Now both Ahriman and the Asuras belong to the evil reflection of the Devachanic dimension, Ahriman to the evil lower Devachan and the Asuras to the evil higher Devachan. All three evil powers are in a manner of speaking “below” the physical level and exist as subterranean spirits. There is a process of fall-down associated with this arrangement, transforming earth. The creative and formative powers of light are being destroyed in sub-physical matter or the lower-astral dimension when the power of electricity is released, and the phenomenon of electricity and electric light is therefore Luciferic in nature. Likewise magnetism is released from the evil lower Devachan when chemical compounds and the higher formative principles behind these are broken down. This applies to the inorganic principles of Ahriman seated in this region, and magnetism is consequently of Ahrimanic nature. Lastly nuclear forces or dissolution of matter and gravity itself are released from an even deeper destruction of the creative powers embedded in the physical world, associated with the evil higher Devachan and the Asuras. The activities and function of the three evil forces are in this way closely connected with the energy-sources of modern society. There is a breaking down of God’s creation on all levels in the form of combustion, decomposition and fission, releasing and producing various types of energy and forces, making the earth still darker and denser in a spiritual sense, turning it into a dead corpse. This is the prevailing tendency of Ahriman’s regime on earth – to materialize, crystallize, fixate and silence every living thing. Likewise our technical ingenuity replaces the organic world with the synthetic everywhere. In this way humanity is slowly sliding down into the intraterrestial dimension of the lower-physical, the world of electromagnetic and nuclear being, where the dungeons and dragons await us all!

According to Steiner, the Asuras are organized around one highly potent evil being of even higher origin designated Sorath. Sorath is the Sun-Demon and the quintessence of opposition to God’s will in human evolution. It is a specific and individual spirit, who has long planned to incarnate on earth when a favourable opportunity presented itself, and since his nature is close to the Ahrimanic principle of cold intelligence and destructive, manipulative knowledge, the propitious time for him coincided with the development of man’s Intellectual Soul and the first beginning of the conscious I, which took place from 747 BC to 1413 AD. The exact middle of this period is the year 333 AD. This particular date corresponds with the famous sentence: “This calls for wisdom. If anyone has insight, let him calculate the number of the beast, for it is man's number. His number is 666.” [Revelation 13:18] The year 666 AD was important due to a historic event, which is not commonly known. At that time a famous academy was founded in Persia in Jundi-Shapur, gathering many of the finest intellects and scholars of the time, who had been exiled from the Greek world when the Emperor Justinian prohibited the schools of philosophy on the whim of his Byzantine Christian intolerance. The academy continued the Aristotelian tradition, which was subsequently translated into Arabic and thus preserved for future generations in Europe. It stood under the direction and guidance of a renowned family of physicians, the Ben Jesu family, who had been banished by the Nestorian Church because they developed clairvoyant powers on the basis of black magic.

It was in this intellectually sophisticated milieu that the head of the family, Joshua Ben Jesu, started a process of demonization in order to incarnate the impulse of Sorath, which in the words of Steiner would have revealed unto mankind the complete body of scientific knowledge in a direct intuitive form and thereby short circuited the progressive development of this way of thinking which was meant to take place in correspondence with the emancipation of the I. This would have been disastrous for the immature ego-structure of man, which possessed no means of administering these ill timed insights and would have surrendered collectively to the connected cult of Sorath or Behemoth [Ahriman] on a worldwide scale. This gloomy plan was upset by the Moslem invasions destroying the academy, and only belatedly and gradually did the impulse make its way into European intellectual life, where it was integrated as empiricism and materialism, paving the way for the natural sciences with their Ahrimanic understanding of nature as “dead” and “inanimate”. World and matter was not to be resurrected and revered, but to be utilized and reduced by the ego of man. And with the progressive extinction of natural species, resources and biological habitats, we are getting close to that goal.

The middle of the epoch belonging to the actualization of man’s Intellectual Soul was the year 333 AD, and Sorath started to influence man in 666 AD. The difference in time is 333 years, and that according to Steiner signifies the birth of Christ, who had to balance the Ahrimanic impact by incarnating the same span of years before 333 AD as Sorath inaugurated his influence after this midpoint. Thus the Sun-Demon Sorath is understood as being the Antichrist, the Beast 666 [in Hebrew spelling “Sorath” has this figure numerically], who tries to destroy the saving and redeeming work of Christ as a Sun Being or a spirit connected with the mystery of the Sun, the eternal spiritual and creative light. Christ leads man back to the spiritual domain through the Mystery of Golgotha in which mankind is resurrected from the physical condition and has begun the upwards journey from matter towards light, transubstantiated by the Soul-I connection or the Christ-being of his inner make-up. Therefore Sorath of all his demonical might wishes to annihilate the influence of Christ on mankind and prevent this resurrection and spiritualization from ever taking place. Man’s spiritual contact is not to be rekindled by his faith in Christ, and the creative impulse of God, the Father, in man and nature is to die out and turn cold. The densification of light and spirit is to continue past the point of no return and result in a total materialisation. It will be the very opposite of a transfiguration turning the living body into an electrified corpse and leaving the soul behind. In order to obtain this sinister goal, Sorath wants man to close himself down, shut his heart, cut of his soul and turn exceedingly egoistic and materialistic – the modern, cynical unbeliever being his prominent product. And in this destructive enterprise he is flanked by his associates Ahriman and Lucifer, trying to create as much unbalance in their mutual influence on man as possible. Whenever these powers and tendencies work together in disastrous alliance as in fanatical warfare or in sensuous drug-abuse or cyber-living, Sorath is the devastating agency behind.

Sorath made his future impacts on evolution in multiples of the span of 666 years. In 1332 AD he inspired Philip “Le Bel”, King of France, to betray, torture, and execute the members of the Knights Templar and with the aid of the Roman Catholic Church steal their fortune. This event meant a grim onslaught on the esoteric Christian teaching and the knowledge of the true meaning of the Christ-evolution. Also it produced a negative and destabilizing karmic effect on the Church itself, both factors leading to the secularized society of today. The next important year was 1998 AD, and for this year Steiner predicted the actual birth of an individuality that is going to appear in world affairs and history as a representative or incarnation of Sorath. He also foretold an increase of Ahrimanic structures in the second half of the 20th century leading up to this event. Prior to that Steiner described a fierce battle in the spiritual regions between good and evil beings, starting in 1841 AD and ending in 1879 AD, resulting in the casting down of the Ahrimanic Angeloi-powers onto earth or deeper into matter. The winning party was commanded by the archangel Michael, who from then on proceeded as a Time Spirit governing parts of our culture. But at the same time the downcast evil powers influenced men more directly and intervened in human will, intentions, motives, thoughts and feelings. Heaven was relieved of them and earth was burdened by them. The overall demonic pressure on man was aggravated.

Many historic, cultural and esoteric circumstances bear witness to this development according to Steiner. Primarily in the East there were secret fraternities delving into black magic who were working on the incarnation of the Sorath-Demon. The outer manifestation of their endeavour may be seen in the steady influx into the Western hemisphere of Eastern philosophy and religion, primarily the yogic and tantric traditions, from the second half of the 19th century and up to the present moment, although this Luciferic contamination in many cases has been promoted by people of good will and honest intent. We shall discuss these complications later. However some of these magic cults furthermore worked in order to bind the souls of deceased humans to the lower astral plane as ghosts, whereby they could cloud the earth away from the spiritual plane and get access to increased power and information together with even more efficient methods of manipulation. This effort coincided with a general change in the conditions of human discarnation since the benchmark event of 1879 AD and the development of the Spiritual or Conscious Soul from 1413 AD. Man now enters the afterlife in the shape of his own belief-structure. That is to say – man will not be able to orientate or release himself from the earth-bound condition unless he dies within a spiritual world-view. He will be inside his thoughts and in the view of himself he has freely chosen. Thus the materialistically inclined person will for a longer time and more often linger as a restless ghost in the dense lower astral cloud around Earth, which on top of that has been filled and troubled with the nightmares of the two World Wars [some interpret Hitler’s holocaust as a calculated attempt on the part of this trained black magician at increasing the astral density-factor]. These historic events dominated the first half of the 20th century and served to make man even more insecure and existentially isolated than ever before in a world with traditions, institutions, world-order and humanistic values breaking down along with the military escalation of technology, industry and science.

Also the second half of the 19th century saw the beginning in the USA of the UFO- and alien-phenomenology, which was intensified after World War II in the second half of the 20th century. We have already discussed the close connection between these apparitions and the Ahrimanic powers with their electro-magnetic fabric and nature. Actually several observers have pointed to the more frequent occurrence of UFO sightings on ley-lines or earth-rays, marked by alignments in the landscape of old places of special power [churches, mounds, cairns, stone-circles, and so forth] and on other geo-magnetic structures and patterns, supporting this correlation. In their book “The Mark of the Beast” Ravenscroft and Wallace-Murphy give a much more extensive and popular paraphrase of Steiner’s analysis of evil powers and of the whole apocalyptic scenario together with their own interesting survey on Freemasonry. They interpret the production of the first atom-bomb in Los Alamos as a direct continuation and karmic juncture of the academy in Jundi-Shapur, and they argument their case from the many circumstantial parallels. This might very well be so, since fission of matter and the release of nuclear powers are indeed within the province of the Asuras, a direct consequence of Ahrimanic intellect and character and an ultimate demonstration of Sorath’s intentions regarding the earth. No wonder this tragedy took place near the vacated village of Oscuro [place of darkness] and the Jornado del Muerto [tract of death]. Many authors have commented on the significance of this event with respect to the increased UFO-activity in USA and elsewhere and speculated, whether man’s intrusion into nuclear-science and technology as such or the accumulated effect of the nuclear test-explosions may have prompted alien civilisations to observe and intervene in our activity, or whether the unintended consequence of this craziness is a rift in the separating layers between dimensions of reality, tempting other-worldly beings to pop in, which could also explain other abnormalities such as for instance disappearances. In our view the second idea is almost accurate. Again we wish to draw attention to the close connection between these motives and circumstances and the development of space-technology and the modern view of cosmos as extended spacemanship.

With the description of the Asuras and Sorath in their specific historic context and the presentation of Lucifer and Ahriman we have now concluded this brief review of the three major evil beings in Steiner’s cosmology and anthropology and their connection with the event and deed of Christ. As mentioned before we are fully aware that Steiner’s perspective is not commonly known or accepted in contemporary understanding of life and man, where metaphysical evil has really no place – not even in many of the Christian denominations, which are downplaying and reinterpreting the traditional role of Satan. But we have found no other trustworthy and elaborated description of these dark regions of reality, which could consistently elucidate the content of Adam’s spontaneous experience and at the same time show credibility in its exposure of the underlying evolutionary and cultural dynamics. At least in our view it adds to the veracity of Steiner’s account that it makes a preceding and intricate phenomenology of lucid dreams, astral visions and paranormal experience explicable and intelligible in the most detailed manner. Nevertheless we would like the reader to bear in mind the author’s introductory statements and consider this interpretation only a hypothesis. Truth, like evil, is a very complex and dynamic phenomenon, and we would like here to quote a beautiful saying of Isaac Penington: “Every truth is shadow except the last. But every truth is substance in its own place, though it be but shadow in another place. And the shadow is a true shadow, as the substance is true substance.” In this sense we have no doubt that Steiner’s description like Adam’s experience hold a shadow of absolute truth and represent true light in the world of shadows. There is something here in the making which should not be neglected. But whether for example the predicted events or delineated structures are accurate, we do not know for certain or even take into account. In our view the truth value of this frame of interpretation lies primarily in the existential and spiritual domain, not in the factual, and accordingly its use and suitability are based on its power of elucidation vis-à-vis the human predicament and not associated with metaphysical speculation. Only for the practical purpose of analyzing Adam’s experiential evidence of evil and find our own way in the modern maze have we accepted Steiner’s tripartition and description of the evil powers as presented above.

Still it is important to remember that those evils are both general forces and individual entities within a hierarchical order of things. So actually we must imagine a host of demons of different nature and capabilities on all levels of magnitude and power. They will be generated in various ways, anchored in different historic contexts, structures and types of activity, some of them man-made and some not. Later we will discuss this vast variation in some detail within the contexts of magic traditions, but at this point we want to shift focus from the macrocosmic perspective to the cultural, and proceed with the spiritual value analysis we have touched on in relation to the question of human individuality.