Steiner's name for the Eastern wisdom-stream born of Lucifer's light, destined to unite with the Western Christ-stream and become the brothers of Christ.
The Children of Lucifer in Anthroposophy is Rudolf Steiner's name for the Eastern stream of humanity that carried the inner light of wisdom drawn from Lucifer, the light-bringer, into post-Atlantean culture. In the lecture cycle The East in the Light of the West (GA 113, Munich, 1909), Steiner sets this Luciferic wisdom-light beside the Western Christ-stream that flows from the Mystery of Golgotha. The Children of Lucifer follow the inward path of soul, reading lineage and descent through the number seven, while the Brothers of Christ stand side by side in space under the number twelve. Steiner's central teaching, given in the cycle that accompanied the Munich staging of Edouard Schure's drama of the same name, is that these two streams must meet and fructify one another. The children of Lucifer are not condemned. They are called to become the brothers of Christ.
The Children of Lucifer are, in Rudolf Steiner's lectures, the Eastern humanity that received wisdom as an inner light kindled by Lucifer. In The East in the Light of the West (1909), this luminous Eastern stream stands over against the Western Christ-stream. Steiner taught that the wisdom of the East and the deed of the West belong together, so that the children of Lucifer are meant to grow into the brothers of Christ.
In Steiner's Own Words
Where the number seven, through the fact that time pours out into space, changes into twelve, the connotation of 'children' ceases to have the same super-sensible meaning and the connotation of 'brotherhood' enters, for beings who live side by side are brothers. The concept of sons of gods is changed in the course of evolution into the concept of brothers living side by side. Brothers and sisters live side by side. Beings who descend from one another live after one another. Here we see the transition, at a significant epoch, from the sons or children of Lucifer's kingdom and of his being to the brothers of Christ, a transition of which we shall speak further.
What it Means Today
The phrase reaches us first as theatre, not doctrine. Edouard Schure (1841 to 1929), the French author of Les Grands Inities, wrote a five-act esoteric drama, Les Enfants de Lucifer (The Children of Lucifer), published in 1900. Steiner and Marie von Sivers translated it into German and staged it in Munich in August 1909, and the very lectures that became GA 113 were given to the audience that had just watched the children of Lucifer embodied on stage. Steiner opens the cycle by thanking his listeners for waiting until the company could "present The Children of Lucifer embodied before human eyes." The term is therefore not an insult hurled at the East. It is a stage name for a whole spiritual lineage, the wisdom-bearers of the Orient, set in living motion before an audience.
The Munich Mystery-drama experiment did not end in 1909. The same impulse continued through Steiner's own four Mystery Dramas (1910 to 1913) and now lives on the stage at the Goetheanum in Dornach, Switzerland, where the School of Spiritual Science still performs and studies these plays. Thalira synthesis: read this way, the Children of Lucifer name a recognisable human task, to carry inherited light, the wisdom passed down "from child to father," forward until it stands beside the deed of love and becomes a wisdom held in common, brother beside brother, rather than guarded down a single bloodline.
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