52 cosmic prehistory lucifer ahriman lecture II :

(imaged retelling of the pair b-n as ahriman-lucifer)

Anyone who wishes to get a true knowledge of life must develop cosmic sensitivity.
What does that mean? It means that he must learn to look at the world somewhat
differently from the customary way of seeing it from the standpoint of maya. When
one goes through the world with the science of initiation then feelings arise which
are not there as long as one remains merely in the knowledge of maya. Feelings
arise which the ordinary person looks on not merely as paradoxical, but as foolish
and fantastic, yet which have every possible justification as regards true reality.
One who possesses the science of initiation and meets with a human beings hovers to
and fro between two perceptions. You man (he thinks to himself), you oscillate
between two possibilities. Either you fall a prey entirely to the temporal, you
become mineralised and stiffened inasmuch as you become solely earth-man and lose
your past, or else you evaporate in the spirit to a spiritual automaton, you do not
reach your goal as human being in spite of being spirit. � It might be said that in
confronting a man there really always come towards one two men, the one who is in
danger of petrifying in his form, becoming dense and rigid and growing together
with the earth; and the other who is in danger of thrusting out all that tends to
the mineralising and the hardening process, and is in danger of becoming quite
soft, jelly-like, and finally of dissolving as spiritual automaton in the All.
These two beings actually meet those who observe a man through the means furnished
by the science of initiation. One always feels anxiety, so to say (one must choose
such words as language provides, thus many things sound a paradox when one points
to the realm of reality) � one has ever anxiety lest the men who confront one
suddenly all become like those remarkable figures sometimes seen on the face of a
rocky cliff: a knight on horseback, or other figures in the mountains, sleeping
maidens, and so on. Men could become something like this and unite with the rock of
the earth and only live on as mineralised form. On the other hand, however, they
could thrust out all that leads them to mineralisation and could become jelly-like:
those organs that have contracted could swell out the ears could become gigantic
and include the throat, wing-like organs could grow out of the shoulders combined
with all this; all as soft as a jellyfish but dissolving as if out of it own
surging wave formation.
And such perception, such cosmic sensitivity, s0 to say, arises not only when one
confronts a human being with initiation knowledge, but ultimately one carries over
to everything what one receives through this cosmic sensitivity. You have assuredly
remarked that the tendency to rigidify, to become rock-like; comes from Ahriman;
the tendency to volatilize, become first jelly-like, then dissolving: comes: from
Lucifer. But this is not confined to man himself, it extends over all the
abstraction that one meets, One learns to perceive all straight lines as Ahrimanic;
all curved lines as Luciferic. The circle is the symbol of Lucifer; the straight
line the symbol of Ahriman. The human head with its tendency (one can see it in the
skeleton) to petrify, to ossify in the form given it by the earth and to remain
hard, is Ahrimanic formation. If forces that work in the human head were active in
the whole an he would acquire the figure of Ahriman as you have him over there in
our Group. He would be entirely permeated by headness � so to say he would be
entirely his own intelligence; but egotistic intelligence; and entirely his own
will so that the will comes to expression in the form itself.
If we look at the rest of man, not the head-man, but the extremities, man in the
broader sense; we have the idea: If the forces working in the rest of man worked
through man as a whole he would then be formed like the figure of Lucifer in the
Group. And wherever we look; whether in the life of nature or in social life, we
can look into the Ahrimanic or the Luciferic if we are equipped with the science of
initiation. We must only perceive it and to develop this sensitive perception is a
necessity in man's future evolution. Man must learn to feel that the Lucifer
character prevails throughout the world, it prevails too through man's social life.
It wants above all to get rid of everything that pertains to rule and order in the
word and the laws that men have established. In man's social life there is nothing,
so much hated by Lucifer as anything that smells at all of law.
Ahriman would like to have laws; inscribe laws everywhere. And again human
community-life is interwoven with the hatred of Lucifer against law and Ahriman's
sympathy for it � and one does not understand life if one does not understand it as
a dualism. Ahriman likes all that is outer form, that can stiffen; Lucifer likes �
the Luciferic beings like � all that is formless, that dissolves form, becomes
fluid and flexible. By life itself one must learn to create the balance between the
wanting to stiffen and the becoming fluid.

Look at the forms of our Bau [ The first Goetheanum, destroyed by fire December 31,
1922. ], the straight line led over everywhere into the curved, equilibrium sought;
everywhere an endeavour to dissolve the fixed again in the fluid, everywhere rest
produced in the movement, but the rest transposed again into movement. That is the
whole spiritual element in our Bau. As men of the future we must try to shape
something in art and life knowing that there below is Ahriman who would let
everything grow rigid, there above is Lucifer who wishes to spiritualize
everything; both, however, must remain invisible, for in the world of maya only the
wave-ripples may appear. Woe if Ahriman or Lucifer should themselves press into
what desires to be life! And so our Bau has become what it is: a state of balance
in the universe which is wrested, lifted out, of the realm of Ahriman and the realm
of Lucifer. Everything culminates in the central figure of our Group, in this
Representative of mankind, in whom the whole Luciferic and Ahrimanic element is to
be blotted out. And the fact that this is so, that all is lifted out of what is to
remain purely spiritual, comes to expression in the Group, where the Luciferic and
Ahrimanic elements are set visibly in balance to each other so that men learn to
understand it.
That is the perspective which one must place before men today, so that they may
learn to grasp how they must find the state of equilibrium between the Ahrimanic
and the Luciferic. The Ahrimanic regulates us always � even in soul and spirit �
rectilinearly; the Luciferic brings us always into curving or circular movement and
diversifies us. If we have a one-sided tendency to monotheism, if we strive to the
whole world as a unity, then Ahriman tugs us by one ear; if we become monadists,
one-sided monadists, explaining the world out of many, many atoms or monads only,
without unity, then Lucifer is tugging us by the other ear. � In fact, to one who
has insight things are like this: when monists dispute with pluralists, monadists,
then the man who is actually disputing is generally quite guiltless, for behind
him, if he is a monist. Ahriman is pulling him by the ear and whispering all the
fine reasons the self-believed logic which he presents for his monism; and if he is
a follower of Leibniz or some other monadist, �Lucifer is there and whispers all
the fine reasons for the manifoldness of spiritual beings. What must be sought is
the state of equilibrium, unity in multiplicity, multiplicity in unity. However,
that is less easy and convenient than to seek either the unity or the multiplicity;
as it is altogether less comfortable to seek a state of equilibrium than something
where one can just rest in laziness. Men become either sceptics or mystics, The
sceptics feel that they have fine minds that can doubt everything, the mystics feel
that they are permeated by the divine and that with love and knowledge they can
embrace all things in their own inner being. The Sceptics are in fact but pupils of
Ahriman and the mystics but pupils of Lucifer. For what mankind must strive towards
is the state of balance; mystic experience in scepticism, scepticism in mystic
experience. It is not the point whether one is Montaigne or Augustine, the point is
that what Montaigne represents is illumined through Augustine and what Augustine
represents is illumined through Montaigne. One-sidednesses mislead men in the
direction of the one or the other stream. What is actually the meaning of �towards
the Luciferic�? The Luciferic is really there to make us headless, to take away our
own intelligence and free-will. The Luciferic spirits (it is better to say
�Luciferic spirits� and to say �Ahriman�, for although there are hosts in the
following of Ahriman, Ahriman stands out as a unity, because he strives for unity,
and the Luciferic element shows itself as plurality, because it strives for
plurality � therefore one expresses it as I have already done in the course of
today's lecture) � the Luciferic element really wants us to die at 28, it does not
want us to grow old. And if things went entirely according to this Luciferic
element we should become children, young men and women, would receive good
knowledge trickled in from duration, but at approximately the age of 28 we should
get sclerosis and rapidly become cretins. Thus what we could develop as human
comprehension would be thrust out just as sclerosis would be thrust out and what we
receive in youth could be made automatic and spiritualised. The Luciferic spirits
would like to take us at once and not let us first go through the Jupiter, Venus,
Vulcan evolution in order then only to become cosmic beings. They do not consider
that necessary but strive to take man away from the earth with what he has already
evolved through the Saturn, Sun, Moon existence. That is the one stream which wants
to hurry on with man as quickly as possible, it is a premature stream. The
Luciferic spirits would like to storm in and lead us as quickly as possible into
cosmic reality. The Ahrimanic spirits would like to root out our past and make the
earth our starting point; they would like to wipe out our past, conserve us on the
earth and then set us back to where we were as Saturn-beings. It is a retrograde,
retarding movement. Life is ultimately compounded out of a premature and a
retrograde movement and the state of equilibrium between them must be found.

Do not say, my dear friends, that these things are difficult, for that is not at
all the point. I spoke yesterday of how in early times men had the experience of
space and time, of how they experienced them concretely, while we experience them
so abstractly. We must learn so to look at our environment that everywhere we
experience in balance this interplay of stiffening and evaporating, of deserting
and thrusting back, of straight line and curve line. One can sleep with what simply
looks at the world. If one looks at it awake, then it threatens to rigidify or
evaporate in its whole nature as soon as it comes out of the state of equilibrium.
We must develop this feeling and it must become as alive in the men of the future
as was the ancient feeling for space and time in the men of the past.
One can have a sensitive perception concerning much in our Group. One can feel in
the centre the Representative of humanity with its lines and planes and forms,
where everything Luciferic and Ahrimanic is obliterated. The forms are there, but
as far as it allows in the human figure the Luciferic and Ahrimanic is rooted out.
One can find Lucifer and Ahriman held fast in their forms; one can feel the
contrast between the central human being and Lucifer and Ahriman, and can go
through the world with this feeling and find its correspondence everywhere. One who
is able to assimilate what lives in the feelings that are brought forth by this
trinity will absorb much for a certain autopsy of life. Much will be revealed by
the world when one contemplates it with the feelings resulting out of the trinity:
the central human being or Representative of mankind, Ahriman, Lucifer, And as to
the ancient space-feeling the three-foldness was revealed, and to the ancient time-
feeling the oneness of the Divine, so must one of the loftiest world-mysteries be
revealed to the humanity of the future, in that it is in the position to grasp
concretely the stiffening, the evaporating, the deserting, the thrusting back, the
straight-lined, the curve, the law-loving, the law-hating, and so on. The
recognition of the state of oscillation everywhere in life � that is what matters.
For life is not possible unless there is such a state of oscillation, If you have a
clock with a pendulum you can of course want to avoid the swinging to and fro and
make the pendulum stand still, but the clock will be of no use to you, the pendulum
must swing. In life there must be this pendulum condition. That must be noted
everywhere.