Steiner's 1918 announcement that the Archai, the Spirits of Personality, have risen to creative rank in place of the Elohim, the Spirits of Form.
The Spirits of Personality as New Creators in Anthroposophy is Rudolf Steiner's name for a change of office among the spiritual hierarchies, announced in the Dornach lectures of December 1918 and January 1919 published as How Can Mankind Find the Christ Again? (GA 187). Until the close of the nineteenth century, creative rank belonged to the Spirits of Form, whom the Bible calls the Elohim: they supplied human beings with involuntary imaginations, and out of those imaginations the older religions grew. Steiner describes the Spirits of Form withdrawing from that office and the Archai, the Spirits of Personality or Time Spirits, rising to the height of Creators in their place. The Archai keep imaginations in their own possession rather than granting them, so the seeker must build imaginations by conscious effort and carry them upward to be verified, which is why Steiner ties the change directly to the birth of human freedom.
The Spirits of Personality as New Creators names the turn Steiner placed at the end of the nineteenth century, when the hierarchy that governs epochs took up the creative work the Elohim had carried until then. Nothing is handed down any longer. The new revelation still pours over the earth, in Steiner's image of an incoming wave, but it waits on souls willing to meet it in freedom.
In Steiner's Own Words
There is just one hope: to look back on this New Year's Eve to a great universal picture, to what has previously been experienced by mankind; to realize that in a certain sense men have now become sufficiently mature to bring this to an end; and to accept what the new Spirits of Personality now wish to bring down to earth from the heavenly heights. But here, dear friends, insight and will must meet. What the Spirits of Personality as new Creators are wishing to reveal will only be able to come into the world when it finds a fruitful soil in human hearts, human souls, human minds, when mankind is ready to accept the impulses of spiritual science.
What it Means Today
Owen Barfield, the English philosopher who sat with C. S. Lewis and J. R. R. Tolkien in the Inklings and who came to Steiner's work in the early 1920s, spent a working life on the same change in secular dress. In Saving the Appearances: A Study in Idolatry (1957) he set out two conditions of consciousness. Original participation is the older state, in which meaning arrives from outside the human being, unbidden, carried in the phenomena themselves. Final participation is the state Barfield argued we have to enter now, in which that same meaning exists only if a person produces it deliberately and knows that he is producing it. Barfield was not describing a mood but a change in who does the work.
Beside GA 187 the correspondence is close. The Spirits of Form placed imaginations before the ancient seer; the Spirits of Personality keep imaginations in their possession, and the modern seeker has to bring his own upward for verification. What Barfield calls idolatry, taking an inherited image for a living one, is what Steiner calls pathological vision. Thalira synthesis: the announcement in GA 187 reads less like a promotion for the Archai than like a resignation letter from the Elohim, which is why the nineteenth century felt to so many like abandonment rather than dawn. Anthroposophical training since the School of Spiritual Science was constituted at the Goetheanum in 1924 begins with constructed meditation rather than with waiting for vision.
Where to Read More
- How Can Mankind Find the Christ Again?, GA 187
- Find at SteinerBooks [THALIRA_BLOG_LINKS_PLACEHOLDER]