The upward-pulling, ego-inflating, mystical-escapist spiritual force. In Steiner sharply distinguished from Satan, and one of three opposing impulses balanced by the Christ-impulse at centre.
In Rudolf Steiner's anthroposophy, Lucifer is one of two spiritual adversary forces (the other being Ahriman) whose pull on the human being must be counterbalanced through the Christ impulse. Lucifer is the upward-tugging, ego-inflating, mystically escapist tendency that lifts a person above sober reality into fantasy and rapture. Steiner distinguished Lucifer sharply from Satan; the popular conflation belongs to later Christianity, not to his cosmology.
In Steiner's Own Words
It is most important for man at the present time to place Christ in the centre between Ahriman and Lucifer. The Christ power must permeate us. But as men we must always seek the balance between the mystic enthusiasm which tends to lift us above ourselves, and the materialistic understanding which by its bourgeois heaviness drags us down to earth. At every moment we must seek the balance between the Luciferic impulses which lift us up, and the Ahrimanic which drag us down. In the effort to gain this balance we find the Christ. When we strive to gain this balance, then alone can we find the Christ.
What it Means Today
Across comparative mythology the name Lucifer ("light-bringer") gets attached to figures as varied as the morning star Phosphorus in Greek sources, the Roman Lucifer of dawn, and the later Christian identification with the fallen Satan of Isaiah 14. Steiner refused that last identification. In his threefold cosmology, Lucifer and Ahriman are two distinct beings with two distinct pulls on the human being, and Christ is the balance that keeps a person human between them. Ahriman drags consciousness downward into materialism, calculation, and hardened literalism. Lucifer pulls upward into rapture, vanity, ungrounded mysticism, and the conviction that one already stands beyond the earth. Both pulls are necessary; both become destructive only when one outweighs the other.
The Luciferic shows up plainly in contemporary spiritual life. The marketplace of disconnected practices, the ego inflation that comes from collecting initiations, the bypass that uses meditation to skip past grief or repair, the spiritual entrepreneur who never quite touches the ground, the dreamer who calls philistine anyone who asks for evidence: these are Luciferic patterns in the sense Steiner meant. The counter is not to reject the upward pull but to weight it with the Ahrimanic gift of rigour and the Christic gift of presence. A reader who notices a flare of mystical enthusiasm in herself can ask one question Steiner kept asking: where is the balance, and what would the earth ask of this impulse before letting it lift? Lucifer is one pole of the tripolar cosmic-moral architecture Steiner names the Lucifer-Christ-Ahriman Triangle; the other pole is Ahriman and Christ is the balancing middle. Both adversaries approach the Christ at the Temptation in the wilderness, where Lucifer and Ahriman make their offers. Lucifer appears in Revelation as one of the two beasts, the beast risen from the sea. Lucifer draws the higher of the two souls of Faust upward, as Ahriman drags the other down. Lucifer's counterpart in historical life is traced in the luciferic and ahrimanic in history. Why such displaced forces must exist at all is treated in the origin of evil.
Where to Read More
- Cosmic New Year and the New Year Idea (GA 195)
- Buy The Influences of Lucifer and Ahriman from SteinerBooks
- Workplace Spiritual Forces Ahrimanic Luciferic Professional
- Luciferic Emotional Volatility Spiritual Communities
- The Peter Complex: Spiritual Pride, the Luciferic Pattern, and the Jungian Shadow