An Ahrimanic spirit-being of the ancient Mexican mysteries who, Steiner taught, drove a sacrificial cult aimed at mechanizing the earth and stripping souls from human evolution.
Taotl in Anthroposophy is the Ahrimanic spirit-being of the ancient Mexican mysteries, perceived only in atavistic etheric vision and never in a physical body, whose initiates gained black-magical knowledge through ritual murder in order to mechanize the earth and tear human souls from their proper course of evolution. Rudolf Steiner described Taotl in his 1916 lecture cycle Inner Impulses of Evolution (GA 171), naming the being an Ahrimanic distortion of the Atlantean Great Spirit once called Tao. The cult's initiation required the excision of a victim's stomach upon a scaffold-like catafalque, and each higher degree of forbidden knowledge demanded a further killing, the offered organ given to the god. Opposed by the etheric beings Tezcatlipoca, Quetzalcoatl, and the virgin-born Vitzliputzli, the Taotl mysteries belong to the Ahrimanic stream of post-Atlantean evolution and survive today, Steiner taught, only as subsensible etheric forces beneath the surface of ordinary life.
Taotl in Steiner's account is the Ahrimanic spirit who presided over the darkest of the post-Atlantean mysteries in ancient Mexico. Perceived only through atavistic, visionary clairvoyance, never in a physical body, this being instructed initiates in a black-magical science whose goal was to rigidify all earthly life and tear human souls away from their proper path of development.
In Steiner's Own Words
This cult was dedicated to the successor, the son of the Great Spirit, in the form he had assumed in America, and who was designated by a sound that approximates Taotl. Taotl is an ahrimanic distortion of the successor of Tao. This being, Taotl did not appear in a physical body but only in an etheric form. His arts, which were essentially impulses for the mechanization of earthly culture and of all earthly life, were acquired through these initiations I have described to you. Now these initiations had a definite purpose. As has been said, the initiate acquired actual powers of black magic, the application of which would have led to the mechanization of the culture of the earth and to the expulsion of all egos, so that the bodies born would no longer have been capable of bearing an ego.
What it Means Today
Steiner gave these lectures in Dornach in September 1916, and the picture he painted of the Mexican cult lands on territory that mainstream historians have since mapped in their own way. The historian Inga Clendinnen, in her study Aztecs: An Interpretation (Cambridge University Press, 1991), reads Mexica human sacrifice not as random cruelty but as a sacred technology for keeping the cosmos running, a ritual labor performed so that the sun would rise and the world would not collapse into stillness. Clendinnen documents the temple-top knife work, the catafalque, the offering of the excised organ, the way the victim and the priest were bound together in a single sacrificial act. Steiner names the same architecture, the steps, the scaffold, the cut, the offering to the god, though he reports an excision of the stomach where the historical record describes the heart. Read side by side, the two accounts agree on the strangest and most specific detail: that this killing was understood by its practitioners as world-maintenance, an effort to fix and harden earthly existence against change. Thalira synthesis: where Clendinnen sees a culture trying to hold the sun in the sky, Steiner sees Taotl trying to hold souls on a hardening earth, two readings of one impulse to arrest the living world and bind it in place.
Where to Read More