Fighting the Dragon

Dragons are certainly popular these days. Books, cartoons, television shows, movies, they’re featured everywhere. Why dragons? For that matter, why were the villagers in stories dating back hundreds of years required to sacrifice a daughter to the dragon terrorizing them?

We know actual dragons don’t exist on earth; we have no evidence that they ever did. Yet, we all seem to know that great courage and strength is required to conquer them, and that, if captured, they are very hard to train. Let’s take a look at a specific dragon from a specific story.

The Archangel Michael (pronounced in three syllables), who is celebrated each year on September 29, has everything to do with the dragon we will talk about today. But first, let’s look at Raphael’s painting depicting Michael conquering the dragon.

Why was this battle a subject for so many artists? We can learn from studying spiritual science that long ago, when humankind still possessed an innate spiritual vision, cosmic images of spiritual realities explained the heavens and the earth to humankind. The knowledge imparted by these cosmic images is the basis of our religions, and though mankind had lost access to direct knowledge of the spiritual world, the artists of the Renaissance like Raphael and Michelangelo kept painting these images.

The paintings by Michelangelo on the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel, for example, depict the cosmic images revealed to the writer of Genesis. Is God an elderly white man with a flowing white beard? No, of course not. And dragons as a species aren’t a thing. So, when we look at these paintings, we must keep that in mind. To refresh this kind of thinking, please refer to the blog from October last year. (https://www.whoareyou.blog/invisibility).

Why are we talking about any of this? Because a cosmic truth is revealed when we understand that a being depicted by the dragon was cast out of his milieu by Michael and found its new residence within us. We don’t see the dragon, but we see the results within us in the form of many evils to which we succumb in our lives. When we contemplate the image of Michael conquering the dragon, we need to understand that the Dragon, cast out of the heavens, is now an earthly problem; a problem each of us must attend to. Why? Because as human beings we need to cultivate courage and strength to fulfill our destiny.

Let’s see what Dr. Steiner has to say:

When we turn our gaze back into earlier times of human evolution, we are inevitably struck with the change that has come about in our conceptual pictures of nature and of spirit. Nor do we need to go back very far to observe this change occurring. As late as the eighteenth century the forces and substances of nature were thought of in a much more spiritual manner than they are today, while spiritual things were conceived more in pictures taken from nature. It is only in quite recent times that ideas about the spirit have become so utterly abstract and ideas about nature have become based on matter that is devoid of spirit and so impenetrable for human thought and vision. For present-day human understanding, nature and spirit are sundered from each other; there appears to be no bridge leading from one to the other.

It is for this reason that images of a sublime worldview, which in past times had great significance for the human being as he sought to comprehend his place in the universe, have passed completely into the realm of things deemed to be no more than airy fancy—to which man could only give himself up so long as an exact science was not there to forbid him. One such cosmic image is that of Michael fighting with the Dragon.

The picture of the fight of Michael with the Dragon expresses a strong awareness that man himself must give to his inner life of soul the direction and guidance that nature cannot give. Our present-day thinking is inclined to mistrust such an idea. We are afraid of becoming estranged from nature. We fear to lose ourselves in all kinds of fantasy should we allow the spirit that transcends the perception of external nature to play a part in our striving for knowledge about the true nature of the world…

Excerpt from: The Festivals and Their Meaning. Article: Michael and the Dragon, Das Goetheanum, Sept. 30. 1923.

That last sentence bears repeating: “We fear to lose ourselves in all kinds of fantasy should we allow the spirit that transcends the perception of external nature to play a part in our striving for knowledge about the true nature of the world.” We are afraid of accepting spiritual truths. Yet, once we do, we recognize the inadequacy of the purely materialistic understanding of life, the universe, and everything.

Maybe we could try to embrace this image of Michael conquering the Dragon. Maybe we could set it before our mind’s eye, and through it accept that a real battle with a real dragon is occurring inside us. We need to emulate Michael. We need to find the courage to recognize the dragon’s influence within us and the strength to conquer the evils to which we’ve fallen prey.

Looking Back

Seven months ago (Why Bother, Sept. 2021) we noted a time when humankind experienced spiritual beings as a matter of course, as part of their everyday life. In other posts, we’ve talked about angels and archangels as those beings in the spiritual hierarchies that are closest to us. Somehow, though, accepting the idea of karma and reincarnation has been easier for many of us than the idea of beings who exist outside our physical senses. What changed?

All cultures have origin stories. No culture was godless at its roots. Why? Though we may be tempted to call the people of our ancient past childlike or gullible, if we focused only on their achievements in astronomy, we would have to admit someone was thinking albeit quite differently. We were those people back then, and we changed. Over the course of centuries, our pursuit of knowledge stopped aiming toward the spiritual world and focused almost entirely upon the natural world we can observe through our senses. Since the spiritual world cannot be experienced with our senses, we lost our connection with it.

Let’s see what Dr. Steiner has to say:

… We must turn our gaze again and again to the particular mental condition of civilized mankind which began with the blossoming forth of the Natural Sciences and reached its climax in the nineteenth century.

One should place the character of this age vividly before the soul’s eye, comparing it with that of preceding ages. In all ages of the conscious evolution of mankind, Knowledge was regarded as that which brings man to the world of Spirit. To Knowledge, man ascribed whatever relationship to Spirit he possessed. Art and Religion were none other than the living life of Knowledge.

All this became different when the age of the Spiritual Soul* began to dawn (1400s). With a very great part of the life of the human soul, Knowledge now concerned itself no more. Henceforth, it sought to investigate that relation to existence which man unfolds when he directs his senses and his intellectual judgment to the world of ‘Nature.’ It no longer wanted to concern itself with that which man unfolds as a relation to the world of Spirit, when he uses—not his outer senses—but his inner power of perception.

Thus there arose the necessity to connect the spiritual life of man, not with any living present Knowledge, but with Knowledge gained in the past—with Tradition.

The life of the human soul was rent in twain. On the one hand there stood before man the new science of Nature, striving ever onward and unfolding in the living present. On the other side there was the experience of a relation to the spiritual world, for which the corresponding Knowledge had arisen in the ages past. All understanding of how the Knowledge, corresponding to this side of human experience, had been gained in ages past, was gradually lost. Men possessed the Tradition, but they had lost the way by which the truths of Tradition had been known—discovered. All they could do now was to believe in the Tradition.

A man who had consciously reflected on the spiritual situation, say about the middle of the nineteenth century, would have been bound to admit: mankind has come to a point where it no longer feels itself capable of evolving any Knowledge beyond that science which does not concern itself with the Spirit. Whatever can be known about the Spirit, a humanity of earlier ages was able to investigate and discover, but the human soul has lost the faculty for such discovery.

But men did not place before themselves the full bearing of what was taking place. They were content to say: Knowledge simply does not reach out into the spiritual world. The spiritual world can only be an object of Faith.

Letter from: Anthroposophical Leading Thoughts: The Apparent Extinction of Spirit-Knowledge in Modern Times, by Rudolf Steiner, March 25, 2025. Dornach, Switzerland.

For years now, those who accept a spiritual world, a world they can accept on faith alone, are seen as misguided if not pathetic by many of their peers. Yet faith and tradition play a big role in science, too. For example, cosmology assumes that the speed of light and the laws of gravity are constants throughout the universe, so we make all sorts of theories based on these assumptions. But what if they aren’t universal? Maybe all our ideas about the natural world are theoretical.

At our current stage of evolution, we need to pursue knowledge of the spiritual world once again purposefully—out of freedom—to understand ourselves as whole human beings. “What in earlier times was known instinctively must now be acquired by conscious effort.” (Steiner) This knowledge, once acquired, will augment what we have learned in all fields of the natural world.

In future posts, we will continue to investigate the other beings inhabiting the spiritual world including those beings who are determined to lead us into error. We need to realize we are not alone, and now more than ever it is necessary to understand who we’ve been, who we are, and who we may become.

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*Spiritual Soul is a stage of human development preceded by that of the Sentient Soul (our lower soul nature) and then the Intellectual Soul (higher soul nature). We will talk more of this in subsequent posts. Or, if you can’t wait, please read the book: Theosophy, Chapter entitled: The Essential Nature of the Human Being.

Why Bother?

Not everyone walks into an art museum with the same enthusiasm, but almost all of us will find at least one painting we think is beautiful. We may even recognize it from somewhere. We will spend a minute or so in front of it, enjoying its colors and forms whether we understand what the artist is trying to express or not. And then we move on.

Let’s say a docent walks up while we are standing in front of our favorite painting and starts to explain it. We may learn about the artist, the painting’s composition, its historical context, etc. Now we see the painting differently; it is more beautiful than it was before. The painting didn’t change, we did. And from now on whenever we see a piece of art, though we may immediately recognize its beauty, we know that it is also filled with mysterious meaning we can’t see until we understand what we’re seeing.

For all of time, humanity has searched for meaning to the mysteries of life.

Why not be satisfied with a feeling? Why bother to understand?

Let’s see what Dr. Steiner has to say:

… All an investigator of the spiritual world is doing is simply recalling to people’s memories something they have forgotten.

Now imagine that during life on earth you come across another person with whom you remember experiencing something 20 years before, but which he has completely forgotten. By talking with him, however, about the incident which you yourself remember clearly, you can bring the other person to recall it also. It is just the same process, though on a higher level, when I speak to you about the spiritual worlds, the only difference being that pre-earthly experiences are more completely forgotten than those of earthly life.

Now people might say: ‘Why should we be asked during our life on earth to take on this extra task of concerning ourselves with matters which, in accordance with cosmic ordering or, one might say, with divine decree, we experience during life beyond the earth?’ There are those, too, who ask: ‘Why should I go to this trouble before death to gain knowledge about the supersensible worlds? I can very well wait until I am dead. Then, if all these things really exist, I shall come face to face with them.’

All this, however, arises from a total misunderstanding of earthly life. The facts of which the spiritual investigator speaks are experienced by human beings in pre-earthly existence, but they are not then the subject of thought, and only during life on earth can thoughts about them be experienced. And only those thoughts about the supersensible world that have been worked upon during earthly life can be carried with us through the gate of death, and only then can we understand the facts we experience between death and rebirth.

… At this present stage of human evolution people’s lives are extraordinarily hard if, during life on earth, they give no thought to the spiritual world. For having passed through the gate of death they can no longer acquire any real knowledge of their surroundings. They are in the midst of what is incomprehensible to them. An understanding of what is experienced after death has to be striven for during life on earth… it was different for people of earlier ages. But, at the present moment of humanity’s evolution people will have to rely more and more on acquiring here on earth an understanding of what they are going to experience in the supersensible world between death and rebirth.

Excerpt from: The Evolution of Consciousness, Lecture 3: New and Old Initiation Science, August 21, 1923, in Berlin.

Consciousness evolves. Spiritual knowledge, once our birthright, once innate, must now be attained through our thinking. Spiritual awareness disappeared so that our thinking could develop freely, and now we need to lift the power of our thinking into the spiritual realms to understand what we will experience between death and rebirth. Until we can acquire this knowledge firsthand, we need a docent. We have the many works of an initiate, Rudolf Steiner, to provide us with this knowledge. We have much to learn before we cross the threshold.

Know It All

The vault of the blue sky arching over snowcapped mountain peaks in the distance invites the soul to expand out to meet the beauty we behold. The sound of a rushing stream that accompanies the visual complexity of water flowing over boulders and cascades fills the soul with feelings of abundance. We are alive and present in the moment. We may begin to notice the tiny flowers sparking the green banks with a multitude of colors. What are they called? How did they get there? We move naturally from our observations to our thinking.

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The first of the six steps of the scientific method states: “Make an observation or observations.” This presumes that we possess the faculties and abilities necessary to observe the world around us. Every further step presumes that we possess a rational mind—that we can think. It is thinking itself that is implicit and fundamental to the scientific method. The scientific method, formalized by Francis Bacon back in 1621, is still the way we do science. Rudolf Steiner uses this method as his means for investigating and reporting on the spiritual world.

Let’s see what Dr. Steiner has to say:

In sequence of time, observation does in fact come before thinking. For even thinking we must get to know first through observation... Everything that enters the circle of our experience, we first become aware of through observation. The content of sensation, perception and contemplation, all feelings, acts of will, dreams and fancies, mental pictures, concepts and ideas, all illusions and hallucinations, are given to us through observation.

Excerpt from: Philosophy of Freedom, Chapter III: Knowledge of Freedom revised edition: 1918.

Critical thinking is essential to the five remaining steps of the scientific method. A definition for critical thinking formulated by Michael Scriven and Richard Paul reads: “Critical thinking is the intellectually disciplined process of actively and skillfully conceptualizing, applying, analyzing, synthesizing, and/or evaluating information gathered from, or generated by, observation, experience, reflection, reasoning or communication, as a guide to belief and action.”

 Back to Dr. Steiner:

When we consider the significance of natural science in human life, we shall find that this significance cannot be exhausted by acquiring a knowledge of nature, since this knowledge can never lead to anything but an experiencing of what the human soul itself is not. The soul-element does not live in what man knows about nature, but in the process of acquiring Knowledge. The soul experiences itself in its occupation with nature. What it vitally achieves in this activity is something besides the knowledge of nature itself: it is self-development experienced in acquiring knowledge of nature. Occult science desires to employ the results of this self-development in realms that lie beyond mere nature. The occult scientist has no desire to undervalue natural science; on the contrary, he desires to acknowledge it even more than the natural scientist himself. He knows that, without the exactness of the mode of thinking of natural science, he cannot establish a science. Yet he knows also that after this exactness has been acquired through genuine penetration into the spirit of natural-scientific thinking, it can be retained through the force of the soul for other fields.

Excerpt from: Esoteric Science: An Outline, Preface to the 1925 edition 10/01/25 by Rudolf Steiner.

Natural science can tell us what type of flower is growing by the stream and how it probably got there. We can investigate its physiology, structure, genetics, ecology, distribution, classification, and economic importance. Natural science struggles to explain, however, why the flower gives us joy; why the sky, the mountains and the stream invoke the feelings they do.  We need to further science into those realms as well—the realms beyond what we can perceive through our senses. We believe that understanding botany is a worthwhile endeavor; shouldn’t we pursue the science of the spirit with equal vigor?  This is what Anthroposophy does. Reading books like The Philosophy of Freedom (also translated as Philosophy of Spiritual Activity) can be a good first step.

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Defining the Scientific Method
https://www.britannica.com/science/scientific-method

Defining the Scientific Method
https://www.livescience.com/20896-science-scientific-method.html

Defining Critical Thinking
https://www.criticalthinking.org/pages/defining-critical-thinking/766