The seven creative powers before the throne in Revelation, which Steiner reads as the seven Elohim, the Sun-spirits whose deeds the seven stars record.
The Seven Spirits of God in Anthroposophy are the seven creative powers that John sees burning before the throne in Revelation, which Rudolf Steiner identifies with the seven Elohim, the Sun-spirits who carried our cosmos through its first stages and poured their own being into the Earth. In his 1908 Nuremberg cycle on The Apocalypse of John (GA 104), Steiner gives the phrase a deliberate double face. Read inward, they are the seven members of the human being, from physical body up to Spirit-Man, which occult language names the seven Spirits of God in man. Read outward into the heavens, they are the regents of the seven planetary conditions, Saturn through Vulcan, and the seven stars are the record of their work. The Being who holds both in one hand is the Christ, and the same seven powers stand behind the Elohim of Genesis.
The Seven Spirits of God are the seven flaming lamps before the throne in the opening vision of Revelation. Steiner does not read them as nameless flames. He calls them the seven Elohim, the Sun-spirits whose creative deeds shaped the planetary stages of evolution, and he shows the same sevenfold pattern living in the human being and held together by the Christ who walks among the candlesticks.
In Steiner's Own Words
In accordance with the concept of the writer of the Apocalypse, man as we know him is an outer expression of the seven human principles we have enumerated. These are the principle of the physical body, of which the external physical body is the expression, the principle of the life body whose expression is the etheric body, the principle of the astral body. This last when transformed yields Spirit Self, the transformed etheric body, Life Spirit, and the transformed physical body, Spirit Man; in the centre is the “I”-principle. These are the seven spiritual constituents in which the divine nature of man is displayed as in the members of a leader. According to the technical expression used in occultism these seven principles are called the seven Spirits of God in man.
What it Means Today
Steiner's single key to this image is the word Elohim. Where most modern translations leave the seven Spirits as a poetic flourish, he points across to the opening of Genesis, where the Hebrew names the creators of the world in the plural, Elohim, and reads that plural as exact. There are seven of them, and they are the same Sun-powers John watches as seven lamps. In the 1909 Munich cycle published as Spiritual Hierarchies and their Reflection in the Physical World (GA 110), Steiner places these beings on the rank of the Spirits of Form, the Exusiai, and describes how six of them worked from the Sun while one, the regent who became the Yahweh-power, withdrew to the Moon to give the human being its waking ego. So the seven flames before the throne are not a backdrop to the drama. They are the workmen who built the stage.
This is why the seven Spirits are bound so tightly to the seven stars in Revelation's first chapter. The stars are the planetary conditions, Saturn, Sun, Moon, Earth and the three to come, and each Spirit signed its deed into one of them: Saturn received the seed of the physical body, the Sun the etheric, the Moon the astral, the Earth the awakened "I." Read this way, the phrase that opens the letters to the churches, the One "that hath the seven Spirits of God and the seven stars," names the Christ as the Being who gathers all seven creative powers and all seven world-ages into a single hand. The image asks something concrete of the reader Steiner addressed in Nuremberg. To know the seven Spirits is to recognise that the same powers who made the cosmos are at work, member by member, in one's own body and soul.
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