Rudolf Steiner on the Ahrimanic Deception
Discussion
Paul Kingsnorth:
"Steiner was an intriguing character, and very much a product of his time. He emerged from the late nineteenth century European world of the occult, in which Madame Blavatsky, the Golden Dawn, Aleister Crowley, W. B. Yeats, Hermes Trismegistus, spirits, goddesses, Tarot and Kabbalah were all filling the gap left by a waning church. Eventually founding his own pseudo-religion, Anthroposophy, Steiner drew on Christianity, his own mystical visions and a mashup of occultish claims to offer up a vision of the future which now seems very much of its time, and yet which also speaks to this one in a familiar language.
Like René Guénon, who wrote at the same time from a very different perspective, Steiner saw the coming of the Reign of Quantity, but he had quite different ideas about what it meant, and why it had happened. The third millennium, he predicted, would be a time of pure materialism, but this age of economics, science, reason and technology was both provoked by, and was preparing the way for, the emergence of a particular spiritual being.
In a lecture entitled ‘The Ahrimanic Deception’, given in Zurich in 1919, Steiner laid out his stall. He spoke of human history as a process of spiritual evolution, punctuated, whenever Mankind was ready, by various ‘incarnations’ of ‘supersensible beings’ from other spiritual realms, who come to aid us in our journey. There were three of these beings, all representing different forces working on humankind: Christ, Lucifer and Ahriman.
Lucifer, the fallen angel, the ‘light-bringer’, was a being of pure spirit. Lucifer’s influence pulled humans away from the material realm and towards a gnostic ‘oneness’, entirely without material form. Ahriman, meanwhile, was at the other pole. Named for an ancient Zorastrian demon, Ahriman was a being of pure matter. He manifested in all things physical - especially human technologies - and his worldview was calculative, ‘ice-cold’ and rational. Ahriman’s was the world of economics, science, technology and all things steely and forward-facing. ‘The Christ’ was the third force: the one who resisted the extremes of both, brought them together and cancelled them out. This ‘Christ’, said Steiner, echoing heresies old and new, had manifested as ‘the man Jesus of Nazareth’, but Ahriman’s time was yet to come. His power had been growing since the fifteenth century, and he was due to manifest as a physical being … well, some time around now.
I don’t buy Steiner’s theology - no Orthodox Christian could - but I am intrigued by the picture he paints of this figure, Ahriman, the spiritual personification of the age of the Machine. And I wonder: if such a figure were indeed to manifest from some ‘etheric realm’ today, how would he do it?
In 1986, a computer scientist named David Black wrote a paper which tried to answer that question. The Computer and the Incarnation Ahriman predicted both the rise of the Internet and its takeover of our minds. Even in the mid-1980s, Black had noticed how hours spent on a computer were changing him. ‘I noticed that my thinking became more refined and exact,’ he wrote, ‘able to carry out logical analyses with facility, but at the same time more superficial and less tolerant of ambiguity or conflicting points of view.’ He might as well have been taking a bet on the state of discourse in the 2020s.
More significantly, though, he felt as if the computer were somehow drawing him in, and draining him of power like a battery:
I developed a tremendous capacity for application to the solution of problems connected with the computer, and ability for sustained intellectual concentration far above average, so long as the focus of concentration was the computer. In other areas, I lost will power, and what I had took on an obsessive character.
Long before the web, the computer was already moulding people into a new shape. From a Steinerian perspective, these machines, said Black, represented ‘the vanguard’ of Ahriman’s manifestation:
With the advent of [the] first computer, the autonomous will of Ahriman first appears on earth, in an independent, physical embodiment …The appearance of electricity as an independent, free-standing phenomenon may be regarded as the beginning of the substantial body of Ahriman, while the … computer is the formal or functional body.
The computer, suggested Black, was to become ‘the incarnation vehicle capable of sustaining the being of Ahriman.’ Computers, as they connected to each other more and more, were beginning to make up a global body, which would soon be inhabited. Ahriman was coming. The other realm was breaking into this one. Four decades ago, the destination was already in view:
The first signs of ‘free will’ can be seen by whoever knows where to look, and beings of a higher order than elementals are beginning to appear within the machines. In sum, the process is rather far along, but is still decades from being complete.
Today, we can combine this claim with Marshall McLuhan’s notion that digital technology provides the ‘central nervous system’ of some new consciousness, or Kevin Kelly’s belief in a self-organising technium with ‘systematic tendencies’. We can add them to the feeling of those AI developers that they are ‘ushering a new consciousness into the world’. What do we see? From all these different angles, the same story. That these machines … are not just machines. That they are something else: a body. A body whose mind is in the process of developing; a body beginning to come to life.
Scoff if you like, but as I’ve pointed out already, many of the visionaries who are designing our digital future have a theology cored around this precise notion. Ray Kurzweil, for example, thinks that everything is proceeding as he has foreseen. Kurzweil believes that a machine will match human levels of intelligence by 2029 and that the ‘Singularity’ - the point at which humans and machines will begin to merge to create a giant super-intelligence - will occur in 2045. At this point, says Kurzweil, humanity will no longer be either the most intelligent nor the dominant species on the planet. We will enter what he calls the age of spiritual machines.
If Kurzweil is right, we have twenty-two years.
Imagine, for a moment, that Steiner was onto something: something that, in their own way, all these others can see as well. Imagine that some being of pure materiality, some being opposed to the good, some ice-cold intelligence from an ice-cold realm were trying to manifest itself here. How would it appear? Not, surely, as clumsy, messy flesh. Better to inhabit - to become - a network of wires and cobalt, of billions of tiny silicon brains, each of them connected to a human brain whose energy and power and information and impulses and thoughts and feelings could all be harvested to form the substrate of an entirely new being.
Perhaps this ice-cold being of metal and reason might be the thing haunting Ray Kurzweil’s dreams. The nineteenth century Russian saint Ignatius Brianchaninov saw it too - and he knew exactly what it was. He wrote about the same force in his essay On Miracles and Signs:
Ahriman will offer to mankind the most exalted earthly organisation of well being and prosperity. He will offer honour, riches, luxury, enjoyment, physical comfort, and delight. Seekers of earthly things will accept Ahriman and will call him their master. Ahriman will reveal before mankind by means of cunning artifice, as in a theatre, a show of astonishing miracles, unexplainable by contemporary science. He will instil fear by the storm and wonderment of his miracles, and will satisfy the [worldly wise], he will satisfy the superstitious, and he will confound human learning. All men, led by the light of fallen nature, alienated from the guidance of God’s Light, will be enticed into submission to the seducer.
I cheated a bit there, I admit. I changed one of the words. The name that the saint used in that passage was not ‘Ahriman’. It was ‘Antichrist.’
St Ignatius would have been well aware of the Russian word прелесть, which translates into English as prelest. Prelest is a state of spiritual delusion: a trap that the unwary can fall into at any time, especially at the beginning of their spiritual journey. False notions about God, false sensations, misguided attempts to achieve visions or certain spiritual states without trusted guidance: all of these can be used by the ‘powers and principalities’ of this world, in St Paul’s famous phrasing, to lead the unwary away from truth and towards falsehood. Prelest is often a result of spiritual pride. It might manifest, for example, amongst people who imagine that they are powerful enough to ‘build God.’ They might imagine that they are ‘ushering in’ something divine when they are, in fact, ushering in the precise opposite.
Whatever is quite happening, it seems obvious to me that something is indeed being ‘ushered in’. Through our efforts and our absent-minded passions, something is crawling towards the throne. The ruction that is shaping and reshaping everything now, the earthquake born through the wires and towers of the web, through the electric pulses and the touchscreens and the headsets: these are its birth pangs. The Internet is its nervous system. Its body is coalescing in the cobalt and the silicon and in the great glass towers of the creeping yellow cities. Its mind is being built through the steady, 24-hour pouring-forth of your mind and mine and your children’s minds and your countrymen. Nobody has to consent. Nobody has to even know. It happens anyway. The great mind is being built. The world is being readied."