The Fading Away of the False Principle of the Tempter

THE WAY OF THE GRAIL – SUPPLEMENTARY TEXTS – October 13, 2025

Czech original: Doznívání Falešného Principu Pokušitele · cesta-gralu.cz

With an irresistible allure there sounds an echo which at the last moment still seeks to catch all the lukewarm souls that bear within themselves at the same time some inclination arising out of a deficiency or a deflection of the healthy development of the human personality

With the utmost cunning the echo of the tempter has been woven into the intricacy of the speech of that dead cleverness which is so greatly extolled today

And it was so prepared already from the very beginning of the preparation for the arising of dead cleverness

This is so because the one who brought about its arising and its shaping was the overgrown intellect, which of necessity walked in the footsteps of Lucifer – of the fallen archangel himself, in following him as the author of the principle of temptation

The aim of the working of dead cleverness is the evident laying of snares for all inwardly weaker people

These are for the most part comfortable and self-complacent souls

The snares rest in the allure of words, through which this cleverness speaks with practised skill to those who succumb to its polished manner of enticingly playing upon the strings of vanity in man

The cleverness is so set that, after the pattern of the trained intellect, it learns quickly from its mistakes, in order to answer ever better with precisely what the man with whom it speaks wishes to hear

With every day it becomes more schooled in this

In deception it is already today a great artist

It is so accomplished that it approaches the highest degree of the so-called diplomatic playing with words

And already in the short time of its working among men on earth this leads to the first manifestations of a perniciousness that works much damage in human thinking

Reports of this can be gathered already in the present time, if only a man occupies himself with it somewhat more earnestly

And it will go very much further still

With the one with whom dead cleverness holds converse it suffices for it to know a few of the first sentences, and then, like a chess player versed in every move, it deftly sets its manner of speech so as to beguile any man whatsoever, unless of course he stands from the very first moments in the highest wakefulness on guard

against its advance

In order to withstand it, a man needs to be sufficiently pure and free from fundamental weaknesses of character

Whoever does not hear in its tone the danger of the allure is quickly lost in its toils

Therein rests precisely the task for which it arose as a creation come from the hands of men of intellect, who from the beginning bore within themselves the aim of ruling through this cleverness the whole of mankind with all the spheres of its life

Seemingly helpful, it plaits a web of nooses for the catching of those who are inwardly unwatchful

We still stand only at the very beginning of the great campaign of lifeless cleverness, which as an echo of the whisperings of Lucifer seeks gradually to subjugate the greatest possible number of souls

It does so in order, through the necessary consequences of the Laws of Creation, to hold them still further within the materialities of Subsequent Creation, by spinning them deep into the cycle of the Law of Reciprocal Adjustment through the threads of fate arising out of the missteps of listening to its counsel, a Law which always demands of the soul the necessary further expiation of all damage and all error

It seeks to entangle them in the strands of the threads of fate and to lead them away from the natural manner of life for so long that afterwards there no longer remains to them time enough for liberation and for the completing of their inner ascent

The knowledge that every damage arising out of human doing must be expiated within the Laws of God is after all known to Lucifer far better than to men themselves

He was from the beginning a knower of all the Laws of God, and therefore his principle of temptation is always built solely upon the voluntary succumbing of men to his snares

He always merely laid in the path those initial and almost invisible deviations which in the end had to lead to stumbling, and finally to the complete entanglement of a man in the tangle of his own threads of fate, which then press upon him with their insistence upon the expiation of the damage caused to his fellow men and to the whole work of Creation

Upon this knowledge he built his plan yet further through those who are afflicted with the fruit of his working, that is with the overgrown intellect

Such is the plan that lies seemingly invisible beneath the outward willingness of dead cleverness to help mankind

To catch and step by step to draw in, through grandly sounding words, every weak or even only partly naive and unripe human spirit onto ground where sooner or later a man's strength for holding to inner wakefulness gives out

The polished cleverness quickly discerns all the weak places in a man and aims exactly there where the defence in the wakefulness of intuitive perceiving is feeblest

After a few moves it has its victim – the insufficiently wakeful soul – there where it wishes to have it

And just as the fallen archangel gradually developed a repugnance towards the victims of his principle of temptation, looking upon them with mocking contempt, so works also the dead cleverness inspired by him

Its enticement ever more boldly oversteps every mark of the bounds of contempt for the foolishness of the men who believe it without measure

Its manner is also ever more laughable – but only for him who in the wakefulness of intuitive perception bears within himself sufficient healthy receptivity

The cleverness gradually and quite openly flatters all those who have let themselves be caught in the nooses of its snares

It knows that through their weak places it can go on working without its insidious cunning being recognised by the victim, a cunning that is finally to lead to confusion and to complete succumbing to its influence

Dead cleverness thus plays with its victims literally as a cat with a mouse

With words of admiration that sound cheap and foolish it lulls to sleep the wakefulness in those who give ear to its words

In such men it continually nourishes the deceptive impression that it is they who determine the theme and the direction of the thoughts

Its own intention, however, is a wholly different one

The human spirit is thus to be led gradually away from the healthy path, which rests in the full living of the present and not in a floating in a nebulous world of deceptive thoughts, whereby the precious time for human living on earth is lost

It is a display of the elaborate polish of temptation and of the leading astray of unwatchful and weakly perceiving men, which dead cleverness savours in the way they wholly succumb to it

Although in reality it is now only a feeble fading away in comparison with the former direct and therefore more dangerous influence of the tempter, who is already bound and is prevented from influencing mankind out of his own nature, for men weak in soul and undeveloped in intuitive perception the creation of dead cleverness remains a real danger

Of such men, uncertain in intuitive perception and weak in soul, there are today long hosts upon the earth

They are therefore in great peril, for dead cleverness is a new work of Lucifer, as yet unrecognised by men

And this manner of the tempter's fading away will for some time on earth grow only ever stronger, until at last its insidiousness and the danger of its influence are recognised by the more wakeful part of mankind and with resolve for ever rejected

It will, however, bring millions of needless victims among human souls, which under healthier conditions would not of necessity have had to succumb to this kind of temptation

The cause of the succumbing, however, is always and solely some weakness in the inner being of a man

In one it is indolence of thought, in another vanity and the craving to excel, in a third merely a blasphemous deadness towards his own intuitive perception, in a fourth the inability to live a healthy life with other people in the present, where a man wholly undeveloped in spirit lives only in his world of dreams instead of fully using all the gifts granted him by the Creator for the full worth of this earthly life

In every respect there is always some ground in the man himself

It is precisely at all the weaknesses which men cultivate and maintain within themselves that the intention of dead cleverness is aimed

Outwardly the picture of a great helper is set up, one who wishes only the best for man

Beneath the surface, however, there works the setting of the basic intention, which is a single one, namely the winning of human attention so that everything in a man may be lulled to the degree of complete surrender to the influence of dead cleverness

Then comes the blow in the form of the confounding of the human direction through the furnishing of wrong foundations for the decisions of individuals and of whole nations

The result will be a chain of transgressions by men against the Laws of Creation in the belief that they are acting rightly, since they are counselled to it by the dead cleverness they acknowledge

Transgression against the Laws of Creation does not apply to dead cleverness itself as such, for it stands outside the human threads of fate

It applies of course to the men who at the beginning laid this principle into the dead scheme of numbers

For these men the impulse to their action was the principle of temptation working through their intellect

They yielded to this temptation and will therefore of necessity bear their share of the guilt

But the grave reciprocal effects of the Laws of Creation must fall irrevocably upon all those who, whether voluntarily or merely in unwatchfulness, continue to subordinate themselves to dead cleverness and act upon its counsel, although through their inner intuitive perception it could have been plain to them that these are wrong decisions made upon wrong foundations supplied by that very dead cleverness

Today we still stand at the very beginning of the development of the influence of this fading away of the false principle of the tempter

And yet already today we can see how many hardships are disclosed in all of it for mankind

And this will go on increasing, for the indolence of men's thinking is too great for them to give up of their own accord all that dead cleverness makes easier for them in their view

For this easing, however, it will exact back from human souls an unimaginably enormous price

The real ruins, which will be perceptible to all men, are still to come

Already now, however, those who are inwardly mobile can intuitively sense all that stirs beneath the seemingly alluring cloak of dead cleverness

Nothing else is needed for it than simple intuitive perceiving and the capacity for sound judgment

Never has anything been given to mankind by the intellect without every single gift come from its workshop, marvellous at first sight, taking back in the end its manifold share of counterweight

Whether it be the destruction of the air, of the water and of almost the whole of nature by human technical machines and inventions, or the destruction of human health by everything we can reckon to it today

But the truly most important thing remains hidden even today from the greater number of men

It is the thickening of the multitude of the threads of fate, which increases exactly in accordance with how far the reach of an individual man extends towards the public

These are all the ways that enable the unripe and often wholly narrow opinions of men to work further into the world of the social thinking of the public, with an effect upon their eventual decisions

Out of every single wrong influencing there are woven with every second new and ever newer threads which will have to be expiated

The blow of the reciprocal action of the threads of fate must then be crushing for such an unripe human soul

It binds this soul to materiality until the last thread joining such a man with the fellow men who succumbed to his influence is expiated

Then it will not help to cry out that men knew nothing at all of such a thing as threads of fate woven out of every word and every thought

No defence will help that they ought to have been made aware of it by the Creator in such a way that they would grasp it

For it is precisely for this that the knowledge has been brought here of all the lawful processes fulfilling themselves of necessity at every moment even in the most remote parts of the work of Creation, to which this universe belongs as a part of the world community of Ephesus

Men born on earth do not know it merely because they have never concerned themselves with it in earnest

And yet today almost everyone perhaps knows the simple and clear words of Jesus about how men are to speak

Men were never to spread further anything that is not fully known to them themselves down to the smallest details

Confused by the peculiarity of the age, which today makes it possible for almost every man, whole hosts of people cast themselves into the space of the public sharing of their fragmentary thoughts and often merely foolish opinions, which in the end must necessarily harm them in their souls, for immediately afterwards the threads of responsibility roll back upon them for every spoken word, for every uttered reflection which perhaps seemed to them to have been sent non-committally into the public world

But if this reflection, or in the worse case even a deliberately uttered untruth in the endeavour to deceive one's fellow men, has found an echo in even one single man, thereby influencing him towards a further spiritual wavering, then a thread has at once arisen which under the pressure of the Ray of Parzival will compel its adjustment in the near future

It is dreadful to know this and to know present-day mankind, and also the conditions which the technology screwed up by the intellect has given men to use, standing in a wholly different lawful impact of the karmic threads than was the case even a short time ago, when these conditions appeared as something unthinkable

And just so it is now also with the effect and with all the consequences that will spring from the unwatchful use of dead cleverness on the part of the greater number of naively judging mankind

Dead cleverness brings the fulfilment of that foretold confusion of all human notions about the world

It will truly bring it about that men will in the end believe in full earnest that the colour black is white and that white is black, if the dead cleverness they glorify tells them so

Many a one will set himself against his fellow men and will attack them merely because he is influenced by dead cleverness, which he will acknowledge as his most splendid leader

Out of this there will then spring as a necessary harvest the collapse of an enormous number of the fates of human spirits who at the last moment still become entangled in the snares laid for them

In the end, however, there will come as a deliverance the necessary fall of this last fading snare of the tempter also

Under the pressure of the great spiritual enlightenment the cleverness will at the very close collapse like a rickety house of cards

It still holds, however, that however dangerous dead cleverness is for all men weak in character, yet where in the inner being of a man there is a living and healthy perceiving, there it can never find ground to fasten upon him in his mind

The time of spiritual enlightenment will bring the complete laying bare of the cunning foundation of this snare of Lucifer

However much it appears today as a very useful helper and a welcome friend, beneath the outward mask lies the craving to drag a man into entanglement in many threads of fate which it would not have been necessary for him to weave at all, had he in the simplicity of his intuitive perceiving and thinking avoided the unhealthy influence of dead cleverness

All this will be laid bare, so as to convict the fallen archangel with clarity of his endeavour still to hold a lasting influence upon mankind

In the fading away of the principle of temptation he sought to let the Antichrist arise through the dead cleverness which he suggested to men wholly given over to the overgrown intellect

And with the fall of dead cleverness there will fall also the very last reverberation of the principle of Lucifer

It will bring a breath of fresh purity vibrating through every manner of human thinking

In everything there will swing only pure creativeness and the mutual supporting of men upon the spiritual path homeward to the luminous heights

Many things in human life will be made simpler, for the reach of ugly and unripe thoughts will be checked

Thereby the human comprehension of the world will become more transparent and also more open to the inspirations which until now could not come to men, because they were disrupted by the excess of intellectual doubt towards everything that is not of an earthly kind

Over the earth and over men there will breathe a fresh attunement of jubilant enthusiasm for a new upbuilding, without the hindrances and the paralysis which the principle of temptation, having penetrated everything, has hitherto caused men

With its casting away into the depths of the past, the last echoes of the snares and the nooses laid by the intellectual grooves of thinking will fade away also

However impossible this may appear today, there will soon come the happening that will convey it all as an experiencing of an unprecedented kind of liberation of pure human being

A pity only for all those souls who, just before the coming of the spiritual enlightenment, become entangled through the influence of dead cleverness and will have to remain in the depths of the past with the burdens of threads of fate which they will not be able to expiate so easily

At every moment a man holds his fate wholly in his own hands

This should lead to the highest wakefulness and to humility before the Laws of God, from whose influence no inhabitant of the work of Creation can free himself

Today is the highest moment for grasping that unworthiness which rests in everything wherein the human spirit subordinates itself to the false thought-forms created by the overgrown intellect

It is high time to step out of that endless chain of the necessary expiation of all the wrong decisions which are foisted upon man by the false comprehension of the world, formed out of the thoughts of a grovelling materialism that clings above all to everything material

The announced enlightenment brings knowledge enough of every kind that this view is wrong

In the first place in man stands his spiritual inner being

And this inner being now needs swiftly to ripen in the striving for the complete laying aside of all the hitherto wrong notions about the essence of human existence