Since the millenium, we have entered the era of domination by Sorath - who is consuming Ahriman, as Ahriman consumed Lucifer

My idea here is that the Ahrimanic impulse - which is evil in its cold, rational, systematic manifestation - has over the past couple of centuries consumed the more traditional Luciferic ('devilish') evil of short-termist personal lust, pleasure and torment. And is now being-consumed, in his turn, by 'Sorath'. 

The archetypal Ahrimanic evil is epitomised by a manipulative bureaucrat who presides over a state or corporate PSYOPS/prison/death machine; while Luciferic evil would be characterised by proximate evil: for example those who personally beat, rape and torture helpless prisoners.  

The final turning-point of the Ahrimanic consumption of Lucifer was when the Luciferic revival of the 1960s ('sex & drugs & rock-n-roll') was captured by the state bureaucracy - leading to a pervasive and intrusive system of monitoring and control for political correctness. 

Modern leaders are primarily Ahrimanic - and often anonymous/ hidden/ personally-timid; while old-style leaders were often Luciferic gangsters and pirates who cultivated a reputation for recklessness and the enjoyment of inflicting cruelty.  Luciferic evil now operates at a low-level in The System - among the mooks, minions and henchmen; while the ruling architects of evil have an Ahrimanic nature.

The Luciferic values were condensed and operationalised into systemic and materialist form; their spontaneity and pleasure were drained-away. 'Free Love' and open-ended promiscuity became compulsory sensitivity-training, and the threat of harrasment prosecutions. Spontaneity ("Turn-on, Tune-in, Drop-out") was incrementaly transformed into a world of proliferating committees, laws, guidelines and procedures; checklists, forms and feedback... 

 

But from about 2000; there was a further move towards the purest, most absolutely negative form of evil - which could be named Sorathic (adapting this from Rudolf Steiner's identification of Sorath as the most extremely evil of beings). 

Sorthic evil is neither about pleasure nor about control; it tends towards the purely destructive.

If Luciferic evil is motivated by short-teremist pleasure; while Ahrimanic evil is motivated by God-denial, spiritual blindness and reductionism towards a meaningless world of mechanical procedures; then the Sorathic impulse is driven by negative impulses - primarily fear, resentment and hatred.

Sorathic evil will therefore tend to destroy both the lustful pleasures of Lucuferic evil, and the complex functional bureaucracies of Ahrimanic evil. 

This is the Sorathic world we inhabit in 2020. 

A world in which the Luciferic lusts of sex/ drugs and the rock-and-roll lifestyle are forbidden and punished; and also a world in which the global system is being disabled and destroyed - even as its Ahrimanic architects have successfully accomplished a silent global coup, and are trying to perfect it into the grandiose schemes of The Great Reset/ Agenda 2030. 

In 2020 we observe all modern institutions, corporations and every kind of bureaucracy as rapidly declining in efficiency and effectiveness - under pressure from an ever-increasing culture of fear, victimology, entitlement and resentment. 

Sorath divides Mankind into more-and-more, smaller-and-smaller, self-identified victim groups; each resentful-of and pitted-against each other. The aim is eventually for each person to feel alone, consumed by feelings of thwarted entitlement, and hatred of the world; and living in permanent fear of a whole world of other people, each of whom resents and hates the solo-victim just as he hates them. 

And then - eventually - Sorath's intent is that everyone, without exception, should die in fear and despair.

 

Thus we see that Sorath takes Luciferic and Ahrimanic and pits the one against the other, to weaken and destroy both. Whatever gives pleasure is thwarted. Whatever has been created, and is complex or functional, is reduced to chaos. 

Chaos is indeed the key term. Ultimately, Sorath is driven by resentment directed against God and all of His works; and resentment of Man as a loving creating-being and all of his works. Sorath wants to reduce creation back to a primal state of chaos. 

And then - when all else has been destroyed - to destroy himself as a act of spite against the God who created him. 

Such is Sorath's fantasy. 

Note: JRR Tolkien depicted Sorath in his Silmarillion legendarium under the name of Morgoth. 

 

Why Sorathic evil is, and must be, the End Stage (The example of Saruman)

I have recently written about Sorathic evil - the purest, most negative and destructive form of evil; as being the direction in which the world is going, here-and-now. 

But, Sorathic evil may be hard to understand. We are used to explaining evil actions in terms of fulfilling personal desires - whether the 'Luciferic' desires of immediate gratification by lust or cruelty, or the longer-term 'Ahrimanic' desires of power and control. 

It seems hard to imagine why 'mere destruction' would motivate someone when they might instead fulfil their desires? 

 

Well, it does happen. Perhaps if we introspect honestly, we can recognise the Sorathic within ourselves, as at least a momentary impulse?

An example are those resentment-fuelled spite-fantasies directed against people that we hate, or even who merely annoy us in some way that gets under our skin. For instance; day-dreaming the wish that somebody we have come to regard as smug, entitled, arrogant, privileged - will suffer massive public humiliation, fatal illness, or agonizing violence. Or somebody who 'thinks they are beautiful' and you 'wish' they would suffer a disfiguring accident that would make them hideous. Or when the idea flashes into mind that maybe I should kill myself and leave an accusatory suicide note; so that he/she/they will suffer lifelong agonies of guilt ("That will show them!").

If you can recognise any or all of these scenarios, then that is an example of the Sorathic evil in you. What identifies them as Sorathic is that the primary satisfaction is in the misfortune of others, rather in gratification of oneself. 

Indeed, someone in the grip of Sorathic evil might plot and scheme, expend time, money and resources - and maybe even take risks to his own health and safety - in order to inflict harm on others. 

Cutting off your nose to spite your face is the proverbial expression of Sorathic evil - although this makes a paradoxical quip out of what is truly the worst kind of evil; and such mockery misses that this 'nose-cutting' is exactly the kind of thing that people will do, when in the grip of Sorath. 

Saruman, in the Lord of the Rings, begins the story as in the grip of typically Ahrimanic evil. Saruman is a very 'modern' figure in the world of Middle Earth; an industrialist with a mind of 'metal and wheels', who even talks in slippery, euphemistic, manipulative management-speak. He works by surveillance (the palantir) and seeks control; even going to the trouble of creating the race of Uruk-Hai; a more obedient and loyal kind of orc-Man, who will stick to orders.  

But evil is a downward path - unless there is repentance: and that path has a slippery slope. 

Ahrimanic evil (while it lasts) retains some Good - insofar as order is better than chaos - and requires virtues such as prudence, hard work, loyalty, obedience...

When Saruman is defeated, he has a chance for repentance; but rejects it. Stripped of power, he refuses to recognise any wrongdoing. 

In particular (and this is amplified in the posthumously-published notes of Unfinished Tales) Saruman is spitefully-motivated against Gandalf. By the end of Lord of the Rings, Saruman has come to exemplify Sorathic evil - since he lives in order to hurt Gandalf, and - by proxy - the hobbits who Gandalf loved and cared for. 

The Scouring of the Shire is a representation of how the brief interlude of Ahrimanic evil administered by Lotho Sackville Baggins, gives way to a frenzy of destructive Sorathic evil when Saruman arrives. 

At first under Lotho - trees were felled to fuel furnaces; later under Saruman ('Sharkey') trees were felled because this would make the hobbits miserable. At first the rivers were carelessly polluted by the outflow of productive industrial processes, but later they were polluted because it would render them hideous... 

Evil as a means to an end, as a by-product; was replaced as evil for its own sake.

 

In his final speech, Saruman reaches the end-point of Sorathic evil when he deliberately courts death by stabbing Frodo in front of the army of hobbits. 

Having reached a point where he cannot destroy the Shire, Saruman tries to saddle the hobbits with a legacy of guilt and regret for having vengefully committed 'deicide' ('god-murder'; in that Saruman is a minor god; a maia or angel).  

But Frodo is protected by his mithril mail, and pardons Saruman - thwarting even his intended indirect 'suicide by cop' and inflicting a further wound of obligation upon the wizard. Yet this act of mercy only increases Saruman's resentment. 

The end-stage of Sorathic evil is despair, and the only perceived 'solution' is suicide. 

Thus Saruman (semi-deliberately) goads Wormtongue into killing Saruman; and thus the wizard 'finally' achieves his own death by that means.

 

Looking at Saruman's descent into Sorathic evil, it is striking how very small, how petty the wizard has become compared with the proud, powerful, 'wise' administrator of the grandiose, world-dominating schemes of his Ahrimanic phase - just a few months earlier. 

And indeed, Sorathic evil can only tend towards being small and petty, because it becomes less-and-less capable of the deferred gratification needed for making and sticking-with complex, long-term plans and manipulations. 

From this we can see that evil cannot go straight to the Sorathic extremity - without rendering itself ineffectual.  Lucifer and Ahriman are needed in the earlier stages to break-open the Good and allow the Sorath in*. 

 

Thus Luciferic and Ahrimanic evils alternate until they have created a situation of vulnerability where Sorathic destruction can take-over. 

On the other hand, the descent from Ahrimanic into Sorathic evil may be very rapid indeed - some historical examples suggest that it may happen in just day, or even hours - so that great tyrants may die suicidally while wishing the like destruction on everybody and everything else ('after me the deluge' - as a desired outcome). 

At the societal level, we reached the threshold of Sorathic evil within only months of the triumph of Ahriman...

 

In the West, we had the Luciferic promises of the 1960s - of a world of unrestrained hedonism; leading incrementally, decade by decade, to the Ahrimanic global prison of 2020 with promises of a world of omni-surveillance and totalalitarian-control (a system, apparently, pioneered in China to be rolled-out everywhere else). 

Yet, such was the triumph of evil and the feebleness of spiritual opposition in this atheist, materialist, leftist-corrupted world; that as the year reached its second half there was already evidence of merely, pettily destructive Sorathic frenzy - with violent riots, destruction, arson, terror, rape and murder; being not just officially funded, organised and defended; but publicly-advocated and approved. 

At a micro-level the brief "all in it together" spring solidarity of March-May devolved into the masked mutual hostility and informer-culture of the summer onwards. 

This happened even though such a spread of chaos erodes the very basis and capability of the global coup and its carefully-constructed Ahrimanic System!

 

The Sorathic spirit can also be seen in the apparent-gratuitousness of using surveillance and control technologies and enforcement for crushing society, church, education, sports, theatres, music, cinema, museums, singing and dancing - and finally Christmas.

In a single year has been wrought a truly colossal destruction of Culture. 

A genuinely Ahrimanic spirit would be subverting and using Culture to monitor, manipulate and control the population... Ahriman would exploit Culture to 'keep people happy' (in a bread and circuses fashion) while explicitly and covertly feeding them pro-System propaganda. 

But the Sorathic spirit of resentment and spitefulness is ever-increasingly getting the upper hand, and engaging in dysfunctional destruction for its own sake. The Sorathic spirit is destroying the Ahrimanic apparatus in all its aspects (including police and military functionality) - destroying, but not replacing. 

 

Because the world is so advanced in evil; such a Sorathic destruction of The System is not any kind of liberation, but a progression of evil delivering the world into chaos: a world of end-stage Sarumans, pursuing personal, petty grudges spiralling downwards into the finality of despair and suicide.  

(And a despairing, or spitefully-motivated, suicide is - surely? - a choice for damnation.) 

So, although the Luciferic, Ahrimanic and Sorathic types of evil fight each other, this conflict is not a negation - but the advance of evil; because evils don't cancel, they synergise. 

 

We cannot defeat Ahriman with Sorath, one cannot be played-off against the other - but only with God. 

If The Ahrimanic System is destroyed by Sorath, then we would be in far worse spiritual situation than if The System remained. 

Yet such a Sorathic collapse looks like a distinct probability for 2021...

 

If we want to resist Sorath spiritually - in our-selves, in our societies; this can only be achieved from a base in The Good. 

If we want Good (i.e. Godly) outcomes; the negative can only be defeated by the positive. 

The only true enemy of Sorath is Jesus Christ.

*I got this phrase from Ama Boden. Thanks!

The Devil, Satan, Lucifer, Sorath... One or how many demonic leaders?

The demon's problem is that, by Not incarnating and having separated themselves from God's direct presence in Heaven, they are not-easily brought-to-a-point...

They are eternal and indestructible spirits who have taken the side against Creation; and as such they are Not-very-good at learning from experience.

Perhaps, the hellish economy works more by a kind of 'natural selection' among demons, rather than by the learning and development of individual demons.

That is, maybe the individual demons stay much the same (because they don't learn from experience), but one or another comes to the fore at different times and places and situations; for which they happen to be best adapted.

Some rise, some fall back down the hierarchy; and the supreme Leader varies at different times, and perhaps too in different places - hence the several names for the chief demon in different sources and cultures. 

So The Devil may be sometimes the passionate and charismatic Lucifer, sometimes the coldly bureaucratic Ahriman, sometimes the sadistic Sorath - whatever is working most effectively here-and-now in the work of opposition to God, Good and Creation?

The test of our times: or, what should we do when Sorathic evil is Destroying the Ahrimanic System?

This is perhaps going to be the great test of our times... 

We have an evil, global totalitarian System - encompassing and linking all the major social institutions. This global System is getting more and more aligned to the side of Satan with every passing month - with a mixture of tacit consent and active approval from (it seems) the majority of the population - and only a few spiritually-religious individuals in explicit opposition. 

Yet this evil System is also what keeps us alive. It is getting less and less capable of keeping us alive, as it gets more and more evil - nonetheless the The System is still what maintains us...

But, evil being evil, the Ahrimanic "lawful evil" that wants us all under micro-surveillance and total control; is giving-way to a wholly-negative, Sorathic, "chaotic evil" of each-against-all in short-termist, destruction.

And the great test is when we are in a situation of considering whether to defend the lesser against the greater evil... Should we do it? 

It seems rational to defend the lesser evil? (At least, to some extent.) But is it in practice corrupting? 

All 'viable' options are evil. People start-out recognizing that fact, but in the heat of battle or the routine of work; they 'forget' and become corrupted into supporting the lesser evil.  

Instead of fighting on the side of God and Good in the spiritual war; people find themselves fighting on the side of Ahriman against Sorath - embroiled in civil war among the demons.

That is the test of our times: to fight for Good instead of for the lesser of evils. 

It is the test of salvation.