“We must accustom ourselves to using the terms and concepts that have become familiar to us for the realm of the spirit, such as ahrimanic and luciferic, with the same precision and focus that a scientist will use when speaking of positive and negative electricity, magnetism and so on, though of course it is a different, higher realm that we are examining.” — Rudolf Steiner
Invisible forces like gravity and magnetism are something we believe in because we experience their effects. Forces of evil are harder for us to believe in even though we experience their effects, too. We recognize our battles within, (see last month’s blog called See No Evil ) but few of us believe these battles are entwined with forces from other beings. In fact, many of us who believe that love exists as a “force” in the world do not believe that evil, too, exists as such. Nevertheless, just as angels and archangels exist, so do spiritual beings who wish to divert us from our evolutionary path, and they’ve been called Lucifer and Ahriman for a long, long time.
It sounds like science fiction or the Marvel Universe, right? Well, like so much of spiritual science, it isn’t far-fetched at all, it shows us what we need to bring into our human consciousness now.
Ahriman and Lucifer represent two scales of a balance with human beings in the middle as the equilibrium. Contrary to our notion of the battle between good and evil, the reality is that the human being stands as a balance between two forces of evil, with the middle point – balance – as the good. The good lies between Ahriman and Lucifer.
We can think of how we work with balance in our everyday lives. For example, too little joy is misery, too much is mania; too little courage is cowardice, too much is foolhardiness; too little love is apathy, too much is obsession. Think of mundane examples like starvation/gluttony—in the middle lies enough. A healthy balance.
The forces of evil that align with too little (contraction) are ahrimanic and can be experienced in materialism, separation, control, exactitude, lying. The forces that align with too much (expansion) are luciferic and can be experienced in passion, excess, self-indulgence, egotism. Ahriman and Lucifer have thoroughly penetrated us, and we work here during our time on earth towards becoming balanced between them.
Let’s see what Dr. Steiner has to say:
We must be aware that the world as it presents itself to us is in a state of equilibrium or balance. The beam of a scale does not come to rest in a straight horizontal position just because it is a beam, but only because equal weights hang down from it on both sides and balance each other out. It is the same with everything in our world. The world exists neither because of a state of rest nor because of nothingness, but because of the balance created by the possibility of deviating radically from what is right and good either toward Lucifer or toward Ahriman.
Anyone who says that we simply have to guard against everything ahrimanic and luciferic is in the same position as people who say they want a scale, but don’t want to put weights on either side. For instance, we know there would be no art if the luciferic element did not play a role in the world. On the other hand, we also know there would be no observation and understanding of nature if the ahrimanic element did not play a part, too. It is only a matter of establishing a balance in the human heart and soul. And that is why we can fall prey to the ahrimanic and luciferic elements just when we think we are rejecting everything ahrimanic and luciferic. We can sin against reality, but we cannot suppress it!
Thus, those who want to avoid everything ahrimanic will easily fall prey to the luciferic, and those who are trying to avoid the luciferic will be easy prey for Ahriman. The point is to find the balance, to fear neither the one nor the other, and to have enough courage to face both ahrimanic fear as well as luciferic hope or desire…
Now there are philosophers, or people dealing with world views, who say they are striving for unity. That sounds very fine but is purely luciferic. Others are striving for diversity and don’t want to have anything to do with unity. Though this can be fruitful today, it is ahrimanic. Only those really strive for balance who seek unity in diversity and look for diversity in such a way that it reveals unity. It is simply a matter of finding a way to really do this…
The important thing is to develop in life, so that when we meet with such things, we do not pass by reality but experience the human soul growing together with reality and maintain the balance even in our relation to what was not made by human beings, but was given by the eternal powers. We can perceive the spiritual world only when our striving is neither only one-sided mysticism, nor only one-sided observation of nature, but instead is directed toward the union of both.
Excerpt from: Toward Imagination, Lecture 5: Balance in Life by Rudolf Steiner. Berlin, July 4, 1916
We can all think of examples of ahrimanic or luciferic extremes in today’s world, and we can see which pole we tend to gravitate toward in various instances in our lives. Essentially, what Steiner is saying is that we are influenced by these forces of evil that are present in our lives. These evil forces lead us away from the center and toward opposite extremes—they lead us away from a healthy balance. As we continue working with the concept of evil, we will see that these forces also play a necessary role in our evolution as human beings and by balancing ourselves between them, by refusing to surrender ourselves to extremes, we will find goodness, truth, and beauty.