The travails we considered in "Oriphiel" will bring us to the sixth Great Epoch. Let's look at #6.

“Leading up to the middle of this age [the Sixth], some time [sic] about 4300 to 4700, it is the turn of Michael (now an Archon but no longer Spirit of the Age) to act again as the ruling Time Archangel; so a further enhancement of the Christ impulse may then be expected. By now many people have made the eightfold path of Buddha their own in its modern form, which leads through conscious exercises to the unfolding of the 16-petal lotus flower in the larynx.” [1]

I've said not to worry if some or much of Steiner's lingo seems incomprehensible. Still, I probably should help set things straight at least a little. So, concerning Archai and Sun Rulers and Time Archangels and all the rest: Steiner's universe is clogged with gods, high and low, here and there, busily engaged in their own affairs and in ours. They have varying roles, which change as they evolve — they supervise various planets, stars, period of time, and so forth. For what little it's worth, here's a sort of scorecard. There are three hierarchies of invisible beings above us and below the Godhead. As is usual in Steiner's doctrines (which, to be fair, he largely appropriated from Theosophy), there is plenty of potential confusion in that various beings (or angel-beings, or gods) go by more than one designation. Here are the hierarchies above us, in descending order:

Seraphim, or Spirits of Love

Cherubim, or Spirits of Harmonies

Spirits of Will, also called Thrones

 Spirits of Wisdom, aka Kyriotetes, Dominions

Spirits of Movement, aka Dynamis, Mights

Spirits of Form, aka Powers, Spirits of Love, Exusiai 

Archai, aka Principalities, Spirits of Personality, Primeval Beings (they were human on Old Saturn)

Archangels, or Spirits of Fire (human on Old Sun)

Angels, or Sons of Life  (human on Old Moon)

Man (human on Earth) [2]

As for Buddha and lotus flowers: Steiner (cribbing heavily from Theosophy) drew on all manner of religious traditions, along with superstitions, myths, and fairy tales. (I kid you not.) His teachings are no more consistent with Buddhism than they are with Christianity. The "lotuses" he spoke of are invisible spiritual organs that humans can develop, sez he. Another term for them is chakras. Forget about them, if you like — they won't come up again often if at all. The Christ impulse, meanwhile, is the spiritual impetus Christ imparted enabling us to advance spiritually toward Christlike divinity. Trying to jam Buddhism and Christianity together in one new faith, Anthroposophy, creates obvious problems — which are only accentuated when bits of Hinduism, Zoroastrianism, and other faiths, are also tossed in. To accept Steiner's views, we would need to agree that almost everyone else has had a tiny sliver of the Truth but mainly not, whereas Steiner himself had Truth full and perfect, almost.

OK. Back to the future. Some of Steiner/Seddon's predictions sound like good news. It’ll be nice to have Michael back again, for instance. Seddon’s sudden uncertainty about dates ("about 4300..." is a little surprising, though, given what we’ve heard from him previously. It almost shakes one's faith in him.

As we push forward in our evolution, we must constantly repeat or recapitulate our previous stages, although in new and different forms. As we move into the Sixth Age, recapitulating earlier stuff as usual, some real nastiness emerges: “This age in fact recapitulates the Persian (Gemini) age, especially its experience of the polarities between light and dark, good and evil, which is now an actual division between good and evil races.” [3]

"Evil races." We shouldn’t be surprised. Steiner spoke of races throughout his account of our history and future. If we take "race" to merely mean grouping or type, Steiner's words may seem okay. But he meant something far less innocent. For him, a "race" is a matter of lineage and blood, and it has its own soul, which can be good or evil, high or low. He taught that some races were inferior in the past, some are inferior now, and some will be inferior far into the future. To move forward, humanity has had to toss aside lowly races at almost every step. “Those who use the life of the body for anything more than an opportunity to gain ego-consciousness  [i.e., people who misuse their earthly incarnations] will descend in the abyss and form the evil race. They have turned away from the impulse of Christ Jesus, and out of the ugliness of their souls they will again develop the animal form man possessed in former ages. The evil race, with its savage impulses, will dwell in animal form in the abyss." [4] This sort of thing happens far in the future, and also soon, and also all throughout our evolution, future and past: Evil people descend, becoming members of low or evil races, or even plunging into subhuman, animal-like status. 

Pause over the notion that people who turn away from the Christ impulse are evil. Since most humans alive now are not Christians, and far far fewer follow Steinerish gnostic semi-Christianity, most humans today must then be deemed evil. (According to Steiner.) Consider, for instance, how Jewish individuals fare in Steiner's accounting, which divides the good from the bad based on a gnostic adherence to Christ. The roots of Steiner's anti-Semitism are exposed, here. But Hindus, Buddhists, and most other people — whether honest or not, whether pious or not, whether dark-skinned or light-skinned — are similarly anathematized in such thinking. 

Let's hear some more of Steiner's words of evil wisdom. He spoke of higher races and lower races, good souls and evil souls:

“The soul is in a different line of evolution than the body of the human being. The difference between soul and racial development can be seen if we look into the past. Souls were incarnated many times in the Atlantean race [the race living in Atlantis]; all of you were Atlanteans at that time [i.e., in previous incarnations]. The souls worked themselves out of that situation and the remaining human bodies belonged to the races that had become decadent and were falling into decline [i.e., the good humans moved on, leaving behind the bad human beings or bodies, members of races headed downward]. The [good] souls left the bodies of the races and rose up to [become] higher races. Human bodies afflicted with fundamental evil will not have souls within them that are striving to rise above their present state to a higher one [they will only contain souls that are evil and/or lowly].” [5]

Some races with their evil bodies decline. Good races leave behind the evil bodies, and move up to better, paler bodies — that's what makes them so good, don't you see?

“Souls previously incarnated in quite subordinate races, raised themselves to a higher level and could incarnate in the bodily descendants of the leaders in Europe ... This was the reason that the lower races had fewer and fewer descendants, while the higher races had more and more.” [6] Good folks getting better, while the lower races die out. That's nice.

Although Steiner is sometimes praised for creating a form of spiritualism that goes beyond good and evil, in fact evil was very much on his mind, and he spoke of it often. He framed the differences between human races in moral terms, and he also attributed evil intent to beings beyond the Earth. Evil people who descend into evil races are choosing the dark side, which extends throughout the cosmos. The good, to advance, must cast off the evil.

“Consider that through evil separating from good, the good will be immeasurably strengthened, and that after the great War of All against All the good will....” [7]  But the evil won’t...

"The Sixth Race will see quite another race, noble and beautiful, in contrast to the thrown off [humans] ... a race of men, horribly ugly, animal-like, sensual, vicious, far more horror-provoking than our present humanity, because these will go on developing downwards.” [8]

Beauty resides with the good; ugliness with the evil. High human souls have little if anything in common with the low:

"Does a Goethe have the same antecedents as any Hottentot? The antecedents of an ape are as unlike those of a fish as are the antecedents of Goethe's mind unlike those of a savage."  [9] For Steiner, terms such as "savage" had real and, in his view, acceptable meaning. A savage is not only unschooled, a savage is morally deranged, hardly a real human being at all.

Subhumans, who are essentially demonic, lurk everywhere — even in Europe. "Quite a number of people have been born since the nineties [the 1890s] without an I, that is, they are not reincarnated, but are human forms filled with a sort of natural demon. There are quite a large number of older people going around who are actually not human beings." [10] Demonic subhumans lack the spiritual "ego" called the "I."

But Evil is not confined to inferior human races and demons in human form, Steiner said. Evil is present throughout the solar system. “Now on each planet there are also Spirits who have remained behind in evolution, they have remained stationary and not wished to progress. You will recognize a law from this: If the most outstanding fall and commit the 'great sin' of not advancing with evolution, then they become the very worst.