In Steiner's reading, 666 is the cipher of Sorath, the Sun-Demon who opposes the Christ-Sun and tempts humanity to harden into matter.
The Number of the Beast in Anthroposophy is 666, which Rudolf Steiner reads not as a coded name for Nero but as the cipher of Sorath, the Sun-Demon and adversary of the Christ-Sun. In The Apocalypse of John (GA 104, Nuremberg 1908) he restores the seer's veiled arithmetic, writing 666 as the four Hebrew letters Samech, Vau, Resh and Tau. Those letters name the four members of the human being, the physical body, etheric body, astral body and lower I, hardened into matter rather than spiritualised. The being who tempts humanity to that hardening is Sorath, drawn with two horns like a lamb. As a marker of the far-future War of All against All, 666 names the threshold at which the black-magical stream parts finally from those who unite with the Lamb.
In Steiner's Own Words
These are nothing else than the two strokes at the upper part of the sign, and in order to conceal this he simply calls the two strokes here “horns.” It was always the case in the use of the mystery language that one uses a word in more than one sense so as to make it impossible for the uninitiated to understand without special effort. 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.
What it Means Today
Most modern commentary on Revelation 13 still asks the question the nineteenth century asked: which historical tyrant does 666 spell? Add the Hebrew letter-values of Neron Kesar and the sum lands on 666, so the verse gets filed as wartime code against the emperor Nero. Steiner's 1908 Nuremberg reading breaks with that whole habit. He keeps the letter-arithmetic but changes what it points at. Written as Tau, Resh, Vau and Samech, the number names the four members of the human being fixed in matter, and the tempter who drives that fixing he calls Sorath, the Sun-Demon, the being who opposes the Christ-Sun rather than any Roman ruler.
This Sorath reading is the thread later esoteric Christianity has pulled on hardest. Steiner returned to the figure in 1924, dating Sorath's recurring assault to the period around 666 after Christ and again in our own century, and Goetheanum-trained students of Revelation have worked the motif ever since, reading 666 less as a label for one man than as a rhythm of temptation aimed at the I. What a reader does with this is mostly a matter of attention. The number stops being a riddle to solve and becomes a description of a real pull, the lure to settle wholly into the sensory and shut the door the Christ-impulse keeps open. Its nearest neighbours in the text make the point: the two-horned beast that bears the number is the earth-side of the two beasts, and the same chapter sets against it the countenance of the Sun, which the seer calls Michael.
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