II
Lucifer and Ahriman
Dornach 21st September, 1918
In the lectures of last
week I pointed out how with the aid of the science of initiation one
must strive to press forward from the apparent reality, that is actually
around us continually, to the true reality. And I pointed out that the
effort which is agreeable to most people, the effort to find a single
rational theory of the universe precisely diverts from reality, leads
precisely to delusion. I said that much rather must one strive to
distinguish two currents of reality, in regard to human knowledge as
well, and then in a living manner unite with each other what can be
found in these two currents.
Let us briefly recapitulate
what we have realised with regard to these two currents in human knowledge
and let us then seek to create the necessary requirements for a conception
of reality on this foundation. You will remember that I said: The course
of human life is actually one in which man can only comprehend in the
second half of life what he has thought, what his soul on the whole
has gone through in the first half. I said that natural intelligence
is active in us from birth to the change of teeth, the intelligent element
prevails. What prevails as intelligence and also what we learn in these
first years of life, is not yet grasped through our own human forces
if we look only at the one current of which we have to speak. If man
were simply thrown on his own resources as earthly man, then only in
later life at the end of the fifties, the beginning of the sixties,
would be able to understand what he thought, felt and willed as a child
up to the change of teeth. Thus it is only in later years that one becomes
mature, as it were, to self-knowledge of the intimate life of childhood.
The forces in man that can grasp what one went through intelligently
in the first years of childhood are in fact only born as late as that
in human life.
Then we have a second
life-period that dates from the change of teeth to puberty. Only think
(it is shown in the booklet
Education of the Child in the Light of Anthroposophy
what the child goes through in thought, feeling, willing, up to puberty,
Through his own human earthly forces man would be able to grasp what
he goes through then only at the end of the forties, the beginning of,
the fifties
And again what we live through
from puberty into the twenties: we should only grasp this through our
own human forces at the end of our thirties and beginning of our forties.
What we devise and develop as ideals we should only grasp in its importance,
its value to life, in our thirties if we were left to our human life
forces. Only what we experience between the ages of 28 and 35 stands
for itself and can be approximately grasped at the time. This middle
member of man's lifetime has a certain equilibrium, there we can at
the same time develop our thought and comprehend it, but not in the
other years of life.
You get a grasp of man's
development in a lifetime if you reflect upon what has been brought
forward, you see how man evolves as earthly man in time. In so far as
we are bound to time, self-knowledge would only be possible if we waited
until the right time of life arrived for a comprehension of what we
had thought in an earlier period of life. The total human life is interconnected.
If we were only earthly man in time we should, as personality, know
nothing at all of ourselves, if we did not in age look back to what
developed in us in youth.
Now that is the one aspect
of man, the one current of human life. As regards this stream man is
entirely subjected to time, he can do nothing but wait till the time
is ripe. But I have already pointed out to you that the way life is
lived through in our maya-existence, is not the true face of human life,
it is merely its appearance when we regard it as taking place in time.
Yet what one specifies in this way about the time-course of human life
is entirely real. For what we normally experience between birth and
death — with this, as I have said, we can if necessary, and if
one is content to stay on the surface, live, but with it one cannot
die. For all our normal knowledge, what we learn from the instruction
of others, what one learns from the store acquired through the course
of history, in short, what as temporal man one learns in any other way
than by looking back in age at youth — that perishes at death,
that we do not carry from the one current through the gate of death.
Only what we have acquired in conformity with this correspondence do
we carry through the portal of death. And do not imagine that you don't
do what I have described! Each of you who has come to a later age of
life looks back in his subconsciousness to the earlier years of his
life. What I have described most definitely takes place, even if it
takes place subconsciously. And you would carry nothing from the external
temporal course of life through death if it did not so take place. In
the age of materialism, however, men pay little heed to this, yet all
that the materialistic age can bring to man cannot be taken with him
through the gate of death. That alone has significance for the world
which you pass through in the sense that you grasp in age what has taken
Place in your whole nature in youth. That is the one stream.
The other stream arises
through the fact that man is not merely soul and body. As a being of soul
and body his existence takes its course in time as we have again shown.
But man is also a being of spirit and soul. And through his soul-spirit
nature he is not merely in the realm of time which has just been
characterised but in the realm of duration. And there again he is very
different from what he thinks. There he goes through no development, he
is the same being from birth to death, but his thinking, feeling and
willing are something very different from how they appear to him. His
thinking and also a part of his feeling is a transposing of himself into
cosmic regions where the conflict of gods takes place (I described this
in a recent lecture
[ 15th September 1918 (not translated). ]),
and again willing and a part
of feeling is the transposing of oneself into another region of the
cosmos where the conflict of gods takes place I said to you that to
reflect and ponder means transposing oneself into a certain region of
spirituality and taking part in certain conflicts of one order of spirits
with another; similarly willing means taking part in certain conflicts
— even though in one or another case these conflicts may have
come to a standstill. It is a profound truth presented in one of the
Mystery Dramas,
The Portal of Initiation,
that while processes
of soul and spirit are enacted in us great cosmic events are happening
Just as man in the age of materialism will have no notion of his soul-body
nature that runs its course in time, so will man know nothing of this
spirit-soul element that acts in the realm of duration, but appears
quite different from his thinking, feeling, willing in ordinary life and
seen in ito reality, takes place as spirit-conflicts, However paradoxical
it may sound to the materialistic thinker, when you form a thought it
is very different from what it appears to you in maya. Let us suppose
that you form a thought, let us say a thought on what we considered
in the last lecture — a thought on space. The moment you think
about space, even in the abstractness of the modern concept of space,
the moment your spirit fills itself with the space-thought, you transpose
your soul into a spiritual region where Ahriman is engaged in a mighty
fight against hierarchies of a different nature. You could not have
the thought of space without living in a region where Ahriman fights
against other hierarchies. And when you develop a desire, if you say,
for instance, I will go for a walk, even when it is such an insignificant
determination as this, as soon as you set this will in action, you place
yourself spiritually in a region where the Luciferic spirits fight against
spirits of other hierarchies. Seen from the aspect of initiation-science,
what takes place in the world is essentially different from its shadowy
reflection, which we know in our maya-existence, between birth and death.
For, my dear friends, what we perceive thus as maya is nothing more
than something that can be compared with the wave-ripples on the surface
of the sea. I put the picture before you in the last lecture: the ripples
of the waves on the surface of the sea would not be there without the
sea beneath and the air above. The forces that produce the ripples of
the waves are in the sea, in the air, and the rippled waves are only
the image of the forces striking together from above and below, So is
our life in maya between birth and death nothing else than a striking
together of two forces. On the one hand the spiritual conflicts which
in truth take place in the realm of duration when we think, feel, will;
on the other hand the course of evolution in time which consists in
our comprehending only in later years the thinking life of youth. Our
life in fact is a nothingness if we do not look on it from the confluence
and conjunction of these two true realities. Behind our life are these
two true realties.
Now behind our life there
is not only on the one hand the time-course which would cause us to
wait and wait in order to grasp something that we conceived formerly,
nor is there only the processes in duration that take place our whole
life through in a similar way between birth and death but we ourselves
stand within this reality, and this too appears to us only in its reflected
image. Our whole relation to the world appears to us only in its reflection.
To know the truth always demands our strengthening ourselves to know
it; truth does not come to us if we want merely to remain passive. To
know the truth means that one knows oneself to be standing in the two
currents that I have indicated, in the realm of time and the realm of
duration. And while we stand within these two realms, and a life goes
on which has no other significance with regard to the true forces than
has the rippled sea with regard to the storming air and the flood beneath
surging up and down, we pass our life between death and birth and then
again also between birth, and death. The forces and powers occupy themselves
with us while we so pass our life. For mighty forces are ever at hand
which endeavour to tear us away from the ordinary earthly life as it
takes its course in maya, and similarly other forces are there which
are at pains to tear us away from the realm of duration. On the one
hand (let us hold fast to this) we have our course of life in time,
where we only become mature at a late period to grasp what goes on in
us in the future; there are forces and powers which would confine us
to what we are as man, which would like to mould us as human beings
so that this takes place. That means, however: there are forces and
powers that want our earthly life to run its course in maya, so that
we experience this or that in childhood, but grasp nothing of it, lead
a sort of sleep-life up to the age of 28, then begin somewhat to comprehend
the present, and then after the age of 35 begin to comprehend the earlier.
There are forces and powers which would like to make us mere temporal
beings, beings who for the first half of life would lead more or less
a sleeping plant-life and in the second half would look back and understand
what took place during this sleep. There are forces and powers which
would like to make man for the first half of his life, a dreamer, and
in the second half a being who remembers these dreams and thus comes
to self-consciousness. If these forces and powers should alone work
upon us it would practically mean that our soul would not be born till
the beginning of our thirties, or at earliest in our twenty-eighth year.
Before that we should go about on earth drunken with sleep.
If that were so, we should
become torn free from our whole cosmic past. Our present existence rests
upon the fact that we have gone through a cosmic past, through the Saturn,
Sun, Moon evolution, as I have shown it in
Occult Science.
During the passage through the Saturn, Sun, Moon periods, Beings of
the higher Hierarchies who have a special interest that human beings
should arise in the cosmos. Beings who are the creators of mankind,
developed us and established us in earthly existence. In earth-existence
we are now such men according to the one stream as I have described.
Forces and powers are present which would shape us only as such earthmen;
should they conquer, they would tear us away from our Saturn, Sun, Moon
past. They would conserve us in earth-life, make us purely men of earth.
That is what certain powers are striving for; they are the Ahrimanic
powers. Ahriman strives to make us purely temporal men, to loosen our
earth-life from our cosmic past. He strives to make the earth utterly
and entirely a self-contained entity, to make us entirely telluric,
earthly with the earth.
There are other forces and
powers which strive for the exact opposite, to tear us from this time-life,
to endow us with a thinking, feeling and willing that trickles in, as
it were, solely from the region of duration. These beings strive to
fill us from childhood on, and with no effort of our own, with a certain
quantum of thinking, feeling and willing and then to conserve it for
us throughout the whole course of life. Should they conquer, our whole
temporal life would dry up. We should finally, — indeed quite
soon, it would have happened long ago if these beings had conquered,
— lay aside the physical corporeality, the bodily spirit-being,
and become pure spirits. But our task, in so far as it comes from our
earth-existence, would not have been fulfilled. We should be drawn away
from earth-existence. To these beings the earth is too evil, they hate
the earth, they would like to get rid of it. They would like to lift
man from the earth and give him an existence purely in the realm of
duration; they would like him to discard all that takes its course in
time in the way I have described. These are the Luciferic beings. They
strive for just the opposite of what the Ahrimanic beings desire. The
Ahrimanic beings seek to free man together with the whole of earth-existence
from the cosmic past and to conserve the earthly. The Luciferic beings
strive to thrust away the earth, thrust away from man everything earthly
and spiritualize him entirely, so that the forces of the earth cannot
work upon him. They would like man to be purely a cosmic being, and
would like the earth to fall away from evolution and be cast out into
the universe. Whereas Ahriman wants the earth to become an independent
entity and man's whole world, the Luciferic beings strive towards the
opposite goal. They want the earth to be thrust away from humanity and
humanity to be lifted into that realm where they themselves have their
existence, the pure world of duration. In order to attain this object
the Luciferic beings seek perpetually to make the human intelligence
automatic, they endeavour to crush down man's free will. Should intelligence
become purely automatic and the free will crushed, then with automatic
intelligence and not with our own will, but the will of the gods, we
should be able to accomplish what it fell to us to perform. We should
become entirely cosmic beings. That is the goal towards which the Luciferic
beings strive. They endeavour to make us pure spirits, such as have
cosmic intelligence in place of their own, spirits who have no free
will, and whose thinking and acting run their course automatically,
as among the Hierarchy of the Angels and to a great extent in the hierarchy
of the Luciferic beings — but here in another respect. They wish
to make us pure spirits and to cast away the earthly impulse. Moreover
they want to create an intelligence for us which is entirely uninfluenced
by any kind of brain and absolutely untouched by the interweaving of
free will.
The beings who flock round
Ahriman, the Ahrimanic beings, want on the contrary to cultivate most
specially human intellect, to cultivate it to the extent of being
increasingly dependent on the whole earth-existence. They want, moreover,
to develop intensively man's individual will — that is, precisely
all that the Luciferic beings wish to repress. The Ahrimanic beings, or,
expressed better, the spirits serving Ahriman, want to develop fully
precisely this — we must take that definitely into account. The
human being in this way would come to a sort of self-sufficiency. He
would, it is true, be a dreamer in his youth, and in later years be
extremely clever and understand many things through his own practical
experience, yet he would receive nothing as a revelation from the
spiritual worlds. Do not let us deceive ourselves about that. Everything
through which one is clever in youth has arisen only from revelation,
one's own experience enters only in later years. The Ahrimanic beings
want to limit us to this personal experience. We should be beings of
independent will, but as beings of soul and spirit we should have at most
to be born in our 28th year. Just consider: we as human beings, are
actually standing in between these two conflicting aims of the spiritual
worlds. And in a certain sense we have the task as man so to live our
life in the world that we follow neither Ahriman nor Lucifer but find an
equilibrium between the two currents.
One can imagine that it
is gruesome even to our materialistic age for men to hear what actually
takes place at the foundation of human nature. Because it is gruesome
it was so arranged in the world-order that in ancient times divine teachers
imparted to men a supersensible knowledge, so that they did not themselves
need to face this spirit-conflict. The initiates could be silent about
the spirit-conflict to the outer world. There have always been men who
know, knew, of this spirit-conflict which is enacted in every human
being behind the scenes of life. There were always men who had convinced
themselves that life is a struggle through a conflict, that it encloses
a danger in itself. But the principle also existed not to lead men to
the threshold of the spiritual world, not to lead them to the Guardian
of the Threshold, so that (forgive the expression but it fits) —
so that they did not get the horrors. But the times have passed in which
that is possible. For the time will come in future earthly evolution
when the separation must take place between the children of Lucifer
and the children of Ahriman, either the one or the other. But to know
that one stands within it, and in this standing within one must guide
one's life with knowledge, that must be said today as a necessity of
life for man's future, and it must be understood. There can be no mere
science of silence for the future.
Anyone who wishes to get
a true knowledge of life must develop cosmic sensitivity. What does
that mean? It means that he must learn to look at the world somewhat
differently from the customary way of seeing it from the standpoint
of maya. When one goes through the world with the science of initiation
then feelings arise which are not there as long as one remains merely
in the knowledge of maya. Feelings arise which the ordinary person looks
on not merely as paradoxical, but as foolish and fantastic, yet which
have every possible justification as regards true reality. One who possesses
the science of initiation and meets with a human being hovers to and
fro between two perceptions. You man (he thinks to himself), you oscillate
between two possibilities. Either you fall a prey entirely to the temporal,
you become mineralised and stiffened inasmuch as you become solely earth-man
and lose your past, or else you evaporate in the spirit to a spiritual
automaton, you do not reach your goal as human being in spite of being
spirit. — It might be said that in confronting a man there really
always come towards one two men, the one who is in danger of petrifying
in his form, becoming dense and rigid and growing together with the
earth; and the other who is in danger of thrusting out all that tends
to the mineralising and the hardening process, and is in danger of becoming
quite soft, jelly-like, and finally of dissolving as spiritual automaton
in the All. These two beings actually meet those who observe a man through
the means furnished by the science of initiation. One always feels anxiety,
so to say (one must choose such words as language provides, thus many
things sound a paradox when one points to the realm of reality) —
one has ever anxiety lest the men who confront one suddenly all become
like those remarkable figures sometimes seen on the face of a rocky
cliff: a knight on horseback, or other figures in the mountains, sleeping
maidens, and so on. Men could become something like this and unite with
the rock of the earth and only live on as mineralised form. On the other
hand, however, they could thrust out all that leads them to mineralisation
and could become jelly-like: those organs that have contracted could
swell out the ears, could become gigantic and include the throat, wing-like
organs could grow out of the shoulders combined with all this; all as
soft as a jellyfish but dissolving as if out of its own surging wave
formation.
And such perception, such
cosmic sensitivity, so to say, arises not only when one confronts a
human being with initiation knowledge, but ultimately one carries over
to everything what one receives through this cosmic sensitivity. You
have assuredly remarked that the tendency to rigidify, to become rock-like;
comes from Ahriman; the tendency to volatilize, become first jelly-like,
then dissolving: comes from Lucifer. But this is not confined to man
himself, it extends over all the abstraction that one meets. One learns
to perceive all straight lines as Ahrimanic; all curved lines as Luciferic.
The circle is the symbol of Lucifer; the straight line the symbol of
Ahriman. The human head with its tendency (one can see it in the skeleton)
to petrify, to ossify in the form given it by the earth and to remain
hard, is Ahrimanic formation. If forces that work in the human head
were active in the whole man he would acquire the figure of Ahriman as
you have him over there in our Group. He would be entirely permeated
by headness — so to say he would be entirely his own intelligence;
but egotistic intelligence; and entirely his own will so that the will
comes to expression in the form itself.
If we look at the rest of
man, not the head-man, but the extremities, man in the broader sense;
we have the idea: If the forces working in the rest of man worked through
man as a whole he would then be formed like the figure of Lucifer in
the Group. And wherever we look; whether in the life of nature or in
social life, we can look into the Ahrimanic or the Luciferic if we are
equipped with the science of initiation. We must only perceive it and
to develop this sensitive perception is a necessity in man's future
evolution. Man must learn to feel that the Lucifer character prevails
throughout the world, it prevails too through man's social life. It
wants above all to get rid of everything that pertains to rule and order
in the world and the laws that men have established. In man's social
life there is nothing, so much hated by Lucifer as anything that smells
at all of law.
Ahriman would like to have
laws; inscribe laws everywhere. And again human community-life is
interwoven with the hatred of Lucifer against law and Ahriman's sympathy
for it — and one does not understand life if one does not understand
it as a dualism. Ahriman likes all that is outer form, that can stiffen;
Lucifer likes — the Luciferic beings like — all that is
formless, that dissolves form, becomes fluid and flexible. By life itself
one must learn to create the balance between the wanting to stiffen
and the becoming fluid.
Look at the forms of our Bau
[ The first Goetheanum, destroyed by fire
December 31, 1922. ],
the straight line led over everywhere
into the curved, equilibrium sought; everywhere an endeavour to dissolve
the fixed again in the fluid, everywhere rest produced in the movement,
but the rest transposed again into movement. That is the whole spiritual
element in our Bau. As men of the future we must try to shape something in
art and life knowing that there below is Ahriman who would let everything
grow rigid, there above is Lucifer who wishes to spiritualize everything;
both, however, must remain invisible, for in the world of maya only
the wave-ripples may appear. Woe if Ahriman or Lucifer should themselves
press into what desires to be life! And so our Bau has become what it
is: a state of balance in the universe which is wrested, lifted out,
of the realm of Ahriman and the realm of Lucifer. Everything culminates
in the central figure of our Group, in this Representative of mankind,
in whom the whole Luciferic and Ahrimanic element is to be blotted out.
And the fact that this is so, that all is lifted out of what is to remain
purely spiritual, comes to expression in the Group, where the Luciferic
and Ahrimanic elements are set visibly in balance to each other so that
men learn to understand it.
That is the perspective
which one must place before men today, so that they may learn to grasp
how they must find the state of equilibrium between the Ahrimanic and
the Luciferic. The Ahrimanic regulates us always — even in soul
and spirit — rectilinearly; the Luciferic brings us always into
curving or circular movement and diversifies us. If we have a one-sided
tendency to monotheism, if we strive to the whole world as a unity,
then Ahriman tugs us by one ear; if we become monadists, one-sided monadists,
explaining the world out of many, many atoms or monads only, without
unity, then Lucifer is tugging us by the other ear. — In fact,
to one who has insight things are like this: when monists dispute with
pluralists, monadists, then the man who is actually disputing is generally
quite guiltless, for behind him, if he is a monist. Ahriman is pulling
him by the ear and whispering all the fine reasons the self-believed
logic which he presents for his monism; and if he is a follower of Leibniz
or some other monadist, —Lucifer is there and whispers all the
fine reasons for the manifoldness of spiritual beings. What must be
sought is the state of equilibrium, unity in multiplicity, multiplicity
in unity. However, that is less easy and convenient than to seek either
the unity or the multiplicity; as it is altogether less comfortable
to seek a state of equilibrium than something where one can just rest
in laziness. Men become either sceptics or mystics, The sceptics feel
that they have fine minds that can doubt everything, the mystics feel
that they are permeated by the divine and that with love and knowledge
they can embrace all things in their own inner being. The Sceptics are
in fact but pupils of Ahriman and the mystics but pupils of Lucifer.
For what mankind must strive towards is the state of balance; mystic
experience in scepticism, scepticism in mystic experience. It is not
the point whether one is Montaigne or Augustine, the point is that what
Montaigne represents is illumined through Augustine and what Augustine
represents is illumined through Montaigne. One-sidednesses mislead men
in the direction of the one or the other stream. What is actually the
meaning of “towards the Luciferic”? The Luciferic is really
there to make us headless, to take away our own intelligence and free-will.
The Luciferic spirits (it is better to say “Luciferic spirits”
and to say “Ahriman”, for although there are hosts in the
following of Ahriman, Ahriman stands out as a unity, because he strives
for unity, and the Luciferic element shows itself as plurality, because
it strives for plurality — therefore one expresses it as I have
already done in the course of today's lecture) — the Luciferic
element really wants us to die at 28, it does not want us to grow old.
And if things went entirely according to this Luciferic element we should
become children, young men and women, would receive good knowledge trickled
in from duration, but at approximately the age of 28 we should get sclerosis
and rapidly become cretins. Thus what we could develop as human comprehension
would be thrust out just as sclerosis would be thrust out and what we
receive in youth could be made automatic and spiritualised. The Luciferic
spirits would like to take us at once and not let us first go through
the Jupiter, Venus, Vulcan evolution in order then only to become cosmic
beings. They do not consider that necessary but strive to take man away
from the earth with what he has already evolved through the Saturn,
Sun, Moon existence. That is the one stream which wants to hurry on
with man as quickly as possible, it is a premature stream. The Luciferic
spirits would like to storm in and lead us as quickly as possible into
cosmic reality. The Ahrimanic spirits would like to root out our past
and make the earth our starting point; they would like to wipe out our
past, conserve us on the earth and then set us back to where we were
as Saturn-beings. It is a retrograde, retarding movement. Life is ultimately
compounded out of a premature and a retrograde movement and the state
of equilibrium between them must be found.
Do not say, my dear friends,
that these things are difficult, for that is not at all the point. I
spoke yesterday of how in early times men had the experience of space
and time, of how they experienced them concretely, while we experience
them so abstractly. We must learn so to look at our environment that
everywhere we experience in balance this interplay of stiffening and
evaporating, of deserting and thrusting back, of straight line and curve
line. One can sleep with what simply looks at the world. If one looks
at it awake, then it threatens to rigidify or evaporate in its whole
nature as soon as it comes out of the state of equilibrium. We must
develop this feeling and it must become as alive in the men of the future
as was the ancient feeling for space and time in the men of the past.
One can have a sensitive
perception concerning much in our Group. One can feel in the centre
the Representative of humanity with its lines and planes and forms,
where everything Luciferic and Ahrimanic is obliterated. The forms are
there, but as far as it allows in the human figure the Luciferic and
Ahrimanic is rooted out. One can find Lucifer and Ahriman held fast in
their forms; one can feel the contrast between the central human being
and Lucifer and Ahriman, and can go through the world with this feeling
and find its correspondence everywhere. One who is able to assimilate
what lives in the feelings that are brought forth by this trinity will
absorb much for a certain autopsy of life. Much will be revealed by
the world when one contemplates it with the feelings resulting out of
the trinity: the central human being or Representative of mankind, Ahriman,
Lucifer, And as to the ancient space-feeling the three-foldness was
revealed, and to the ancient time-feeling the oneness of the Divine,
so must one of the loftiest world-mysteries be revealed to the humanity
of the future, in that it is in the position to grasp concretely the
stiffening, the evaporating, the deserting, the thrusting back, the
straight-lined, the curve, the law-loving, the law-hating, and so on.
The recognition of the state of oscillation everywhere in life —
that is what matters. For life is not possible unless there is such
a state of oscillation, If you have a clock with a pendulum you can
of course want to avoid the swinging to and fro and make the pendulum
stand still, but the clock will be of no use to you, the pendulum must
swing. In life there must be this pendulum condition. That must be noted
everywhere.
|