On Rudolf Steiner's Concept of Lucifer and Ahriman
A thorough discussion on this strange German man's fascinating theory
I. Intro - Steiner and Waldorf Schools
Readers of this blog will know that I’m interested in the great quasi-occultist and Waldorf school inventor Rudolf Steiner’s notion that world history consists of three ages: an age of Lucifer, an age of Christ, and an age of Ahriman. I briefly discuss it here, and I’ve discussed it here as well. In this entry, I’m going to discuss at length Steiner’s basic theory, as he expounded it over many various lectures, and its implications. It’s a distinction I keep coming back to, for whatever reason, and I appreciate the iconography associated with it, so we can consider this brief discussion a useful reference point for whenever I might refer to it in the future.
Rudolf Steiner, to be clear, is not someone I’d consider a great luminary of his time. He originally began his career in association with the Theosophy school of Helena Blavatsky, and then Annie Besant and Charles Leadbeater, but Steiner then broke off from it to create his own system known as Anthroposophy, which attracted a sizable following, enough to earn official denunciations from various Christian sects such as the Jesuits. Although Steiner certainly made his mark, he is not an easy writer to recommend. For people who want simple, straightforward, crackpot occultist theories about the lost city of Atlantis, Hyperborea, the Egyptian mysteries, various fascinating forms of pseudoscience, astral bodies, and UFOs, he is too philosophical and intellectually demanding. But for people who want some well-developed, erudite, intellectually demanding esotericism, his writing also contains its own fair share of crackpot material, leaving him stranded in an uneasy middle space. Additionally, his works are often quite repetitious. Rather than write everything down in book form, he mostly gave lectures in various cities over the course of several days at a time, and so his many, many books are in fact typically just collections of these lectures. It is therefore unsurprising that there are no academic biographies about him (to my knowledge), and little if any academic commentaries on his work, even conducted from merely the standpoint of intellectual/cultural history.
Yet nevertheless, Steiner did quite a bit of work on pedagogy theory, and he indeed opened the first Waldorf school, which has been successful as a model for alternative education and private school brand, with around 1,200 schools and 1,900 kindergartens worldwide. I believe Steiner took many of his ideas from Rousseau’s Emile, but no matter — success is success. And speaking of success, quite a few Waldorf students have proven themselves successful upon graduating, themselves often coming from successful and well-to-do families. Waldorf is basically a school for rich people, and its aversion to the students’ use of modern digital technology is one of its main attractions, along with its general anti-corporate attitude (e.g. they ban clothing with corporate logos and brand names on them). In 2011, the New York Times reported on one particular Waldorf school in suburban California to which quite a few Silicon Valley tech workers were sending their kids.
For my part, I was sent to a Waldorf school in the upper-middle-class suburbs for first and second grade, and I honestly couldn’t stand it. I found everything about the school both miserable and often ridiculous. We had to make beeswax sculptures almost every day (which I hated because beeswax is quite annoying to warm up and make pliable), most of the kids in my class couldn’t read and I had already been doing so since four years old, and we had to engage in a bizarre, symbolic dance form called Eurythmy, which I felt was basically for girls. Yet as I grew up and had long since departed from that system, I found at least the theory behind Waldorf’s practices more or less defensible, even if I couldn’t accept them in execution. And at the same time, it was also becoming clear to me whenever I’d stop by the school that the ideas of Rudolf Steiner were being slowly decanted from its administration and classroom instruction. Sometime during the late 00s, I stopped by there to watch a documentary being publicly screened and talked to a parent who assured me that they’re doing everything in their power to remove the influence of Steiner. He even whispered Steiner’s name as though he, the man who invented Waldorf, amounted to a black stain on what would otherwise be an excellent community. About a decade and a half later, in the Summer of 2021, I drove by the same school and found both LGBT pride and Black Lives Matter flags on its front lawn — two things Steiner never would have approved of, not in a million years. So this leads me to suspect that the Waldorf system has broadly been usurped by left-wing progressive ideology and is thus now entirely worthless. But who knows.
II. Evola (and by extension the Guénonian Sophia Perennis) on Steiner
Anyways, in the first aforementioned essay in which I mentioned Steiner, I quoted one of Julius Evola’s statements on him from his Maschera e volto dello spiritualismo contemporaneo: Analisi critica delle principali correnti moderne verso il sovrasensibile (1932, though he updated it numerous times in later decades), translated as The Fall of Spirituality: The Corruption of Tradition in the Modern World (2021). Evola is valuable for this kind of commentary because he comes from a relatively sympathetic perspective, not one from the standpoint of scientific positivism, which will always fail to yield interesting insights in these matters. I had to truncate the quotation last time, so here is a lengthier excerpt:
Various components must be distinguished in the Steiner phenomenon. The first—and predominant—component is one that shares a common origin with theosophism, from which multiple elements have been adopted. The second component is connected to Christianity. There is then a final factor, which would seem to correspond to a positive element, the need for a “spiritual science.” The intertwining of these components—forcibly bound in the chainmail of a system that, in terms of its ingenuity, is almost on par with the “nature philosophies” of the German Romantics—forms the characteristic of anthroposophy.
As in so many specific points of anthroposophic teaching, and likewise in Steiner’s own overall personality, one has the painful sensation of a straight and clear direction that has been broken by sudden and tyrannical visionary influxes, and by irruptions of collective complexes. Steiner’s is a typical and highly instructive example of what might happen when one ventures alone in the world of the supersensible without a connection to a proper initiatic tradition and without a protective chrism, utilizing a variety of practices and cultivating, for example, “thought detached from the senses.”
In anthroposophy as a conception of the world, we definitely see the first of the aforementioned components at work. Thus, we find the same misunderstandings regarding the law of karma and a transmigration reduced to “reincarnation,” the same “evolutionalist” superstitions, the same “cruising” through planets reincarnated on other planets, through spirits, angels, races, and bodies both subtle and non-subtle, and so forth, that we have critiqued in theosophism.
For Evola, Steiner’s concepts of Lucifer and Ahriman were both reflective of a degraded understanding of initiation into the higher mysteries that one originally finds in theosophy. In his chapter on the theosophist movement, he writes:
Among the principles held by the movement is that of the immanence of a “One Life” in every form and in every being; there is, at the same time, the principle of the task, on the part of each individual “self,” to achieve an independent self-consciousness. With a strange application of the anti-aristocratic conceptions proper to certain new moralities, there has even been talk of a renunciation of the primitive divinity, which one “possessed without meriting it” and only to won [sic] back “deservedly” through struggle and the hard experiences of repeated immersions in “matter.” This, in the reformed theosophism of Rudolf Steiner, corresponds to a plane all its own, onto which “Ahriman” and “Lucifer” have been duly conscripted.
Essentially, Evola’s problem with Steiner is that he exhibits the same kind of humanism one finds in post-medieval Christianity, urging his adherents to reach their true individuality, “becoming the best version of themselves” (if I can invoke the recently popularized cliché), by fusing only the best elements of Luciferic and Ahrimanic principles within them and thereby transcending both. For Evola, this whole approach is wrongheaded because it fails to achieve self-overcoming on a vertical, upward-striving plane, and thus it leaves uncorrected many of the same problems found in the original theosophical society, which Evola and his mentor Rene Guénon both despised. Whatever validity Evola’s criticism may or may not have had, I’m only interested in Steiner’s conception of Lucifer, Christ, and Ahriman as figures that define contrasting sensibilities throughout world-historical time, Lucifer and Ahriman as psychological/philosophical types, and what the symbolism of these figures can say about the present and future, if anything.
III. Steiner’s Model of Cosmic History
One thing to bear in mind is that Steiner did have a more systematized, elaborate conception of world history’s various epochs than the treatment I gave him in previous writings may suggest. He believed that we currently live in the fifth of seven grand-scale world-historic epochs — the post-Atlantean epoch — and within that big epoch, our time today occurs in the fifth smaller epoch (or sub-epoch, you could say). In Steiner’s model, each smaller epoch lasts about 2,160 years, and it will culminate in a great “war of all against all,” much like the one John the Revelator prophesied in the book of Apocalypse, and this will end the post-Atlantean epoch and begin the next one. I suppose that in Steiner’s view, each bigger epoch structurally resembles the other, with seven smaller ones that all roughly correspond to each other respectively.
Within the fifth post-Atlantean epoch, Steiner had a specific understanding about which cultures dominate each epoch, and he expressed it like so:
Ancient Indian culture (7227 - 5067 B.C.)
Ancient Persian culture (5067 - 2907 B.C.)
Egyptian-Chaldean culture (2907 - 747 B.C.)
Greco-Latin culture (747 BC - 1413 AD).
Anglo-German culture (1413 - 3573 AD, our present epoch)
Slavic culture (3573 - 5733 AD)
American culture (5733 - 7893 AD)
For Steiner, the “Slavic culture” scheduled to begin over a millennium from now will constitute the real “Age of Aquarius” that the later hippies would always be going on about, in which a force of elevated Christians who have survived the influence of the Ahrimanic era will eventually rise up and prepare for the final epoch of history, which will belong to the American race (he probably is referring to the indigenous/native Americans here) and culminate in the apocalypse.
Now, if you’re sympathetic to this kind of prophesying, you’d argue that today’s world is still Anglo-German dominated even though the center of power is in America’s land mass… but Steiner is never altogether clear about the biological role of race in the cultures he describes, and he likely didn’t foresee the United States’ rise to total political dominance as a realistic scenario. It is also somewhat amusing that neither black people nor the Chinese get to be the center of anything, as Steiner thought that sub-Saharan African and east Asian peoples were locked in a kind of permanent adolescence, for whatever reason. In any case, he felt that the times of Lucifer, Christ, and Ahriman roughly run from the beginning of Egyptian-Chaldean culture to the end of the Anglo-German culture, with Christ’s birth right around the middle of Greco-Latin culture.
IV. Lucifer
Steiner believed that Lucifer was a real guy, and he was born in China (this seems to be the only time he gives the Chinese credit for anything). I don’t know if there’s a specific historical figure to whom he assigned the role of Lucifer, but I doubt it. He also believed that Ahriman would assume the form of a real guy as well. Here he is explaining how Lucifer, Christ, and Ahriman all arrive roughly three thousand years apart from one another and usher in their own distinct eras (which, as you can see, are not totally congruous with the schema of post-Atlantean epochs shown above):
If we were to go much farther back, to a time more than three thousand years before the Christian era, we should find that together with the promptings of wisdom there did come a moral impulse, that the moral principles, the ethics needed by these men of old were contained in this wisdom. But a specific ethos, a specific moral impulse such as came with Christianity was not an integral part of Paganism. Why was this?—It was because through the millennia directly preceding Christianity, this Pagan wisdom was inspired from a place far away in Asia, inspired by a remarkable Being who had been incarnated in the distant East in the third millennium before Christ—namely, Lucifer.
To the many things we have learned about the evolution of humanity, this knowledge too must be added: that just as there was the incarnation which culminated in Golgotha, the incarnation of Christ in the man Jesus of Nazareth, there was an actual incarnation of Lucifer in far off Asia, in the third millennium B.C. And the source of inspiration for much ancient culture was what can only be described as an earthly incarnation of Lucifer in a man of flesh and blood. Even Christianity, even the Mystery of Golgotha as enacted among men, was understood at first by the only means then available, namely the old Luciferic wisdom. The one-sidedness of the Gnosis, for all its amazing profundity, stems from the influence that had spread from this Lucifer-incarnation over the whole of the ancient world. The significance of the Mystery of Golgotha cannot be fully grasped without the knowledge that rather less than three thousand years previously, there had been the incarnation of Lucifer.
In order that the Luciferic inspiration might be lifted away from its one-sidedness, there came the incarnation of Christ and with it the impulse for the education and development of European civilisation and its American off-shoot. But since the middle of the fifteenth century, since the impulse for the development of individuality, of personality, has been at work, this phase of evolution has also contained within it certain forces whereby preparation is being made for the incarnation of another super-sensible Being. Just as there was an incarnation of Lucifer in the flesh and an incarnation of Christ in the flesh, so, before only a part of the third millennium of the post-Christian era has elapsed, there will be, in the West, an actual incarnation of Ahriman: Ahriman in the flesh. Humanity on earth cannot escape this incarnation of Ahriman. It will come inevitably. But what matters is that men shall find the right vantage-point from which to confront it.
According to Steiner, the incarnation of Lucifer set about a series of events that ultimately led to the coming of the Christ and what he calls the Mystery of Golgotha, i.e. his crucifixion and resurrection. The implication is that Luciferic wisdom is what guided the bronze age and ultimately led man toward the creation of monistic theology, like the kind we see in Plato and the Neoplatonists, before Christ came along and engendered a new religious sensibility that Nietzsche once memorably called “Platonism for the people.” Again, here’s Steiner:
It would be wrong to pass derogatory judgment on this Lucifer-culture. For all the beauty produced by Greek civilisation, even the insight that is still alive in ancient Greek philosophy and in the tragedies of Aeschylus would have been impossible without this Lucifer-incarnation.
The influence of the Lucifer-incarnation was still powerful in the south of Europe, in the north of Africa and in Asia Minor during the first centuries of Christendom. And when the Mystery of Golgotha had taken place on earth, it was essentially the Luciferic wisdom through which it could be understood. The Gnosis, which set about the task of grasping the import of the Mystery of Golgotha, was impregnated through and through with Luciferic wisdom. It must therefore be emphasised, firstly, that at the beginning of the third Millennium B.C. there was a Chinese incarnation of Lucifer; at the beginning of our own era the incarnation of Christ took place. And to begin with, the significance of the incarnation of Christ was grasped because the power of the old Lucifer-incarnation still survived.
Now, the above quotations are from a lecture series he gave in 1919 about Lucifer and Ahriman. But as I said above, Steiner is a frustrating figure to study, because he scattered his insights across many, many lectures, and one can’t always easily get a clear view of things without consulting remarks he made in other, seemingly irrelevant books. Moreover, he sometimes explains to us things about Lucifer and Ahriman only indirectly, by discussing various tendencies and even occult “beings” he describes as Luciferic and Ahrimanic.
So elsewhere in his body of work, Steiner discusses how Lucifer is ultimately dedicated to leading mankind toward escaping from all materiality into a realm of pure morality (note the interesting contrast) in which man surrenders all of his freedom — but he does so only by way of describing Luciferic beings, not Lucifer himself. In his lecture series entitled Spirit as Sculptor of the Human Organism, he says of these beings,
Looking out into our atmosphere, we have a world of beings composed of air and warmth, and their nature is one I have often described in my writings and lectures as Luciferic. These Luciferic beings have a very special endeavor in relation to humankind. Although they often live in weather we find unpleasant, they are beings who have an extraordinary interest in the moral element at work in the human social order. They adhere so strongly to the moral element that they consider we ought not to have a real physical body, or at least we ought not to have a body containing earthly and watery nature. They wish they could have shaped humankind like themselves, making us into entirely moral beings, though without freedom. We would be better off in their view if we did not have a physical nature at all and were moral beings alone.
[…]
People with a tendency to foggy mysticism and ungrounded enthusiasms succumb very easily to these beings who seek to draw us away from the earth, to make us a kind of angel so that we cannot possibly fall prey to immoral temptations. This probably sounds very strange and paradoxical. These powers expressed in the wind and weather, pulsing in the atmosphere, hate human freedom above all else and wish to have nothing to do with it. They want to destroy it if possible and yet at the same time make us into moral automata, into nothing but angelic goodness.
From this, one gets a sense of how Steiner assesses the internal logic of the monistic metaphysics that one sees in figures such as Plotinus. The figure of Christ, for him, then seems to resemble a grounded individual who maintains and affirms what makes humans actually human, such as the capacity for freedom.
Additionally, Lucifer is opposed to rationality and logic. Since Ahriman represents the pinnacle of scientific materialism, Lucifer is ultimately about the loosening of all distinctions, viewing everything as one immaterial substance into which one must seek reintegration. I’ll conclude this section with a good summary by Steiner describing what’s at stake with Lucifer, as he tells us,
Lucifer's intention was to convey the wisdom to men in such a way that it would induce them to abandon the path of earth-evolution and take a path leading to a super-earthly sphere, a sphere aloof from the earth. The Luciferic beings inculcated their wisdom into man but their desire was that it would make him turn away from the earth, without passing through earthly evolution. Lucifer wants to abandon the earth to its fate, to win mankind for a kingdom alien to the kingdom of Christ.
V. Ahriman
Ahriman, unsurprisingly, resembles the opposite of Lucifer. Whereas Lucifer strives to liberate man from the body into a kind of purely moral slavery, Ahriman is equally nefarious, but he encourages man to use science to make himself entirely comfortable in his body, affixed to the earth, and ultimately alone, plagued by a miasma of endless distinctions that keep him from any kind of healthy, life-affirming behavior. Steiner is particularly concerned with Ahriman as a force that encourages nationalism — not as a unifying mechanism, but as a splitting mechanism, causing smaller and smaller sectarian groups of people to break away from a larger mass. In the lecture series specifically on the topic, one of the first things he tells us about Ahriman is,
Another tendency in modern life of benefit to Ahriman in preparing his incarnation is all that is so clearly in evidence in nationalism. Whatever can separate men into groups, whatever can alienate them from mutual understanding the whole world over and drive wedges between them, strengthens Ahriman's impulse. In reality we should recognise the voice of Ahriman in what is so often proclaimed nowadays as a new ideal: “Freedom of the peoples, even the smallest”, and so forth.
Later on, a few lectures into his series, he makes probably his most cogent statement on what Ahriman represents:
Let it never be imagined that Ahriman will appear as a kind of hoaxer, playing mischievous tricks on human beings. No, indeed ! Lovers of ease who refuse to have anything to do with spiritual science, would fall prey to his magic, for by means of these stupendous magic arts he would be able to make great numbers of human beings into seers—but in such a way that the clairvoyance of each individual would be strictly differentiated. What one person would see, a second and a third would not see. Confusion would prevail and in spite of being made receptive to clairvoyant wisdom, men would inevitably fall into strife on account of the sheer diversity of their visions. Ultimately, however, they would all be satisfied with their own particular vision, for each of them would be able to see into the spiritual world. In this way all culture on the earth would fall prey to Ahriman. Men would succumb to Ahriman simply through not having acquired by their own efforts what Ahriman is ready and able to give them. No more evil advice could be given than to say: “Stay just as you are! Ahriman will make all of you clairvoyant if you so desire. And you will desire it because Ahriman's power will be very great.”—But the result would be the establishment of Ahriman's kingdom on earth and the overthrow of everything achieved hitherto by human culture; all the disastrous tendencies unconsciously cherished by mankind to-day would take effect.
This is probably the part of his description to which I’m most attracted, since he’s basically describing the effects of the information revolution in the form of electronic technology, which was only starting to blossom at this point in 1919. Additionally, he never says that Ahriman necessarily drives people towards atheism, which is an important insight — rather, Ahriman gives everyone a clear vision of “the spiritual,” but because people don’t struggle inwardly so that such a vision might reveal itself to them as the hard-won fruit of their labors, it is a satisfying image but ultimately sterile.
In another lecture from a series entitled Problems of Society: An Esoteric View - From Luciferic Past to Ahrimanic Future, he discusses how Ahrimanic forces use the veneer of science to make their arguments and ultimately capture people’s minds. He uses the spread of Karl Marx’s Communism as his chief example.
Our modern proletariat now looks to Karl Marx. It is worth studying how the teachings of Karl Marx spread amongst the modern proletariat, and how they gave rise to a never-ending flood of Marxist literature. This literature fully embraces the scientific mode. Everything is rigorously supported with proof and evidence — so rigorously, in fact, that many [whom] one would have thought immune to Marxism have in fact succumbed to it. The fate of Marxism was to have spread first of all through the proletariat while academic institutions disputed and rejected it. Now, there are a number of academics who can no longer resist the logic of Marxism, who acknowledge it and can no longer escape it, because Marxist literature, as has gradually become apparent, offers subtly congruent conclusions.
Steiner concedes that the logic of Marxism is undeniable (here he goes a bit too far), but the problem is, bourgeois man could have written his own version of Marxism from the perspective of the bourgeoisie, and this, too, could have been just as impeccably argued. Therein lies the problem of Ahrimanic influence — its logic is always flawless, but the matter of its perspective always determines the outcome. A modern parallel, you might argue, can be found in how sociologists will often engage in research yielding two very similar data sets, and yet each sociologist will draw almost opposite conclusions based on her own theoretical prejudice.
In the same lecture in which Steiner describes Luciferic beings as airy and warm, Steiner also describes Ahrimanic beings. In one of his more bizarre passages, he describes them almost as resembling a subterranean race of mole people, like the kinds of who would reportedly burrow themselves in the sewers under the streets of Manhattan:
If someone has fallen prey during his lifetime to the Ahrimanic powers, he is given up entirely to his passions, instincts, and drives, becoming rampant in his desires. These [Ahrimanic] beings can “harvest” this after his death to create a whole population, a subhuman populace of the earth, which does indeed already exist. This does really exist in the elements of water and earth. And if we ask what such Ahrimanic beings intend with this subhuman populace, it is this: to draw this kind of instinctual nature from a human being, and make it into a being of earth and water. And beings of earth and water do now actually populate the strata directly below the earth’s surface. There, they dwell. People who can use spiritual vision to observe minds know such entities very well. They exist there, having been torn from a human being at the moment of his death. And there waits Ahriman. There wait the Ahrimanic powers for a person’s karma caused by instincts, drives, and passions to lead him down into an incarnation where he takes special pleasure in such a being, and therefore finds, in a particular life on earth, that he does not wish to return to the world of spirit. Having left his physical body, from which after all we depart again for a supersensible life, he will seek instead to be embodied in a subsensible being of this kind — to remain united with the earth, no longer to die, but choosing to remain united with the earth as a subsensible entity.
One has to be astonished, since Ahrimanic beings, after all, are extraordinarily intelligent. As paradoxical as it sounds, they always think — and this is a quite accurate finding — that by this means they will be able to entice so many people into their race that eventually the earth will be populated entirely by subhuman Ahrimanic entities of this kind.
So basically, when someone under Ahrimanic influence dies, his soul takes on a material form somewhere underground and stays there forever as a sort of chthonic mud-golem creature (elsewhere, though, Steiner says Ahriman wants to turn everything to stone, so it’s hard to parse what he’s imagining). Despite the weirdness of this discussion, I’m impressed by Steiner’s recognition that there’s no contradiction between a person of extreme technical intelligence and a life of succumbing entirely to his passions and instincts rather than mastering them.
But despite encouraging hedonism, Ahrimanic forces also seek to rule over everything through endless rules and laws. In a lecture series entitled Eternal and Transient Elements: The Cosmic Past of Humanity and the Mystery of Evil, Steiner says, “Ahriman wants to have laws everywhere. Ahriman wants to be able to just write down laws all over the place.” So there’s no contradiction in Steiner’s perspective between scientism, political sectarianism, legalism, and reckless hedonism. This may seem a bit knotted in thinking, but then again, a quick overview of recent trends in Silicon Valley (e.g. polycules, male-to-female transgenderism) will confirm that whatever his eccentricities, Steiner was definitely onto at least something.
VI. Lucifer and Ahriman as Conspiring Forces
When Steiner lays out the distinctions between Lucifer and Ahriman, he makes sure to stress that both forces can exert influence in different ways at any point in time. So even though the time prior to the birth of Christ was more Luciferic, Luciferic beings can still exert influence now. In his lecture series Secrets of the Threshold, he has a discussion on Luciferic and Ahrimanic influences in the realm of art. He begins with a discussion on handwriting scripts, arguing that the Gothic script is more Luciferic while Ahriman favors the Roman. He then divides the arts more broadly into five types: music, poetry, painting, architecture, and sculpture. Music and poetry are more Luciferic inherently, while architecture and sculpture are more Ahrimanic, and painting is in the middle. For Steiner, this is a loose configuration, since sculptures can be more Luciferic while some music can be more Ahrimanic. And painting, far from the “safest” of the arts, is actually the most vulnerable on both ends to corrupt influences. Steiner elsewhere states that expressionism is Luciferic while impressionism is Ahrimanic (I don’t see how the second claim is true, but whatever).
In everyday life, Luciferic and Ahrimanic forces contend for dominion over man’s soul. Metaphysically, Lucifer leads man towards monism, while Ahriman leads man towards atomism. Lucifer seeks to dissolve all material, while Ahriman seeks to harden everything into stone. Lucifer likes curves; Ahriman, straight lines. Lucifer makes us arrogant; Ahriman, stubborn. Yet despite being so seemingly opposed, Steiner insists that both Lucifer and Ahriman work together as a team. This claim is a bit paradoxical, so I’ll try to explain it carefully. One thing to understand about Steiner’s philosophy is that regardless of how suffused with evil he sees the world as being, he’s basically optimistic in that he doesn’t think evil can ever fully win. That is, neither Luciferic forces nor Ahrimanic ones can ever claim total victory. He explains it in Spirit as Sculptor of the Human Organism.
One gains the very strong impression that Ahriman and Lucifer are profoundly disappointed if you spend any time in hospitals, or by the beds of patients, or in mental hospitals. These beings wage a hard battle, as I said, to possess human nature, but every time one side is victorious against the other, they find their aims have not been served.
[…]
When the Ahrimanic being are victorious, we succumb to diseases such as tumors, carcinomas, or metabolic disorders such as diabetes. Whenever a disease such as this physically affects us, Ahriman has won a victory against Lucifer. And this would be associated with the potential ruination of our physical nature. And then this physical nature can no longer serve Ahriman. He can no longer draw from the instincts and drives with which to create his own race of entities. This will give you a paradoxical yet accurate insight into illness. In many cases, it is the only means whereby the good powers can save the human being from the clutches of Ahriman. And when Lucifer wins a victory in our human nature over Ahrimanic powers that seek to harden us and draw us down into their race of mere water and earth beings, we succumb to allergic or catarrhal disorders or can develop mental disorders, and this in turn renders Lucifer’s victory redundant. These Ahrimanic and Luciferic powers continually work with all their strength to secure their victories only to be downcast and disappointed besides sick beds, in hospitals, and in lunatic asylums.
There are a couple points here worth making. The first is that there’s, I think, some profundity in the notion that sickness occurs as an act of mercy to prevent the body from being corrupted by malevolent spiritual forces. The second is that Steiner’s ultimate point is that the human body’s incorruptibility makes the victory for either Lucifer or Ahriman impossible, and so these forces are always wrestling with one another, even though one may be dominant during a particular era. And in these constant entanglements with one another, the forces can sometimes augment each other in warping some aspect of the human psyche.
Understanding this point is crucial in parsing what Steiner says here, in what’s probably his most confusing statement on Lucifer and Ahriman ever said:
Now that we are facing an incarnation of Ahriman in the third millennium after Christ, Lucifer's tracks are becoming less visible, and Ahriman's activities in such trends as I have indicated, are coming into prominence. Ahriman has made a kind of pact with Lucifer, the import of which may be expressed in the following way —Ahriman, speaking to Lucifer, says: “I, Ahriman, find it advantageous to make use of ‘preserving jars’. To you I will leave man's stomachs, if you will leave it to me to lull men to sleep—that is to say to lull their consciousness to sleep where their stomachs are concerned.”
You must understand what I mean by this. The consciousness of those human beings whom I have called devourers of soul and spirit is in a condition of dimness so far as their stomachs are concerned; for by not accepting the spiritual into their human nature, they drive straight into the Luciferic stream everything they introduce into their stomachs. What men eat and drink without spirituality goes straight to Lucifer!
And what do I mean by “preserving jars”? I mean libraries and institutions of a similar kind, where the various sciences pursued by man without really stirring his interest, are preserved; these sciences are not really alive in him but are simply preserved in the books on the shelves of libraries. All this knowledge has been separated from man himself. Everywhere there are books, books, books!
Steiner is not particularly clear whenever he brings up food and food-related metaphors. Earlier in his lecture, he discusses at length how man is always “eating the spirit” without knowing it, and I believe this is a metaphor to describe reading books or taking in knowledge without actually internalizing their true value, much like if you were to eat a piece of food and excrete it completely without having taken in any nutrients. The image of “eating books” is actually quite common in medieval allegory, since it is found in Revelation 10:9-10, but in this passage Steiner seems to shift the meaning somewhat.
I believe that what Steiner means here is that Ahriman represents the sterility and blandness of modern intellectual life, and when he is winning, he preserves men’s knowledge in physical substances (like books) that no one actually reads. In doing so, he allows man’s appetites to take over his sensibilities, unsated by valuable knowledge, and when man finally sates his appetite, he does so with Luciferic ideas — ideas that veer toward the irrational, the formless, the ethereal, and so on. So even though man’s thought process frequently tends toward the Luciferic, his actions and actual behavior is essentially Ahrimanic and dominated by Ahrimanic currents.
I suspect this reading is correct because Steiner’s big example of the Ahrimanic forces taking over, which he returns to numerous times, is how so many Protestant sects continue to emerge that reject esoteric readings of the Gospels, instead telling everyone to read them ad litteram, without relying on any extrabiblical commentaries or allegorical exegesis. For Steiner, this is a sign of Ahrimanic manipulation, because while these adherents to such denominations live their lives in an increasingly technologized, materialist fashion, they allow themselves a purely emotive reading of the sacred scriptures, which does nothing to enrich them during all the other moments of the day. While the sum of human knowledge grows increasingly externalized and ignored, internally people are irrational and ignorant. Thus, Ahriman controls them materially while they sate their Luciferic desires by poorly engaging with the spirit. And, surely enough, these sects that call for a purely “innocent” reading of the Bible are highly fragmented and can agree on nothing, which Steiner would see as indicative of his point. A similar interpretation could perhaps be drawn with the emotional vs. intellectual reception of Marx, but Steiner never goes that far. Steiner also sees scientific racism as an Ahrimanic force, because it causes further fragmentation along ethnic lines — again, one can appreciate the logic here today, particularly since white nationalist circles have often allowed science-based race realism to lapse seamlessly into racial mysticism.
Steiner presents Lucifer and Ahriman as a sort of Yin and Yang of corruption, since the seed of one is always embedded within its opposite. So when an Ahrimanic movement is underway, it is often pulled along by a Luciferic undercurrent of irrationalism. It would be interesting to ponder how a similar undercurrent of Ahrimanic forces may have guided along what was Luciferic during the Axial age, but Steiner never really goes there.
VII. Conclusion
Whatever one makes of Steiner’s motivations or reasoning, I find it undeniable that the trends he was describing have continued on more or less the same trajectory. While it’s perhaps true that the world is becoming less cluttered with material books, or “preserving jars,” information is still increasingly fragmented and disunified, even as people desperately search for ways to bring together various sciences through the creation of interdisciplinary fields, which themselves of course only contribute to the problem by becoming discrete fields in their own right. The great “Consilience” that E.O. Wilson hoped for never came to fruition, and mankind continues to compartmentalize information to various material ends that he ought to integrate into his life on the whole.
What mostly interests me about Steiner’s theory is that I regularly find examples of the Ahrimanic whenever I read about the same Silicon Valley culture that was promoting his Waldorf schools over a decade ago. Consider the example of the polycule, or even the various sexually deviant anarchist communes that preceded the polygamy trend by a few decades, and then consider how Steiner describes the influence of Ahriman: it takes highly intelligent people, encourages them to become enslaved by their (Luciferic) instincts and drives, and then they proceduralize everything about how they live, creating laws and rigidity everywhere. I once talked to a guy who belonged to an anarchist commune for a brief time in the 1990s, and he said that its “leaders” created a gigantic, ever-growing list of “Dos and Don’ts” just so that each person could sate his or her bizarre sexual fetishes in the most efficient way possible. Then, twenty years later, it became clear that the internal logic of this ridiculous group of people had more or less become mainstream, with the intellectual-led promotion of “positive consent” laws, tortuous interpretations of “power dynamics,” and other various perversions of logic. And from what I gather, Silicon Valley polycules operate in much the same fashion as what my acquaintance described.
Beyond that, the Lucifer vs. Ahriman distinction sheds some light on the phenomena of male-to-female transsexualism, particularly of the autogynephilic type. Much like the polycule, it appeals to highly intelligent, computer-literate people who fall prey to their instincts and passions. They then act upon those passions, guided by an intellectually satisfying series of academic rationalizations, until they ultimately impose an altogether new and highly rule-governed order upon their lives. One thing that Steiner’s distinction has increasingly convinced me of is that conservatives are altogether mistaken when they claim that transsexuals, technological post-humanists, and members of the extreme body modification community are fundamentally “gnostic” in nature because they “hate the body.” Exactly the opposite is the case. These groups appear to suffer from an excess attachment to the body and a strong desire to become as comfortable as possible within it, not to escape from it at all. If anything, they have resigned themselves to the idea that there is no escape. Gnosticism, by contrast, was a Luciferic ideology about wholly departing from the body after death, and it’s therefore quite telling that we have no evidence whatever of actual Gnostic practitioners from late antiquity ever engaging in self-harm, scarification, or the amputation of limbs. After all, if these Gnostics were looking forward to their spirits being reunited with the heavenly pleroma, why would they bother picking and scratching at their flesh? We’re clearly dealing with a whole different ball of wax, here.
Beyond those fairly prominent and oft-discussed examples of Ahrimanism, I can think of several others — the explosion of Autism in recent decades not being among the least. But that will be enough for now. Rudolf Steiner, in his own peculiar way, produced an interesting theory that dealt primarily with the growth of information being circulated within his lifetime, and this increasing flow of information eventually led to the electronic age and the digital revolution, which we’re currently undergoing. As the trend toward more and more easily-available information has continued, his observations have grown pretty trenchant, at least from what I can see. Moreover, he came up with a simplistic but compelling reason not to make glib associations between the strange ideologies of our age and the various heresies of the distant past, despite whatever superficial differences in the ideology that one might spot — this tendency is one of the great mental diseases of political conservatives. But perhaps most importantly of all, he delved into the realm of archetypes to pull out a compelling icon to represent the present day. I have no idea if there will be a real manifestation of Ahriman, and I’m not sure I particularly care one way or the other — in fact, I’d say that Steiner’s tendency to literalize everything is among one of his weaknesses. I also will clarify that I have no idea why he bothered to use the Persian demon and opponent of Ahura Mazda in this way to oppose Lucifer — there surely is no scriptural reason. But all the same, I can’t think of a better symbol to capture the manner in which our increasingly technical culture is, at its core, guided by a tendency towards fragmentation, materialism, technological slavery, and unquenchable thirsts. At any rate, Steiner’s sculpture of him looks good.
Rudolf Steiner Rocman ~ knows secret
Songs more beep
You’ll float to ~ see ya in hell https://youtu.be/BcoK0Gdg8qs?si=RSJhQVD2u-8dwfOn