This article is the first part of a four-part series  on Truthdig..

By Paul Fitzgerald and Elizabeth Gould

“The Gate of Hell” by Gustave Doré for Dante’s “Inferno.” (Wikimedia) “Lasciate ogne speranza, voi ch’intrate. (Abandon all hope ye who enter here.)”—Dante, The Divine Comedy, Inferno (Part I), Canto 3, Line 9

Before the Tomahawk missiles start flying between Moscow and New York, Americans had better educate themselves fast about the forces and the people who claim that Russia covered up a Syrian government gas attack on its own people. Proof no longer seems to matter in the rush to further transform the world into Dante’s vision of Hell. Accusations made by anonymous sources, spurious sources and outright frauds have become enough. Washington’s paranoia and confusion bear an uncanny resemblance to the final days of the Third Reich, when the leadership in Berlin became completely unglued.

Tensions have been building since fall with accusations that Russian media interfered with our presidential election and is a growing threat to America’s national security. The latest WikiLeaks release strongly suggested that it was the CIA’s own contract hackers behind Hillary Clinton’s email leaks and not Russians. The U.S. has a long reputation of accusing others of things they didn’t do and planting fake news stories to back it up in order to provide a cause for war. The work of secret counterintelligence services is to misinform the public in order to shape opinion, and that’s what this is.

The current U.S. government campaign to slander Russia over anything and everything it does bears all the earmarks of a classic disinformation campaign, but this time is even crazier. Considering that Washington has put Russia, China and Iran on its anti-globalist hit list from which no one is allowed to escape, drummed-up charges against them shouldn’t come as a surprise. But accusing the Russians of undermining American democracy and interfering in an election is tantamount to an act of war, and that simply is not going to wash.

This time, the United States is not demonizing an ideological enemy (USSR) or a religious one (al-Qaida, ISIS, etc.). It’s making this latest venture into the blackest of propaganda a race war, the way the Nazis made their invasion of Russia a race war in 1941, and that is not a war the United States can justify or win.

The level and shrillness of the latest disinformation campaign has been growing for some time. But the American public has lived in a culture of fake news (formerly known as propaganda) for so long many have grown to accept fake news as real news. George Orwell saw this coming, and here it is. As a big supporter of U.S. military intervention in Cuba and an avowed practitioner of “yellow journalism,” in 1897, William Randolph Hearst admonished the illustrator he’d sent to Cuba who’d found no war to illustrate: “You furnish the pictures, and I’ll furnish the war.” Hearst eventually got his war, and America’s experiment in imperialism was off and running.

Americans should know by now that their country’s wars are fertile ground for biased, one-sided, xenophobic, fake news, and the United States has been in a permanent state of war since 1941. Although the targets have shifted over the years, the purpose of the propaganda hasn’t. Most cultures are coerced, cajoled or simply threatened into accepting known falsehoods demonizing their enemies during wartime. But no matter how frequently repeated or cleverly told, no lie can hold if the war never ends. The legendary cold warrior, Time and Life magazines’ Henry Luce, considered his personal fight against Communism to be “a declaration of private war.” He’d even asked one of his executives whether or not the idea was probably “unlawful and probably mad?” Nonetheless, despite his doubts about his own sanity, Luce allowed the CIA to use his Time/Life magazines as a cover for the agency’s operations and to provide credentials to CIA personnel.

Luce was not alone in his service to the CIA’s propaganda wars. Recently declassified documents reveal the CIA’s propaganda extended to all the mainstream media outlets. Dozens of the most respected journalists and opinion makers during the Cold War considered it a privilege to keep American public opinion from straying away from CIA control.

Now that the new Cold War has turned hot, we are led to believe that the Russians have breached this wall of not-so-truthful journalists and rattled the foundation of everything we are supposed to hold dear about the purity of the U.S. election process and “freedom of the press” in America.

Black propaganda is all about lying. Authoritarian governments lie regularly. Totalitarian governments do it so often nobody believes them. A government based on democratic principles like the United States is supposed to speak the truth, but when the U.S. government’s own documents reveal it has been lying over and over again for decades, the jig is up.

Empires have been down this road before, and it doesn’t end well. Americans are now being told they should consider all Russian opinion as fake and ignore any information that challenges the mainstream media and U.S. government on what is truth and what is the lie. But for the first time in memory, Americans have become aware that the people Secretary of State Colin Powell once called “the crazies” have taken the country over the cliff.

The neoconservative hitmen and hit-ladies of Washington have a long list of targets that pass from generation to generation. Their influence on American government has been catastrophic, yet it never seems to end. Sen. J. William Fulbright identified their irrational system for making endless war in Vietnam 45 years ago in a New Yorker article titled “Reflections in Thrall to Fear.”

The truly remarkable thing about this Cold War psychology is the totally illogical transfer of the burden of proof from those who make charges to those who question them. … The Cold Warriors, instead of having to say how they knew that Vietnam was part of a plan for the Communization of the world, so manipulated the terms of the public discussion as to be able to demand that the skeptics prove that it was not. If the skeptics could not then the war must go on—to end it would be recklessly risking the national security.

Fulbright realized that Washington’s resident crazies had turned the world inside out and concluded, “We come to the ultimate illogic: war is the course of prudence and sobriety until the case for peace is proved under impossible rules of evidence [or never]–or until the enemy surrenders. Rational men cannot deal with each other on this basis.” But these were not rational men, and their need to further their irrational quest only increased with the loss of the Vietnam War.

Having long forgotten the lessons of Vietnam and after a tragic repeat in Iraq that the highly respected General William Odom considered “equivalent to the Germans at Stalingrad,” the crazies are at it again. With no one to stop them, they have kicked off an updated version of the Cold War against Russia as if nothing had changed since the last one ended in 1992. The original Cold War was immensely expensive to the United States and was conducted at the height of America’s military and financial power. The United States is no longer that country. Since the Cold War was supposedly about the ideological “threat” of Communism, Americans need to ask before it’s too late exactly what kind of threat does a Capitalist/Christian Russia pose to the leader of the “Free World” this time?

Muddying the waters in a way not seen since Sen. Joe McCarthy and the height of the Red Scare in the 1950s, the “Countering Disinformation and Propaganda Act” signed into law without fanfare by President Obama in December 2016 officially authorizes a government censorship bureaucracy comparable only to George Orwell’s fictional Ministry of Truth in his novel “1984.” Referred to as “The Global Engagement Center,” the official purpose of the new bureaucracy will be to “recognize, understand, expose, and counter foreign state and non-state propaganda and disinformation efforts aimed at undermining United States national security interests.”

But the real purpose of this totally Orwellian center will be to manage, eliminate or censor any dissenting views that challenge Washington’s newly manufactured version of the truth and to intimidate, harass or jail anyone who tries. Criminalizing dissent is nothing new in time of war, but after 16 years of ceaseless warfare in Afghanistan, a Stalingrad–like defeat in Iraq and with Henry Kissinger advising President Trump on foreign policy, the Global Engagement Center has already assumed the characteristics of a dangerous farce.

The brilliant American satirical songwriter of the 1950s and ’60s Tom Lehrer once attributed his early retirement to Henry Kissinger, saying “Political satire became obsolete [in 1973] when Henry Kissinger was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize.” Kissinger’s duplicitous attempts at securing an “honorable peace” in America’s war in Vietnam deserved at least ridicule. His long, drawn-out negotiations extended the war for four years at the cost of 22,000 American lives and countless Vietnamese. According to University of California researcher Larry Berman, author of 2001’s “No Peace, No Honor: Nixon, Kissinger, and Betrayal in Vietnam,” the Paris Peace Accords negotiated by Kissinger were never even expected to work, but were only to serve as a justification for a brutal and permanent air war once they were violated. Berman writes, “Nixon recognized that winning the peace, like the war, would be impossible to achieve, but he planned for indefinite stalemate by using the B-52s to prop up the government of South Vietnam until the end of his presidency. … [but] Watergate derailed the plan.”

The Vietnam War had broken the Eastern establishment’s hold over foreign policy long before Nixon and Kissinger’s entry onto the scene. Détente with the Soviet Union had come about during the Johnson administration in an effort to bring some order out of the chaos, and Kissinger had carried it through Nixon and Ford. But while dampening one crisis, détente created an even worse one by breaking open the longstanding internal-deep-state-struggle for control of U.S. policy toward the Soviet Union. Vietnam represented more than just a strategic defeat; it represented a conceptual failure in the half-century battle to contain Soviet-style Communism. The Pentagon Papers revealed the extent of the U.S. government’s deceit and incompetence, but rather than concede that defeat and chart a new course, its proponents fought back with a Machiavellian ideological campaign known as the “experiment in competitive analysis” or, for short, Team B.

Writing in the Los Angeles Times in August 2004 in an article titled “It’s Time to Bench ‘Team B,’ ” Lawrence J. Korb, a senior fellow at the Center for American Progress and assistant secretary of defense from 1981 to 1985, came forward on what he knew to be the real tragedy represented by 9/11. “The reports of the Sept. 11 commission and the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence missed the real problem facing the intelligence community, which is not organization or culture but something known as the ‘Team B’ concept. And the real villains are the hard-liners who created the concept out of an unwillingness to accept the unbiased and balanced judgments of intelligence professionals.”

Copyright © 2017   Fitzgerald & Gould   All rights reserved

Part II will be published on Truthdig 4/25/17  and trace the origins of Team B’s hardliners back to their roots in the Fourth International, the Trotskyist branch of the Communist International and the Machiavellian culture of American philosopher and political theorist James Burnham as his present-day disciples threaten to ignite a Third World War..

A powerful Tarot card because its possibilities start in nothingness and reach into infinity Rider-Waite tarot deck, public domain

How the hatred for Catholic Rome in the 14th century would establish a life and death struggle within the European deep-state; and how this conflict would lead to the rise of a crypto-Cathar counter church, whose apocalyptic world-ending goals would complete its cycle on November 22, 1963 in the Anglo/Norman America of the present era.

By Paul Fitzgerald and Elizabeth Gould

On Friday October 13, 1307 the French King Philip IV, who was deeply indebted to the Knights Templar, ordered them arrested and charged with heretical practices and on November 22 of that year under pressure from Philip, Pope Clement V issued the papal bull Pastoralis Praeeminentiae instructing all the monarchs of Europe to seize their assets

Whether or not the Knights Templar practiced heretical beliefs as charged, the immolation of Templar Grand Master Jacques de Molay at the hands of the Pope’s Inquisitors in 1314 would serve as an inspiration to generations of people who did. Pope Innocent III’s brutal Albigensian Crusade of 1209-29 against the powerful dualist Cathar movement pitted Northern France’s Catholic nobility against the lesser nobility of the south who were tolerant and supportive of it.

As a pre-Christian faith deeply rooted in the ancient world and spread by Rome’s legions through Mithraism to the four corners of the pagan Roman Empire, Catharism represented an old and powerful belief system which refused to be suppressed by the sterile and often contradictory doctrines of Rome’s Christian Empire.

As described by Reverend V.A. Demant, Canon of London’s St. Paul’s Cathedral in a preface to a 1947 book on the subject titled The Arrow and the Sword:

“To mention only its roots in Mithraism, its links with the Gnostics, its theological dualism, its asceticism, the ritual of life and death as cosmic mysteries, the appeal of the troubadours, Arthurian legends and the cult of the Holy Grail, the passions aroused for and against witchcraft, the intimate connection between sex and religion — all these things are sufficient testimony to the deep rooted vitality of a stream of religious consciousness which cannot be superciliously dismissed by rationalists and moralists.”

Writing on the heels of World War II, and with Europe still in ruins from the rise of an irrational and immoral pagan faith called Nazism, Demant feared that such a vital apocalyptic belief system with its “robust religiousness” and commitment to a struggle against an evil material world was bound to rise again, as it had so many times in the past.

Yet, he might not have been surprised to know that his own “Protestant” faith, of which he was a senior officer as the Canon of St. Paul’s, had its own roots in the same heresy.

Now lost in the cross weaves of history, Britain’s version of the heresy represented a new and far more dangerous version of life-denying Catharism than was ever imagined by the Templars, Bernard of Clairvaux or Jacques DeMolay._________

A Grudge that lasted through the Centuries

Much has been speculated about the survival of the Templars following their dissolution in 1312. Today’s popular fiction about their life as a secret society rests not on any particular historical accounting but mainly on 18^th century Masonic myth-making and Sir Walter Scott’s early 19^th century stories that romanticized the Templar Knighthood.

The 18^th century men of the Enlightenment found great interest in mystical illumination through Masonic rituals. To these men, the newly industrializing West needed a new prophetic tradition to anchor it in history. Rediscovery of the ancient world, as a result of imperial interventions in the Near East and Egypt, spawned a renewed interest in Renaissance Neo-Platonism and Cabbalism and their roots in a life-denying Gnostic creed. In fact, the very act of returning in victory to the origin of these Gnostic beliefs was in itself proof that they had been chosen to fulfill a cosmic cycle, as prophesied by the ancients.

Bestowing the Templars with occult mystical powers fit neatly into the early Romantic Movement and helped to promote Enlightenment thinking as part of God’s plan for mankind.

But the ravages of the Inquisition and the growing anger over a corrupt Roman Catholic Church were anything but myth to those living in the thirteenth and fourteenth century.

As a military order of religious warriors responsible only to the Pope, the Templars and their Cathar backers in France and England represented a powerful autonomous deep-state within medieval society. In many ways orthodox Christianity was no match for the life-denying, dualist doctrine of the Cathars. Catharism’s simple focus on the cosmic battle between a spiritual good and a material evil, and its promise of a time-ending apocalypse in which the material world would be consumed in fire, was an extreme seduction.

Driven to ground by a corrupted Roman Catholic Church and greedy French King, “the heresy” appeared to have been trampled out by the middle of the 14^th century. But with the onset of the Reformation in the early 16^th century, Rome’s authority faced a new challenge and as it spread to Ireland, the old Anglo/Norman warlords like the Fitzgeralds, would face their own apocalypse.

The Protestant Reformation represented a heresy that was at once secular and religious. Martin Luther and John Calvin confronted a Papacy that claimed a material domain, as well as a spiritual one.  In 1534, the English Parliament’s Act of Supremacy solved that problem by declaring Henry VIII “Supreme Head on earth of the Church of England”, and in 1559, his daughter Queen Elizabeth I became the Church’s “Supreme Governor.”

Cathar territory remained fertile ground for insurrection against the church and that insurrection came with the Protestant Reformation. The French Calvinist Huguenot movement of the late 16^th century grew from exactly the same ground in France, where 200 years earlier, the Cathars had been brutally suppressed by the Papal Crusade.

In England, Queen Elizabeth I’s deep-state, comprised of the Earl of Leicester Sir Francis Walsingham and Sir Philip Sydney, found common cause with the Huguenots and supported them with soldiers, guns and money. Their armies waged holy war against the Papacy across Europe and in Catholic Ireland where they targeted the last visible threat to Elizabeth’s supremacy at home, the Fitzgeralds.

16^th Century deep-state competition

The Fitzgerald family had drawn their original power from France and Italy in the 11^th century as the muscle for the Cathar-friendly Anglo/Norman royals. They had clearly performed their duties well enough to be rewarded by their feudal lords with lands and titles, but when they came to Ireland, their paths diverged. Gerald of Wales makes clear in his book that, by 1170, this family of Anglo/Norman Samurai was fed up with royal excess and wanted to strike out on their own under their own banner.

But three centuries of the Fitzgerald family’s immersion in Irish culture transformed them. Forsaking the English language, English customs and English law, the Anglo/Normans married the land and became “more Irish than the Irish themselves”. Known as the “Old English” (Seanghaill), their ongoing intermarriage with Irish clans produced furious resentment from London, while the coming of the Protestant Reformation produced outright hatred.

Known for their love of Ireland and their willingness to renounce their loyalty to England, the Fitzgerald family were feared and hated as representatives of a Roman Catholic deep-state bent on reversing the Reformation. On the other hand, the Sidney Circle represented a very old deep-state of its own; that “stream of religious consciousness,” that had been suppressed for centuries, had risen in rebellion and was committed to ridding the world of evil.

The Sidney Circle and its primary operatives, Francis Walsingham, Edmund Spencer, Sir Walter Raleigh and John Dee, represented the militarized edge of Renaissance Neoplatonism, bent on establishing England not just as a global empire to rival Catholic Spain, but as a spiritual empire headed by Queen Elizabeth I that would cleanse the material world and restore its spiritual destiny.

The first step to that destiny was the conquest of Ireland. Inspired by the Hermetic-Cabbalist Neoplatonism of John Dee, the Sydney Circle would take on the Fitzgerald Earl of Desmond in a genocidal war of extermination. Viewed from the 21^st century, the idea of an all-or-nothing Manichean holy war between white Europeans seems bizarre.

But the feud between the European deep-state factions of the Counter-Reformation was a no-holds-barred fight to the death that embodied no less than the core principles of a cosmic war between light and dark.

In 1580, the prospect of this apocalyptic war of genocide coming to Ireland prompted the Holy See in Rome to send an army of Italians and Spaniards to help the Fitzgeralds under the authority drafted by the “Just War Doctrine.”

Dubbed by Richard Berleth, author of The Twilight Lords: Elizabeth I and the First Irish Holocaust as the “Twilight Lords”, the Fitzgeralds’ struggle against the Elizabethans and their Renaissance Neoplatonism offers a window into a thousand year old factional struggle of a European “deep-state” rooted in a Gnostic belief system. As allegorized in Edmund Spencer’s Faerie Queene, the Fitzgeralds satisfied the Manichean requirement for evil in the English propaganda of the day, while Elizabeth and her Red Cross Templar knights represented Christian purity in the tradition of King Arthur and the Round Table.

It is of no small importance that the death of Gerald Fitzgerald, the last Earl of Desmond in 1583, marks the beginning of the British Empire. The eternal struggle of good against evil, the ancient Iranian war of light against dark by design required a victory over the darkness, and the Earl of Desmond filled that sacred role. As was the custom at the time, his decapitated head was sent to London where, legend has it, Queen Elizabeth sat with it for the morning before having it impaled on London Bridge.

With the incorporation of the British East India Company in 1600, Elizabeth’s victory would be spread around the world through imperial expansion. Elizabeth’s favorite courtier Walter Raleigh would sail to America and establish the colony that came to be named Virginia for the “Virgin Queen.”

The East India Company would establish trading posts from India to America and play a key role in the economic causes leading to the American Revolution.

It would make its founding families rich beyond dreams of avarice and make the English language universal and English culture the standard by which all other cultures would be judged. But the competition with Rome and the suspicion over its motives would never stop.

In the 400 plus years since Elizabeth I’s time, much of what was once deemed heretical by Church authorities has become commonplace. The Irish feudal society the Fitzgeralds died to preserve was already obsolete by Elizabethan times, and would have vanished with or without them.

The sexual practices of the “heretics”, forbidden by law as recently as a generation ago, have become accepted and even openly embraced. The perfection of the human race through magic and alchemy sought by John Dee and the Sidney Circle has been replaced by computer science, physics and biotechnology, but the final product of such perfection is far from clear or even desirable.

Unknown and often unseen, the bitter struggle for power within the Anglo/Norman deep-state has raged beneath the surface down through the centuries.

On November 22, 1963, Americans were shocked by the public execution of their President, John Fitzgerald Kennedy. In the years since every manner of conspiracy theory has been advanced to explain what happened. But killing the only Roman Catholic President of the United States on the site of the first Masonic Temple in Dallas on the Masonic day of revenge for the destruction of the Knights Templar (November 22) bespeaks a ritual; and the ritual to which it bespeaks belongs to the Cathars and the De Clare family.

The discovery that George Bush was descended from Earl Richard de Clare, “Strongbow,” the same man who drew the Fitzgerald family en masse into Ireland in 1169 was one of those moments few may understand without access to the deep-state script.

If the assassination of President John Fitzgerald Kennedy could have been an act of retribution for an eight hundred year old vendetta, then we all must begin to view history from a much more complex perspective. In order to understand a “deep-state”, we must all begin to ask “deep-questions” and be willing to accept “deep-answers”, no matter where they lead.

But with some clues to our own past, with an understanding of the ancient cycles of revenge and retribution and a rudimentary knowledge of the ancient rituals of death and rebirth, we can move forward to enthusiastically greet whatever is about to come next in much better shape than we might have thought possible.

Copyright © 2016   Fitzgerald & Gould   All rights reserved

COMMENTS  FROM OPEDNEWS                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                  Submitted by Bill Johnson Dec 16, 2016:  Playing games with the comments I see. Apparently a little truth bothers those who would otherwise misrepresent history.  Surely we can expect better than this???  I am a heretic.

Submitted by Paul and Liz Dec 13, 2016:  Is it really possible to move beyond the horrific stage of revenge and retribution that has trapped so many humans for millennia?

Submitted by Bill Johnson Dec 14, 2016: Again, a very interesting spin on history – even if one-sided. You neglected to mention why to this day there is a lasting historical dislike, disdain, contempt, and grudges against the Roman Catholic empire church leading to revenge carried out to this day.You failed to mention the seemingly endless tortures or murders the Roman Catholic killing machine engaged in all across Europe for centuries. We call it the Dark Ages today. “We will quote Catholic documents just as they were printed, so you can see the true face of this beast that slaughtered 75-100 million people over 1,200 years;” Millions of humans were tortured and murdered by “representatives”of the Roman Catholic empire church. In fact, that church tortured and killed in all corners of the world, even here in Florida their Jesuits were involved in killing thousands of Native Indians in their conquest of this new world.

So the backlash and revenge and reformation were a natural and much needed occurrence. And you seem to think everyone should just forgive and forget that bloody past? Even when it is our own families??? For you see, I am a living example of the Alta Vendita. My family and family history was caught up in all that inglorious past. In fact my entire homeland was excommunicated from the RC empire because of our choices.

This country (USA) was created by FreeMasons to escape the killing machinery of the Roman Catholic church. The United States of America exists as a place of refuge from the Catholic killing machinery. It was created as a safe haven from which to launch a counter war on that church hence separation of church and state along with religious freedom requirement. And yes, JFK, a Catholic, was taken out because of a history beyond his control. Who would allow a Catholic to run a Masonic refuge? The implementation of the Alta Vendita is the other way around- for a Mason to rule the Catholic empire from within. Success has been attained! Do unto others and it will be done unto them. And it has. Alta Vendita! So no, we will not forget and we do not forgive an evil institutional empire of conquest and profit and power. It is our work to bring it to a halt. That is no church of Jesus. Satan is more like it. Non nobis Domine, non nobis, sed nomini tuo da gloriamNemo me impune lacessit

America, an Empire in Twilight Series

PART I: When America Became the Dark Force

PART II: How Guilt, Innocence & Facts Have Been Rendered Irrelevant

PART III: Neoconizing the Just War Doctrine in the service of American Empire

PART IV: The End of Illusion

FINALE: The Trump Card is played! Never Underestimate THE FOOL

This excerpt from the Steiner lecture analyzed in The Occult in Russian and Soviet Culture alludes to why the strange Trump/Putin alliance may be its fulfillment

“When Rudolph Steiner (1861-1925) reflected on the history of civilization, he envisioned a special role for Russia, because he considered Russia the country that could best embody the spirit of a new cultural epoch. In Russia, Anthroposophy developed beyond the mere study of an esoteric doctrine and its theory of knowledge. Anthroposophy sought to evaluate Russian and Soviet reality concretely, to interpret Russia’s historical development in the context of world history, and to become the basis of action for Russian cultural activities. Russian Anthroposophy is more than a variant of the Anthroposophical movement. Russia occupies a prominent place in the Anthroposophical conception of culture.

Steiner structured the history of civilzation in seven (post –Atlantean) periods: Indian, ancient Persia, Egyptian-Chaldean, Greek-Roman, Central European, Slavic, and American. According to his scheme, humanity at the end of the fifth ,the central European period-that is, at the threshold of the end of the fifth, the Central European period-that is, at the threshold of the sixth period, the Slavic period. The fifth post-Atlantean epoch began in the first half of the fifteenth century among the Germanic peoples. It manifested itself through an increase in individualism and through a growing interest in the sciences and technology. Around the year 3500, this era of perception was to be succeeded by the sixth epoch, the epic of the “Spirit Self” the characteristics of the Slavic people were to prevail: a sense of community, selflessness, patience, and the ability to accept a higher truth. These qualities constitute the basis for the ’seed’ of the world spirit incarnation in the Russian people, according to Steiner, the broad Russian masses already carried in them the seed of the coming civilization. Steiner used the image of ’seed’ repeatedly to describe the state of Russia’s development, the embryonic, nuclear state of the East as opposed to the ‘hypertrophy’ of the West. The spirit of the Russian people was ‘young and fresh in it’s hopes’ and ‘yet to confront it’s task.’ This task, to suffuse all aspects of life with new meaning, would be realized only in the course of history. Steiner called the Russian a child, in whose very soul one could find the questions that must be answered if humanity was to master the future. From the Russian character traits Steiner derived the capability of holistic thinking. In the Russian way of thinking, as he saw it, two opposing concepts can hold sway simultaneously so that rationality was mysticism and mysticism is rationality. ‘The Russian does not have the slightest understanding of what Westerners call ‘reasonableness.’ He is accessible to what we term ‘revelation. Basically, he will accept and integrate into the content of his soul anything he owns to a kind of revelation.”

In Soloviev’s ideas Steiner saw the seed of the philosophy of the ‘Spirit Self’ of the sixth epoch, for here the religious and philosophical worldviews merged. Soloviev’s philosophy spoke the language of religion, while his religion strove a philosophical worldview.” According to Steiner, this was where the superiority of the Russian philosophy over the aging Western philosophy lay: it transcended the limits of reason and it built a basis for a new holistic understanding. In order to develop the capacities and to fulfill its mission, Steiner said, the Russian people needed contact with the West; the ‘female East’ should be impregnated by the ‘male West.’ Intellectuality and technology, the achievement and problem of the fifth epoch of civilization, had led the life force to stagnate in Europe. Meanwhile this life force was at work in Russia, but was so lacking in form that it could fall into chaos. That was why Steiner felt that Russia depended on a Western awareness of form and consciousness. ‘To imagine that the East, at its present state, would develop on its own would be comparable to the foolish hope of a woman who wanted to have a child without a man. In the past, Eastern Europe had proved its receptiveness to the West. Steiner pointed to the reception of the Byzantine religion in Russia. Thus the Slavic peoples showed that they were also capable of absorbing higher truths- that is, the spirit of the sixth epoch.”

Edgar Cayce’s 1945 prophecy also explains Russia’s similar role in the future of the West.