"In examinig the connections among the Gnostics, the Manichaeans an the Cathars, we should not forget that all the old Mysteries...flowed into Christianity through the instructions of Mani... (We) must... see that it was the archangel Michael who, after revealing himself in India as Indra, and in Persia as Mithra, was the leader of the Manichaean "elect" and of the Catharic "Christians". It was Michael whose light, like a flashing sword, dispelled the dragon's darkness."
(Déodat Roché)
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"After the incarnation of Manes, a great spiritual conference takes place in which Manes participates. In connection with this, Rudolf Steiner calls him "...a sublime emissary of Christ". In preparation for the consciousness soul, this sublime messenger of the Christ-being enters into the Parzival incarnation. He is the great Sun initiate. When he passes through nature, the beings of nature receive his imprint. The result is something people can still experience today. When travelling through the Pyrenees, people are strangely moved. Why? Rudolf Steiner says there are Grail elemental beings everywhere in this area. They descend from the slopes of the Pyrenees, and they can be found in the mountains of Catalonia and Spain. Parzival, and those who came after him, impressed upon nature the character of the Grail, the mood of the Grail."
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"It is characteristic of Innocent III that he set out very specific tasks for the Catholic Church. We could ask, just as Rudolf Steiner did, "What in fact, is the task taken on by the papacy after the great epoch I just discussed -the tenth, eleventh and twelth centuries-? What has been the mission of the papacy since that time? The mission of the papacy in the Catholic Church is essentially to prevent Europe from recognizing the reality of the Christ. It is a matter of more or less consciously founding a Church which had as its task a complete missunderstanding of the true Christian impulse, preventing the true impulse of Christianity from becoming known among the people." Allow me to repeat: even after this period, the Church still had many true saints, true knowers of Christ, but it also pursued this mission of the organized Church. "Europeans have accepted a Christianity that is no Christianity, and one of the significant results of this is the absolute impossibility of speaking today about the Christian Mysteries. There is nothing that can be done about this; lengthy preparations will be required to make it possible to speak of these Mysteries again.""
(Virginia Sease, Manfred Schmidt-Brabant, "Paths of the Christian Mysteries: From Compostela to the New World")