Angels who completed only five or six of their seven principles on the Old Moon, were cast down to Earth, and now inspire the delusion of one uniform truth.
The Luciferic Angeloi in Anthroposophy is Rudolf Steiner's name for a class of angelic beings who developed only five or six of their seven principles during the Old Moon evolution, the planetary stage before our Earth. Because the normally developed Angeloi and Archangeloi could make no use of them in the spiritual world, they were cast down to the Earth, where they stand midway between humanity and the regular Third Hierarchy. Their distinguishing trait is premature intellect: already on the Old Moon they possessed the intelligence that humanity only begins to unfold in the present Fifth Post-Atlantean epoch. Steiner describes them in his Dornach lectures of 1915, published as Artistic and Existential Questions in the Light of Spiritual Science (GA 162), as the inspirers of the seven Rishis of ancient India and as the source of the delusion that one uniform truth must hold for all people, a signature still legible wherever a single doctrine claims validity for every soul.
The Luciferic Angeloi are the retarded members of the angelic hierarchy: beings who finished their Moon development incompletely, were expelled from the spiritual world, and attached themselves to early humanity. Steiner describes them as astute intelligences who possessed men of ancient India and later ages, tearing thinking away from speech and planting the fanatic's conviction that a single form of truth must prevail over the whole Earth.
In Steiner's Own Words
The saying that truth resides in every human soul is a profoundly Christian principle, as I have said on other occasions. It is the outcome of a strengthening of the Angeloi, enabling them to gain a victory over the Luciferic Angeloi who want to spread over the whole earth the delusion of the uniformity of dogma as a body of intellectualism which does not admit of diversity of manifoldness of understanding. And on the other side, the power of the normally developed Archangeloi was to be fortified in order that they may gradually defeat those spiritual beings who bring about the differentiation of groups of men through the fact that these groups become infatuated with their own language and are led to separate from each other to the point of fanaticism.
What it Means Today
Steiner's picture of the Luciferic Angeloi reads like a spiritual case history of what the philosopher Isaiah Berlin later called monism. In his 1958 Oxford lecture Two Concepts of Liberty, and again in the essays collected as The Crooked Timber of Humanity (1990), Berlin argued that the most dangerous idea in Western thought is the conviction that all genuine questions have one true answer, valid for every person in every place, and that whoever holds that single answer feels entitled to enforce it. Berlin traced the political terrors of the twentieth century to this belief; Steiner, lecturing in Dornach in 1915 while the First World War was demonstrating the point, gave the same diagnosis a spiritual anatomy. On his account the dream of uniform truth is not a human invention at all. It is the influence of intelligences that completed their thinking before humanity began, and that pour finished intellect into unripe souls, from the illumined Rishis of ancient India to the dogmatists of the eighth and ninth centuries. Where Berlin answers monism with value pluralism, Steiner answers it with the Christ-Impulse, which strengthens the normally developed Angeloi so that each soul can find truth in its own individual form. Thalira synthesis: the Luciferic Angeloi are borrowed brilliance, an intellect that arrives ahead of its rightful bearer, which is why every ideology of the single truth feels luminous first and turns fanatical afterward.
Where to Read More
- Artistic and Existential Questions in the Light of Spiritual Science, GA 162
- Find Artistic and Existential Questions at SteinerBooks
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