The war in heaven of Revelation 12, read by Steiner as the Archangel Michael overcoming the dragon and chaining the powers opposed to the Christ-Sun.
Michael and the Dragon is the apocalyptic image of the heavenly combat in which the Archangel Michael, standing beside God, masters the great dragon and binds the forces that drag the human soul toward matter. Rudolf Steiner described the scene in his 1908 Nuremberg cycle on Revelation, presenting Michael as the countenance of the Sun-genius who holds the key to the abyss.
In Steiner's Own Words
And the face of the sun genius is Michael, who, as the representative of the sun genius, so to speak, overcomes the beast with the two horns, the deceiver, who is also called the great dragon. This is represented by the image of Michael appearing to the seer, holding the key to the abyss and the chain in his hand, standing with God and holding the opposing forces in chains. Thus, in Christian Rosicrucian esotericism, the casting away of those who belong to 666 and the overcoming of the dragon, the deceiver, is characterized.
What it Means Today
Steiner did not leave this picture inside the text of Revelation. He tied it to a date. In the lecture cycle on the spiritual hierarchies he gave in 1909, and again across the Michael lectures of his final years, he taught that a battle in the spiritual worlds reached its turning point in the autumn of 1879. From that year the Archangel Michael took up the leading regency over the present age, and the spirits of darkness who had been cast down from heaven fell, no longer into some distant abyss, but into the sphere of the earth itself, into human thinking and human social life. The dragon of Revelation 12, on this reading, is not a monster of the past. It is the cluster of powers, loosed among us since 1879, that would harden the soul into mere matter and clever calculation.
That places the combat squarely in the heart. Michael, the Sun-being who guards the deeds of cosmic intelligence, does not fight the dragon on the seer's behalf and leave the watcher safe. Steiner's whole point is that the casting-out continues now, on a battlefield that is each waking person's own capacity to think. The woman clothed with the sun brings forth the higher self that the dragon waits to devour; the two beasts press the same hardening from sea and from earth. Michael asks for free allegiance, never compulsion. To stand with him is to recognise the adversary clearly, to refuse both fear and flattery, and to hold one's inner ground, in the spirit of the chapel above Dornach where Steiner placed Michael over the dragon as the emblem of the age.
Where to Read More