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Fall of the Spirits of Darkness
by
Rudolf Steiner. From Behind the Scenes of External Happenings, 1917
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In the lecture here a week ago I dealt with a
theme of vital importance in view of the events that are breaking with such
tragic consequences into the life of mankind. This theme may be indicated,
briefly, by saying: It is urgently necessary for mankind once again to know
and realise that the physical world is connected with spiritual realities, to
become conscious of the fact that a spiritual world is working into the actual
details of physical existence.
Our age, above all, must be alive to the necessity for the
spreading of this consciousness among mankind. The human being of the present
time does not differ so very markedly in outward, physical appearance from human
beings living in those past ages with which ordinary history deals. History,
after all, goes no farther back than the Third Post-Atlantean period. What lies
before that is a very vague chapter in the only kind of historical scholarship
that is recognised by modern man. Although in the intervening period, man's life
of soul has undergone very great changes indeed, it cannot be said that equal
changes have taken place so far as the external, physical organism is concerned.
Therefore people neither notice, nor try to notice, what is really happening as
the outcome of impulses from the spiritual world. We are living in very
momentous times. This has nothing to do with the trivial remark, so often heard,
that this age is an age of transition. Naturally, every age is one of
transition. The point is to know what is in transition in any particular
age.
We become particularly conscious of what is thus in transition
in our time that is to say, of what is assuming new forms and undergoing
great change when we are able to observe not only the life of beings moving
about the Earth in physical bodies, but also the beings who do not belong to the
physical world among them, the Dead. In the world in which the human being
lives between death and a new birth there, the changes, especially the
transformation that is proceeding during this present age, are to be observed in
all their deep significance. But modern man is loath to take in earnest matters
concerning the spiritual world. The fact that this is so gives rise to many
reflections in regard to the growth and existence of Anthroposophy. It really is
the case that one need not be particularly biased in favour of the ideas
represented in the Anthroposophical Movement before being willing to advocate
them. In other Movements and countless numbers of leagues, unions and the
like are founded today, all of them convinced that they represent the most
urgent needs of the world in all such Movements people have the subjective
fanaticism of their particular cause. They are infatuated with their own
programme, maintaining that it will bring universal happiness, that it is an
absolute necessity. In the case of the Anthroposophical Movement, such
infatuation is simply not necessary, for the urge to advocate such ideas may
come from something quite different. Briefly and I must be brief because we
can only be together for such short intervals let me say the following: When
a man has become convinced of the truth of the idea of Anthroposophy, he is
impelled to do everything he can to spread them by the feeling of compassion for
those who need these ideas at the present time in other words, practically
every human being with whom one comes into contact compassion for men who
need these ideas and without them will fall upon evil times.
In the last lecture here I tried to give you a conception of
how a great deal that is unintelligible on the physical plane only begins to be
intelligible when it can be viewed in its connection with the spiritual world.
Today I want to put before you certain other points of view, which to begin with
will appear to relate to quite different matters. We will start from a very
common experience. Many people who consider themselves qualified to pass
judgment on such matters, regard it as sign of religious enlightenment to
repudiate ideas presented in Anthroposophy, for example, that on the other side
of the threshold of the spiritual world, many Spiritual Beings, whole
Hierarchies of Spiritual Beings are to be found ... Angeloi, Archangeloi, and
still higher Hierarchies. It is considered to be a sign of enlightenment to
dwell upon the One God and aspire to establish an intimate and direct
relationship with Him. This is regarded as the only possible form of Monotheism
and many people evince something like horror at a teaching that speaks of many
Spiritual Beings.
Let us be quite clear about what this really implies. When a
man's attitude to the spiritual world is merely that of the enlightened
Church today, his relationship to the spiritual world even if it is only in
his feeling is of a definite kind; it is simply a relationship with his
Guardian Angel, the Angelos with whom he is, in fact, connected. And this
Angelos the only Being with whom he is able to feel related he calls his
God; if he is a Christian he calls him Christ; he confuses his Angelos with
Christ. This may be difficult to understand, but it is so. Protestant
theologians who claim to be enlightened and inveigh against Polytheism, urging
men to establish direct relationship with the one Being, Christ whatever
they may preach concerning Christ, the truth is that what they say has only to
do with the relationship of the human being to his Angelos. Monotheism in our
time is in danger of becoming a worship of the Angelos of each individual human
being.
Men are still unwilling to admit many things that are
nevertheless there. Even the crudest circumstances, however, prove to an
objective observer that such illusions set men well on the path to calamitous
ideas. This worship of man's own Angelos is the reason why each individual has
his own God, merely imagining that he shares with others a Godhead who is common
to them all. The truth is that the monotheist of today has only his own
individual Angelos and because there is such uniformity in the words with which
each human being describes his own egotistical relation to the Angelos, people
imagine that they are speaking of the Divinity who is the one God of them all.
If this state of things were to continue, individuals would develop, still more
strongly, the tendency that is taking such a terrible form among the nations
today. Although the nations still theorise about the one universal Godhead, they
do not and this holds good above all at the present time really
acknowledge this one Godhead, because each of them prefers to have its own
special God.
This, however, is merely what comes to light in crude,
external form. In reality, every human being today wants to have his own God and
he gives the name of Monotheism to the relationship between himself and
his own Angelos. And because conditions are so clouded in an age when men's only
desire is for perception of the Material, the truth of what I have just said
does not occur to them.
Today there is evidence on all hands that when one speaks of
man's concrete relationship with the spiritual world to those who as yet know
nothing about Anthroposophy, they are unwilling to go into such matters; they
are afraid of it all. They will not summon up courage to think about impulses
that are said to come from the spiritual world. The same tendency has always
existed in times of crisis and we are living in one such time nowadays. It is
grievous to see how utterly inattentive men are to the momentous and tragic
events of the present time, how disinclined to pay the necessary heed, except
when driven to it by material considerations. The individual has to be trained,
so to speak, before his attention is aroused to the fact that in the events of
our time, deep and trenchant impulses in the life of mankind are placed before
the soul.
That, after all, is why people simply did not listen when it
was said that momentous, incisive thoughts and undertakings are called for by
men if the world is to be lifted out of its present pitiable state and that
such thoughts and undertakings must be born from spiritual knowledge, real
spiritual knowledge. Constant references to the universal Spirit, all the talk
about inner, spiritual deepening and the like none of it leads anywhere.
What is essential is that men of the present time shall establish real and
concrete relations with the spiritual world. It is not difficult for us to
realise that even in earlier times when men were in closer contact with the
spiritual world, their attention was directed to those concrete relationships
which are no longer understood today. In earlier times men did not speak vaguely
of swarms of human beings on the Earth below with some kind of Godhead up above,
but they spoke in terms of concrete realities.
The most beautiful and significant fruits of these concrete
relationships with the spiritual world are prophetic utterances like those of
Daniel, of the Apocalypse, where men are not merely bidden to trust in a God, to
believe in a God, but where they are told of the first heavenly kingdom, the
second, the third ... told in all concrete reality of the connection of the
spiritual world with the physical, material world. Humanity has lost all
aptitude for speaking thus concretely of the relation of the Spiritual to the
Physical, would prefer that everything should be painted the same colour, if I
may put it so. Men like best of all to devise theories according to which human
beings the Earth over can find equal material happiness. The socialist of today
insists that certain ideas are right and proper for the life of man right
for England, for America, for Russia, for Asia; he thinks that if one and all
arranged their national affairs according to socialist principles, the happiness
which is the dream of modern man would come to the Earth of itself. All these
ideas are abstract, unreal. Ignorance of the fact that something quite specific
arises in one region of the Earth out of a particular people, something quite
different in another region out of another people, the inability to understand
the great difference between the West and the East this is what causes
endless confusion and chaos. For only when a man is able to build a bridge from
his soul to the objective realities, can he co-operate fruitfully in shaping
earthly existence.
People are unwilling to build such a bridge. Inner reasons
have lately caused me to speak to friends in very many places of an event
momentous in its effect upon evolution which took place in the last third of
the nineteenth century; it is an event known to all occult schools although they
are not always able to give accurate details of its actual course. I will speak
of it briefly, again today. From the year 1841 onwards, a battle was waged in
regions of the spiritual world, between certain Beings of the higher Hierarchies
and other superior Beings. The Beings who rebelled and waged war from 1841 to
1879 had been used, before that time, in the service of the wise guidance
of worlds. Even those Beings who rebel and become evil Beings of Darkness may,
at certain other times, serve good and useful purposes. I am speaking,
therefore, of Beings who up to the year 1841 had been used by higher Spirits in
the service of the wise guidance of worlds but whose aims, from then onwards,
ran counter to the aims of the Beings superior to them. These Beings of lower
rank fought a great battle in the spiritual world one of those battles that
often take place but at different levels and are portrayed in legend and
symbolism as the battle of Michael with the Dragon. In the autumn of 1879 this
battle ended by certain Spirits of Darkness being cast down from the spiritual
world to the Earth. Since then they have been working among men, creeping into
their impulses of will, into their motives, into their ideas, indeed into all
human affairs. And so, since the autumn of 1879, certain Spirits of Darkness
have been among humanity and if men wish to understand earthly happenings, they
must be alive to the presence of these Beings.
It is absolutely correct to say that in the year 1879 these
Beings were cast down to the Earth. This made the heavens free but the Earth
full of them. From that time onwards their habitation is no longer to be found
in the heavens they are on Earth.
If I am to describe the aim pursued by these Beings in their
war of rebellion from 1841 to 1879, I must say the following: They wanted to
be able to prevent the spiritual wisdom, which will be revealed from the
twentieth century onwards, from flowing into the souls of men. Only by the
removal of the hindering Spirits of Darkness from the spiritual realm could the
minds and hearts of men be opened to receive, from the twentieth century
onwards, the spiritual knowledge destined for them; only so was the flow of this
spiritual knowledge possible. Wandering as they now do among men, these Spirits
of Darkness make it their business to spread confusion; from their arena here,
on Earth, they want to prevent the establishment of the right attitude vis-ΰ-vis
the spiritual truths, they want to withhold from men the blessings which it
is the purpose of the spiritual truths to bring.
Intimate and penetrating knowledge of these things is the only
means whereby the aims of the Spirits of Darkness may be counteracted. Certain
occult brotherhoods, however, make it their business to work in exactly the
opposite sense; they want to retain the wisdom exclusively within their own
narrow circles, in order to exploit it in connection with their lusts for power.
We are living in the midst of this struggle. On the one side there is the
necessity for men to be led along the right paths by the assimilation of the
spiritual truths; on the other side there are enclosed occult brotherhoods of an
evil kind, desiring to prevent these truths from finding their way to men, with
the result that they remain dull and stupid as regards the spiritual world, and
thus make it possible for those within narrowly enclosed brotherhoods to carry
on their intrigues from there.
Events of the present time bristle with such intrigues and
machinations, and calamity looms ahead if men will not realise that these
machinations are in full swing. You will feel at once that light is shed upon
the real background of these things when I tell you of certain truths which have
matured in our time truths which must fall as it were like ripened fruit
from the spiritual world into the kingdom of men but are prevented from
spreading against which, moreover, men are instinctively prejudiced because
they are afraid of them.
In this connection I want to speak as concretely as possible.
The fact that in 1879 a number of Spirits of Darkness were cast into the kingdom
of men, has weighty and significant consequences one of which is that since
that time, clear thinking has assumed a far, far greater importance than it ever
had before. At no other period could it have been said, having regard to the
inner necessities of evolution, that clarity of thinking is as essential as
eating and drinking are to the maintenance of physical life. For if man's
thinking lacks clarity in the age in which we are actually living and in the
times to come, he will not be able to see in their right light the ripened
truths which are to fall from the spiritual world. Above all, he will fail to
realise the vast and profound significance of the Mystery of Golgotha, of the
Coming of Christ, for the whole evolution of humanity. Many there are who speak
of Christ Jesus. Modern theology, however, would actually like to prevent anyone
from speaking of the deep purpose imparted to the earthly evolution of mankind
by the Mystery of Golgotha. In the nature of things, fulfilment of what was to
come to pass through the Mystery of Golgotha has been, and is, both slow and
gradual. And in our present century, for the first time, this becomes intensely
evident.
Previous epochs still enjoyed a heritage from the days when
spirituality pervaded the atavistic inner life of man. Now, for the first time,
man must strive for spirituality if he desires it. And so, in our day, and
actually only from the year 1879 onwards, very definite phenomena appear.
Because external observation has become so crude, they are really only clearly
to be perceived when the eyes of the soul are directed to that realm which the
human being enters on passing through the Gate of Death. For souls born before
the year 1879 and those born afterwards pass into the spiritual world in
different ways. Truly, it is a momentous event of which we are here speaking.
One consequence of this event is that in their souls, human
beings more and more come to resemble the thought, to resemble that which they
regard as knowledge. This will seem a strange truth to the modern mind, but it
is so, nevertheless. To see certain things in their proper light, with clarity
of thought, with thoughts saturated with reality that is vitally important.
It is good to see Darwinism in the proper light as I tried to present it in
the public lecture yesterday.1 To regard Darwinism as the one and
only valid conception of the world, believing the only possible truth to be that
man descends from the animals and reiterating the thought: I descend from
the animals, I descend entirely from forces which also produce the animals ...
such thoughts, in our age, tend to make the soul resembles its own conceptions
of itself. This is really an important matter! When the body is discarded, the
soul is then confronted with the sorry fate of having to perceive its
resemblance with its own thought! A man who lives in the physical body believing
that animal forces alone were at work in his evolution, fashions for himself a
kind of consciousness in which he will perceive his own likeness to animal
nature. For since the event of 1879, the character of the Fifth Post-Atlantean
epoch has been such that the souls of men are transformed into the ideas they
form of themselves. That is why I said: It is not necessary to be particularly
biased in favour of anthroposophical Spiritual Science before being willing to
advocate it; all that is necessary is compassion for men who need these thoughts
and ideas because they are creative powers in the life of soul, because it is
ordained that in times to come, what the human being considers himself to be,
that he will become. This development is part of the wise guidance of worlds, in
order that the human being may attain full and free consciousness of the Self.
On the one side the Gods were bound to make it possible for man to become what
he makes of himself; and in order that he might imbue this self-created being
with supersensible meaning, that he might be able to find in this self-created
being, something that gives him an eternal aim in order that this might be,
Christ Jesus fulfilled the Mystery of Golgotha. And when man understands Christ
Jesus in the light of Spiritual Science, in the light of true thought, he finds
the way to Him: the way which leads out from the animal into the Divine.
1Anthroposophy and
Natural Science. 12th November, 1917.
There is one truth that stands out strongly when the eyes of
the soul are able to look into the world entered by the human being after death.
Those who were born before 1879 always carry with them a certain heritage which
protects them from becoming purely that which, here on Earth, they have pictured
themselves to be. And for a long time still these things are only gradually
approaching for a long time still this protection will be possible, but only
through pain, only when men can suffer, when, to speak paradoxically, they can
take on themselves the pain of knowing and feeling in themselves the
shortcomings of their conception of man. Harmony with the Self, together with a
knowledge which lets man after death be truly man, this will arise
for future times only if human beings become aware, here, in the physical body,
of their true connection with the spiritual world. Those who are afraid of
concrete facts of spiritual knowledge because of their materialistic ideas will,
of course, for a long time yet be unwilling to acknowledge that any such change
took place in the year 1879; nevertheless it will have to be acknowledged sooner
or later. It is clear from this that one thing, above all, is essential and will
become increasingly so in the future, namely, that all available spiritual
knowledge shall spread over the Earth. Therefore in order to further their aims,
the Spirits of Darkness will attach particular value to the breeding of
confusion among men so that they will not succeed in forming the right thoughts
and ideas into which, after death, they are transformed. What man thinks himself
to be, that he is obliged to become.
This is a truth that was destined, after the great changes in
the nineteenth century and from then onwards, to find its way to men. The human
being must be voluntarily anything that he can be really; he must be able
to think about his own being if he is to be truly himself in his life of soul.
For even now the Dead could announce as a ripened truth: The soul is what it
thinks itself to be. At the time when it was necessary, from the stage of the
Earth to spread the truth: The soul is what it thinks itself to be, at that time
Spirits of Darkness inspired human beings to announce the following: Man is
what he eats. And although this is not, in theory, widely
acknowledged, the practical conduct of life amounts very nearly to being an
acknowledgment of the principle that man is what he eats that and nothing
else. Indeed this principle is more and more being applied and developed in
external life. To a far greater extent than people believe, the grievous and
tragic events of the present time are an outcome of the tenet: Man is what he
eats. In a much deeper sense than is supposed by the superficial modern mind, a
terrible amount of the blood that is shed today, is shed over unseemly issues.
Humanity is already infiltrated by the principle that man is what he eats.
And it gives rise, indirectly, to much contention.
That is why the spread of thoughts and ideas corresponding to
the realities of the times is so very necessary. Thought will gradually have to
be known as a concretely real power of the soul, not merely as the miserable
abstraction produced so proudly by the modern age. Men living in earlier times
were still linked, by an ancient heritage, with the spiritual world. Although
for many centuries now, atavistic clairvoyance has almost entirely ebbed away,
this heritage still lives in the feeling and in the will. But the time has come
when everything that is conscious must become a real power hence the
Spirits of Darkness strive to counter really effective thoughts by abstract
thoughts in the form of all kinds of programmes for the world. This connection
must be realised and understood. Thoughts must be imbued with greater and
greater reality.
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