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The Rudolf Steiner Archive

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Search results 121 through 130 of 434

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26. The Michael Mystery: Before the Door of the Spiritual Soul III
Translated by Ethel Bowen-Wedgwood, George Adams

Yet eventually, if it be not grasped by the spiritualized power of the Spiritual Soul, this too must end by falling from Michael's range of action into the dominion of Lucifer. That Lucifer might gain the ascendancy in the rocking of the cosmic balance—this is the other dire anxiety in Michael's life.
He was obliged to remain on the far side, aloof from men, and carry on the war in his own region against Lucifer and Ahriman. Hence came the great and tragic difficulty; for Lucifer can approach Man all the more easily, the more Michael—who is also the preserver of his past—is obliged to keep away from him. And so a stormy contest was being waged on Man's behalf, in the spiritual world next to earth, by Michael against Lucifer and Ahriman: whilst Man himself on earthly territory was busying his soul in opposition to the healing forces of his own evolution.
149. Christ and the Spiritual World: The Search for the Holy Grail: Lecture III 30 Dec 1913, Leipzig
Translated by Charles Davy, Dorothy S. Osmond

But we know also that the evolution of the Earth had been exposed to the attacks of Lucifer, and later to those of Ahriman. Thus the souls of men had to enter into bodies wherein they were exposed in the course of human evolution to the attacks of both these spiritual Beings.
For the cosmic forces which had worked on them from the surroundings of the Earth, and whose task it was to bring order into these organs—the organs of breathing, blood circulation and so on—these forces would have developed under the influence of Lucifer and Ahriman in such a way that the vital organs would have ceased to be usable by human beings on Earth.
And it was necessary that these forces, also, should be modified. If they had remained under the sway of Lucifer and Ahriman, the vital organs would have become merely organs of greed or organs of loathing. For example, a man would not have been able to restrain himself from hurling himself greedily upon a given dish, while a terrible loathing would have driven him from another.
272. Faust, the Aspiring Human: A Spiritual-Scientific Explanation of Goethe's “Faust”: Wisdom – Beauty – Goodness Michael – Gabriel – Raphael 19 Aug 1916, Dornach

I told you at the time that Goethe did not yet properly distinguish between Lucifer and Ahriman. Mephistopheles is actually Ahriman, who has only been left behind in a different way than Lucifer.
Lucifer would stand there. And because Lucifer has as his companion Ahriman, Mephistopheles – which is the same as Ahriman – Mephistopheles would then step in, or Lucifer would step down and Mephistopheles would step up.
That Faust should be tempted by base passions cannot really come from Ahriman, it can only come from Lucifer. And when Ahriman-Mephistopheles says this, Goethe remembers, subconsciously, that it is not quite right.
157. The Destinies of Individuals and of Nations: Lecture XIV 06 Jul 1915, Berlin
Translated by Anna R. Meuss

What happens is that those powers will, unknown to man, develop in such a way that he will offer to Lucifer and Ahriman what he would otherwise have offered to the legitimate gods. Everything you suppress in your conscious mind, everything you will not allow to unfold, you offer to Ahriman and Lucifer.
It now serves the powers we refer to by the technical terms of Lucifer and Ahriman. Those human faculties are then not directed along the path of the progressive deities but into the path,. of Ahrimanic and Luciferic powers.
150. The World of the Spirit and Its Impact on Physical Existence: Luciferic and Ahrimanic Aspects of Contemporary Cultural Life 12 Jan 1913, Leipzig

Mephistopheles sends Faust to the realm of the Mothers and says: There you will find the Nothing. — Faust answers him: “In your Nothing I hope to find the All.” — But humanity today does not answer like Faust, for materialistic people are obsessed by Ahriman. In the religious-rationalistic direction, on the other hand, another spirit is at work, namely Lucifer.
Now let us look at public opinion. It arises from the law that Lucifer and Ahriman had to intervene in the world view. In the past, instead of public opinion, there were people whose spiritual life extended to the spiritual mysteries.
Those who have become accustomed to thinking in such a way that they know themselves to be in the community of spirits have the moral laws. Ahriman lets human beings sink into the swamp of matter; Lucifer draws them away from the truth, preventing them from realizing that they are lost in an illusory world.
194. The Mission of the Archangel Michael: Michaelic Thinking. The Knowledge of Man as a Supersensible Being. 23 Nov 1919, Dornach
Translated by Lisa D. Monges

In regard to the spiritual sphere, the desire of egotism penetrates into our human nature on this path. Thus we see this duality—Lucifer-Ahriman—connected with human nature, and I have shown you by Milton's Paradise Lost, by Klopstock's Messiah, and by Goethe's Faust how modern civilized mankind deceives itself, can deceive itself, in regard to this duality.
The fact that we have to become clear about the effects of Ahriman and Lucifer, of the Angeloi, Archangeloi, Archai, and so forth, in another way means simply that we have to learn to know them in a different manner.
For only by looking upon the state of equilibrium between the beautiful and the ugly do we stand within reality; then we do not exist within a one-sided Luciferic or Ahrimanic reality not belonging to us, into which, however, Lucifer and Ahriman strive to place us. It is very necessary that such ideas as I have just put forward enter human cultural evolution.
134. The World of the Senses and the World of the Spirit: Lecture III 29 Dec 1911, Hanover
Translator Unknown

Why do they strike back? It comes about because while here Lucifer is striking in, Ahriman, in the physical and etheric body, is striking back from the other side. Here in the middle, where you have on the one hand the ascendancy of etheric body over astral body and physical body over etheric body, and on the other hand the ascendancy of astral body over etheric body and I over astral body—here in the middle you have Lucifer and Ahriman in collision. Here they come up against one another. Thus, there is in man a centre point where Lucifer and Ahriman meet in their own true nature. And man can either swing in the direction of Lucifer and bore his astral body deeper than is right into his etheric body, or he can take hold of the impetus in the power of Ahriman and strike the etheric body too deep into the astral body.
191. Lucifer and Ahriman: Lecture II 02 Nov 1919, Dornach
Translated by Dorothy S. Osmond

The lecture yesterday will have shown you that if we are to acquire insight into the nature and evolution of man, we must be constantly mindful of the power and influence of Lucifer, of Christ, and of Ahriman. These influences were, of course, already at work in earlier stages of cosmic evolution, but in spheres where it was unnecessary for man to have clear consciousness of their effects.
They want to be virtuous, avoiding both the Ahrimanic and the Luciferic. But the truth of the matter is that Lucifer and Ahriman must be regarded as two scales of a balance and it is we who must hold the beam in equipoise.
For such things as I want to bring home to you in these lectures—how Lucifer and Ahriman intervene in the evolution of mankind side by side with the Christ Impulse—these things must be taken in all earnestness and their consequences rightly assessed.
195. The Cosmic New Year: The Dogma of Revelation and the Dogma of Experience 01 Jan 1920, Stuttgart
Translated by Harry Collison

Through that which Lucifer on the one hand takes for his own, Ahriman on the other hand attains the possibility of making his own that which works in the needs of human nature.
An attempt is being made to do away with everything human, with everything embodied in a human body as human, and to harness together Lucifer and Ahriman, with the civilization they represent. Were this to be realized in the East, then the Manufacturing Company of Lucifer and Ahriman would create a world excluding everything beneficial to the individual human being, and man himself would be dovetailed into this Luciferic-Ahrimanic civilization as part of a machine in the complete working of the machine.
It is only the insight of Spiritual Science and its living earnestness which can explain what the fact implies that, during the last thirty to forty years, the essential nature of the German people would not turn back to that German spirituality pointed out in my essay, but that in this German world of culture, we have at last come to this, that men of authority have felt it to be the right thing to send to Russia (in a sealed railway carriage), through a man who stood in their service, the inaugurators of Lucifer and Ahriman. In our days, it will not do simply to look around and then go to sleep peacefully, in the presence of what is actually taking place in the depths of the spirit of the present time.
156. The Festivals and Their Meaning I: Christmas: The Birth of Christ Within Us 27 Dec 1914, Basel
Translated by Dorothy S. Osmond

Therefore when the time is fulfilled, the earth will not remain a corpse in cosmic space—the soul having become the prey of Ahriman and Lucifer! No—that is what would have happened had Christ not come into the earth as a living, fertile seed. Because He has come, the earth will not fall into dust, the soul will not be in the sole possession of Lucifer and Ahriman, for the Christ Seed has infused new life into earth-evolution! Just as the earth once separated from the sun and has become a child of the sun, so will earth-evolution, imbued with a new impulse, be fraught with the meaning and purpose imparted by Christ.

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