The World of the Spirit and Its Impact on Physical Existence

GA 150 — 12 January 1913, Leipzig

X. Luciferic and Ahrimanic Aspects of Contemporary Cultural Life

Notes from a lecture

Our life must, so to speak, represent what we can become through anthroposophy. This requires a clear view of life and a healthy judgment about it. In our time, life is more complicated than it was in the previous age. Even in periods of time that lie just behind us today, it was much less complicated. This was due to the simple circumstances. At that time, the soul and the qualities associated with it were more widespread in humanity than they are today. But many other things have also changed significantly. And we all live in this changed life and must try to penetrate the sphere of life in which we live as it is necessary. It is precisely part of contemporary life that we achieve harmony of soul and inner unity of mind despite the fragmentation of modern life.

This cannot be fully explained in a lecture; we can only highlight a few points. Today we find materialism everywhere, including a materialism that permeates all of practical life, brought about by machine operation. The latter has made the conditions of business life, of life in general, much more complicated, has given rise to the hustle and bustle in which humanity must live and not come to its senses. People often do not even realize how their entire labor, their entire thinking and pondering from morning till evening is devoted to material needs. It is only natural that in the age in which we are surrounded by machines, people begin to think materialistically about all matters. Truly, the spread of materialistic and monistic worldviews would be impossible in any other age.

We anthroposophists stand in a new worldview. The spiritual movement is entering the world. Consider the difficulties we face, consider how small spiritual science has remained despite its magnificent potential. Let us compare what prevails in the world as religious denominations, which are to be seen as remnants from times gone by. We find many religious aspirations. We should certainly take a look at them. We find a very intellectual approach to religion. There are preachers, Christian ones, who no longer believe in a human Christ, no longer believe in immortality. People are happy when a Jatho movement and the like appears and is presented as rationally as possible. All old authorities can no longer prevail against the blind faith in what science has proven. These phenomena are all related to moral concepts. Anyone who works in a business will confirm how little truth there is in today's interactions between salespeople and customers. Many a person who stands in between suffers as a result. Do the cobweb-thin concepts of such rational preachers have any moral force in them? Even the public opinion of which we are so proud today did not exist in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries as it does now through the newspaper system. Great philosophers have long since said: Public opinion is private error. Who could possibly make an Ostwald and the like believe that spiritual entities have anything to do with him? But by denying them, he is summoning very specific spiritual entities. Behind every Ostwald there is an army of very specific spirits. The spirit lives in all matter. There is a spirit that has every interest in denying its spirit, and that is Ahriman. When man directs all his attention to the material laws, he does not banish the spirits, but conjures them up; they creep into the minds of the materialists. Mephistopheles sends Faust to the realm of the Mothers and says: There you will find the Nothing. — Faust answers him: “In your Nothing I hope to find the All.” — But humanity today does not answer like Faust, for materialistic people are obsessed by Ahriman.

In the religious-rationalistic direction, on the other hand, another spirit is at work, namely Lucifer. Through abstract, cobweb-thin concepts, he detaches people from the real spiritual. Ideas are now supposed to live in history, which is just as clever as expecting a painter who is only painted to paint pictures. This amalgamation with matter had been in preparation for a long time, and today it has reached a preliminary climax. Heraclitus diluted Theosophy into philosophy through the influence of Lucifer. This is expressed figuratively in the saying that he offered his book as a sacrifice to Diana of Ephesus.

Now let us look at public opinion. It arises from the law that Lucifer and Ahriman had to intervene in the world view. In the past, instead of public opinion, there were people whose spiritual life extended to the spiritual mysteries. For better or for worse, these personalities had an influence on world life. This can be understood by studying the history of Florence between the years 1100 and 1500, for example. Today, this influence corresponds to those people who strive to achieve a connection with the spiritual. However, the luciferic beings who have remained behind on the moon and determine public opinion have not progressed to this point. As a result, public opinion is about a thousand years behind. The very lowest among them, the recruits, so to speak, of the luciferic army, work on public opinion. Beings are formed in them that will later appear as powerful entities. They sit behind the editorial desk, they stand behind the popular speaker and so on. These are just beginning luciferic spirits, actually still little ones.

To know about life, that is part of practical spiritual science. Man forms his image of the world with his mind. What now arises from this knowledge of the mind and senses? There is an old word for it. Not even the appointed representatives can grasp it. The serpent says: You will be like God, knowing good and evil. All intellectual and sensory knowledge is Luciferic, is its actual hallmark. The insistence on external experience, which does not recognize anything other than atoms, is a fantasy. Behind Maya are not atoms, but spiritual realities. All the phenomena that are described are not realities; the realities are the spiritual beings. The monads do not exist if we do not grasp them in reality as the higher hierarchies. There are many hierarchies, among the highest are also the deities of the Trinity. Philosophy speaks only of one unity. But the spirits are many, and unity exists only in the souls of the spirits. Those who have become accustomed to thinking in such a way that they know themselves to be in the community of spirits have the moral laws. Ahriman lets human beings sink into the swamp of matter; Lucifer draws them away from the truth, preventing them from realizing that they are lost in an illusory world. Maya has a right to exist if it is understood as an expression of the reality behind it.