Steiner's name for the Sun-Demon, the being hidden behind the apocalyptic number 666 and pictured as the two-horned beast opposing the Christ.
Sorat in Anthroposophy is the name Rudolf Steiner gives to the Sun-Demon, the spiritual adversary of the Christ-being whom he also calls the Lamb. In his 1908 Nuremberg cycle on the Apocalypse of John, GA 104, Steiner reads the apocalyptic number 666 backwards through the Hebrew letters Samech, Vau, Resh and Tau, which spell Sorath, the being hidden behind that number. Sorat is the same power that John pictures as the two-horned beast rising from the earth, the seducer who tempts hardened souls toward black magic and away from union with the Sun at the end of earthly evolution. Steiner places this being not as a moral abstraction but as a concrete adversary at the root pole of the physical, the force that holds the human being fast in matter. The contemporary application is interpretive: Sorat is the key esoteric Christianity uses to decode the figure 666.
Sorat is the Sun-Demon in Rudolf Steiner's spiritual science, the adversary of the Christ-impulse and the being concealed within the apocalyptic number 666. Steiner derives the name from the four Hebrew letters that the number encodes, and identifies this being with the two-horned beast of Revelation. As the great seducer toward black magic, Sorat works to hold souls in matter and thrust them away from the Sun at the close of evolution.
In Steiner's Own Words
That which he describes here: “It has two horns like a lamb,” is the symbol of the sun-demon, which in the mystery language is expressed by the word “Sorath,” and this, if we convert the several letters into their numbers is expressed by the four numbers, 400, 200, 6 and 60. This is a very veiled way of expressing 666. Thus we see that the writer of the Apocalypse is referring to the adversary of the Lamb. When the earth passes over into the spiritual, the forms of men appear below in such a way that they receive their old animal form. The beast with the seven heads and ten horns appears. But there also appears their seducer, the adversary of Christ, who has the great power to prevent their returning to the sun.
What it Means Today
Sorat belongs to esoteric Christianity, and the place to read him is Steiner's lecture cycle The Apocalypse of John, given to twelve listeners at Nuremberg between 17 and 30 June 1908. There Steiner takes the single most argued-over figure in the Book of Revelation, the number 666, and refuses the popular nineteenth-century guess that it stood for the emperor Nero. He reconstructs instead the older mystery method, writing the number as 400, 200, 6 and 60, setting the Hebrew letters Tau, Resh, Vau and Samech in their place, and reading them from right to left to recover a name: Sorath, the Sun-Demon. For an esoteric reading of scripture this is the decisive move. The two beasts of Revelation 13 stop being lurid imagery and become a precise account of two cosmic directions, one toward the Sun and the Christ, the other toward hardening, black magic, and the abyss. The number is not a cipher for a Roman tyrant but the signature of a being. Anyone working with the Apocalypse in the anthroposophical sense treats Sorat as the named adversary the text deliberately veils, the power Michael, the countenance of the Sun-genius, finally overcomes when the 666 stages of evolution are complete. The sun-demon Sorat bears the cosmic number 666, the number of the beast of the Apocalypse.
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