The Mission of Alcohol

[Bruce Michael]

Hello Friends,
During the Fourth Subrace wine began to be treated as a holy thing. In the past, water was considered holy and used in the mysteries. Note that for women of childbearing age, wine was still forbidden except during the Bacchanalia.

From some notes on the "Origin and Meaning of Wine" by Rudolf Steiner:

"In the Persian Race we get the description of the beginning of the vine culture. But still wine was something quite worldly. Gradually it was applied to the Dionysian cult."

Back to the Doctor:
"Wine was that which separated man from everything spiritual. He who takes wine cannot arrive at the spiritual. He can know nothing of Manas, Buddhi, Atma. The whole course of humanity is one of descent and ascent.
Man had to go own once to the lowest point. That he might thus go down to the lowest point, there arose the Dionysian cult."

"Formerly there was a strict rule for priests, forbidding wine. They could experience Atma, Buddhi, Manas. There had to be a religion which could come quite down to the physical plane, one that changed water into
wine. Later on the wine will be changed into water. If water had not been changed into wine, man could not have taken with him all that is below in the Vale of Earth."

You can read more about this in the Gospel lectures.

Some might know that Dr. Steiner claimed he used alcohol in his early years to stamp out blood clairvoyance. Now whether or not that was a great excuse for getting drunk, I don't know. It's not going to work if you're pulled over by the police.

Alcohol was intimately connected with the incarnation of the human ego- I'll develop this later.


-Br.Bruce

[Bruce Michael]

Further comments on the mystery of alcohol:
Apart from the direction alcohol guided us -downwards - there is also the fascinating connection it has with the Self.
Here's the quote from the Gospel of John Lectures 23 May 1908:

"In future, people will be able to say in the most literal sense that it was the task of alcohol to pull man down into the material world so far that he would become selfish, and that alcohol would lead him to demand the use of his self for his own purpose, so that it would no longer serve the whole nation... Alcohol has removed man's capacity to feel at one with the universe in the higher worlds."

It is interesting that a people such as the Australian Aboriginal still had this feeling of oneness with the land and cosmos. They of course did not have the use of alcohol 'til the arrival of the white man.

After the Incarnation the use of alcohol became decadent. It was Christ who was to bring the gift of the independent Self:
"His mission consisted of bringing man the full power of the Self, the inner independence of soul."
-St John Lectures

Alcohol prepared the way for the independent Self but now it creates a separate self of its own.

The Self manifests itself on Earth by the agency of the ethereal warmth:

"The effect of ethereal heat permeates the total organism...it is the medium through which man's spiritual self can come into contact with the living, physical body."
-Lievegoed

Alcohol acts like an interior imitation of sunshine. Through this separate warmth organisation, it now interferes with the Self- the Self is disrupted:

"We may therefore say that to take alcohol is to produce a counter-ego in oneself. For it has the effect of influencing action that should spring freely from the resolution of the ego: alcohol thinks, feels and acts in the ego's place. A person in this situation lets a purely external, material ego dictate to him. Alcohol prevents his own ego from acting, thus making him its slave."

This is "Big Al's" game and purpose now- slave-driver. RS from "The Problems of Nutrition"
Lecture: Problems of Nutrition

"It would take too long to explain the spiritual scientific reason
showing that alcohol produces physically and in an external way out of the plant, just what a man should develop physically within himself through his ego being centered within him. It is a fact inwardly perceived through spiritual science that when a person drinks alcohol, it takes over the specific activity that otherwise belongs wholly to the person's ego. A person who drinks much alcohol needs less food and his body will require less nourishment than is normally required in the process of combustion.

It calls forth forces that otherwise would be called forth by the ego's inner penetration. Thus, a person can externalize the activity of his ego by infusing his body with alcohol. Consequently, alcohol imitates and copies the activity of the ego, and you can understand why it is that people turn to it. To the extent, however, that a man replaces his inner self with such a substitute, to that extent does he become its slave. If otherwise qualified, a man will be better able to unfold the
best forces of his ego when he abstains from alcohol altogether. By drinking alcohol an inner hindrance is created behind which something takes place that actually should and would be accomplished through the activity of the ego itself if the hindrance had not been produced. "

-Br.Bruce