The Dutch Farmers v. the Technocrats / Sophia v. Ahriman

Back in February I published a blogpost entitled “The Canadian Peasants’ Revolt” about the Canadian trucker convoy and their protest in Ottawa (amongst other places) in the Great White North. What has happened in Canada is indeed stunning as well as heartbreaking. Popular podcaster Joe Rogan recently called Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau a “f*cking dictator” and he is not incorrect. What’s going on behind the Maple Curtain is mind-blowing—and Tamara Lich is still in jail on trumped up charges. O Canada.

While the truckers’ protest may have ended for a time, their spirit has not been extinguished. Recently, for example, Dutch farmers have been protesting draconian climate gerrymandering of their government that seeks to close farms and seize property. They’ve brought tractors to the protest instead of the traditional pitchforks, but you get the idea. In one instance at least, they planted a Canadian flag in the center of a town to symbolize their solidarity with and inspiration of the Canadian truckers. The farmers are not having it and have closed down borders and city centers throughout their country. It really goes without saying that Dutch Prime Minister Mark Rutte, like his Canadian counterpart Trudeau (not to mention New Zealand’s Jacinda Ardern and many others) is a protégé of Klaus Schwab and the World Economic Forum, whose primary funder is Bill Gates. I guess yesterday’s conspiracy theory is today’s political reality. But it doesn’t need to stay that way. It won’t.

What has really struck me in the images coming out of The Netherlands of the protest is the symbolic nature of the farmers in opposition to the technocracy. In my book Transfiguration and elsewhere I have described this as the battle between Sophia and Ahriman, not that Sophia is a warrior (that is actually St. Michael the Archangel’s job—and I encourage you to invoke his protection in these evil times). The farmers, people connected to the land and the seasons, represent Sophia and the technocrats who seek to destroy them represent Ahriman. I don’t want to stretch the analogy too far, but, as with the Canadian truckers, this is a protest with a long pedigree going back to the enclosure riots of the 16th and 17th centuries—a protest of the common man against the machinations of the elites. And, at root, this is a spiritual battle. The spirit of Gerrard Winstanley, both prophet and journeyman, overshadows these protests—which have now spread to Germany, Italy, Canada (again) and other places and will within short order, I think, arrive in the United States. In fact, a worldwide protest is planned for July 23rd:

Winstanley’s words from A Declaration from the Poor Oppressed People of England (1649) are just as poignant now as when he wrote them:

“The power of enclosing land and owning property was brought into the creation by your ancestors by the sword; which first did murder their fellow creatures, men, and after plunder or steal away their land, and left this land successively to you, their children. And therefore, though you did not kill or thieve, yet you hold that cursed thing in your hand by the power of the sword; and so you justify the wicked deeds of your fathers, and that sin of your fathers shall be visited upon the head of you and your children to the third and fourth generation, and longer too, till your bloody and thieving power be rooted out of the land.”

That is, what the Dutch government and their counterparts in other countries and the WEF are after is a new form of enclosure. It’s the same old game, what E.P. Thompson described as “a plain enough case of highway robbery, played according to fair rules of property and law laid down by a Parliament of property-owners and lawyers.” And need I remind anyone that Bill Gates has been sucking up farmland like a drunkard at last call? I sincerely hope it is last call for him and his breed.

I have not yet mentioned Sri Lanka, which has fallen into chaos, causing the country’s President Gotabaya Rajapaksa to resign. Estonian prime minister Kaja Kallas has also just resigned, and this follows upon the resignation announcements of Italian PM Mario Draghi and British PM Boris Johnson, not to mention the assassination of former Japanese PM Shinzo Abe. Maybe these things are related, maybe they’re not. But I am certainly watching. As should we all be.

These are dangerous times. Recently, one of my oldest and dearest friends came to me in tears about the status of the world, telling me that she only wants for me and my children and grandchild to be safe. I want us all to be safe, but we’re up against a profound (and profoundly organized) kind of evil.

Unfortunately, what we’re seeing play out now on the world stage is something I saw coming years ago, though I must admit it has arrived much earlier than I thought it would. In Transfiguration, I end with the following warning, which seems now even more pressing than when I published it:

“But there must be a place for human agency in this eschatology: free will demands as much. As Berdyaev prophesied, “Either a new epoch in Christianity is in store for us and a Christian renaissance will take place, or Christianity is doomed to perish—although this cannot for a moment be admitted, since we know that ‘the gates of hell shall not prevail against it.’” Christians all too often operate under the assumption that God will show up in the nick of time in order to save us from ultimate catastrophe; but world history, especially that of the twentieth century, begs to differ (a point that Death of God theology brought to our embarrassed attention). Likewise with the enveloping darkness of the technological colonization of the human person: don’t for a second think that God will prevent us from letting this happen to ourselves. It’s already happening. We’re letting it happen.

“Sophia awakens only when we awaken to her. And this is the task of Christians in this age: to awaken ourselves and those who dwell upon this earth with us to the sophianic reality of Creation. We can choose to do nothing. We can simply let things progress and see how it ends. But, whatever the case, Christians need to own their complicity in creating the world in which we now live. We did this. To hide behind the bulwark of a reactionary fear, hoping to raise the glory of Christendom once again from its ashes, or to reduce the Christian mystery to a palliative social program or variation on the group-therapy model: these are missions for fools. In Berdyaev’s damning assessment:

‘The world is living in a period of agony which greatly resembles that of the end of antiquity. But the present situation is more hopeless, since at the close of antiquity Christianity entered the world as a new young force, while now Christianity, in its human age, is old and burdened with a long history in which Christians have often sinned and betrayed their ideal. And we shall see that the judgment upon history is also a judgment upon Christianity in history.’

“There is no place to which to retreat. Nothing to preserve. Nothing to restore. There is only the future, the eschaton, the parousia which is always/already here. Let us embrace it.”

Be not afraid.

Michael’s latest book is Sophia in Exile. He can be reached at director@thecenterforsophiologicalstudies.com See also The Center for Sophiological Studies' available courses. Also check out the latest volume of Jesus the Imagination: The Divine Feminine. Twitter: @Sophiologist_

Sophia in Exile: An Introduction

My latest book, Sophia in Exile, appeared in print last week courtesy of Angelico Press. Below is the introduction as found in the text.~ mm

INTRODUCTION: NOTES FROM EXILE

After Francis of Assisi and his companions walked the hundred and ten or so miles from Assisi to Rome, a trek that took days, in order to petition approval for founding the Order of Friars Minor, the cardinals interviewing them asked what their rule would be. Pretty straightforward question. Francis, a pretty straightforward man, held up the book of the Gospels. The cardinalate thought he must be either mistaken or a fool, since such a rule “seemed a thing untried, and too hard for human strength.” [1] That says pretty much all we need to know about ecclesial governance. Very few princes of the Church take out their own garbage or dirty their hands with manual labor. Living the Gospel, for all their preaching, is ultimately impractical: at worst a nuisance, at best an ideal. Even the order Francis founded couldn’t live up to its own principles and strayed from them during Francis’s lifetime. It brought him great sorrow.

When it happened, I had no idea how prophetic an event the tragic fire at Notre-Dame de Paris on 15 April 2019 would prove to be. It’s a fitting icon for a Church in distress, the weight of its own corruption, not least the ongoing sex scandals that fill us with shame and anger, evidence as they are of an ecclesial structure inured to the sufferings of its victims and further complicated by the manner in which some of its most powerful leaders have continued to shield their own from scrutiny. These are symptoms of a deeper pathology. The hierarchy’s inept and milquetoasty response to the global pandemic that began in early 2020 only further betrays how indifference has become a cardinal virtue. How many millions died without receiving the last sacraments? How many more left the Church permanently because it was too hard for the hierarchy to live out the Gospel and too easy to play the political sycophant? Did Christ wait until lepers were no longer contagious to heal them?

It was under these conditions and in this frame of mind that I wrote this book.

This book, however, is not a jerimiad on the sins and ineptitude of the hierarchy, or even about living through the madness of the pandemic. These things, I think, are only tangential, though nonetheless symptomatic, of a deeper estrangement from the Real that is the true source of our cosmological dissociation, and which has its roots deep in the historical Christian imaginary. This dissociation did not begin with the conflagration of Notre-Dame, nor with the complicity of bishops in the abuses among their ranks. When Christ told Francis “Rebuild my Church,” he was not speaking of San Damiano, though that was what Francis thought at the time. Perhaps he was telling us the same thing with the burning of Notre-Dame, for “every man’s work shall be made manifest: for the day shall declare it, because it shall be revealed by fire” (1 Cor 3:13).

I wrote the first chapter, after which the book is named, in 2019. I did not return to the project until fall of 2020, the confusion of the pandemic and work on my farm taking all of my attention in the interim. Looking at it now, the book can be called the third in a trilogy that started with The Submerged Reality (2015) and continued with Transfiguration (2018), though writing a trilogy was at no point my intention. But here we are. I felt the need to write this book because I came to realize that I had left some things, such as the Gnostic mythos of Sophia and the sophiological structure of marriage, undeveloped in those previous books, and I wanted to provide insight into the poetic metaphysics of Sophiology by deeper examinations of Eleanor Farjeon, Thomas Traherne, the legend of the Holy Grail, the Rosary, and the radical Christian philosophy of Nikolai Berdyaev (the chapter on whom was originally published in the Russian journal Тетради по консерватизму [Essays on Conservatism]). In addition, I felt a call to write on the Creation and our relationship to it—as a biodynamic farmer, this is an environment in which I live and move and have my being—as well as to contribute something on the role of human creativity. These areas of contemplation organically brought me to a consideration of the Realm of Faerie, which has thankfully been getting more serious attention from John Milbank and David Bentley Hart, among others.

As a result of all these commitments and interests, what you have in your hands here is (with the exception of my poetry) the most personal of all of my books to this point. Sophiology, it is my contention, is above all something one does, a way of being. It is not a grand theory, a beautiful intellectual construction. No. Sophiology is an entrance into life.

In the Gnostic mythos, Sophia lives in exile, trapped in a kind of spiritual prison. We, too, live in exile, which is also a spiritual prison. Most of all, we live in exile from the Divine and the Creation. As the pandemic and the ever-increasing totalization of the technocracy have shown, we are also in exile from each other, and, ultimately, from ourselves. This is an untenable situation and one which, if left unchecked, will have disastrous repercussions, many of which are deep into their implementation stages. The antidote to such a situation, as I argue in these pages, lies in reorienting ourselves to the Real, to the sophianic structure of the world. Like St. Francis’s project, this is one of simplicity and not applicable to the needs of hierarchies of power and influence. In essence, what Sophiology offers is a regeneration of life by an engagement with what is Real. And this regeneration is conditioned by learning how to see.

Love is integral to this seeing, as both agapeic opening and as erotic longing. This integral seeing is in not characterized by a spiritual acquisitiveness or desire to possess, so much as it is a product of the subject’s entrance into a loving disposition to that which shines through the world. St. Paul describes such a condition in 1 Corinthians: “If anyone imagines that he knows something, he does not yet know as he ought to know. But if anyone loves God, he is known by God” (8:2–3). Those who try to turn Sophiology (or any theological or philosophical gesture) into a method for comprehending or containing the world are barking up the wrong sacred tree. The first movement is in love, and the response to love is not “to know” but to be known.

And in that spirit, I welcome you to these pages.

1. Bonaventura, The Life of Saint Francis of Assisi (London: J. M. Dent, 1904), 30.

The God of the Technocrats

In the Zoroastrian mythos, Ahriman (or Angra Mainyu) is the spiritual power who opposes Ahura Mazdao (or Ormazd), the Creator, whose name means “Lord of Wisdom.” In his early novel Cosmic Puppets (1957),Philip K. Dick uses the Ahura Mazdao/Ahriman binary in the story of the battle between spiritual and cosmic evil and good played out in small town Virginia; it was kind of a precursor to Dick’s later fascination with Gnostic dualism and in no small part influenced his thoughts on what we would now call mass surveillance and transhumanism.

The concept of Ahriman also appears in the writing of the great Russian radical Christian philosopher Nikolai Berdyaev and became a fundamental idea in the spiritual science of Rudolf Steiner. For both Berdyaev and Steiner, Ahriman represents the technological, the materialistic, and the technocratic, that which seeks always to turn human beings into collectivist and efficient machines: emotionless, unfeeling, and inartistic—like the Borg in Star Trek: The Next Generation.

In the introduction to The Meaning of the Creative Act (1914), Berdyaev confesses himself a dualist (with some serious qualifications):

“I confess an almost manichean dualism. So be it. “The world” is evil, it is without God and not created by Him. We must go out of the world, overcome it completely: the world must be consumed, it is of the nature of Ariman, Freedom from the world is the pathos of this book. There is an objective source of evil, against which we must wage an heroic war. The necessity of the given world and the given world itself are of Ariman.” [1]

And then the qualifications:

“Over against this stands freedom in the spirit, life in divine love, life in the Pleroma. And I also confess an almost pantheistic monism. The world is divine in its very nature. Man is, by his nature, divine. The world-process is self-revelation of Divinity, it is taking place within Divinity. God is immanent in the world and in man. The world and man are immanent in God. Everything which happens with man happens with God. There is no dualism of divine and extra-divine nature, of God's absolute transcendence of the world and of man.”

He is completely aware of the antinomy and embraces it.

In The Meaning of History (1923), Berdyaev returns to the Zoroastrian understanding of Ahriman is his consideration of history and, what is always a preoccupation of his, eschatology:

“The conflict between Ormuz and Ariman is resolved by a catastrophe which brings about the end of history and the beginning of something else. Without this sense of an end, the process cannot be conceived as historical movement. Without this eschatological perspective progression cannot be considered as history, for it lacks inner purpose, significance, and fulfillment.” [2]

The Eschaton, I think it’s spiritually healthy to say, is always already happening. It’s only that sometimes it is easier to perceive.

My guess is that Berdyaev first became intrigued by the religious and sociological implications of the concept of Ahriman during the period of his interest in Rudolf Steiner. Berdyaev’s friend, the poet and novelist Andrei Bely (real name Boris Bukarev) was an early Russian enthusiast of Steiner’s and encouraged his friend to read some of the Austrian philosopher’s work, and even entreated him to attend lectures of Steiner’s in Helsingfors, Finland in 1913. Berdyaev was never completely sold on Steiner, but neither did he completely dismiss him. He returns to Steiner often in his work, sometimes in approval and sometimes in critique. But he takes him seriously.

Steiner’s treatment of Ahriman is much more developed and complex than Berdyaev’s. Clearly inspired by Hegelian dialectic, Steiner reads Ahriman as part of a polarity with Christ as the mediator:

“To gain a right conception of the historical evolution of mankind over approximately 6000 years, one must grasp that at the one pole stands an incarnation of Lucifer, in the center the incarnation of Christ, and at the other pole the incarnation of Ahriman. Lucifer is the power that stirs up all fanatical, all falsely mystical forces in human beings, all that physiologically tends to bring the blood into disorder and so lift man above and outside himself. Ahriman is the power that makes people dry, prosaic, philistine—that ossifies them and brings them in the superstition of materialism. And the true nature and being of man is essentially the effort to hold the balance between the powers of Lucifer and Ahriman; the Christ impulse helps present humanity to establish this equilibrium.” [3]

One way to think of this is to turn to basic human psychology. Say a person is drawn to an extreme self-expression characterized by a very narcissistic interpretation of “freedom”—which is how Steiner understands the workings of Lucifer. Well, just desiring this freedom might not be enough to actualize it without medical or technological interventions, so the person in question undergoes such intervention, often resulting in a lifelong dependency on various drugs or other chemical therapies or even mechanical manipulation of the body. This is what Steiner would call an ahrimanic gesture: the capitualtion to the technological (or technocratic). So we can see how the luciferic tendency can deliver the individual into the clutches of the ahrimanic. The desire for freedom, then, leads one into a life of slavery.

Speaking in 1919, Steiner explains how this tendency not only impacts individual human persons, but can also impact societies:

“Ahriman has the greatest possible interest in instructing men in mathematics, but not in instructing them that mathematical-mechanistic concepts of the universe are merely illusions. He is intensely interested in teaching us the concepts of chemistry, physics, biology and so on, as they are presented today in all their remarkable effects, and in making us believe that these are absolute truths, not that they are only points of view, like photographs taken from one side. If you photograph a tree from one side, it can be a correct photograph, yet it does not give a picture of the whole tree. If you photograph a tree from one side, it can be a true likeness, yet it does not give a picture of the whole tree as can be gained from photographing it from four sides. Ahriman has the greatest interest in concealing from mankind that in modern intellectual, rationalistic science, in superstitious empiricism, one is dealing with a great illusion, a deception—that men should not recognize this is of the greatest possible interest to Ahriman. It would be a triumphant experience for him if the scientific superstition which infiltrates all areas of life today and which human beings even try to use as a template for the social sciences should prevail into the third millennium. He would have the greatest success if he could then arrive in western civilization in human form and find the scientific superstition as prevailing dogma.” [4]

Here we are.

And, in a stirring piece of prophecy, Steiner describes the method of Ahriman:

“The second means that he employs is to stir up all the emotions that fragment people into small groups—groups that attack one another. You need only look at all the conflicting parties that exist today, and if you are unprejudiced you will recognize that the explanation is not to be found in human nature alone. If people honestly try to explain this so-called universal warfare through human disharmonies, they will realize that it cannot in fact be attributed to physical humanity. It is precisely here that ‘super-sensible’ powers, ahrimanic powers, have been at work.” [5]

In short, the desire for luciferian freedom has led to advent of ahrimanic transhumanism.

I have been teaching and writing about transhumanism, the great leap forward in human evolution by integration of biology with technology, for about twenty years. When I first started thinking about the topic and discussing its ramifications with my students, most of them seemed to think I was making a big deal out of nothing. This could never happen, they said. It’s just science fiction or a wet dream for computer nerds. Well, it’s happening. It began with promises of liberation and ends with a kind of slavery, whether to pharmacological, governmental, or corporate hegemony (and most effectively when the three are united). Transhumanism is only one tool of technocracy.

I write at length in my book Transfiguration about Ahriman in contrast to Sophia. In fact, to find an alternative to this dreadful state of affairs proposed by the threat of transhumanism is part of what drew me to Sophiology, which is, to my mind, the only antidote to the ghastly scenarios promised by technocracy, whether ushered in by a “Great Reset,” the lure of universal basic income, or any other promise of Utopia, a promise of freedom—from constraint, financial hardship, from illness, from worry—that invariably results in slavery.

What I’m saying, then, is that what we are in the middle of is a spiritual battle, a battle between the ahrimanic black magic of the technocrats and what we can call the white magic of Sophia. The late Ioan Couliano figured this out a long time ago:

“Nowadays the magician busies himself with public relations, propaganda, market research, sociological surveys, publicity, information, counterinformation and misinformation, censorship, espionage, and even cryptography—a science which in the sixteenth century was a branch of magic.... Historians have been wrong in concluding that magic disappeared with the advent of ‘quantitative science.’ The latter simply substituted itself for a part of magic while extending its dreams and its goals by means of technology.” [6]

Sound familiar?

I doubt most technocrats believe in the existence of Ahriman (or God for that matter, not to mention Sophia) and they certainly don’t pray to him. But there is no doubt that they worship him.

Michael’s latest books are an edition of The Chymical Wedding of Christian Rosenkreutz and Transfiguration: Notes toward a Radical Catholic Reimagination of Everything. He can be reached at director@thecenterforsophiologicalstudies.com See also The Center for Sophiological Studies' available courses. Also check out the latest volume of Jesus the Imagination: The Divine Feminine.

1. Nikolai Berdyaev, The Meaning of the Creative Act, trans. Donald A. Lowrie (New York, 1962), 15.

2. Nikolai Berdyaev, The Meaning of History, trans. George Reavey (New York, 1962), 40.

3. Rudolf Steiner, The Incarnation of Ahriman: The Embodiment of Evil on Earth: Seven Lectures, trans. Matthew Barton (Forest Row, UK: Rudolf Steiner Press, 2006), 17–18.

4. Ibid., 22.

5. Ibid., 23.

6. Ioan P. Couliano, Eros and Magic in the Renaissance, trans. Margaret Cook (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987), 109.