X. First Contemplation: How Michael prepares his earthly mission supersensibly, by the conquest of Lucifer.

In this confusion, when viewed with spiritual understandings, may be seen the actions of the Luciferic Powers. The impulse which makes the soul adopt Imaginations into her personal store of life-experience, corresponds less with the faculties that she possessed in primeval times—through dream-like clairvoyance—and more with those already in existence in the eighth to the fourteenth centuries. These later faculties were already impelling the soul more towards a thinking interpretation of what was perceived through the senses. The soul is placed betwixt the two: betwixt the old orientation—where all turns upon the spiritual world, and the physical world is only seen as in a mist—and the new orientation, where all turns upon physical proceedings, and spiritual vision has grown dim.