The Indian Rishis' name for the Sun Being beyond their seven spheres, whom Zarathustra called Ahura Mazdao and who became the Christ.
Vishva Karman in Anthroposophy is the name by which the ancient Indian Holy Rishis pointed to the exalted Sun Being who dwelt beyond their seven spheres. In GA 114 (The Gospel of St. Luke, 1909) Rudolf Steiner identifies this Being as the same one Zarathustra proclaimed on the sun as Ahura Mazdao, and the same who descended at the Baptism in the Jordan to become the Christ. Vishva Karman therefore names a single cosmic Being under three successive cultural revelations, Indian, Persian, and Christian. Steiner places him as the thirteenth at the centre of the lodge of twelve Bodhisattvas, the divine creative Word from whom all wisdom substantially flows into earthly evolution. The term marks the deep unity of pre-Christian initiation wisdom across the post-Atlantean epochs, naming in Sanskrit what later ages would meet as the approaching Christ.
In Steiner's Own Words
Those great teachers of humanity who appeared in ancient India in the first epoch after the Atlantean catastrophe, the holy Rishis, knew all about this being because they were initiates; but they knew that it could not yet be attained through earthly wisdom in that epoch, that it would only be possible to attain it through earthly wisdom in a later epoch. Therefore, the formula for that time was that this being lived beyond the region of the seven rishis. It was called Vishva Karman. Thus they also taught about that being whom they called Vishva Karman, whom Zarathustra called Ahura Mazdao.
What it Means Today
The Sanskrit name Steiner reaches for is not his invention. Vishvakarman appears in the Rigveda as the divine artificer of the cosmos, addressed directly in two hymns of the tenth mandala, 10.81 and 10.82, which the Indologist Wendy Doniger renders in her widely used translation The Rig Veda: An Anthology (Penguin Classics, 1981). There the figure is hailed as the maker of all, the one who fashioned heaven and earth, the seer-priest who knows every region. Steiner takes this attested Vedic creator and reads it through his own spiritual research as a name for the Sun Being who had not yet descended to earth, the Being the Persian stream would meet as Ahura Mazdao. This is what comparative esotericism does at its most careful: it sets the Indian, Persian, and Christian witnesses beside one another and asks whether they could be pointing at one reality under three garments of culture and language.
Thalira synthesis: Vishva Karman is the proper name of a question, not a doctrine, the question of whether the world's oldest creation-hymns and the Gospel of the Word made flesh were describing the same approaching Being from two ends of history. Read this way, the Rigvedic hymn to the all-maker and the prologue of John become two readings of one descent, separated by the long preparation of the post-Atlantean epochs and joined at the Jordan. The entry asks the reader to hold both texts open at once and notice what Steiner noticed.
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