Lecture III

Everything which has developed during the more recent ahrimanic age by way of materialistic science, a science that comes from the burning pain of material existence that is cooled in the human being, is ahrimanic by nature. We see this materialistic science arise as human beings evolve it. When people give their inner life to this science, Ahriman unites with them through it. Lucifer has a hand above all in the sphere of the arts; Ahriman has a hand in the development of mechanics, technology, anything that seeks to take the human intellect away from people and put it into machine tools and also the machinery of government. This alone has made the developments possible which have arisen mainly from the time of the Renaissance onwards. We might say that luciferic activity came to a kind of dead end during the Renaissance and that ahrimanic activity then took over. We can see how everything since then has gone in the direction of mechanization, and a science divorced from the realm of the spirit.