Reflections on the “Prince of Darkness” as discussed in the writings of Bô Yin Râ. Part One of Two

A Three Sages Original

Reflections on the “Prince of Darkness” as discussed in the writings of Bô Yin Râ. Part One of Two

By Klaus Weingarten

Klaus Weingarten resides in Germany. He is a multimedia artist with the Organisation zur Umwandlung des Kinos (Organization for the Transformation of the Cinema) and Publishing Director, Magische Blatter (Magical Leaves). As a longtime student of the teachings of Bô Yin Râ, he consults with Three Sages on its publishing program.

Edited by Richard C. Cook

Richard C. Cook is Editor of Three Sages. He resides in Maryland, USA.

Books to Light

Books in English by Bô Yin Râ, along with German/English dual editions are available from Books to Light. Find the main website here: bo-yin-ra-the-luminary.com/en. Readings from the books of Bô Yin Râ are also now becoming available on the Books to Light YouTube channel here: https://www.youtube.com/@BookstoLight.

Part One: Reflections on the “Prince of Darkness” as discussed in the writings of Bô Yin Râ.

Introduction

Chapter Six, “The Great Struggle,” from Bô Yin Râ’s The Path to God has recently been published, as part of the complete book, on Three Sages, as has the text Bô Yin Râ: Commentary on metaphysical realities--from the legacy of Elisabeth von Oldenburg, both of which address the phenomenon of the “Prince of Darkness.”

This figure, however, runs like a thread through Bô Yin Râ’s entire 32-volume Hortus Conclusus (The Enclosed Garden), and I consider knowledge of its existence to be a fundamental cornerstone of our individual path to spirituality.

Here in Germany, we are a group of artists, members of the Organisation zur Umwandlung des Kinos (Organization for the Transformation of the Cinema) who, over the past few decades, have increasingly incorporated the writings of both Bô Yin Râ (1876-1943) and German mystic Jacob Böhme (1575-1624) into our artistic work. We consider these writings to be the most accurate and complete descriptions of spiritual reality in the German tradition.

Four of our artists, including our spiritual mentor and fatherly friend, the late Ronald Steckel, released the film Dawn in Ascent, a tribute to Jacob Böhme, over ten years ago. The film surprised us with its reception; after its premiere in Görlitz, it was screened over 200 times in German cinemas and cultural venues and received the German Film Spirit Award and the Rosa Mars Film Prize in 2016. That same year, the film was published by the renowned Suhrkamp publishing house. The experiences from the discussions following the screenings have shown us that the need for spiritual interchange among people is strong.

The Source Behind Jacob Böhme and Bô Yin Râ

The writings of Böhme and Bô Yin Râ speak of the same spiritual reality, and both authors draw from the same original spiritual source. Their messages, often cloaked in the person of historical figures, including Jesus, also herald a distant future.

There is a very interesting area of overlap between Jacob Böhme and Bô Yin Râ, though they lived three centuries apart, in that the Jakob-Böhme-Bund was an artists’ association founded in Görlitz in June 1920 by Bô Yin Râ and Fritz Neumann-Hegenberg. It emerged from the Lusatian Art Association, of which Bô Yin Râ, under his birth name of Joseph Anton Schneiderfranken, was the first chairman from 1919 to 1921.

We find further profound insight into Jacob Böhme in Bô Yin Râ’s 1925 book, Wegweiser (Guideposts). Here Bô Yin Râ writes: “What is to be explicitly presented here, however, is the account of Böhme’s spiritual origins, which can only be obtained from a single source. This account was prompted by the repeated observation that even the best interpreters of the spiritual phenomenon that is Jacob Böhme are unable to fully understand either the man himself or his writings, as long as they are unaware of Böhme’s connections to the spiritual circle of the ‘Luminous Ones of the Primordial Light.’” Bô Yin Râ himself was a member of that circle, a Luminary.

Following the Böhme film, which was intended to be more of a film by Böhme than about Böhme, we set ourselves the ambitious goal of creating a film about Bô Yin Râ in a similar but different vein. The film has yet to be made, though for this process, our research into the Jakob-Böhme-Bund and the then-current publication Magische Blätter (Magic Leaves) has proved invaluable, so much so that we published the results of our research in the form of modern editions of Magische Blätter between 2020 and 2026, along with a culminating Almanac.

Hortus Conclusus: Bô Yin Râ’s “Textbook”

In conducting our research, it was important for us to place the history of the Jakob-Böhme-Bund within the context of Bô Yin Râ’s 32-volume Hortus Conclusus (The Enclosed Garden) as a whole, viewing our work along similar lines as to how many people came to Jesus through the events shown in Acts of the Apostles after his death. We wanted to express that these deeds, these actions, the entire being of Bô Yin Râ and his way of life, are authentically and ingeniously intertwined with the Hortus Conclusus. This is why these biographical background details are both extraordinarily enriching and add an essential element to the overall picture that had previously been obscured.

As an example of the ferment of the times, in his memoirs, the music theorist H. H. Stuckenschmidt, who in 1921, at the age of twenty, gave a lecture entitled “The Problem of New Music” at the first exhibition of the Jakob-Böhme-Bund, wrote: “One evening, Neumann-Hegenberg told me he had founded a Jakob-Böhme-Bund in honor of the 16th- and 17th-century Görlitz philosopher. I knew nothing about Böhme. Neumann-Hegenberg read me passages from his works, whose religious mysticism, especially in the book Enlightenment, foreshadowed the situation of the 1920s down to the smallest detail.”

Stuckenschmidt continued, quoting Böhme and reflecting conditions within the Weimar Republic: “But what shall Iwrite of you, earthly Babylon? Behold, (...) you boast of being a child of God: but your heart is a murderer and a thief. You only seek worldly honor and riches. And how you may acquire them, your conscience does not question.” (Description of the Three Principles of the Divine Being)

Stuckenschmidt later became an ambassador for the new music based on the twelve-tone technique, or chance, and presented musicians of this movement in his television series “Music in the Technological Age.”

But what is the actual source of the frightful conditions such as those described by Stuckenschmidt here? Elisabeth vonOldenburg, an important pupil of Bô Yin Râ, recorded conversations with him from the 1920s. He is quoted as saying of the figure he called the “Prince of Darkness”: “If we were to learn about the powerful being in his ‘reality’ in school, as we learn about the ‘devil,’ then we would know from childhood to whom we can fall prey and how to prevent it. Because we do not know, the powerful being can exercise this immense power unhindered; no one learns to defend themselves. Our ancestors knew very well about him. It has been lost to us, and perhaps much was omitted in the compilation of today’s Bible. –”

Who, or What, is the “Prince of Darkness”?

The “Prince of Darkness,” unlike the “devil,” appears at first glance to represent a local, earthbound, purely mental idol. Since we weren’t informed of its existence, we tend, as we get older, to relativize him as our own defense mechanism, retorting that we humans are all essentially emanations of hybrid forms of light and darkness, and that history really just consists of people accusing each other of being led by dark forces. The very act of publicly distinguishing between “children of light” and “children of this world” is considered socially unethical. However, we find this very distinction in the words of Jesus, as well as in the writings of Jacob Böhme and Bô Yin Râ.

Note, however, that in the Christian Bible and common parlance, no substantial distinction is drawn between the “Prince of Darkness” and the “devil”; these are simply different names for the same adversary of God.

Bô Yin Râ, however, differentiates between these two terms. As mentioned above, the “Prince of Darkness” seems at first glance to describe merely an earthbound local idol, created by the human mind itself from its own mental powers. But it is actually much more than a human projection. In his writings, Bô Yin Râ warns of the real, energetic power which seeks to “freeze” humanity spiritually. Its influence leads to ossification, blind materialism, boundless cold intellectualism, and ultimately to a paralysis of the heart. It is a power that does everything in its power to keep humanity bound to the material earthly realm.

This power is not a fairy tale, but a spiritual reality that can only be confronted through awakening to one’s own spiritual origin that long preceded our earthly incarnation. Bô Yin Râ points out that one must not seek the “Powerful One” in the external world, but rather in the way the world is perceived. This is more about the struggle between our understanding of humanity and the maintenance of the old, externally imposed human condition that has made much of human experience a nightmare.

In this conception, humanity is perceived as a cog in a machine or a programmable computer, whose genetic material is 99 percent identical to that of a chimpanzee. Perhaps you can say that while “Lucifer” seduces you into becoming an aloof fantasist who has lost touch with reality, the Prince of Darkness turns you into an obedient automaton, devoid of all feeling. You are then subject to the influence of forces vastly beyond your comprehension.

By contrast, Bô Yin Râ expresses the idea that the Church’s conception of the “devil” is a dangerous caricature. The devil of dogmatic religions appears here as a specter invented to keep people in fear and is a human creation that distracts from the true danger.

I think it is now time to follow Bô Yin Râ’s advice in informing people of the existence of the Prince of Darkness so that we can start to protect ourselves.

Hitler vs. Bô Yin Râ

Looking at the first half of the 20^th century, two historical figures in Germany stand out in our perspective: Adolf Hitler and Bô Yin Râ.

Ronald Steckel, cited earlier, simplified this situation by comparing it to a chessboard with black and white pieces. For him, the black pieces represented the nationalists of the Third Reich, while the white pieces embodied the people who encountered Bô Yin Râ, those he influenced, and those who worked with his teachings. Ronald added that the white pieces remain practically invisible or unacknowledged to this day.

According to Jacob Böhme, evil is absolutely necessary, for evil is the principle of all intellect. However, as a society, we enter a precarious imbalance when this particular polarity increasingly gains the upper hand and humanity’s basic structure becomes significantly unbalanced. This is reflected today in the fact that entire German television channels like Spiegel TV, Welt TV, Tagesschau TV, Phoenix, etc., owe their existence to the Third Reich and Hitler’s films, while we as a culture have not been able to produce a single film about Bô Yin Râ.

The media nevertheless assumes a dualistic, though watered-down, nature, for instance, by embodying on the one hand the figure of an amoral seducer and on the other hand—acting in the name of society—the role of the punitive judge. But such treatment is not just superficial, but also hypocritical. In his book, The Spectre of Freedom, Bô Yin Râ thus writes:

“Everything that is still called ‘punishment of the criminal’ today is a wicked undertaking, for it does not proceed from the understanding that the entire human organism is most intimately connected, and that all of humanity must becomplicit in the criminal’s act—as soon as it becomes possible. — Here, higher knowledge will one day have a far more beneficial effect by making crime impossible, whereas today crime is still taken almost as a natural necessity, and the only aim is to ‘punish’ the criminal. —”

In this quote, we find further evidence that the messages of Bô Yin Râ, like those of Jacob Böhme, actually radiate toward us from a distant future, when we consider how far removed we are socially today from this mature outlook being expressed 95 years ago. We have yet to realize that a criminal act is done not just by an individual, but by the entire society.

In his earlier text “Cinema, Art and Culture,” first published in Görlitz in 1920, Bô Yin Râ clearly pointed to the seductive power of the film industry:

“Here, too, everything that could truly be instructive and valuable is spoiled by an unspeakably silly presentation, and the already kitsch-prone taste of the masses is subdued even further below its original level in an almost ingenious way. The same applies to the much-loved detective stories, which mock all reality and often seem like ‘courses for criminals and those who want to become them.’ It would be an interesting task for criminologists to investigate what percentage ofcrimes committed by juveniles or other innocent people are attributable to an ‘initial stimulus’ from the cinema….You see, there are good reasons why serious men and women today view the ‘cinema problem’ with concern, when one finally begins to see what a devastating plague is raging right in our midst, and searches for ways to contain it.”

Ronald Steckel recounted that in Himmler’s 1943 speech on the “Final Solution,” he saw the Prince of Darkness personified, and yet Himmler was not himself the Prince of Darkness. Rather the Prince of Darkness is very well explained in these quotations from Bô Yin Râ by Elisabeth von Oldenburg:

“[Such entities] are appearances who consist solely of intelligence and for whom the belief in the spiritual, which they find in humans, is mere folly, since the spirit remains incomprehensible to them. They are a kind of ‘regent’ of the material cosmos, have an incomprehensibly long life by earthly standards, but are ultimately transient through gradual dissolution. They are also the true rulers in the realm of intelligence accessible to humankind: of intellectual understanding, where they seek to compel humanity to abandon, judging by their capacity for knowledge, the ‘folly’ of believing in spiritual matters…. The Prince of this World [i.e., Prince of Darkness] …is one of these powerful beings inthe cosmos, namely the one whose consciousness resides in the matter of the earth. Jesus, through his act of love on Golgotha, deprived him of the majority of his power.”

Ronald Steckel writes in 1973: “Following in the footsteps of Jacob Böhme, I came across the Kabbalistic concept of ‘egregore,’ which describes something that could also be called a ‘collective hallucination.’”

An egregore is an invisible creature produced by human collectives, a demon that constantly turns and acts upon the collective that created it. The substance of which this being is made is what Jacob Böhme, in his writings, calls “imagination”: psychic energy, the power of visualization, mental images, and a vivid imagination shaped by thought.

The history of the West is characterized by such collective projections: dogmatic religions and their fixed images of God, Marxism-Leninism, Stalinism, National Socialism, doctrinaire Capitalism, corporations, cults, schools of psychology, political parties, “three-letter” agencies, even popular fads and fashions, along with their contradictory conceptions of humanity — indeed, nationalists, imperialists, ideologues, and fundamentalists of every stripe.

One could even say that we humans ourselves create, nurture, and strengthen these entities through our beliefs (collective hallucinations) and our worship, where we believe, for example, in the God of the Old Testament (an “eye for an eye” and “tooth for a tooth”, etc.). Today, the highest “religion”—the archetypal egregore—is “science,” whose “objectivity” lies in its atheistic and godless nature and which is capable of wiping out humanity with mighty weapons and tiny microbes alike.

Once manifested, the egregore develops a certain life of its own and can influence or even manipulate the people who created it. Individuals with conflicting egregores may revile and kill each other. With today’s mass media, such egregores can be created overnight. The presence of an egregore might be detected by observing the visceral response of its followers when the mere name of the idol is mentioned. A typical response is either fear or adulation, along with hatred and anger toward the “other,” including anyone not reflexively bending the knee.

All this plays directly into the hands of the Prince of Darkness, whom I would thus characterize as an entity of the unseen earthly world but which is represented in the visible earthly domain by people who are possessed through his multitude of vassals. After death, these victims are likely to find themselves in what Bô Yin Râ calls the “shoreline realms,” where, measured in earthly time. they must wait vastly longer for their eventual liberation.

This Ends Part One of Two.