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Prayer for You
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Rudolf Steiner's Theories of Evil
From the book Imaginary Landscape: Making Worlds of Myth and Science, by William Irwin Thompson: "The traditional mythological system of the battle of Christ and Satan in history must be seen in a new way. Rudolf Steiner articulated a Christology in which Christ is the human mediation between the demonic Ahriman and the satanic Lucifer. Ahriman is the unit crushed into the uniform, the destruction of individuality in sameness. Ahriman is the spirit behind Stalin, or Orwell's nightmares of Big Brother. Lucifer is the opposite, the individual raised, in the unbounded pride of the sin of superbia, to a cosmic egotism where there can be no other one, not even God. The Ahrimanic evil is the state that crushes all diversity; it is the war-time economy. . . . in which all life, all art, all science, and all sensuous happiness must be sacrificed to the Moloch of battle. The Luciferic evil is the overweening pride of the scientist who believes he can do better by taking over the control of evolution through the genetic engineering of life in his laboratory. The Christ, however, is neither the unit and the uniform, nor the alone, but expresses the crossing of the unique and the universal." Ahriman <-------(Christ)-------> Lucifer From the essay "The Spiritual Psychology of Rudolf Steiner," by Fraser N. Watts in Beyond Therapy: The Impact of Eastern Religions on Psychological Theory and Practice, edited by Guy Claxton: "Rudolf Steiner believed that there were two different forces for evil, forces which were opposed to each other in many ways, though with a tendency to form an alliance. One, which he associated with Lucifer, represents grandiosity, arrogance, and self-indulgence. The other, associated with Ahriman, is manipulative and acquisitive, but ultimately sterile. They are associated with different forms of thinking: Lucifer with a tendency to hazy mysticism, and Ahriman with analytic definitions and formulae. Steiner characteristically asserts that even these evil forces have a necessary and constructive role. We owe art to Lucifer, and technology to Ahriman. They have both played a crucial role at different stages of the evolution of consciousness in enabling human beings to find a path of development towards love, wisdom, and freedom. Thus, for Steiner, "the task of evil is to promote the ascent of man." Because in this scheme there are two forces of evil, not just one, good is not seen as being opposed to evil. The forces of good, associated with Christ, are seen as balancing, redeeming and healing the two evil forces." |
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© 1995-2008 -- Rob Brezsny. All rights reserved
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