A dear friend of mine from Russia told me there was a joke circulating about an old rivalry between the Beatles and the Rolling Stones. He said that they were always in friendly competition, and when the Stones released an album entitled “Aftermath,” the Beatles threatened to release a collection entitled “After Geography.” Apologies to all who do not find this as hilarious as I do, but I simply had to share this story as we all delve into the aftermath of this (as the pundits and experts keep telling us) the first inning of the pandemic of 2020.
As I have been writing and musing about what the deeper meanings behind this truly novel experience we are all having, a recurrent theme for me comes clear. There are more people on the earth right now than have ever been on earth before. Some scientists and historians theorize there are actually more people on the planet than if previous populations were combined. I do not understand the math or statistics on this theory, but either way one looks at it, there are quite a lot of people on earth right now. It is also true that this virus and the reaction to it is essentially a global phenomena. The majority of the global population is sequestered in homes, rooms and so on. Yes, there are those who are health care workers and staff who are making sure utilities are consistent and some form of food is available, but for about two months, people all over the planet have been staying inside and watching TV or the Internet. What does this mean, how will this affect civilization and human evolution, particularly the evolution of consciousness.
What is striking about this event is that it is a slow motion complete turn around of everything in modern technological society. This pandemic differs say from a massive earthquake, a superstorm, tsunami or volcano. Such events are quick processes compared to the pandemic response. The widespread experience of the Black Plague of the 14th Century took a while to spread and transform culture, but it was mainly focused in Europe and Asia, the current plague now has reached everywhere except Antartica.
Now that Spring in the Northern Hemisphere has burst forth and the peaks of COVID19 deaths seem to be coming to certain regions, people are becoming restless, protests are erupting throughout the globe, on everything from resistance to public health measures to government responses and workers demands for safer conditions. The running theme is that people are wanting normalcy back, they are suffering economically and they are also getting quite annoyed by being cooped up with no where to go for so long during such lovely weather.
Throughout my writings, I focus on the Middle Ages, particularly the age of the Crusades. Whatever one thinks of these years, what Rudolf Steiner says about them resonates with me quite deeply. He states that the era of the Crusades was the preparation for the Age of Consciousness Soul. The other perceptions he has of this era, and The Knights Templar in particular (who were formed because of the Crusades and essentially lasted until the Crusades had finished) was that the Templars wanted to create a culture that could contain the Christ, and a civilization where the Apostle Paul’s Damascus experience was a reality. The Damascus Experience of Paul was that he perceived Christ in the realm of the Etheric. Steiner goes on to outline that the current era, our age of the Consciousness Soul is one where we are to develop the spiritual capabilities of our souls, we are to develop discernment, and that the great mystery to be encountered in our age is that of evil.
I am an ardent student of history, I adore history. Once while staying with a dear friend who had a dizzying option of cable channels on her dish network, she asked me after noticing my watching habits (Tolkien fantasies, Medieval period dramas and endless documentaries on the Middle Ages) if I was aware we were living in the 21st century. Alas, yes, as I long to sit in a great hall with a banquet featuring stuffed peacock, rose infused jellies, and entertainment from jugglers and harpists, I will have to just keep watching all the food scenes (sans group murders) of Game of Thrones, The Tudors and Lord of the Rings to ease my broken aware heart that we were not living in the idealized past.
History has much to teach us, mainly on what does and does not work. Obviously we can build on past learnings, while I appreciate the romance part of the Middle Ages, I am ever so grateful that we have evolved from the privy holes that dumped raw human waste through a hole in the outskirts of the castle, as well as tooth brushes and tooth paste instead of scrapers and chewing mint leaves. But the idealism of ages past, that I do think in many ways is missing from our cynical times, there is so little mystery to anything anymore on a certain level, which may be a reason conspiracy theories are so abundant and murder television shows so popular.
A casual or maybe not so casual observation , is that humanity has had quite a few upheavals since the age of the Crusades. We seem to be on an ever quickening pace of change, with not much time to actually digest anything properly. (Fast food may be more symbolic of our age than we give it credit) I used to joke that I would tell my grandchildren “I used to have to get up and walk across the room to change the channel on the television.” The era of the 14th century if we actually observe it carefully, provides what Barbara Tuchman so eloquently presented in her landmark book of the same title, “ a distant mirror.” Disease, political and religious upheaval, changing gender relations, climate change of a mini ice age, technological innovations and increased globalism through international trade. In Tuchman’s book, she examines how the Black Death, the plague that wiped out essentially half of the population of Europe in the mid 1300’s, planted the seeds for the Reformation, the Renaissance and challenges to the economic and political structures of the day. Something she wrote about which I am thinking of now, is in the aftermath of the Black Death, how after half the population perished, there were fewer skilled laborers to plant crops and provide crafts and services specifically for the noble class who were used to being waited upon through the work of their underlings. These laborers and crafts people joined forces to create guilds, and set prices for their labor because they were actually in high demand after the great mortality of their age. After a bit, the clergy and noble class got together with the monarchs to pass legislation that workers would only be paid “pre-plague” wages, not wanting the costs of their stuff to go up, ensuring that the class divide would continue. Persecutions of Jews, Gypsies, Witches, Lepers and other undesirables commenced, because obviously THEY were the origin of the pestilence, not the failures of either the organized church or monarchies who were supposed to be in charge (specifically of public sanitation works and the like.) When there were no more people to burn as distractions from the failures of institutions, people started to question all sorts of things, even the existence of God, in the aftermath of the plague.
If we follow history from the Black Death until today, there have been quite a few political and economic upheavals, which in many ways have never quite been resolved. The Reformation of the 1500’s had as much to do with political and economic infighting between royal families as it did with maturing understanding of the human/divine relationship or religion. Ongoing religious wars, counter reformations, peasant revolts and such would rear their heads with regular periodicity in the years afterwards. Excellent ideas would spring forth, but they never seemed to catch on in anything but philosophical circles. With the expansion in the “Age of Discovery” the solution to the human condition seemed to be based on expanding territory, the institutions and cultures of certain places were too entrenched, so lets try something new. This was one of the many impulses for the Crusades, that the church and monarchies were so corrupt, lets take Jerusalem from the Muslims that have ruled it for about 500 years and set up a perfect kingdom where Christ walked. Aside from the wholesale slaughter of various populations on the way there, and of a large portion of the community within Jerusalem’s walls, the ideals and initial attempt at governance of Jerusalem had good intentions. One would simply question some of the methods to get there, obviously, which set up the experiment to fail bitterly, and humans are still fighting over this patch of land to this day.
The Americas were also supposed to be a utopian culture, again the presence of an indigenous population posed a problem that the explorers solved through murder, displacement and the purposeful introduction of diseases to make room for those seeking to create the perfect society, free from the oppression of institutional religion and monarchies. The result of this adventure is widely known, and in spite of obvious advances in self governance, we can argue there are numerous failures in the establishment of colonies that again, humans are still fighting over to this day.
In the early 1800’s a new trend emerged regarding technology, industrialization and the move towards democracy and away from monarchies. With the advent of the steam engine and the beginnings of automation resulting in factories resulted in large segments of populations leaving rural lands and moving into cities. The concept of employment, and unemployment became the norm, the latter causing much political and cultural unrest. When we read of the issues of the day occupying the press and regional governments, one can hardly believe they are 175 years old. The requests which later turned to bloody demands of the mobs were for affordable housing, food, fair wages and employment. In the Spring of 1848 across Europe the dam broke, and a chaotic violent uprising ensued. Entire cities became war zones where citizens dismantled streets and buildings creating barricades to keep out the military. After months of the upheaval which included soldiers mowing down women and children in the streets, the population retreated and essentially begged the monarchies to take charge of the situation. If this was democracy and freedom, the population did not want any part of it as crops were not being planted and people were being killed by the thousands in the streets and alleys of their neighborhoods. The deep injustices of the day, particularly in the economic realm were not addressed. The population was exhausted, if the kings wanted control, then they could have it, just stop the slaughter and let us “get back to work.”
The injustice was not dealt with and essentially was the fodder for the tinderbox that erupted into World War I, which was not solved either, and fed into World War II, which divided the world again, and led to the Korean Conflict (still an issue as this conflict is technically still a war between two Koreas being propped up by the great axis of world powers.) The non ending of the Korean Conflict fed into the Vietnam War, which also really did not end, and on and on and on until the most recent follies in Iraq and Afghanistan, Central and South America and large swaths of Africa. What all of these wars and social upheaval have in common is the desire to control natural resources, particularly petroleum, and they are justified by phrases and ideology of “freedom and democracy” or the age old attempt at creating a utopian society by first murdering the ingenious peoples on the lands desired by those who feel they can not make a difference in their own communities and they want to go somewhere new and set up shop with the goal of creating the perfect society.
We are out of places to move to on the planet, so there are big efforts to colonize the moon and mars, again mainly because well, maybe just maybe, on these outer planets we can get things right this time.
Which brings me back to the Crusades. The so called preparation for the Age of Consciousness Soul.
I believe in reincarnation, for me this is really the only way the human condition within the cosmos make any sense whatsoever. What if we have been making the wrong conclusions and keep ignoring our responsibilities in all of the many many upheavals humanity has endured during and since the time of the Crusades? If we are reincarnating, as well as witnessing what is occurring on the planet as we sojourn between lifetimes, what if we are all present now in numbers never before experienced on the earth to finally set things right? What if this is the upheaval where we are given the opportunity to do what is needed to transform the earth as a key player in creating a cosmos of love?
The virus behind the 2020 Pandemic has collapsed the global economy. It has collapsed the petroleum industry. We are told that the economy will have contracted nearly 30% in the quarter when the virus had it’s first peak. We live in an economy, a global economy that is dependent on producing more than it needs in terms of meeting basic living requirements of food, shelter and clothing. We have an economy based on people buying too much of everything. When we do not continue to buy too much of things we essentially do not need, then the vulnerable of us fall off a cliff in terms of livelihood.
Industrial agriculture has enabled the world to produce so much food that a large segment of the human population is obese, while another large segment of the human population is starving. Humanity throws away nearly half of the food it produces from farm to table, and this is everywhere if the UN Agriculture statistics are to be believed. We see pictures of farmers dumping milk into ditches, and trucks filled with potatoes with no where to sell them, while miles and miles of cars line up to get food assistance in major cities and workers are being forced to go to infected meat packing plants if they want to feed their families making products they can not afford on their miserly wages. The virus has highlighted for all to see in the endless 24/7 coverage of the pandemic the inherent injustices and insanity of the modern global technological economy.
For the last 50 years, human beings within a civilization are now called “consumers.” In Medieval culture, the human being was seen as a miniature reflection of the cosmos, as a reflection of divinity. Now humans are creatures that consume products, buy things. Brian Swimme in his landmark Canticle to the Cosmos lecture series and his book The Universe is a Green Dragon, highlights one of the reasons for this phenomena. Swimme states that ancient cultures used to gather together round the fireplace during evenings to tell stories. These people watched the stars in the evening and made correlations between the events happening in the heavens with events on the earth. Winter time was especially rich because the nights were longer, demanding more stories of how the human related to the cosmos through legends, fairy tales and scripture. With the advent of artificial light and ultimately television and movies, the communal story time was replaced by advertisements and shows articulating human worth and relationship with the divine in terms of the consumption of stuff, be it food or appliances, drugs or cosmetics. It is profound that we call the actors from television and film “celebrities” and “stars.” It is profound and tragic that we seek these individuals out for their opinions on just about everything, even how one endures the COVID19 illness.
How are we to approach the “aftermath” of an event that essentially will be lasting for a very long time?
We are social distancing mainly to protect not only ourselves but others, especially the vulnerable. We can not stay indoors forever, and many of our leaders are telling us that the vulnerable must be sacrificed for the economy, that economic hardship is just as toxic as the virus. We see people with guns and paraphernalia from the confederate and fascist armies demand “freedom” to spread the virus to the vulnerable, so a large portion of society can get back to work, as well as get back to consuming too much food and buying things they do not need. An American president who refuses to use his power to help protect medical professionals and essential workers, is using his signature to force vulnerable populations to work in infected factories without the protections he could help manifest with an executive order, and the governors of the states where these factories reside are proclaiming that any resistance to this order means no unemployment, while the head of the US Senate is threatening to withhold funds from states unless the opposition agrees to stripping American citizens of their right to civil redress through the court system. No liability for the companies who lack safety equipment and procedures for their workers, no access to the courts, and no food for their families if they choose their health over working at minimum wage jobs in disease ridden deadly factories. The protests began as soon as the order commenced.
It is obvious we as humans have what one would diplomatically call a mixed bag in terms of learning from past mistakes in terms of civilization. Any progress is met with intense, sometimes violent opposition, wearing down the populace into passivity as what happened in the Fall of 1848. All opposition has it's basis in excessive greed for "stuff" over the dynamic living human being.
But what if this virus infecting the largest human population in the history of humanity was inviting us to get it right this time?
The two things needed to adequately protect the population and ultimately the economy are protective gear for health care providers and workers, and testing so targeted isolation can commence while allowing the rest of society can continue to be in the public sphere. The global supply chain, which is international using much petroleum for transportation and also displacing workers from one nation and creating a permanent underclass of underpaid workers in another, has two locations for the manufacture of such products. Protective gear is produced in the region of Wuhan China, the first place devastated by the virus. The swabs needed for mass testing are produced in Northern Italy, the second region ravaged with tragic outcomes. Forget the “China-Made-The-Virus-in-the-Lab” conspiracy which is the re-election campaign talking point for the morally bankrupt and inept president making low wage workers infect themselves in slaughterhouses so he will not have his taco bowl and hamburger access interrupted. For me it speaks volumes that the items needed to successfully encounter the virus while maintaining the global economy as we know it, are produced in the first two regions completely decimated by the pandemic. I can assure you, no conspiracy panel in a smoke filled bunker would unleash something that well thought out, to knock out the supplies in both China and Italy so as to infect the entire earth and shut down the global economy in the process. While I detest the behavior of many robber barons and petroleum industry executives, they still need us to buy their stuff and the virus is collapsing their bottom line. A consumer based economy needs consumers, and the virus is forcing everyone to stop buying most stuff other than toilet paper and food.
So what does this all have to do with The Black Madonna, the Knights Templar and the Crusades? Quite a bit actually. The Black Madonna is a symbol of the Human Soul, of endurance under tremendous odds. The Black Madonnas that dot the Camino de Santiago de Compostela were placed there by the Knights Templar during the era of the Crusades. The Camino was and is a path of modern initiation, the Knights wanted to create a civilization that could be a container for the Cosmic Christ. The Crusades were a time of preparation for the Age of Consciousness Soul, the era we are presently in and enduring with what I would argue varying degrees of success. We are to confront in our age, the Mystery of Evil. We also are in the middle of Earth Evolution, and on our way to transforming the Cosmos of Wisdom into a Cosmos of Love.
The Black Madonna is a message from the spiritual world and from our ancestors that we have a difficult path during our era, but that path has a purpose, to use our wills and deeds to create goodness and love on the earth.
Love is dependent on Freedom. Love can not be forced or coerced, it is freely chosen.
How we go forward in the aftermath of the Pandemic of 2020 is a choice. We have at no other time in history such access to our collective history, the nature and outcome of so many different upheavals and responses. There were somethings we got right after each challenges, but I would argue, we got quite a bit wrong, or the right and wrong was not evenly distributed. The global Great Depression of the 1930’s produced advances in workers rights, social programs and education in the United States of America, but it also created totalitarian and fascist regimes in many places resulting in a global conflict never seen before by human kind. In the aftermath of the horrors of World War II, incredible initiatives were commenced with the desire that such a tragedy not be repeated. The Marshall Plan attempted to address the economic disparity throughout Europe as well as the devastation of four years of relentless mechanized warfare. The tragedy was that Europe was divided along political ideologies which put the East under totalitarian regimes masquerading as “communist,” and the West had all the benefits of democracy, capitalism and some forms of socialism. The environmental disaster of the eastern block countries and the politically unstable governments of the years following the fall of the Berlin Wall have their own deep challenges, where entire nations of people are forced into low wage jobs to survive and a resurgence of fascism and religious fundamentalism in beginning to surface in fragile emerging democracies.
What choices will we make? What will be our governing principles as people lose their homes, are forced on the street by the son-in-law slum lord of the taco bowl consuming president?
The initial response has been for me, hopeful. A majority of Americans, regardless of party, supports social distancing and the governors who are trying their best to implement procedures to keep their citizens safe. While noisy and revolting, the initial gun and swastika toting protestors are a tiny fraction of the population. These vocal protestors are being funded by powerful donors who want their workers to get back to creating stuff that people do not really need to buy in the first place. People from all over the world are doing what they can to assist their friends, neighbors and people they do not know, doctors and nurses are traveling from one region to another to assist colleagues in the emergency room battle. Money is being donated, prayers said, and deep thinking is taking place. There is a recognition that our health care system does not address underlying immunity, our environment and our nutrition are not enabling large segments of the population to adequately build their immune systems. A consensus of what I am witnessing is that there is a great desire to address injustices, from how we treat farm workers and meat packers, to grocery store personnel and mail carriers, as well as a recognition that the environment is being improved by the reduced assault it experiences with our mindless consumption and transportation methods.
There is much to draw upon from major faith traditions. In the Jewish tradition there is the practice of Sabbath and Jubilee, a weekly rest and a periodic year where no work is done after a generation. Imagine what would happen if we gave the planet a weekly rest from trash and exhaust, and a once in a generational year where no pollution was created ? In this tradition, the Shalom tradition, there is a recognition that a harmony needs to be sustained between peoples, Divinity and the planet. In each plot of farmed land, the outer boundaries were left unharvested to allow the poor and landless the dignity of picking their own food. In the Christian tradition, specifically modeled in Acts and the Epistles, the foundation for a community was in that all contributed to the good of the whole. The land, water, plants and animals were considered to be part of the “commons” available for the good of the community. It was in the Middle Ages in Europe when this practice started to wane, and private ownership of land, particularly through the monarchy and institutionalized church, taking access to food and resources away from large segments of the population and essentially forcing them into servitude. This practice was shocking to the populace of the time, which inspired them to find alternatives, seek justice and create counter movements against the methods of depriving people of food and shelter.
As we start to “open” what is it that we want to open? Do we want to open our hearts and minds? Do we want to open our communities to justice? How do we go forward? We have been through this before actually, with varying degrees of effectiveness. It may be that this event has happened now, with so many of us on the planet at the same time so that our human community can be an effective catalyst for transforming a cosmos of wisdom into a cosmos of love.
The Black Madonnas remind us of our capacity as humans, that we can endure the most difficult odds, we can endure upheavals, warfare, environmental calamity and still be present to divine love, we can still birth divine love from within.
What will you be doing to help birth this divine love as a foundation for the aftermath of the pandemic of 2020?
I eagerly await your response, as goodness surrounds us all.
