The “Delayed” Inauguration of the 21st Century

The “real” beginning of the 21st century didn’t come neatly with the calendar in 2000, but with a threshold-event that rearranged the psychic and geopolitical order of the world.

The “Delayed” Inauguration of the 21st Century

• In outer terms, the Bush inauguration (January 2001) and 9/11 (September 2001) were the hinge through which the 20th-century order (post-1945, Cold War, Pax Americana) was decisively broken.
• In inner terms, Rudolf Steiner and others pointed toward 1998 as a karmic pivot: the midpoint between the Michaelic turn of 1879 and future critical junctures. After that, new powers—some luciferic, some ahrimanic—would emerge with greater intensity.
• Thus, one can see Bush’s taking office as the earthly political “seal” of a new era, and 9/11 as the fiery gesture that inaugurated it through shock, fear, and sacrifice. That is why many feel the actual third millennium began then.

The Gesture of “666”

• “666” in apocalyptic tradition marks the incarnation of a world-principle of calculation, commerce, and denial of spirit.
• The 9/11 events can be read as a ritual of this kind: spectacular destruction mediated through media-images, producing a global fear-matrix and justifying new structures of surveillance and control.
• The twin towers themselves were an emblem of world finance and trade—Mammon’s pillars—and their fall enacted a symbolic collapse that was then used to consolidate power in a more controlled, digitized form.

Why the Buildings, Why Building 7?

• Twin Towers (WTC 1 & 2):
  They were not just offices but architectural icons of global finance. Their destruction was a blow to the “pride of commerce,” seared into the world’s collective unconscious through endless replay of collapsing images. In occult-symbolic language, the “double pillars” fell.
• Pentagon:
  Military center—symbol of earthly power and protection. Its wound was an image of vulnerability, meant to initiate a new global militarization.
• WTC 7 (Building 7):
  Often overlooked, but full of federal and intelligence offices. Its unexplained collapse has always carried a hidden aura. Symbolically, it was the “occult third pillar”—not commerce (towers), not defense (Pentagon), but control (intelligence, records, secrets). Its quiet disappearance suggests erasure of hidden archives, the sealing off of knowledge, or the elimination of traces that could disturb the official script.

A Synthetic View

If we frame it spiritually:

• 9/11 was not only a geopolitical “inside job” (in whichever sense one takes that) but also a sacrificial act on the etheric plane.
• It inaugurated the century not with hope, but with an initiation through fear. Humanity was pushed across a threshold into the age of surveillance, virtualization, and global war.
• Whether one calls that the gesture of “666,” of the “Beast,” or simply of the Ahrimanic will, the essential point is that it marked a collective descent into a more calculative, mechanized order—exactly the spiritual danger Steiner foresaw.