We are living in catastrophic times. That in itself is not new in human history. The Lemurian and Atlantean epochs both ended in catastrophes: Lemuria in a fiery catastrophe, and Atlantis in the “Great Flood”.
At the end of the seventh and final Post-Atlantean Epoch the Earth will experience a catastrophe of the air. That will be in about the 8th millennium, which spiritual science speaks of as the American Epoch, and which will be under the sign of Capricorn. The Moon will then reunite with the Earth, which it left long ago, something of which modern astronomy is already aware. Everything will then change radically. The division of the sexes which has prevailed since the exit of the Moon in the Lemurian Epoch will be replaced by a form of procreation related to the larynx, as represented in the first seal in the Apocalypse of St. John (the man with the fiery sword from his mouth).
We now find ourselves in a dramatic prefiguring of that final catastrophe. People sense something of this. Therefore, we have, for example, the gender issues, which are occurring today like summer lightning, a harbinger of future conditions1. Rudolf Steiner speaks of an Earth-spanning spider-like web which will embody all materialistic thoughts that have not been spiritualised by that point. That too is prefigured in our time by the all-encompassing World Wide Web. A prime example of this is the software known as Aladdin (an acronym for Asset, Liability and Debt and Derivative Investment Network), the main system employed by BlackRock, which is striving to achieve, or already has achieved, global control of all economic data. According to economic journalist Ernst Wolff, it is de facto far more powerful than all governments and central banks.
Friedrich Nietzsche’s “Superman”, which is discussed in D.N. Dunlop’s article in this issue, presents an ahrimanic counterpart which Nietzsche calls the “ugliest human”. Alongside this, a humanity will develop that has intense spiritual abilities by which the rest of humanity is to be healed in a Manichean way. Today’s “races” will disappear as such and give way to two kinds of human being – spiritual human beings and those bound to matter. This contrast too is also being prefigured today. The “good” and the “bad” are also aware of this; a caricature of “the bad” is associated with Putin’s empire, while the US/NATO empire is supposed to embody “the good”. It is unnecessary at this point to comment further on the absurd, mendacious or even obtuse nature of today’s world situation. Every alert modern human being can see this, but also recognise the acute danger hanging over all humanity.
Does the prelude to the next catastrophe include an even greater present one? Were clairvoyants and soothsayers wrong when they predicted for the present time upheavals such as a coming war between Russia and the West, which would be followed by a three-day eclipse?2
Has the arc of truth been so stretched “by a challenge to truth and reality itself” that there is cause for higher spiritual powers to intervene before the whole of humanity perishes in the ongoing COVID-injection quagmire?
Rudolf thought that such an intervention was possible in view of the terrible lies against the Central Powers [Germany and Austria-Hungary] that were being spread in 1917.3 Is the situation today not actually far worse?
Are we not living through the reappearance of appalling black magical practices such as were practised in the Mexican Mysteries, before the greatest black magician who ever walked the earth was crucified by the even greater white magician Huitzilopochtli at the very time of the Mystery of Golgotha (R. Steiner, 18 September 1916, GA 171)? His soul was then placed under “a spell”, but not his activity for all time. Today unfortunately, it reaches out to the very youngest inhabitants of the Earth.
However today’s catastrophic prelude ends, we should not forget that we have lived through and survived more colossal catastrophes. As D.N. Dunlop once put it:
“Remember that you have looked upon cataclysms many times and have always risen triumphant.”

T.H. Meyer

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1 Lecture of 13 May 1921 (GA 204); see also R. Steiner, Die Vorträge über die Inkarnation Ahrimans, Basel, 3rd ed. 2022, p.115 ff.

2 For example, the seer Alois Irlmaier. See also Ruben Stein, Der dritte Weltkrieg. Die Prophezeiungen der Maria S.- pdf.

3 Rudolf Steiner, lecture of 13 January 1917 (GA 173c).