The Rudolf Steiner Archive

10. Centaur and Sphinx. Lucifer and Ahriman. Christ in the Etheric

[ 1 ] I once knew a poet who has long since passed away. In the second half of the 1880s, the man once told me that he was deeply afraid of the future of humanity—and I emphasize that while the way he expressed his fear may have been somewhat paradoxical, he was absolutely dead serious about the fear itself and about the direction he was trying to point to with his paradoxical expression—indeed, he was inclined toward a certain pessimism because he had this fear. He said, in fact, that it seemed to him as though the development of humanity toward the future were proceeding in such a way that human beings would increasingly develop their heads above all else, and that everything else in a human being would wither away in comparison to the head. He was, as I said, bitterly serious about this mental image, and he expressed the paradox as follows: that he feared the rational, intellectual nature of man might one day become so dominant that the head would be like a large sphere, and that people would then roll along like spheres on the earth. The man was bitterly serious about this fear of his; for he imagined that we live in the age of intellectualism, the development of intellectual powers that find their expression in the head, and that these intellectual powers will increase more and more, so that humanity is heading toward a future that arouses little longing.

[ 2 ] Now, of course, this is a thoroughly paradoxical statement, and one could say, in a certain sense, that even the fear that inspired his pessimism is, in a certain sense, paradoxical. But as is so often the case with the mind, so it is here: the human mind, namely, has a tendency to run wild, to draw conclusions, whenever an observation is made. This can be observed abundantly both in external, exoteric life and in the realm of the Theosophical Movement. In external, exoteric life, one need only look around a little to notice that the experiences, the actual observations, that humanity has made over the course of time have always given rise to a vast number of theories and hypotheses. How many hypotheses have, in the course of human development, sunk into the abyss, so to speak, as worthless! In the field of anthroposophical occultism, one can observe that someone who has received occult training—and thus possesses clairvoyant powers in a certain sense—communicates this or that based on genuine clairvoyant observation, and then the theorists come along and invent all manner of schemes and theories: the ideas are expanded upon. Often the observation is small, but the schemes and theories built upon it encompass entire worlds. That is precisely the problem: that such a tendency of the intellect exists. We do, after all, see this tendency in a somewhat more subtle sense in Sinnett’s famous book *Esoteric Buddhism*. This book is based on a number of genuine occult facts; these are found in the middle sections of the book and relate to the middle phase of Earth’s development. But then a schematic system of cycles and races is built upon this, and it just rolls and tumbles on in more or less the same way. These are conclusions, theories, that have been drawn from the few genuine, fact-based details that can also be found in this book. And so it was, so to speak, with my poet. He had a kind of unconscious, instinctive imagination in the background that told him something that is true—one might say, as true as a plumb line—and he made a mountain out of a molehill. Such things often happen in the world. What is the truth of the matter?

[ 3 ] The truth is that, in fact, in our present age—in our current Earth cycle—human beings are undergoing a certain evolution with regard to their heads; the formation of the head, the entire development of the head, will undergo changes as we look toward the future. If we look toward a very distant future of the Earth, we must indeed create a mental image of the fact that, for example, the formation of the human forehead, the human nose, and the human jaw will have undergone significant changes, that in a certain sense, however, everything else that the human being carries within themselves as an earthly organism will have regressed; but of course the relationship of the evolving head to the rest of the body during the Earth era will never be that of a rolling sphere. So this can certainly be perceived to a very, very limited extent. In contrast, in earlier epochs of Earth’s development, before the middle of the Atlantean epoch, the rest of the human organism was changeable, in a process of formation. Relatively little—relatively little—has the human organism changed since the middle of the Atlantean epoch, apart from the head; in contrast, before the Atlantean epoch, the human being underwent great changes with regard to the rest of the organism. From this you will be able to draw the conclusion—which is now correct, however, because it is nothing other than the observation put into words—that the further back we go into the Atlantean and Lemurian epochs, the more fundamentally different human beings looked, even to their own eyes. And in the ancient Lemurian epoch, human beings looked quite different from how they are now familiar to themselves.

[ 4 ] The image that human beings would have had of themselves during the late Lemurian period now presents itself to them in a certain way as they gradually approach that clairvoyant impression which leads to what we have already described: the Paradise Imagination. I have indeed told you—and this is correct—that this Paradise Imagination corresponds to a complete manifestation of the human being, of the physical human body, as it were, as Paradise itself. Humanity, as it were, steps apart, divides itself; the present physicality appears spread out in the manner described; but in that time—that is, when the time was actually present, into which one looks back, as it were, clairvoyantly when one has the legend of Paradise before one—in that time a leap forward took place, a powerful jolt forward. And through this jolt, which can also be observed through clairvoyant observation, what might be called the expansion of the human being was relatively quickly condensed into what then became the starting point for humanity’s subsequent development. Nevertheless, immediately following the time corresponding to the Paradise imagination, the human being was, in terms of form, quite unlike what has become of this human being today. And, in essence, everything in the realms of nature that surrounded humanity back then was also quite unlike what surrounds humanity in nature today.

[ 5 ] I have already told you in the lectures I have given here that a person could arrive at this vision of paradise if, during sleep, they suddenly became clairvoyant for a moment and, as it were, looked back at their physical and etheric bodies, allowing themselves to be inspired to the corresponding vision through their physical and etheric bodies. In general, one can say that one must have gone through a great deal in terms of esoteric development if one wishes to arrive at this vision of paradise. One must have overcome many obstacles and undergone much of what is required to transform personal interests into interests of humanity and the world at large. Then, when one emerges, so to speak, from the deepest sleep—sleep, after all, has its degrees—into a less deep sleep, and in this less deep sleep becomes clairvoyant, then what emerges is what, so to speak, later became reality in the Earth’s development: the state in which humanity existed in the ancient Lemurian era after having made the great leap forward. We can therefore say: There is a possibility to behold this primeval past of the Earth by separating one’s Self and one’s astral body from the physical and etheric bodies and looking back upon them. Since nature’s own mechanism—one might say—comes to our aid at night because we are outside our physical body, we can, so to speak, make use of this mechanism and arrange our training so that, as if awakening from sleep but not returning to the physical body—as if awakening into a different state of consciousness—we then see the physical body. From this you will be able to gather that this view, of which we have just spoken, offers the only real possibility of learning how human beings were constituted in the distant past.

[ 6 ] It will be a long time coming, but the day will eventually come when people will know the following, when they will say: How strange those people of the 19th and 20th centuries were! Back then, they believed they could discern the origin of humankind through external natural science; they believed they could draw conclusions about the ancestry of humankind from the animal beings they observed in their surroundings on the physical plane. Now, however, the true development of human knowledge reveals that one can only arrive at a true understanding of the origin of humanity on Earth, of its ancient form, through clairvoyant observation; that one can never gain insight into what human beings were like, for example, during the Lemurian epoch, except through clairvoyant observation, through a looking back inspired by the impressions of one’s own physical and etheric bodies. But then it will become clear—as will be known in the future—that human beings were never similar to any of the animal forms living around humans in the 19th or 20th centuries; for the forms that human beings had back then, and which reveal themselves to their clairvoyant consciousness in the manner described, differ from all the animal forms that might surround human beings in the 19th century. And even the terms we have used—bull, lion, and so on—are, after all, used only in a comparative sense. Particularly grotesque—people of the future will say—is to see how the people of the 19th and 20th centuries trace their family tree back to ape-like beings; for monkeys, in the form in which they later appeared on Earth, did not even exist at that time in the Lemurian era; these arose only from degenerate and fallen human forms at a much later time.

[ 7 ] It is not until around the middle of the Atlantean epoch that one finds, when looking back at Earth’s evolution, animal beings that can be compared to the apes living today. For the further back one goes in human development, the more one also perceives that, so to speak, our form from prehistoric times has been preserved for the clairvoyant gaze in the vision of our self during sleep, during the night. And so it is also that when the human being looks upon themselves, they come to know their physical corporeality in an infinitely finer—one might say—etheric corporeality, but not in the sense of our present-day ether. This is how the human being appears to himself. His form is more akin to a vivid dream image than to the form of flesh and blood as which the human being appears to himself today. Thus we must familiarize ourselves with the mental image that the Self and the astral body, when they are outside the human being, can barely see the head. It becomes quite shadowy; it does not fade away completely, but it becomes quite shadowy. In contrast, the rest of the human organism becomes clearer. It, too, becomes shadowy, but in such a way that although the human being does not appear to be of flesh and blood, they have the distinct impression that they possess a more powerful organism.

[ 8 ] It may seem paradoxical to you, but it is true: when a person clairvoyantly beholds themselves in sleep, at certain moments they—that is, their physical and etheric bodies—appear to the Self and the astral body in such a way that one is strongly reminded of the figure of the centaur. However, that which appears above the centaur as a human extension, showing a human face, is merely shadowy; whereas that which does not correspond to any animal form of today, but which in a certain respect recalls animal forms, gains power, and one says to oneself: To the spiritual gaze, this is stronger, even denser than today’s form of flesh and blood.

[ 9 ] I have touched on these things before in a series of lectures; but you must, of course, realize that all these imaginations—with the exception of the imagination of paradise—are fleeting, and that they can be depicted from various perspectives. I could just as easily present a slightly different view, and you would see that this corresponds merely to a different stage of development, and then we would come to the figure of the sphinx. The successive development of the human being presents itself precisely in different views, in different aspects. The mythological images, the so-called mythological symbols, possess far greater accuracy and far more truth than the fantastical intellectual constructs that modern science devises.

[ 10 ] At night, then, we become a very peculiar being. But now something else becomes clear to us. When we perceive this extension—which reminds us of an animal being—downward into the clairvoyant eye, we come to know something that leaves us with a very definite impression. And as I said yesterday: These impressions, these inner experiences, are actually the essential thing. The images are important, but the inner experiences are even more important. You gain a certain impression, so that afterward you know: What actually drives you during the day toward your purely personal interests, what instills purely personal interests in your soul, comes from what you see at night as your, so to speak, animal extension. During the day you do not see it; but it is within you as a force. These are the forces that, so to speak, pull you down and lead you astray toward personal interests. — And if one develops this impression more and more, then one comes to recognize who is actually the real Lucifer in our evolution. For the further we turn our clairvoyant gaze back toward the time corresponding to the Paradise imagination, the more beautiful becomes the form that actually only later comes to resemble the animal. And when we go back even further to the paradisiacal era, where the situation appears such that the animal continuation of humanity is, as it were, torn away from humanity itself and multiplied into the Bull, the Lion, and the Eagle, we may say that these figures, whom we address by these names for those ancient times, can in a certain sense also be for us the symbols of beauty. These figures become ever more beautiful. And if we then go even further back in time, to the period we spoke of yesterday when we described the impression of the sacrifice, we return to the time in which, so to speak, Lucifer’s true form appears to us in sublime beauty, just as he wished to preserve himself in the evolution from the ancient Moon to the Earth.

[ 11 ] From the description I have given in my *Secret Science*, you can see that human beings on the Moon were endowed with an astral body. What we carry within our astral body played a major role on the ancient Moon. However, we have characterized it as egoity, as egoism. On the ancient Moon, this egoism had to be implanted in human beings, and since human beings received their astral bodies on the ancient Moon, egoism is precisely situated in their astral bodies; and since Lucifer has retained his lunar nature, he has carried egoism into the Earth as the inner soul quality of his beauty. He is therefore, on the one hand, the spirit of beauty, and on the other, the spirit of egoism. And what one might call his wrongdoing is simply this: that he took something which belonged to humanity—if I may use the expression—on the Moon, namely the process of permeating and imbuing itself with egoism, and transplanted it onto the Earth. But through this, as has often been mentioned, human beings were precisely given the opportunity to become, within themselves, a self-contained, free being. Human beings would never have become this if Lucifer had not carried egoity from the Moon to Earth. Thus, in inner experience, one comes to know Lucifer, so to speak, as the spirit of the night. And it is connected with that transformation that takes place with our self and our astral body during our occult development that we feel ourselves in the company of Lucifer at night.

[ 12 ] At first, if you take this mental image at face value, you may find it quite alarming that when a person becomes clairvoyant and falls asleep, they become aware that they enter into the company of Lucifer during the night. But if you think about it more closely, you will soon realize that it is wiser to learn to recognize Lucifer, that it is better to know that you are in his company—than to believe he is not there, and that his forces are merely at work within you invisibly. After all, this is also the case during the day. The danger does not lie in the fact that Lucifer is at our side, for we gradually learn to recognize him as the spirit who brings freedom; rather, the danger lies in the fact that we do not know him. But in a certain sense, after humanity had, so to speak, beheld him during his temptation in the Lemurian epoch, they were not permitted to continue seeing him; for that original temptation in the Lemurian epoch would then have been followed by a succession of partial temptations. Therefore, the divine-spiritual being concerned with human progress had to draw a veil over the vision of the night. With that, however, humanity also lost everything it would otherwise see during sleep. And sleep covers the world in which a person exists from falling asleep until waking with darkness. The moment the veil were drawn away that covers the night with darkness, we would find that Lucifer is at our side. If humanity were strong enough, this would cause no harm; but since it could not yet be strong in the context of Earth’s development, this veil had to be drawn over the time of night’s sleep. And following the original temptation, which in its aftermath left behind the possibility of human freedom, the other temptations were not to be able to approach humanity through a direct view of Lucifer from the moment of falling asleep until waking up.

[ 13 ] Now there is an equivalent. For one cannot behold Lucifer in the night unless one beholds his counterpart, Ahriman, by day. And so, for the human being who has progressed this far in the development of their ego and astral body, the daily life that shapes their perception of things while awake is different from that of the naive human being. The human being learns to recognize that they approach things differently than they did before the development of their Self and astral body. The human being first learns to view certain impressions, which they would otherwise accept in an abstract sense, as effects of the Ahrimanic beings. Thus they learn to recognize desire—not the kind that comes from within, which is Luciferic, but that which comes from without, that which arouses desire in the human being from the outside, that which in the things and beings around us attracts us so that we follow this attraction out of personal interest—in short, everything that entices us from the outside toward pleasure—as an Ahrimanic impression. Then one learns to recognize as an Ahrimanic impression everything that instills fear in us from the outside, that which arouses fear within us from the outside. There are two poles, I would say: pleasure and fear. Around us are the so-called material and the so-called spiritual worlds; both the material world and the spiritual world appear to the outer waking consciousness in maya. The outer world of the senses appears in maya, for people do not see that wherever they are stirred to pleasure by external things and beings, Ahriman peeks out and evokes pleasure in the soul. But that which, for example, the materialists deny—that true spirituality is present everywhere in matter—this gives rise to fear; and when the materialists sense that fear is approaching them from the depths of their soul, from the astral realm, then they numb themselves, then they devise materialistic theories; and it is profoundly true what the poet says: The little people never notice the devil—namely Ahriman—even if he were already by their throats. Why, for example, are materialist gatherings held? To conjure up the devil! This is true in the literal sense; only people do not know it. Everywhere in the world today where materialist gatherings are held and where it is advocated in fine theories that only matter exists, there Ahriman has the people by the scruff of the neck, and there is no better opportunity today to study the devil than by attending materialist or monist gatherings. Thus, once one has undergone a certain development in one’s astral body and self, Ahriman accompanies one at every turn. When one begins to perceive him, one can protect oneself from him; then one sees that he peeks out from the temptations of pleasure and from the impressions of fear.

[ 14 ] Once again, because of humanity’s immaturity, this Ahriman had to be concealed; that is to say, a veil was cast over his nature. This was done in a somewhat different way than with Lucifer; it was done by immersing the outer world in maya for human beings, by making them believe that instead of Ahriman, who peeks out everywhere, there is matter out there in the world. Everywhere where human beings dream of matter, there is in truth Ahriman. And the greatest seduction is the materialistic theory of physics, the material atoms; for these are in reality nothing other than the forces of Ahriman.

[ 15 ] Now, humanity as a whole is undergoing a process of development, of evolution. And this evolution is taking place in such a way that, as we move toward the future, human beings are indeed developing the powers of intellectualism more and more. As a result, their physical form will take on a different shape. In a certain sense, the beginning of this development toward intellectuality was set in motion at the dawn of the modern natural sciences, roughly from the 16th century onward. However, as this intellectual development deepens further and further, it will exert a great influence on the human self and on the astral body. Now there came a time when traditions of the old clairvoyance still existed—they coincided precisely with the dawn of the modern natural sciences. It was precisely in the 16th century; people knew that a future would come in which, due to the higher development of their Self and their astral body, human beings would be able to truly see Ahriman more and more. Then, because in the early days intellectual development resisted the perception of the spiritual with all its might, a period of darkness set in. But the 16th century was still able to point out, in the figure of Mephisto at Faust’s side—who is nothing other than Ahriman—that, fundamentally speaking, Ahriman will, in a conscious sense, become ever more and more dangerous to the future of human development; that Mephisto, so to speak, will increasingly become a kind of seducer of the human race. In the early days, this was evident only because people still had a memory of the old spiritual forms. Now it has been forgotten by humanity at large; but in the future, the realization will impose itself upon humanity that it is accompanied by Ahriman-Mephisto throughout its entire waking life. Of course, there is also a counter-image to this, and that is that humanity is heading toward a future in which, upon every awakening, it will have the impression—like a dream just slipping away—and then ever more clearly: your nocturnal companion was Lucifer.

[ 16 ] You can see from this that, through the occult development of their ego and astral body, human beings can foresee something of what will happen in the future of humanity, and can sense something of the alliance between Ahriman and Lucifer. Due to a certain law of development, Lucifer first approached humanity during the Lemurian epoch, and only later, as a consequence of the Luciferic influence, did the Ahrimanic influence follow. In the future, it will be the reverse: the Ahrimanic influence will be strong at first, and then the Luciferic influence will join it. The Ahrimanic influence will act primarily in the waking state, the Luciferic influence primarily in the sleeping state or in all those states that are similar to the sleeping state but are conscious, in the increasingly developing clairvoyant states of the human soul.

[ 17 ] Since Ahriman is to enter into human beings’ outer, sensory life during the waking state, humanity first needed protection for the waking state against Ahriman. Such protective impulses are given over many, many centuries in the course of human development before the corresponding danger arises. While full awareness of Ahriman-Mephisto is still not present for humanity as a whole, the protective impulse entered at the beginning of our era in the physical manifestation of the Christ in the development of the Earth. The fact that Christ once appeared in a physical body during Earth’s development served as a precaution to ensure that humanity might be armed, through the reception of the Christ impulse, against the inevitable influence that will come from Ahriman-Mephisto. That humanity will be armed later, when the Luciferic influence is present—against this, humanity will be armed by the appearance of the Christ in the etheric body, of which it has already been spoken often that it is approaching. This is an influence that will come for a different consciousness. Just as Christ once appeared in the physical body and the impulse went out from there, so will Christ become perceptible in ethereal form, beginning as early as this 20th century, first to a small number of people and then to an ever-increasing number. And so we see how, through a kind of equilibrium, through a kind of balancing of the impulses, the further development of humanity is brought about. What is depicted in the temptation stories of the Gospels—the confrontation of Christ with Lucifer and Ahriman, in one Gospel in one way, in another in another—as I have once described—is a testimony to the fact that humanity can find the right path of future development through the Christ impulse, through the impulse of the Mystery of Golgotha. It is part of a true development of the human self and astral body that the human being, in this transformed self and astral body, can receive the impressions of how things stand with Ahriman, with Lucifer, and with Christ in the evolution of humanity; and a proper development of the self and the astral body leads to such an understanding of the three impulses that determine the evolution of humanity.

[ 18 ] However, true development involves directing the egoity of the astral body toward the general interests of humanity and the world. And it acts like poison when a person carries personal interests and personal aspirations into those regions of their clairvoyant observation where they should be observing solely imbued with general human and world interests. Then, in the case of clairvoyant observation, the truth does not emerge, but rather imaginations arise that are untrue and incorrect, which are merely reflections of personal interests and personal aspirations. It can sometimes happen that a clairvoyant who is still entirely filled with personal aspirations and interests does something like the following. I received a letter in which someone wrote to me that they had to tell me something I needed to know. Christ had been reborn in a physical body; his address was London W., such-and-such. Mary had been reborn in a physical body; her address was that of her niece, such-and-such Street. Paul had been reborn; that was his brother-in-law, who was identified by the address. And so the entire group described in the Gospels had been reborn into that family, and the individual addresses were listed in that letter. I could show this letter to anyone; it is a document—as grotesque as it may seem—of the elevation of personal interests to those heights where the interests of the world and humanity should prevail.

[ 19 ] Now, however, we must be clear that when someone errs with regard to their abstract intellectual knowledge, they are essentially presenting something that is easily controllable with this error—something that can be eliminated relatively quickly—even though human knowledge has that—one might say—terrible origin that was pointed out yesterday. Because human knowledge, as it manifests itself in our waking daily life, contains such diluted impulses that everyone can develop complete freedom in the face of these diluted impulses, therefore no one needs to be blinded by the follies conceived by the human intellect, and those who allow themselves to be blinded by the follies conceived by the human intellect will be able to be healed in a relatively short time.

[ 20 ] But let us suppose that, in clairvoyant observation, incorrect imaginations arise in the manner described; then these incorrect imaginations have a certain psychologically contagious effect; they are so contagious that they actually extinguish common sense and intellectuality. They are therefore far more harmful than mere intellectual follies. If one therefore attempts to subject everything gained in the field of occultism to the scrutiny of common sense, one is doing the right thing. If one simply presents the imagination without further ado and does not attempt to justify it in the way we are doing in this very lecture series—and one will present only those imaginations that are unjustified as mere imaginations—then one is precisely deceiving that very aspect in the other person that should be stirred to reject such imaginations. And it could well be that—while the one who spreads intellectual folly invites criticism, easily invites criticism—someone who spreads false imaginings thereby deprives those who believe in him of the very possibility of criticism, that is, renders them blind to the necessary rejection of the imaginings in question. We can see from this how, in the very moment when knowledge goes beyond what is intended for human beings in the natural course of development—how, in the very moment when a human being rises to clairvoyant insights—it is absolutely necessary that their development be directed precisely toward the general interests of humanity and the world. This is something that will always be recognized in true occultism. And to assert the opposite—that there could be a healthy entry into the spiritual worlds, that is, a healthy development of the astral body and the Self, independent of the expansion of human interests toward selfless world and human interests—the assertion contrary to the one made here could only spring from a mindset that permeates occultism with frivolity. We must bear this in mind as an important point when we speak of the changes that take place with the astral human being and the Self during higher spiritual development.