The seventh message in Revelation, which Steiner reads as the last culture-epoch: the lukewarm age sunk in matter, facing the War of All against All.
The Letter to Laodicea in Anthroposophy is the seventh and last of the messages to the churches in the Book of Revelation, which Rudolf Steiner reads as the seventh and final post-Atlantean culture-epoch. In Reading the Pictures of the Apocalypse (GA 104a, 1909) he describes Laodicea as the lukewarm community: a humanity grown too jaded for either spirit or sense, sunk into ever denser matter while it perfects its inventions. This is the age of the War of All against All, the social undoing that the souls preserved from the sixth epoch of Philadelphia must outlive in order to begin a new culture. Laodicea names a danger held open to free choice, the root-pole of the whole apocalyptic sequence.
In Steiner's Own Words
Those who have understood the call of the Masters today will be carried over into a distant future. The key will be turned in the sixth cultural epoch. Those who have heard the call will be co-founders of a new humanity. If few people become entangled only with matter, then the church of Laodicea will not last long. It is up to the free will of human beings to belong to the church of Philadelphia or to that of Laodicea.
What it Means Today
Read on its own terms, Laodicea is not a place but a temperature. The Greek text rebukes a community that is neither hot nor cold, and Steiner takes that single word, lukewarm, as the keynote of the seventh and final epoch. Where Philadelphia, its sixth-epoch neighbour, gathers the few who have heard the call of the Masters, Laodicea is what remains for everyone else: a culture that has perfected its inventions and discoveries while its souls grow too jaded to long for the spirit or even for the senses. The faithful and true witness of Revelation 3:14 calls itself the "Amen, the beginning of God's creation," and in Christian esotericism, Steiner notes, the Amen is the sound spoken when the I has worked its way down into the physical body. Laodicea is therefore the deepest point of descent, the root of the apocalyptic ladder, the moment the spirit reaches matter and must decide whether it can rise again.
The contemporary reading developed in the anthroposophical movement holds this picture as an open question rather than a fixed prophecy. The seventh epoch is reached by free will, not fate: Steiner ends the Kristiania lecture by saying it lies in human freedom to belong to Philadelphia or to Laodicea. The Thalira reading names this the Lukewarm Threshold, the point where the great social undoing called the War of All against All meets the small remnant who, purified through the sixth epoch, can found a new culture once the war has burned itself out. To picture Laodicea well is not to predict a date. It is to recognise the lukewarm hour in one's own indifference, and to grasp that the door it describes, unlike the open door of Philadelphia, is one the soul itself can still choose to keep shut or to open.
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