In March 2020, Are Thoresen contracted Covid-19. Whilst 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, now deeper, unknown realms appeared 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 and Baldur – who stand as guardians to the threshold of the outer etheric world – and characterizes the Northern way of initiation, which is 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, the Kalevala and von Eschenbach’s Parzival. Based on painstaking research, he describes the individual qualities of the three elemental realms, and how the adversarial forces – seeking to corrupt human senses – hinder spiritual observation of them. Thoresen’s book is a powerful personal testimony to the human potential for spiritual knowledge and experience in our time.

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 run a private holistic practise in Sandefjord, Norway, for the healing of small animals and horses, as well as people. He has lectured widely, specializing in veterinary acupuncture, and has published dozens of scholarly articles. In 1984 he started to treat cancer patients, both human and animal, and this work has been the focus of much of his recent research. He is the author of Demons and Healing (2018), Experiences from the Threshold and Beyond (2019) Spiritual Translocation, The Lucifer Deception (both 2020), Transforming Demons (2021) and several other books on complementary medicine published in various languages.