Destructive elemental beings the gods employ to bring about human birth and death, and who since the eighteenth century have served technology, industry, and commerce.
The Elemental Spirits of Birth and Death are, in Steiner's account, beings hostile to human well-being that the gods nonetheless require to accomplish the passage of souls into and out of physical life. He places them next door to the sense world, governed under iron necessity, and warns that since the eighteenth century the same destructive powers have moved into laboratories, workshops, and commerce, becoming the unseen engine of modern invention.
In Steiner's Own Words
The elemental spirits who have given impulses to our civilization from the eighteenth century onwards are of the same kind as those used by the gods to bring about birth and death. This is one of the mysteries which human beings have to discover today. And the law of world history of which I have spoken is that as evolution proceeds, the gods always rule for a time within a particular sphere of elemental spirits and then human beings enter into this same sphere and use the elemental spirits. In earlier times, the elemental spirits of birth and death essentially served the divine spirits who guided the world; since our day, the elemental spirits of birth and death are serving technology, industry and human commerce.
What it Means Today
Steiner's most concrete claim, that technology is animated by beings older than birth and death, has a precise counterpart in the philosophy of technology. The political theorist Langdon Winner, in Autonomous Technology: Technics-out-of-Control as a Theme in Political Thought (MIT Press, 1977) and the essay "Do Artifacts Have Politics?" (1980), argued that large technical systems acquire a momentum that escapes the intentions of their makers and quietly reorders human life around their own requirements. Winner did not speak of elemental spirits, yet his diagnosis, that the machine carries impulses no single engineer chose, runs strikingly parallel to the GA 177 picture of laboratories and workshops staffed by inspirers the inventor never sees. Where Winner traces this momentum to scale, standardization, and institutional inertia, Steiner traces it to the same destructive class of beings the gods once reserved for the thresholds of incarnation.
Thalira synthesis: read together, Winner names the symptom and Steiner names the agency, so that the unease many feel before self-propelling technology becomes legible not as nostalgia but as an accurate perception of a real and inhuman power working behind the machine. The practical counsel Steiner draws is neither rejection nor worship. He insists that one neither abandon the tram nor pretend the keys to the vault are innocent, but learn to recognize the Ahrimanic character of the forces at work, so that they can be used in full consciousness rather than serving humanity in the dark.
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