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. Can you say something about those two sets of masks and especially about the Zodiac, on which you run a workshop in March?

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 plantes. Then when I Iwas working with biography work I created masks of phasic development, and the archetypes of age. While working on the Mystery Dramas by Rodolf Steiner I created masks of Luicifer 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 analyzing each other to find out what personality style we might have, rather it’s about entering in through a process of embodiment, and then reflectingng 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.

The 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, and thus we can find a way how to connect with them or empathize with them. 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 theater 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.

…

The Masks of the Zodiac workshop with Mike Chase will take place at the Open Space in Trpoměchy between 12th and 16th of March 2025.

Here you can find more about the workshop and how to apply: https://otevrenyprostor.cz/en/udalosti/masks-of-the-zodiac-with-mike-chase/

by Mike Chase

I work in a democratic therapeutic community prison, HMP Grendon. Over the past nine years, I’ve been working with violent male offenders as a psychodrama psychotherapist and therapy manager, helping to reduce the rate of re-offending and support their integration back into society. As a psychotherapist, we are taught that it is the events of our childhood that affect our thoughts, feelings and behaviours;
however, I have always questioned the validity of that idea,which does not take into account the impact of our karma from past lives.

Throughout my life, my understanding of karma has been based on conceptual and theoretical understandings. However, having been immersed in rigorous research exercises inspired by Rudolf Steiner’s indications for a number of years my felt experience for the truth of these ideas has begun to emerge. Developing this more living experience of what behaviours, thoughts and feelings may have arisen from childhood or from past incarnations, the question arose: how can I redeem my past
actions, and learn their lessons for the future?

Answers began to arise in meditation, along with insights about my relationships with the prisoners and staff I was working with, about our karma, and the question of what some of us might have to do with each other. This led to the deeper question of how to create less chaos, pain and misunderstanding in the world and to take responsibility for our often complex lives?

Some years ago a colleague put in a grievance about the way I had managed her practice on the wing. While managing the therapy with a multi disciplinary team of sixteenstaff on a wing with twenty men with learning disabilities, I had got into a tangle with this colleague whose practice was not up to scratch. In the process of managing her misdemeanours something seemed to get triggered for her, and she
took out a grievance against me. We undertook mediation which, in all intense and purposes went well. However, when she asked me for a written apologyI declined and told her I was not willing to do so as it had felt clear to me that we had co-created this conflict together.

Seeing her disappointment in my decision, I went home that evening and undertook Steiner’s four-day karma exercise focusing on our conflict. Four days later I woke up with a shocking imagination: I had done her a terrible wrong, thousands of years ago, in a foreign land.Getting over the shock and shame, I decide to apologise,not only for the manner in which I had managed her but for something much
deeper, further back in time, and much darker. I felt able to take another step in our relationship and wrote her a card apologising for the way I had made her feel, and gave it to her the next day. To my surprise she took it with a smile, the first genuine smile l had seen on her face;and our relationship improved considerably over the next year. 

In order to research karma it became evident that I had to find a place within myself which was gentle, open and un-expectant,in the hope that the beings of the spiritual world could come towards me and reveal – if I was ready – what it is that lies behind some of the complex relationships in my life. The process of moving beyond the desires and passions of my astral body and coming into an awakening of cognitive imaginations, inspirations and sometimes intuitions, was sometimes, to my surprise, like a flash of lightening; at other times, however, it was very slow and demanding patience which I often struggled to maintain.

The difficulty I was finding with doing karma research was that some of what was being revealed to me were aspects of my double, parts of myself which I would rather run away from rather than face the demons in my soul. The more I began to strengthen my Self to face these beasts arising in hideous animal forms, the less I needed to run away and hide from myself in shame. Going further into understanding and facing the darkness began to give me more courage to take on what this life was
asking of me, and enabled me to move into more light-filled experiences. 

As I started to get images of different incarnations spanning thousands of years, rich and challenging and insightful as they were, I became overwhelmed, struggling to keep track of what was arising. I decided to document my experiences by making masks of each of the personalities from different incarnations. The masks were quite primitive at first, different to any of the masks I had made in the past. Having made many hundreds of masks over many years for personal and professional use, these
new masks were taking me to a very personal place within my karmic past, not for the stage, classroom or prison therapy room. As I began to explore these masks a friend, Jostein Saether, told me about a quote by Rudolf Steiner which helped contextualise what was arising in my research. 

Rudolf Steiner describes (GA 96. Page 289f.) how in pre-Christian antiquity there were those initiated into the spiritual world, in whom Christ was already fervently awakened. This was Christ in an etheric form, not yet incarnated into the physical. One of the pictures that arose for the initiates of those times was that,while lying asleep for three and a half days, they became surrounded by twelve human figures
with whom they sat around a table. These twelve figures were the personalities which the initiate had lived through during different epochs of human development. In the cosmic ether twelve personalities from different incarnations sat around the initiate, the ‘host’, the 13 th ,and they broke bread to together. This was a preview of Christ as the 13th in the middle surrounded by six disciples on either side. In the
same way that the Steiner’s sculpture of the Representative of Man is both Christ between Lucifer and Ahriman and each human being between the counter forces, this archetypal constellation is of the spiritual development of each of us as we strive towards awakening the Consciousness-Soul and eventually the Spirit-Self.

Far from being an initiate, this image has given me courage to situate my karma masks in a growing image of my past. In this article,as I prepare for my retirement from the prison service, I wanted to share a fragment of this research, to invite a conversation with those who might be interested in sharing their karma research in light of the spirit. It is now one hundred years after Rudolf Steiner brought his lecture
series Karmic Relationships, and it feels to me that we need to be able to have a more open discourse about our personal heartfelt experiences.

On the 27 th February 1924, Rudolf Steiner wrote a verse to Ita Wegman.

Hearts will sense
The meaning of karma,
When hearts learn to
Read the word
Which shapes human lives.
When hearts learn
To speak the word
Which develops the human being.

***
As an adult educator, I have been running workshops, self development courses and groups for many years, and I am now exploring ways in which a karma research approach can be developed by anyone who might be interested in embodied creative ways of learning, exploring and researching these aspects of ourselves. I am currently running a karma research group in Stroud, with the view of opening up
an ongoing group from September to December 2024.

For further details please contact Mike Chase E: [email protected] / M: 07741472063

In Open Space (Slany, Czech Republic) I’ll be running a series of three Karma Drama workshops starting in November 2024 – you can check the dates here: https://otevrenyprostor.cz/en/

We finally opened our new venue at the end of April with a clowning workshop led by Vivivan Gladwell. On Friday (when the worskhop started) the builders and cleaners were still busy in the morning and as soon as they left our first participants started arriving.

This was the second clowning workshop with Vivian in the Czech Republic (the first took place in May 2015) and we were happy to see some clowns returning and excited about all newcomers who journeyed to this small village near Prague from four different countries. As it turned out it could have easily qualified as one of the “intercultural clowning workshops” which we want to organise in the near future as well.

Vivian’s approach to clowning made us live in the present moment and heightened our situational awareness as well as our capacity to listen to each other and ourselves. As it is usually the case at these workshops we’ve laughed a lot and there were many moments when we also felt genuinely moved by what we saw.

The next clowning workshop with Vivivan Gladwell – is planned in autumn, details should soon be published on our website.