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The Rudolf Steiner Archive

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Search results 351 through 360 of 434

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260. The Christmas Conference : The Envy of the Gods — The Envy of Human Beings 31 Dec 1923, Dornach
Translated by Johanna Collis, Michael Wilson

And if our Goetheanum could have been finally completed, then once again, as we entered from the West, our glance would have fallen on that statue which would have challenged the human being to know himself as a cosmic being placed between the forces of Lucifer and the forces of Ahriman with the inward, divinely sustained equilibrium of his being. And when our glance fell on the forms of the pillars, the architraves, they spoke a language that was a continuation of what was expressed from the platform in the ideas which worked as though interpreting the spirit.
193. The Influences of Lucifer and Ahriman: Lecture Three 04 Nov 1919, Bern
Translated by Dorothy S. Osmond

It would be wrong to pass derogatory judgment on this Lucifer culture. For all the beauty produced by Greek civilization, even the insight that is still alive in ancient Greek philosophy and in the tragedies of Aeschylus would have been impossible without this Lucifer incarnation.
It is of the very greatest importance that people should approach the coming incarnation of Ahriman with full consciousness of this event. The incarnation of Lucifer could be recognized only by the prophetic insight of the priests of the Mysteries.
On the contrary they will say to themselves: The whole physical and spiritual life of human beings must be illumined and pervaded by the conceptions of spiritual science! Just as once in the East there was a Lucifer incarnation, and then, at the midpoint, as it were, of world evolution, the incarnation of Christ, so in the West there will be an incarnation of Ahriman.
13. Occult Science - An Outline: Man and the Evolution of the World
Translated by George Adams, Mary Adams

In the spiritual world, Ahriman brings man to complete isolation, leading him to center all his interest upon himself alone. Men who at death are in the power of Ahriman are born again as egoists.
To them was unveiled what had been veiled by the impulses of Lucifer and Ahriman. Lucifer concealed from man all that of the spiritual world which had, until the middle of the Atlantean time, been pouring into the human astral body without any participation on his part.
The superhuman Beings were known in Europe too; but they were seen in perpetual warfare with the associates of Lucifer. The God of Light was indeed proclaimed, but not in such form and figure as would enable one to say with assurance that He would conquer Lucifer.
26. The Michael Mystery: Heavenly History, Mythological History, Earthly History. The Mystery of Golgotha
Translated by Ethel Bowen-Wedgwood, George Adams

But Lucifer would like to extend this tendency to the whole Cosmos. And here his activity becomes a war against that divine spiritual order to which Man originally belongs.
In the freezing blasts of winter we must recognize the workings of Ahriman. [ 35 ] In the height of midsummer, Lucifer mingles his power with the Love, the Warmth of Nature.
In so doing, He renders harmless that which craves the Calculable only—Ahriman and his forces. [ 37 ] The unique Event of Golgotha is the free, cosmic act of Love within Earth's history.
190. Past and Future Impulses in Society: Lecture I 21 Mar 1919, Dornach

to answer: Look at the representative of mankind in the middle and above Lucifer and below Ahriman! All three belong together in the unity of man. But the man is just tripartite and differently you do not understand the man.
62. Errors in Spiritual Investigation: Meeting the Guardian of the Threshold 06 Mar 1913, Berlin
Translator Unknown

He also explores the encounter with the double, the influences of Lucifer and Ahriman, the role of fear, and the polar tendencies toward phenomenology and mysticism. Lecture 12 of 14 from the volume: Results of Spiritual Investigation The volume of the Complete Edition of the works of Rudolf Steiner containing the original text of the this lecture, among eight others, is entitled: Ergebnisse der Geistesforschung, (No. 62 in the Bibliographical Survey, 1961).
213. Human Questions and World Answers: Tenth Lecture 15 Jul 1922, Dornach

What has been achieved is that one has learned to think as Ahriman can think, what the Ahrimanic ideal of thinking is. One can only recognize the full significance of what is happening in our time when one knows what it actually is.
Franz Brentano approaches nature with this attitude: Just don't touch Ahriman! - and to the supersensible world: Just don't touch Lucifer! — So just don't become atomistic, just don't become a mystic.
And the original spirits who personally experienced this still half-masked encounter with Ahriman in the 19th century had a tragic fate behind them. But the students now received the prepared thoughts.
210. Old and New Methods of Initiation: Lecture I 01 Jan 1922, Dornach
Translated by Johanna Collis

To learn to know ourselves fully we have to perceive these abysses, or at least we have to learn about them. We are drawn in one direction towards Lucifer and in the other towards Ahriman. And the ahrimanic and the luciferic aspects can be characterized in relation to the body, the soul and the spirit.
It is for this that all art and all beauty are striving. Lucifer is the guardian of beauty and art. So in seeking the right balance between luciferic and ahrimanic influences we may allow art—Lucifer—in the form of beauty, to work upon this balance.
But if they give to external existence a form which expresses something it could not express by its own laws alone—marble can only express the laws of the mineral world—if they force marble to express something it would never be able to express by means of its own natural forces, the result is the art of sculpture; then, something which cannot be a reality in a sense-perceptible situation of this kind, something unreal, is brought as if, by magic into real existence. This is what Lucifer is striving to achieve. He strives to lead human beings away from the reality in which they find themselves between birth and death into a reality which was indeed reality in earlier times but which cannot be genuine reality for the present day.
68c. Goethe and the Present: The Spiritual Significance of “Faust” 22 Sep 1909, Basel

This is how Lucifer works. But there is also another kind of force that makes us act, that our minds gain real knowledge when we direct our perception to this world.
Goethe sensed what clouds the human gaze and leads to error, what is called the forces of Ahriman. For Ahriman is the same as what we are accustomed to calling Mephistopheles, after the one who characterizes human behavior as lying: from the Hebrew “Mephis” is liar and “tofel” is ruin. It means the same thing that Zarathustra calls Ahriman. But Mephisto does not mean Lucifer. He is the power that leads man to lie, to see outer life in deceptive forms, not in truth.
191. The Influences of Lucifer and Ahriman: Lecture Five 09 Nov 1919, Dornach
Translated by Dorothy S. Osmond

Results 351 through 360 of 434

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