Mike, you were at the Open Space twice before. The first time you did the masks of four temperaments, and then the masks of seven planets. And I know that you have some other sets of masks developed around such archetypes like the masks of the Zodiac, and recently, you have been also working with this new concept or new type of work, this karmic research that you call Karma Drama where I’d imagine it’s a different type of mask work where the masks are like the end product so you don’t start with them. Can you say something about those two areas, the Zodiac and then Karma Drama or the karmic masks. How you got into it and what is it about?
Thanks for the question Pavel. I have always learned about anthroposophy through making masks of the subject I am investigating. This included masks of the four temperaments, then some years later the masks of the seven planets. Then when I I was working with biography work I created masks of phasic development, and the archetypes of age. While working on the Mystery Dramas by Rudolf Steiner I created masks of Lucifer and Ahriman and the Guardian of the Threshold. Having made the masks, I was able to put them on and see others with them on and I was able to get an embodied experience of the profound ideas arising out of anthroposophy.
More recently I have been investigating the Zodiac and so I began making masks of each of the zodiacal archetypes. I had a friend William Bento, how died a few years ago, who wrote his doctor’s thesis on the relationship between personality disorder and the Zodiac. And I found this very intriguing as I was working in a therapeutic prison with men who were diagnosed with personality disorders. I decided to create a set of masks that I could use in prison with the men I was working with. I created these masks and as it turned out, I never used them in prison. I never got the chance.
Why not?
I was working in a Therapeutic Community Prison, HMP Grendon doing psychodrama. However, because COVID had closed everything down for so long, by the time we had recovered from COVID and I had the opportunity to use them, I was promoted into a managerial role, managing a team of 16 staff in a wing with violent male offenders. I no longer had the possibility to extend that work into the domain of creative research with the prisoners. However, I was asked to become a faculty member of the Mental Health Seminar that’s been running in England for over 40 years. This started out as a training for people in the Camphill movement, and later, it became a training for anthroposophical mental health in England where people could get a diploma in anthroposophical mental health. I started to use the zodiac masks there.
So even though my inspiration had been working in prison, and to help the prisoners through creative methods to reduce their rate of re-offending, that had been the sort of inspiration, but I was then able to use the masks to develop an understanding of personality disorder. I’m going into the third three year cycle using these masks what I found is that they’re very effective to work with these big archetypes, archetypes behind the creation of the mind and body of the human being.
I’ve been working at the Open Space center teaching the four temperaments, and the seven planets, and so the zodiac could be the next step. From the temperaments, arising in the etheric, into the planets, arising in the astral, and then into the zodiac giving rise to the spirit in the human being, is the journey I am on. The spirit arises in our capacity to have a world view. By looking at one’s ideal world view, and then at distortions from the pure world view, we can find the path to personality disorders. And we’re looking at the whole archetype of the Zodiac brought alive in the mask. It’s about embodying these ideas. It’s not just about sitting around and talking and analysing each other to find out what personality style we might have, rather it’s about entering in through a process of embodiment, and then reflecting on what we experienced. The question arises how do I relate to those archetypes, and what are my tendencies?
The work with the Zodiac, for me, is incredibly exciting because the step into investigating our world view takes us into the domain of the spirit, if you like, and the ‘I’ is, I think the most important work. One cannot exist without the temperaments and the planets, however, the work with the I is the most important step in the journey to self awareness and the consciousness of self.
What participants are finding helpful with this new set of masks, is that they are full masks, but you can speak with them on. I’ve tried to encapsulate the qualities of the Zodiac, through creating a full mask, which has space for all the detail of these archetypes and is very fulfilling as a visual and experiential tool, but it also has a slightly open mouth so it can speak. Half masks can become quite funny and they tend to take you into Commedia dell’arte or something of a humorous nature. Whereas with this new set of masks we can keep the lower face, the middle face and the forehead, and that offers another level of play. This is good for improvisation, expression, and embodiment, because it embodies both the body and also the voice.
If you take it out of this context of you working in the prison with people with personality disorders and out of the mental health seminar, and you just take the Zodiac and offer it as a workshop to general public. What is there that people can get out of it or what is there that they can explore and learn from?
So what they would learn is really about personality, because the zodiac is ultimately a picture of the human personality, the expression of the I, if you like, and through that, one can enter through the embodied process of playing these masks, which are rich in expression, and bringing them alive in order to grasp insights about each of their one-sidednesses, and be able to relate that to ourselves. In a playful community based process of theatre making.
With four temperaments we can all relate to them, because somehow it’s just them four and we know that we all have some strongly present in us and some less so we can find a way how to maybe connect with it or empathise with it. But with the Zodiac they are these twelve signs and they all represent something different like you say maybe something extreme within the whole. So how do you approach that in a workshop, how do you work with it?
I’m not an astrologer. But I work through the theatre and a spiritual psychology. What I have found with this work is that without referring to anybody’s birth chart, without asking them what sun sign they are, we can work with the zodiacal archetypes as a tool to understand how each sign has a relationship to everyone. We work with the archetypes and what tends to happen is that our natural tendencies, which to the greater extent are present in our astrological sign, start to manifest, and we are drawn more often than not to the masks of our sign. But that in a way is a bye product, and it might not happen all the time.
The idea is that we’re going to have certain tendencies, but all of these different signs are important for being human. We won’t have all of these different signs in us, but they all make up a whole.
An example of this is the twelve world views, twelve different ways of looking at the same thing. For example, there is a traditional story of the elephant. There are these twelve Indian holy people standing around this elephant, all looking at it each from a different point of view. One says: “Well, it’s got this big thing that’s moving around, it’s grey, and swishing about”, and then another one says: “No, no, it’s just got these two white sharp things that seem to jab into people.” And another says: “No, no, you’ve both missed the point. It’s got these big strong grey tree trunk like things…”, etc. Etc. The idea is that to see reality, you’ve got to be able to see it from all twelve different points of view. Rudolf Steiner has given a lecture series Human and Cosmic Thought, where he discusses at length these different world views. And he says that what’s important is to develop tolerance of all of them because they all have a place.
This is a beautiful invitation to see, irrespective of zodiacal signs and birth charts and all of that, our differences our world views are so important and yet one side of a bigger whole.
The Zodiac is a huge step forward from temperaments and planets, and is an invitation to embrace something quite cosmic. It’s not about etheric, which is temperaments. It’s not about soul and astral, which is very much the planetary realm. But it’s about spirit.
That sounds great and very intriguing. And could you also say something about this most recent research that you have been involved in which is the Karma Drama or this karmic research. How did you get into that? What brought you into it and how do you see it being useful? What is your experience working with it?
Yeah, that is a very important question I think – how can it be useful? I think the best way to answer that for me would be to give an example from my life, where it was helpful. For me, it goes back into my last few years of working at HMP Grendon, His Majesty Prison, where I was a therapy manager. While working with one of my staff members, whose practice was really not up to scratch, I needed to put things in place to help her improve her work performance.
In this process of managing her, she got very upset, and I didn’t really know why. I couldn’t figure it out. She then put in a grievance against me. Eventually we went for mediation which I’m happy to say was meaningful for both of us. But then she asked me for a letter of apology. I thought, well she’s the one who created the problem and I was just trying to work with it. I didn’t feel it’s up to me to apologise and so I said I would not write her a letter of apology. And she just said she was very disappointed. The expression of disappointment on her face stayed with me as I was driving home, and I thought, there’s something here that I’m not getting. I don’t know what’s going on because it felt like her reaction was far bigger than the situation of me managing her. I decided to do an exercise that night, which Rudolf Steiner suggests in his Karmic Relationships’ which lectures he gave about 100 years ago. He describes a four day karma exercise which he invites us to do, where you focus your attention on the encounter between you and another person. You bring it very much alive in front of you with all the details: what was going on, what was being said, how were you dressed, what was the tone of voice, what was the feelings? Following the next three nights this image brought by the ‘I’ is elaborated firstly by the astral body, then by the etheric body, which in turn on the third night brings this image into the physical brain, and one wakes up on the forth morning with an image of the origin story of the situation you focused on at the start.
I did that before going to sleep that night, and on the fourth morning I woke up with an imagination. It was not a dream. It was not a fantasy, but it was not a normal thought. It’s was as if for a moment I was in another world. I woke up with this image a very, very clear image. I saw myself as a soldier, a warrior in ancient times part of an army invading another country. I saw myself abuse a person, a women from that country we was invading. I could see my colleague in the prison as this person I had abused I was horrified, absolutely ashamed. I couldn’t face myself. After some time I thought, well, maybe that’s what the problem is. Maybe it’s not about me apologising just for the way I line managed this colleague in prison. Maybe I need to apologising for something that happened 1500 years ago, in another time, in another place, in another life.
This image started to work on me over number of days, so I bought her a card and I said, I’m sorry that what I did made you feel this way. That was not my intention, and I value your colleagueship. When I gave the card to her she was quite surprised, and said, okay, let’s see how it goes. And I have to say that our relationship improved quite dramatically. She and I were able to sit in the same room, work together in a way that we had not been able to for some time, which was a surprise to both of us and our team of colleagues.
I realised that past life and karma work is about helping us in the here and now and in the future, not just about being inquisitive about the past. Yes, we go back into the past, but we’re doing that in order to improve the present and to prepare for the future. And the more I looked at that and began to study and research, the more I saw that karma is playing its role in everything we do. And actually, it is karma which makes us human. It’s what distinguishes us from animals. It’s what the spirit is about, our spirit is about our karma.
After we die, we go up into the soul world, we pass through the planetary spheres, we go up into the spiritual realm of the Zodiac. We go beyond and we encounter, perhaps unconsciously for most of us, vast spiritual beings. We encounter our higher self, and our higher self is comprised of all our different incarnations we have had. As I began to enter more deeply into this picture of the spiritual world, of karma and repeated earth lives, I got more and more insights. A number of years ago I had a spiritual breakthrough of some kind, which enabled me to understand a series of different lives over a period of thousands of years. I began to get a bit overwhelmed, to be honest. I didn’t know what to do with all these images which I found so interesting and intriguing, so I started to write down every single experience I have. I now have journals and books full of these experiences. Then it dawned on me, as with all my other anthroposophical endeavours like the temperaments, planets and zodiac for example, that if I wanted to understand my past lives, I would need to make masks of them.
I began to make masks of these different personalities that I’ve had in different incarnations which had been revealed to me. I started to come out of meditation and then draw and sketch the faces of these different personalities and gradually, over a number of years I’ve developed a set of past life masks. At the moment I have nine different personalities, which for me are a working hypothesis of my different incarnations. I began to share this work, initially very tentatively, however, when people asked me to come and share things with them I began to give talks. At the Christian community initially, then in Budapest and in Oslo, gradually doing more and more.
One evening I was wondering what to do with the next phase of my life, and I took this question into sleep. I do psychodrama, I do drama, I do theatre, I do mask work? What am I going to do with my life now that I am retiring from the civil service? As I lay in bed with the burning question, I could feel it in every cell in my body calling out for an answer. At 3:00 in the morning I sat bolt upright, and I could hear these voices singing, in chorus, they said, “Karma Drama,” over and over again. Something began to fall into place.
It felt great having a title for the work I needed to do, but what is, Karma Drama? I spent the next six months trying to figure out what Karma Drama might be. After many conversations with friends and family I created a series of processes in a structured form that could enable others to find their own karmic biography, through a process I called, Karma Drama. Firstly, this included preparing to cross the threshold, into experiences of karmic clairvoyance, and everything that I thought would be necessary for such an exploration. Secondly, how to impart the exercises I’ve been using to enable cognitive imaginations for others? Having prepared ourselves for crossing the threshold to experiencing imaginations, inspirations, and intuitions, from the spiritual world, how do I impart the four main past-life and karma exercises I have been using. They would need to be brought in an embodied way, the Four -day karma exercise and the Three-level karma exercise by Rudolf Steiner; and then the process of Destiny Learning started by Coenraad van Houten. This includes working with the karmic double. And then a bit more recently the Biographical karma exercise created by a Norwegian Karma researcher, Jostein Saether, I would need to find a way of embodying this for my teaching.
So I set up a research group exploring the most effective way of working with these four exercises to try and bring them to people in an embodied way, with art, with movement, with masks, and with meditation. And then the third module began to emerge which includes an opportunity to deepen this through, developing a karmic organism through a karmic biography, looking at future incarnations, the world of Kamaloka and then making a karma mask. So that’s probably the best description to give right now.
And have you done already all three modules somewhere with someone, some participants?
I’ve done module one and two with different groups and in different countries. I’m doing module two and three in Oslo early next year. I haven’t actually run module three yet. I’m preparing module three as there are some people in Budapest who are interested. So it’s all rather new. I only started setting up a research group in February 2024 in Stroud in the UK where I live. I took a few months to research with a number of close friends who were very interested in these themes, and we tried out different things. The results of the research were very favourable, and since then I started to teach. I’ve been teaching since then running six different workshops.
Well thank you.That’s very helpful. Also for me to hear the journey that you’ve been on and the inspiration how you got it and how it can inspire others. I think it’s always the best if hear the personal story behind it. It’s not just a theory, but you can see how it works on people’s lives and that I always interesting.
Yes, it is very interesting, and it does work on people’s lives. These methods that I’m teaching are all well known exercises, but I’m bringing them with a process of embodiment, art and drama which people say is enlivening them. There is one new process which has been given to me, incorporating my own work with theater, masks and embodiment. This was initially inspired by Destiny Learning, to help participants get deeply in touch with previous incarnations through working with all the strong and unusual moments in their present biography. This I have called Karma Drama.
People are finding it helpful when they come to some results. You know, many participants on the workshops that I’ve been running, not everybody all the time, but certain individuals have been given past life glimpses, fragments, scenes and entire lives through this work.
It can present challenges for many people to sit down and these exercises on their own, because it takes a lot of determination and effort, and the results don’t always come when you want them. We only get results when the spiritual world thinks we’re ready. We can only receive these imaginations, inspirations, intuitions, of past lives, when we are ready for them. If we’re not ready, they won’t come through. Thorough these embodied processes people are telling me that they are having experiences of past lives, and they are able to do them more easily at home on their own.
However, more and more people are ready, more so than when Rudolf Steiner gave some of these exercises 100 years ago. There’s the experience today that we’re already crossing the threshold. This era in which we’re living is such that humanity is closer to stepping over into spiritual experiences than it’s ever been. However, more often than nnot people are not able to make meaning of these experiences because they don’t have a map. In ancient times, we were naturally connected with the spiritual world. Now, we’re either thrust over through mental health problems or through drugs or through accidents where people have near death experiences. But actually, we also have the possibility now beyond atavistic clairvoyance to have spiritual experiences of this kind that are suited to the age in which we live and are beneficial for us. It feels for the time being that this work is timely. If the feedback is anything to go by, it’s important that I carry on. And if the spiritual world says stop, then I will know. I will know that that’s as far as I can go. But so far, it’s saying keep going. And I find Anthroposophy is one of the most useful maps for this terrain.
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Mike’s workshop “The Masks of Zodiac” will run in the Open Space (Slaný near Prague) from 12th to 16th of March 2025 – to find out more / apply go to https://otevrenyprostor.cz/en/udalosti/masks-of-the-zodiac-with-mike-chase/
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In 2026 we we would also like to run the whole series of three workshops on Karma Drama in the Open Space – if you’re interested write to [email protected] and we will keep you informed about the dates.
