Every summer at the end of July and the first half of August in the northern hemisphere the so-called Perseids are visible in the constellation of Perseus. On founding our publishing house we named it after this constellation. In doing so, we had in mind the Greek myth which tells of how Perseus, with the wings of Mercury on his shoes, and by using his shield as a mirror, cuts off the head of Medusa with his sword. Medusa embodies the decadent powers of ancient clairvoyance. They had to be killed in the mirror of reflective reason, if human progress was to develop further.
Only after the company was founded did we become aware that the astronomer and Anthroposopher Elisabeth Vreede (1879-1943) had once spoken of Perseus-Michael in relation to the constellation of Perseus. She writes: “It must already seem meaningful to us that in summer, when it is already moving towards autumn, those shooting stars which bring the cosmic iron that defeats the sulphurous dragons of summer appear from that direction in the cosmos where Perseus stands, which according to ancient tradition is to be regarded as the constellation of Michael.”1
In Perseus then we have a Michaelic fighter, who has to push back old forces that have become anti-rational. His sword is the sword of Michael.
Today’s Michael-Impulse calls for an energetic “spiritualisation of the intellect”, including a new awareness of the reality of the “dead” and of karmic and reincarnational facts. Michael sounds a call to a spiritual struggle which is waged in each individual soul. It is the struggle within the human soul between reason, striving for real spirituality, and the irrational forces of Medusa.

The Birth of Europe
Perseus was a son of Zeus (Jupiter). Another kindred being of likewise divine origin and with an intimate link to Zeus was “Europa”. Her Phenician father Agenor was a son of Poseidon and of Libya, an Egyptian daughter of a king. Europa had as a young maiden a dream in which two women appeared, one of an Asiatic kind with a familiar appearance, the other quite foreign-looking. It is known that Zeus, fulfilling this prophecy, approached Europa disguised as  a lovely bull, taking flight with the naïve maiden across the Sea to Crete where she bore him two sons. One of them was Minos, the inspirer of the Minoan culture, the other one Rhadamanthus ruling with his brother over the kingdom of the dead. Then Zeus left her in desolation and solitude. Thereupon she was approached by Aphrodite, telling her: “Love has brought you here, therefore be consoled. It was Zeus, as a bull, who stole you away, and to Zeus you have given your hand in marriage. Now you are the earthly wife of a invincible God. Your name will be immortal, for the foreign part of the world which has given you shelter, will be called for all time Europa.”
Thus the future mission of Europa was inspired and guided by a supersensible being – Zeus. The great values of art, philosophy and democracy were her primary gifts.

Europe has lost its spirit
Today we are at the dead end of this process. No supersensible being nourishes Europe anymore. Art, philosophy and “democracy” are mostly dead or dying. A Golden Calf of pure materialism has replaced the the divine bull (Taurus) of Europe’s origin. Spirit has become spiritless “gold”. It is no accident that it is precisely Greece, once the origin of the best values of Europe, that is now bitterly reflecting the process of decadence in the whole of Europe. The European Union is a purely materialistic concept that has not worked and can never work, and Greece has been taken prisoner in the labyrinths of this disunited union. Not because of the other Europeans’ love for Greece, but out of financial and geopolitical interests. The highest value, the highest criterion for “reality” is money and power. It is no accident that the most important European institutions (IMF, ECB and EC) are all based on these two powers. The high priests of the European Golden Calf are the “Gods” of Goldman Sachs. They tricked Greece into the EU, and they might have to face a later lawsuit against their calculated bad “advice”. They are not likely to lose, for one of the former Goldman Sachs high priests (Mario Draghi) is the president of the ECB.

Destructive militarism as a result of materialism
A by-product of European materialism is destructive intellectualism and a blind alliance with the Western high priests of unlimited financial greed. Sadly, in Europe today, it is mainly Germany that is host to most of these decadent features. A shocking example of this, which is like the other side of the “Greek coin”, is the following: A US military base near Mannheim which was to have been closed in the course of 2015 has received permission to remain open for US military operations. On 23 June the new American minister of defence, Aston Carter, announced the transport of heavy military equipment to Central and Eastern Europe, to counter alleged “Russian aggression”. One of the results: in June 250 Bradley battle tanks and other military equipment were shipped to Bremerhaven, and from there by train to the military base near Mannheim. A 9 minute video filmed the continuous rolling in on a train into the Mannheim base. It is a sinister funeral cortege accompanied by the famous Funeral March by Chopin.
The EU is a “Titanic” project, aiming at the utter destruction of Europe and involving it in the next Great War. The iceberg is Europe’s stubborn materialism. The European Union is but a prelude to “some effective World Super-Government” (Churchill, 14 May 1947, London), doomed to sink as old Atlantis once sank. But Europe is helpless as it has lost its spirit and has mocked most of those who wanted to introduce that spirit in a new form.
One of these individualities was Helmuth von Moltke who is like the personified conscience for the spiritual origin of Europe as well as for the spiritual future of this continent – if there is to be a future for it at all.

Europe needs to discover its path to the new spirit
Behind all the noisy inner and outer warfare, Europe is crying for a new spiritual realism, in the knowledge that there is no “reality” whatsoever without a spiritual component in it, that the so-called “dead” belong to life as a whole as well as the so-called “living” and that even behind money there is a concrete spiritual component. This new mission of Europa is present among the living as among the “dead” souls. After his death in June 1916, there resounds mightily from the soul of von Moltke: “Europe must come to its senses and find its way to the spirit.”
That is the present and future mission of this continent, of Europa, who was born out of an old spirituality that has been totally lost. If Europe finds the way to the spirit, other words of the Moltke soul will come true: “Europe’s materialistic era will be like an interlude when the new Spirit Sun begins to shine for humanity.”

Thomas Meyer

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1    E. Vreede, Anthroposophy and Astronomy, Ch. 25, “Shooting Stars and Meteors”