Travels on the Northern Path of Initiation

Travels on the Northern Path of Initiation: Vidar and Baldur, the Three Elemental Realms and the Inner and Outer Etheric Worlds

In March 2020, Are Thoresen contracted Covid-19. While convalescing from the disease and suffering great exhaustion, he experienced a breakthrough in his daily meditation. Although he has always been able to “see” into the spiritual world, deeper, unknown realms began to appear to his inner vision. In the soapstone surround of the fireplace in his Norwegian home, he perceived the elemental beings and forces that make up the mineral at an atomic level. A few days later, an even deeper dimension revealed itself in the form of a void or vacuum. Here, astonishingly, was an open portal to the entire cosmos.

In Travels on the Northern Path of Initiation, Thoresen shares the results of his latest spiritual investigations, including a moving, life-changing encounter with “the Light of the World.” He details the teachings he receives from the beings Vidar (Víðarr) and Baldur (Baldr), who stand as guardians to the threshold of the outer etheric world, and he characterizes the Northern way of initiation, based on merging, or “fading,” into nature. Thoresen documents Rudolf Steiner’s descriptions of this path and shows how it is reflected in the Old Norse Poetic Edda, in the Kalevala, and in von Eschenbach’s Parzival. Based on painstaking research, Thoresen describes the individual qualities of the three elemental realms and how the adversarial forces—seeking to corrupt human senses—hinder spiritual observation of them.

This book is a powerful personal testimony to the human potential for spiritual knowledge and experience in our time.

C O N T E N T S:

Preface
Introduction

1. Meeting Vidar and Balder beyond the Elemental Realms
2. Seeing the Elemental Realms
3. How the Adversarial Forces Hinder Spiritual Observation, Corrupting Our Spiritual Senses

Postscript: Vidar’s Further Teachings

Appendix 1: The Northern Path in History
Appendix 2: Rudolf Steiner on the Three “Occultisms”

About the Author

Are Thoresen was born in Norway in 1952. A doctor of veterinary medicine, he has also studied anthroposophic medicine, homeopathy, acupuncture, osteopathy, and agriculture. Since 1981, he has operated a private holistic practice in Sandefjord, Norway, for healing small animals and horses, as well as people. He has lectured widely, specializing in veterinary acupuncture, and has published dozens of scholarly articles. Since 1984, he has treated cancer patients, both human and animals, which has become the focus of much of his recent research. He is the author of Demons and Healing and other books on complementary medicine.