Anthroposophical Guiding Principles
GA 26
30 November 1924
Translated by Steiner Online Library
First contemplation:
At the gates of the soul of consciousness. How Michael prepares his earth mission by defeating Lucifer supernaturally
[ 1 ] Michael's intervention in the development of the world and humanity at the end of the nineteenth century appears in a special light when one considers the spiritual history of the centuries that preceded him.
[ 2 ] The beginning of the fifteenth century is the point in time when the epoch of the consciousness soul begins.
[ 3 ] Before this time, a complete change in the spiritual life of mankind is revealed. One can trace how previously imaginations still played a role in human perception everywhere. Individual personalities, however, had already found their way earlier to mere "concepts" in their soul life; only the general soul constitution of the majority of people lives in an interpenetration of imaginations with concepts that originate from the purely physical world. So it is with the ideas about natural events, but also with those about historical development.
[ 4 ] What spiritual observation can find in this direction is confirmed by external evidence. Some of the latter are indicated here.
[ 5 ] What had been thought and spoken about historical events in the preceding centuries is often written down just before the dawn of the age of consciousness. And so we have preserved "legends" and the like from this time, which give a true picture of how "history" was previously imagined.
[ 6 ] A fine example is the tale of "Good Gerhard", which is preserved in a poem by Rudolf von Ems, who lived in the first half of the thirteenth century. The 'good Gerhard' is a rich merchant in Cologne. He undertakes a trading trip to Russia, Livonia and Prussia to buy sable skins. He then goes to Damascus and Nineveh to buy silk fabrics and the like.
[ 7 ] On his journey home, he is caught up in a storm. In the foreign territory he arrives in, he meets a man in whose captivity there are English knights and also the fiancée of the English king. Gerhard gives up everything he had acquired on the journey and receives the prisoners in return. He takes them on board his ship and sets off on his journey home. When the ships arrive at the point where the paths to Gerhard's homeland and to England diverge, Gerhard releases the male prisoners to their homeland; he keeps the king's fiancée with him in the hope that her bridegroom, King William, will come for her as soon as he receives news of her liberation and whereabouts. Gerhard keeps the royal bride and her friends in the best possible way. She lives like a much-loved daughter in the house of her deliverer from captivity. The longest time passes without the king appearing to fetch her. Then Gerhard decides to marry her to his son in order to secure the future of his foster daughter. For it is believed that Wilhelm is dead. The wedding feast for Gerhard's son is already underway when an unknown pilgrim - Wilhelm - appears at it. He had wandered around for a long time looking for his fiancée. After the selfless renunciation of Gerhard's son, his bride is returned to him. They both stay with Gerhard for a while; then he prepares a ship to take them to England. When the restored prisoners are able to welcome Gerhard back to England, they want to elect him as king. But he is able to reply that he is bringing them their rightful king and queen. They, too, had believed William to be dead and wanted to elect a new king for the country, where conditions had become chaotic during William's wanderings. - The Cologne merchant turns down all the dignities and riches offered to him and returns to Cologne to continue being the simple merchant he was before. - The story is framed in such a way that the Saxon Emperor, Otto the First, travels to Cologne to get to know the "good Gerhard". The powerful emperor is tempted to count on "earthly reward" for some of the things he has done. By getting to know Gerhard, he becomes aware of an example of how a simple man does unspeakable good - giving all the goods he has bought to free prisoners; returning his son's bride to William; then everything he does to bring him back to England and so on - without desiring any earthly reward for it, but expecting all reward solely from the rule of God. The man is called "the good Gerhard" by the people; the emperor feels that he receives a powerful religious and moral jolt through his acquaintance with Gerhard's attitude.
[ 8 ] The narrative, the framework of which I have given here so as not to merely interpret something little known by name, now shows from one side quite clearly the state of the soul of the age before the emergence of the consciousness soul in the development of mankind.
[ 9 ] For anyone who allows the narrative as given by Rudolf von Ems to sink in can feel how the experience of the earthly world has changed since the time in which Emperor Otto lived (in the tenth century).
[ 10 ] Look at how, in the age of the consciousness soul, the world before the human soul's gaze has become, so to speak, "bright" for all comprehension of physical being and becoming. Gerhard sails with his ships as if in a fog. He only ever knows a little bit of the world with which he wants to come into contact. In Cologne one learns nothing of what is going on in England and has to search for years for a person who is in Cologne. You only get to know the life and possessions of a person like the one Gerhard is taken to on his journey home when fate brings you directly to the place in question. Looking through the world conditions of today is like looking into a sunlit, wide landscape and feeling your way through thick fog.
[ 11 ] What is told in connection with the "good Gerhard" has nothing to do with what is considered "historical" today. All the more so, however, with the mood and the whole spiritual situation of the age. These, not the individual events of the physical world, are depicted in imaginations.
[ 12 ] This representation reflects how man feels himself not only as a being who lives and is active as a link in the chain of events of the physical world, but how he feels spiritual, supersensible beings working into his earthly existence and his will in connection with them.
[ 13 ] The story of the "good Gerhard" shows how the twilight darkness that preceded the age of the conscious soul with regard to seeing through the physical world pointed the way to seeing the spiritual world. One did not see into the vastness of physical existence, one saw all the more into the depths of the spiritual.
[ 14 ] But just as a dim (dreamlike) clairvoyance had once shown mankind the spiritual world, it was no longer so in the marked age. The imaginations were there; but they occurred within a conception of the human soul that was already pushing strongly towards the mental. As a result, people no longer knew how the world that revealed itself in imaginations related to the world of physical existence. For this reason, the imaginations appeared to people who were already more insistently attached to the mental as arbitrary "fictions" without reality.
[ 15 ] They no longer knew that they were looking through the imagination into a world in which they stood with a completely different part of their human being than in the physical world. Thus both worlds stood side by side in the representation; and both bore a character through the attitude of the narrative that one could think that the spiritual events that were told had taken place as perceptibly between the physical ones as these themselves are perceptible.
[ 16 ] In addition, the physical events in many of these narratives were mixed up. People whose lives are centuries apart appear as contemporaries; events are transposed to incorrect places or times.
[ 17 ] Facts of the physical world are viewed by the human soul as one can only view the spiritual, for which time and space have a different meaning than for the physical; the physical world is depicted in imaginations instead of in thoughts; instead, the spiritual world is interwoven into the narrative as if one were not dealing with another form of existence, but with the progress of physical facts.
[ 18 ] A historical narrative that focuses only on the physical thinks that the ancient imaginations of the Orient, Greece and so on have been adopted and poetically interwoven with the historical material that preoccupied people at the time. After all, the writings of Isidore of Seville from the seventh century contained a formal collection of old "legendary motifs".
[ 19 ] But this is an external view. It only has meaning for those who have no sense of the human soul condition, who know that their existence is still directly connected to the spiritual world and who feel compelled to express this knowledge in imaginations. If, instead of one's own imagination, a historically handed down one is used into which one has settled, then this is not the essential thing. This lies in the fact that the soul is oriented towards the spiritual world, so that it sees its own actions and natural events as being integrated into this world.
[ 20 ] However, there is an aberration in the narrative style of the time before the dawn of the age of consciousness.
[ 21 ] In this aberration, spiritual observation sees the workings of the Luciferic power.
[ 22 ] What urges the soul to include imaginations in its experiential content corresponds less to the abilities it had in prehistoric times - through a dreamlike clairvoyance - but already more to those that were present in the eighth to fourteenth centuries after Christ. These abilities were already pushing more towards a mental grasp of what was perceived by the senses. Both faculties exist side by side in the transitional period. The soul is placed between the old orientation, which focuses on the spiritual world and sees the physical world only as if in a fog, and the new orientation, which focuses on physical events and in which spiritual perception fades away.
[ 23 ] The Luciferic power works into this wavering balance of the human soul. It wants to prevent people from finding their full orientation in the physical world. It wants to keep him and his consciousness in spiritual regions that were appropriate for him in the past. It does not want to allow purely mental thoughts, which are directed towards grasping physical existence, to flow into his dreamlike, imaginative view of the world. It may well hold back his visual faculty from the physical world in the wrong way. But it cannot maintain the experience of the old imaginations in the right way. Thus it allows him to contemplate in imaginations without being able to transfer him mentally completely into the world in which imaginations are fully valid.
[ 24 ] In the dawning of the age of consciousness, Lucifer rules in such a way that through him man is transferred to the supersensible region, which is initially adjacent to the physical, in a way that does not correspond to him.
[ 25 ] This can be seen quite clearly in the "legend" of "Duke Ernst", which was one of the most popular of the Middle Ages and was told everywhere in a wide circle.
[ 26 ] Duke Ernest comes into conflict with the emperor, who wants to unjustly destroy him through war. The duke feels compelled to escape the impossible relationship with the head of the empire by taking part in the crusade to the Orient. In the experiences he now undergoes until the journey leads him to his destination, the physical and the spiritual are "fabulously" interwoven in the manner alluded to. On his way, for example, the Duke comes across a people with heads shaped like cranes; he is taken to the "magnetic mountain" with the ships, from which they are magnetically attracted, so that people who come near the mountain cannot return, but must perish miserably. Duke Ernst and his entourage make their escape by sewing themselves into skins, allowing themselves to be taken to a mountain by griffins who are accustomed to taking the people who have been taken to the magnetic mountain as prey, and escaping there after cutting through the skins in the absence of the griffins. The further journey then leads to a people whose ears are so long that they can be wrapped around the whole body like clothing; to a change whose feet are so large that when it rains, the people can lie down on the ground and spread their feet over themselves as umbrellas. He comes to a dwarf people, a giant people and so on. Much of this is told in connection with Duke Ernst's crusade. The "saga" does not allow us to feel in the right way how, wherever imaginations occur, the orientation towards a spiritual world takes place, how things are told through images that take place in the astral world and are connected with the will and fate of earthly people.
[ 27 ] And so it is with the beautiful "Rolandsage", in which Charlemagne's campaign against the pagans in Spain is glorified. It is even said, with reference to the Bible, that in order for Charlemagne to achieve the goal he was striving for, the sun was slowed in its course so that one day would be as long as two.
[ 28 ] And in the "Saga of the Nibelungs" we see how the form that has been preserved in Nordic countries maintains a purer view of the spiritual, while in Central Europe the imaginations are brought closer to physical life. The Nordic form of the tale expresses the fact that the imaginations relate to an "astral world"; in the Central European form of the Song of the Nibelungs, the imaginations glide into the contemplation of the physical world.
[ 29 ] The imaginations that appear in the Herzog-Ernst saga also refer in reality to what is experienced between the experiences in the physical sphere in an "astral world" to which the human being belongs just as much as to the physical world.
[ 30 ] If we look at all this with the spiritual eye, we see how entering the age of consciousness means growing out of a phase of development in which the Luciferic powers would triumph over humanity if a new developmental impact did not come into the human being through the consciousness soul with its power of intellectuality. The orientation towards the spiritual world, which wants to turn into the paths of aberration, is hindered by the consciousness soul; the human gaze is drawn out into the physical world. Everything that happens in this direction withdraws humanity from the Luciferic power that is obstructing it.
[ 31 ] There Michael is already working for humanity from the spiritual world. He prepares his later work from the supernatural. He gives humanity impulses that preserve the premature relationship to the spiritual-divine world without this preservation taking on a Luciferian character.
[ 32 ] Then, in the last third of the nineteenth century, Michael penetrates into the physical world on earth itself with the activity that he had practiced from the supersensible in preparation from the fifteenth to the nineteenth century.
[ 33 ] Mankind had to undergo spiritual development for a time in order to free itself from the relationship to the spiritual world, which threatened to become an impossible one. Then, through the Michael mission, this development was steered into paths that bring the progress of earthly humanity back into a relationship with the spiritual world that is beneficial to it.
[ 34 ] So Michael stands in his work between the Luciferic worldview and the Ahrimanic worldmind. With him, the worldview becomes wisdom-filled world-revelation, which reveals the world-mind as divine world-working. In this worldly work lives the Christ's care for humanity, which can thus reveal itself to the human heart from Michael's worldly revelation.
[ 35 ] (The second and third considerations follow.)
Goetheanum, November 23, 1924.
Further guiding principles issued by the Anthroposophical Society at the Goetheanum (With reference to the preceding first consideration of Michael's supersensible preparation for his earthly mission)
[ 35 ] 124 The advent of the Age of Consciousness (fifteenth century) is preceded in the twilight of the Age of the Mind or Spiritual Soul by a heightened Luciferic activity, which continues for a time into the new epoch.
[ 36 ] 125 This luciferic activity wants to unlawfully preserve old forms of imagining the world and hold man back from understanding the physical world existence through intellectuality and living into it.
[ 37 ] 126 Michael connects himself with the work of humanity so that independent intellectuality remains with the ancestral divine-spiritual, but not in a Luciferian, but in a lawful way.