The following is an edited and often paraphrased transcription of a series of three talks given by Vladislav Rozentuller to a group in Ghent, New York, in March 2007.

I will not speak about the High Tor legend, which some of you know, but only about the novel, The Salamander, by Elizabeth Oakes Smith, also known as "E. Helfenstein." For me, the novel has become much more significant than the legend, although the two are certainly connected, even if not directly.

The main topic for our three sessions is given concise expression in the novel where it speaks of "the last of the Exiled Angels, who through a great love conceived a mission of good, but who failed of its achievement, through the infirmities of the material into which they were compelled to shape themselves" (introduction). There are two things to note here. First, "last" doesn't mean last in time. Rather, it's a matter of the completion of a vast cosmic process. In the story we hear that the angel was "greatly beloved of God," so we should not consider his case as that of an incidental being who unfortunately made a mistake and then had to pay for it. Rather, the dramatic story of his transformation is the story of the completion of earth evolution. He represents all the beings who shared his own fate, and with his transformation something was finished.

In the second place, we see a powerful tension between two poles: heaven and the material world. The conflict only becomes more dramatic due to the fact that these angels are not malevolent. They are not evil beings, but beings of great love and good intention who received a mission of altruism. In order to perform their mission, they have to encounter the material world and to shape themselves into material form. They were challenged by everything stemming from the world of matter, and in particular by its "infirmities," its spiritual weakness. By failing to overcome this weakness, they became slaves of the spiritual being of matter. They failed, and were imprisoned.

The question is, What happened in this meeting between beings who have known only heavenly purity and other beings connected with gross matter? This encounter is at the same time the story of all human evolution, although the angel himself stands above human evolution.

I would like to begin by considering two characters who represent human evolution itself: Hugo and Mary. Our first two sessions will be concerned with each of them in turn, and then in the third session we will look at the process of evolution overall and the case of the angel.

The Way of Hugo

Before beginning I would like to read three brief passages from Becoming: A Call to Love, by Claire Blatchford:

You are continually failing the spiritual world, failing it insofar as you give in to the demands and whims of the lower, the lesser ego. Yet this very failing is the door to an opening insofar as you are willing to humbly admit this tendency to fail.
. . . .
Discouragement, doubt, dissension, greed -- there is nothing straightforward about them. They can worm their way into you. You are never immune to them. They can affect you right down into your physical body without being aware of them.
. . . .
Daily I pray as in Gethsemane, and souls sleep in promises they cannot keep, in thoughts that chain them to the earth, in deeds that lead nowhere.

The story starts with a description of humanity in its child-like state. The first people described -- the American Indians inhabiting what is now the Ramapo Valley -- are depicted as having a consciousness in some ways like a child of today. For them the difference between dream and reality is not what it is for us. This is a world of legend, of magic powers, a world where dreams merge into reality, and reality merges into dream. Its inhabitants lived to a considerable degree outside themselves, in the surrounding world. Even for their food and daily needs, they used rather directly what nature gave them. This was the first stage of evolution as we will conceive it now.

Next the Europeans came for the first time to the valley. Among other things, they brought fire. This was not merely fire that warms the body and cooks food, which of course the Indians also had. They brought the power of fire, nurtured in earth-covered furnaces and capable of forging wondrously effective weapons and other artifacts. These people tried to penetrate the depths of the earth, digging mines and bringing fire to this earthly matter. Try to have this as a psychological image: people coming to the surface of the earth and then trying to go deeper, deeper, deeper. They incarnate more deeply in the hard material substance of earth than their Indian predecessors. In the process of incarnation they come to experience their own bodies and find their own center in connection with the body. They meet for the first time in a personal and individual way everything that comes from the physical body, and this is the world of instinct and desire. It is our lower, or bestial, part, which in fairy tales is often depicted in the form of an animal -- fox, wolf, tiger, toad, and so on.

So in an outer way we see these early settlers going into the earth; psychologically, we see them meeting their own earthly, instinctual element. We can find these motifs in ancient myth, and we also find them in a writer like Tolkien, who describes the dwarves going ever deeper into the earth in search of treasures until they encounter something they call evil or dark fire -- original evil of the depths. It's clear that in the depths of the earth, connected with physical substance, there are certain beings -- evil beings.

This first generation of European settlers are shown in the novel as having two sources of protection from this evil. They could hold their thoughts within their religious tradition, not being free in their thinking but rather accepting the church's answers to any questions they might have. And then they could cultivate religious, pious feeling -- for example, in prayer. This could shield them from the reality streaming up from beneath, from their bodies. They didn't have the guiding images of nature like the Indians did, but they had this intense inner life of feeling that could raise them above an instinctive and selfish life.

Hugo (the father) illustrates this condition of the early settlers. Then, as an exemplar of the third phase of human evolution, the novel gives us Hugo (the son). He is very different from his father. He did not believe in tradition, but cut himself off from it. He learned a lot of philosophy and followed a path of free-thinking investigation. He was not at all a religious man. As an artisan of the highest degree, he had in a way mastered the material element and could make wonderfully powerful objects, but unlike his father he did not consider this work to be a service. It was his own work. He did not feel himself to be serving a divine power or to be charged with the task of making the earth more beautiful. He was a free artist and investigator, pursuing his own interests and seeking his own possessions, without an externally given mission. We find him described as an extremely self-willed and proud individual. Even with respect to his wife, whom he adored and loved very much, he could still keep his self-willed nature, doing whatever he chose out of himself.

As for pride, what is it? It is, of course, a core element of human psychology. I wish to point only to one aspect of it: in pride we are centered on ourselves. Pride makes us feel that we are creators and masters of our own deeds and thoughts. The poet may feel that it is his own genius to create such a poem, and will not feel the poem as a gift given to him. The thinker may possess his thoughts as his own. This can be true in all areas of life; I perform a deed because I choose to, not because something wants to be performed through me.

Pride closes us up within ourselves. You can actually feel it as a force that goes up through the spine and has its center somewhere up here [gesturing a little above and behind the head]. It's a place from which we feel ourselves looking down upon others.

Pride affects our thinking by making us pull our thoughts a little closer to ourselves -- closer to our physical bodies -- than they otherwise would be. In this you see the grasping, possessing, self-centered gesture. The element of spirit in our thinking is brought closer than it should be to the material world. Proud people can be very smart, with the sharpest thoughts and most brilliant wit, but they are unable to understand reality in its depth. Reality belongs to a different world, and for that world you have to sacrifice something.

Pride also affects our unconscious being. As the drive to possess comes into the soul, we open the gate to everything that comes from beneath, from the world of instinct and desire. That's because these lower elements have the same grasping, possessive gesture. The soul's proud attempt to grasp things naturally opens a pathway for all the grasping impulses of our lower nature. We become greedy for power. In this state, like Hugo (the son), we are not able to withstand temptation.

Those, then, are the three stages of human evolution we can find exemplified in The Salamander. Before going further, let's ask ourselves, What is matter, and why are evil beings connected with it? As Rudolf Steiner describes it, the origin of matter is fire. In general we can say that there are two creative powers in the world: the power of light and the power of fire. The power of light is connected with forming processes. We can observe this power at work in the creation of leafy plant forms. In the spring the light is alive and gives plants the power to shape themselves. Each flower, each plant, has its own meaningful and living law of development.

We see the polar opposite power when we look at fruits and, most notably, seeds. The elaboration of shape is muted and in its place we come more strongly into the element of warmth or fire. There is relatively little substance in the seed, but this substance, through what we might think of as its stored warmth, possesses great potential for a subsequent material expansion.

We humans live within the same polarity. At the pole of consciousness we apprehend and express form, bringing both our understanding of things and our activity into order or shape. In our digestion and limb system we have more the pole of movement and warmth.

Now, it's possible to view the material world as the result of a process of cooling: from fire to air to water to earth. Actually, though, it might be more helpful to think of it as a progressive withdrawal of warmth, and not merely as cooling. The warmth that was there in the beginning was removed, and because of this the world condensed into the substance we now have.

Why? If we accept that nothing in the world happens accidentally or mechanically, but always through the moral and spiritual deeds of living beings, we may be led to see that the element of warmth is connected to the soul quality we call "love" and with the spiritual quality we call "sacrifice." On this view physical warmth means that some beings are radiating sacrifice.

When the sacrifice is missing, room is given for an opposite gesture -- that of grasping. It is worth taking into yourself and meditating upon these two gestures: radiating, and grasping. You can then observe the qualities of this grasping: it is a possessing, devouring gesture -- which, in fact, is the gesture of our digestive system.

Through the activity of grasping one steals warmth, creating a contracted place, dark and opaque, cut off from other places. And this is what we call matter. So we could say that there has been a withdrawal of warmth (as radiation and sacrifice) from matter, and in its place a kind of destructive warmth is expressed in a contracted, grasping nature. Matter is that which lacks sacrificial love. Another name for it is "hell." Behind matter there are beings, often called ahrimanic, whose inner life is governed by this obsessive grasping, the opposite of giving.

From outside, matter can be viewed as something cold, deprived of living warmth. From inside, however, it shows itself as a fire, not of creation, but of destruction. We might think of it as cold fire. In human hatred we can sense how these seemingly opposite qualities can work together.

This is how we might understand matter from a spiritual point of view. Psychologically, on the other hand, the novel gives us extraordinary and powerful images of the beings associated with matter. They are, in the first place, horribly ugly. In general, generosity of soul always presents itself in images of beauty, while soul selfishness constitutes images of ugliness. In fairy tales we often encounter, say, an ugly, enchanted toad, waiting for someone possessing the greatest possible love to transform it into a prince or princess. Or some kind of man made of iron or with a monster inside, waiting, again, for a transforming expression of love.

On the other hand, the novel adorns these creatures with jewels and precious stones. You could almost say they are built out of gems. This is not a contradiction, however. The gems represent the wealth of the kingdom of earth, and we are attracted to this kingdom through greed and desire. Our desire makes us see this ugliness as something very attractive. We must choose which kingdom we will seek: the kingdom of this world or of another, more spiritual world. As the angel in our story puts it:

All knowledge and power must exist, and man is free to choose. Who will choose to be of the earth, earthy, and forget that it is the spirit that giveth life? The spirit is eternal, while the heavens themselves wax old as doth a garment. Will a man perish with earth, or live with the spirit? He must know all things if he will -- error even, yet must he choose the good and the true as the enduring things of the spirit.

We saw earlier that a man such as Hugo, being proud, cannot resist temptation. Now let's look at the actual temptations of Hugo and what happens to him. To begin with, Hugo hears some sort of metallic and dead music. Later it is described as music that might result if strings were built out of nerves. Then different beings such as a toad approach him with their singing, and then a serpent sways with the music and Hugo starts to sway with it. It's as if his free will were being hypnotized and paralyzed.

Then he saw that the earth opened, revealing a great funnel, the sides of which consisted of projections or little shelves upon which rested swarthy creatures whose eyes were gems, and lighted the cavern. As Hugo looked, they each turned themselves heavily and rolled their eyes upon him; and as they did so, each lifted a filmy paw, and showed a jewel which he held beneath, so bright as to dazzle the eyes and cast a flash like that of the firefly when he lifteth his wings. Hugo felt his heart burning with desire; he longed to reach out his hand and seize the wealth held under those black claws; but he was at a loss which to take, for every moment one more gorgeous than the last met his eyes.

This is precisely the character of the desire that we all have in the depth of our being. It's a desire that can never be satisfied, an eternal thirst, desire without an end. There is always a greater thing to desire, so that the last thing loses its lustre. In this we find a description of hell's tormenting fires.

Then we come to the culmination of the temptation:

He beheld upon the floor of the cavern a huge brown creature studded with crimson, which clung to the ground as the haliotis clings to the rock; but seeing the eager desire of Hugo, he lifted himself and showed what he held concealed; and the man saw a burning triangle, with a word written in fire, and he knew that that was the word, which spoken gives dominion over the whole earth.

Here we see an image of what stands directly opposite to the creative, sacrificial fire of the divine trinity: a fire associated with a being living in the depths of the earth. And what he offers is precisely the temptation presented to Christ: "I will give you all the kingdoms of the world if you will bow down and worship me." Hugo was saved from this temptation by his love for his dead wife, who appeared before him. "For awhile the vision of the mountain lost its power, for his true human heart yearned with an exceeding love, which made all things else poor and unworthy." Great love can vanquish the power of our base desires. And when the desires fade, so, too, does the illusion they foster.

The temptation is presented again, intensified, because no temptation disappears until it is overcome. Hugo's desire for dominion over the world now goes deeper, spilling beyond his personal drive for riches and power and affecting his relationships with others. He becomes angry and hateful even toward his beloved daughter, Mary. He tries cruelly to force her to pronounce the hidden word of power. If it had been anyone beside the daughter, he probably would have killed him for his disobedience; because it was his daughter, however, he restrained himself somewhat, yet still striking her forcefully enough to make her lose consciousness. As the desire for power takes fuller possession of us, it creates hatred and the potential to kill whoever gets in our way. What stops Hugo is the pain of his conscience in response to his treatment of the daughter he loved. Again a deep moral quality saves him.

After this his daughter observes how all his normal life energies leave him. He becomes pale and wholly obsessed with his desires. Renewed temptation comes, and again the subterranean creatures, glittering with gems on the outside and burning with fire on the inside, present themselves to Hugo:

They opened their huge mouths, burning like fire, and the rocks gave back the cadence of their hideous mirth....And now the earth opened, and below appeared the burning triangle, and the word of power, whereat Hugo grasped the arm of the white child eagerly and bade her behold and speak, but she was silent. ... And the earth-punished raised their glittering eyes, and lifted their huge paws, and one creature thrust up a black arm from beneath the burning triangle, holding a crown like unto a circlet of fire, and a scepter.

Then Mary echoes the words of Christ in his temptation, when he said, "Thou shalt worship the Lord thy God, and him only shalt thou serve" (Matt. 4:10). This saved them. Picture the scene: the earth is opened, there's burning fire, the fallen creatures are trying to grasp Hugo and give him a crown and scepter of power, and he tries to say the word. With his mouth open over the chasm, he struggles to emit the word, but it will not come. The word he seeks is not the divine word that issues from above, from the mouth of God. He wants to live according to the word summoning him from below. That is the choice: to be filled from above, or to be filled from beneath.

Looking toward the future, we can expect that human beings will have less and less opportunity to remain morally neutral, untouched by both the divine and subterranean powers. Either we will become divine humanity or bestial humanity. The lower beings want not only to tempt us, but to find a place to live in us. They want to create a new human-demonic race.

In Hugo the author gives us a remarkable picture of the fate that may overtake humanity or some part of it. Mary beheld her father standing alone,

his arms folded over his broad chest, and the light from the furnace below streaming upon his face, till he looked like a statue of bronze, motionless, stern, and awful, the type of the region of Rockland--as if the hidden metal, rare and terrible, had shaped itself to a man of iron -- the prophecy of a coming age.

It's a picture of inner, fiery rage and outer steely mechanism. Many fairy tales give us the figure of an iron being with huge claws, its eyes burning with an interior fire. In the Russian fairy tales we have the figure of Baba Yaga who flies around in a metal bucket. She beheads the knights who fail her test and impales their heads on iron stakes. The eyes of the impaled heads are burning. It's a prophecy of a possible human fate.

Hugo had been saved from his temptations -- by his love for his wife, by his stricken conscience after hurting his daughter, and by the right choice of his daughter when she said, "Thee only do we worship." But in the end he was willing to kill the youth-angel in a cruel manner by burning him in the furnace, and he cast out his daughter because of his mistrust of her. The result? Deceived in his confident knowledge, he became blind. Misled by his proud strength and skills, he became helpless, so that his daughter had to lead him. These were the karmic consequences for his deeds.

I would like to talk a little more about Hugo before we consider Mary. Here again is the picture of Hugo when he failed to pronounce the magic word: he stood alone with

his arms folded over his broad chest, and the light from the furnace below streaming upon his face, till he looked like a statue of bronze, motionless, stern, and awful, the type of the region of Rockland -- as if the hidden metal, rare and terrible, had shaped itself to a man of iron -- the prophecy of a coming age.

I mentioned last time that we often encounter in fairy tales the image of iron-like beings who are burning with a kind of cold, destructive, inner fire. What I would like to add now is that we have also seen this image in the actual history of the twentieth century. I will mention only two of the worst examples: we saw it in Stalin's Russia and in Nazi Germany. Here was the actual reality of a particular kind of being. On one hand, the entire country functioned like a machine, like a huge factory where everyone felt like a small cog in an uninspired mechanism. But, on the other hand, there was a kind of bestial, fiery, and destructive fanaticism. So the prophecy discerned in Hugo's image has already come true and may happen again. In our own time we can observe something similar (although not the same) in the fanatical varieties of religious fundamentalism.

In all such cases the individual is consumed, devoured. The law is that the bigger and stronger should tyrannize over the smaller and weaker. The "supreme being" at the top of this hierarchical structure is the crowd – not that the crowd rules as such, but the tyrant can connect with the dark instincts and passions of the crowd. In the crowd everyone loses his individual identity, becoming part of a larger entity that takes from him his own will. The picture is rather like that of the rocks on High Tor, which a geologist, Christine Ballivet, has described as "conglomerates" -- formless masses of indistinct elements. The crowd is powerful, but its power works always and only in a destructive way. It cannot create anything.

Back to Hugo. It's clear he is going through temptation, and his temptation is connected to the archetypal temptations we know from the life of Christ. This is a huge topic, but here I want only to ask: What was the common character of Christ's three temptations? He was offered, in the first place, dominion over the kingdoms of the world. [This was the third temptation recorded in the gospels.] He was also offered the assurance and support of miracle – miracle that would save him if he cast himself from the temple wall. And he was offered a kind of eternal life or immortality, to be realized in the world of matter as symbolized by the turning of stones into bread. In all three cases he was invited to possess a power. But note that this possession was not made dependent upon his own inner soul work; the gifts were offered from without, as mere effective power. They were to be his powers, possessed by him, yet not the expression of his own selfless, loving being.

This same psychological gesture of possession, or desire for possession, is the central feature of Hugo’s temptation when he sees the gems and precious stones. The temptation grows stronger with time as the desire for possession penetrates and takes over the being. So it is that at one point Hugo says to his daughter: I've worked my whole life and I don't want to work any more; I just want to have things. He wants to be carried; he wants some sort of miracle so that he doesn't have to work any more. In spiritual terms work is always inner movement, a life of the soul. Hugo was looking for a result without having to be alive in his inner activity. As a result, as becomes clear in the last temptation scene, his soul was about to be sucked into the very stones by virtue of his pronouncing, not the words proceeding from the mouth of God, but the magic satanic word issuing from below. He wanted to connect his soul with the rocks, bringing them alive.

With some caution we can call this a masculine temptation, in the sense that we all have within us something of a masculine nature. It involves a movement toward the earth with a gesture of grasping. In the time of Hugo's father there was protection against this temptation. As you will recall, after the furnace had burned for seven years, the fire was extinguished and there was a period of rest. This points us to the important spiritual practice of working and praying. Or working and contemplating. It's what we see in the seven days of creation: six days of work and then a pause. During this pause and withdrawal from the work, we are given the opportunity to sense whether we are still free in performing the work or are being driven by unconscious desires or mechanisms. We need to make sure that it is we who are doing the work and not the work that is doing us. It is characteristic of Hugo the son that he did not want to engage in this pause.

Mary

We know a number of things about Mary. To begin with, she was in a permanent dream state for the first seven years of her life. It's not that she didn't feel anything. She quite evidently felt a lot, but not through the senses. Her life arose from within, through her dreams. It's said that she heard music, sang a melody, and smiled. It was an active life, but not on the earth. The earthly sun of our daytime life never touched her face and no human passion went through her soul. Her face was so unearthly, so heavenly, that when people saw her they knelt and prayed.

She is still not born on the earth. Hugo is trying to get under the earth, but she is still not born.

We next meet her when she is born. You'll remember the scene during the night. She received a very strong pain -- so strong that for the first time in her life she shed tears. Experiencing great restlessness and fear, she could not rest, but kept turning from one side to another in her bed. She looked around as though she had lost somebody or something -- or, perhaps, her home. Pain, tears, fear, restlessness -- these are the symptoms of her coming to earth. At the same time this was a night of terrible storm, of the wild, frightful power of thunder, rain, and wind. So we have complementary pictures of what the soul experiences in leaving the realm of sweet, heavenly dreams and coming to earth.

Later, when Mary has grown a little older, Lady Margery wants to teach her how to work in service of everyday needs. But Mary finds this boring and feels no connection to it. It doesn't touch her soul. She asks with great amazement, Was it really true that my mother did everything with her own hands? With her soul constitution, she simply can't understand this. And to her father she says, Isn't it enough for me to express my love through my songs?

In each of these pictures so far we have someone who doesn't really want to be on earth, or who is so constituted that she can't be on earth. Her inclination is toward the light and lightness and beauty of heaven. We can see this inclination in three examples:

Her character is vividly expressed in her service to her father when he tries to force her to pronounce the magic word. She prays to God, asking him to erase the word from her mind. She doesn't want to have to choose whether to speak the word or not. She would rather not have the possibility to sin, and was willing to give up her knowledge in order to preserve the moral side of her being. She didn't want freedom, but only to be in God's will. (This crucial moment, we will see later, was of decisive importance for the angel, who asked her how she performed this miracle.)

Secondly: when, after striking Mary, Hugo was running wildly around like a madman, her prayer was "Be pitiful, O thou good Father, be pitiful and forgive." She felt that her father's blasphemy was a matter of unconscious or unwilling guilt. Her constitution of soul was such that she didn't experience her own pain upon being hit, but rather was sensitive to the needs and sufferings of her father. Her center is not in herself, but in other people.

And again, at the moment of most intense temptation when Hugo sees the burning triangle and the proffered crown and scepter, and again commands her to speak the magic word, she finds the right response, echoing that of Christ: "Holy and blessed, and Eternal Three, whose sacred symbol is burning beneath us, Thee, Thee only, do we worship."

On the one hand, Mary doesn't have much inclination toward the earth; on the other hand, she has the great strength of her attraction to heaven and is possessed of heavenly wisdom. I don't say "complete wisdom," but "heavenly wisdom," a wisdom without freedom.

Then we see her meeting the angelic youth and being in love with him. This love is described as very subtle, very fine, very pure -- but also very passionate, so that she suffered from the youth's lack of response. It's pictured very subtly, but nevertheless romantically. By passion, however, I don't mean anything low. The nature of her passion is evident when she says at one point, "Why didst thou awake me?... Let me sleep once more. Angel – Demon – whatsoever thou art, let me be thine." She wants to return to her former realm of unearthly beauty, which she recognizes in the character of the angel. Her tendency is not to grasp and possess but to be dissolved in the strongest union. She has passionate love for the sublime, even if she doesn’t fully understand its character.

Then, during her long conversation with the youth, Mary asks several times, Will we meet again? It's a perfectly innocent question -- the sort of question any person who is in love will ask. There's nothing here even close to sin or immorality. But the interesting thing is that Mary's question becomes a huge temptation for the angelic youth -- so much so that he says to her, You are my last and strongest temptation. The situation for him is so extreme that he says he is again in danger of perishing. Why is even the question so dangerous? We will see later that this is the central moment for understanding the entire nature of the angel, his mission, the reasons for his failure, and the path of redemption for him -- and also what form this same temptation assumes in our human lives.

And how does Mary's way upon earth end, so far as the novel is concerned? After her father becomes blind and helpless,

Mary was ever at his side -- she combed his long white locks, she bathed his temples and feet, she held the food to his lips, and then knelt in prayer to the good Father, that he would comfort the comfortless.

So we have two contrasting images. Hugo with his male qualities is directed toward the earth and into the earth. He is proud, strong, confident, self-willed, with a gesture of grasping. Upon this way he eventually comes to a state of blindness and helplessness. And then one more step: he is redeemed. You will remember that at Christmas people are singing, and when they come to the lines about the child, Hugo starts to sing with them. And the next moment he dies. Strong and confident, he becomes blind and helpless, and then is redeemed through the soft, gentle, open, flexible, vulnerable qualities of the child. From strong man to child: here we see a spiritual path for the masculine side of our being.

Then there is Mary. At the beginning she is far from earth, singing, dancing, uninterested in mundane tasks of the world. And in the end she is taking care of a helpless man, doing chores that anyone would find unpleasant. The light, sweet girl becomes a mother and caretaker. Beginning with a spirit of adoration and a readiness to dissolve herself in heavenly worship, she moves, through sacrifice and suffering, to the inner quality of the mother.

So we have in the novel both a masculine and feminine way of temptation and salvation.

Evolution of Humanity

I would like to finish for today by looking at the evolution of humanity as it is seen by the angel. While his viewpoint is not the same as that of the Bible, I don't believe it contradicts what we have in the Bible. And as a preface to this, I will read three more short meditations from Claire Blatchford's Becoming: A Call to Love:

There are times when each of you
must travel alone into the wilderness,
into the unidentified, unmarked dark spaces
in order to shift through the past and the present,
the known and unknown,
the necessary and not so necessary.
Do not be frightened by these places,
where familiar points recede and become like a mirage.
Just hold close to the thought:
"Father, I praise and bless you,
I love you with all my being,
lead me where you would have me go.
. . . .
Pain is a messenger,
acknowledge its presence
and listen to it
with an open mind
and a thankful heart
no matter how ugly or unfamiliar
its face may be.
. . . .
The denial is important.
Every soul that loves me
must go through the denial as Peter did.
For some it is short and easy,
for others it is long and grievous.
The sleep and the scatterings:
they are important too.

And now the passage I want to look at from our novel:

Look upon this earth -- it is most beautiful -- the lily, the rose, the amaranth are here; creatures primal in their beauty -- yet each have lost a shade of their original brightness. Once the angels of God came and went here, and sang harmonies amid pleasant bowers; and the first man, but little lower than the angels, talked familiarly with spirits whose station was fast by the throne of the Eternal. Then I talked with this creature of nobleness, who questioned us like a little child, and we loved him for his limitedness, and delighted to teach him.

This describes the first, paradisal morning of mankind. Meditating on this, we can take the image of, say, spring flowers and a rainbow and make it in our imaginations even brighter, less connected to dense material substance, so that it is almost "in the air." In this way we can come closer to the subtle lightness, liveliness, brightness, and color of paradise. The first man was like a child created out of this light substance and he was a part of this bright, wonderful world. He was almost like an angel in his form, his nobleness, in how he was created. His form was perfect, or almost so.

But there are certain subtle boundaries between him and the angelic world, described here where the angel says "we loved him for his limitedness." He may have been perfect as a created being, but he did not have within him his own sources of creative work. The wisdom that created him and his world was not his own wisdom. Therefore he has to ask and be taught. His spirit and ego were outside, in the spiritual world. His shape was perfect, but it was shaped from outside and the shaping power remained outside. He has the ego form, but the divine I Am was still to come. The angels were delighted because this first, childlike human being wondered and asked -- the primary human activities. We open our eyes to look, and we ask, "What is it?" Unlike the angelic beings, we don't have answers.

Dost thou know the angel nature? two incorporate in one -- think in holy and sublime reverence of that great eternal Being, who alone is composed of those triple elements, out of which proceed the whole universe of God.

The human being of that paradisal time did not have his center in himself; his center was in the angelic hierarchies. The center is called "love," and is a divine essence of a triune nature. To understand this essence, consider our relation to the people around us. We find ourselves in a position to give something to them, and also to receive something. But as we now are, we cannot receive fully; we cannot receive so deeply that we are united with another being. Likewise, we cannot give so fully that we sacrifice our own being. We can give presents, but we cannot give ourselves. So we are limited both in reception and in giving. But if we could engage in these two activities fully, we would be receiving with love and sacrificing with love -- and living between the two movements, in their harmony and unity, would be love itself. These movements and this harmony are the divine substance of the created world. They show how the individual can be an individual -- separate and unique, distinctly himself without being dissolved in the whole -- and yet harmoniously connected with the world at the same time. This is the miracle of divine love.

We often think of the gestures of giving and receiving as masculine and feminine, respectively. Their archetypes are Christ and Mary, and they constitute the center, the divine image, of all beings. We read in Genesis that the human being was created in the image and likeness of God. The image is the archetypal ideal, the spiritual reality; the likeness is our current, more or less approximate realization of the ideal. In the morning of humanity the image and likeness were very close, even if the likeness was an embodiment of the image "from without" -- as a blank form, so to speak -- rather than being an expression of our own selves "from within." Man was almost like an angel. In the future, through the activity of Christ, this archetypal image should penetrate and be united with the likeness. Now, between that past and that future, the image and likeness are growing farther and farther apart. The likeness of God in us is progressively dimmed through our descent into matter.

At length the man wearied of his nature so like unto the angels, and yet inferior to them in knowledge; and he cast his eyes outward, seeking for external companionship -- longing for affinities -- and then it was that the heaviness of the material grew upon him: the spiritual slept, and man sank prostrate to the earth -- with which his nature had begun to mix from the time that he ceased to look upward unto God.

Man, touching the earth, began to identify more with gross substance. He became less flexible, less transparent. His inner eyes, instead of looking inside and upward, were directed outside and downward. Losing his inner connection to heaven, he increasingly desired to replace it with an outer connection. His complete, archetypal, inner nature, masculine and feminine, an expression of love's potential in the world, was split in two. Instead of attraction to God, he felt an attraction to his companion. However, he could not fully satisfy his longing, because he could not see his companion clearly, but only through a darkened glass. He couldn't see the inner being, the soul, of his companion, but could only see from the outside, through matter, however subtly perceived.

And then (continuing to describe the angel's point of view), as humans become ever more deeply connected to the earth, the hard element along with earthly fire and desire increasingly influences their souls. So, too, their divine likeness is ever more corrupted and their attraction to each other degenerates toward mere sensuality. Their relations are not primarily of a purified soul nature, but are mediated through the external senses. Here we see the problem we find in literature as that of Don Juan: someone who is looking for eternal union in love and is always disappointed because he cannot get past the external barrier of matter.

Such then is the picture given by the angel in our novel. It brings us to the question: How can we overcome this separation associated with egotism and death? How can we satisfy our longing for unity? Actually, we know of three possible ways. One is the way back to paradise. Another, opposite way is shown in Hugo before he is saved: it is to become a part of a collective conglomerate, where your individuality is suppressed. Both these ways involve a loss of the potentials of the individual, whether through dissolution in the light and beauty of paradise, or through demonic suppression. We thereby escape the burden of being alone and individual.

The third way is the way of Christ, which will be our topic for next time when we take up our consideration of the angel. What is love -- human and divine? What is the earth's mission in relation to this love?

Today we will talk about the so-called "lost angel" -- his tragedy and the mystery of his way. The topic is so huge that I will only be able to touch some of the various motifs. But again I would like to begin with three meditations from Claire Blatchford's Becoming: A Call to Love:

The heart that loves
and seeks for truth
both rests in heaven
and is willing to go through hell
for what it loves.
. . . .
True healing can only come through sacrifice.
True sacrifice is the essence of love.
Sacrifice is the essence of love.
Until that is recognized
relationships will fail.
To those who give all, all is given.
. . . .
I hung on the cross
my breast fully exposed,
my connection to humanity laid bare.
So must your heart be exposed at the right time,
in the right place,
if the new connection is to be born.

Let's recall the situation in the paradisal morning of humanity. There were beings whose bodies were, in a certain sense, perfect in structure and harmony and wisdom, with a soul "inside." But not really inside, for the body was itself ensouled and you might say that the body and soul were the same. Through this body the soul could sense the creative forces and beings who created, shaped, and formed the body. The connection to the cosmos was not through a spirit within, but through the purity and openness of this perfect, ensouled body. The soul had an ego form, but it was not so much a divine center "inside" us as the ego is today; rather, it was connected to the wider world of harmonious light.

We can sense this state by meditating on the small child, who is very much an expression of his body and who, through his body and senses, is in turn connected objectively and in purity to the surrounding world. His center is not in himself, but outside. He has an ego form, but he is yet to become spirit. Think by comparison of an old man and you will see what it means for the spirit to come "inside" and at the same time to be relatively independent of the body.

In this perfect, uncorrupted bodily form -- I emphasize, in the bodily form, and not in spirit -- masculine and feminine aspects were united. Through his body, this not-yet-fully-descended ancestor of humanity could experience a certain completion and wholeness of his being. Think of the attraction between male and female: each hopes to find something in the other that he or she does not have inside. By contrast, this original, child-human had everything already complete. He was a whole being, without any longing for someone outside. And in his wholeness he could feel the wholeness of the universe. This was his connection to the divine.

After some time it is said that this human being felt himself alone. Then the separation of genders is referred to. So we can understand the separation as a gradual breaking apart of that original unity of masculine and feminine -- the inner unity that had also been the basis for experiencing unity with the larger universe. And after the separation, the human being is alone, gripped by a deep, unconscious wish -- a longing to regain the lost unity, but now by seeking outer connections. This is what Ben Aharon refers to as a "reversal": something that had been inside now had to be sought from outside. We can recognize in this reversal the point at which, as Genesis tells us, "their eyes were opened" -- opened to an external world of gross matter where all connections, and not only those between male and female, were glimpsed "through a glass darkly." So now we do not perceive each other in the center of our being. We perceive each other only through the dense material of our bodies -- not like we are, but like we seem.

This process of materialization is also a process of individuation. To experience separation is also to become, or have the opportunity to become, an individual. We experience this individuation so strongly in part because we experience it through our bodies. No two bodies can occupy the same space! Until the material world is transformed, the longing for union can never be satisfied through the senses or through material relations. As we have seen, we can try to achieve union by dissolving our individuality and trying to go back to a childlike state of harmony with the spiritual world. In the Sufi tradition, among others, this is seen as a very high ideal. In the other direction we can submit ourselves to the kind of union offered by tyrannical powers, where everyone is consumed by, and becomes a part of, one huge totalitarian entity. The first path is that of Mary, the second that of Hugo. Between the two we have the way of Christ, and also that of the angel. The question along their paths is: What is perfect love? You will remember that the angel said he did not have perfect love. What was he lacking?

The Way of the Angel

To begin with, the angel is strongly connected with light, beauty, and harmony. When taking care of the angel as a small child (Hugo the grandson), Dame Margery sensed something heavenly about him. Later, as a youth, the angel, with his blue eyes and golden locks, is described as someone who might just then have descended from heaven. He is extremely sensitive to everything beautiful and to what beauty is. When he describes his past, he speaks of a world of light where he and his fellow angels sang harmonies.

The angel also describes himself as belonging to "that subtle element which is flame -- burning and glowing with intense love -- nearest to God -- loving most his works, analyzing best the wonders and the beauties of his creation." He is a being of love, and his use of the word "intense" already suggests a great passion in his soul. Combined with this love, the element of fire gives him and the other angels of his kind the ability to enter into the depths of God's creation. This loving flame is associated with what we call intuitive knowledge; it allows one to be united with another being, learning about it from inside, not from outside. But this flame of intuition can happen at different levels: it can be an intuition of knowledge, or of the soul, or of one's entire being. It's clear that the angel-youth and the others of his kind have an intuition of knowledge; they analyze and seek to understand what is more beautiful or less beautiful, what is more harmonious or less harmonious.

We are also told that these angels were very close to mankind at the beginning of our evolution. They were our first teachers, answering the questions we ask. But more than that, they had delight in teaching this childlike and open humanity, and they also felt delight in the perfection of the human form.

As humanity progressively descended toward the dense earth, these angels grieved terribly. They loved the childlike human being and it was painful for them to see this child disappearing from their vision into a dark, untransparent, sinful place they had no experience of and could not understand. They could not follow mankind into the depths of matter. Imagine your child going into some place you consider not only dangerous for life, but also corrupting for the soul. You might easily feel a desire to keep your child from going that way. So, too, the angels would have liked to keep humanity in the safe and beautiful state of childlikeness:

The spiritual was more and more sliding from the earth, and the angels of God, who had so loved man in his perfect state, grew fearful that the blackness of the external world would plunge him, and all like unto him, into the darkness and downwardness of creatures who have no semblance to God in their internal forms.

I would like to read another passage in which the angelic youth describes himself. It provides a key to understanding him.

When nearest Thee, rejoicing in the Infinitude of Thy love, I knew Thee not, and yet was lost in adoration.

How can we understand this apparent contradiction: "lost in adoration," yet "I knew Thee not"? What the angelic being experienced was not the center of divinity, but rather the revelation of divinity. Think only of how the magic world of light -- the living light that sings, creates, and gives us the beautiful forms of things -- can be seen as a revelation of divinity but is not itself divine. The angels could adore the creator and could rejoice with great intensity in the world of beauty, they could lose themselves in this beauty, swimming, so to speak, in the divine emanations, but they could not experience from inside what it meant to create this beauty. And so, "I knew Thee not, and yet was lost in adoration."

The creative center these angels could not experience was a center of love and sacrifice. Everything that is created can be created only through the sacrifice of a divine being. From such a sacrifice there are emanations we can know as wisdom, beauty, magic. The angels knew the revelation, but did not know the high moral qualities of the creative center itself. Note also that to be lost in admiration as the angels were means one lacks a center of one's own. If we are lost -- even if we are lost in subtle beauty or love -- then we don't have our own center. And it is only from such a center -- Christ's I am -- that we can understand the qualities of love and sacrifice at the world's foundation.

Rudolf Steiner often spoke of "retarded" beings, which is not the same as "evil" beings. Retardation can be positive or negative, depending on your vantage point. But what matters for our consideration now is that these beings who are retarded failed, at some point in their evolution, to go properly through the I am development. In some ways they were similar to humanity in its childlike state, which helps to explain their attachment to human beings. Then, seeing mankind entering into a state of darkness and death, they were deeply saddened and wanted to be helpful. But as beings of wisdom -- beings of heavenly wisdom only -- they could not understand why humanity should descend from the marvelous beauty of paradise and be swallowed by the earth. They couldn't bear it. They couldn't understand that the darkness and loneliness of the human condition could, from a divine center, be transformed into light, evil could be transformed into good, and death into resurrected life. The next step was to intervene in order to save humanity, and here we see their rebellion against God's will.

One other way to view the activity of these angels is to say that they could not combine love and wisdom. Parents and teachers and doctors all know the problem that occurs when a child faces the prospect of great pain. The question arises: should this child be shielded, if at all possible, from the pain, or should he be allowed to go through it. It can be a wrenching decision, especially difficult to handle rightly if one doesn't understand why the pain must be experienced.

From one more side we can ask: what does all this mean psychologically? Think of the difference between pity and compassion. We can feel compassion even for someone who is very strong and is capable of enduring his suffering. For example, we can and must feel compassion for Christ in his great redemptive suffering. After all, he suffered like a human being. But pity is a very different thing. We pity someone when we think he is not strong enough to bear the suffering -- when he is too weak to grow by means of it. A lot of pride can be unconsciously present in pity. It may be that we put ourselves above the other person: "No, he is too weak, like a child. He cannot bear it." We stand in a certain way above the other person when we make that judgment.

The angelic beings were passionate in their love for mankind, and they were proud beings. So their passion took the form of pity. They could not trust that mankind could go through the dark vale of matter and come to something higher, something divine. The only solution was to keep humanity in the state of a child -- beautiful, perfect, delightful -- not in itself a bad thing!

All this may give us an appreciation of the title for a lecture cycle by Steiner: "Children of Lucifer and Brothers of Christ." For Lucifer, mankind was a child whom he wanted to keep in paradise; for Christ, men should become brothers who are sharing in his work -- brothers of the same father.

One last general remark with reference to the angels. If one has too much passion, if one's soul is overheated with passion so that one wants to hold on to the object of passion, then one is led to the psychological element of delight. By this I mean a feeling that is primarily a feeling of ourselves rather than of the Other. The emphasis shifts from "I am doing this work" to "I am doing this work." Some of our activity in doing the work is held back and is felt as delight or pleasure in ourselves.

We can experience this when we burn passionately for some ideal or for another person who becomes for us almost like a god or goddess -- an idol. Even when we seem to lose ourselves in that which we admire so strongly, the element of self-pleasure can be very much there. We are feeling our own happiness in losing the burden of separateness and being united with the object of our admiration.

And again we find this element of pleasure when we pity someone. In Russian literature there are many examples: before I will help you, I need to see you in an awful situation, suffering terribly. Then I will become very nice and be willing to help you with all my heart. If you are happy, it's boring to me, but if you are in great pain, then it's an occasion where I can express myself. "Oh, now I am such a kind person." Pride, as I noted a moment ago, is the other side of pity.

So these angelic beings, with their passion and pity and pride, came to the earth. Here they met everything arising from the dark realm of matter. You will remember that we spoke of the element of grasping expressed in matter. When the soul's fire is not purified but finds pleasure in self-feeling, and when it then meets this grasping element from beneath, it lacks the forces necessary to resist the downward pull. It is sucked into that which is of the same nature as itself, but much more powerful. Here is how it is expressed in the novel:

I touched the earth, and gems the rarest, and beauty that bewilders, and power that intoxicates, filled me with dreams such as I had never before known.

In St. Paul’s "Song of Love" (I Corinthians 15) we read that all gifts come to nothing without love. This means that without love, the gifts can be changed into something very different. For these angelic beings the richness and wisdom of the heavenly images are exchanged for earthly gems; their joy in heavenly beauty is exchanged for a captivating earthly beauty in which they become lost and bewildered; and the creative power of the spiritual world is exchanged for the earthly power to rule, which intoxicates and poisons the soul. Because they were not centered, because they were, so to speak, too light, too much still in heaven, they did not have enough "spiritual weight" to resist what came from beneath and pulled them down. It's a kind of law: whatever is too light will sooner or later be grasped and brought down to where it is too heavy.

We discover this truth routinely in our own lives. Everyone knows the state of being in love with someone. We see a romantic ideal in the other person. But then, suddenly or otherwise, the veil is removed and we see that it's not really so. That's not who the other person is. Maybe the other person even seems monstrous now, or the love turns into hatred. We say, "Oh, now my eyes have been opened," unlike how they were fifteen years or three years or two days ago. Or again we burn with passion for the high ideal expressed in some institution or community, and then we discover that the reality is a long way from the ideal, and we sink into depression. From the lightness of enthusiasm for an ideal to the weight of depression. We see this kind of thing in the way idealistic revolutionaries often end up by murdering countless numbers of the people they were intent upon helping. There was a saying during the Russian revolution: "For the happiness of humanity, we are prepared to kill half of humanity." A similar motif is expressed in Dostoevsky’s "The Grand Inquisitor" and Solovyov’s "Antichrist."

We can express this law by saying: Lucifer has his karma as Ahriman. Lucifer becomes the prey of Ahriman because he does not have his own center. Our goal, then, should not be the exultation of passion, but rather the clear sight of reality and a willingness to work at changing this reality.

The particular angel-youth of our story, when he came to earth to help save humanity, says that

The world was at my feet, with its deluding adoration; men hailed me as a minister of good -- and good was done. I lightened human bonds. I gave new impulse to thought -- to aspiration. I revealed anew the lost lights of the struggling understanding; re-taught the doctrines of Eden, the deep and true and beautiful wisdom of God, and his untold mysteries.

In Sufism and Zen Buddhism and many, many doctrines of the ancient east you find pictures of this "deep and true and beautiful wisdom of God, and his untold mysteries." What is striking about these pictures is that it's as though the authors just barely touch the earth. They do not actually come down to earth. Human bonds, the curses of Eden, were indeed lightened, and it was taught how we could go back to a purer time. In ancient Chinese wisdom we find the doctrine of "not doing" -- refuse everything that comes from your wish to accomplish something here on earth; only go back. They had a saying to the effect that the more steps you take out of your house, the further you have removed yourself from heaven. The idea was to escape everything connected with the outside world as a barrier between ourselves and heaven.

The angel was fully capable of carrying out this educational task on earth. How, then, did he fail?

A messenger of the Almighty bade me lay aside the scepter of power and go forth to bind up the wounds of the dying -- speak lovingly words of comfort to the wayside beggar -- bade me look upon man, not as a mass over whom the sceptre of power was to be swayed, but as one suffering, forlorn human creature with a blind and broken heart, into which light might be poured and the oil of comfort.

And the angel's response? "I turned aside with disgust." He was too much above mankind. The human individual can come to birth only by confronting his dark side, his bestial side. In this encounter we have hope of regaining our divinity, but now as individuals. We can experience not only the light, but also the highest quality of love. The angel, as a being of light, was too removed from this dark and hopeful necessity and could not accept it. Not only was this revulsion a part of his nature, but as a member of the archangelic hierarchy he had a tremendous energy and power with which to express his nature. He went on:

The wayside leper -- the sickly and loathsome maniac -- the guilty and miserable bent their eyes upon me, and I revolted at the sight.

We ourselves may feel something similar, as expressed in the saying, "I love mankind; it's just people I can't stand" -- people with all their difficult and ugly sides can be difficult to sympathize with. Or, in the angel's words:

There was presumption in my love; I failed in that, self was not annihilate in the sacredness of my mission. The good I would have done for man was taken from me, because I did it not through a great and overwhelming sympathy for his trials, his toils and temptations, but as a patron and lawgiver. It was not the solitary and struggling heart, weak and dark, but the great mass that I would redeem....I should be hailed as a benefactor.

Thus the angel failed in his mission. His love was only toward one side of our being. The problem is evident in human relations when we are close to someone and discover not only the traits that first drew us, but also many unsavory traits. We don't know whether to be faithful to the better side or run away from the darker side. Our inescapable reality is that we have two sides of our being.

The angel sinned, and for this there were karmical consequences of suffering. Not that this should be understood as punishment in the usual sense. Rather, the necessity was to gain something that he lacked. And what he lacked was a center that could radiate love and sacrifice. His disgust for the human estate opened the door to the world beneath, so that he became accessible to the powers that radiate hatred and fill one with darkness. Too weak to withstand Ahriman, he fell prisoner to an illusory sensual reality without seeing in it the possibility for something higher. If you can imagine the angel in his original state as a light, expansive, free being, and now contracted and imprisoned under the earth, then you can recognize the karmic consequences of his fall. His wisdom gave way to unknowing and doubt; his strength became weakness and fear; his proud confidence yielded to hopelessness and despair. Through this experience he would have to grow beyond all his one-sidedness.

Ahrimanic beings are described in the novel as beings whose pleasure is torture and whose destiny is despair. In the angel’s own words: "Oh! the temptations that beset, the darkness that involved, and the peril and dismay from deadly conflict with those malevolent spirits who delight in torture, and whose doom is despair. How the shapes of these lost but not annihilate ones thronged in my path crowding into infinite space, and I was compelled to walk over, disarm and conquer them, or sink to a doom too terrible for utterance." We can scarcely imagine how much the angel suffered when he descended from the realm of light to the Ahrimanic depths and was required to change his own constitution in a radical way. What does it mean to withstand this suffering and contraction? By being willing to enter into the suffering and withstand it, we build within ourselves an inner center, a center that can begin to radiate into its surroundings and dissolve the hardest products of grasping. We need to imagine this radiant, dissolving power as concretely as possible.

The path for the angel, then, looks like this: first pride; then disgust in response to those who are weak and not pure; then seizure by a desire for power; then imprisonment; then suffering; and finally, through the angel's embrace of suffering in a right way, the rising of a central, inner sun that can radiate and transform the world of suffering from the inside.

The angel explained how he met Jesus and was instructed by two sayings:

Obey and love.
Love and watch.

Obedience and love may seem difficult to reconcile. The mere duty of obedience, as a response to an obligation imposed from outside, can be a long way from love. But if we take obedience in the fullest religous sense of the word, it points us to the necessity of accepting the Father's will as it is given to us in the conditions of our lives. This is the first step toward the selflessness of love. I must accept things as they are -- all the difficulties, challenges, and temptations -- without reference to my own selfish will; then, having purified my inner being, I can freely approach the expression of love.

As for the second sentence, "watch" means more than merely being awake. It means for the angel, Watch what humanity will be able to do. This in turn is connected with the deed of Christ. Christ did not teach mankind how to escape the curse of the father. He did not lighten the bonds of earth. Rather, he himself came into the human being. He showed how the bonds could be transformed, as we see in the Beatitudes: Blessed are the poor in spirit, blessed are those who suffer.... In sum, blessed are those who do not receive their gifts from without, because they must realize them from within. Christ came into the "I," into the center of our being. He didn't cancel toil, temptation, suffering, death, but he showed us what we could do with these things. He was not a benefactor, but a brother. We may take something from a benefactor, but we cannot follow him. We can follow a brother.

An orthodox priest once expressed this: Christ did not lead us upon a lost venture; he has already gone the entire way. The job was finished, the result known. He would not leave us in darkness. But the way for us nevertheless remains: take up your cross and go into the depths. There is no other way, but he has shown us that this way leads, not to ultimate darkness, but to light. "The mission of Jesus [remarks the angel] was accomplished through a perfect human heart." Jesus managed to connect the pure divine with the human nature, which is to say that he poured divine love into the darkness of matter and transformed it into a pure fire. "The Child Jesus alone was able to know within himself every pang that belongs to humanity, know it through the greatness of his sympathy with him whom he came to redeem, and yet be unspotted from the world."

We can see three steps along the angel-youth's way. First, as a result of his wanting to stand above suffering humanity, he was brought through the suffering of imprisonment in matter. Then he became a human child, where he had a relationship to his sister, Mary. Here, not regarding all of humanity but only regarding Mary, he went through the same temptation and he failed a second time. He wanted to keep Mary in a heavenly dream world, above the earth. So he was punished again. Then, finally, he appeared as the youth, where he could feel a profound romantic passion for Mary -- his "last and hardest temptation."

In this sequence we see a kind of progress where first the angel experienced temptation in relation to humanity as a whole, then in relation to one person, but a person still in a dreamy and non-individualized state, and then in relation to an individual. What is required of him is to transform this element of attachment which belongs so strongly to human soul life, and which was one of the main elements in the life of the angelic beings. The way of transformation is not through simple denial of attachment, but through an obedience enabling one to penetrate to the deepest roots of attachment. Then one can find the right place for personal connections, raising them from a soul to a divine, soul-spiritual level.

In the novel we can also see three steps along Mary’s path of maturation, each of which was an intimate part of the angel’s path as well. The first occurred when she pronounced the right answer in response to Hugo’s demand: "Holy and blessed, and Eternal Three...Thee, Thee only, do we worship." Upon hearing this answer the angel said "Amen." At the second step, when she prayed to have the secret word removed from her memory, she gave up knowledge in favor of trust. When the angel asked her how she managed to achieve this feat, she told him how she had beseeched God to remove the knowledge from her. He received her answer as a blessing and lesson for himself, praying in his own turn, "By the mouth of this child I have been taught a new obedience; a new submission to duty....Take from me a knowledge too infinite for me. Alas! the pride of the archangel has departed; make him as a little child." She had shown him the way from a wisdom which knows only the past to an obedient trust in God that opens a pathway of love to the future.

The third step occurs when Mary wonders within herself concerning the angel, "Shall we meet again?" The answer that comes is, "Leave it to God. Thou art the seal of his mission." This is her comfort. Don't have your will, but be in God's will, and then you will be united -- not through the maya of space, and not through the half-maya of soul attachment, but through an eternal spiritual connection. Earlier, Mary had asked this same question directly of the angel-youth, who responded by saying how lonely he will be in the spiritual world without her and her love, which was the single most precious thing he found upon this earth full of suffering. Then, however, he added, "But Father, thy will be done." He needed to let Mary, as a human being, go through her earthly task and destiny without trying to hold her back. And, connected with this, he needed to experience the fact that loneliness, like death and all separation, is an illusion of the senses. It can be overcome, not through regression to an older, paradisal state, but by finding our completeness -- the union of the masculine and feminine, of all the dissevered aspects of our being -- inside ourselves, as expressed in the formula, "I and the Father are one." And then we can create free community with other beings. This is the way of our future. Luciferic beings wait with us until we can let them go and show that we are mature enough to withstand temptation and fulfill our destiny.

Steiner remarked that in the past humanity experienced Lucifer inside and Christ outside. We were intimately connected with Lucifer, whereas Christ, as a divine ego, was outside. Now we have to find Christ inside -- and through him a connection to the entire world -- while discovering a redeemed Lucifer, as a pure flame, without passion, outside, in our connections with each other.

The picture here is that, while we still have to deal with the consequences of Lucifer's fall for human evolution, Lucifer himself has already been redeemed. We are not moral machines. If we choose to do something out of our moral intuition, there should be enthusiasm in our activity. This fervor, as also our enthusiasm for beauty, comes from redeemed and purified Luciferic beings. And I would like to add that Lucifer is somehow connected with the being of Sophia, with the female aspect of existence. Sophia is a being who inspires community. So my understanding of this remark about Lucifer being outside and around us is that it does not have to do only with wisdom and creativity, but also with the warming of relationships between people.

When the early Christians were led away to be killed by lions and other wild beasts in the Roman Coliseum, many of them not only were not frightened, but they were positively inflamed with enthusiasm for their sacrifice. During those first Christian centuries there was a great willingness to experience death. This flame came from a redeemed Lucifer. The redeemed Lucifer is the purified flame of our soul.

Conclusion

America’s destiny lies in the transformation of matter -- going into its depths, meeting everything we find there, and resurrecting it. But for someone in the inner state of Hugo, this isn’t possible. He cannot withstand the temptation and would be consumed by the dark powers. There is only one way for our masculine part to enter the earth’s depths: to become like a child, and to be able to play with the gems as a child plays with them. But for this again we need to transform our soul, our Mary being, who is striving toward heaven. Our soul needs to become like a Mother Soul, softening with her love the coarse masculine will. So this image of Mary and Hugo at the end, both now changed from their beginning stages and considered together as one being, could be a useful image to meditate.

I'd like to conclude with additional meditations from Claire Blatchford's book. The first one addresses Lucifer's story:

When you give in to personal desire,
no matter how lofty, deep, great or pure it seems to you,
you lose something;
you lose access to me because you are closing me out.
There is an immense difference between love and desire.
You are coming closer to understanding it;
you will take big steps forward
when you learn to distinguish between them
and then choose in full consciousness.
You can move on as you wish
yet only to the degree you can relinquish your desires.
. . . .
Have no wish nor want,
simply give.
As you give of your heart,
so is it filled up and transformed by me.
. . .This giving has no boundaries,
it feeds the dead as well as the living,
it can move backwards in your "time"
and forwards into your "future."
Light of truth from without,
light of love from within:
you will travel back and forth between them
until the two become one stream.
The point where the physical and the spiritual meet,
where the meeting can be truly alive,
is in me, in my love.
I opened the door for the spiritual into the physical world
and for the physical into the spiritual world.