid 19: The Great Reset.6 Here too, therefore, “medicine” plays a key role in a far greater civilizational change. 3. We can be in no doubt that the spiritual source of the Christmas Conference is intimately connected to the 3 Lecture of April 24, 1924 (GA 316), in Understanding Healing (Rudolf Steiner Press, 2013). 4 Encyclopaedia Britannica on The Fourth Industrial Revolution by Klaus Schwab. 5 Klaus Schwab, “Shaping the Fourth Industrial Revolution,” January 11, 2016 (posted at www. Project-Syndicate.org). 6 World Economic Forum, 2020. “COVID-19 has accelerated our transition into the age of the Fourth Industrial Revolution” (Schwab). december 2023 • 21
