VIII
AHRIMAN'S
FIGHT AGAINST THE MICHAEL PRINCIPLE
THE MESSAGE OF MICHAEL
We shall now have
to describe how the individual anthroposophist can come to
experience his karma through the simple fact that he has
placed himself into the Anthroposophical Society, or at any
rate into the Anthroposophical Movement, through all the
previous conditions of which we have already spoken. To
this end it will be necessary for me to add a few
explanations to what I set forth last Monday. I told you of
the deeply important super-sensible School at the beginning
of the 15th century. To characterise it we can say: Michael
himself was the great Teacher in that School. Numbers of
souls, human souls who were then in the life between death
and a new birth, and numbers too of spiritual beings who do
not have to enter earthly incarnation, but spend the aeons,
during which we live, in an ethereal or other higher form
of higher existence, — all these human, super-human
and sub-human beings, belonged at that time to the
all-embracing School of the Michael Power. They were, so to
speak, disciples of Michael. And you will remember, last
Monday I told you a little of the content of the teaching
given at that time.
Today we will
begin by emphasising this one point: the previous Michael
dominion, having lasted three centuries and finding its
culmination in the Alexandrian epoch of pre-Christian time,
was withdrawn from the earth, and the dominions of the
other Archangeloi followed. At the time when on earth,
within the earthly realm, the Mystery of Golgotha took
place, the Michael community were united in the Spirit,
with all the spiritual and human-spiritual beings who
belonged to them. How did they feel and perceive the
Mystery of Golgotha? Christ at that time was taking His
departure from their realm — the realm of the Sun.
Such was their experience; while the human beings who were
then living upon earth had to experience the Mystery of
Golgotha quite differently. For Christ was coming down to
them to the earth.
Now this is an
immense, far-reaching and gigantic contrast in experience,
as between the one kind of human soul and the other,
— a contrast which we need to penetrate and
understand with all our heart and mind.
Then there began
the time when the Cosmic Intelligence, that is to say, the
essence of Intelligence that is spread out over the great
universe, which had been subject to the unlimited rulership
of Michael until the end of the Alexandrian epoch,
gradually passed into the possession of man on earth and
fell, so to speak, out of the hands of Michael.
You must realise,
my dear friends: the evolution of mankind with respect to
these things took place as follows. Till the end of the
Alexandrian time, nay even afterwards, — and for
certain groups of human beings long, long afterwards,
— when a man was intelligent there was always the
consciousness, not that he had evolved the Intelligence
within him, but that he was gifted with it from the
spiritual worlds. If a man thought a clever thought, the
cleverness of it was ascribed to the inspiration of
spiritual Beings. It is indeed of fairly recent date that
man ascribes his cleverness, his intelligence, to himself.
This is due to the fact that the rulership of Intelligence
has passed from the hands of Michael into the hands of men.
When Michael at the end of the eighteen-seventies again
assumed his regency in the guidance of earthly destinies,
he found the Cosmic Intelligence, which had fallen away
from him entirely since the 8th or 9th century A.D.,
— he found it again in the realm of mankind
below.
Thus it was in
the last third of the 19th century, when the Gabriel
dominion was over and the Michael dominion began to spread.
It was as though Michael, coming to the intelligent human
beings, arrived at a point where he could say: Here do I
find again that which has fallen away from me, which I
administered in times long past.
Now in the Middle
Ages there was a great conflict between the leading men of
the Dominican Order and those who, in a continuation of
Asiatic Alexandrianism, had found their way over into
Spain, — Averroes, for example. What was the
substance of this conflict? Averroes and those on his side
— the Mohammedan followers of Aristotelian learning
— said: “Intelligence is universal, common to
all.” They only spoke of a pan-Intelligence, not of
an individual human Intelligence. To Averroes the
individual human Intelligence was but a kind of mirrored
reflection in the single human head. In its reality it had
only a general, universal existence.
I will draw a
mirror, thus (drawing on the blackboard). I might equally
well have drawn a mirror not with nine parts only, but with
hundreds, thousands and millions. Over against it is an
object which will be reflected. So it was for Averroes, who
was attacked so vigorously by Thomas Aquinas. For Averroes
— in the tradition of the old Michael epoch —
Intelligence was pan-Intelligence, one Intelligence and one
only, which the several human heads reflected. As soon as
the human head ceases to work, the individual Intelligence
is no more. Now was this really true?
The fact is this.
That which Averroes conceived had been true till the end of
the Alexandrian age. It was simply a cosmic and human fact
until the end of that age. But Averroes held fast to it
while the Dominicans received into themselves the evolution
of mankind. They said, “It is not so.” They
might of course have said, “It was so once, but it is
not so today.” But they did not say this. They simply
took the actual and true condition at that time (the 13th
century) which became even more so in the 14th and 15th
centuries. They said: “Now everyone has his own
intellect, his own intelligence.”
This was what
really happened, and to bring these matters to full
clearness of understanding was the very task of the
super-sensible School of which I spoke last Monday. It was
repeated in that School again and again in many
metamorphoses, inasmuch as the character of the ancient
Mysteries was again and again described. Wonderfully
clearly and visibly, not in super-sensible Imaginations,
(these only came at the beginning of the 19th century) but
in super-sensible Inspirations, there was described what I
have often been able to give here in a reflected radiance
— the essence of the ancient Mysteries.
Then too they
pointed to the future, to what was to become the new life
of the Mysteries. They pointed to all that was to come,
though not in the way of the old Mysteries which had come
to human beings who did not yet possess Intelligence on
earth, and who, accordingly, still had a dream-like
experience of super-sensible worlds. They pointed to that
new life of the Mysteries which we must now begin to
understand in the realm of Anthroposophy, and which is
absolutely compatible with the full Intelligence of man
— the clear, light-filled Intelligence.
Let us now enter
a little into the more intimate details of the teachings of
that super-sensible School. For they led to a knowledge of
something, of which only a kind of shadowy reflection has
existed in the world-conceptions of men upon the earth
since the old Hebrew time and in the Christian era. It
exists, to this day (when a far deeper insight ought
already to prevail) in the large majority of men only as a
dim reflection out of old traditions. I mean the teaching
about Sin, about the sinful human being, the teaching about
man, who at the beginning of human evolution was
predestined not to descend so deeply into the material
realm as he has actually descended.
We can still find
a good version of this teaching in St. Martin, the
‘Unknown Philosopher.’ He still did teach his
pupils that originally, before human evolution on the earth
began, man stood upon a certain height from which he then
sank down through a primeval Sin which St. Martin describes
as the Cosmic Adultery. By a primeval Sin man descended to
that estate in which he finds himself today.
St. Martin here
points to something that was inherently contained in the
doctrine of Sin during the whole of human evolution, I
mean, the idea that man does not stand at that high level
at which he could be standing. All teachings about
inherited Sin were justly connected with this idea, that
man has descended from the height which originally was
his.
Now by following
this idea to its conclusion, a world-conception of a very
definite shade or colouring had gradually been evolved.
This kind of world-conception said in effect: Man has
become sinful (and to become sinful means to fall from
one's original height). And since man has in fact become
sinful, he cannot see the world as he would have been able
to see it in his sinless condition before the Fall. Man,
therefore, sees the world darkly and dimly. He sees it not
in its true form. He sees it with many illusions and false
fantasies. Above all, he sees what he sees in outer Nature,
not as it really is or with its true spiritual background.
He sees it in a material form which is not there in reality
at all. Such was the meaning of the saying: Man is sinful.
Such was its meaning in ancient time and — in the
traditions — frequently even to this day. Thus upon
earth too, those who had kept the tradition of the
Mysteries continued to teach: Man cannot perceive the
world, he cannot feel in the world, he cannot act in the
world as he would think and feel and act if he had not
become sinful, — if he had not descended from the
height for which his Gods originally predestined him.
Now we may turn
our gaze to all the leading Spirits in the kingdom of
Archangeloi who follow one another in earthly rule, so that
this earthly dominion is exercised by the several
Archangeloi in turn through successive periods of three to
three-and-a-half centuries. In the last three or four
centuries it has been the dominion of Gabriel. Now it will
be that of Michael, for three hundred years to come. Let us
turn our gaze therefore to the whole series of these
Archangel Beings: Gabriel, Raphael, Zachariel, Anael,
Oriphiel, Samael, Michael. As we look to all these Beings,
we can characterise the relation that exists between them
and the loftier Spirits of the Hierarchies, somewhat as
follows.
I beg you not to
take these words lightly or easily. We have but human words
to express these sublime realities. Simple as the words may
sound, they are not lightly meant. Of all these Angels, the
number of whom is seven, six have to a very considerable
extent (not entirely — Gabriel most of all —
but even he not altogether) — six, as I said, have to
a very considerable extent resigned themselves to the fact
that man is faced with Maya, with the great illusion,
because, in his quality which no longer accords with his
original pre-destination, he has in fact descended from his
first stature. Michael alone, Michael is the only one (I
say again, I am forced to use banal expressions) Michael is
the only one who would not give in. Michael, and with him
those who are the Michael spirits even among men, continues
to take this stand: I am the Ruler of the Intelligence. And
the Intelligence must be so ruled that there shall not
enter into it any illusion nor false fantasy, nor anything
that would restrict the human being to a dark and vague and
cloudy vision of the world.
My dear friends:
to see how Michael stands there as the greatest opponent in
the ranks of the Archangels, is an unspeakably uplifting
sight, — overpowering, magnificent. And every time a
Michael Age returned, it happened upon earth too that
Intelligence as a means to knowledge became not only
cosmopolitan as I have already said, but became such that
men were filled through and through with the consciousness:
We can after all ascend to the Divinity.
This
consciousness: “We can after all ascend to the
Divine,” played an immense part at the end of the
last Michael Age, the Michael Age before our own. Starting
from ancient Greece, the places of the ancient Mysteries
everywhere were in a state of discouragement; an atmosphere
of discouragement had come over them all. Discouraged were
those who lived on in Southern Italy and Sicily. The
successors of the ancient Pythagorean School of the sixth
pre-Christian century had been well-nigh extinguished. They
were filled with discouragement.
Once again, those
who were initiated in the Pythagorean Mysteries saw how
much illusion, illusion of materialism, was spreading over
the whole world.
Discouraged too
were those who were the daughters and sons of ancient
Egyptian Mysteries. Oh, these Egyptian Mysteries! It was
only like the slag from wonderful old veins of precious
metal, when they still handed down the deep old teachings,
such as were expressed in the legend of Osiris, or in the
worship of Serapis. And where were those mighty and
courageous ascents to the spiritual world that had taken
their start, for example, from the Mysteries of Diana at
Ephesus? Even the Samothracian Mysteries, the wisdom of the
Kabiri, could now only be deciphered by individuals who
bore deep within them the impulse of greatness to soar
upward with might and main. By such souls alone could the
clouds of smoke that ascended from Axieros, etc., from the
Kabiri, be deciphered.
Discouragement
everywhere! Everywhere a feeling of what they sought to
overcome in the ancient Mysteries as they turned to the
secret of the Sun Mystery, which is in truth the secret of
Michael. Everywhere a feeling: Man cannot, he is
unable.
This Michael Age
was an age of great trial and probation. Plato, after all,
was but a kind of watery extract of the ancient Mysteries.
The most intellectual element of this extract was then
extracted again in Aristotelianism, and Alexander took it
on his shoulders.
This was the word
of Michael at that time: Man must reach the
Pan-Intelligence, he must take hold of the Divine upon
earth in sinless form. From the centre of Alexandria the
best that has been achieved must be spread far and wide in
all directions, through all the places of the Mysteries,
discouraged as they are. This was the impulse of Michael.
This is indeed the relation of Michael to the other
Archangeloi. He has protested most strongly against the
Fall of man.
This too was the
most important content of his teaching, the teaching with
which he instructed his own in the super-sensible School of
which I spoke last Monday. It was as follows: Now that the
Intelligence will be down among men upon the earth, having
fallen from the lap of Michael and from his hosts, —
now in this new Age of Michael, men will have to become
aware of the way of their salvation. They must not allow
their Intelligence to be overcome by sinfulness; rather
must they use this age of Intelligence to ascend to the
spiritual life in purity of Intelligence, free from all
illusion.
Such is the mood
and feeling on the side of Michael as against the side of
Ahriman. On Monday last I characterised this great
contrast. Already the very strongest efforts are being made
by Ahriman, and more still will be made in the future
— the strongest efforts to acquire the Intelligence
that has come into the hands of men. For if men once became
possessed by Ahriman, Ahriman himself, in human heads,
would be possessing the Intelligence.
My dear friends,
we must learn to know this Ahriman, these hosts of Ahriman.
It is not enough to find the name of Ahriman contemptible
or to give the name of Ahriman to so many beings whom one
despises. That is of no avail. The point is that in Ahriman
there stands before us a cosmic Being of the highest
imaginable Intelligence, a cosmic Being who has already
taken the Intelligence entirely into the individual,
personal element. In every conceivable direction Ahriman is
in the highest degree intelligent, over-intelligent. He has
at his command a dazzling Intelligence, proceeding from the
whole human being, with the single exception of the part of
the human being which in the human forehead takes on a
human form.
To reproduce
Ahriman in human Imaginations we should have to give him a
receding forehead, a frivolously cynical expression, for in
him everything comes out of the lower forces, and yet from
these lower forces the highest Intelligence proceeds. If
ever we let ourselves in for a discussion with Ahriman, we
should inevitably be shattered by the logical
conclusiveness, the magnificent certainty of aim with which
he manipulates his arguments. The really decisive question
for the world of men, in the opinion of Ahriman, is this:
Will cleverness or stupidity prevail? And Ahriman calls
stupidity everything that does not contain Intelligence
within it in full personal individuality. Every
Ahriman-being is over-endowed with personal Intelligence in
the way I have now described; critical to a degree in the
repudiation of all things unlogical; scornful and
contemptuous in thought.
When we have
Ahriman before us in this way, then too we shall feel the
great contrast between Ahriman and Michael. For Michael is
not in the least concerned with the personal quality of
Intelligence. It is only for man that the temptation is
ever-present to make his Intelligence personal after the
pattern of Ahriman. Truth to tell, Ahriman has a most
contemptuous judgment of Michael. He thinks Michael foolish
and stupid, — stupid, needless to say, in relation to
himself. For Michael does not wish to seize the
Intelligence and make it personally his own. Michael only
wills, and has willed through the thousands of
years, nay through the aeons, to administer the
Pan-Intelligence. And now once more, now that men have the
Intelligence, it should again be administered by Michael as
something belonging to all mankind — as the common
and universal Intelligence that benefits all men alike.
We human beings
shall indeed do rightly, my dear friends, if we say to
ourselves: the idea that we can have cleverness for
ourselves alone is foolish. Certainly we cannot be clever
for ourselves alone. For if we want to prove anything to
another person logically, the first thing we must presume
is that the same logic holds good for him as for ourselves.
And for a third party again it is the same logic. If anyone
were able to have a logic of his own it would be absurd for
us to want to prove anything to him by our logic.
This after all is easy to realise; but it is essential in
the present age of Michael for this realisation also to
enter into our deepest feelings.
Thus behind the
scenes of existence is raging the battle of Michael against
all that is of Ahriman. And this, as I said last Monday, is
among the tasks of the anthroposophist. ... He must have a
feeling for the fact that these things are so at the
present time. He must feel that the cosmos is as it were in
the very midst of the battle.
You see, this
battle was already there in the cosmos, but it became
significant above all since the 8th or 9th century, when
the Cosmic Intelligence gradually fell away from Michael
and his hosts and came down to men on earth. It only became
acute when the Spiritual Soul began to unfold in humanity,
at the point of time which I have so often indicated, at
the beginning of the 15th century. In individual spirits
who lived on earth at that time, we see, even upon earth,
some sort of reflection of what was taking place in the
great super-sensible School of which I spoke last Monday. We
see something of it reflected in individual men on the
earth.
In recent
lectures we have said much of heavenly reflections in
earthly schools and institutions. We have spoken of the
great School of Chartres, and others. But we can speak of
this in relation to individual human beings too. Thus at
the very time when the Spiritual Soul began to evolve in
civilised mankind — when Rosicrucianism, genuine
Rosicrucianism, was nurturing the early beginnings of the
impulse to the Spiritual Soul, — something of the
impulse which was at work above the earth struck down like
lightning upon a spirit living in that age. I mean Raymond
of Sabunda. What he taught at the beginning of the 15th
century is almost like an earthly reflection of the great
super-sensible doctrine of Michael which I have
characterised.
He said: men have
fallen from the vantage-point that was given to them
originally by their Gods. If they had remained upon that
point, they would have seen around them all that lives in
the wondrous crystal shapes of the mineral kingdom, in the
amorphous mineral kingdom, in the hundred-and-thousand fold
forms of the plant kingdom, in the forms of the animal, all
that lives and moves in water and air, in warmth and in the
earthly realm. All this they would have seen as it really
is, in its true nature.
Raymond of
Sabunda called to mind, how the Tree of Sephiroth, or the
Aristotelian categories (those generalised concepts that
look so strange to one who cannot understand them) contain
what is meant to guide us through Intelligence, up into the
universe. How dry, how appallingly dry do these categories
seem as they are taught in the textbooks of Logic. Being,
having, becoming, here, there — ten of these
categories, ten abstract concepts, and people say: it is
too dreadful, it is appalling to have to learn such
abstractions. Why should anyone grow warm with enthusiasm
for ten generalised concepts — being, having,
becoming and so forth?
But it is just as
though someone were to say: here is Goethe's Faust.
Why do people make so much fuss of it? It only consists of
A, B, C, D, E, F, ... to Z. Nothing else is there in the
book, only A, B, C, D ... Z in various combinations and
permutations. Certainly one who cannot read, and takes
Goethe's Faust in hand, will not perceive the
greatness that is contained in it. He will only see A, B,
C, D ... to Z. One who does not know how the A, B, C, D,
are to be combined, who does not know how they are related
to one another, cannot read Goethe's Faust.
So it is, in
relation to the reading of words, with the Aristotelian
categories. There are ten of them, not so many as the
letters of the alphabet, but they are indeed the spiritual
letters. And anyone who knows how to manipulate
‘being,’ ‘having,’
‘becoming,’ etc., in the right way, —
just as we must know how to treat the several letters so
that they produce the Faust of Goethe, —
anyone who knows how to do this, may still be able to
divine what Aristotle for example said of these things in
his instruction of Alexander.
Raymond of
Sabunda was one who still drew attention to such things. He
had knowledge of them. He said: Look for instance at what
is still contained in Aristotelianism. There we find
something that has still remained of that old standpoint
from which man fell at the beginning of human evolution on
earth. Originally, men still preserved some memory of it.
It was the reading in the Book of Nature. But men have
fallen; they can no longer truly read in the Book of
Nature. Hence God in His Compassion has given them in the
Bible, the Book of Revelation, in order that they may not
entirely depart from the Divine and Spiritual. Thus Raymond
of Sabunda still taught, even in the 15th century, that the
Book of Revelation exists for sinful man because he is no
longer able to read in the Book of Nature. And in the way
he taught these things, we can already perceive his idea
that man must find once more the power to read in the great
Book of Nature.
This is the
impulse of Michael. Now that the Intelligence administered
by him has come down to men, it is his impulse to lead men
again to the point where they will read once more in the
Book of Nature. The great Book of Nature will be opened
again. Men will read once more in the Book of Nature.
In reality,
everyone who is in the Anthroposophical Movement should
feel that he can only understand his karma when he knows
that he personally is called to read once more,
spiritually, in the Book of Nature — to find the
spiritual background of Nature, God having given His
Revelation for the intervening time.
Read the inner
meaning that is contained in my book
Mysticism at the Dawn of the Modern Spiritual Life
(Modern Mysticism).
[Mysticism and Modern Thought. Anthroposophical
Publishing Co.] On the last page you will see (in the form,
of course, in which I could and had to write it at that
time), you will see that the whole point was to guide the
Anthroposophical Movement in this direction — to
awaken once more the faculty to read not only in the Book
of Revelation, in which I said that Jacob Boehme was still
reading, but in the Book of Nature. The blundering,
inadequate, and frequently repulsive attempts of modern
natural science must be transmuted by a spiritual
world-conception, till there arise from them a true reading
of the Book of Nature. I think even this expression,
‘the Book of Nature,’ is to be found at the end
of my book
Mysticism at the Dawn of the Modern Spiritual Life.
From the very beginning, the Anthroposophical
Movement had this ‘Shibboleth.’ From the very
beginning it was an appeal to those who should now listen
to the voice of their own karma, and hear more or less
dimly and subconsciously the call: ‘Behold, my karma
is somehow moved and taken hold of by this Michael message
which is sounding forth into the world. I, through my own
karma, have to do with this.’
There are the
human beings after all, who have been always there. They
are always there. They have come, and they will come ever
and again. There are those who are prepared in some sense
to depart from the world and come together in this which is
now called the Anthroposophical Society. As to the sense in
which this ‘departure from the world’ is to be
conceived — whether it be more or less real, or
outwardly formal or the like — that is another
matter. For the individual souls it is a kind of
departure — a going away from the world and into
something different from the world in which they have grown
up. All manner of karmic experiences come to the
individual, each in his own way. The one will have this or
that to undergo through the fact that he must tear himself
loose from old connections and unite with those who are
seeking to cultivate the message of Michael. There are some
who feel this union with the mission of Michael as a kind
of salvation. There are others who feel it in a different
way, finding themselves in this position: ‘I am drawn
to Michael on the one hand and to Ahrimanism on the other.
I cannot choose. Through my life I stand in the midst of
these things.’ There are some whose inner courage
tears them away, albeit they still preserve the outward
connections. There are some who still find the outer
connections easily. And this perhaps is best for the
present condition of the Anthroposophical Society. But in
every case, those human beings who are within the
Anthroposophical Movement stand face to face with others
who are not in it, including some with whom they are
deeply, karmically connected from former earthly lives.
Here we can look into the strangest of karmic threads.
My dear friends,
we shall only be able to understand these karmic threads if
we remember all the preceding conditions that we have now
set forth. We shall only understand them when we have
really seen how the souls who today, out of their
unconscious Being, feel impelled to the Anthroposophical
Movement, have undergone experiences together. For they
have undergone much together in former lives on earth.
Moreover the great majority of them belonged to the hosts
who heard the Michael message in the super-sensible in the
15th, 16th and 17th centuries, and who took part at the
beginning of the 19th century in the great Imaginative
ceremony of which I have here spoken. Thus we behold a
mighty Cosmic and Tellurian call, addressed to the deep
karmic relationship of the members of the Anthroposophical
Society. We heard last Monday, how this call will continue
throughout the 20th century, and how the culmination will
come at the end of this century. Of these things, my dear
friends, I will speak again next Sunday.
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