The personal guardian-spirit one rank above humanity, holding the thread between incarnations and forming pictures of humanity's future into the astral body.
Angels in Anthroposophy are the lowest rank of the nine spiritual hierarchies, one stage above the human kingdom, with each Angel assigned as the personal guardian-spirit of one individual human being. Steiner names them Angeloi in the Greek-Christian taxonomy, Sons of Twilight, or Sons of Life. They reached human-rank on Old Moon, hold the memory-thread between a soul's incarnations, and form living pictures of humanity's future state into the astral body during the present age of the Consciousness Soul.
In Steiner's Own Words
It is then revealed that these Beings of the Hierarchy of the Angels, particularly through their concerted work, although in a certain sense each single Angel also has his task in connection with every individual human being, these Beings form pictures in man's astral body. Under the guidance of the Spirits of Form (Exusiai) the Angels form pictures. Unless we reach the level of Imaginative Cognition we do not know that pictures are all the time being formed in our astral body. They arise and pass away, but without them there would be for mankind no evolution into the future in accordance with the intentions of the Spirits of Form.
What it Means Today
The Angels are the only rank of the spiritual hierarchies assigned one-to-one to each human being, which is why anthroposophical Christology returns to them so often in the age of the Consciousness Soul. Sergei Prokofieff, in his 2010 work The Mystery of the Resurrection in the Light of Anthroposophy and in the lectures he gave at the Goetheanum during his tenure on the Vorstand from 2001 until his death in 2014, traced what he called the Angel's specific task in our time: helping the Consciousness Soul recognize what the human I cannot yet see directly, namely the spiritual ground of the other person. This is the practical edge of the GA 182 passage. The pictures the Angel forms into our astral body during sleep are not decoration. They are working impulses, and Steiner warned in the same Zurich lecture that Luciferic and Ahrimanic interference can deflect those pictures into automatism (Lucifer) or pure technical materialism (Ahriman) if we sleep through them. The third-eye correspondence here is exact. The Angel works at the threshold of inner perception that the Consciousness Soul is just beginning to open. The clinical-spiritual reading developed at the Goetheanum's School of Spiritual Science, First Class, treats the Angel less as a folk-religious comforter and more as the cognitive presence that holds individual karma steady between incarnations, the watcher Steiner described in GA 110 as the entity that preserves the memory of the I when the I itself cannot.
Where to Read More
- The Work of the Angels in Man's Astral Body, GA 182, full lecture
- Spiritual Hierarchies and the Physical World, GA 110, full text
- Buy from SteinerBooks
- The Book of Abramelin: Sacred Magic and the Holy Guardian Angel
- Angels Signs: How to Recognize Messages From Your Guardian Angels
- Guardian Angels: Your Personal Spiritual Protector