Steiner gave ten lectures on angels and the angelic realms of the Third Hierarchy. For an introduction to the hierarchies above us humans this is as good a collection of Steiner's writings on the subject as I have found. As you read down, you will be able to note the names that Steiner gave to beings or Spirits at each level. There are the Spirits of Twilight, Fire, Personality, Form, Movement, Wisdom, Will, Harmony, and Love. He refers in one place to Spirits of Will and in another place to the same beings as Thrones. In this book, he makes explicit his reasons for assigning the "Spirits of" names as he did, which, in the maze of confusion that a newbie will encounter, is a helpful mnemonic. The classical names of Thrones, Cherubim, Seraphim, et al, are useful for cross-reference purposes when reading the Bible and other theological exegeses.
Before the ninth century, humans and even philosophers still knew by direct experience of the existence of the spiritual hierarchies. In the Introduction to this book, Wolf-Ulrich Klünker quotes a philosopher from that time, Johannes Scotus Erigena:
[page 1] 'It is not without reason that we may believe and recognise that the incarnation of the Word of God is of as much service to the Angels as it is to man. To man it brought salvation and self-regeneration, to the Angels understanding and knowledge.'
To the materialistic scientists of today such words seem to be utterly devoid of meaning. Rightly understood, they who make such a claim are in charge of lives that are utterly devoid of meaning. Or rather, they have given up control of their lives to the waves of materialism and are foundering out of sight of the beach, up until now. By definition angels are beings without a material existence, and for those scientists to insist that all reality have a material existence is to, in effect, condemn themselves, their very souls, to death. But, all is not lost, the Sun is coming up, and with the rays of Christ's light flooding their souls, they are given a new chance in every moment to rise above the heavy seas of materialism and reach the safety and security of the shore of reality.
Three centuries after Erigena, Alanus ab Insulis said:
[page 2] 'Tradition has it that in time to come belief will be superseded by knowledge, by certain perception. Understanding will no longer be obscure and indistinct as it is in our time.'
Klünker says that this clearly implies that Alanus knew that humans were on a track to becoming Angels who are founts of understanding and knowledge. Two hundred years after Alanus, Thomas Aquinas said, "To man is promised nothing less than equality with the Angels." (Page 3) Before Mendeleev's time chemistry foundered in a morass of half-truths and practical formulas, but there was no consistency that could bridge the magic of alchemy and the science of chemistry. What Mendeleev did was to build a Table of the Elements which for the first time gave a coherent order to the chemical elements. One could for the first time understand why sodium had such an affinity to chlorine and why certain elements were so similar to others, only heavier. One may find materialist scientists that ridicule the spiritual believers and spiritual believers that denigrate the efforts of the scientists, but only in Rudolf Steiner can one find someone who has bridged that abyss separating materialism and spiritualism by the creation of a spiritual science that blends the insights of both into one coherent picture, not as a doctrine or an assertion of a truth, but as an illumination of a path. (Page 9) And if one accepts the premise that there are beings in existence that are non-material, one can proceed with the rest of this review.
Klünker says "thinking which attains to the sphere of the Angels must always be self-aware." To achieve this self-awareness, paradoxically, it seems that we had to go through a period in which we lost our perception of and dependence upon the Angels. During that period we managed to achieve a level of freedom and independence for ourselves. With that newfound freedom in hand, we are poised now at the edge of that abyss, ready to step across the chasm separating material and spiritual reality by becoming self-aware with our organs of thinking from now on. Again, Klünker's words in the Introduction:
[page 10] Rudolf Steiner's perception of the hierarchies comes to us at a moment in the development of human thinking when it begins to be possible once more to gain access to the reality of the sphere of the Angels.
"Why bother trying to gain access to the reality of angels, anyway?" Inquiring minds want to know. In his Occult Science Steiner points out how the hierarchies are involved in the creation of the various bodies of us humans, our physical, etheric, astral, and I bodies. Do you think that they created all these intermeshed bodies and then turned them loose? Said goodbye and hopped the first train? It sounds ludicrous to have to mention it, but those hierarchies are still around. Learning to access the realm of the Angels is our first step into understanding the reality that surrounds us that is ignored bythe materialistic sciences of our day, up until now. These bodies that we rely on to be fully human were created by the hierarchies, rightly understood.
[page 19] The hierarchies have not only been involved in their creation - they are still active in them. People who think the human being to be merely a combination of bones, blood, flesh, and so on, which is the view held in modern science, physiology, biology or anatomy, do not understand his true nature.
So what is the job of the Angels currently with humans? Steiner says they are working on our astral bodies to create images of what the Spirits of Form (Exusiai or Elohim) intend for us to achieve in this Earth evolution. (Page 21, 22) Those Angels won't be finished until "no human being shall find peace in the enjoyment of happiness if others around him are unhappy." How will we know that we achieved this stage of human development? Among other things, all churches will shut down (hurrah!!!). Here's how Steiner sees the evolution of the church as humans evolve:
[page 23] The church, if it understands itself rightly, must consider it to be its sole aim to render itself superfluous on the physical plane as the whole of life becomes an expression of the realm that lies beyond the senses. Such, at least, is the reason behind the work of the Angels - to bestow complete religious freedom on humanity.
To achieve their goal, Angels will strive during this spiritual soul age to engender full consciousness of the Angels at work on our astral bodies. For this reason Steiner also calls this the Consciousness Soul Age and dates it as starting in the fifteenth and lasting till the thirty-fifth century. So we are all spiritual soul newbies and learning our way around, attempting to bootstrap ourselves into a new level of understanding of our place in the only universe that matters, the one that surrounds us. To help us, Steiner says that the Angels will show humanity three things:
[page 25] Firstly, it will be shown that their own genuine interest will enable people to understand the deeper side of human nature.
[page 26] The second event will be that the Angel irrefutably shows the human being that apart from all else the Christ impulse means complete religious freedom for humanity and that the only true Christianity is one that makes absolute religious freedom possible.
[page 26] The third event will be that we gain irrefutable insight into the spiritual nature of the world.
I might add that by using the word "irrefutable" Steiner can only mean the kind of evidence of our direct experience that began in the fifteenth century to be the only acceptable means of doing science. Steiner was a person who in his time had this kind of irrefutable evidence from his senses, and he has shared that with us. The good news is that this "lonely affliction" of his, his atavistic clairvoyance, will soon infect the rest of humanity and make possible the completion of this third goal of the Angels.
If this scenario sounds too sunny and bright, let's throw a little clouds and cold rain on the parade.
[page 26] But luciferic spirits seek to divert human beings concerning insight into the work of the Angels. They do this by curbing free will. They try to cloud our understanding of the exercise of our free will.
And next follows the place where Steiner tells us that Lucifer wants us all to be goody-two-shoes, full of goodness and light, but doing so automatically with no free will. Like the fanatic cult around the corner just took over the world! No one can be bad anymore, and all we have to do is give up this illusion of free will. And put money in the collection plate, of course. Maybe sell a few roses on street corners in our spare time. Now, why in the world would luciferic spirits want to keep us from having free will? Because they never achieved it themselves. They are trying to sell us an inferior product, but are all enthused because it's the best product that they have. Buy now! You'll never get a better chance! Ever heard those words before from a salesman? I have.
Now what about old Ahriman? Surely the ahrimanic spirits won't stand still while the Angels work us into freedom? No way. But just what are they up to? Simple - they are attempting to get us to "smother our spirituality."
[page 27] They want to teach people that they are really only a perfectly developed animal. Ahriman is in truth the great teacher of materialistic Darwinism.
Lucifer wants us to do it the old way (the goody-two-shoes way) and Ahriman wants us to do it the technologically advanced way using the best of modern technology to sate our senses with stimulation so much that the spiritual world stays away from our door, never enters our mind. Rather than the moral automatons of Lucifer, we become the automatic amoral beings of Ahriman. Either way we remain unfree and in a stultified development that is a reflection of Lucifer and Ahriman's own condition. Only by transcending the temptations that the two faces of the Devil, Lucifer and Ahriman, are exhorting us to embrace, do we stand a chance to be free and accept the three gifts, the three events, that the Angels have planned for us.
How have we become so beguiled by materialistic theories that we have lost the truth of our co-existence with the hierarchies? It wasn't that way during the Graeco-Latin times for the simple reason that atavistic clairvoyance produced images of the spiritual world that were more powerful than what anyone thought. Beginning with the fifteenth century, this reality of images began to fade and suddenly ahrimanic spirits could utilize human thoughts to infuse ideas about their evolutionary relationship to animals, for example.
[page 28] Only now do we live in an age when a scientific theory may be deliberately used to deprive us of our divine nature and all experience of divine nature. This is only possible in the age of spiritual soul. The ahrimanic spirits therefore seek to spread teachings among humanity that obscure man's divine origin.
In the 21st Century we have reached a stage of development where we humans can begin to participate consciously with the Angels, and if we do not participate consciously, we will do so during sleep while the Angels work on our physical and etheric bodies. In this brief passage Steiner summarizes three possible outcomes for us. Read it and determine for yourself if these things are coming to pass some 80 years after Steiner wrote them. Think of such new endeavors as Special Olympics, participation in which is supposed to indicate a lack of prejudice and broadmindness, or, think of what passes for modern art, such as installation pieces with elephant dung as a prominent feature.
[page 32] People would delight in the instinctive broadening of their knowledge of certain processes and substances; they would gain a certain satisfaction in the pursuit of sexual aberrations, regarding them as evidence of an advanced development of more than human qualities, lack of prejudice and broad-mindness. In some respects ugliness would be considered beauty and beauty ugliness.
