Ahriman: Occult Annihilation of the Soul

by Douglas Gabriel

This lecture is available in a very nice PDF download HERE.  

“The time of decision is around the end of the Twentieth Century when we will either

stand at the grave of civilization in a War of All against All or turn toward a spiritualized culture.”

                                                                                                  Rudolf Steiner GA 240

    We live in grave times. Reading the news headlines on any particular day, one can easily feel overwhelmed with the impending collapse of cultures, countries, financial markets, common decency, law and order, education, and spiritual and moral impulses. One crisis after another, whether real or false flags, are used to chisel away our personal freedoms and liberties, leading us into an Orwellian world of global governance and the complete annihilation of all that is divine in the world. We hold on to threadbare strands of hope, praying for mercy and divine intervention in a global quagmire that seems unsolvable. 

    Where is the Christ that was to come? Where is the path to Shamballa? Where is the otherworldly exit door to all of this worldly madness?

    If you are new to anthroposophy you may not be aware that Rudolf Steiner spoke of these matters at great length. For those that have studied anthroposophy, you will recall that Steiner wrote of the War of All against All, a time in a distant future that is the transition to the future Earth. But what many may not be aware of is that this struggle can take place at any cultural period either in a microcosmic form or in a full-fledged battle between the Moon and Earth.

    In order to be victorious in this struggle–whether now or at the end of the Seventh Epoch, whether personally or globally—one must meet evil in its luciferic and ahrimanic forms with courage to see through their terrifying and daunting spectres of fear, hatred and doubt, embracing in their place a spirit full of faith, love, and wisdom. To do so is to wield the sword of Michael and slay the fiery dragon. But, first, one must become aware of evil and, like the miller’s daughter in Rumpelstiltskin, call out his name in full recognition of the devil he is. 

    Rudolf Steiner (1861-1925) wrote and lectured extensively on these beings—Lucifer and Ahriman—as well as the Being of Christ who incarnated in Palestine and is the second person in the Holy Trinity. What may be a surprise for readers new to anthroposophy is that on each side of Christ there are two beings, a left hand and right hand path of evil.  Those two beings of evil are Lucifer, the tempter, the left hand path of evil, and Ahriman, the father of lies, the right hand path of evil. Lucifer is the fallen angel we know from the Bible. Ahriman, whose name is taken from Ancient Persia where he was seen as the polar opposite of the sun god, is also known as Satan. 

    Another surprise comes from the teachings of Steiner that both Lucifer and Ahriman actually incarnate once as a human being, Lucifer in 2000 BC and Ahriman in 2000 AD, and that Christ balances them by incarnating in the middle. There is another being of evil that directly opposes Christ known as Sorath or Sorat the Sun-Demon who incarnates in the distant future as an assault against the development of the human ego. His incarnation is now being prepared by Ahriman. These four beings and their physical incarnations are part of the plan of spiritual evolution, and each being, even though deemed evil, has important functions in the evolution of the free human being who must develop discernment to know the difference between each of these beings. As hopeless as the world may seem at times, we can have comfort in knowing that the spirits of opposition are an important part of the divine plan.

    Christ’s incarnation created the turning point of time as all evolution revolves around this central event. Christ incarnated once to defeat the existing effects of Lucifer’s human incarnation in China and prepare for the incarnation of Ahriman in North America. Christ conquered the temptations of Lucifer as He will conquer the lies of Ahriman, as He will, by donating the form of the human ego (I consciousness) to man at the turning point of time, conquer Sorat’s anti-ego influence in the distant future.  Because of the Deed of Christ at the Mystery of Golgotha, Christ’s perfected ego now exists in an etheric form in the realm of the super-etheric and can replicate itself for those who wish to take on this perfected form. Although it will take humanity as a whole quite some time to take on the perfected vehicle of Christ consciousness, there are some advanced souls, and you may be one, who have or will accomplish this wonder and bring teachings that align with the perfected vehicles of Christ. 

    In order to become conscious of evil so that we can ascend to Christ consciousness, we must know its many faces and manifestations. We must recognize their physical incarnations. The time has passed for recognizing the incarnations of Lucifer and Christ, and Sorat does not come until a distant future. Our task today is to understand the incarnation of Ahriman. No one has written more extensively of Ahriman than Rudolf Steiner, so it would seem only logical to read what he has written and lectured about the subject. The purpose of this paper, Ahriman’s Incarnation and the Future, is to provide the initiate with a compilation of Steiner’s descriptions of Ahriman, and where those descriptions are not easily quoted, provide the reader with a summation of Steiner’s indications for the particular topic.

    Passages that come directly from Steiner are referenced with their GA number (collected works) and title reference, along with a reduced font size. Summations by the author remain in the font size of the manuscript and are designated with the initials “DG.” 

The Incarnations of Lucifer, Christ, Ahriman (RS)

The Ahrimanic Deception, Zurich, October 27, 1919, GA 193

       The impulses entering humanity from a luciferic source sank down gradually into the soul. The ahrimanic, is growing stronger and stronger in modern times. It will become increasingly strong in the near future and on into future ages. The ahrimanic impulse proceeds from a super-sensible Being different from the Being of Christ or of Lucifer. The influence of this Being becomes especially powerful in the fifth post-Atlantean epoch. If we look at the confused conditions of recent years we shall find that men have been brought to such chaotic conditions mainly through the ahrimanic powers.

    Just as there was an incarnation of Lucifer at the beginning of the third pre-Christian millennium, as there was the Christ Incarnation at the time of the Mystery of Golgotha, so there will be a Western incarnation of the Ahriman being in the third post-Christian millennium. At the one pole stands a luciferic incarnation, in the center, the incarnation of Christ, and at the other pole the ahrimanic incarnation. Lucifer is the power that stirs up in man all fanatical, all falsely mystical forces, all that physiologically tends to bring the blood into disorder and so lift man above and outside himself. Ahriman is the power that makes man dry, prosaic, philistine – that ossifies him and brings him to the superstition of materialism. And the true nature and being of man is essentially the effort to hold the balance between the powers of Lucifer and Ahriman; the Christ Impulse helps present humanity to establish this equilibrium.

    Viewed historically, we find that the luciferic preponderated in certain currents of cultural development of the pre-Christian age and continued into the first centuries of our era. On the other hand, the ahrimanic influence has been at work since the middle of the fifteenth century and will increase in strength until an actual incarnation of Ahriman takes place among Western humanity.

    Ahrimanic powers prepare the evolution of mankind in such a way that it can fall a prey to Ahriman when he appears in human form within Western civilization as once Lucifer appeared in human form in China, as once Christ appeared in human form in Asia Minor. Ahriman will appear in human form and the only question is, how he will find humanity prepared. Will his preparations have secured for him as followers the whole of mankind that today calls itself civilized, or will he find a humanity that can offer resistance. Disregard of truth is precisely what will build Ahriman the best bridge to the success of his incarnation.

    Ahriman stirs up all the emotions that split men up into small groups – groups that mutually attack one another. Ahriman also makes use of what develops from the old conditions of heredity which man has really outgrown in the fifth post-Atlantean epoch. The ahrimanic powers use all that is derived from old circumstances of heredity in order to set men against each other in conflicting groups. All that comes from old differences of family, race, tribe, peoples, is used by Ahriman to create confusion.

    Ahriman skillfully prepares his goal beforehand; ever since the Reformation and the Renaissance, the economist has been emerging in modern civilization as the representative governing type. Since that time the economist has been in command. Rulers are in fact merely the handymen, the understrappers of the economists.

    We know very well that we have no occasion either to hate Ahriman or to fear Lucifer, since their powers are inimical only when they are working outside the realm where they belong. Luciferic activity has the result of making the will young. When the activity of our soul is streamed through by luciferic activity the result is will. When the luciferic influence predominates, when Lucifer makes his forces felt in the soul, then will is active in us. Lucifer has a rejuvenating influence on the whole stream of our soul-activity.

     When Ahriman brings his influence to bear on our soul-activity, he hardens it, it becomes old, and thinking is the result. The etheric body has actually this appearance; one can perceive in it luciferic light and ahrimanic hardness. But there are places where the etheric body seems to be quite non-transparent, as if it had ice tracings in it. This freezing of the etheric body at certain places is due to Ahriman; his forces have found entry there by means of thought. There are also places which seem to be full of light. Here the etheric body is transparent and gleams and glows with light. It is Lucifer who sends his rays into the etheric body of man and makes there centers of will. Then there are regions in between, where the etheric body is in perpetual movement and activity. Here you see at one moment hardness – and then suddenly the hardness is caught by a ray of light and melts right away. Hardening and dissolving, in perpetual alternation – such is the expression of the activity of feeling in the etheric body.

    When the ahrimanic forces gain the upper hand, we have an expression of thinking; when the luciferic forces are in ascendance, we have an expression of willing; and when they are in mutual conflict one with the other, we have an expression of feeling.

    Ahriman has great power over our waking consciousness. In sleep consciousness, Lucifer has the upper hand. They are in equilibrium only when we dream; there they pull with equal force, they strike a balance between them. The ideas which are called forth by Ahriman in day consciousness and which he causes to harden and crystallize, are dissolved and made to disappear under the influence of Lucifer.

    Thus we are truly, in a certain connection, redeemers of Lucifer. When we begin to be able to love our duty, then the moment has come when we can help towards the redemption and release of the luciferic powers; we set free the Lucifer forces which are held in us as by a charm, and lead them forth to fight with Ahriman. We release the imprisoned Lucifer (imprisoned in self-love) when we learn to love our duty.

    Calm and peace of mind have the coldness of Ahriman; in the quiet understanding of what is in the world, we unite our warmth and our understanding love with the coldness that is in the world outside. And then we release Ahriman, when we meet what has come about with understanding, when we do not merely demand our rights out of self-love but understand what has come about in the world. In the revolutionary stream lives Lucifer, in the conservative stream Ahriman, and man in his life of right lives in the midst between these two poles. This is the eternal battle that is waged between Lucifer and Ahriman. 

Ahriman and Lucifer in the Modern World (DG)

    In the modern world, ahrimanic shadow-thoughts rule the day. Our media devices are so alluring and addictive that children and adults seldom turn away from them for long. Whether those platforms are television, smart phones, game systems, computers, or virtual reality, they are seductive distractions that draw our attention away from the spiritual to the materialism of an electronic sphere where Ahriman ensnares us in his spider web network of grey shadow thoughts. The ego of the unwitting devotee of Ahriman is entangled with Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and a plethora of electronic prisons that fabricate a false version of ego – a digital-ego that appears to be connected with other human egos, but is, in fact, a complete mirage of one’s true ego. 

    Any of us can appear to be clever as we access unlimited information from search engines, but this is hardly having knowledge that is earned by rigorous thinking and actual experience. Ahriman gives us the illusion of having all knowledge at our fingertips, but what we really have is so much information that we are overwhelmed with indigestible digital gobbledygook. It is hard to discern the pearls from the swill. In fact, Ahriman uses the ease of posting information on the digital platform to confuse us even more. An entire world of anti-knowledge and propaganda fills the digital world, drowning us in so much information that it is difficult to discern truth from fiction. Fake websites, false-flag events, photo-shopped images, propaganda, lies and deceit, and distractions continue to pour into the great fathom of the internet which is as unlimited as our cosmos. Ahriman’s intent of destroying human intelligence and diverting us from pursuit of spiritual consciousness is accomplished when we are so overwhelmed by the digital world that we simply become absorbed in its electronic energy. Sadly, many of us don’t have the consciousness to know that this has happened and any thought of spiritual beings and a world outside of materialism is not even considered.

    An over-reaction to the influence of Ahriman might be to eschew all electronic platforms and anything that smacks of materialism. But Ahriman would not be in the world if he didn’t have something to offer the initiate for spiritual evolution. Just as Lucifer gave man the capacity of thinking, Ahriman will give man the sacred magic of will power. It behoves the initiate to recognize Ahriman as he manifests in the world today so that his incarnation can be redeemed for a higher purpose in man.  

    The higher spiritual forces of Christ, the middle-path, are able to discern the good and ill that both Lucifer and Ahriman offer to the human soul at every moment of decision. There is no ultimate evil, just regressive beings who resist the progressive beings. These beings of evil will be redeemed in time but the soul of the individual is in the middle of a pitched battle for its ego. Lucifer would have us ascend into the spiritual world too quickly and Ahriman would have us forget our spiritual nature and be forever imprisoned in materialism. 

    Luciferic beings are regressive spiritual beings. There have been regressive beings involved in each of the planetary incarnations of Earth – Saturn, Sun, Moon, and Earth. Each set of regressive beings has a separate name and somewhat different ways of manifesting. The regressive beings of the Moon incarnation of Earth are called luciferic and are found working in the astral body of human beings. The regressive beings of the Sun incarnation of Earth are called ahrimanic and are found working in the etheric body of the human being. The regressive beings of the Saturn incarnation of Earth are called asuric and work through the physical body of the human being.

    In the astral body of the human being, the luciferic beings try to draw mankind away from the normal earth evolution to their own realm of light. In the human soul they inspire pride, egotism, disinterest in others, fiery emotionalism, subjectivity, fantasy, and hallucination. In the human intellect they inspire generalization, unification, hypothesizing, and the building of imaginative, fantastical pictures that are beyond reality. Human speech and thought were given by luciferic beings to humanity which developed into self-consciousness and the capacity for independent thinking.   

    When Lucifer incarnated in a human body, he brought about a revolution in human consciousness. Before then, humanity could not use the organs of intellect and lived by a kind of instinct. Lucifer was the first to comprehend through the human intellect the wisdom of the mysteries. The effects of Lucifer’s incarnation inspired culture from the ancient Chinese through the teachings of the Gnostics, lingering into the early nineteenth century. The great initiates took it upon themselves to enter into the luciferic influence and turn it to the benefit of mankind. Only through the luciferic influence has mankind risen above the status of immaturity.

    Ahriman, too, has his purpose for helping man evolve as this biography of Ahriman will illustrate. 

Lucifer, Christ, and Ahriman (RS)

Thinking and Willing as Two Poles of the Human Soul-Life, Dornach, July 15, 1921, GA 205

    Thus our life is poised mid-way between the annihilation of earthly existence and the building up of earthly existence, in other words, between Lucifer and Ahriman. Lucifer is concerned with the attempt to make us into non-corporeal beings; he would fain lift us right out of earthly existence. Lucifer, if he could, would spiritualise us, or shall we say de-materialize us. But Ahriman is his opponent. Ahriman works in such a way that he continually fills in what is hollowed out by Lucifer. If you wished to give plastic expression to Lucifer and Ahriman you could do it very well by merging your material in such a way that the figure of Ahriman was continually pressing into the hollows and curves of Lucifer, as though desirous of turning him inside out. And because these hollows and cavities are actually present within us they must be pushed outwards, they must, as it were, be turned inside out. Ahriman and Lucifer are two opposing forces, and both work in the human being. Equilibrium lies between them. The result of Lucifer’s persistent efforts at dematerialization is: Materialization. When we perceive: Lucifer. When we think over that which we have perceived: Ahriman. When we form ideas with regard to our desires and wishes: Lucifer. When we really bring our will-forces into play on the earth: Ahriman. Thus we stand midway between them both. As human beings we are placed in the most intimate relationship with the ahrimanic and luciferic powers, and we learn to understand man only when we consider him in connection with these polar opposites. Christ stands there as the Balance between Lucifer and Ahriman.

The Incarnation of Ahriman (DG)   

    The being of Ahriman will use all aspects of scientific materialism to bring a form of mechanical occultism to his followers. He will appear as a type of anti-Christ who his disciples will confuse as another incarnation of Christ. There will be no love in Ahriman and his cold heart will not be able to help freedom and love develop, only fear and hatred. Christ will antidote this evil by appearing in the etheric realm in what is commonly called the second coming of Christ in the etheric. This etheric clairvoyance will be the opposite of the mechanical occultism clairvoyance which Ahriman will grant his followers. Ahriman’s clairvoyance will lead to dead ends and will not help the initiate advance to the astral light vision of Christ in the etheric realm.

    Ahriman’s followers will have different visions that will not coincide with one another. Instead of connecting humans to one another and to divine beings, Ahriman separates humans from each other and anything spiritual. When you see a world divided into countless factions, battling one another with angry words or devastating wars, you see the manifestation of Ahriman. Basically, this is a pre-figuring of the War of All against All that will come in the distant future, or, if we don’t become spiritually vigilant, may come to pass in our time.

    Ahriman has been working to steal human intelligence since printing was invented. The printed word, book, or library gives the reader the illusion that the knowledge in print, the book in his hand, is his personal knowledge. This concept explodes infinitely with the invention of the internet, giving any user information of all time, all cultures, and any subject. It takes spiritual work and effort to embody knowledge, as any ardent student of Steiner will attest. Knowledge is not obtained by surfing, clicking, and scanning web pages. Knowledge must ripen with time and grow into wisdom before it is infused by Christ in the free human soul. 

    Ahriman amplifies information to the point that anything of spiritual value is muted. He then has been effective in keeping humanity from knowing its spiritual origins and future. This conflagration of digital information may provide endless knowledge, but without the integration of human warmth, it will not be imbued with wisdom.  Ahriman and Lucifer will give us plenty of information and cleverness, but without Christ, knowledge cannot yield wisdom.

    Anthroposophically speaking, Ahriman is a retarded or regressive hierarchical spiritual being of the rank of the Spirits of Form from the Sun Incarnation of Earth. He works in the realm of the Archai (Spirits of Time) and can be found active in the etheric body of the human being. Ahriman’s ultimate intent is to foil the goals of human spiritual evolution. 

    He and his hosts wish to freeze the earth into complete rigidity, so that it will not pass over to the Jupiter, Venus, and Vulcan incarnations of Earth, and to make the human being into an entirely earthly being who is not individualized, a slave to materialism, and divorced from the divine. He wants to materialize, crystallize, darken, silence, and kill the living spirit. Ahriman promotes the illusion, the lie, that matter is primary reality, or the only reality.    

    The modern scientific revolution, since the fifteenth century, has been inspired largely by Ahriman. He is the inspirer of amoral, atheistic, mechanistic materialism. He wants humanity to live from unconscious instincts as a member of a collective herd. Ahriman teaches that humanity is derived from animals and is little better. 

    Scientific materialistic thinking is hardly conscious or all-encompassing at all. Each scientific area is a silo of its own, rarely exploring fields afar or integrating whole living processes in its investigations. Ahriman wants humanity to be part of a herd, a general species of pseudo-humans who are clever, earth-bound animals that experience the world through narrow vision and are not conscious of their life beyond the borders of birth and death.

    Ahriman believes there is no spirit or soul in the world but that life itself is a mechanical process, a machine of sorts. He is more apt to liken the body to a machine than to an angel. He works through subconscious instincts, inspiring fear, hatred, lust for power, and destructive sex impulses. He inspires rigid, automatic thinking that is hard and literal, not soaring and imaginative.

    Ahriman uses hollow words to separate language from meaning and reality. Language becomes dead under his rulership and human warmth is withdrawn from conversation. Eventually ahrimanic thinking leads us to thoughts devoid of spirit. Only by consciously imbuing our thoughts, conversations, and writings with human warmth are we able to counter the death of spirit in our language. 

    Another tendency of ahrimanic thinking is nationalism based on ethnicity with dogmatic party politics breeding hatred for others, destroying cultural, political, and economic life. Ahriman promotes mechanization of the world bound by rigid laws everywhere, with little place for free human initiative. Philistinism, tedium, alienation, and lack of interest in one’s work kill human intelligence and imagination.

    In medicine, we find Ahriman entrenched in materialistic, mechanistic experimentalism and treatment, isolating symptoms of the patient from his whole physical health and environment in order to prescribe federally-approved allopathic drugs that better serve pharmaceutical companies than the patient. The ahrimanic cycle of the medical industry is quite disturbing. First poison the crops with irradiation, pesticides, and genetically modified foods all in the name of growing better harvests, which, in turn, cause disease and illness, which then creates a life-long customer for the medical conglomeration.

    Or vaccinate a child with massive inoculations, causing medical conditions immediately or in the future, and create another steady customer base for the medical industry. Process and pasteurize foods so that they are left without enzymes and are indigestible, causing further symptoms that create even more customers. Then create a medical system so that every symptom can be checked off an extensive list which has a corresponding government approved drug to treat the symptom. Punish any doctor that goes outside of these parameters because holistic approaches to healing do not bring repeat customers to the medical big business. Make sure alternative remedies are discouraged or outlawed by regulation or legislation.

    This is an example of how Ahriman works in the world of money, power, greed, and the severance of man from his spiritual source until a human is nothing more than a cog in a medical industry wheel, our physical bodies used as economic food for others to feed upon. Similar analogies could be given for big business involved in education, war, politics, and organized religion.

    For example, ahrimanic materialistic interpretations of the Gospels make Christ into a simple man with little spiritual connection to the modern human. Worship of the physical world leads humans to deny life after death and a struggle to find solace exclusively in the physical world. Once Ahriman closes off the spiritual world to humans, they can easily lose connection to morality, spirituality, and a virtuous life. Instead they begin a descent towards a more animal-like existence, spiralling downward through the seven deadly sins.

    Instead of “feeding the gods” with our etherized blood, we feed Ahriman with physical bodies that have become diseased by Ahriman’s own mechanical processes that sabotage health, healing, and spiritual evolution. Instead of partaking in a reciprocal stream of spiritual nutrition between humans and angels that lifts us into higher dimensions of consciousness, we are tethered to an ahrimanic stream which gaols us in a material prison that keeps us from knowing our spiritual future.      

    In this way, Ahriman hardens the etheric body in man so that it becomes a vehicle of automatic, intellectual thinking devoid of will, permanently shackling human etheric bodies in the region of the earth after death. Man would become clever, animalistic, ghostly, earth-bound creatures. The earth would become so hardened without the vibrancy of human etheric bodies that it could not pass over to the Jupiter incarnation of Earth. Ahriman’s followers seek a kind of “immortality” in the slag-earth that will surround the earth with Old Moon forces.  It will be an immortality with egotistic, earthly consciousness instead of the cosmic consciousness of the individualized spiritual ego.

    The old earth would be preserved and parts of humanity would become etheric ghosts, imprisoned in an etheric body made of earth substance that does not dissolve. Those humans would not be able to ascend to spiritual heights but would remain chained to Earth as egoless soul beings. Ahriman will preserve dead thinking through a condensed etheric body of the Earth. In doing so, he darkens the etheric realm where Christ can be found and instead promises an ahrimanic immortality. 

    Despite these ominous descriptions of Ahriman, his incarnation need not be an evil event. His incarnation is necessary in human and earthly evolution, and can be turned toward the good if humanity meets it in the right way. Ahriman wants us to be unconscious; but it is our responsibility to strive to be more and more conscious, and to help inculcate consciousness in as many people as we can. We can become more aware of the meaning of our own lives and of the world by studying and filling ourselves with the modern form of cosmic wisdom given by spiritual science. Just as the ancient initiates entered into luciferic wisdom and rescued it for the good of mankind, now must mankind, with the consciousness gained from spiritual science and from the Etheric Christ, enter into ahrimanic knowledge and turn it to good purpose.

    Ahrimanic knowledge will show what cleverness can, and cannot, produce from earthly forces. If we meet Ahriman consciously, we can acquire through him the realization that the earth is becoming old and must decline physically, eventually to die and enter the spiritual worlds, to be reborn as the Jupiter incarnation of Earth. Ahriman wishes to preserve, condense, and harden the old earth and its etheric body so that it will not evolve into the future Jupiter incarnation of Earth but will become a dwelling place for his beings, a new planet of his own making.   

    Ahriman is the false prince of the world who makes the claim that he is the one who guides and leads humanity. He is the mighty teacher of materialistic Darwinism and technology. His goal is to slay human awareness of spirituality in us and harden the ego. Ahriman wants to create a humanity that is a group soul of animals which thinks without using the vehicle of an ego, or human I consciousness. He tries to numb us to the fact that humans have the capacity to think angelic thoughts, spiritual thoughts.

    Whereas Christ wishes to create a new spiritual Earth from the old one through love and human freedom, Ahriman wants to destroy the cosmic plan and be the god of his own world.

Ahriman’s Incarnation in the West (RS)

The Influences of Lucifer and Ahriman, Human Responsibility for the Earth, Dornach, 1919, GA 191

    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. But what matters is that people shall find the right vantage point from which to confront it.  If Ahriman were able to slink into a humanity unaware of his coming, that would gladden him most of all.

    Ahriman’s impulse is clearly evident in the spread of the belief that the mechanistic, mathematical conceptions inaugurated by Galileo, Copernicus, and others, explain what is happening in the cosmos. The cosmos is permeated by soul and spirit. It is this knowledge that Ahriman, in preparing his earthly incarnation, wants to withhold. Whatever can separate people into groups, whatever can alienate them from mutual understanding the whole world over and drive wedges between them, strengthens Ahriman’s impulse.

    It was a pre-eminently luciferic culture that persisted until after the Mystery of Golgotha – a culture inspired by the incarnation of Lucifer in China in the third millennium B.C. Many influences of this incarnation continued to radiate and were still powerful in the early Christian centuries; indeed they are working to this day. Through Lucifer, human beings have acquired the faculty of using the organs of their intellect, of their power of intellectual discernment. It was Lucifer himself, in a human body, who was the first to grasp through the power of intellect what formerly could be imparted to humanity only through revelation, namely, the content of the Mysteries.

    But 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. The ahrimanic incarnation will be greatly furthered if people fail to establish a free and independent spiritual life and allow it to remain entangled in the economic or political life. To the ahrimanic power a free spiritual life would denote a kind of darkness, and people’s interest in it, a burning, raging fire.

    It should be realized that just as external science becomes ahrimanic, the higher development of our inner nature becomes luciferic if we give ourselves up to mystical experiences.

    There is nothing more ahrimanic than this knowledge of the material world, for it is sheer illusion. Nevertheless if the fata morgana that arises out of chemistry, out of physics, out of astronomy and the like can fill us with fiery enthusiasm and interest, then through our interest – which is itself luciferic – we can wrest from Ahriman what is his own.  Nothing does more to prepare the path for Ahriman’s incarnation than to find this or that tedious, to consider oneself superior to one thing or another and refuse to enter into it.

    The incarnation of Ahriman in human form may be able to mislead and corrupt humankind on earth to the uttermost. A task of humankind during the next phase of civilization will be to live toward the incarnation of Ahriman with such alert consciousness that this incarnation can actually serve to promote a higher, spiritual development, inasmuch as through Ahriman himself humanity will become aware of what can, or shall we say, cannot be achieved by physical life alone.

    It must be realized that Ahriman will live among people on the earth, but that in confronting him people will themselves determine what they may learn from him, what they may receive from him. This, however, they will not be able to do unless, from now onward, they take control of certain spiritual and also unspiritual currents which otherwise are used by Ahriman for the purpose of leaving humankind as deeply unconscious as possible of his coming; then, one day, he will be able to appear on earth and overwhelm people tempting and luring them to repudiate earth evolution, thus preventing it from reaching its goal.

   The Representative of Man by Rudolf Steiner

    In the future people will either receive spiritual knowledge consciously or consume the spirit unconsciously, thereby delivering it into the hands of the luciferic powers. This stream of spirit-and-soul-consumption is particularly encouraged by Ahriman because in this way he can lull humankind into greater and greater drowsiness, so that then, through his incarnation, he will be able to come among people and fall upon them unawares because they do not confront him consciously.

    Everything that is developing as intellectual life without being suffused by warmth of soul, without being quickened by enthusiasm, directly furthers the incarnation of Ahriman in a way that is after his own heart. It lulls people to sleep. Chauvinism, perverted patriotism in every form – this is the material from which Ahriman will build just what he needs.     

    And those who believe they are being most truly Christian by rejecting any development of the conception of the Christ mystery, are, in their arrogance,  the ones who do most to promote Ahriman’s aims. The denominations and sects are positively spheres of encouragement, breeding-grounds for Ahriman. Just as the materialistic attitude, rejecting the spiritual altogether and contending that the human being is a product of what people eat and drink, furthers Ahriman’s aims, so are these aims furthered by the stubborn rejection of everything spiritual and adherence to the literal, “simple” conception of the Gospels. In their day, the Gospels were given as a necessary counterweight to the luciferic gnosis; but if no attempt is made to develop understanding of their content, the aims of Ahriman are furthered, not the progress of humankind.

    If, in the future, people were to do nothing themselves toward acquiring a new wisdom, then, without their consciousness, the whole of culture would become ahrimanic, and it would be easy for the influences issuing from Ahriman’s incarnation to permeate all civilization on the earth. Through certain stupendous acts he would bring to humanity all the clairvoyant knowledge which until then can be acquired only by dint of intense labor and effort. When Ahriman incarnates in the West at the appointed time, he would establish a great occult school for the practice of magic arts of the greatest grandeur, and what otherwise can be acquired only by strenuous effort would be poured over humankind. The clairvoyance of each individual would be strictly differentiated. What one person would see, a second and a third would not see. Human beings would succumb to Ahriman simply through not having acquired by their own efforts what Ahriman is ready and able to give them. The result would be the establishment of Ahriman’s kingdom on earth and the overthrow of everything achieved hitherto by human culture.

    Our concern is that the wisdom of the future – a clairvoyant wisdom – shall be rescued from the clutches of Ahriman. Again let it be repeated that there is only one book of wisdom, not two kinds of wisdom. The issue is whether this wisdom is in the hands of Ahriman or of Christ.

    A good way of playing into Ahriman’s hands is to exclude everything of the nature of knowledge from denominational religion and to insist that simple faith is enough. If people cling to this simple faith, they condemn their soul to stagnation and then the wisdom that must be rescued from Ahriman cannot find entry. The root of the matter is that for the wisdom of the future too, a struggle is necessary, a struggle similar to that waged against Lucifer by the ancient initiates through whose intermediary the faculties of speech and of thinking were transmitted to humanity. Just as it devolved upon the initiates of the primeval wisdom to wrest from Lucifer that which has become human reason, human intellect, so the insight which is to develop in the future into the inner realities of things must be wrested from the ahrimanic powers.

    We have only to remember that it is the endeavor of the ahrimanic powers to reduce the earth to a state of complete rigidification. Their victory would be won if they succeeded in bringing earth, water, and air into this rigidified state. Were that to happen, the earth could not again acquire the Saturn warmth from which it proceeded and which must be regained in the Vulcan epoch; and to prevent this is the aim of the ahrimanic powers.

It must be realized that in very truth the human being is balanced as it were between the luciferic and the ahrimanic powers, and that the Christ has become a companion of human beings, leading them, first away from the battle with Lucifer, and then into the battle with Ahriman.

The Incarnation of Ahriman (RS)

The Cosmic New Year, The Mystery of the Human Will, Lecture III, December 29, 1919, GA 195

     When the incarnation of Ahriman takes place in the Western World we shall simply see inscribed in the local Register, the birth of John William Smith (of course, this will not be the name) and people will look upon the child as a citizen in comfortable circumstances like any other, and they will sleep through what has in reality taken place.

You must realize that there is no better way to prepare for the fact that Ahriman is endeavouring cunningly to capture the whole Earth for his evolution, than that man should continue to live an abstract life, steeping himself in abstractions, as he does in the social life of today. This is one of the ruses, one of the clever tricks, by which Ahriman prepares in his own way for his lordship over the earth.

But there is also another form of preparation for Ahriman which can happen through an erroneous view of the Gospels. The conception of the Gospels has gradually become completely materialized.

It is of the most extreme importance to Ahriman so to prepare his incarnation that through Spiritual Science man shall not follow this path of Imagination in the Gospels on to the Reality of the Mystery of Golgotha. The incarnation of Ahriman, in a future not very far distant, can be helped on its way just as well by an obscured worship of the Gospels as by abstract thinking. 

Sorat and the Asuras (DG)

The asuras remained behind in the Saturn incarnation of Earth and now work as regressive Archai who long to destroy the human ego, or I consciousness.  The asuras work with the Sun-Demon Sorat (Sorath). Sorat is the Apocalyptic Beast 666 who also works with all ahrimanic forces and beings. If we identify the dragon of the Apocalypse as Sorat, we can picture Lucifer and Ahriman as the left and right hands of Sorat. Christ strives to hold Lucifer and Ahriman in balance so that they serve the good, while Sorat strives to keep them out of balance, so that they work for destruction. The asuras seek to destroy the ego itself, along with the earth.

The aims of the Western occult circles not only relate to the spiritual en-webbing of humanity but ultimately to the endeavor to put the whole undertaking into the service of Sorat who is the prime opponent of the ego principle in mankind.  The en-webbing of humanity through artificial intelligence that has come “alive” will lead ultimately to the loss of the ego.

The ahrimanic powers serving Sorat work in opposition to this, especially after 1998 (3 x 666).  Ahriman makes use of the forces of sub-nature to penetrate Michaelic intelligence with the artificial intelligence created by him, which includes the digitization of thought. This started with the fixation of human thoughts through the process of printing and continues now through digitization. The question becomes one of whether the human being controls the computer and the internet or they control the human being.

Ahriman and the Asuras (RS)

The Deed of Christ and the Opposing Spiritual Powers, Lucifer, Ahriman, Asuras. January 1, 1909, GA 107

     In the Lemurian epoch it was the luciferic beings who intervened in man’s evolution, in opposition to the Powers who at that time were striving to help him forward. In the Atlantean epoch, the Spirits opposing the progressive Powers were the Spirits of “Ahriman” or “Mephistopheles.” The ahrimanic or Mephistophelean spirits – to give the precise names – are those known in medieval times as the Spirits of “Satan” – who must not be confused with “Lucifer.”

     The host of ahrimanic spirits has worked upon man since the middle of the Atlantean epoch onwards. They enticed him into regarding everything in his environment as material, with the result that he does not see through this material world to its true, spiritual foundations. Were man to have perceived the Spiritual in every stone, in every plant, in every animal, he would never have fallen into error and therewith into evil. Karma was thus the indirect consequence of the deeds of Ahriman.

     It was in the second soul-member, the intellectual soul – the transformed part of the ether-body – that Ahriman established his footing. From there he lures humanity to false conceptions and judgments of material things, leads them to error, to sin, to lying – to everything that originates in the intellectual or mind soul. In every illusion that matter is the sole reality, we must perceive the whispered promptings of Ahriman, of Mephistopheles.

     In the course of the Earth-period man will cast away all the evil brought to him by the luciferic spirits together with the blessing of freedom. The evil brought by the ahrimanic spirits can be shed in the course of karma. But the evil brought by the asuric powers cannot be expunged in this way. Whereas the good Spirits instituted pain and suffering, illness and death in order that despite the possibility of evil, man’s evolution may still advance, whereas the good Spirits made possible the working of karma to the end that the ahrimanic powers might be resisted and the evil made good, it will not be so easy to counter the asuric powers as earth-existence takes its course. For these asuric spirits will prompt what has been seized hold of by them, namely the very core of man’s being, the Consciousness Soul together with the ‘I’, to unite with earthly materiality. Fragment after fragment will be torn out of the ‘I’, and in the same measure in which the asuric spirits establish themselves in the consciousness soul, man must leave parts of his existence behind on the earth. What thus becomes the prey of the asuric powers will be irretrievably lost. Not that the whole man need become their victim – but parts of his spirit will be torn away by the asuric powers.

     These asuric powers are heralded today by the prevailing tendency to live wholly in the material world and to be oblivious of the realty of spiritual beings and spiritual worlds. True, the asuric powers corrupt man today in a way that is more theoretical than actual. Today, they deceive him by various means into thinking that his ‘I’ is a product of the physical world only; they lure him to a kind of theoretic materialism. But as time goes on – and the premonitory signs of this are the dissolute, sensuous passions that are becoming increasingly prevalent on earth – they will blind man’s vision of the spiritual Beings and spiritual Powers. Man will know nothing nor desire to know anything of a spiritual world. More and more he will not only teach that the highest moral ideals of humanity are merely sublimations of animal impulses, that human thinking is but a transformation of a faculty also possessed by the animals, that man is akin to the animal in respect of his form and moreover in his whole being descends from the animal – but he will take this view in all earnestness and order his life in accordance with it.

The Beginning of Ahriman’s Efforts (RS)

The Principle of Spiritual Economy, Results of Spiritual Scientific Investigations of the Evolution of Humanity: Lecture IV, Rome, March 28, 1909, GA 109

    According to the divine plan, human beings were not supposed to perceive the world with external sense organs before the middle of the Atlantean period, but the luciferic forces made this happen earlier, at a time when human instincts had not yet matured. That represents the “Fall” of mankind. Religious documents tell us that the snake opened man’s eyes, but without the interference of Lucifer the human body would not have become as firm as it now is and the Atlantean humanity would have been able to see the spiritual side of all things. Instead, man fell into sin, illusion, and error, and to make things worse, toward the middle of the Atlantean period he was also subjected to the influence of ahrimanic forces. The luciferic forces had worked on the astral body, but the ahrimanic forces worked on the etheric body, especially on the ether-head. By that, many human beings fell into the error of mistaking the physical world for the world of truth. The name “ahrimanic” comes from Ahriman, the name the Persians gave to this erroneous principle. Ahriman is identical with Mephistopheles and has nothing to do with Lucifer. Satan in the Bible is Ahriman too, not Lucifer.

    Although the ahrimanic influence began in the Atlantean epoch, as we have said, it unfolded its full strength only later in human evolution. The ancient Indians were sufficiently protected against Ahriman; for them the physical world was never anything else but maya, illusion. Only in the most ancient Persian period of Zarathustra did people begin to place value on the physical world and thereby come into the power of Ahriman.

Lucifer and Ahriman during Atlantis and Post-Atlantean Times (RS)

Memory and Habit, The Sense for Truth, The Phenomenon of Metamorphosis in Life, Dornach, Lecture I August 26, 1916, GA 170

    The moment a luciferic activity sets in, the other side of the balance begins to operate: the ahrimanic impulse. While on the one side we memorise, calling Lucifer to our aid in this respect, on the other side we make more and more use of the ahrimanic support to memory, namely, we write things down. I have often said that it was a true conception in the Middle Ages which made men speak of printing as one of the ‘black arts.’

    Man’s task is to cultivate the position of balance and not to believe that he can simply escape from the clutches of Lucifer and Ahriman. Calmly and courageously he must admit to himself that both beings are necessary for world-evolution, that in his own development he needs both Lucifer and Ahriman in his active life, but that the balance must be maintained in every sphere of life.

     At the beginning of the Old Testament there is a significant picture of the influx of the luciferic forces into world-evolution. Luciferic forces enter earthly evolution by way of the woman. This biblical picture symbolises the influx of the luciferic element which occurred in the age of old Lemuria.

    Then, during the subsequent Atlantean age, there came the entrance of the ahrimanic element into earthly evolution. Just as during the fourth Post-Atlantean period human knowledge had to come to an understanding of the luciferic symbol, so now, during our fifth post-Atlantean epoch, it was necessary to place before the soul the opposite symbol. The figure of Faust has Ahriman at his side, as Eve has Lucifer. Lucifer approaches the woman, Eve; Ahriman approaches the man, Faust. And just as the man, Adam, was indirectly beguiled through Eve, so here, the woman, Gretchen, is deceived through the man, Faust. The seduction of Gretchen is the result of deception, because Ahriman is at work. Ahriman is the ‘Lying Spirit’ in contrast to Lucifer who is the ‘Tempter.’

    Much exists in the world for the express purpose of guarding mankind from temptation by Lucifer: rules of conduct, maxims, moral precepts, instituted customs and so forth. But there is less to help man to protect himself in the right way from falling prey to the ahrimanic impulse – namely, untruthfulness.

    All that is luciferic in man has to do with the emotions, the passions. On the other hand, the ahrimanic influence which asserts itself in human evolution has to do with lying, with untruthfulness.

    Ahriman feels a certain satisfaction on account of the evil that is in the world. We must acquire the power to conquer Ahriman within us at every moment. 

Ahriman throughout History (RS)

The Challenge of the Times, 1918, November 29, Dornach, GA 189

    If we look at the period of human evolution when mankind was approaching the Mystery of Golgotha, we find that the state of equilibrium between the luciferic and the ahrimanic forces was extraordinarily fluctuating, vacillating – no real balance was there. We have on one hand the stream of mankind which is moving towards the Mystery of Golgotha and manifests historically in the evolution of the Semitic peoples. This stream is particularly susceptible to the luciferic influence, whereby a strong ahrimanic activity is brought about in the subconscious.

    On the other hand, the Greek nature is highly susceptible to the forces of Ahriman, and this brings about great luciferic activity in the subconscious. We can fully understand the Semitic and Greek cultures – polaric opposites of one another – only by keeping in mind this vacillation in human evolution between the ahrimanic and the luciferic. Precisely through the ahrimanic intervention experienced by the Greeks, and manifest as a luciferic element of their art, they had developed a lofty wisdom. And this wisdom took on a very individual, humanly individual, character. But fundamentally it was at its greatest where there still shone into it out of primeval times the teachings received from actual spiritual beings.

    This ancient knowledge of man, however, was mediated by way of Lucifer, and men worked upon it with the aid of ahrimanic forces.

    Now at the time when the ancient world was passing away and from the other side came the Mystery of Golgotha, the ahrimanic forces began to gain a slight ascendancy; they were then particularly strong. And since the sixteenth century something similar is happening again – a kind of renaissance of the ahrimanic forces. And through them man’s life of soul was driven in the direction of the abstract – towards that abstraction which meets us in the thoroughly abstract nature of the Romans.

    Through the incursion of the Mystery of Golgotha men were given from spiritual heights, which were no longer within their reach on earth, a renewed capacity for grasping themselves as persons. The Christ Impulse brought men the possibility of once more grasping their personalities, but now of doing so through inner forces. Christ Himself had to unite His cosmic destiny with mankind, so that in the continual fluctuation of the balance between Ahriman and Lucifer men should not fall away from their onward path.

    Lucifer turns men’s hearts from interest in other men. Luciferic natures take very little interest in their fellows; they grow stiff and hard, considering as right only what they themselves think and feel, and they are not accessible to the opinions of others.

    The ahrimanic is particularly revealed by a man not being willing to live among other men as a personality among other personalities, but wanting to develop power in the way I referred to yesterday – wanting to rule by exploiting the weaknesses of others. 

Ahriman Influence on the Inner Planets (RS)

Man’s Life on Earth and in the Spiritual Worlds, Lecture V, London, November 16, 1922, GA 218

    Whilst the luciferic spirits build, as we said, their strongholds in the air, in order to fight for the moral – as against the earthly – element in man, the ahrimanic beings struggle to harden man; they want to make him like themselves. And their efforts, which have actually been going on for thousands of years, have in fact succeeded in producing a whole race of sub-human beings. They are there, in the elements of earth and water, a sub-human race. They draw out of a human being his instinctive nature and make of it an earth-and-water being. These earth-water beings inhabit the strata immediately below the surface of the earth. They are beings that have been snatched out of man in the moment of death.

    The ahrimanic beings persist in believing they will ultimately be able in this way to entice such a vast number of human beings into their own race and that the earth will one day be peopled entirely with such ahrimanic sub-human beings. By this means they hope to make the earth itself immortal, so that the hour may never come for it to perish and be dispersed in cosmic space.

    A fearful war is waged all the time between the air-fire beings and the earth-water beings; they fight to get possession of man. And it is important that man should be aware of this war that is perpetually being waged for him; he must not be blind to it.

    Moon, Mercury, Venus, Jupiter, Mars and Saturn live at peace with one another and are held in balance by the Sun; they wage a double fight for the possession of man. First of all, there is the conflict that goes on between the ahrimanic and the luciferic beings; and then we have on the one hand, the fight that is put up by the luciferic beings against the planetary forces beyond the Sun, – the Mars, Jupiter, and Saturn influences – whilst on the other hand the ahrimanic forces are waging war on the influences that proceed from Moon, Venus and Mercury.

    Luciferic and ahrimanic beings never relinquish the belief that they will one day achieve their ends, and they are therefore always ready to begin the fight over again. For, time after time, when they think they are on their way to success, they experience frustration and disappointment. This kind of being may indeed be said to live in a mood that oscillates between jubilation and triumph on the one side and constantly recurring disappointment on the other.

    For when someone turns liar, – well, that can be ameliorated in the further course of karma; whereas if Lucifer were really to gain the victory he seeks, the earth would lose that human soul, it would soar right away above the earth. If, on the other hand, Ahriman were to conquer, or come near to conquering, in the ether body, then the person would become possessed – possessed by his own cleverness.

    At the present time, when you cross the threshold, you find yourself only in the midst of the terrific conflict of which we have spoken, between beings of the upper planets who have remained behind in their evolution, – immature Mars, Jupiter and Saturn beings – and beings of the lower planets who have remained behind, – immature Moon, Mercury and Venus beings. The fight goes on with such fury that the Sun becomes first of all fiery and aflame, and then grows darker and darker, until at last it shows like a terrible black disk. Then we are guided to turn our eyes to the Christ, Christ stands before us, the Spirit Being who, through the Mystery of Golgotha, united Himself with the earth. And He says to us: Be not dismayed that the Sun has become black; it is black because I, the God of the Sun, am no longer in it; for I have come down and united myself with Earth.

    And if, with inner devotion, and with quick and sensitive recognition of all that a knowledge of the Mystery of Golgotha can bring, we draw near to Christ, the Sun begins to make audible for us what Christ is saying to us. When therefore we speak of Christ today, we are speaking of One who can be at our side here on Earth as our Leader, guiding us out of the terrible conflict that the luciferic and ahrimanic powers are waging, – with one another and with the worlds of the upper and lower gods.

Ahriman and Error (RS)

Manifestations of Karma, Forces of Nature, Volcanic Eruptions, Earthquakes and Epidemics in Relation to Karma, Lecture 7, May, 1910, GA 266

    Our greed, egotism, ambition, pride, vanity, all qualities connected with this inflation of our Ego, this desire to be in the limelight, all this is the result of luciferic temptations in the astral body. If there were nothing else in life but the egotistical impulses and passions born of Lucifer, we should never be able to free ourselves from them.

    When we fall into the power of Lucifer, there immediately intervenes a counteraction by powers antagonistic to the luciferic powers. These exercise an opposing force, whereby the luciferic influence may be actually driven out of us. And it is these forces, opponents of the luciferic powers, which add pain to the process resulting from Lucifer’s influence. Thus, if the luciferic powers are evil, we must regard pain as something which is given us by benevolent forces, because through pain we escape from the clutches of these evil powers, and do not succumb to them again. Pain, which is the consciousness of the astral body in a wrong waking state, is also that which prevents us from ever again falling prey to the luciferic powers in that realm where we have already succumbed. Thus pain becomes our schoolmaster in regard to the temptations of the luciferic powers.

    Just as we cannot see the world when we have imperfect eyes, so through luciferic influence we are prevented from seeing the external world as it really is. And because of man’s incapacity to see the external world as it really is, the ahrimanic influence has been able to insinuate itself into this inaccurate picture. So it is the luciferic influence on man which has made Ahriman’s approach possible. Subjected to the ahrimanic influence we can fall a prey not only to egotistical passions, urges, greeds, vanity and pride, and so forth, but now egotism can affect the human organism to such an extent as to develop organs through which we can see the external world distorted and inaccurate. Ahriman has insinuated himself into this inaccurate picture, and under his influence we succumb not only to inner temptations, but also to error. We fall into untruth in our judgement of the external world and our assertions concerning it. Thus Ahriman acts from outside; but we have made it possible for him to reach us.

    The ahrimanic and luciferic influences are thus never separated. They always react upon one another, and in a certain sense keep a balance. Lucifer manifests outwards from within, Ahriman acts from without, and our picture of the world is formed between the two. And we oscillate between these two influences which lead us – the one to inner conceit, and the other to illusions about the external world.

    The temptations from both sides must be especially resisted by anyone who is called to a spiritual development, and who wishes to penetrate into the spiritual world, whether by penetrating into that external spirituality which lies behind the phenomena of the external world, or whether by descending mystically into his own inner being. When we penetrate the world which lies behind the physical world, we always find those deceptive images which Ahriman conjures up. When a man tries to descend mystically into his own soul, he is exposed to the temptations of Lucifer in a special degree.

    There is but one power before which Lucifer retreats, and that is morality which burns him like the most dreadful of fires. And there is no means by which to oppose Ahriman other than a power of judgement and discernment schooled by Spiritual Science. For Ahriman flees in terror from the wholesome power of judgement acquired upon Earth. In the main there is nothing to which he has a greater aversion than the qualities we gain from a healthy education of our Ego-consciousness. For we shall see that Ahriman belongs to a very different region far removed from that force of sound judgement which we develop in ourselves. The moment Ahriman encounters this, he receives a terrible shock, for this is something completely unknown to him, and he fears it. The more we apply ourselves in our life to develop this wholesome judgement, the more do we work in opposition to Ahriman. In fact, the best remedy against the particularly harmful diseases which result in visions and delusory voices induced by Ahriman is to make all efforts to induce the person to acquire a wholesome and rational judgement.

    Lucifer has an aversion for humility and modesty in man and is repulsed if we have only such an opinion of ourselves as a wholesome judgement entitles us to hold. He is present whenever the qualities of vanity and ambition arise. All this and the illusions which we engender about ourselves, prepare us to receive Ahriman as well. Nothing can defend us against Ahriman unless we really make an effort to think wholesomely, as life between birth and death teaches us to do. Certainly – but there is only one healthy path by which we can enter, and that is the morality that must be acquired upon earth, a morality in the highest sense of the word, which will keep us from over-estimation of ourselves, and will make us less subservient to our impulses, greed and passions, but which on the other hand will be an active, wholesome co-operation with the conditions of earth life, and not a desire to soar above such conditions.

    Whatever is to be traced to ahrimanic influence is indirectly attributable to Lucifer; when, however, the luciferic influence has been so strong as immediately to call forth the ahrimanic influence, then this influence is the more malicious. It anchors itself not only in the transgressions of the astral body, but in those of the etheric body. It manifests itself in a consciousness lying deeper than our pain consciousness, causing damage not necessarily accompanied by pain, damage that renders useless the organ which it attacks.

    A counteracting effect comes into play, however, just as we have the effect of pain counteracting the luciferic influence. This counteracting effect will operate in such a way that the moment there is any danger of our being linked too closely with the physical world of the senses, and of our losing the forces which lead us up into the spiritual world, in that moment the organ is destroyed; it will either be paralyzed or else rendered too weak to be effective. A process of destruction takes place. Thus if we see an organ approaching destruction, we must realize that we owe this to beneficial forces; the organ is taken from us so that we may find our way back into the spiritual world. When there is no alternative of escape, certain forces do in fact destroy our organs or weaken them so that we may not become too greatly entangled in Maya or illusion and may find our way back into the spiritual world.

    The good we have attained through Lucifer is the possibility of discrimination between good and evil, the free faculty of discrimination, and our free will. All this we may attain only through Lucifer. Our greed, egotism, ambition, pride, vanity, all qualities connected with this inflation of our Ego, this desire to be in the limelight, all this is the result of luciferic temptations in the astral body. If there were nothing else in life but the egotistical impulses and passions born of Lucifer, we should never be able to free ourselves from them.

    When we fall into the power of Lucifer, there immediately intervenes a counteraction by powers antagonistic to the luciferic powers. These exercise an opposing force, whereby the luciferic influence may be actually driven out of us. And it is these forces, opponents of the luciferic powers, which add pain to the process resulting from Lucifer’s influence. Thus, if the luciferic powers are evil, we must regard pain as something which is given us by benevolent forces, because through pain we escape from the clutches of these evil powers, and do not succumb to them again. Pain, which is the consciousness of the astral body in a wrong waking state, is also that which prevents us from ever again falling prey to the luciferic powers in that realm where we have already succumbed. Thus pain becomes our schoolmaster in regard to the temptations of the luciferic powers.

    Just as we cannot see the world when we have imperfect eyes, so through luciferic influence we are prevented from seeing the external world as it really is. And because of man’s incapacity to see the external world as it really is, the ahrimanic influence has been able to insinuate itself into this inaccurate picture. So it is the luciferic influence on man which has made Ahriman’s approach possible. Subjected to the ahrimanic influence we can fall a prey not only to egotistical passions, urges, greeds, vanity and pride, and so forth, but now egotism can affect the human organism to such an extent as to develop organs through which we can see the external world distorted and inaccurate. Ahriman has insinuated himself into this inaccurate picture, and under his influence we succumb not only to inner temptations, but also to error. We fall into untruth in our judgement of the external world and our assertions concerning it. Thus Ahriman acts from outside; but we have made it possible for him to reach us.

    The ahrimanic and luciferic influences are thus never separated. They always react upon one another, and in a certain sense keep a balance. Lucifer manifests outwards from within, Ahriman acts from without, and our picture of the world is formed between the two. And we oscillate between these two influences which lead us – the one to inner conceit, and the other to illusions about the external world.

    The temptations from both sides must be especially resisted by anyone who is called to a spiritual development, and who wishes to penetrate into the spiritual world, whether by penetrating into that external spirituality which lies behind the phenomena of the external world, or whether by descending mystically into his own inner being. When we penetrate the world which lies behind the physical world, we always find those deceptive images which Ahriman conjures up. When a man tries to descend mystically into his own soul, he is exposed to the temptations of Lucifer in a special degree.

    There is but one power before which Lucifer retreats, and that is morality which burns him like the most dreadful of fires. And there is no means by which to oppose Ahriman other than a power of judgement and discernment schooled by Spiritual Science. For Ahriman flees in terror from the wholesome power of judgement acquired upon Earth. In the main there is nothing to which he has a greater aversion than the qualities we gain from a healthy education of our Ego-consciousness. For we shall see that Ahriman belongs to a very different region far removed from that force of sound judgement which we develop in ourselves. The moment Ahriman encounters this, he receives a terrible shock, for this is something completely unknown to him, and he fears it. The more we apply ourselves in our life to develop this wholesome judgement, the more do we work in opposition to Ahriman. In fact, the best remedy against the particularly harmful diseases which result in visions and delusory voices induced by Ahriman is to make all efforts to induce the person to acquire a wholesome and rational judgement.

    Lucifer has an aversion for humility and modesty in man and is repulsed if we have only such an opinion of ourselves as a wholesome judgement entitles us to hold. He is present whenever the qualities of vanity and ambition arise. All this and the illusions which we engender about ourselves, prepare us to receive Ahriman as well. Nothing can defend us against Ahriman unless we really make an effort to think wholesomely, as life between birth and death teaches us to do. Certainly – but there is only one healthy path by which we can enter, and that is the morality that must be acquired upon earth, a morality in the highest sense of the word, which will keep us from over-estimation of ourselves, and will make us less subservient to our impulses, greed and passions, but which on the other hand will be an active, wholesome co-operation with the conditions of earth life, and not a desire to soar above such conditions.

    Whatever is to be traced to ahrimanic influence is indirectly attributable to Lucifer; when, however, the luciferic influence has been so strong as immediately to call forth the ahrimanic influence, then this influence is the more malicious. It anchors itself not only in the transgressions of the astral body, but in those of the etheric body. It manifests itself in a consciousness lying deeper than our pain consciousness, causing damage not necessarily accompanied by pain, damage that renders useless the organ which it attacks.

    A counteracting effect comes into play, however, just as we have the effect of pain counteracting the luciferic influence. This counteracting effect will operate in such a way that the moment there is any danger of our being linked too closely with the physical world of the senses, and of our losing the forces which lead us up into the spiritual world, in that moment the organ is destroyed; it will either be paralyzed or else rendered too weak to be effective. A process of destruction takes place. Thus if we see an organ approaching destruction, we must realize that we owe this to beneficial forces; the organ is taken from us so that we may find our way back into the spiritual world. When there is no alternative of escape, certain forces do in fact destroy our organs or weaken them so that we may not become too greatly entangled in Maya or illusion and may find our way back into the spiritual world.

    The good we have attained through Lucifer is the possibility of discrimination between good and evil, the free faculty of discrimination, and our free will. All this we may attain only through Lucifer.

Balancing Ahriman and Lucifer (RS)

The Balance in the World and Man, Lucifer and Ahriman, The World as Product of the Working of Balance, Dornach, 20th-22nd November, 1914, GA 158

    Experiences deriving from the influences of Lucifer and Ahriman are all the time playing into human life. In this basic experience of man during the Fourth Post-Atlantean or Greco-Roman epoch, Lucifer’s influence was the greater; in our own epoch, Ahriman is the predominant influence. Lucifer is connected with all those experiences which, lacking the definition imparted by the senses, remain undifferentiated and obscure.

    Everything that is associated with questioning and doubt, with feelings of dissatisfaction caused when something in the world demands an answer and we are thrown back entirely upon our own resources – all this is connected with the luciferic powers. An over-exuberant, too widely extended ether-body gives rise to an excessively vigorous breathing process and this provides the luciferic forces with opportunity to work. The luciferic forces, then, can make their way into the human being when the ether-body has expanded beyond the normal. The luciferic forces also operate in the blood, permeating and surging through it.

    The Sphinx is the being who brings doubts, who torments the soul with questions.

    The ether-body is too small now, and this will become more marked as evolution proceeds. If it can be said that in the man of ancient Greece, the ether-body was too large, it can be said that in the man of modern times the ether-body is compressed and contracted, has become too small. The more human beings are led by materialism to disdain the Spiritual, the more will the ether-body contract and wither.  The physical body too will always tend to dry up, to wither, if the contraction of the ether-body is excessive.  Now into this dried-up ether-body, Ahriman can insinuate himself, just as Lucifer can creep into an extended, diffuse ether-body. Ahriman will assume the form which indicates a lack of power in the ether-body.

    Just as those etheric forces which tend towards the luciferic nature can only find easy access to the blood by way of the breath, so the etheric forces which tend towards the ahrimanic nature can only approach the nervous system. Ahriman is deprived of the possibility of penetrating into the blood because he cannot come near the warmth of the blood.

    Just as the Greek confronted the Sphinx whose field of operation is the breathing system, so the man of the fifth post-Atlantean epoch confronts Mephistopheles who operates in the nerve-process, who is cold and scornful because he is bloodless, because he lacks the warmth that belongs to the blood. He is the scoffer, the cold, scornful companion of man.

    Just as it was the task of Oedipus to get the better of the Sphinx, so it is the task of man in the fifth post-Atlantean epoch to get the better of Mephistopheles. The human being of the modern age is confronted by the fruits of intellect and cold reason, rooted as they are in the nerve-process.

    Whereas the child in Greece was tormented by a flood of questions, the suffering awaiting the human being of our modern time is rather that of being in the grip of preconceptions and prejudices, of having as an incubus at his side a second “body” consisting of all these preconceived judgments and opinions.

    The Mephistophelean nature is strengthened by all the prejudices and limitations of materialism, and a future can already be perceived when everyone will be born with a second being by his side, a being who whispers to him of the foolishness of those who speak of the reality of the spiritual world. Accompanied by this second being, he will feel the urge to think materialistic thoughts, to think, not through his own being, but through the second being who is his companion.

    In an ether-body that has been parched by materialism, Mephistopheles will be able to dwell. The ether-body must be quickened in order that the human being may be able to take his rightful stand, fully cognizant of the nature of the being who stands at his side. If he does not understand the nature of this second being, he will be spellbound by him, fettered to him.

    If adults whose task it is to educate children today do not know how to deal rightly with what comes to expression in the child, human nature itself will be impaired owing to a lack of understanding of the wiles of Mephistopheles.

    When Ahriman is beside us, we are perpetually in danger of falling victim to him, of giving ourselves over to him to such an extent that we cannot get free. In face of the Sphinx, the human being is aware of something that penetrates into him and as it were tears him to pieces. In face of the Mephistophelean influence he feels that he must yield to it, bind himself to it, and succumb to it.

    But just as it was the task of the Greek, through the development of conscious egohood, to conquer the Sphinx, so we, in our age, must get the better of Mephistopheles by enriching the Ego with the wisdom that can be born only from knowledge and investigation of the spiritual world, from Spiritual Science.

   In their rightfully allotted place, Lucifer and Ahriman work beneficially; in their wrongful place – there they are injurious. The nerve-process – which works, not from without but from within the Ego, must here be strengthened. Thus is the ahrimanic power taken into the human being and put in its right place.

    The man of the fifth post-Atlantean epoch, who confronts Ahriman-Mephistopheles, must take Lucifer into himself. Everything that the Ego accumulates in the head must be pressed down into the rest of man’s nature.

    The Ahriman-nature in Oedipus has to get the better of Lucifer; the Lucifer-nature in Faust has to help him to overcome Ahriman-Mephistopheles. Ahriman-Mephistopheles operates more in the external world, Lucifer more in the inner life.

    In the man of the modern age, the Ego has become too strong and he must break free. But this he can only do by deepening his knowledge of spiritual happenings, of the world to which the Ego truly belongs. The Ego must know that it is a citizen of the spiritual world, not merely the inhabitant of a human body. This is the demand of the age in which we ourselves are living. The man of the Fourth Post-Atlantean epoch was called upon to strive with might and main for consciousness in the physical body; the man of the fifth post-Atlantean epoch must strive to become conscious in the spiritual world, so to expand his consciousness that it reaches into the spiritual world.

Ahriman and Lucifer Work Together (RS)

Secrets of the Threshold, Lecture VIII, August 31, 1913, GA 147

    Lucifer and Ahriman now are in league together in a kind of partnership in the outer world. Before these forces reach the human soul, they are knotted together externally. In ancient times the skeins of influence from Ahriman and Lucifer were quite separate, but nowadays we have them tangled and knotted together within the development of our civilization. It is extremely difficult for a human being to unravel the entanglement and find a way out of it. We need to be watchful of the chaotic entanglement of luciferic and ahrimanic threads. For no one today is more challenged to come to terms with these forces than he who is on the path of spiritual knowledge.

    On the threshold, the luciferic impulses assert themselves strongly from within, and when the human soul tends to deaden its awareness, Lucifer immediately unites with Ahriman, with the result that the entrance to the spiritual world is barred.

    At the very moment when we get rid of the results of our egoism, Lucifer and Ahriman have an easy game with the soul: in partnership, it is not at all difficult for them to lead the human soul into their special kingdom where they can produce all sorts of spiritual worlds, which the human being will take for the truly genuine one grounded in the cosmic order.

Ahriman in Meditation (RS)

Esoteric Lessons, Part III: Stockholm, 6-8-1913, GA 266

    In a theosophical lecture everyone is called upon to be active; in a lecture with slides Ahriman is summoned to think for the people.  Materialists are the greatest conjurers of spirits. Every materialistic gathering is nothing else than a conjuring of Ahriman, because basically people are afraid of the spirit in their soul.

    Esoteric pupils often come and complain about thoughts that attack them during meditation. It’s really a sign of progress that one senses these thoughts; it shows that we don’t just have Lucifer and Ahriman in us anymore, but that we begin to see them outside us as powers, for thoughts that arise like this are entirely from Lucifer and Ahriman. If everything had remained as originally intended then after the luciferic temptation a man wouldn’t have been able to forget his thoughts. He would always have had access to the Akashic records, but it would have been Lucifer and Ahriman who wrote up this chronicle for him. That’s why the good Gods had to arrange things so that a man can also forget his thoughts. Everything that sinks into the unconscious like this is dead and Lucifer and Ahriman eat it up. They make it a part of their being and it comes out again in men’s meditation as luciferic and ahrimanic things.

    As soon as someone starts to meditate the hope arises in Lucifer: Maybe I’ll be victorious in the world yet. And then he attacks the man with his discarded thoughts. A man really loves to go from one thought to another, and he doesn’t love to remain filled with one thought-content in reflection. A man doesn’t really love the spirit at all. He must force himself to keep certain thoughts in his soul for an extended period. A man really loves Lucifer and Ahriman.

Ahriman and Falsehood (RS)

Morality and Karma, Nuremberg, November 12, 1910, GA 135

    We know that the human soul passes through many incarnations and that there was a moment in the development of mankind when the tempters, Lucifer and Ahriman, crept into the human soul. Ahriman lives in the etheric body and Lucifer in the astral body of man.

    Lucifer is a power that tempts the human soul by drawing it down morally and by leading it away from its origin. He casts us into the depths of earthly nature and we should beware of this. Lucifer is the power that draws us down into the depths of passion.

    Ahriman, on the other hand, is the spirit of falsehood and error and he falsifies our judgments. Both Lucifer and Ahriman are powers which are hostile to human progress. Yet they get on very well with each other. Envy is a quality in which the luciferic power comes to expression. When a person first discovers that his soul is filled with envy, he begins to fight against Lucifer, the source of envy. What does Lucifer do in that case? He simply hands over the matter to Ahriman, and Ahriman darkens the human judgment.

    When we fight against Lucifer in the astral body, Ahriman can easily insinuate himself into the etheric body, darkening our judgments on other people. This is falsehood and falsehood is an ahrimanic quality.

    People also feel a strong dislike for falsehood and they try to fight against it. When we try to overcome falsehood, we can see that Ahriman hands over the sceptre to Lucifer, so that a quality creeps into the astral body which appears in the form of an extremely pronounced Egoism. Egoism is restrained falsehood.

    These two qualities, falsehood and envy, are a crass expression of the way in which Lucifer and Ahriman work within the human soul. 

Ahriman and Lucifer in Art (RS)

Old and New Methods of Initiation, Lecture I, Dornach, 1 January 1922, GA 210

   Thus, in ordinary consciousness, we are on the whole unaware of the two dangers which can cause us to deviate from our state of balance towards one side or the other, towards the luciferic or the ahrimanic side.

When we are small, perhaps tiny, children, the youthful, luciferic forces predominate. But even then, deep down, are the ageing forces, the forces which eventually lead to the sclerosis of our body and, in the end, to death. It is necessary for both kinds of force to exist in the human body. Through the luciferic forces there is always a possibility of inclining towards, let me say, the phosphoric side, towards warmth. In the extreme situation of an illness this manifests in a fever, such as a pleuritic condition, a state of inflammation. This inclination towards fever and inflammation is ever-present and is only held in check or in balance by those other forces which want to lead towards solidified, sclerotic, mineral states. The nature of the human being arises from the state of balance between these two polar-opposite forces.

    Organs, such as heart, lungs, liver, are seen to encompass polar opposites which incline them on the one hand towards dissolution into warmth and, on the other hand, towards consolidation into the mineral state. For instance, that at the change of teeth, around the seventh year, ahrimanic forces are setting to work in the head region; or that when the physical body starts to develop towards the warmth pole at puberty, this means that luciferic forces are at work; that in the rhythmical nature of the human being there are constant swings of the pendulum, physically too, between the luciferic and the ahrimanic aspect.

    Turning now to the soul element, in a higher sense the second element of man’s being, we find the ahrimanic influence at work in everything that drives the soul towards purely intellectual rigid laws. Our natural science today is almost totally ahrimanic. As we develop towards ahrimanic soul elements, we discard anything that might fill our concepts and ideas with warmth. We submit only to whatever makes concepts and ideas ice-cold and dry as dust. Also, when we imbue our soul with moral issues, the ahrimanic influence is found in everything that tends towards what is pedantic, stiff, philistine on the one hand; but also in what tends towards freedom, towards independence, towards everything that strives to extract the fruits of material existence from this material existence and wants to become perfect by filling material existence.

    The luciferic influence in the human soul is found in everything that makes us desire to fly upwards out of ourselves. This can create nebulous, mystical attitudes which lead us to regions where any thought of the material world seems ignoble and inferior. Thus we are led astray, misled into despising material existence entirely and into wanting instead to indulge in whatever lies above the material world, into wanting wings on which to soar above earthly existence, at least in our soul. This is how the luciferic aspect works on our soul. To the ahrimanic aspect of dull, dry, cold science is added a sultry mysticism of the kind that in religions leads to an ascetic disdain for the earth, and so on.

    Luciferic forces endow human beings with the possibility of expressing the spirit in the semblance of sense-perceptible existence. It is for this that all art and all beauty are striving. Lucifer is the guardian of beauty and art. So in seeking the right balance between luciferic and ahrimanic influences we may allow art – Lucifer – in the form of beauty, to work upon this balance. There is no question of saying that human beings must guard against ahrimanic and luciferic influences. What matters is for human beings to find the right attitude towards ahrimanic and luciferic influences, maintaining always a balance between the two.

    Lucifer strives to lead human beings away from the reality in which they find themselves between birth and death into a reality which was indeed reality in earlier times but which cannot be genuine reality for the present day.

    During the period from Augustine to Galileo, human beings had to resist the luciferic element in their striving for balance. And in more recent times human beings have to resist the ahrimanic element in their striving for balance. 

Ahriman in Art (RS)

Secrets of the Threshold, Lecture VI, August 29, 1913, GA 147

    We tried to show through the teachings of Benedictus (in the Mystery Dramas) how the luciferic, the ahrimanic and the middle condition work into the triad of thought, word and writing in the development of human culture.

    Of the five arts, architecture and sculpture are those most particularly open to the ahrimanic impulse. To accomplish anything in architecture and sculpture we must find our way into the form element, which is dominant on the physical plane, for here the Spirits of Form are the ruling forces. To get to know them, one must plunge into their spiritual element, as I said before, when speaking figuratively of putting one’s head into an ant hill. A person who has anything to do with sculpture must plunge his head into the living element of the Spirits of Form. In the realm of the physical world these Spirits work cooperatively with the ahrimanic element.

   We should always realize that such beings as the luciferic and ahrimanic ones have their particular domains, where normally they live and work, and that bad effects come about only when they overstep their boundaries. The ahrimanic impulses have their absolutely legitimate domain in architecture and sculpture.

    On the other hand, we find that music and poetry are two arts where luciferic impulses are at work. Just as thought takes place in the solitude of the soul and thereby separates it from the rest of the world, the experience of music and poetry, too, belongs to our inner nature where these arts directly meet the luciferic impulse.

    In architecture it is generally the case that the ahrimanic impulse is the stronger, but in sculpture the luciferic influence opposing Ahriman can be so strong that in some sculptural works Lucifer is more dominant than Ahriman. There can be luciferic sculpture and though poetry is chiefly under the influence of Lucifer, the ahrimanic influence can work very strongly on music, so that we can find music with more of Ahriman than of Lucifer.

    In the realm of painting we are in the highest degree vulnerable to one or the other influence. The middle line is always the place where we have to bring about, in the very strictest sense of the word, the harmonious balance of polarities by means of human will and human action.

Ahriman and Mystery Wisdom (RS)

Occult Science – An Outline, Chapter IV, Man and the Evolution of the World, GA 013

     The more man turned his interest to the physical world, the greater was the possibility for Ahriman to find his way into the soul during earthly life, and then maintain his power over it after death. In Earthly life the power of Ahriman misleads man into regarding the sense-perceptible, physical existence as the one and only reality, thus shutting himself off entirely from any kind of outlook into a spiritual world. In the spiritual world, Ahriman brings man to complete isolation, leading him to center all his interest upon himself alone. Humans who at death are in the power of Ahriman are born again as egoists.

    After the intervention of Ahriman another kind of initiation was added. Ahriman had, since the middle of the Atlantean epoch, veiled all that of the spiritual world which would, but for his intervention, have appeared behind the perceptions of the physical senses. This was now unveiled to the initiates. It was revealed to them that spiritual powers underlay the forces of nature. They could tell of spiritual beings behind outer nature. It was given them to behold the divine creative powers underlying the forces that are at work in the realms of Nature beneath man. All that had worked on from Saturn, Sun and Moon, forming man’s physical body, life-body and astral body, as well as the mineral, plant and animal kingdoms of nature – all this made up the content of one kind of mystery-secrets. These were the secrets over which Ahriman held his hand. What had led, on the other hand, to the sentient soul, intellectual soul and spiritual soul, was made manifest in a second kind of mystery-secrets. But there was something of which the mysteries could only tell prophetically, namely that in the fullness of time a human being would appear with an astral body such that, in spite of Lucifer, the light-world of the spirit and the Sun would come to consciousness in him through the life-body, apart from any special states of soul. And the physical body of this human being would be such that for him the realms of the spiritual world which Ahriman is able to conceal until physical death occurs would become manifest.

Physical Description of Ahriman (RS)

Karmic Relationships, Ahriman’s Fight Against the Michael Principle, The Message of Michael, Volume III, Lecture VIII, GA 237

    The very strongest efforts are being made by Ahriman 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.  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.

   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. 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 illogical; scornful and contemptuous in thought.

Ahrimanic Possession (RS)

Karmic Relationships, The Working of Ahriman into the Once Cosmic and Now Personal Intelligence, Volume III, Lecture X, GA 237

    We must understand that since Michael no longer draws out the soul-and-spirit from the physical bodily nature as in times past, Ahriman can play his game with the soul-and-spirit as it lives within the body. Above all when the soul-spiritual is highly gifted and is yet firmly fastened in the body, then especially it can be exposed to Ahriman. Precisely in the most gifted of men does Ahriman find his prey, – so as to tear the Intelligence from Michael, remove it far from Michael. The ahrimanic spirits, though they cannot incarnate, can incorporate themselves; temporarily they can penetrate human souls, permeate human bodies. In such moments the brilliant and overpowering spirit of an ahrimanic Intelligence is stronger than anything that the individual being possesses, – far, far stronger. Then, however intelligent he may be, however much he may have learned, and especially if his physical body is thoroughly taken hold of by all his learning, an ahrimanic spirit can for a time incorporate itself in him. Then it is Ahriman who looks out of his eyes, Ahriman who moves his fingers, Ahriman who blows his nose, Ahriman who walks.

    Ahriman is a great and outstanding Intelligence, and Ahriman’s purpose with earthly evolution is overwhelming and thorough. He makes use of every opportunity. If the Spiritual has implanted itself so strongly in the bodily nature of a human being, – if the bodily nature is taken hold of by the Spirit to such an extent that the consciousness is thereby in a measure stunned or lowered or impaired, – Ahriman uses this opportunity. And then it happens (for in our age this has become possible) then it happens that a brilliant spirit takes possession of the human being, overpowering the human personality; and such a spirit, dwelling within a human personality and overpowering him, is able to work upon earth – able to work just like a human being.

    I have told you, my dear friends, of what will be fulfilled at the end of this century, with those who now come to the things of the Spirit and take them in full earnestness and sincerity. This is the time above all, which the ahrimanic spirits wish to use most strongly. This is the time they want to use, because human beings are so completely wrapped up in the Intelligence that has come over them. They have become so unbelievably clever. But of a truth, the cleverness which is thus cultivated is used by Ahriman. And when moreover the bodies are especially adapted to a possible lowering or diminution of consciousness, it may happen that Ahriman himself emerges, incorporated in human form. Twice already it can be demonstrated that Ahriman has thus appeared as an author.

    For Ahriman by his brilliant gifts can find his way into everything – he can slip into the very style of a man. He has a way of approach to all things.

 

The remaining lecture, which is quite comprehensive, can be downloaded in this free PDF. Link here. 

 

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Our Spirit

    Tyla and Douglas Gabriel launched the Our Spirit project in July 2014 as a way to introduce anthroposophy to a new generation of spiritual seekers. Our work is based on the foundations of Rudolf Steiner, but written and presented in a way that harnesses  ahrimanic technologies to deliver the message of the ever-present Sophia and second coming of Christ. The Our Spirit website is filled with relevant content from free downloadable lectures like this one to videos, books, consciousness games, and ascension products and protocols.

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