Understanding Rudolf Steiner´s conception of the four bodies; and of Lucifer and Ahriman; and concept of Christ and Abraham in the 20th and 21st century.

´See thou, my eye,

The Sun’s pure rays

In crystal forms of Earth.

See thou, my heart,

The Sun's spirit power

In Water’s surging waves.

See thou, my soul,

The Sun's cosmic will In quivering gleam of Air.

See thou, my spirit,

The Sun’s indwelling God

In Fire’s abounding love.´

Rudolf Steiner

Rudolf Steiner was an Austrian spiritualist from the 19th century who came up with unique theories and understandings, of which the two I most believe worthwhile I discuss here. First, Rudolf Steiner held that humanity has passed through an astral and an etheric stage and has possessed intuitive and clairvoyant modes of consciousness. He believed the human body to be a vessel consisting of the ether-body (our life-body), the astral-body (our soul body), the physical body and the ego, I.

The four bodies.

The traditional way of looking at the different bodies and planes of experience is that whilst a stone has just a physical body, a plant has an etheric and a physical body - which is why a plant changes over time slowly and is adapted to its environment, though it generally preserves the same structure – it is asleep. Whilst plants have etheric and physical bodies, animals have physical, etheric and astral bodies. This is why they don't just change gradually like a plant but also day to day, moment to moment, rapidly reacting to the environment and playing a role within the environment, changing it and adding quality to it.

It is said that when awake, the physical body, etheric body and astral body all work together in animals; however, when asleep the astral body and ego are released from the physical and etheric body and our dreaming consciousness is when it returns to the physical and etheric body. Steiner writes- ‘in sleep the physical and etheric bodies remain on the couch, the astral body and ego are poured onto the whole great world immediately bordering on our physical existence.

Even by day we must always be able to dream somewhat, to give ourselves to art, to poetry, or some such activity of life that is not directed to solid reality.

The stages according to Rudolf Steiner

According to Steiner, the etheric heart carries the imprint of all the deeds of humanity, and therefore it must act almost akin to a collective unconscious influence on us during our lives. In our astral body we carry the condensed seed of all of our interpersonal interactions as well as all that happened in past lives, thereby forming our soul body.

Steiner notes how -´The physical body disintegrates when it is not held together by the etheric; the etheric body falls into unconsciousness when it is not irradiated by the astral body. In the like manner the astral body would forever have to let the past sink into oblivion if the I did not preserve the past and carry it over into the present. Forgetting is for the astral body what death is for the physical body and sleep for the etheric. Or, as we may also express it: life is proper to the etheric body, consciousness to the astral body, and memory to the Ego.´

In this sense, Steiner describes the etheric forces as the forces of growth and vitality (our life force) and the astral forces as that of consciousness and differentiation (our soul- force). Indeed, Steiner wrote - ´A spiritual researcher speaks of an ether body at the point where an organism discloses something that a lifeless object cannot´ and that ´the astral body is the bearer of feeling, of happiness and suffering, joy and pain, emotions and passions; wishes and desires too, are anchored in the astral body.´

According to Steiner, the fourth member of the human being, the ego or “I” organism, enters from above and lives in the inner warmth of man, particularly visible in young children who have a certain warmth and air vibration. Steiner believed we had to lose our awareness of the spiritual world in order to exchange it for ego-consciousness, and that in the future we shall possess both at the same time - full clairvoyance, meaning every man will able to look into the spiritual world (like in the past according to Steiner) and yet feel themselves as a human, as an ego (unlike in the past). Steiner believed the ego allowed man to acclimate to the physical plane, develop logical thinking as well as experience the sensation of being an individual being, focusing on the sensations of being an 'I' organism.

A human-being works, first of all, on his ego and continues working on it during repeated earth lives (or re-incarnations). Once the ego is strengthened, work passes over to the astral; then once that astral body is strengthened with the help of the ego, work passes over the to etheric body, and finally to the physical body. Steiner believed each body belonged to a sphere and world. The etheric body belongs to the animal world (and this means in us there is a secret wish to become like animals), the astral body to the plant world (making us connect with plants and want to be like forests and jungles), and finally the ego to the mineral. The physical body however is not related to any other world, and fights off all these urges. Secondly, each body belongs to a sphere – the etheric to the Economic Sphere, the astral to the Rights Sphere, and Ego to Spiritual Sphere.

Kingdoms

The kingdoms relate to the direction of Will.

Mineral Kingdom - Everything that appears as the content of culture and civilisation is basically speaking transformed mineral kingdom. Thus, science, art and religion come from minerals and transform our own being fountain of personality. And so, man is linked to the spiritual sphere via his ego an life.

What is established in the spiritual sphere carries predispositions which we bring us through birth.

Astral Kingdom – The questions between people cannot be individually decided like art, science and religion. Human social life requires agreement and reciprocal understanding. Thus a sphere of rights is created. And so, man is anchored in the rights sphere through his astral and feeling.

Etheric Kingdom – It is not suffice that the human being as an individual personality confronts another individuality, but that as an an individual being they confront mankind as well. This directs man to associations and the economic sphere of the social organism. And so, man is grounded in the ether body in the outer world, specifically economics and with reason.

What we implant in the economic sphere is something which so strongly unites with the soul, we bear it with us through the portal of death.

Anthroposophy

Steiner held his own opinions regarding spirituality, not being a follower of any religions but being influenced enormously by many, in particularly Christianity (although also Paganism, Hinduism, Buddhism etc.). His body of teachings are termed as Anthroposophy and there are even alternative schools, Waldorf schools, based upon his creation - Anthroposophy.

Despite, not being particularly enamored by his styles of lectures and books, I find his ideas fascinating, and the one that most struck me was the legend of the Asuras or Fallen Angels - Lucifer and Ahriman, which I will expand upon because I find them so prescient.

To clarify first though, Steiner did not believe that Lucifer represented the devil, but rather that a demon called Sorat (Hebraic) was (more-so) the equivalent of Satan. He viewed Christ as a pagan god (the Sun God). Nevertheless, it is his opinions on Luciferian and Ahrimanic forces that stand out as more original and frankly, very visible in society and even backed by the latest science.

Lucifer and Ahriman

According to Steiner, Lucifer incarnated in a human body during the third millennium before Christ in Asia and Christ was born in Palestine and saved humanity which was becoming too Luciferian. Now, Ahriman will likewise incarnate in the third millennium after Christ, the one we are currently entering, and he will be the greatest threat to our spirituality. Together they both form two Asuras who are polar opposites to each other and both with access to almost every part of our being, such as our etheric body, thus posing completely contrasting threats to humanity.

The head of Lucifer (Steiner) The head of Ahriman (Steiner)

Ahriman is a modern cosmic deity and his forces promote an atheist, technology-dominated and heartless systematic yet hedonistic age; consigning humans to be parts in a machine that owns them rather than anything spiritually poignant, and tricking humans into not believing in a mysterious reality but instead in more of a computerised reality. Lucifer on the other hand is an older cosmic being who ungrounds us from the earth, and makes us into bloated, self-serving and vain destructive individuals who undermine society due to their deluded notions of grandeur. Where Ahriman forces are overly-rationally intelligent, Lucifierian forces are greedily spiritual and turn us into victims of our own imagination and self-deceit. However, what is crucial is that whilst these forces are dangerous they are also positive. Neither Asura needs to be destroyed, as both serve humanity when they are understood and accepted. Lucifer helps keep us awake to our freedom and encourages expansiveness and passion. Ahrimanic forces vitally keeps us structured, aiding our thoughts and speech, and encourage contraction and being grounded. We are not gods as Lucifer would have us believe but nor are we merely physical beings as Ahriman would have us believe, we are somewhere in between according to Steiner and his mythology.

Earth lives and Physiognomy - Relates to the perceptual side, that is considers what kind of impressions arise when our environment reacts to us. If a person grows up in an artistic atmosphere or a prosaic environment, it will be felt by those who can tell thanks to the person’s physiognomy.

What is key, is that in our next lives our physiognomy will bear strongly the results of our spiritual environment in this life. Our faces tells what sort of environment we lived in, in our previous earth lives.

We have passed through various earth lives before, since we had to develop ourselves in each one. Before we lived in the primeval indian period where our ether body was developed, then the old Persian period where our astral body developed, then the Egypt-Chaldean stage where our sentient soul developed. In the Greco-Latin period our rational soul came to fore and now our consciousness soul is developing. From the Latin-roman period we are juristic, and entangled with fate and destiny. From the oriental (e.g. Vedas and Ancient Chinese) successive earth lives are grasped. Our entire spiritual life, taken fundamentally, has still the character given to it by that which the oriental possessed.

Even before, we ourselves lived in surroundings of animal, plant, mineral nature prepared for us as the bequest of our divine preginators who were humanity on the Moon, Sun and Saturn, and who in pre-stages of Earth experienced what we are experiencing today.

The future of the earth must be man’s own creation and his own burden. It thus is the duty of modern humanity to comprehend concretely how man’s essential being itself is connected with the cosmos, and how it’s existence is bound up in the cosmos.

The mechanics of reincarnation

After death, our material parts in the physical body is delivered to the earth, the ether returns to the cosmos and dissolves there, the configuration of our physical body is strongly active again in the next life with all that is has gainedd from the spiritual sphere and to a smaller degree our etheric body activation and present nature is borne across in our next earth life, but just our very next one.

Thus, it is important, you develop a political life and a good life of rights. All that is physical derives from spirit and should be ordered, if not it will be unordered. This sphere/kingdom connects us with the earth life. Steiner points out, we lived on that which was bequeathed to us by the Gods, the beings of the higer hierarchies. Now, we have reached the point where the earth dry up and whither were man to spin, as it were, a new brand of life out of himself.

The two extremes of fate and free will.

The self surrendering to observation, to conceptions and to thinking in which the will has no part decides your fate. The impelling expression and force of will without thought drives our free will. Human though is the shadow, the social conditioning, the plural mind of concept and being which are in a higher world, is that world which we call the astral plane.

The Seperate Ages

Krita Yuga - Golden Age : Period when man was still untied with the divine-spiritual beings, preceding the Atlantean catastrophe. Men dwelt among divine beings, and as a result of direct intercourse with the gods, the soul felt itself as belonging to the divine spiritual world and spoke a will out of this soul which was inspired because the soul dwelt among the gods.

Treta Yuga – Silver Age : Men’s impulses were less determined by their association with the gods, when even their vision began to grow dimmer with regard to the spirit and soul. But they retained the memory of having dwelt with the gods. This was especidally distinct in the Old Indian world. The souls in ancient India no longer saw the gods themselves, but they stilll saw spiritual realities and lower spiritual beings, while the lofty divine beings were still visible to a few people (but a living companionship with the gods was obscured even to these). The most important realities of the spiritual world , which had previously been a matter of experience, had become merely a sort of awareness of the truth, like something that the soul still remembered distinctly, but which had only the effect of knowledge of truth.

Dvapara Yuga – Bronze Age: Time of incarnations – men’s vision became more and more cut off from the spiritual world but conversely more and more adjusted to the immediate outer world of the senses. Thus entrenched in the world of the senses, the inner ego-consciousness, the awareness of being human emerged. As old men today remain in possession of something of the joy of youth, the souls of that time were still to a certain degree familiar with what leads to the spiritual world.

Kali Yuga – Dark Age (3101 A.D): However, there followed a period when even this familiarity with the spiritual world came to an end. If man wanted to know something of the spiritual world, they had to accomplish this through reflection. At this time the human being had to experience the kingdom of heaven, the spiritual world, as remote from the ego. This is the period when men became the unspiritual and accordingly the most firmly rooted in the sense world. However, this was necessary in order that consciousness of self might gradually attain the pea of its unfoldment. For only through the sturdy opposition of the outer world could man learn to distinguish himself form the world and perceive himself as an individual being.

Christ, St. John and Abraham, and the purpose of Clairvoyance and Etheric vision in the 20th and 21st centuries.

Steiner predicted that the central 20th century spiritual event would be the second coming of Jesus Christ, appearing to human beings in the etheric world, as opposed to returning in a physical body. Steiner believed Christ walked upon earth in the midst of Kali Yuga, or the Dark Age, as ‘it was necessary that the God should descend among men in order that a connection with the spiritual world which has been lost may be won again’. If all men living at that crucial time had persisted in remaining in darkness, that this significant event would have passed unnoticed by them and men’s souls would become withered, desolate and depraved as all human connection with the spiritual world would gradually have been lost.

Steiner believed it was a possiblitiy that the event of the appearance of Christ on earth should pass unmarked by anyone, just as it did pass unnoticed, for example by the inhabitants of Rome. Among these it was said ‘somewhere in a dingy side-street lives a strange sect of horrid people; and among them lives an arrant spirit who himself Jesus of Nazareth and who preaches to the people inciting them to all kinds of heinous deeds. It was the Roman historian Tacitus who describid in suchna way after the events of Palestine. - ‘Yes it was quite possible to live at that time and yet know nothing of the appearance of Christ Jesus on the physical plane! It was possible to dwell on earth without taking this most significant event into one’s consciousness’. That being who we call Christ appeared on earth in the flesh at the beginning of our era. He will never come again in a physical body, for that event was unique. But the Christ will come again in an etheric form in the period we are currently living in.

Likewise, Steiner would say Christ's second appearance needn't be necessarily famous, and yet he believed 'Christ will reappear by reason of the fact that in etheric vision men will be raising themselves toward Him...with those who are especially blessed able to perceive Him always in this spiritual-etheric world.' For Christ spoke truly when he said ‘ I am with you always, even unto the end of the Earth cycles. He is here; he is in our spiritual world… and those who are especially blessed can percieve him always in this spiritual etheric world. The biggest threats to this development will be false messiahs and materialism according to Steiner.

Steiner thought that 'man will be capable of seeing etheric bodies, and among these etheric bodies will be able to also see the etheric body of the Christ; that is, Christ will be visible to his newly awakened faculties.'. However, he feared 'there might be so much wickedness, so much materialism on earth that the majority of mankind would not show the slightest understanding but would consider the people who had this clairvoyance as fools, and would clap them into insane asylums along with others whose souls develop in a muddled fashion'. Moreover, the feared the 'period may bring us false messiahs' and that as 'the materialistic mind corrupts everything, so it will come about that this sort of mind will be unable to imagine that the souls of men must advance to etheric vision and it to Christ in the etheric body.' The goal of Christ's reappearance was for humanity 'to unite anew with the Christ'

Steiner believed in the prophets of Solomon, Moses and Abraham. He prophesized further that 'even as Abraham preceded Christ, preparing His way, he has also assumed the task of helping later with the work of Christ. Thus the human being who does not sleep through the greatest event of the near future, gradually enters into association with all those who, as patriarchs, preceded the Christ event; he unites with them.' Steiner believed that there was a Kali Yuga age, which began 'approximately in the year 3101 BC (the 5000 year lasting Dark Age) and that this age had finished now Christ had reappeared in the Etheric Realm - the 20th century marked a new age. Steiner believed the first part of Kali Yuga was 'primarily the period of Abraham - that period in which man loses the direct outlook into the higher spiritual worlds, but in which something like a consciousness of God arises in him, which gradually grows more and more into his ego, so that he increasingly conceives this God as being related to the ego consciousness, the human ego-consciousness.' Following, there was a time most influenced by Moses and then by Solomon. Steiner believed 'a repetition occurred,... but in reverse order. The repetition occurs in such a way that the essential feature of the Solomonic age is repeated in the first millennium after Christ... followed by the age of Moses in the second millennium after Christ' and now in the third millennium by Abraham.

What does this mean according to Steiner? Well, 'in the case of Abraham, consciousness of God was led into the brain' and now 'he must perform this deed twice - once as though doing the opposite of the other time'. Steiner predicts that Abraham 'having led humanity into a consciousness of God within the sense-world, may now lead humanity out of this;... What Abraham brought down for humanity into physical consciousness, so to speak, he will carry up again for humanity into the spiritual world' this millennium.

Rudolf Steiner believed Christ was crucified in real life but not re-incarnated and believed the Apocalypse of Saint John By Rudolf Steiner was written based on the actual experiences of St. John. He did not believe in the "Four Knights of the Apocalypse" as a literal concept, but rather interpreted the Book of Revelation from a spiritual and esoteric perspective, emphasizing the forces of Lucifer and Ahriman as essential components of human evolution and freedom. While he studied the Apocalypse, he saw its "secrets" as something to be experienced and "carried out" through inner spiritual development, rather than a set of external figures to be believed in. 

Clairvoyancy

Steiner expanded on Goethe’s theory of colour by introducing the distinction between active colours and passive colours. Black, white, green and peach-blossom are picture or image colours – in that as we saw in the conclusions above, they are pictures of something – the living, the soul, spirit. Yellow, blue and red are termed lustre colours in that “something shines from them”.

• Peach-blossom represents the living image of the soul

• White or light represents the soul’s image of the spirit

• Black represents the spiritual image of the lifeless

• Green represents the lifeless image of the living

References:

The event of the appearance of Christ in the etheric World, lecture by Rudolf Steiner January 25th 1910

The reappearance of Christ in the Etheric, lecture by Rudolf Steiner March 6 1910.