Michael (Archangel)

What it Means Today

Steiner's account of Michael belongs to a wider doctrine of time-spirit cycles: seven Archangels take turns ruling roughly 350-year epochs, and in 1879 the regency passed from Gabriel (lunar, dreamlike) to Michael (solar, intellectual). The age that opened in late November of that year, Steiner says, was the age most of us have lived inside our whole lives. It is the age in which thinking detached itself from cosmic order, became the private property of the individual human being, and immediately fell into the orbit of what Steiner calls the Ahrimanic powers, the spirits behind mechanization, abstraction, and the cold logic of pure quantity. Michael's mission is not to undo this fall. He had to permit it, because only a thinking that has fallen out of its cosmic source can be taken up again in freedom. Michael waits, instead, for human beings to recognize on their own that thinking can become a spiritual organ rather than a clever machine, and then to consecrate that organ back to Christ.

This is why Michaelmas, the festival on 29 September, was so important to Steiner. He set it as a counterweight to the warm sentimentality of Christmas and the catharsis of Easter. Michaelmas is the autumn festival of moral courage, the moment in the year when the outer world begins to die back and the human being must find a spiritual will inside themselves to meet the dark season. Modern Waldorf schools still mark it with sword-and-dragon plays, harvest meals, and tasks that require a child to act bravely without being told to. Steiner's final public address, on the evening before Michaelmas 1924, closed with the Michael Imagination, the meditation he meant to be carried forward in his absence. The practice answers the cosmic situation. In the age of Michael, no one will save your inner life for you. You take it up, freely, against the Ahrimanic drift, or you do not. Michael wields iron as his cosmic weapon; the Iron Process is the Michaelic Mars-iron stream incarnating into earthly courage and blood-iron metabolism. Michael's regency since 1879 belongs to the dawn that followed the close of Kali Yuga in 1899, the great turning toward a new and conscious spirituality. Under Michael's regency the Platonists and Aristotelians of the heavenly school must find each other again on earth. The Aristotelian schoolmen prepared the modern intellect that Scholasticism bequeathed to Michael's age. In Revelation 12 the archangel casts the dragon down, the scene of Michael and the dragon. Under Michael's regency humanity is called to order economic life in conscious brotherhood. Michael wields the sword of meteoric iron against the dragon of fear. The teachers later gathered into Michael's supersensible school taught on earth at the School of Chartres. The souls karmically bound to his stream are the Michaelites.