The Abominable Abyss

The Unthinkable Facility

I guess everybody has an idea what a WC is. A Water Closet right? A Toilet. But it also means something else: Waldorf Critics. Those are people who hate everything associated with Rudolf Steiner and his works passionately and obsessively, including Waldorf schools, biodynamic agriculture, eurythmy, the Threefolding idea, the Camphill movement, the Christian Community etc. and last but not least anthroposophy itself with its cosmology, Christology and all its culturally heretical features.

The earliest Waldorf Critics who emerged after the first world war, were Nazis and other nationalists and fascists. They accused Rudolf Steiner of being a Jewish bolshevik-Communist conspirator. Today, they call him the opposite: A racist, anti-Semite, pan-Germanist, fascist, semi-Nazi etc. How is this possible? Rudolf Steiner explains:

"Ahriman makes use of this confusion in order to prepare the triumph of his incarnation and to drive men with increasing force into what they find so difficult to realize — namely, that by intellectual or modern scientific reasoning today, one can prove anything and equally well prove its opposite. The point is for us to recognize that everything can be proved and for that reason to examine the proofs put forward in science today. It is only in natural science that reality is shown by the facts; in no other field can one consider intellectual proofs valid."

( -- Rudolf Steiner: The Ahrimanic Deception, Zurich, October 27, 1919, GA 193)

The WC itself, more commonly known as the Hole, where such creatures congregate, and where the guru during the last decade has been someone called The Pied Piper who is rumored to be full of peanut butter, has acquired quite a few nicknames over the years: The Unplumbable Toilet, The Unthinkable Facility, The Hole, The Abyss etc. In short: Everybody knows where it is, but nobody wants to go there -- unless they're wacky space cadets or severely demon-possessed. Be patient, I'll explain.

One of the charges against Rudolf Steiner, not merely of racism but of wild and kooky ideas about race, is based upon a joke that may have been funny in Europe a century ago but doesn't amuse us much today:

"I am personally convinced that if we get more Negro novels, and give these Negro novels to pregnant women to read during the first phase of pregnancy, when as you know they can sometimes develop such cravings, if we give these Negro novels to pregnant women to read, then it won't even be necessary for Negroes to come to Europe in order for mulattoes to appear. Simply through the spiritual effects of reading Negro novels, a multitude of children will be born in Europe that are completely gray, that have mulatto hair, that look like mulattoes!"

( -- Rudolf Steiner: "Health and Illness" Vol 1, Dornach Oct 1922, GA 348)

This joke is rather tacky today, but Rudolf Steiner was full of silly jokes when he gave these lectures to the workers at the Goetheanum. The devastating fire had not taken place yet, and the Doctor was full of life and vigor. In the same cycle, he was making fun of materialistic philosophers by suggesting they were constipated:

"It would be extraordinarily interesting, for example, to consider the following. You see, there were a great many philosophers in England—Hobbes, Bacon, Locke, Hume. These philosophers, even including John Stuart Mill, led essentially to the great rise of materialism. These philosophers all had such heavy thoughts that they could not pene­trate the spiritual with their thoughts. They clung to matter with their thoughts. It would be extraordinarily interesting to examine the digestions of all these philosophers, these many philosophers. I am convinced they all suffered from constipation! Starting with Hobbes in the seventeenth cen­tury, and proceeding all the way into the nineteenth, this whole philosophy that brought us materialism was actually caused by the constipation of individual philosophers! This materialism could have been prevented—what I say now is not in earnest, I only wish to make a joke!—if one had given Hobbes, Bacon, Locke, and the others regular laxatives in their youth. Then all this materialism most likely would not have arisen."

( -- Rudolf Steiner: Health and Illness, Volume II, Lecture 1, Fever Versus Shock; Pregnancy, Dornach, December 30, 1922, GA 348)

The fire was still more than 24 hours away, and Steiner was still having fun. But let's strike that. Let's not argue that Rudolf Steiner was joking here, because this idea has been rejected, ridiculed and proven false by the peoples of the Abyss -- there's an overwhelming consensus that Rudolf Steiner was dead serious about this, and that's a classic example of how utterly wacky he was.

So I say let's agree on that and also take his statement about constipation and materialism to heart with the same seriousness, with all its consequences. And those consequences are severe in a place where nobody is able to shit and the flushing doesn't work anyway and is beyond repair because of all the Asuras embodied as sewer rats keeping the entire Abyss hostage.

You see, many years ago the Unthinkable Facility became unrepairable and unplumbable. At the same time, its residents all developed constipation. This means that the only shit they can throw against anthroposophy is very old shit being recirculated and repeated constantly, because their constipation prevents them from producing any new shit.

As a result of these conditions, the Unthinkable Facility sank into a hole so deep it became an Abyss after the lower crust fell off, enabling a seer to see straight down into Hell through it, if he has the courage to look down there. That place is crawling with vampire bats, asuric rats, far worse creatures that would make Superman shudder, and things that go bump in the night. But the Hole Dwellers don't see or hear them, because they're spiritually blind and in denial of all such things. That was how this facility became unthinkable.

The Asuras

The infestation by the Asuras is a very special phenomenon. Rudolf Steiner could not speak too much about the Asuras for some reason. The Asuras are retarded Beings of the Hierarchy of the Archai (Spirits of Personality). They are Beings who instead of furthering man's progress to independence, lure him into gross egoism. In the negative sense they now bear the name originally pertaining to the entire Hierarchy.

In a lecture held 1. January 1909 entitled The Deed of Christ and the Opposing Spiritual Powers Lucifer, Ahriman, Mephistopheles, Asuras (GA 107) - Steiner speaks a little about the Asuras, but thereafter almost nothing. In the lectures about World-Being and Egohood ("Weltwesen und Ichheit", 1916, GA 169), Rudolf Steiner speaks of how the profound secrets contained in the symbols of Jachim and Boas may be misused by secret brotherhoods:

"There is very, very much contained in the old preserved symbols. Our age is called upon to understand these things, to penetrate into them. The contrast which will at one point be experienced between all that which is truly spiritual and that which will approach us when Keely's motor actually becomes reality, from the West, will be a much stronger contrast than exists today between Tolstoy's world view and that which now approaches us from the East. Oh, these things cannot be further spoken of!"

In a lecture entitled The Nature of Sub-Sensible Forces" ("Von Wesen der Kernenenergie" published in 1978 and later translated by Anthroposophic Press), the prominent mathematician and astro-physicist Georg Unger said about the above passage:

"And that is connected with the mystery of evil and the silence which Rudolf Steiner maintained with regard to the Asuras. One senses from this utterance that one simply cannot speak further about this matter. If someone comes and says, "I would like to study quite quickly all that which Rudolf Steiner says about the Asuras," then one must say to him, "You can do that quickly, indeed, but you will still have nothing. You will only have something when you understand why he was silent about this point."

With this in mind, I think it's appropriate to quote what Steiner has to say about the Asuras in The Deed of Christ:

"Toward the end of the Atlantean epoch, the etheric body corresponding to the head came right into the physical head and gradually brought about self-consciousness in the physical body. Fundamentally speaking, man is still working at his unconscious transformation of the physical body, at the development of the consciousness soul. And in the age now approaching, those spiritual Beings known as the Asuras will creep into the consciousness soul and therewith into the human "I" or ego - for the "I" lights up in the consciousness soul. The Asuras will generate evil with a far mightier force than was wielded by the Satanic powers in the Atlantean epoch or by the Luciferic Spirits in the Lemurian epoch.

In the course of the Earth-period man will cast away all the evil brought to him by the Luciferic Spirits together with the blessing of freedom. The evil brought by the Ahrimanic Spirits can be shed in the course of karma. But the evil brought by the Asuric powers cannot be expunged in this way. Whereas the good Spirits instituted pain and suffering, illness and death in order that despite the possibility of evil, man's evolution may still advance, whereas the good Spirits made possible the working of karma to the end that the Ahrimanic powers might be resisted and the evil made good, it will not be so easy to counter the Asuric powers as earth-existence takes its course. For these Asuric Spirits will prompt what has been seized hold of by them, namely the very core of man's being, the consciousness soul together with the "I", to unite with earthly materiality. Fragment after fragment will be torn out of the 'I', and in the same measure in which the Asuric Spirits establish themselves in the consciousness soul, man must leave parts of his existence behind on the earth. What thus becomes the prey of the Asuric powers will be irretrievably lost. Not that the whole man need become their victim – but parts of his spirit will be torn away by the Asuric powers. These Asuric powers are heralded today by the prevailing tendency to live wholly in the material world and to be oblivious of the reality of spiritual beings and spiritual worlds. True, the Asuric powers corrupt man today in a way that is more theoretical than actual. Today they deceive him by various means into thinking that his 'I' is a product of the physical world only; they lure him to a kind of theoretic materialism. But as time goes on - and the premonitory signs of this are the dissolute, sensuous passions that are becoming increasingly prevalent on earth - they will blind man's vision of the spiritual Beings and spiritual Powers. Man will know nothing nor desire to know anything of a spiritual world. More and more he will not only teach that the highest moral ideals of humanity are merely sublimations of animal impulses, that human thinking is but a transformation of a faculty also possessed by the animal - but he will take this view in all earnestness and order his life in accordance with it.

Man does not as yet entirely base his life on the principle that his true being descends from the animal. But this view of existence will inevitably arise, with the result that men will also live like animals, will sink into animal impulses, animal passions. And in many things that need not be further characterized here, many things that in the great cities come to expression in orgies of dissolute sensuality, we can already perceive the lurid, hellish glare of the Spirits we call the Asuras."

( -- Rudolf Steiner: "The Deed of Christ and the Opposing Spiritual Powers Lucifer, Ahriman, Mephistopheles, Asuras", GA 107)

The above looks terribly sinister, and Steiner had to stop himself from talking about the Asuras because the Spiritual Powers that Be would not give him permission to continue. The fallen Archai Spirits who eat up chunks from your "I" in a manner that cannot be reveresed!

What the Asuras are doing to us cannot be fixed; they eat up chunks of our egos that we never get back. No wonder I'm reminded of Stephen King, the Master of Horror. Imagine meeting clones of ourselves on the streets, armies of them, created by the Asuras. They carry chunks of our most intimate selves; they're part of us, subjected to the control of Superdemons forever. And it cannot be fixed! And Steiner is not allowed to speak about it!

So the Asuras actually take a piece out of your 'I' that you never get back. I believe something like that happened to a dear friend of ours, an anthroposophist in Arizona who can best be described as a Goethean-epistemological fundamentalist. He was in the Abyss with the noble intention of defending anthroposophy in their discussion forum down there, which is basically psychological trench warfare. Then he had to take a dump, because our friend is not one of the constipated ones. Bad timing, perhaps, because this was during a thunderstorm in the middle of the night, with no candlelight, and all of a sudden this Asura shows up in the pitch dark in the shape of a rat and bites Joel in the buttock. In the process, he took a little chunk of his Ego, which can be explained by the fact that this friend of ours had been thinking with his ass so much that his 'I' had actually taken up residence between his buttocks. He never got over it, and he never will.

Our friend did however avail himself of the Waldorf Toilet Roll that was donated to the Unthinkable Facility by a charitable anthroposophical organization many years ago, originally designed and produced by Ita Wegman. The hole dwellers themselves cannot enjoy this gift because of their constipation. They have been offered all kinds of homeopathic remedies and anthroposophical laxatives for their affliction, but it's against their anti-anthro religion to touch any such substances.

The State of the Stinker

With so much foul stench reeking out of the hole -- and the worst part is not what it does to your sense of smell, but how it stings your eyes so bad you have to rinse them not to go blind – the fumigators and exterminators have to go to work to manufacture new air fresheners and new anti-toxins.

In the Abyss itself, the pileup of old shit -- from the ancient times of yore when the hole-dwellers were not yet quite constipated, because the Curse of Constipati Yuga had not yet descended upon them -- has been worked over by asuric rats, zoratic maggots, and ahrimanic vermin, and this gives it a distinctive stench that is unimaginable, unthinkable, and totally unknown to the general public, because all this demonic activity and the very weight of the stench itself, keeps it from escaping into the air outside, so the only thing that reeks out is the old shit in relatively odorless condition, and if any faint foulness remains, it's immediately neutralized by the antidotes already in the atmosphere.

Theodor and The Basement Legend

A fascinating hole-creature, Theodor Grekenquist, claimed to suffer from a severe multiple personality disorder and being treated by a therapist in Germany and another one in Asia. In this condition, he came to the conclusion that Rudolf Steiner was a schizophrenic, and this theory resonated very well in the Hole. In addition, he came up with the most amazing nasty Waldorf rumors that are known in the Hole as "The Waldorf Basement Files".

Theodor:

"I was treated at the Jawaharlal Nehru University in New Dehli by Dr. Masaro Delitsu for my multiple personality disorder. Dr. Delitsu didn't cure me, but he succeeded in reducing my personalities down to eight (from 25 originally). I felt so well that I wanted to learn how to help others, and Dr. Delitsu sent me to a colleague of his at Oxford in England, Dr. Herbert von Bisselkahn from Hamburg, who also became a good personal friend of mine. He taught me how to counsel recovering drug abusers.

During my own practice, I was introduced to Dr. Rudolf Steiner's works through a patient of mine. Later on, when I was visiting Herbert at his home in Hamburg, I told him that I had been looking into Steiner, and that I thought Steiner suffered from a unique variety of schizophrenia because of his suppressed childhood traumas. What I didn't know was that Herbert had also taken a keen interest in Steiner, and that although he was very sympathetic to my views, he also had some startling opinions of his own.

These opinions were based upon letters he had seen, copies of letters that had been procured by German Waldorf parents. Herbert said they were called "The Basement Files". Someone had tried to publish them once, but the Anthroposophical Society had banned the publication by court order, confiscated the letter copies, and threatened to sue. They couldn't even be mentioned in the media, it was complete hush-hush. According to Herbert, that is, who said he had it from a good source.

I have never seen those documents, and I am very skeptical about this kind of thing. All I know is what Herbert told me, and I don't know if this is reliable or even credible, but here it goes:

In his later years, Steiner was desperate to reproduce his peculiar schizophrenia, this so-called "clairvoyance" or "initiation", in other human beings after recommending exercises had yielded no results among his students, so he began to concentrate on children, whose minds, he said, were more attuned to the desired condition. And in order to facilitate this spiritual condition in children, initiation or clairvoyance, he thought he had to reproduce something similar to his own childhood traumas. For this purpose, he extracted a certain number of kids from the first Waldorf school in Stuttgart and took them to a secret area below the Goethanum: The Basement.

According to alleged descriptions, this was no ordinary basement. It was a cluster of rooms that looked like bomb shelters, with many long and winding corridors going in many directions, some of them to unknown underground facilities underneath the woods nearby, and one such corridor was said to reach all the way to Basel. It was said that Steiner had acquired the services of an Italian man who knew the secrets of the ancient pyramids. Anyway, the juxtaposition of these underground rooms and corridors created a peculiar resonance and echo when children chanted. Copies of the chants have never been seen, but the resonance of the chants, which had been composed by the young Aleister Crowley, Steiner's apprentice, produced some sort of trance in the listeners. One of the underground rooms in the direction of the nearby woods was said to contain chains, shackles, whips, and there were pentagrams and hexagrams everywhere.

Herbert didn't know much about the activities that Steiner had arranged there, but the letters describing all of it are supposedly called "The Steiner Basement Files". And there''s more: The Stuttgart Waldorf kids who came back home from the Goetheanum Basement, were said to be permanently changed; their personalities, attitudes, opinions, interests were altered. Some became incurably schizophrenic, and on at least one occasion, a boy became so violent and dangerous that he had to be locked up. Those who were obviously insane were later "mercy-killed" by the Nazis, others became Nazis themselves, and some survived the second world war and denied that the Nazi era and the war ever happened. Herbert had also heard of anthroposophists who denied the holocaust, and he thought this was their background. A few of them were not in any condition to leave the Goethanum Basement, and some of those unfortunate children have been rumored to still live in the Basement, over 90 years old at the present time.

But that is not all. After Steiner's death, the knowledge of the secret Goetheanum Basement was passed on, and some founders of Waldorf schools built such "special facilities" underneath their schools. There are not many of these, but rumors have it that there are at least three such "Waldorf Basements" on each continent. Those Waldorf teachers who learned the special skills of the Basement, were called "inspectors", and they would visit the schools equipped with such facilities at night. The most important element was the echo effect that the chanting had to produce. One rumor says that the Goethanum Basement also contained, and still contains, a special chamber for animal and human sacrifices.

Not all "Basement children" became schizophrenic; some became artists, composers, actors, and film producers. Inspired by the Basement Chanting, they composed music for vampire movies. Alfred Hitchcock was very much aware of this eerie talent and its origin. For this reason, it was always easier to get a job on a Hitchcock's movie set if you had Waldorf Education on your resume. He used to say that he wanted "that Waldorf effect" for many of his films. Tony Perkins was not only a Waldorf graduate, he was also a Basement Child. After "Psycho", Hitchcock used to refer to Tony Perkins' facial expression at the end of the film, when he sits in custody thinking he is his deceased mother, for "that Waldorf look".

Personally, I am very skeptical about all this. I am an ultra-skeptic, especially about occult claims like this. Nobody I have ever met or heard about, has seen the Goetheanum Basement, or any Waldorf Basement for that matter, so it's possible that the whole thing is a hoax, something that PLANS people have made up. At least, that is what I thought when Herbert told me all this. But Dr. Herbert von Bisselkahn is a thorough man, he is meticulous about his research, unless he has been carried away with this particular thing, which is always a possibility. I will write to him and ask if he can get electronic copies of The Basement Files somewhere."

Theodor Grekenquist