Spirits of Form who failed to advance with the other Elohim, and who now work only on the human head, giving ideas the will to become judgment.
The Backward Elohim in Anthroposophy is Rudolf Steiner's name for spiritual beings who should by rights have risen to the rank of Elohim, the Spirits of Form, but who stayed behind at earlier stages and are met today among the ranks of Angeloi, Archangeloi and Archai. Steiner set this out on 11 March 1921 at Dornach, in the third lecture of the cycle published as The Responsibility of Man for World Evolution through his Spiritual Connection with the Earth and the World of the Stars (GA 203). Because they lagged, their reach is narrowed. The advanced Elohim work through the whole human being, through metabolism, limbs and will; the Backward Elohim act on the head alone, where they supply the will that turns bare ideas into reason, judgment and artistic imagination. Steiner identifies them with the Luciferic spirits, and calls them opponents of the Elohim rather than enemies of humanity.
The Backward Elohim are the Spirits of Form who did not keep pace. Steiner places them among the hosts of Angeloi, Archangeloi and Archai, working in a sphere below the one their nature belongs to. Their gift, and their limitation, is the human head: they give thinking its will, and so give reason and judgment to a creature the other Elohim could only hold whole.
In Steiner's Own Words
These beings, who are the Elohim who remained behind, are actually the opponents of the other Elohim. The other Elohim cut humanity off from themselves, but they could not give humanity freedom because they have influence over the whole human being. In contrast, the backward spirits of form limit themselves to the head, and in this way they gave humans reason and understanding. These are essentially the Luciferic spirits. As you can now see from the illustration, they are will-givers on a lower level. The Elohim give the will to the whole human being, but they give the head its will. Otherwise, the head would be filled with ideas devoid of will. Ideas become reasonable only when they are imbued with will and become the power of judgment. This comes from these spirits.
What it Means Today
Owen Barfield, the English philologist who came to Steiner's work in the early 1920s, spent his writing life on the question this lecture poses: where did detached, judging consciousness come from, and what did it cost. In Saving the Appearances: A Study in Idolatry (Faber and Faber, 1957) Barfield traced the long withdrawal of what he called original participation, the older awareness in which a person felt the world thinking through them rather than standing over against them. What replaced it was the onlooker: the head that can hold a representation still, weigh it, and pass a verdict on it. Barfield named the two operations alpha-thinking, thinking about the collective representations, and beta-thinking, thinking about the act of thinking itself, and read the first as the birth of the sciences.
Steiner's 1921 picture supplies the agent Barfield's history leaves unnamed. Barfield describes the change; the Backward Elohim are who works it. The Luciferic Spirits of Form did not hand humanity the world, they handed it the power to stand apart and say yes or no.
Thalira synthesis: what a person calls their own critical intelligence is, on Steiner's reading, borrowed equipment lent by beings who could not keep up, and the reason it feels like freedom is that their reach stops at the head and never touches the will asleep in the limbs.
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