Anthroposophical Guidelines

Michael’s Task in the Sphere of Ahriman

When man looks back upon his evolution and the special attributes which brought him to the spiritual vision which his spiritual life has taken on during the past five hundred years, he must, even with normal consciousness, at least recognize that since these five hundred years he has stood at an important turning-point in the earthly evolution of humanity.

In the previous consideration, I pointed to this important turning-point from one point of view - the observation of evolution in antiquity. One sees how the soul-force in man developed to the point where it is now active as the force of intelligence.

Dead, abstract thoughts now appear in the field of human consciousness. These thoughts are bound to man’s physical body, and he must recognize that they are of his own making.

In antiquity man saw divine-spiritual beings when directing his vision to where his own thoughts originated. He found his whole being, down to the physical body, bound to these beings; he had to recognize himself as their creation - but as such creation not only recognize his being, but also his deeds. Man had no will of his own. What he did was the manifestation of divine will.

In stages, as has been described, he has come to have his own will, beginning approximately five hundred years ago. But the last stage is far more different from all the others than they are amongst themselves.

In that thoughts pass over to the physical body, they lose life. They become dead; spiritually dead structures. Previously, as they belonged to man, they were simultaneously organs of the divine-spiritual beings to whom man belonged. They willed in man. And therefore through them man felt himself united with the spiritual world.

With dead thoughts he feels himself detached from the spiritual world. He feels himself completely displaced to the physical world.

He is thus displaced to the sphere of ahrimanic spirituality. This has no strong power in the areas in which the beings of the higher hierarchies keep man in their sphere, in which they either act in man themselves, as in antiquity or, as later, through their ensouled or living reflection. As long as super-sensible beings acted in human affairs, that is until the fifteenth century, the ahrimanic powers had only a weakly suggestive power within human evolution. Direct intervention only became possible in the period that began approximately five-hundred years ago.

The Persian worldview did not contradict this when describing Ahriman’s work. For that worldview did not imply Ahriman working within human soul-evolution, but in one directly bordering on the human soul-world. Ahriman’s machinations may have run over from a neighboring spirit-world into the human soul-world, but did not directly intervene.

Thus man stands at the end of an evolutionary stream in which his being, derived from such a divine-spirituality, finally succumbs, as such, to his abstract intelligence.

Man has not remained in the divine-spiritual spheres which constitute his origin. What began five-hundred years ago for human consciousness had already taken place to a larger extent for his whole being when the Mystery of Golgotha took place on earth. Imperceptibly for the consciousness of most people, human evolution had gradually slipped out of a world in which Ahriman had little power into one in which he had much. This slipping into a different world-stratum reached its completion in the fifteenth century.

Ahriman’s influence on humanity during that world-stratum was possible and could have had devastating consequences, because in that stratum man’s relation to divine activity had died out. But man could not develop free will in any other way than by making his way into a sphere in which the divine-spiritual beings that had been united with him from the very beginning were not living.

Seen cosmically, the Sun-Mystery is in the essence of human evolution. Up until the important turning-point of his evolution, man was able to perceive that divine-spiritual beings were conjoined with his origin. They have however detached themselves from the sun and left only what is dead behind. So that man in his corporality can now only receive dead thoughts through the sun.

But those beings have sent Christ from the sun to the earth. He has united his being with the mortality of the divine-spiritual existence in Ahriman’s realm for the healing of humanity. Thus humanity has two possibilities that guarantee his freedom: to consciously turn to Christ with the spiritual disposition he subconsciously held during the descent from the vision of super-sensory spirituality up until the use of the intellect; or to complete the detachment from this spirituality and therewith become addicted to the orientation of Ahrimanic powers.

Humanity has been in this situation since the beginning of the fifteenth century. This has been in preparation - with evolution everything happens gradually - since the Mystery of Golgotha which, as the earth’s greatest event, is intended to rescue man from the corruption he is necessarily exposed to, because he is meant to be a free being.

One can therefore say that what humanity has done in this situation was in semiconsciousness. And in this way it led to what is good in the abstract ideas about nature and to many equally good principles about life in general. But the time is over when man may still unconsciously evolve in the dangerous Ahrimanic sphere.

The investigator of the spiritual world must draw humanity’s attention to the spiritual fact that Michael has taken over the spiritual leadership of human affairs. Michael does what he must do in a way which does not influence people; but they can follow him in freedom with the Christ-force, in order to find their way out of Ahriman’s sphere in which in was necessary for them to enter.

Whoever honestly feels one with Anthroposophy from the bottom of his soul will rightly understand this Michael phenomenon. And Anthroposophy would like to be the messenger of this Michael-Mission.

106. Michael goes again upward along the paths which humanity trod downward during the stages of spiritual evolution to the activation of intelligence. But Michaelic will lead wills upward along the pathways which wisdom trod downward until its last stage: intelligence.
107. In order than humanity can develop in freedom, from now on in world evolution Michael merely points out the path, which differentiates this Michael leadership from all earlier archangel leaderships, even from all earlier Michael leaderships. The earlier leaderships were active in man - which meant that man’s own actions could not be free.
108. To recognize this is man’s present task, so that he can find his spiritual path with his whole soul during the Michael era.