Steiner's name for the ahrimanic beings that gain a physical foothold when a machine creates a vacuum, driving the air, and the god, out of a space.
Demons in the Steam Engine in Anthroposophy is Rudolf Steiner's account, given at Dornach on 25 November 1916 in the cycle published as The Karma of Vocation (GA 172), of what happens spiritually when a machine works by emptying a space of air. Steiner notes that the engines of Thomas Newcomen and James Watt rest entirely on the vacuum, on a deliberate rarefaction of air that older physics had called horror vacui. He then reads that operation against Genesis, where Jahve breathes the living breath into man and man becomes a living soul. Driving air out of a space undoes that act locally, and the emptied space gives ahrimanic beings their opportunity to fasten themselves into physical matter. Steiner therefore calls modern technical industry not merely a demonology but a Dämonomagie, a demon magic, while refusing in the same hour to say that machines should be abolished.
Demons in the Steam Engine is the phrase Steiner used for the moral cost of vacuum technology. He was not condemning engineering, and said so plainly to the same audience. He was insisting that a machine is never spiritually empty: what industry evacuates from a cylinder it also evacuates from the cosmos, and something else moves into the room that has been made.
In Steiner's Own Words
What really happens when man makes use of space containing little air, that is, drives air out of space? Here opposition occurs against Jahve. You may now easily think that, whereas Jahve streams into man through air, man drives Jahve out when he creates a space containing rarefied air. When the steam engine is created in this way, Ahriman gains the possibility of establishing himself as a demon even in the very physical entity. In constructing steam engines, the condition is created for the incarnation of demons. If anyone is unwilling to believe in them, he need not do so; that is negative superstition. Positive superstition consists in seeing spirits where there are none; negative superstition consists in denying spirits where they are. In steam engines ahrimanic demons are actually brought even into a physical object.
What it Means Today
Langdon Winner published "Do Artifacts Have Politics?" in Daedalus in the winter of 1980, and collected it six years later in The Whale and the Reactor (University of Chicago Press, 1986). Winner's claim is that technical objects are not neutral tools waiting for a good or a bad user. Some artifacts settle questions of authority in their very design, and once built they keep enforcing that settlement without anyone deciding again. The essay became a founding text of science and technology studies.
Steiner had made a stranger version of the same objection at Dornach sixty four years earlier, approaching from the other side. Winner reads politics off the arrangement of the parts; Steiner reads cosmology off the operating principle, and asks what the machine is doing to the space it works in. The two men meet on the point that matters for a reader now, which is that neutrality is the superstition. Steiner named the refusal to see beings where beings are "negative superstition", and he counted the engineer's confident disbelief as an instance of it. Thalira synthesis: Winner asks whom a machine is built to obey, Steiner asks what has moved into the space the machine emptied, and the second question is the one that never appears on a specification sheet. What Steiner asked for was not refusal but counterweight, knowing what a technology costs the spirit while continuing to use it.
Where to Read More