The beast from the sea and the beast from the earth in Revelation 13, read by Steiner as a twofold adversary of humanity, later named Lucifer and Ahriman.
The Two Beasts of Revelation 13 stand together as the dark counter-image at the close of John's vision. One rises from the sea bearing seven heads and ten horns; the other climbs out of the earth with two horns like a lamb. Steiner read this pair as the future face of a humanity that has hardened against the Christ, and the tempter who works upon it, set against the rising of the New Jerusalem.
In Steiner's Own Words
Thus at the moment when the earth passes over into the astral condition there appears that in man which existed in him when the earth was still clothed with a covering of water. The human animal appears. From the water one sees the beast with seven heads and ten horns raise itself. Through this human animal having left the earth unused, Sorath, the adversary of the sun, the tempter, can now arise out of the earth, through this he can approach man and tear him down with all his might into the abyss.
What it Means Today
Two distinct beings stand behind the single word "beast," and keeping them apart is the whole point. The first beast is not a separate creature at all but humanity's own past, the seven-headed group-soul form that was shaped across the seven ages of Atlantis and that springs back up out of the water in anyone who reaches the War of All against All without having taken in the Christ-impulse. The second beast is a genuine stranger to the earth: Sorath, the Sun-Demon, the adversary of the Sun-Being, who can only fasten on a soul that has already let the first beast harden in it. Read this way the pair is not a sequence of monsters but a polarity, a downward pull working from two sides at once.
The contemporary anthroposophical reading, worked out by Steiner in his 1919 Dornach lectures and carved into the great Dornach sculpture, names this polarity Lucifer and Ahriman. Lucifer is the beast of inflation, the heat that lifts a soul out of the earth into pride and fantasy; Ahriman is the beast of hardening, the cold that nails it into matter, calculation, and the lie. The sea-beast and the earth-beast of Revelation are these two adversaries seen at the end of time. The Representative of Humanity, the Christ-figure at the center of the wooden group, does not destroy either one. He holds them in their place, each pressed back to the measure where its force serves rather than seduces. The Two Beasts, in this frame, name the standing task of every awake human being: to walk the narrow line that neither beast wants you to find.
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