Aether Force
Steiner himself expressly disapproved of being used as an authority for any conclusion; the Michaelic Cosmic Intelligence was present as a living force when he spoke, and once the content entered the page it died. Large general assertions about Sorat, the ahrimanic double, secret brotherhoods, and semiliving computers arrive in Emberson's text broken up by Steiner quotes assembled to lend the authority of the great initiate to conclusions Emberson reached through his own largely subconscious soul activity. Steiner, when addressing comparable subjects, characteristically circled the topic from multiple vantage points before arriving at a higher picture, always conditional and context-dependent; Emberson proceeds in a straight line from strongly held mental images to citations selected to confirm them, what Wendt identifies as perceptless concepts on a large scale: thoughts severed from the percept-experience that alone could verify them. A pointed example appears on page 131 of Emberson's first volume, where a Steiner quote on electricity contains the phrase "when one learns to view it from a particular level," a conditional Steiner placed there deliberately and that Emberson passes over without comment because acknowledging it would have undercut his conclusion.
In Meditations on the Taro, Tomberg warns if one is to contemplate evil too closely, without standing at a sufficient objective distance, one draws the soul toward communion with what it seeks to examine and sacrifices its vital forces in the process.
The most serious objection Feiten raises is evidentiary: specific statements Emberson attributes to Steiner cannot be found in the published or unpublished record, and Martin Schüpbach, former chairman of Weleda AG, wrote to the Mathematical-Astronomical Section in May 2010 that after visiting Emberson in Les Sciernes he "could not see any research project" and received no experimental data despite repeated requests. Just as telling is what Emberson never mentions: David Black's 1981 work The Computer and the Incarnation of Ahriman, which anticipated the central themes of Emberson's books by nearly thirty years. Black distinguished between a micro incarnation, Ahriman embodying in a single human body in the third millennium, and a macro incarnation, Ahriman and his hosts gradually embodying in computers and AI technology; both themes, along with the loom technology and the Hollerith census computer's evolution into IBM, appear fully developed in Black's work before Emberson wrote a word on the subject. Black and Emberson even published articles in the same 1988 edition of the British journal Shoreline, which makes the omission hard to explain.
Wendt points directly to the Open Source community as concrete evidence against Emberson's picture: "the moral power that puts this tool to use in countless wise ways" is visible to anyone who looks, and the whole of civil society uses it to bring, step by hard step, more moral sanity into the world. Software writers and the technical creators who build the physical aspects of this tool have struggled through genuine moral effort to make something that helps humanity; to tell them the devil runs their work is, as Wendt states, "a terrible and unjustified judgment to place on another human being." One of the deepest imbalances in Emberson's vision is that Christ and the Divine Mother appear to be sitting this one out on the sidelines, leaving the entire field of the future of humanity to evil demonic beings, a picture Steiner's own placement of the Mystery of Golgotha as the central redeeming gesture in human affairs directly contradicts.
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