The fifth post-Atlantean cultural epoch (1413 to 3573 CE), in which the human I awakens to itself as a free cognitive agent.
The Consciousness Soul Age in Anthroposophy is the fifth post-Atlantean cultural epoch, running from 1413 CE to 3573 CE. In Steiner's seven-epoch cosmology, the consciousness-soul age is the 2,160-year cycle in which the human I-Being develops the capacity to know itself as a free cognitive agent, and ethical individualism becomes the moral norm. The Archangel Michael, regent since 1879, leads humanity into this freedom.
In Steiner's Own Words
If we look at all this with the spiritual eye, we see how entering the age of consciousness means growing out of a phase of development in which the Luciferic powers would triumph over humanity if a new developmental impact did not come into the human being through the consciousness soul with its power of intellectuality. The orientation towards the spiritual world, which wants to turn into the paths of aberration, is hindered by the consciousness soul; the human gaze is drawn out into the physical world. Everything that happens in this direction withdraws humanity from the Luciferic power that is obstructing it.
What it Means Today
The consciousness-soul age is not a metaphor for cultural mood. It is, in Steiner's anthropology, a 2,160-year cycle of soul development that began in 1413 and runs to 3573. What changed at the threshold of the fifteenth century was the relation of the I-Being to its own thinking. Before 1413, thought still arrived clothed in residual imagination, in the inherited authority of cult and confession, in the lingering picture-language Steiner traces through the legend of Good Gerhard and the Duke Ernst saga. After 1413, thought has to be borne by the individual I, or it is not borne at all. Descartes writes "cogito ergo sum" because he is standing inside this new condition. The narrow pillar of his self-certainty is what the consciousness soul could secure on its first day in the cosmos.
Sergei Prokofieff's Michaelmas cycles, given at the Goetheanum from the 1980s through 2014, traced the ethical task that follows from this. Michael, regent since 1879, asks for thinking that is free in the precise sense of Philosophy of Freedom: ethical individualism, the moral intuition that arises in the single human I rather than being received from outside it. The consciousness-soul-age task is not to keep the cult-knowing of the third epoch and the philosophy of the fourth, but to build, from individual cognitive responsibility, a new spiritual culture. The Joan of Arc karma at the start of the epoch, the Christian Rosenkreuz mystery running underneath it, and the Michael time-spirit overhead are the three guardians of that work. The consciousness-soul age meets its trials in the crisis of the fifth epoch.
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